Thread: 6.0 Both Tank and Healers Need Major Focus on Bringing Back Job Identity

As much as I agree with OP I think the days of 3.0, tank diversity is long gone. The problem is elitism + poor raid design = dev playing safe. The reason why pld sucked so hard in 3.0 was because most, if not all, the raid fights had magic damage for a tank that exclusively excelled in physical mitigation. I honestly thought that PLD was great in what it did and if it had Clemency at that time things would be very different but the insane self sustain and damage of WAR and magic mitigation of DRK was just too good. FFXIV has been scarred since then and it finally led us to where we are currently with all tanks having the same cds, the same answer to any situation and roughly the same damage output. I put the blame on not just elitists but the Devs as well for lacking foresight.

Just to note some things that tanks lost on the way to Shadowbringers:
-cross class skills (pld used to have raise outside battle via CNJ fyi)
-niche abilties like mercy stroke
-Job exclusive interrupts like DRK low blow procs
-Physical and magical damage exclusive defensive cds
-enemy debuffs like int down or str down (debatable if removal was a good thing or not)
-Cd synergy like Raw Intuition and Awareness
-Threat management, there was a time where you actually had to tank to make sure the dps or healers won't steal hate.
-Tp management (also debatable)
-Job exclusive tank stance (imo they got lazy with DRK tank stance since its just a reskin or PLD)
-Off tank stance tied to gcd or long ogcd (requied thought as using at the wrong time may end up losing boss aggro)
-Stance dancing
-Bloodbath rotation
-Berserk-Infuriate-Inner Release rotation of 3.0
-Utility heavy tank vs damage heavy tank vs magic mitgation tank These used to be PLD, WAR, DRK respectively but now all tanks have an answer for each situation
-Skill based tanking tanks used to have a high skill ceiling that separated the player base (debatable if it needed to be removed completely)

These are just off the top of my head and I'm sure I'm missing more since I've been with the game since 2.0 beta as WAR and been through the highs and lows and currently its a low for me imo.

Originally Posted by Lyth

The present fix of auto-positioning bosses is not an appropriate countermeasure.

The idea of an invisible mechanic-buddy for the boss seems an appropriate jank work around if the baseline code can't be altered in a reasonable timeframe. Thinking on it, if the problem is the baseline AI, there's similarities between Pet jank and Boss Jank that would be hard to ignore.

A mechanic buddy, director, however one would want to classify it is suitably hidden from the player's eye while providing much of the benefit. The boss can flit around as it needs to, and as mechanics need to happen, the buddy snapshots the boss facing and position and works from there, while being able to simply lay down the dance floor without issue.

Cleaves take the boss's facing / position, AoE's wouldn't require a cast bar, PBAoEs snapshot position, etc, while the hidden director sources the boss's current debuff state and performs the mechanic, all while it seemingly comes from the boss.

I think the mechanic-buddy idea works with a bit of a caveat. Cleaves may introduce an issue depending on how quickly the game is able to snapshot. As an example, let's say that I am kiting a boss around a circular arena, and a cleave goes out. As I move backwards, melee is moving forwards. As the melee move past the old location of the boss, do they get snapshotted due to the delay despite being physically behind the boss? At the moment, if you do this, the boss freezes when the cleave is going out and stops following you. But that brings back the old bug with mobs continuing to track the player and not being able to execute abilities.

Now, if there was a way to designate certain auto attacks as cleaves (or even if you designed a boss where all the outgoing autos are cleaves as a start), that might be a workaround. I wish that there was a way to force a mob to backstep in this game. I'm not sure if you can still do this, but in Warcraft, stepping far enough into a mob's hitbox without crossing its midline historically forced it to take a step back. It may sound odd, but one of the foremost jobs of a tank should be to "pilot" the mobs and manoeuvre them into a position that best benefits the team.

It also strikes me as interesting how so much of the fight design seems driven by avoiding prior glitches. The original Binding Coil was the one case where we broke away from circular/square platforms in favour of irregular arenas with height variations. Players took advantage of this (most notably with T5 divebombs), but I don't think that's necessarily a reason to not do these types of fights ever. The formula is safe, but after a while everything becomes recycled.

And there are little ways in which this can be experimented with. "Break line of sight behind destructible pillars" is a common enough mechanic. What's preventing us from say, having a 'T' or 'I' shaped corridor arena where breaking line of sight around a corner is essential to avoid mechanics? Dungeons seem to allow for these geometric configurations without issue. I feel like these are the things that need to be looked at most urgently.

Originally Posted by Mindiori

They have no incentive and if anything, extreme casuals that don't hang around are going to accelerate game box sales before the game comes to a close in its primary development path. So nobody really wins as players; but many developers do this across the genre as we well know. Executive level money crunch no doubt; as with YP's feelings about the game and MMO's, as per past interviews, it's unlikely he personally wanted a trivial experience either. With other games as a guideline, there's certainly more than enough to predict it getting worse - not better. Complaints always go unheard for a long time but if you hit the bank balance at all with suggestions, no matter how logically valid, its not going to yield any good result.

I'm hanging on where I can but even then, I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry about the state of things like Scholar. Perhaps some 1 button easymoders enjoy that sort of thing but personally. Heh. I literally would rather watch paint dry than imagine some poor newer player and what they may make of its 'depth'. Its got to be skip pot, or die of boredom. Can't even fathom what possessed them to gut things so much.

I don't think Yoshi has had a chance to give feedback on Tanks/Heals because well he is working on other projects now. Most likely leadership has passed down a bit on class design and that person wanted this expansion to focus on streamlining and fix the 'heal/tank' population issue, but that hasn't really happened. Its still just as bad except the veteran tank/healers are being replaced with newer ones. So quality of players in those roles has gone down as a result.

Originally Posted by Marxam

snip

See while we can go back and forth about some of those mechanics(we have and still debate them) the biggest problem isn't any single one being cut.

It's all of them, as a group. Some of those were small, others bigger and still others badly handled.

But they really haven't given us something to replace what we have lost so each time we lose something it chips away at us.

Most of those action differences either were irrelevant, or made one tank job mandatory back in the "good-ole days". I can't think of the last time that I used an out of combat raise, aside from farming the rez achievement. Physical and magical damage cooldown were but a passing nuisance; the highest dps tank always won out, even in predominantly physical fights. Mandatory 100% uptime debuffs are quite possibly the poorest design decision ever made in this game. Shoehorn you in based on your job regardless of player competency just because you brought a mandatory buff? No thanks. Bring the player, not the job.

Enmity management? Do I really want to have to sacrifice dps on add pickups depending on whether there's a semi-competent NIN actually willing to use Shadewalker or not? Nah. The real test is whether you know where and when the add spawns, not whether or not you can bully your teammates into picking the right team comp. Stance-dancing? What's that? You're using a Warcraft term where different stances actually confer desirable gameplay advantages. Not "please minimise your use of this button to maximise your raid performance". There's no "dancing" if you're just in the same stance for the entire fight. Damage vs. utility is literally never, ever a question. It always comes down to "how do I sacrifice this utility for more damage." Skill-based tanking is entirely contingent on fight design, not on giving certain jobs advantages over the rest. Directional autos are possibly the one exception to this, but most people probably didn't ever know that such a thing ever existed.

The one thing on that list that I do miss are situational abilities like Mercy Stroke and SoSu. I truly enjoyed having a dedicated keybind on an ability that I could use like three times per fight. Truly masterful gameplay.

No, I'm happy that they dumpstered a lot of the meaningless rubbish or the stuff that skewed the tank balance in favour of certain tank jobs over others. Those were good decisions, kudos on them for listening about that, 10/10 would support again. If you needed to play a particular job to make you valuable as a tank, then you shouldn't ever have been tanking in the first place. What I dislike is shallow, formulaic fight design that de-emphasises tank movement and positioning. That has, and always will separate the wheat from the chaff.

Originally Posted by Nedkel

Thats why its important for you guys to stop "afking" in this game and move into other ones.
I started playing wow and cant wait for shadowlands, unsubbed from ffxiv for now since lvling healers is just a true pain and i dont feel like going into there. :P
Having more fun with wow so far, playing demon hunter feels like playing some arcade game, playing with freedom and mobility like i never would have in ffxiv.

I kinda lost all my hope for this japanese company, they just dont even listen to players outside of their own island, well.

If you think its any better in WoW, then you have another thing coming.
Blizzard actively makes it a point to say "we don't listen to players", and they have said so in the past.
There are incredibly large issues balance wise for PvP, and though they created vendors, they didnt add necessary PvP elements which causes a lot of PvE to leak through it.
They also made it clear when shadowlands released there will be no large mechanical changes, which is unfortunate because bear druid has been in a bad place since the start of BFA, and many classes are so reliant upon the current azerite system that they simply wont function.
I get why you're hopping, but trust me, the grass is definitely not greener on the other side.frost DK takes 6 seconds before i get to do my rotation or continue it, not counting a racial being used mid rotation.

Originally Posted by Leiron

If you think its any better in WoW, then you have another thing coming.
Blizzard actively makes it a point to say "we don't listen to players", and they have said so in the past.
There are incredibly large issues balance wise for PvP, and though they created vendors, they didnt add necessary PvP elements which causes a lot of PvE to leak through it.
They also made it clear when shadowlands released there will be no large mechanical changes, which is unfortunate because bear druid has been in a bad place since the start of BFA, and many classes are so reliant upon the current azerite system that they simply wont function.
I get why you're hopping, but trust me, the grass is definitely not greener on the other side.frost DK takes 6 seconds before i get to do my rotation or continue it, not counting a racial being used mid rotation.

Playing warrior and monk atm, and i like it more than current FFXIV war or drk.

Originally Posted by Nedkel

Thats why its important for you guys to stop "afking" in this game and move into other ones.
I started playing wow and cant wait for shadowlands, unsubbed from ffxiv for now since lvling healers is just a true pain and i dont feel like going into there. :P
Having more fun with wow so far, playing demon hunter feels like playing some arcade game, playing with freedom and mobility like i never would have in ffxiv.

I kinda lost all my hope for this japanese company, they just dont even listen to players outside of their own island, well.

*Looks at Demon Hunter in cinematic.* "They look kinda like paper bat props in a sock-puppet show..."
*Plays Demon Hunter in-game.* --> *Is overjoyed.*

*Looks at Gunbreaker in cinematic.* --> "Are we finally getting meaningful stance choices via ammo? Use of mobility on a tank even after having taken threat?!!!"
*Plays Gunbreaker in-game.* --> "I mean, I guess the bit of added APM twice per minute helps a little...?"