Thread: Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

Originally Posted by Jpec07

I also failed to specify what I thought was a given for this conversation: damage mitigation is inversely proportional to DPS (in most cases). With a modicum of similar skill, a tank who opts to hone their skill around mitigation and minmaxes their cooldowns for optimal sequence and usage on a given encounter such as to take virtually no damage very likely won't do as much damage as the tank who opts for the minimum amount of mitigation required to survive in favor of Big Numbers (Praise Fell Cleavus).

Personal DPS and group DPS may work in tandem, but they're still way different from eachother. If making your numbers go up causes your healers combined DPS to go down by more than you're gaining then you've effectively lost damage and made the healers' lives harder. I know everyone likes to believe that the DPS meta means that tanks literally just focus solely on pumping up their DPS, but in reality it's a balance between mitigating damage and dealing it to find an equilibrium that allows for the highest possible gDPS. The only place you'll see players play seemingly risky to an extreme is in speedkills where everything has been thoroughly mapped out, a good example being: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0AyFjeIcaM

Now, let me make something clear: If you feel like you're not being rewarded for PROPERLY mitigating in the current meta then you're wrong. The literal only difference between a PLD or a DRK tanking in content that hits extremely hard and content that hits not so hard is that you have to turn your tank stance on for larger periods for the hard hitting fights (or the full fight, barring tank swaps). WAR is the exception, and only because IB is tied to their tank stance - however, due to WAR's CD kit being more tightly packed and versatile, it doesn't really need IB (though I do miss timing IBs, that was fun). Basically what I'm saying is that even if they made stuff hit wayyyy harder, your CDs would still be used exactly as they are now you'd just be doing less damage because you'd be forced into tank stance more often - maybe you'd see more tank swaps to keep CDs rolling as well but that's about it. The only way they could make mitigation different and more fun is if they went the active mitigation route that WoW and other MMOs took and while I'd be all for that it would take a massive overhaul of a lot of things and I don't see them doing it unless people just stop playing tanks all together for some reason.

Also I don't know what the comment "some people enjoy navigating mechanics" is meant to mean. Even if you skip a lot of mechanics, you still have to do mechanics, so if you have some fetish for moving out of AOEs then you still get to do that... except the boss will have a higher chance of dying by doing less of those. Even if you are addicted to mechanics, you are one in a group of 8, you'd need to find 7 other people who are super into doing all the mechanics of a fight and seeing enrage to really hold any weight.

Originally Posted by Reynhart

Actually, the meta says the exact opposite. Mitigates more than you need to survive and you're probably sacrificing too much DPS for it.

There's a difference between mitigating the amount you need to mitigate to survive comfortably and get healed back up and mitigating just enough to not completely get squashed by the tank buster. The former is what good tanks do because being in tank stance neuters your DPS, and if thats the mitigation you can afford to drop and still survive comfortably then you do. If you need tank stance then you use it, but if you don't then you... y'know... don't.

I still fail to see what lunatic decided that "doing everything you can" meant "doing as much DPS you can" when you're a tank or a healer and designed fights around this.

The goal of any boss in any game is to make it's HP go to 0. The only way to do that is to deal damage to it. As a tank your job is to keep aggro and mitigate damage, as a healer your job is to heal people. As a tank you actually have less of an excuse for not maximizing your DPS than a healer does as the healer has to go out of the way to hit the boss, but as a tank you HAVE to hit the boss. Even before we had everyone out of tank stance, tanks were optimizing their rotations (especially WARs) and finding spots where they were just taking autos to drop stance. Anyway, if you as a tank or a healer can contribute to making the boss' HP go to 0 then you should - maximizing that is your goal as a group so that the boss dies and you get loot. The only way to stop this from being a thing is if you make tanks literally do 0 damage and only deal "aggro" and get rid of all the healer DPS spells, which I'm pretty sure would put everyone off both for life if for no other reason than they'd have to party with people to get anything done at all.