Tank Stance Redesign

[Lyth]

The discussion about whether tanks should use defensive stances when tanking is a digression.

The question to ask is this: if the devs were to completely remove stances from tanks next expansion, what would it change? I think you'd see a narrowing in the difference between low and average tank dps. You'd see a lot of awkward stance related issues removed from PLD and DRK. That's pretty much it.

If you'd asked me back in Heavensward, I would have said that this is a bad idea. Now that I've seen healers function post Cleric Stance, I can't say that we'd miss stances any more than they did. The implementation is just clunky in this game.

[Big-Isaac]

I'd argue that, if the stances don't change what buttons you press, then why are they there in the first place? As I said, it feels like the stance dancing is there to paper over the fact that the gameplay of the tanks is very very simple. If given the choice, I'd rather they cut the stances altogether and instead flesh out the individual mechanics of the jobs.

[Chrono_Rising]

Forgive me if I sound like a broken record, but this is all part of a larger question about tank identity. I believe Lyth hit the nail on the head in an earlier post but I don't think it got quite the attention it deserved in terms of discussion.

First off, do we need tank stance? No, what we need are tools that can be used to function as tank stance in terms of enmity and a drastic cut in cooldown time on defensive cooldown timers so tanks can feel tankier.

Maybe some jobs should keep their stance, I'm not saying that the idea of stances is wrong, but a stance on every tank is pointless as it primarily benefits one class. For example, 100% uptime on tank stance leads to a 25% reduction in tank dps, we see this cited often. However, this is not the complete story though, considering warrior is free to stance swap every 5 combos, that means warrior has the option to give up 20% of its max hp in tank stance in exchange for buffing its damage by 5% and increasing its main gauge spender by 56%. Give up 20% of max HP increase your gauge spender (Fell Cleave) by 56%, hmm seems we already had a dark knight in the game.

When you take into account how fluidly warrior can switch stances, you can work out for yourself that they are benefited by tank stance more so than any other tank. Simply pay an HP penalty, and swap stances to spend gauge. You gain the benefits of tank stance, and take a far smaller penalty from it than other tanks in practice. This isn’t an option on other tanks since swapping into or out of tank stance costs a GCD as well as other resource costs. From a thematic perspective, the method in which warriors do so is extremely similar to dark knight, the job which couldn't have HP mechanics because its a tank.

Shields, lifesteal, high burst, oGCD healing, shortest ultimate cooldown, longest duration mitigation cooldowns, HP mechanics, fluid stances, Slashing debuff (which actually had a real use even with a ninja this tier), and all of it on one job. We need a trimming of abilities and identity, and need to make room for other jobs to grow.

[Chrono_Rising]

Having an ability like Dreadspikes functioning like a tank stance is a great way to add flavor to Dark Knight and involves some nice decision making. Need to survive the next tankbuster/follow up auto? Dreadspikes provides an alternative to stacking more Direct damage mitigation, mitigate enough to live and absorb some HP back to get to a liveable HP. Need to tank swap? Map your dreadspikes use. Need to smooth out some fluff damage but need direct damage mitigation cooldowns soon? Dreadspikes.

Those are the decisions you would make if Dreadspikes had no interaction with your other abilities. Imagine if Dreadspikes had similar effects on our abilities like grit currently does. Giving access to abilities like Blood price, the lifesteal on soul eater, and having bonus mana generated from syphon strike but gated by a “tank stance like” cooldown (like dreadspikes). It would increase the benefits of having a dark knight while also bringing in more engagement in the class by increasing the number of decisions on how to best use the cooldown.

Having a multipurpose tool with a large number of applications but limited by a cooldown timer leads to interesting gameplay design. Paladin could benefit from similar changes, maybe move away from more blocking cooldowns and towards that Holy Knight reputation increasing healing effects, while also reducing damage taken by self and party members, and increasing its own magic damage.

Right now tank stance is this button no one but warrior wants to really touch, but it could be far more engaging and provide direction to expand on the identity of the jobs.

These clunky stance gates on our lifesteal and some of our offensive cooldowns (like blood price and extra syphon strike mana) make it so that we have limited to no use for these abilities because we attempt to avoid tank stance like the plague on 2 out of 3 tank jobs, which is a shame when they could be a core part of our survival and job mechanics. Think about how well unchained, defiance, and Equilibrium work together as multipurpose tools, imagine if every tank had access to similar abilities but in a thematically appropriate way. Dissimilar means to similar end goals.

[aqskerorokero]

Just why....? SE should nerf dps stance in my opinion, the purpose of the damage reduction in tank stance is because one can't output nearly the same damage as an actual dps job while having the double of hp and survibility.

To me makes more sense if one want to dps then have the same hp as a dps. And we could even craft some "stanceless" play to balance the game.

[Shurrikhan]

Dread Spikes is an ability that DRK has, historically had, which serves a similar function. Why not merge it together with Blood Price? For the next X seconds, your attacks generate additional enmity. Attacks performed against you restore a minor proportion of the damage back.

Functionally, it's not all that different from "for the next X seconds, your %healing increases and your attacks generate additional enmity" or "for the next X seconds, your block rate goes up, Shield Swipe's recast is reduced, and you generate additional enmity."

I just don't see why you'd want to muddy an ability that puts the resources generated entirely under the DRKs control with passive spending of its output. Assuming proper balance, what you gain in HP generated and/or damage reflected you lose from other options, whereas providing pure resource instead puts those options fully in the DRK's hands. What DRK lacks, imo, isn't an stylized Rampart (but without any protection vs. being one-shot, since you can't reabsorb damage taken after you're already dead) so much as spenders strong enough to fill its iconic identity. It needs greater punctuation available to its MP spending and greater utility output from spending that MP.

That likely means trading out Darkside as a flat bonus to a toggle-able that causes your spells and abilities to spend additional mana for additional potency, to be used during burst or emergencies and avoided when banking for such. That certainly means upping the %-damage-to-HP modifier on Souleater and Abyssal Drain. And it likely means adding some vampirism-synergetic bonus to Grit, such as allowing self-overhealing to instead create a (continuously fading, by both flat and percentile rates) shield effect.

[Lyth]

[...]

I skipped some steps in my explanation.

From a defensive standpoint, it's relatively simple to remove stances from the tanks. It's just a matter of tuning baseline tank defensive values and mob damage output. What makes this different from, say, the removal of Cleric Stance from healers is that stances have the dual function of generating enmity.

The place where enmity matters the most is when you're grabbing initial aggro on the boss or a newly spawned add. That's also the point when you're at highest risk of losing aggro to a non-tank. The general solution to this is to Shirk. But there are situations where you can't rely on Shirk (i.e. your co-tank is on a different target, or is unreliable). Other solutions involve Unchained (WAR only) or Shadewalker (NIN only).

The simplest substitute for tank stance would be a role action ability that simply gives your attacks an enmity multiplier for a short period of time. It's also kind of boring. If you want to inject a bit of flavour, you just need to combine it with a fluff defensive cooldown.

For PLD, you're never going to use Bulwark in isolation to mitigate a tankbuster. So combining it with an ability that increases enmity and perhaps lets you throw in a few more Shield Swipes in the process achieves the above goal while fleshing out the job identity a bit. The same holds true for Dread Spikes. This isn't intended to substitute for the damage reduction of the old tank stances. That's a passive effect that can be built into the jobs at baseline. It's intended to convert a fluff defensive into something that serves a new but essential function.

[...]

I remember that post. I think it did a good job of capturing the growing pains that were associated with Gordias. It wasn't enough to get the best armor and stand in front of the boss, awing your team with how little damage you were taking. It wasn't enough to simply survive and RP fight the big dragon. You now had to study boss attack patterns and compensate for a dps-focused loadout with more skilled use of active, as opposed to passive defensive abilities. Your team now counted on your tanking skill to make the dps check.

I appreciate the sentiment. I wouldn't play a tank if the defensive gameplay elements didn't matter to me. But I felt that your post just about missed the mark then, and it still just misses it now.

Compare and Contrast
The main problem with tank stance is that it's passive. You apply it, and it stays on. There's functionally no difference between a game in which tank stance is mandatory and one in which the mobs all do 20% less damage. So do you attribute the lower damage numbers to the fact that the stance is making you "more defensive", or is it because the bosses don't hit all that hard? You may be "maximising your defense" passively, but it does nothing for the "role fantasy" that you described.

These "role fantasies" are established through contrast. WAR has a relatively low average GCD potency. So when you launch into Inner Release, you see a massive jump in your damage output. If all of WAR's attacks passively did more damage across the board, you'd lose the impact. What is a "powerful attack"? Is it 1000 damage? 100000? Numbers are meaningless unless you have a baseline to compare them to.

On the mitigation side of things, one of the most iconic tanking moments in this game was in T13, when your two tanks, standing side by side, get blasted by wave after wave of destructive energy. It's not passive mitigation that creates the impact of the scene. It's not 100% tank stance uptime. It's the fact that if you don't actively mitigate, the attack vaporises you. Passive effects, like the defensive stats from armour and tank stance, exist to separate tanks from non-tanks. But it doesn't give you the accomplishment of standing resilient in the face of an overwhelming attack. It's the threat, the sense of danger of being one-shot that does this.

The other problem with stances, as you describe them, is that players by nature will seek out ways to maximise their dps. You saw what happened with tank accessories at the start of this expansion. They removed STR from our accessories. What did we do? We equipped i270 STR accessories from the end of Heavensward and rolled cooldowns. You can try to make conditions more hostile for the player, but there's enough variation in skill that you're bound to find someone capable of pulling it off.

And what are these players really doing? They're not cheating the system. When they maximise their dps by replacing passive mitigation with a more nuanced use of cooldowns, they're creating that very sense of danger, that risk of being oneshot. They're creating that very same mitigation fantasy that the draconian stance system would seek to deny them.

Rewarding Mitigation
I don't really think that reactive skills and RNG crit effects are the answer either. If you have time to react to it after the fact, it's not all that dangerous. What you need is short recast, short duration mitigation moves like Sheltron and TBN which reward tight timing against cleaves. Sheltron-ing your way through Living Liquid's cleaves in Sword Oath was the OG mitigation challenge. It demonstrates an understanding of damage patterns and a mastery of fight timings.

It's worth noting that some of those "other MMOs" that you mentioned have similarly moved away from passive effects like defensive stances, precisely because they're clunky and don't really offer any real gameplay value if they're designed to be "always on".

You point out that there are players who like to do damage, and there are players who like to mitigate. Why not both? Abilities like Sheltron and TBN bridge the gap between attack and defense. You mitigate well in order to do more damage. The solution to reward both groups of players is to create synergy between the two.

I think another issue that we haven't really considered up until now is the idea of counterattacks. Shield Swipe generally benefits you more when you're actively tanking, outside of fishing for procs with Sheltron. But why does it have to be that way? What if your co-tank could proc it by taking damage from the boss? What if countering an attack provided a mitigation benefit to a teammate? Pyros showed us the fun of Reflect. What if the point wasn't just to mitigate, but reflect damage back to the boss through a well timed counter?

Enforcing tank stance is not the answer. The answer is to make mitigation more meaningful through use of contrast and active mitigation, as opposed to passive design.

[Sapphidia]

The current situation with tank stances is one of the major reasons that made me swap from PLD main to RDM for Stormblood. I've always felt that WAR should really be the only tank that heavily relies on stance swapping.

I wrote a very lengthy thread back at the start of Heavensward here and on Reddit that got a huge bunch of responses discussing the concept of Player Fantasy and the failure of the current tank meta (mostly due to encounter design) on catering for the tank players that like to focus on improving their survivability and being the toughest they can be. It's not changed since then. The game here encourages SACRIFICING any survivability you gain. Get more vitality and defense from gear upgrades? Grats, that just means you can spend more time in DPS stance. We have Tenacity now as a stat that helps our survivability along with dps increase equivalnt to 2/3 a point of Det, but we de-prioritise it despite 2000 Tenacity (easily reachable) being the equivalent mitigation of adding half a tank stance to you... but we don't care because it doesnt matter.

I don't mind a focus on DPS, it gives you something else to think abuot as you tank, but what I do object to is feeling like its never optimal to max out your toughness as this comes about via sacrifice, and tank stances are a major factor of this. To this end, I have four concepts that I feel should be correct about tank stance:

- Tank stance should be designed to be the optimal thing to be in when tanking. If you're dpsing and waiting for your turn to provoke, THEN you should be in DPS stance.
- Tank stance should not noticeably reduce your DPS. In fact it should increase your DPS in tanking situations.
- DPS stance should always be higher DPS but only when not being directly targetted or attacked. It should also be harder to hold threat in.
- Tank stance should provide enough buffs that you're always going to want to use it where appropriate.

(Note - the above really applies to PLD and DRK primarily, as I feel WAR is set up to be the tank which DOES swap stances in combat, in part because Defiance's tanking bonus is based on being healed up after taking damage, not mitigating it as heavily during combat)

I'd accomplish the above via a mechanic change to CRITS from enemies, some threat changes, and relying on REACTIVE skills. The easiest way to prop up damage of Tank stances WHEN TANKING is to ensure they enable things like Shield Swipe, and make them strong. If you're not being attacked you do poop damage but if you are, you can reflect it.

Example of how I'd balance this:

- Make all bosses have a very high Crit rate. 50% perhaps.
- Remove Awareness but make Shield Oath and Grit make you immune to crits. Keep them at maybe 10% damage reduction, but most of your mitigation is via the fact that bosses can't crit you any more.
- Remove the damage penalty in Shield Oath and Grit.
- Make Shield Swipe only available in Shield Oath. Reduce the cooldown to 5-6 seconds, balance the potency to balance the overall dps
- Give DRK a version of Reprisal back for parries, so it has a similar damage return skill. Alternatively, remove Blood Price as an active skill and make its effect a permanent (slightly lesser) always-on passive when you're in Grit.
- Make Sword Oath REDUCE your threat by 50% when in it so you literally can't hold aggro in it. Blood Weapon could also have a similar mechanic so you really don't want to be using it when tanking.

The above would make it very clear - be in Shield Oath/Grit when tanking, or you'll be crit to death. Your damage wont suffer as long as you block and parry enough to boost your DPS via Shield Swipe/Reprisal.

When not tanking, swap to Sword Oath or "Non Grit" and you'll enjoy low threat at the expense of lots of mitigation, but due to Sword Oath procs and Blood Weapon you'll be doing more damage when not tanking a mob.

That's what I'd like to see. I'd also love to see some kind of positive effect of heavy CONSISTANT mitigation outside of cooldowns. How about something like...

Each tank has a resource bar which increases as you reduce damage. EG, take a 1000 damage hit, your combined armor and tenacity and a random parry reduces it to 450 damage.
You've mitigated 550, so your resource bar grows by 550 points.
Then, when you use shield swipe, it has a low base potency but its potency is increased by a factor of current energy bar, and your energy bar is drained to zero.
This would encourage stacking mitigation where possible to speed up the bar increase and would increase your dps as a factor of mitigation but only when actually tanking.

[saltlife]

TBH, I think it's the sacrifice of survivability that makes being in tank stance worth it at all.

Removing crits while having a tank in damage stance would either mean all the bosses basically need auto attacks to do more damage and removes reactive healing that healers have to do since there aren't any crits either. Kinda means that healers need to actually focus tanks which becomes pretty boring, over it would be over the top and healers would never have to heal tanks which kinda takes a part of their identity away.

As far as paladins, your damage would still take a large drop since most of PLD's damage comes from auto attacks. Nearly 15% of their damage comes from auto attacks and another 10% on their damage on top of that is the added damage from sword oath so literally they'll still be doing at least 10% less damage from not being in sword oath.

I would say give a bit more usage tanks can do with their resource bars. I do like that PLD gets actually defensive buffs with theirs that I'd like to see WAR and DRK get so they have a choice of either doing damage, or protecting teammates with their own iteration of Intervention. (I realize DRK has TBN, but this is just random thoughts).

As far as straigh reactive skills, pressing shield swipe every few seconds really isn't refreshing or rewarding in any way than it already is, and giving it to DRK wouldn't be anything anyone would be excited about anyway.

I understand that the whole point of tanks generating less aggro in dps stances is meant when they're not holding hate, but if people planned on optimizing on the fact that pld could MT with sword oath, anyone would just retake aggro when this works just fine as it is anyway.

sure we can take into account always about making tanks "tougher", but it's a game and what fun value does that add to being a tank? Sure it makes sense from a role playing aspect, but personally I find it fun to take a bit more damage if it means I can try and push out more damage. Tank contribute right now in combined dps up to and past 10k dps in fights that usually require 36k dps it's fun to actually contribute to killing the boss instead of being a straight punching bag.

[Shurrikhan]

snip

So you want players to pay an obligatory tax on being tanks atop being tanks? No risk-reward, just make sure you spend your GCD to swap before anything so much as touches you. You can forget all enmity control skills that you've been optimizing around because they won't be enough. Use the otherwise unnecessary mitigation, or your tanking abilities will be punished more than a DPS would just for being a tank.

May I... dare I... ask why?