How to get people to tank!

[ManuelBravo]

While making a job "edgy" and likable aesthetically sounds like it works, we all know it wont be enough to get the average DPS player to stick with the job. (Such as DRK)

What are you thinking? not to put you down but that is an insult to people who actually tank. Think about it this way:

Some people play tank roles actually understand the hardship and importance of that role. In most cases tanks have to put up with various factors, such as DPS getting power hungry and pull in advance. Thinking they can do a better job, yes even some vets. get ahead over their heads do to power. Some of us tanks have a golden rules, such as you accidentally get agro and pull we will tank, mistakes happen, you do it on purpose you tank. There is more to tanking that you seem not to be covering. Giving an inexperience tank some type of bonus is a set up to failure in the future. Some people are great at tanking and some just aren't up to the challenge as a main. on the other hand healers, as part of a factor...were to start.

Some healers still don't understand the basic concept of not healing while pulling, or casting regen during a pull. Makes tanking job harder specially on newbies and discourages. Some still don't understand that while we appreciate them DPSing their main job is to heal. Swapping cleric stance and being cautious is understandable, yet even now some DPS still don't know how to help tanks. If your over geared and take agro from tank, temp switch target while it gets re established. It's a simple yet basic rule and DPS still don't understand that. My main is a DPS, I tank second, and heal as needed. So I understand all 3 perspectives. What your proposing is to pretty much make tanking a joke that anyone can do. Not everyone can tank, it takes patience, strategy, and understanding the potential of the group. While your intention is well placed, It would be better to just get a more tank friendly job that perhaps sacrifices dmg for agro generation. A PLD is very easy to maintain hate, at level 60 can help heal, easy combos to follow. Now if you want something easier the only way it could be balance would be to be extra weak, easy agro generation and keep healer on their toes. I doubt however anyone would want to play that.

[MagiusNecros]

In a perfect world Tanks would have more self sustain, attacks that close gaps or draw in enemies, and have attacks that cleave into multiple adjacent enemies at once. Until that time comes though Tanks will rely on boring 1-2-3 combo skill rotations, press cooldown button for defensive awesome, and overzealously pretend like their armor means something. Especially with 100% useful stats like Parry.

It's less about Tanking and more just playing a smoke and mirrors game of memory match.

[ManuelBravo]

In a perfect world Tanks would have more self sustain, attacks that close gaps or draw in enemies, and have attacks that cleave into multiple adjacent enemies at once. Until that time comes though Tanks will rely on boring 1-2-3 combo skill rotations, press cooldown button for defensive awesome, and overzealously pretend like their armor means something. Especially with 100% useful stats like Parry.

It's less about Tanking and more just playing a smoke and mirrors game of memory match.

They actually have more rotations and combos if you know the job properly and understand what can cancels what out from other jobs.

[MagiusNecros]

They actually have more rotations and combos if you know the job properly and understand what can cancels what out from other jobs.

Such as...?

[ManuelBravo]

Such as...?

I could go on a very detail process but will keep it simple.

Lets take DRK as an example I love it for speed runs and simple fast and don't really need to stick to 1,2,3 combo, here is what I use besides the obvious buffs active, Grit / Darkside , which by the way if you can't keep up dark side up 100% of the time you may be missing some rotations, I do the following;

Sprint>gather unmend>>>Unleash>>>foresight>>>abissial Drain>>>Blood price>>>Abyssal drain, dark arts>>>dark messenger>>>shadow skin>>> (rotate syphon / soul eater) shadow wall, by then blood prince usually add depending on your skill speed, rotate soul survivor, abyssal drain spam, you can keep dark side constantly up. and can keep rotating to what you prefer carve and split on CD ect. This is a basic and simple. as an example. There are various combinations for war and pld. DRk is a tricky one but once you master it others are all about timing and CD. But hey I only DRK/PLD/ and WAR on occasion. I'm sure there are more creative ones people just need to stop wining, be well geared, and check what other jobs can do. IF your able to understand what cancels what, and what boost what tanking is fun and is all about timing and strategy. This again is a simple example I use various ones depending on types of mobs and what I'm doing. I can go through each tank Job but don't have enough time and at work.

[Awful]

Speed runs.

Yeah Drk is the best for speed runs what I love to do (especially if I have a brd with foes) is gather everything > Unleash > Blood Price > Shadowskin > Drop Grit> spam DA+Abyssal Drain. If you have a Brd in your group Salted Earth and Abyssal Drains dmg goes up and i've had Asts put Balances on me and i've crit healed myself for 2.3k which is absurd. I had an Ast do that in Sohm Al and he was just laughing so hard that I can heal myself for 2k a mob, he was very happy that he could just spam Gravity and throw Balances on me 24/7, even though we had a Brd/Nin combo that'd benefit from it more, but ah well. Drks trickyness pays off once you get the hang of it and it's super fun that's for sure.

[Dzian]

In a perfect world Tanks would have more self sustain, attacks that close gaps or draw in enemies, and have attacks that cleave into multiple adjacent enemies at once. Until that time comes though Tanks will rely on boring 1-2-3 combo skill rotations, press cooldown button for defensive awesome, and overzealously pretend like their armor means something. Especially with 100% useful stats like Parry.

It's less about Tanking and more just playing a smoke and mirrors game of memory match.

I main PLD and I d somewhat agree with this. I wish my defensive mitigation was a lot more interesting than pop a cooldown here and there. I've said for a long time one of the things I miss is aegis boon in 1.23. there was a huge sense of cool when you used that skill properly and laughed off a 4k tank buster with more hp than you had before it hit you... it had a huge impact if used right. where currently defensive cooldowns don't have any real impact

shelltron is sort of ok. but simply doesn't feel powerfull enough, because you block an attack you still take ~80% of the hit. so it doesn't really feel like its made a huge difference or actually done anything at all really. cool downs are kind of the same. and I see this from the tank and healer perspective. as a healer I often don't even notice if a tank has used a cool down or not. it simply doesn't make that much difference generally speaking. a tank will need healing after a smash regardless of whether he used a cooldown or not so nothing really changes... and as a tank they're quite boring to use. 20% less damage for 20 seconds. but visually nothing really changes using it. just the numbers are a bit smaller.

making that 10k hit only do 8k damage to you doesn't really matter when my next heal is gonna heal you for 10k anyway.. what was the point??

where using shelltron for example it feels a lot more involved even as weak as it is... it is a bit more rewarding though. use it badly and you just waste it on an auto attack. and maybe mitigate a couple of hundred damage. time it right you might block a couple of thousand..... as weak as it feels it's probably one of the most interesting tank skills defensively speaking

personally in some cases using mitigation on other jobs is more satisfying than tanks for example pop a manaward / shadeshift and watch that hit smack you for a big fat zero damage. feels more substantial than rampart or something because it's changing the outcome of an event. if you use shadeshift or manaward or something and a hit hits you for zero. you've changed the result of a hit from tanking damage to taking no damage. it's had an impact... aegis boon was the same I.n 1.23 you went from taking damage to taking no damage. or in somecases actually getting healed.

compare that to tank cool downs. you pop a ramapart and you don't change the outcome. you're still taking damage. and most of the time the reduction is barely noticeable at all.

I sometimes think if they made the defensive aspects of the job more involved and interesting you'd probably have more people playing them... but many of my friends tend to agree that the defensive aspectsare very lacklustre because they don't really make a huge difference most of the time

[MagiusNecros]

snippy snip

Good post. I agree 100%. If tanking had more impact and felt more involved it would be more enjoyable. But sadly it isn't. I feel like a lot of responsibility falls on the Healer role in many cases.

[Claire_Pendragon]

Good post. I agree 100%. If tanking had more impact and felt more involved it would be more enjoyable. But sadly it isn't. I feel like a lot of responsibility falls on the Healer role in many cases.

Yes, now that Im i270 for A12S, I can pretty much survive all tank busters with no CDs, and let the healers virus/spam heal me for just about everything.
Healers really do "Carry" the most of all right now. (Of course minimum HP pools, and minimum DPS needs to be met, but atm thats not much.)

[Shurrikhan]

snip

Can I ask what you have in mind to make mitigation seem more interesting or impactful? More active mitigation? Choice mitigation (maybe some shared resources so you have to be more picky about what you use, but also each can be a bit more powerful as a result)? Should it still be just as front-loaded as now, where as long as you have all your CDs ready you can take on an army, and when you don't you take on an army of mice? Or should it be pulled back a bit? Should diving into the fray have more advantages than just more mitigation output and the few sustain tools like Bloodbath Overpowers or Blood Price? Should offensive, defensive, and utility ever feed from any sort of common resource so that you'd have to pick between those too?

I feel like there's some good points that come out of the system we have now, even if far from seemingly perfect. Front-loaded mitigation toolkits give us a fairly large capacity range or periodic variance around which to pace our runs, which brings out the feeling of the tank as a dungeon leader, the pace-maker, and necessitating variance in that pace. The simple CDs (no charge, just refresh, with any time left unused after recharge going to waste) gives near-obligatory interactions in healer-tank trade-offs for focused output. Their length makes it timeable against very certain attacks in a given fight. Their cooldowns incentivize strategies for non-forced tank swaps, pre-popping CDs to catch the next applicable even if the first's duration would partly go to waste, etc. There's quite a few good things to be said about it, on the whole. Which or, moreover, what could be better? Which are worth throwing out for that something better?

There's also the balance of mitigation (both anti-burst and anti-sustain) and damage-dealing (both burst and sustain). I'd ideally like both to feel impactful, but I don't want to see the simultaneous capabilities of tanks so overwhelm those of DPS that it'd just make sense to go mostly tanks? An extra or two in an 8-man—I'd like to see use for such variance, if merely optional, just as with healers. But just as much as I don't want tanks to feel unimpactful in their mitigation or like wet noodles in their damage-dealing, I don't want to see non-tanks as a burden.