Boss Autoattack Damage and FFXIV's Tanking Meta

[Kerrath]

for you who are a warrior and you stances are desing to do that yes, for a DRK is a pain in the ass stance dancing

I'm a DRK main.

stance dancing is more fun on WAR than DRK, but I still enjoy dropping grit.

[MyaValentine]

I personally feel stance dancing should be a thing since it's what brings some level of kills to tanks, tank combos aren't nesesarily hard or even close to a dps yet we don't have the healer preasure of keeping the pt alive. Stance dancing is fun and really sets a bar that if we take it out I see lot's of potential tanks switching to dps not because they only like to dps but because they don't like oversimplified mechanincs.

How to fix tank stance: IMO
-While it might take some work from the dev team and I doubt they will ever do anything like this, I think to fix tank stance we need to make aggro generation only possible with tank stance and make it harder to maintain (on bosses) that way it becomes a a choice of how much aggro we sacrifice for extra damage, build up aggro, spend some while increasing dps and back to aggro, that way it's more of a tank maagement not only on cooldowns and shuch but actually tanking make the boss notice you. ofcourse this will imply that tanks will require more skill and management will also make the devs make yet another overhaul of the system and make it more complex whichh is the opposite of their idea behind the recent changes.

Additionally They could make it so Tenasity also increases aggro generation, which since foreve I though it should've been an actual stat and not some passive ability, so now the gearing becomes a min/maxing between how much aggro/defense you want to generate vs how much damage you want to generate.

to me this is how tanking should work. unfortunately if it wasn't obvious this requires a lot of work. so so far we are stuck with the current meta witch well, it's ot so bad, a bit tooo focused on dps but is still fun.

[Hruodig]

In DF I cant even count how many times my HP dropped below 30% while in tank stance due to auto attacks and if I wasn't in tank stance I would have died or I would be self healing way to often which would leave me vulnerable (low mp) during mechanics. In all honesty stance dancing should be reserved for tank swapping. It shouldn't be used for dps checks and all this other rubbish players are trying to do. Its annoying and nobody should be forced to stance dance unless its used for a specific purpose like tank swapping.

As I said before the dev team needs to create in-game parsers for all players that way dps can get better and actually beat dps checks. Tanks sole purpose in life is to be a meat shield and making sure the boss is positioned correctly during heavy mechanics and during phase changes. Outside of that is purely optional and should not be forced on anyone. If your team is not meeting dps checks then you need to look at your damage dealers to practice more or meld more materia to their gear.

If you still cant meet dps checks then the devs need to give us parsers and rework tanks damage so its inline with the current meta.

Unfortunately, how you think things should be isn't how things actually are. This game's tanking meta is designed so that, if you have smart and efficient cd usage combined with coordinated efforts with your healers, then you can spend all fights in dps stance. A lot of it relies on teamwork. Like I said, good tank dps relies on good healer decisions, and vice versa. It's a team effort, in a team-based game. It's fun to see how far you can push your raid dps.

[Kerrath]

Additionally They could make it so Tenasity also increases aggro generation, which since foreve I though it should've been an actual stat and not some passive ability, so now the gearing becomes a min/maxing between how much aggro/defense you want to generate vs how much damage you want to generate.

every stat increases aggro generation to some greater or lesser degree.

[MyaValentine]

every stat increases aggro generation to some greater or lesser degree.

yeah but I mean on a actual meaninful way, right now aggro generation is something you can't even see numbers off all you see is a bar filling up there's no direct way of increasing aggro generation i just multiplies depending on how much damage you do and multiplicative modifiers they add on abilities. I meant it as If aggro was an actuall thing to manage think of healers and health bars we need to make sure we deal enough aggro before our aggro bar drops as if it was a health bar to maintain aggro during fights. as it stands aggro managemen is so easy for me it's the main reason tank stamce sucks ass at this moment.

[Kerrath]

yeah but I mean on a actual meaninful way, right now aggro generation is something you can't even see numbers off all you see is a bar filling up there's no direct way of increasing aggro generation i just multiplies depending on how much damage you do and multiplicative modifiers they add on abilities. I meant it as If aggro was an actuall thing to manage think of healers and health bars we need to make sure we deal enough aggro before our aggro bar drops as if it was a health bar to maintain aggro during fights. as it stands aggro managemen is so easy for me it's the main reason tank stamce sucks ass at this moment.

what

aggro management being easy isnt the reason tank stance sucks. the reason it sucks is because it reduces DPS. a theoretical threat stat would either be mandatory or 100% useless depending on implementation and neither option is good.

[MauvaisOeil]

what

aggro management being easy isnt the reason tank stance sucks. the reason it sucks is because it reduces DPS. a theoretical threat stat would either be mandatory or 100% useless depending on implementation and neither option is good.

Not only. Tank stances are a failure because they reduce way more dps than they give benefits. The more expansion passes, the more dps you loose for a mere 20%ehp gain, as they bake more and more things into dps stances. If during arr you lost less than 20%dps as a warrior in tank stance due to ib compensating, now you loose what, 30, 35 or even 40% dps by going into defiance ?

[ovIm]

I think to fix tank stance we need to make aggro generation only possible with tank stance and make it harder to maintain (on bosses)

The thing is, aggro in this came is directly calculated from the amount of damage that you do. In general:
1 point damage = 1 point aggro
2 points healing = 1 point aggro

Tanks mainly hold aggro because of aggro modifiers, meaning that certain attacks generate more aggro than damage (e.g. Unmend generates 5 times as much aggro as it does damage).
At the moment, we mostly generate loads of aggro at the beginning of the fight in our opener, then switch over to our DPS rotation. The headstart we generate in aggro is usually enough to keep the boss focussed on the tanks for the duration of the fight (it might require lots of use on diversion depending on the boss' HP, shirk and lucid dream, but it is definitely worth it)

What you are proposing would mean a huge disparaty between tank and damage dealer DPS, or a complete rework of how aggro works in this game, both which are hardly desireable imho.

[Freyyy]

The thing is that I like stance dancing. A lot. But in my post I also said that it has become completely braindead and I explain why. We don't stance dance anymore, we just go all-out DPS stance all the time because our defensive CDs and healers' oGCDs are far enough to survive everything without having to sacrifice DPS. We just activate tanking stance in two scenarios : 1. When we are still learning brand-new raid tier fights, which is only for a short time before we start optimizing DPS again, 2. When people start fucking up mechanics and healers need some extra safety. This wasn't the case in ARR because we had fewer defensive tools and healers had less powerful oGCD heals.

2) delete tank stance and rename dps stance to tank stance and add a weaker threat modifier on top of a damage taken reduction to it. this suggestion is terrible because in reality low-skill and low-gear tanks use tank stance a lot to compensate. it also gives up on the idea of ever having stance dancing again, which is an incredibly satisfying mechanic for tanks.

I made this suggestion with the intent of making the current DPS-stance tank gameplay the default gameplay for both stances, thus reducing the aggro generation and increasing incoming damage so that our tank duties are still a bit challenging while in tanking stance, unlike how it is right now (tanking stance is basically easy mode). The only part where I agree with you here is about low-skill tanks. Low-gear doesn't matter unless they are violently undergeared (like a level 69 tank still wearing level 60 idyllshire gear, and in that case just put an ilvl restriction to levelling dungeons too.). Low-skill tanks who are constantly in tanking stance as of right now would have a hard time adjusting to my suggestion because it's basically just like being in DPS stance all the time, but I think that tanking shouldn't be such a braindead task; you have 69 levels to learn how to use your mitigation skills and manage aggro properly, but the tanking stance is the exact reason why we see level 70 tanks who never use any CD. My suggestion would force them to learn how to be a good tank, since they'd have to press buttons to mitigate damage instead of just sitting in tanking stance all the time. I don't think that it's a bad thing. It would not reduce the population of people who actually main tanks because they enjoy the tanking duty in MMOs, it might just reduce the amount of lazy players who just occasionally play a tank as their second or third job just to proc queues faster.

I also said this towards the end of my original post :

That way, they could also focus on adding complexity to how tanks play by other means without having to bother with the different stances.

It would require an expansion, but I think that they can totally bring an interesting amount of complexity to the tanks with other means. Stance-dancing is not the only way, and as I said numerous times before and in my original post as well, right now it's only a shadow of what it used to be anyway. It's no longer as interesting as it was. Tanks and healers are too powerful defensively.

[shao32]

I personally feel stance dancing should be a thing since it's what brings some level of kills to tanks

the real thing is compared to WAR, PLD and DRK dont change at all when you drop shield/grit, on PLD is the same in both sides and DRK only change the mp generation a bit and DA priority on bloodspiller, there is no skill involved there, you just drop you tank stance and make everyone live more harder for a personal/raid dps gain, WAR in the other hand yes they take benefic from stance dancing, and still is somehow clunky bcs the damage penalty and ppl avoid all the time they can defiance.

so for my part change stance dances to make you stay on it at least on PLD and DRK will dont change anything on our gameplay and all those coments about "it will be boring" or "low skilled players will be like me" are just poor excuses without any weight on the real matter, on WAR on other hand at the nature of they stance desing will make swaping betwen defiance-deliverance much more active and become a real stance dance tank bcs they will never have to fear to suffer a damage penalty to use equilibrium and inner beast.

It would not reduce the population of people who actually main tanks because they enjoy the tanking duty in MMOs

i belive the actual meta and the rude actitude against every tank how use tank stance much make many quit the role that anything else, so im complety agree on any change they made to never have to choise betwen pasive defense vs extra damage it will be welcome, we will no longer have to face fights in the comunity for tanking styles, just how bad its this tank for his own skill.