Tank Stances.

[SpookyGhost]

Yes, I'm aware of all that. Did you not read my entire post? My point is that the shitshow that ensues from the meta isn't relevant the overwhelming vast majority of the time, and where it is relevant, well, stance dancing is already a norm and required.

It's relevant in the only content that matters. If people are being jerks in 4man dungeons then just kick them. It's not the meta's fault that people are stupid.

[KingFrost]

It's relevant in the only content that matters. If people are being jerks in 4man dungeons then just kick them. It's not the meta's fault that people are stupid.

Lemme rephrase then. This meta can facilitate toxicity by justifying people's nasty attitudes. There will always be shitty people, no doubt, but a meta can offer a justification for their awful moods and elitism.

That's mainly why the DPS meta can bother me (That's the part I hate) but also because tanking feels like a secondary function and damage is primary, but the role implies the reverse. It's why I dropped War (Really feels like a 5th DPS sometimes lol) and played Monk. Tanks can feel like they get hate as a by product of DPSing and them happening to generate more enmity, rather working to build it and working towards maximizing mitigation and easing the burden on DPS and healers. Or, ya know, being a tank.

But I love tanking at heart, so I'm leveling a Pld and Drk right now. Maybe I just didn't like War.

[Yorumi]

Lemme rephrase then. This meta can facilitate toxicity by justifying people's nasty attitudes. There will always be shitty people, no doubt, but a meta can offer a justification for their awful moods and elitism.

That's mainly why the DPS meta can bother me (That's the part I hate) but also because tanking feels like a secondary function and damage is primary, but the role implies the reverse. It's why I dropped War (Really feels like a 5th DPS sometimes lol) and played Monk. Tanks can feel like they get hate as a by product of DPSing and them happening to generate more enmity, rather working to build it and working towards maximizing mitigation and easing the burden on DPS and healers. Or, ya know, being a tank.

What defines "being a tank"? In everquest, one of the earliest MMOs, warrior, the one and only raid tank, was also the 3rd best dps in the game, behind rogue and monk. Likewise, berserk tanking was a thing in everquest. Warriors would go berserk below 40% hp and that turned all crits into cripling blows which had like a 3 or 4x modifier on them. In ffxi the use of the skill "defender" was frowned upon because it lowered damage too much, and ninjas were favored as tanks for their ability to take little damage while also dealing decent damage.

The concept of a tank doing damage is not foreign to mmos, nor is it new to ff14. I wasn't really until more recently that it was arbitrarily decided that tanks do no damage and shouldn't care about it. But that's not even entirely true. As I mentioned with swtor's intense openers and pushing tanks as hard as possible just to hold hate. How is it really different from doing damage? You're still spamming skills in a proper order for maximum effectiveness. How is it somehow more authentic for a warrior in ff14 to spam butcher block in defiance vs deliverance? You're doing the same thing you're just altering the numbers you see. The only rotational difference with deliverance is...oh wait there is none. Drks just do a different 3 hit combo and plds just swap halone for royal.

The dps meta and "elitists" are scapegoats. I tank all the time, in dungeons I'm in defiance full time during trash pulls and other than opener deliverance full time for bosses. I've never once has one person say any complaint about my tanking. Ever. My rotation wouldn't change one single bit if I was using defiance on bosses. Beast is the same key as Cleave and cyclone is the same as decimate. Few people, if any, expect perfection in dungeons, but a good way to get on people's nerves is to go everywhere shouting "I don't want to use my class to it's potential." In a cooperative mmo you are expected to perform the way the community deems a class should perform. I know it sounds harsh but I don't think I've ever seen someone complain about elitists or a toxic community in an mmo when it's not about someone not wanting to do their job and complaining that other people in a team based game have expectations.

[KingFrost]

snip

I feel like me properly replying to your comment would be just me repeating myself since it's starting to feel like people are reading what they want to read from my posts or reading one and not the others to try to prove me wrong, when honestly I pretty much am in agreement with everyone in the thread.

Where did I say I don't want to play my class to it's fullest potential? I don't recall ever saying that or even alluding to it. In fact, I actually said mastery of one's class is necessary and expected to beat on content raiding, including stance dancing, and that in the overwhelming vast majority of play, stance dancing isn't necessary, but always welcome.

When did I ever say toxicity was a overreaching issue in the community? Oh wait, I didn't. I said it exists, which it does, as evidenced by anyone trying to provoke discussion being attacked with negative assumptions made of them. Acknowledging it's existence is not the same as saying it's prevalent. Nor does acknowledging the meta playing some role in it's validation mean the meta is bad. I didn't word my first post properly, I will admit that, but I've since clarified what I meant​, and, again, never said anything that would close to suggest I'm an advocate of subpar play or gating one's own potential because you want to force what you consider to be a tank into the game's meta. That counter-productive and hurtful to a team because of one's own pride. That's stupid.


When did I say a tank doing damage is bad? I didn't. I celebrate optimization, and even said I stance dance when possible despite me just leveling. What I said was that tanking can feel secondary to damaging. I have never once said tanks can't or shouldn't do damage.

Again, if you read what I had posted, you'd already know this.

[SpookyGhost]

Lemme rephrase then. This meta can facilitate toxicity by justifying people's nasty attitudes. There will always be shitty people, no doubt, but a meta can offer a justification for their awful moods and elitism.

Sorta, yeah. There's an inherent problem with changing everything so that 100% tank stance uptime is the efficient and optimal way to do things, however, and that's that you can no longer carry. Now all the DPS actually have to put the work in, which will lead to the toxicity shifting from tanks to the DPS. Which you'd think "that's fair enough, DPS should be held accountable" but then you have to consider that 99% of the DPS in this game are people just banging their fists against the keyboard and hoping something happens. I guess it'd be a good cleansing of the lazy DPS players, but I dunno if that'd be particularly healthy for the game, especially since in order for this to have any impact you'd also need to make 4man dungeons require 100% tank stance.

This, however, is talking about taking it from one extreme to the other. I think the real issue is that tank stance simply is never needed, even when tanking. In 2.0 tank stance was still a thing and the DPS meta was about taking off said tank stance when the damage was low or you could immune the tank buster (at least in the case of PLD). This was a much more comfortable meta and I don't actually think this bled too heavily into the lower tier of players since it took actual understanding of the fight and your job to pull off correctly. In 3.0, though, tanks became so insanely OP relative to the content that tanking out of your tank stance is essentially brainless.

Essentially, a good fix for the current meta is to get a proper in-between where tank stance actually exists again outside of world first prog (and even then it barely does). I'm not entirely against just completely re-shifting the focus to 100% tank stance uptime as I actually initially played WAR b/c planning out my IB/Unchained usage was fun and made fights more engaging, whereas now I only use Unchained on the pull and stray as far away from IB as humanly possible. I honestly am probably not going to play tanks anymore in 4.0 unless they change things, my previous posts were just sort of saying "ignoring the DPS meta while we have it is a bad idea if you want to help your group". Which, fair enough, wasn't really what you were saying - I'm glad you clarified as I actually empathize with a lot of your points.

(Really feels like a 5th DPS sometimes lol)

Also it really, genuinely is and it doesn't even do the same damage as a dedicated DPS. All you do is your DPS rotation and occasionally hit CDs - which, imo, is another important point: If they're going to refocus tanks on actually tanking, they need to incorporate more ideas like WAR's stack usage into DRK and PLD. Both of those jobs literally play exactly the same in and out of tank stance, and both essentially boil down to "press the defensive CD when a tank buster is coming".