PLD Advice - Skill bloating?

[Phoenicia]

I think you are missing what I'm saying.. Or I'm not saying it clearly. (probably the latter as I'm horrible at explaining things.) I don't think they should have tank stance / dps stance. They got rid of stance dancing on healers I so no reason why tanks should have to do it. Just make the mitigation and increased enmity from tank stance a natural trait. So long as you remove the damage penalty from it. Then the tank can worry about it's dps and hate generation without having to worry about weither they are in the right stance or not or worry about switching to tank stance to worry about taking less damage cause they do it naturally.

People say, "but then you have the off tank pulling the same enmity as the MT and the boss spinning like crazy."

To which I say, No you wouldn't, cause the OT wouldn't be using their enmity combo. You'd have the MT doing their enmity combo and dot combo or dps combo while the OT just did their dot and dps combos.

I think you are explaining what you want clear enough. Give yourself more credit.

It is the differing opinions that are at clash here, which is fine, I won't hate you for it. Personally I dislike the differentiation between "MT" and "OT". The concept itself isn't dominant in FFXIV. Both tanks take roughly equal or similar amounts of hits and damage in most fights. Some fights, the tank NOT tanking the main boss takes more damage than the one that IS. I can give examples of many scenarios and explain how it is so.

Back to your suggestion, we already avoid touching those combos even with a 10-foot stick. The "OT" is never an issue for the "MT" unless the OT is being stupid, sitting in tank stance and spamming its aggro combo. Thanks to role actions like Shirk, snap enmity tools and helping tools form party like Diversion and Shadewalker, enmity is not really a concern. Again, if you want details, check opening rotations for the three tanks. Our "MT" priority currently has it that the tank with best snap aggro pulls, this means the OT has almost no chance of pulling off. I can even explain and give simple math to how that is done if you want. We do not need the stances to exist solely to just say "I am tanking".

Tanks swap all the time, shirks tossing each tank's enmity on the other, DPS won't reach tanks unless they try hard (not press Diversion), or the tank holding the boss dies (where all the enmity is pooled). So having a stance we press on top of provoke is just redundant.

Don't get me wrong, I am not anti-stances. I think stances can add to game play. But they have to be done right. A stance that has abilities locked behind it as an incentive to use it but no real "punishment" for entry is a good stance. Check BRD songs. Or MNK's "dance" between Fists of Fire and Wind in order to use Tornado Kick for DPS gain instead of loss.

Enmity moves in general are redundant. WoW removed the whole deal of enmity moves. Tanks simply generated 10 times their damage in enmity in legion (4times in BfA) and the first tank hitting the boss is usually tanking without the off tank worrying about "stealing" aggro. To make tank swaps easy, taunt has 1 more feature than topping the enmity of highest person, it adds a 3 second buff where they generate more enmity. Taunted target WILL attack the taunter until this debuff wears off, and unless this tank fails to generate enmity, it will stick on the tank that taunted.

I know you mentioned aggro reduction tools are button bloat too, but WoW classes also have Tricks of the Trade and Misdirection to boost tank aggro and many classes have their own way to drop threat. Hunters feign death, rogues and mages vanish, priests have Fade and so on. And WoW is one of the biggest MMO examples of 4-button-classes.

It is not simple really, you don't just yell "button bloat" and cut actions. You intelligently design actions so your rotations don't involve pressing all 36 buttons (like how it is in Aion). What we have in FFXIV now is not bad, we have ~36 buttons, our rotations have us press ~10 of those, the other 26 are all situational actions with CDs.