Removing Tank Stance Argument

[Liam_Harper]

Because most of the tanks who play tank on this game just want to play Melee with Fast Queue times.

I want stances gone and this is the last thing I want.

In WoW they had no real stances and up until Legion, I'd by far prefer to play a WoW tank than a FF tank. Your rotation, or priority system, actually revolved around mitigation. Your dps was a higher skill ceiling as your mitigation abilities were also your hard hitters, so you had to know when you could blow them and when you needed to hold them. In general most tanks played it safe and the really good tanks were rewarded with the extra utility. Things generally hit like trucks but you had the tools to handle almost anything if you played it well. I miss that.

Tank Stance is simply a passive you turn on, take a big punishment and your rotation is almost unchanged except for a button or two. I fail to see the appeal of it. Tanking in tank stance is the most simplistic gameplay in the entire game.

[Shurrikhan]

I want stances gone and this is the last thing I want.

In WoW they had no real stances and up until Legion, I'd by far prefer to play a WoW tank than a FF tank. Your rotation, or priority system, actually revolved around mitigation. Your dps was a higher skill ceiling as your mitigation abilities were also your hard hitters, so you had to know when you could blow them and when you needed to hold them. In general most tanks played it safe and the really good tanks were rewarded with the extra utility. Things generally hit like trucks but you had the tools to handle almost anything if you played it well. I miss that.

Tank Stance is simply a passive you turn on, take a big punishment and your rotation is almost unchanged except for a button or two. I fail to see the appeal of it. Tanking in tank stance is the most simplistic gameplay in the entire game.

Honestly, pre-oGCD Ignore Pain BfA Protection felt great to me for this reason. But as much as many of we Warriors asked for simply improvements to Ignore Pain to make its mitigation worth its GCD cost in some way behind pure and immediate mitigation (that is to say, without making us specialized turtle tanks), community conceptions and hashtag chains of "what Warriors clearly want[ed]" gave us yet more carpal-tunnel, low-thought mitigation. I loved weaving between offense and defense. And I don't think we need stances to accomplish that.

That said, I don't think stances, properly made, work against that in any way. They should augment it. I know we have about the worst possible examples of their application at present, but what we've had isn't the be-all-end-all of what could be.

There's nothing intrinsic about making tanks do low damage. They do need to do less damage than pure damage dealers, because otherwise we'd just bring tanks and healers (we sometimes do that anyways). But tanks are still here to do damage.

Please teach me to be a pacifist with an oversized axe. My greatsword was clearly never meant to inflict mortal wounds. Tanks are still damage dealers, first and foremost. We just happen to be the only ones brave enough to hit from the front.

To make fight knowledge matter more, things need to be better telegraphed but less scripted.

These are by far the two most important considerations relevant to the conversation of MMO tanking (especially in XIV), imo.

[Duskane]

stances should just be one button to avoid button bloat (same could work for Ast secs)
Press once for Defiance
Press again for deliverance
also stops miss pressing and just deleting all your gauge
or
Tanks by default have traits that add Tank stance attributes and DPS stance just corrects the stats (so pre SB cleric stance basically but for tanks)

[shao32]

Tank stances are just so bad designed it doesn't matter where the meta is, if the meta was around 100% tank stance uptime we will suffer the GCD and resources penalty every time a forced tank swap it's present on top of the overall dps penalty and currently we can avoid switching stances thankfully but stay on then for whatever reason is still a huge punishment not only in term of numbers but in term of gameplay too.

This skills with the combo agro become painfully useless with time with the amount of agro we generate and the overall defensive capability we have.

Removing or just reworking tank stances will be no only a big benefic on terms of gameplay for us but a way to control tanks by the Devs, they complaint to much they can't work around us BCS we do to much damage and we didn't get tank acc fixed bcs of this and tank stances desin and current use are one of the primary contributors to that problem.

[Cabalabob]

Tank stance shouldn’t exist because it’s just a strange concept. Tanks needing tank stance to tank? Why should a job need a stance to perform its basic function? Healers don’t have heal stance (except ast but that’s about heal type not giving it the ability to heal).

Really tanks could have both their stances removed and it wouldn’t effect anything. Enmity combo when you want enmity, dps combo when you don’t, cooldowns for mitigation, provoke and shirk for enmity management between two tanks.

The only issue that would arise is for low level/new players, tank stance is basically a crutch for when your party outgears you, but this could be made up for by adding cooldowns with enmity effects on them. E.G. WAR could have unchained reworked to just double enmity on skills for the duration, PLD could get holy chain that forces all targets to attack them regardless of enmity, giving them time to generate an enmity lead. DRK already has abilities that increase enmity when used with dark arts.

Tank stance as a concept should really be a thing for jobs that can’t tank natively, e.g. imagine if fists of Earth on monk was basically shield oath. Allowing monks to take over tanking if the tank dies, just until they can recover. It’s not a thing that actual tanks should need... because they’re tanks.

[Kabooa]

Tank stance shouldn’t exist because it’s just a strange concept.

Uh what.

Tanking "Stance" as the name changes but the term is pretty universal is any defensive / protection boost at the cost of offense power. It's been a hallmark of tanking archetypes for most RPG games, because the immovable wall of meat shouldn't also be throwing out high amounts of damage. Why bring the damage dealers, who are at risk of dying to the lightest breeze, if the guy who can't die does just as well?

Why would a Monk have to sacrifice their DPS to therefore tank if Tanks don't have to do this? That's the strange concept here.

[Cabalabob]

Uh what.

Tanking "Stance" as the name changes but the term is pretty universal is any defensive / protection boost at the cost of offense power. It's been a hallmark of tanking archetypes for most RPG games, because the immovable wall of meat shouldn't also be throwing out high amounts of damage. Why bring the damage dealers, who are at risk of dying to the lightest breeze, if the guy who can't die does just as well?

Why would a Monk have to sacrifice their DPS to therefore tank if Tanks don't have to do this? That's the strange concept here.

Because a tanks damage should be naturally low, because they’re a tank, not a dps. A monk would need to sacrifice dps to tank because they’re not a tank.

A stance should be to make you do something you can’t do without it. A tank shouldn’t need a tank stance because they are already a tank. A tank at best should need a dps stance that sacrifices defence and enmity to increase damage.

I think the intention on SE's part was 'tank stance for when tanking, dps stance for when not tanking.'

That way you have your defenses and enmity aplenty when tanking things, but can do more damage when not. Be it in raids/trials when only one tank is needed, doing solo stuff, or phases of bosses where there isn't anything to tank like killing Ifrit nails or Omega level checker etc.

In practice however, the game's design has lead to a meta where tanks want a bare minimum defense/enmity to get the job done and then pump out as much damage as possible, because for the most part you don't NEED tank stance to tank outside of getting an early head start etc. Further compounded by provoke/shirk combos to boost enmity between tanks.

But again, why should a tank need tank stance? Why not just make the tanks naturally tanky? A dps stance for when solo or not tanking is fine although the same thing is achieved by just giving them separate combos for enmity and dps, but tank stance on a tank is redundant because they should basically just BE tank stance.

[Bright-Flower]

Tank stance shouldn’t exist because it’s just a strange concept. Tanks needing tank stance to tank? Why should a job need a stance to perform its basic function? Healers don’t have heal stance (except ast but that’s about heal type not giving it the ability to heal).

Really tanks could have both their stances removed and it wouldn’t effect anything. Enmity combo when you want enmity, dps combo when you don’t, cooldowns for mitigation, provoke and shirk for enmity management between two tanks.

The only issue that would arise is for low level/new players, tank stance is basically a crutch for when your party outgears you, but this could be made up for by adding cooldowns with enmity effects on them. E.G. WAR could have unchained reworked to just double enmity on skills for the duration, PLD could get holy chain that forces all targets to attack them regardless of enmity, giving them time to generate an enmity lead. DRK already has abilities that increase enmity when used with dark arts.

Tank stance as a concept should really be a thing for jobs that can’t tank natively, e.g. imagine if fists of Earth on monk was basically shield oath. Allowing monks to take over tanking if the tank dies, just until they can recover. It’s not a thing that actual tanks should need... because they’re tanks.

I think the intention on SE's part was 'tank stance for when tanking, dps stance for when not tanking.'

That way you have your defenses and enmity aplenty when tanking things, but can do more damage when not. Be it in raids/trials when only one tank is needed, doing solo stuff, or phases of bosses where there isn't anything to tank like killing Ifrit nails or Omega level checker etc.

In practice however, the game's design has lead to a meta where tanks want a bare minimum defense/enmity to get the job done and then pump out as much damage as possible, because for the most part you don't NEED tank stance to tank outside of getting an early head start etc. Further compounded by provoke/shirk combos to boost enmity between tanks.

[Mixt]

I actually tried experimenting with going without tank stance a while back.

It didn't go well.

Shield lob (PULL)
Flash X 3
Already lost aggro
Ultimatum + Flash
Lost aggro again
Mobs kill everyone
WIPE.

...Well, how nice.

But sure, let's remove tank stance, make the above scenario the norm, why not?

[Bright-Flower]

Because a tanks damage should be naturally low, because they’re a tank, not a dps. A monk would need to sacrifice dps to tank because they’re not a tank.

A stance should be to make you do something you can’t do without it. A tank shouldn’t need a tank stance because they are already a tank. A tank at best should need a dps stance that sacrifices defence and enmity to increase damage.



But again, why should a tank need tank stance? Why not just make the tanks naturally tanky? A dps stance for when solo or not tanking is fine although the same thing is achieved by just giving them separate combos for enmity and dps, but tank stance on a tank is redundant because they should basically just BE tank stance.

The idea is to limit tank damage while tanking, but give them more damage when they're not tanking so that they're not TOO good and doing too much damage as a tank, but not left with so little damage as to be annoying to play through quests etc. I think that's the intent anyway. The idea with tank stance is to swap between those two extremes. The issue is that FFXIV content generally does not require the benefits of the tank stance, at least not for the majority of a boss fight's duration, which leads to people hardly ever using it. Were the game balanced in a way where you NEEDED the enmity and defense boost from tank stance to tank all the time it would serve more of a purpose.

I actually tried experimenting with going without tank stance a while back.

It didn't go well.

Shield lob (PULL)
Flash X 3
Already lost aggro
Ultimatum + Flash
Lost aggro again
Mobs kill everyone
WIPE.

...Well, how nice.

But sure, let's remove tank stance, make the above scenario the norm, why not?

I assume that anyone arguing to remove tank stance is assuming the extra enmity would be baked into the job, not just stripping away their enmity tools with no compensation. People don't want to just say, remove Shield Oath and make no other changes to PLD to compensate.