How tanking feels post ShB patch

[Typhoria]

"Wait for 3 Sunders" It's a meme for a reason. Waiting for a tank initialize threat is boring/wastes time.

Mitigation damage and positioning the boss is the core of tanking. Even the tank not currently holding threat can drop mitigation on the other tank to help.

Regarding comments about good vs bad tanks, this weekend I joined an Ex party that included a note about using Provoke and Shirk. So some people apparently are missing the knowledge of proper tank swapping.

[Nedkel]

If tanks are playing like dps, then i do not want to be in the healer skin with tank who has these toughts xD

[msoltyspl]

The entire point of this thread was to see if anybody else felt like the removal of hate mechanics all together made playing a tank feel odd to them.

It does, and enmity management should be the part of the game - though more in the hand of the tank than of dps (not that they had much tools, besides one long CD skill). Alas, instead of improving on that part of the gameplay, they gutted it out completely. Threat multiplier from threat toggle now is so big you can do nearly nothing at all. Looking at actual enmity values one can wonder "really devs ? wtf guys". Tanks now are literally poor man's dpses with mob(s) glued to them. So the only remaining funs are swapping/positioning/CDs - which are few and far between during encounters. With provoke giving us chunk of enmity on top one can wonder, what's even the point of shirke now (outside of trolling). TBH one of the more funny parts is well done wall-to-wall trash pull now. There is something sexy about healing your healer with nascent flash =)

OTOH, the reality of at least 4.x content was that no one gave a fuck about the mystical stance dancing - tanks shirked each other's ass from time to time and did openers in tank stance. Very rarely you saw tank actually going back to tank stance.

Compared to what SE did to healers (SCH especially) though .... one could say we are not in that bad position. Though ..... you can see what kind of japanese part of playerbase they are listening to (if listening to anyone at all).

[kidalutz]

I'm not trying to be rude or funny so please don't read that sort of tone into what I am about to say:

If you want to focus on DPS more than emnity the I have to ask why not just play a DPS? Why play a role where your job should be focusing on taking/mitigating damage and holding focus? If this is the attitude of the majority of people tanking in the game then why not just do away with the idea of a tank all together? I feel like it's going to boil down to the question of - If they don't play differently then why have them at all?

The funny answer to your question is rather people are like sheep they hear or see some top tier person do something and suddenly it spreads to everyone else thinking they should do that too and eventually because it became prevailent because more and more people seen it and went Solomon Grundy want pants too and started doing it. eventually it became widespread to the point that it really wasnt going to change back.

[Kaitoo]

"Wait for 3 Sunders" It's a meme for a reason. Waiting for a tank initialize threat is boring/wastes time.

Mitigation damage and positioning the boss is the core of tanking. Even the tank not currently holding threat can drop mitigation on the other tank to help.

Regarding comments about good vs bad tanks, this weekend I joined an Ex party that included a note about using Provoke and Shirk. So some people apparently are missing the knowledge of proper tank swapping.

the incoming dmg, and by that the resulting mitigation, is already a joke in this game tho.
Thats why the green/blue dps meme even exists. cause damage is a joke, number and predictability wise. You cant compare with that with wow, yes they gone away from the aggro managment game but the health pingpong that you play in wow is not comparable to this game, which they replaced the aggro managment game.

as for the op: People in PF farm party say me paladin is strong but feels very bland, dont know about the rest

[Ricola]

I’m...kinda surprised at how many people are saying that gaining and holding hate aren’t fun...I guess i’m in the minority but I always liked the stress of holding hate, along with all the other things such as boss positioning and the like. Then again, I like when things are as difficult as possible; feels rewarding to me. I guess I just personally don’t feel there’s enough going on.

[Lannybaby]

This post pulls me back to my WoW days, particularly towards the death knight NPCs. They have this saying: "harness your hate, make it useful."

It would be nice if tanks have a mechanic that actually makes use of the enmity we generate. Maybe it would be tied to our tank stance. Turn grit on, generate enmity, turn it off and gain increased damage/haste at the cost of some enmity. This would actually give a purpose to enmity generation more than holding foes to the tank. Not only does the tank lose a percentage of enmity on all targets, but they won't be generating much more than everyone else for the 10 (maybe 30?) seconds their tank stance is turned off. This instills some planning on the usage of this mechanic.

Tanks would have to make sure they have enough enmity to not only use the mechanic, but make sure they don't lose attention until they can turn their stance back on.

[Bobzitto]

I’m...kinda surprised at how many people are saying that gaining and holding hate aren’t fun...I guess i’m in the minority but I always liked the stress of holding hate, along with all the other things such as boss positioning and the like. Then again, I like when things are as difficult as possible; feels rewarding to me. I guess I just personally don’t feel there’s enough going on.

I like challenging content. Which is why I raided mythic until recently in WoW, and enjoyed progressing in high M+ (high tier dungeon content). Guess what's one of the things I rarely had to contend with? Aggro management. Save for one specific affix that made tanks generate less aggro for that week, I never had problems holding mobs to me. The fact that removing the whole aggro management from FF14 makes it seem like there isn't much going on just exposes the problem that comes with having a much slower game experience in general.

[Typhoria]

I’m...kinda surprised at how many people are saying that gaining and holding hate aren’t fun...I guess i’m in the minority but I always liked the stress of holding hate, along with all the other things such as boss positioning and the like. Then again, I like when things are as difficult as possible; feels rewarding to me. I guess I just personally don’t feel there’s enough going on.

I understand where you are coming from. I think the change was made to help newer/undergeared players fully play their class.

For example a tank in The Burn with ilvl 340 gear, the minimum to enter, would not be able to keep threat from someone with full ilvl 400+ without spamming threat combo in stance. That kind of gameplay is stale and boring for the returning/newer player trying to gear up.

[Valmarus]

Since we're comparing tanking to other MMOs I'd say originally tanking was more akin to FFXI than any other MMO, though, in a much more dumbed down and easy way. And before anyone makes any uniformed comments about the success of FFXI it is still going strong and even paid for the remake of FFXIV. FFXI had a great balance with difficulty that really made you feel like you'd achieved things in the fight, and while certain hard fights were timed most weren't and there was almost no DPS checks with insta-wipe. Also mobs weren't overly scripted to a set rotation of abilities. The fact there was always a chance of losing because you could rarely predict exactly what curve balls may be thrown your way was exciting, there was a lot more adapting to situations as they developed rather than memorising sequences. In that hate management was a huge part of the game, to the extent that there were two forms of enmity known as Volatile and Cumulative. Volatile enmity is high impact but fast decay while cumulative decays slowly. All damage caused volatile enmity spikes, and abilities like provoke were high in volatile enmity while flash was better for building cumulative enmity. Tanks had to keep their cumulative enmity and account for volatile enmity, especially from spike damage classes like BLM or SAM.

EVERYTHING effected hate, damage got you hate, taking damage made you lose it, so tanks had to constantly maintain their enmity and it was a very satisfying experience. Constant high damage wasn't needed from tanks. The enmity system was such that it even allowed for different forms of tanking that the game developers never even counted on in the form of "blink" tanking. Ninja, the primary blink tank (though for a while RDM tanks were a thing during for certain high level battle in Aht Urhgan). Ninja was meant to be a DD and had very few hate tools in the beginning (though the devs embraced its tanking role and it gained more enmity tools later on, but also enmity mitigation so they could be used as DD also). They relied on hasted auto attack, provoke (from war sub job) and weaponskills to maintain enmity. The reason blink tanking worked was because their spell that put up shadows meant that when the enemy hit them they consumed a shadow instead of causing damage and thus they didn't lose enmity for taking damage. Shadow management in and of itself was an art form because of long recast times, the fact the lower level spell couldn't overwrite the remaining shadows of the higher level one (so you had to time your recast as the last shadow dropped because nin took a lot of damage if hit) and avoid getting interrupted when you got hit. The variety in how the different tanks worked made having multiple tanking jobs fun. But now on to my main point. Nobody complained they had to manage enmity.