Thread: Boycotting Warrior 4.0 (Let's do it!)

Originally Posted by bswpayton

but the thing is nobody wants to tank , so why on earth would you force tanks into a play style that they arent asking for , leave tanks alone and let people who are willing to tank play them the way they want I dont get SE sometimes

Not true. Plenty of people want to tank. 15-20% of the player base plays tanks.

Tanking is (1) having the highest Effective Hit Point (EHP) pool, (2) keeping as much of the incoming damage as the mechanics will allow aimed at that highest EHP pool, (3) smoothing out incoming damage as much as possible to make encounters both survivable and predictable. That's THE ROLE.

Now there are plenty of ways to manage how each tank job approaches those core mechanics of the MMO tank role, but in the end, you are there to keep a predictable and reliable max EHP pool between the bad guys and the rest of the party. PLD can be shieldy-blocky EHP, WAR can be berzerker "my rage lets me shrug off your feeble dmg" style EHP, and DRK can be "I feast on your soul to strengthen myself" EHP. However they do it, the end result remains the same - put your EHP between bad guys and your party, and keep it there.

That is the tank core playstyle, and everything is window dressing on how that gets accomplished. Look at any other MMO's tank classes, and theorycraft out an optimal 30-120 second sustained threat generation + incoming dmg mitigation throughput, then change raid bosses, trash, AE, etc and average it all out, and you'll end up seeing how tanking is remarkably the same across different games and each game's tanks. Same thing here, ideally.

Originally Posted by bswpayton

but the thing is nobody wants to tank , so why on earth would you force tanks into a play style that they arent asking for , leave tanks alone and let people who are willing to tank play them the way they want I dont get SE sometimes

Balance and good design in this instance are more important than any of the other factors.

Intentional imbalances make the idea of a tank roster pointless if you're going to end up with two tanks that are "good" and everyone else being subpar. That's even the reason the devs did not include a new tank or healer with Stormblood, as tank and healer balance is not where it should be. That each tank should be different in terms of gameplay is a given, and there's more to differences in gameplay beyond whether you're pushing toggles more often than others or dealing more damage. While I think WAR getting RageInner Beast is a good idea, the DRK and PLD resource bars reek of pointless gimmick but can at least be seen as a step in the right direction.

As far as people not wanting to tank, I'd have to ask why they rolled PLD, DRK or WAR in that case.

PS: If we're still going on about losing resources when changing stances, just remember that stance swaps are supposed to have a penalty. The free ride is over, though I still think it should have been over around patch 3.1.

Originally Posted by Falar

Even with tank damage severely nerfed (a very bad move IMO) people will still rate tanks on how much DPS they do, since everything else should be automatic and is taken as a given.

This hinges on encounter design staying the same. With what they've done to healers, I'm curious as to whether EX and savage have gotten an increase in amount of overall damage taken by tanks and the raid, which would force tanks to become defensive and thus make the breaking point of playing WAR/PLD/DRK whether you can survive the damage from the boss rather than attempts at e-peen DPS.

Worst case scenario is things stay the same, where PLD (assuming the current potencies remain untouched) or WAR (because 6 fel cleaves) will rule the roost. Best case scenario being that if encounters as a whole change, tank DPS becomes a means of holding aggro and a minor contribution to overall raid DPS, since the rest is being generated by your melee and ranged DPS (which puts us on par with how the meta generally treats tanks in WoW, and that would not be a bad thing at all).

Originally Posted by Reynhart

No, it won't. "Bad" players don't do "low DPS", they do "less DPS than what the optimal rotation can offer"
If you reduce tank damage by 30%, you'll still end with people doing twice the damage than others. These numbers will just become the new reference.

Nope.
Bad Players do Low DPS
That's a fact

I've discussed this with many people, I think given the performance gap between good players and average players in this game it's impossible to design encounters that require high tank stance and healing uptime without making them too hard for most people. The amount of attention to details that the top groups put is just out of reach for most of the playerbase. If even the best tanks who can perfectly time and manage their cooldowns and coordinate with their equally skilled healers have to stay in tank stance most of the time, with the healers actively healing most of the time, then most of us average raiders won't even have a chance to clear the raid. It's just not realistic. Most of the DF/RF/PF groups that clear a12s aren't even close to the top groups' level of (lack of) tank stance and healing uptime.

Those tanks in the deletemonk/angered/elysium groups mitigate way better than your average tanks in grit 24/7, and require less heals. What takes their healers 5 casts of healing spells probably takes average healers 10. What takes their tanks 0% grit/defiance uptime probably takes more than 70% on average tanks. Average players compensate for their lack of skills and coordination by having higher tank stance uptime and more heals. If you make contents "challenging" enough to make those great players need like even 50% tank stance or healing uptime, then the clear rates will plummet. We'll get another gordias tier, except it's not about dps checks but tank/heal checks. Let's step back a moment and look at midas savage. How much of our playerbase actually cleared a8s pre echo? How much of us (who even managed to get there) struggled with mitigation and healing in the second (adds) phase and the last part before J storm of that fight? If you want something more challenging than creator savage for tanks/healers go ahead and do a8s min ilv sync.

Let me ask, among those who think that tanking in full dps stance is trivial, how many of you have actually cleared a12s with both tanks out of tank stance throughout the whole fight?