Can we please get aggro management back?

[Fynlar]

DRK's also cost a GCD IIRC but DRK's didnt and dont stance dance. they had both at all times.

I definitely remember seeing some DRKs trying to remove Grit after establishing hate though, in exactly the same sort of way some PLDs might have tried swapping to Sword Oath. It's just that you were far, far more likely to see WARs doing this, mainly because of the whole "Defiance doesn't reduce damage" thing (at least that was the reason I constantly remember seeing mentioned on the forums for why WARs hated being in Defiance), but I imagine not having to miss a GCD like PLD did was a pretty nice incentive too. That and maybe WAR was just most likely to attract the whole "DPS tank" mentality for some reason, idk.

Regarding DRK and Grit specifically, like I said I don't remember DRK back then too well, but it might also have been that activating Grit consumed a GCD but deactivating it did not, meaning that so long as you didn't have to reactivate Grit in the middle of combat, DRK wasn't losing any GCDs from it, unlike PLDs who had to actually swap stances and therefore use a GCD. I don't know if it was like that for DRK in Stormblood though; anyone who is more well versed in it can feel free to correct, because I'm quite possibly wrong.

Ultimately Tanking has lost any sense of actual tanking and all we are is just a weaker dps with more defense.

Isn't that basically the core of what a tank has always been, though? You say that like it's a newfound problem with tanking in this game, but to me it basically reads off as "business as usual, then"

The only real difference is that in the past, tanks had to, in one way or another and to some degree or another, sacrifice some of their maximum damage output in order to actually effectively perform their role (whether that meant keeping aggro or not getting themselves killed). And let's face it; given a choice between having to do that or being able to do their maximum possible damage, it's not hard to guess what most people in this game would want to do. (If you were in my shoes during Stormblood in particular, it would not be hard to guess what most people in this game did anyway, even in cases when they shouldn't have.)

[Fluffernuff]

Youre correct on grit. dropping grit didnt consume a GCD. The same is true for Shield oath, too. The only difference is that when DRK dropped grit, they already had darkside up. PLD still had to use Sword Oath regardless. I remember a big thing for PLD was to either eat the GCD to swap directly into sword oath, or to simply drop shield oath and try to weave in sword oath when you were forced to lose uptime anyway, like a ranged phase or when a boss went invuln.

stormblood kind of made that a little.... bad to do though, because dropping shield oath killed your gauge in it's entirety

[Lersayil]

Tank stances would work if aggro was disabled in off stance, thus requiring someone to stay in tank stance in order to hold aggro. If provoke or shirk didn't work when you are in an off stance that would potentially fix things but raid design would still need to be taken into consideration. I think o4s is probably a good example where enmity resets after grand cross required the tanks to be top 2 enmity asap or the mechanic might target a party member. Now if we apply the same mechanics but if one of the tanks were in Deliverance, Darkside, or Sword Oath, they would not get aggro and potentially kill a party member.

Ultimately Tanking has lost any sense of actual tanking and all we are is just a weaker dps with more defense. To the people who said tanking was just tank stance > one enmity combo > off tank stance. Guess what you do now. Regardless of tank stance enmity has been buffed so insanely high that it is possible to keep hate and we even have less combos so literally all you are doing is spamming an enmity combo. No reward for going into off stance and risking higher damage for potentially losing aggro.

I mean, thats our point though. Why dedicate 2-3 extra buttons on a class to skills that under normal circumstances will be used roughly once per pull? There was no interraction, no skillful struggle to hold aggro. It was a group skill check to see if everyone can properly use one to two agro dump oGCDs on cooldown. It added no extra consideration to tank gameplay other than that (lets be generous) 5 GCDs on pull and maybe circle shirking if the situation made it possible.

Agro management can be something interesting and challenging, but it wasn't in any of its previous iterations.

If they want more tank mechanics, I would personally prefer something to do with active mitigation.

[MariaArvana]

snip

1) Not everyone wants to 'pick a different tank.' believe it or not, people like certain jobs thematically or rotation wise, and throughout this game's history, there's been plenty of threads/rants/vents about people's job they love getting shafted hard. (PLD in HW, DRK in SB, MNK and to lesser extent RDM essentially 4ever, etc.) Arbitrarily making the tank they love to play harder to play than the others enmity wise is just going to annoy many people who love the job while tickinling the itch of a potential minority. The current tank setup allows all 4 tanks to effectively do their job on all fronts, with minor variances that only come in to play in the highest of end content, compared to your theoretical setup where they'd have major variations present in all content, casual or hardcore.

2) The purpose of your setup was to make certain tanks stronger in certain aspects while weakening them in others. I was simply pointing out a quick flaw that makes the 'enmity weak tank' basically have zero weakness compared to the other 3, which is a balancing issue. A tank that has a harder rotation can't fix his damage by hitting a single button, neither can a tank that generates resources needed for mitigation slower can speed it up by hitting one button, whereas provoke would knock out the enmity weak tank's issue, leaving it with only its strengths. WAR from 2.1-5.0 has historically shown that when your job has all the strengths with basically none of the weaknesses or almost non-issue weaknesses, it becomes the desired tank and inevitably forces another tank onto the bench. (PLD in HW, DRK to a lesser extent in SB). With how close in balance the tanks currently are, I'd rather not they invest in a system that could easily re-create such days.

3) The Inner Release debate in SB is proof enough that people aren't very fond of one job having to execute tons of weaving/optimizations in order to achieve its max dps threshold (SB DRK), vs a job that can unga bunga spam and deal just as much, if not more damage for basically zero effort (WAR). Rotation complexity should be pretty standardized across all tanks which honestly, is something they still need to work on a bit.


Aggro management by itself is intrinsically boring, it's just a simple binary yes/no system, and for any skilled tank during SB, it basically didn't exist due to how absurdly broken WAR was at generating it, combined with shirk use. Focus should shift away from aggro and more towards fun aggro-based mechanics for the tanks to deal with, like:

-the aggro drops in Neo-Exdeath
-more boss mechanics that target #2 hate instead of #1, making control of the fight who's MT/OT at certain times more important than it is currently.
-a phase where aggro gets dropped and then inverted, so the tanks want to drop tank stance to stay at #7 & #8 to keep aggro
-boss randomly swaps #1 & #2 hate through the fight right before certain mechanics/tank busters, placing more emphasis on pre-emptive planning mitigation & positioning.

The thing about your OGCD stance idea is that it inherently limits fight design by its nature, or becomes irrelevant. What if they wanted to design a boss that constant auto'd #1 -2 in hate throughout the fight forcing both tanks to pop their ogcd at the beginning, but quickly into a fight, they wanted to spawn an add around the time after the OGCD wears off? And if you can refresh it by using stuff, then how would it be designed to be refreshed without making it completely irrelevant and permanently up (DRK' darkside as an example), without it also being a dps loss? If you make the refresh too forgiving, then it might as well have never existed, and if you make it too harsh, you just run into the same situation as SB where bad tanks were constantly losing aggro, and is just an extra thing they had to keep up and failure to do so gets the healer/dps eaten alive and having the tank get yelled at, potentially scaring them off the role and completely defeating the purpose Square intended with making tanking easier? It's a much more complex solution with tons of variables that would require much more dev time to balance than the eloquently simple solution they have now.

Also, a tank stance OGCD would be a logistical nightmare for dungeon groups. "Okay, lemme pop my tank stance and - oh, everything's dead in 25s, my stance fell off and can't refresh it, and now I can't gain aggro on the next pack due to the OGCD being on cd for another 1:30." At that point, the group either pulls and lets the dps/healers tank, or waits 1:30 for the tank to get his stance back. (oops)

[Fynlar]

Youre correct on grit. dropping grit didnt consume a GCD. The same is true for Shield oath, too. The only difference is that when DRK dropped grit, they already had darkside up. PLD still had to use Sword Oath regardless. I remember a big thing for PLD was to either eat the GCD to swap directly into sword oath, or to simply drop shield oath and try to weave in sword oath when you were forced to lose uptime anyway, like a ranged phase or when a boss went invuln.

stormblood kind of made that a little.... bad to do though, because dropping shield oath killed your gauge in it's entirety

Hadn't actually thought about the whole "drop ShO and swap SwO during downtime" thing, haha. Probably because my mind simply never thought about dps optimization to that severe of a degree.

But yeah, I'm guessing there were some people that did that. Because PLD's gauge wasn't/isn't actually used for anything except defensive maneuvers that don't actually contribute to your damage dealt... I'm sure that to some people it was deemed acceptable loss -_-

[Fluffernuff]

yeah, i remember it being more of a HW thing than a SB thing. but those days are fuzzy to me as well.

sword oath optimizing aside, it definitely was NOT the gauge controversy of 4.0, which was the point of the discussion I quoted.


and failing to mention how that was specifically and only beast gauge on WAR is bordering on misinformation. And in that particular case, the fact WAR actually lost resources for doing what it had to do was.... bad. really bad. it led to far more than just 1 lost GCD, especially over the course of a fight. Contrary to the fell cleave meta, a good WAR didnt want to be locked and forced into Deliverance, even in the heights of 4.X

[MariaArvana]

Hadn't actually thought about the whole "drop ShO and swap SwO during downtime" thing, haha. Probably because my mind simply never thought about dps optimization to that severe of a degree.

But yeah, I'm guessing there were some people that did that. Because PLD's gauge wasn't/isn't actually used for anything except defensive maneuvers that don't actually contribute to your damage dealt... I'm sure that to some people it was deemed acceptable loss -_-

Very, very minor nitpick, but in SB PLD still had shield swipe, which while directly didn't use the oath gauge, many PLDs used excess gauge on Shelltrons to guarantee blocks to use shield swipe for extra damage optimization instead of banking on RNG to proc a block for shield swipe.

[Fynlar]

Very, very minor nitpick, but in SB PLD still had shield swipe, which while directly didn't use the oath gauge, many PLDs used excess gauge on Shelltrons to guarantee blocks to use shield swipe for extra damage optimization instead of banking on RNG to proc a block for shield swipe.

I did forget about that one, thanks. I know at some point they put a cooldown on Shield Swipe though, probably specifically because of this, but once again I forget exactly when that was instituted.

[Halivel]

Back when aggro management was "Turn on tank stance, use your aggro combo once, turn off tank stance and use dps rotation only for the rest of the fight." When everyone is told to play like that, its no wonder things ended up as they did. Players complain about problems that they themselves created.

This. I see no sense it going back to what this "aggro management" was, because there wasn't any management for tanks at all, it was all on healers and dps and real issues started if they forgot about their agro reducing skills. Unless it's completely reworked to become something meaningfull for tanks, there's no reason to go back.

[Melichoir]

Isn't that basically the core of what a tank has always been, though? You say that like it's a newfound problem with tanking in this game, but to me it basically reads off as "business as usual, then"

The only real difference is that in the past, tanks had to, in one way or another and to some degree or another, sacrifice some of their maximum damage output in order to actually effectively perform their role (whether that meant keeping aggro or not getting themselves killed). And let's face it; given a choice between having to do that or being able to do their maximum possible damage, it's not hard to guess what most people in this game would want to do. (If you were in my shoes during Stormblood in particular, it would not be hard to guess what most people in this game did anyway, even in cases when they shouldn't have.)

Except this wasnt exactly true. Aggro management between casual content and raid content was different, something that people typically dont make distinctions about. In casual content, slap that tank stance on and never lose aggro. Yeah if you wanted to push more damage, youd drop it, but in casual content there was never a need to do this. There was almost never a DPS check or mechanic in a boss fight that would require you to really need that tank stance off. People chose to go the "Do aggro combo once, drop tank stance and DPS" in casual content cause "It's what the cool kids do." or "I can shave off a minute or so off my 20 minute dungeon run if I just do that extra bit of damage" and not because the game necessitated it. And frankly the player base was stupid about this on both ends of it - You had the raiders who chastised casuals who didnt drop tank stance in a dungeon cause "You dont need it on" so they can get through things a small bit faster, and you had casuals who copied the concepts of raider strats without fully understanding that you need to do proper dps and what not to keep aggro if you dont have tank stance on.

Now you go to Savage content, yeah, threat management and beating DPS checks was a lot more prominent. You want to maximize dps, using threat dumps, voke shirking, dropping tank stance, etc was all a part of it. But at that level of play, youre gonna need more overall competence in playing your class.

Now the solution is "Turn on tank stance, have threat" and thats it. Voke if you need a tank swap. Shirk is semi redundent currently cause voke generally does the job efficiently enough unless your a tank that out damages your cotank by a decent margin. This isnt threat management and just solidifies the position that tanks are just a DPS with more health and a CD. As a whole, the role is too simplistic. No positionals, tank CDs are literally "Push button to mitigate", threat isnt a thing to worry about, and depending on the tank, there is little in the way of rotation.