Removing Tank Stance Argument

[Lordfurious]

I personally believe the reason the vast majority of people would like to see the tanks stance eliminated completely is because of the unnecessary stress it puts on the group. A lot of times the tank will drop the stance and go into DPS which at that point gives them the more likelihood of critical hits and an additional 20% of damage in addition to reduced hit points. As someone who plays both tank and healer I can tell you I don't see a need to ever drop a stance for a tank. The DPS is miniscule. When tanks do this there's usually heavy AOE damage the entire group is taking damage and if the Healer stops focusing for 1 Global cooldown or rather 2.5 seconds the tank ends up dead. And of course anybody whose use Duty Finder no it's that this creates rage and nasty comments back and forth between players in the group oftentimes one of the members will drop out if not the entire group. When I play a Healer and I'm healing a tank like that it drives me crazy because an easy dungeon is now turned into massive work and stress on the Healer. In addition to changing team stance I believe some of the DPS mechanics should be changed for healers as well. How many times have we all seen a scholar show up in a dungeon summoning Eos to do all of the healing in high-end content the tank dies. Same result in those nasty comments like this isn't World of Warcraft we're supposed to DPS heal yourself. So now the only way to Duty Finder is enjoyable is if you are massively over-geared for the content of that dungeon. At which point it begs the question why do the dungeon at all if you don't need anything from it? I like to level characters using the Duty Finder however leveling my tanks and healers is extremely frustrating because of the reasons I just mentioned. I'm the person who refuses to continue after a couple of wipes because I don't want to spend an excessive amount of time trying to complete the dungeon. If you find a dungeon boring don't play it's simple. Please don't ruin the experience for everyone else.

[SargentToughie]

Wall of text

As somebody that both heals and tanks at a Savage level, this comment is way overblown. No, you're not more likely to get crit when you're in DPS stance. That statement is an outright falsehood. Even if it were true we have Awareness for that. The DPS gain from going into your DPS stance is gigantic, and as long as you're rotating your cooldowns appropriately, there isn't a dungeon in this game threatening enough to turn an easy dungeon into some hellhole slog that's too stressful to heal. Also, funny note, even in Savage it's pretty rare for there to be so much AoE damage going out that properly cycling Indom and your Co-healer's Aoe ability of choice can't cover it. But hey, that's what Emergency Tactics, Whispering Dawn, and Deployment Tactics are for. Typically that's just the final fight in a given raid tier though. Heal checks ahoy!

When I'm healing, typically I just pop an Adlo on the tank on the way in, and I'm free to unleash my DoTs and spam Miasma II, even on the spicier pulls of your standard EXR. This also works for Benison and Regen before you pop out Aero III and begin the holy bomb. And, yes, this is with a tank that goes into DPS stance once they've secured threat.

Tanks, you pull wall to wall, and slap on your cooldown of choice. Typically I start with Rampart to get it on CD faster, squeeze another use or two out of it through the dungeon. Then, slap on that damage and go to town. Next pull you use Sentinel/Vengeance/Shadow Wall, etc etc etc. It's pretty rare that I ever feel like I'm in any actual danger. Especially because PLD can help pick up the slack with Clemency spam.

I don't really expect to change your mind specifically with any of this, Lordfurious, but this comment was false on so many levels that just letting it stand without contest would be a disservice to anybody who reads it and may not be aware.

[OdinelStarrei]

Snip.

I feel compelled to take this post and deconstruct it, because it's not accurate and is spreading misinformation.

like to see the tanks stance eliminated completely is because of the unnecessary stress it puts on the group

That hasn't been mentioned by my post earlier, or by any posts in this topic. Most of the discussion has been focused on the risk vs reward imbalances, limited rotations, and a lack of need in most encounters. The encounter brings the stress, not the tanks. Unless you're playing with subpar players.

go into DPS which at that point gives them the more likelihood of critical hits and an additional 20% of damage in addition to reduced hit points.

This is one of the worst offenders by far, and shows a lack of understanding of what tank stance does on each tank, and what the defense stat is in reference to how the game deals damage. Nothing about tank stance does anything about Critical Hit rate. It does nothing. The only thing in the game that affects Critical Hit rate is Awareness, which you SHOULD be using on every pull in dungeons if it's available, or at periods with lots of movement or auto attacks in a Savage raid. O11S post-pantokrator 1/2, pre and post Tail End in O10S etc etc.

There is also a misconception on what 20% means in accordance to tank stance. First of all, WAR doesn't get this. It gets the HP increase of 25% with no increases in defense. DRK and PLD do not get increased HP from Tank stance either. They're all different, no one gets both. Also, the game should be tuned for default defensive values on tanks assuming proper gear, outside of some very specific scenarios. Essentially, you're not taking INCREASED damage. You're taking the INTENDED damage, and using tank stance to DECREASE that value. That's not the same thing from a damage intake or encounter design perspective.

As someone who plays both tank and healer I can tell you I don't see a need to ever drop a stance for a tank. The DPS is miniscule.

This is not true. The difference between stances is so vast, multiple people IN THIS TOPIC have discussed on how overly punishing it is on the DPS. But I'll re-iterate it in this post.

Your base offensives are nerfed 20% (25% for WAR). I can say nerfed, because the game is ADJUSTING the damage, much like how tank stance ADJUSTS the damage you are taking. The actual problem is the removal of several abilities that comprise of the rotation and resource generation. On DRK and PLD, using tank stance REDUCES my resources to use cooldowns, which is what you should be using over tank stance. The damage reduction is higher then 25%, it's over 40% after you compensate for the lack of offensive skills that are gated behind the stance.

Seriously, I need to get this point across, that if we had more DPS enrage mechanics outside of Extremes and Savage, you would see so many more wipes from those checks alone. Tanks can pull over 60% of a DPS in an encounter. 2 tanks working together can do more damage then a single DPS in a trial. A good DRK/WAR in a dungeon can do the same, or even MORE damage then a DPS with cooldown management, proper positioning, and bursting. If they can't do that, it's the player's fault, not the design of the job or encounter.

If you don't understand these last few points, I wonder what you have actually healed or tanked that could promote such a mindset.

heavy AOE damage the entire group is taking damage and if the Healer stops focusing for 1 Global cooldown or rather 2.5 seconds the tank ends up dead.

Where is this happening? I struggle to think of encounters in SAVAGE where this happens. Doesn't your party know when this is happening? Why isn't your tank using cooldowns? Better yet, why aren't your DPS using Second Wind/Bloodbath to mitigate the unavoidable damage? Better yet, why aren't your healers using regens or shields to mitigate incoming AoEs? Shouldn't they have topped the party before a AoE happens? A Largesse+Succor/Indom, Media II regen, or Largesse+Aspected Helios in either Sect, Earthly Star (OP), or pre-AoE Collective Unconscious are more then enough for any baseline AoE that a boss can do. Anything beyond that is Savage territory, where people actually help you mitigate AoEs further with Reprisal and Addle. If you can point to a specific encounter that you've seen trouble with, there are solutions available that are not exclusively relying on one person. It's a party effort with raidwides.

some of the DPS mechanics should be changed for healers as well. How many times have we all seen a scholar show up in a dungeon summoning Eos to do all of the healing in high-end content the tank dies

This isn't Healer Roles, but I'm going to pretend it is. No. It's already easy enough to press one or two buttons to keep up DoTs and basic damage output when nothing is happening. I see SCHs not casting Physick/Adlo all the time. Why? Because Eos is actually pretty bonkers when used properly to boost healing, passive tether and embraces are really strong, and Aetherflow abilities with no cast time like Indom and Lustrate have INSANE potency. Tank is at half-health? Doesn't matter, Excogitation! If they're using their kit improperly, the kit is not broken, the player is not playing the job correctly. It's the same thing when DPS don't press weaponskill combos. They're playing the job wrong.

this isn't World of Warcraft we're supposed to DPS heal yourself

Almost every job in the game can self-heal.
Tanks: Clemency for PLD, Soul Survivor + heavy shielding for DRK, Storm's Path on WAR. None of those require tank stance. You can weave an Equilibrium in Defiance or use Grit+Souleater healing if things are getting scary.
DPS: Bloodbath is HUGE. Second Wind has saved lives in my group, which are on every DPS except casters, who can help mitigate, and have increased magical defense. SAM has Third Eye. RDM has Vercure.
WoW is not a mythical scary monster that is destroying the game and the community with it's playerbase migration. Lessons from other MMOs are key for improving our own game. 2.0 literally would not exist without lessons learned from WoW in particular.

The rest of this post I can't quote. There are too many personal anecdotes that aren't backed up with factual information. If you're going to do this, I recommend citations like fight timelines you've taken of the encounter in question or an in-depth analysis of the encounter to better illustrate your points. I've posted this before in other threads, but just because YOUR tanks are bad, does not mean the job is broken. It means you have BAD PARTY MEMBERS. Although, I will address one last point that I feel is important.

why do the dungeon at all if you don't need anything from it? I'm the person who refuses to continue after a couple of wipes because I don't want to spend an excessive amount of time trying to complete the dungeon. If you find a dungeon boring don't play it's simple. Please don't ruin the experience for everyone else.

This particular piece blows my mind. I do roulettes because they provide resources like tomes and gil to further my goals in the game. I still craft, I still want to earn gil, I still do WT, and I want to contribute to my guild, whether that means placing things in the Guild chest for future like raid food and potions, or gearing up our new players for Shadowbringers. I don't need a superfluous reason to play the game anyway, because that means unsubbing or AFKing in town, which has it's own "assumptions" on what you're doing. I find the game fun, so I play it.
If you're the kind of person to give up on an encounter after a few wipes, it makes complete sense why you have these thoughts. You've never actually gone through progression of a difficult encounter that can take dozens if not HUNDREDS of wipes before the team understands the encounter completely. You develop a lot of patience for other people and for mistakes that way. If you are having trouble in LEVELING dungeons, maybe it's because people are new? And leveling? They don't have their entire kit? Stop painting the entire playerbase with a broad stroke because you've had bad experiences in some of the most unbalanced, mandatory, and lackluster content in the game.

Please re-read the thread to better understand the points people are making about this topic, since a lot of it has been discussed already.

I doubt your opinion will change, because they never do about things like this(see signature), but this post simply cannot be unchallenged in case someone who's never read the forums comes across a post like this, without reading the rest of the thread, and does not possess the in-game knowledge to refute it on their own.

[SargentToughie]

Snip

I appreciate you. I just wanted to make sure you knew that.

[Kabooa]

I feel compelled to take this post and deconstruct it, because it's not accurate and is spreading misinformation.

Every party encounter in the game is tuned around the Tank currently getting hit being in tank stance.

[Shurrikhan]

Every party encounter in the game is tuned around the Tank currently getting hit is in tank stance.

Seems strange, then, that literally every strike allows for the tank's survival without said tank stance. Isn't that the very basis of a tuning point -- to either disallow X, forcing Y, or allow X and thereby discourage Y? If it allows for us to play without tank stance, therefore granting no meaningful advantage to the stance, one would figure that state is what we've been tuned around.

[Kabooa]

Seems strange, then, that literally every strike allows for the tank's survival without said tank stance. Isn't that the very basis of a tuning point -- to either disallow X, forcing Y, or allow X and thereby discourage Y? If it allows for us to play without tank stance, therefore granting no meaningful advantage to the stance, one would figure that state is what we've been tuned around.

Only in Ultimate.

Every other content type is tuned around the lowest common denominator.

AKA tank stance.

[Shurrikhan]

Only in Ultimate.

Every other content type is tuned around the lowest common denominator.

AKA tank stance.

Ultimate is tuned more leniently than casual content now? What? I can survive without tank stance in Ultimate, but... not elsewhere?...

Ahh, I see now you meant that the raid DPS requirements of most fights should allow for (whichever tank is at the time) the MT to remain in tank stance, not that tankbusters are tuned around tank stance.

Fair enough. But, is that at all relevant?

Remember, we allegedly tune around 0 healer dps, despite that healers would otherwise spend the vast majority of their time standing idle. Is that truly the obvious tuning point when there are still very significant benefits for dealing healer damage (or, further tank damage) and none at all for not doing so?

[Kabooa]

Ultimate is tuned more leniently than casual content now? What? I can survive without tank stance in Ultimate, but... not elsewhere?...

Ahh, I see now you meant that the raid DPS requirements of most fights should allow for (whichever tank is at the time) the MT to remain in tank stance, not that tankbusters are tuned around tank stance.

Fair enough. But, is that at all relevant?

Remember, we allegedly tune around 0 healer dps, despite that healers would otherwise spend the vast majority of their time standing idle. Is that truly the obvious tuning point when there are still very significant benefits for dealing healer damage (or, further tank damage) and none at all for not doing so?

It's not relevant. My entire gripe with tanks in this game is that so little is expected of them. I gave up in other threads not because I was wrong or they were right on a specific matter, but that they were right -in general- that it doesn't matter.

And that just made me realize Gunbreaker won't be some turning point. It'll have the bog standard 3 combos of threat, maintenance and spam, uninteresting stances, and a burst window to make them not seem so lifeless which will be their only deviation.

But by god, if someone is wrong on one irrelevant detail, I'll still be there.

[Kalise]

There is also a misconception on what 20% means in accordance to tank stance. First of all, WAR doesn't get this. It gets the HP increase of 25% with no increases in defense. DRK and PLD do not get increased HP from Tank stance either.

Your base offensives are nerfed 20% (25% for WAR). I can say nerfed, because the game is ADJUSTING the damage, much like how tank stance ADJUSTS the damage you are taking. The actual problem is the removal of several abilities that comprise of the rotation and resource generation.

I just wanted to go into further detail with these things.

Paladin and Dark Knight get 20% damage reduction from their Tank Stance. However, it's worth noting that effects stack multiplicatively, meaning that this 20% damage reduction makes their CD's less effective.

For example, a Paladin popping Rampart isn't taking 40% less damage in Tank stance, they're taking 36% less damage. Making that Tank stance only providing 16% damage reduction. If they pop Sentinel, they're not taking 60% less damage, they're taking 52% less damage, making Tank stance only provide 12% damage reduction.

With Warrior... Well, their Tank stance doesn't even give them damage reduction! It only gives them extra health! But then there's the thing where extra health often doesn't matter. So long as you can survive the biggest burst that you will receive during an encounter, additional health is meaningless. Since, either way, it will need to be healed up (Yes, Defiance also gives increased healing to help with that, but it's not as if oGCD's aren't already healing for 50%+ a Tanks max health as is)

If a Tank is using Hallowed Ground, Living Dead or Holmgang... Well, their Tank stance is offering zero benefit at all because these are immunity skills!

Now, given that the vast majority of damage to a tank comes in the form of abilities such as Tankbusters and Raidbusters and thus are mitigated via defensive CD's, the worth of Tank Stances defences are being thus reduced from their already meagre stated value of 20-25% damage reduction/extra health.

Then on to damage!

Where the effect of Tank stances are HUGE.

Lets go through one by one:

For Warrior, they lose the 5% bonus damage from Deliverance and get the 20% damage reduction from Defiance to boot. Now, remember what I mentioned earlier? Effects stack multiplicatively.

A Warrior in Deliverance isn't simply dealing 5% more damage. Since Warrior has Storm's Eye for a 10% damage increase and Maim for another 10% damage increase.

This means that their damage modifier is actually 1.05 * 1.10 * 1.10 = 1.2705. That means they're doing 127.05% damage, 27.05% more than baseline.

Defiance thus means that their 20% less damage multiplier is being utilized into the stacking of the damage modifiers. So again, a Warrior with Defiance with Storm's Eye and Maim has the damage modifier of 0.8 * 1.10 * 1.10 = 0.968. That means they're are doing only 96.8% damage, 3.2% LESS than baseline.

This means that the difference is 30.25% damage. With the difference increasing for any further modifiers that will be applied during an encounter (Trick Attack, Embolden, Brotherhood, Radiant Shield, Hypercharge)

Furthermore, a Warrior in Defiance loses out on being able to use Fell Cleave and instead has to settle with Inner Beast. This is a comparison of 520 potency vs 350 potency which means a 33% loss in damage from the times when you would use this gauge dump (Which when you consider that Fell Cleave currently makes up about 40% of a Warriors total damage output, that's significant)

Next we have DRK.

Dark Knight has a 20% damage reduction modifier on their Tank stance.

But again, multiplicative stacking makes this much worse. Since they have a permanent 20% damage increase from their Darkside ability.

This means that instead of being a baseline of 120% damage (20% more than baseline) they are instead working off of 1.2 * 0.8 = 0.96 = 96% damage (4% less than baseline) making the difference 24% damage. This again, is amplified by any other effects they may receive during an encounter (Including Slashing debuff provided by say, a Warrior)

In addition to this, they lose access to Blood Weapon, the single most important skill for any Dark Knight as it provides a MASSIVE boost to resources, allowing them to deal more damage, to mitigate more damage (Via having MP to use The Blackest Night) and to even provide more enmity (Since they can use high enmity generating skills that cost MP such as Dark Arts buffed Plunge or Dark Arts buffed Dark Passenger). It is absurd how much better this skill is than the tank stance variant of Blood Price which is absolute garbage.

Next up, Paladin.

Paladin gets away with only a 15% damage loss from their tank stance right?

Wrong. Sword Oath's passive damage bonus on auto attacks, equates to roughly 10% of a Paladin's overall damage output.

In addition, multiplicative stacking rears its ugly head when Paladin's revolve heavily around their 2 CD skills, Fight or Flight (Providing 25% bonus damage) and Requiescat (Providing 20% bonus damage)

This is also to say nothing about how GARBAGE Shield Oath is for actually generating Oath Gauge to be able to use Sheltron - Which provides a ton of mitigation (Since it works outside of damage reduction modifiers because it's a Block effect which reduces the damage of an attack before it actually hits you and is affected by your damage reduction buffs) as well as an increase in DPS via Shield Swipe activation.

The TL;DR version of it is thus:

Tank Stance offers approximately 10-15% overall damage reduction. While costing up 30%+ of your damage output.

That is simply not a good deal. Thus is should be no wonder why people really don't want to be using Tank stances if they can help it.