Tank Stance Redesign

[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.