Removing Tank Stance Argument

[Jandor]

Before role skills, we had cross class skills. Which meant that things like provoke and rampart, you had to level gladiator to get even if you wanted to play warrior or dark knight.

Role skills was a way around that, to make it so you didn't have to level other classes and could just get some basic across the board abilities for your role. The issue ended up being there were a handful of essential ones, like provoke and rampart, and a lot of situational or just not very useful ones.

So seeing the issue, the dev team mid SB decided to just give you all the role skills and then in 5.0 work out the ui issues so you don't have to go in and 'pick' them anymore, and culling some of the useless ones.

And that's how we got to where we are now.

I don't need a recap, I played through it live.

How is any of this relevant? Everyone now gets Rampart at level 8, but why? All the tanks have different but functionally identical 30% DR skills, what's wrong with PLD getting Rampart, DRK getting Shadowskin, etc. etc.

[Bright-Flower]

I don't need a recap, I played through it live.

How is any of this relevant? Everyone now gets Rampart at level 8, but why? All the tanks have different but functionally identical 30% DR skills, what's wrong with PLD getting Rampart, DRK getting Shadowskin, etc. etc.

Additional work/time making distinct spell effects when they all already have rampart.

[Jandor]

Additional work/time making distinct spell effects when they all already have rampart.

There is no additional work/time, the distinct spell effects already exist.

[OcieKo]

There is no additional work/time, the distinct spell effects already exist.

Always wondered about this

Every time they update one of them, they'd have to update all 4. So if it was say Rampart's 20% Damage Reduction, 20s Duration, 90s Cooldown. ATM if they say make it 25% Damage reduction, they do it once, they are done. If they go the other way, they do it 4 times, test all 4 of them, then done. And if they add a 5th tank eventually... boom 5 times.
For Gunbreaker alone, they got out of coming up with a name, an icon, a tooltip, a spell effect, an animation, coding in the effects of 7 skills, just by having role skills. From a development standpoint, the more things that are shared the easier it gets, and none of these things are so important that I want them to be unique. I'd be far less happy if my combo finisher was shared than if my taunt was shared.

[whiskeybravo]

Every time they update one of them, they'd have to update all 4. So if it was say Rampart's 20% Damage Reduction, 20s Duration, 90s Cooldown. ATM if they say make it 25% Damage reduction, they do it once, they are done. If they go the other way, they do it 4 times, test all 4 of them, then done. And if they add a 5th tank eventually... boom 5 times.
For Gunbreaker alone, they got out of coming up with a name, an icon, a tooltip, a spell effect, an animation, coding in the effects of 7 skills, just by having role skills. From a development standpoint, the more things that are shared the easier it gets, and none of these things are so important that I want them to be unique. I'd be far less happy if my combo finisher was shared than if my taunt was shared.

Frankly, they could've re-purposed any of the number of abilities that have been retired throughout the cycle of the game. They already had Shadow Skin on DRK, deleted for no reason. They could've made Foresight 20% DR. And if enough of the abilities are similar, or at least tiered like they are now (we all have 20% @ 90 sec and 30% @ 120 sec) then you don't need to test them all - they're all the same!

You would do this, take this extra time to add detail for each job, because you want a quality end product. When they simply copy abilities or throw their hands up and give us all the same ability, it reeks of lack of effort. Anybody can see it, and most do notice. So, if SE really wanted to do it, if they really wanted to provide a quality experience, then it would be no problem to dedicate time and resources for that. The problem perhaps is that they're trying to provide quality experiences in too many things at once.