Tanking in FF14 question

[ReiMakoto]

Yeah, gotta love the people who seem to think there was some kind of difference between turning stance on/off and today.

"REMEMBER THEM DAYS WHEN YOU NEEDED GRIT FOR THE FIRST UNLEASH!? I MISS THOSE DAYS!!!!"

......sigh.

Yeah, like turning Grit off after one Unleash was just awesome gameplay or something.

Meanwhile, newbie tanks who left Grit (or whatever stance) on got yelled at, scolded, mocked, etc.

I'm going to repeat that.

It was considered bad play to use your defensive stance as a tank because it did "less DPS". A whole 10% less. Not that tanks were ever anywhere close to the top of the DPS charts, and not like you didn't already have 2 other people there whose job it was to kill junk, and not like that 10% DPS really did that much of a difference in 4man content.

EDIT: And before anybody yells at me about OTs and everybody should do DPS, etc. For tanks and heals, DPS is a tertiary job. In 8-man fights (which I am not talking about here), the OT is a gimp DPS until or unless he is needed, depending on the fight or if the MT dies. Obviously. He should be doing whatever he can to do as much DPS as possible, because there's literally nothing else he can do. But in 4man groups, the tank's first job is to keep mobs on him and his second job should be to keep himself alive. This includes defensive abilities, including stance back when that was a thing. And besides... losing the 10% defense on the stance meant healers had to cast more heals and do less DPS as a result and if the tank mis-calculated how much threat everybody else put out, this was a further waste to the healer's time when other people need heals dumped on them as a result. I often questioned just how effective going without stance really was, considering these points.

My dude it was way more than a 10% difference. It was a 20% damage straight up penalty, and the stance locked you out of using certain abilities, in some cases your most powerful abilities. It was more like a 30%+ difference in dps, and trust me it was noticable as tanks could do up to 70% of the damage of a dps, potentially more in dungeons cos their aoe burst was so strong.

I dont want aggro back btw but you are seriously misrepresenting how it was

Edit: in some cases using dps stance over tank stance actually made you more tanky btw. As drk if you used dps stance you could become essentially invincible as dps stance generated way more mana so you could spam abyssal drain and blackest night infinitely making you almost unkillable, and warriors IR burst did so much damage than you could often kill the add pack before the whms holy stun resistance applied to the mobs meaning you took no damagem

[Maeka]

My dude it was way more than a 10% difference. It was a 20% damage straight up penalty, and the stance locked you out of using certain abilities, in some cases your most powerful abilities. It was more like a 30%+ difference in dps, and trust me it was noticable as tanks could do up to 70% of the damage of a dps, potentially more in dungeons cos their aoe burst was so strong.

I dont want aggro back btw but you are seriously misrepresenting how it was

Edit: in some cases using dps stance over tank stance actually made you more tanky btw. As drk if you used dps stance you could become essentially invincible as dps stance generated way more mana so you could spam abyssal drain and blackest night infinitely making you almost unkillable, and warriors IR burst did so much damage than you could often kill the add pack before the whms holy stun resistance applied to the mobs meaning you took no damagem

That just just plain terrible design then, if 2 tanks could do that and the other one couldn't.

It needed fixed.

Dropping your protective stance, and dumping most of your threat generation shouldn't make you *more* tanky and able to do more DPS at the same time. That's just stupid.

[Danelo]

That just just plain terrible design then, if 2 tanks could do that and the other one couldn't.

It needed fixed.

Dropping your protective stance, and dumping most of your threat generation shouldn't make you *more* tanky and able to do more DPS at the same time. That's just stupid.

High risk high reward, which now no longer seems to exist, is maybe a better way of stating that style of play. PLD was far from useless comparatively when you factor in things like HG and clemency. It was strong in its own way verses now where every tank is strong in basically the same way.

But why shouldn’t dropping tank stance reward you with higher dps? The trade off makes complete sense to me as a secondary means of generating enmity is damage output. You bleed less enmity the more dps you have, allowing you time to utilize all those awesome stance gated abilities then transferring back to grit or what have you if need be. Saying it was flawed design philosophy is a fair critic but stupid is a bit fair.

[ReiMakoto]

That just just plain terrible design then, if 2 tanks could do that and the other one couldn't.

It needed fixed.

Dropping your protective stance, and dumping most of your threat generation shouldn't make you *more* tanky and able to do more DPS at the same time. That's just stupid.

Its called risk reward, and was designed like that to raise the skill ceiling. It was harder to play aggressive but there was a massive reward for doing so, which I would argue is good design. Through smart play you could be just as tanky as someone sitting in crutch stance while doing more damage, but if you didnt play better you got bopped. That is inherently good design as it rewards mastery of the system, whilst having a crutch there for people who need it due to being undergeared or lesser skilled.

The flaw with the system was simply that threat was so easy to manage and damage was so low that it was the obvious choice spending 99% of your time in damage stance was the correct way to play, and even SE introducing aggro resets and other mechanics didnt offset how people played the classes, so it became a vestigial system. I would have hoped in cutting it that tanks would get more in depth dps rotations to compensate but well here we are, basically in the same state we were before but now without the illusion of choice.