Tank Stances and the Return of Job Flavour

[bundythenoob]

you could still tank in offtank . cause you can just put mt for a bit and no dps or heal will ever get aggro cause of the dumbed down aggro mechs. what youve proposed is just how aggro used to work during stormblood, without every job having a say about it.
personally id rather they revert the aggro changes cause it wasnt replaced with anything and the stances was what i loved about tanks.

this is exactly what i proposed. I wanted to return stances and stance dancing without having to worry about how the party would be affected. I would hope that a new tank would stick to MT stance, and would swap when they're comfortable. this would allow more experienced tanks to show off their knowledge. by putting more responsibility on the tank to know when to boost their defences, and when its ok to go on the offence, newer tank players will have a form of skill they can work towards, while more experienced tanks get to have their old playstyle returned to them, but in a different way.

[bundythenoob]

If we keep enmity generation the way it is now then yes, you would probably just generate enmity in your opener and then switch to dps stance for the rest of the fight.


Another issue is that if we would make the tank stance mandatory for mting but the dps stance vastly superior in terms of damage performance you're probably gonna end up with a shortage of people wanting to actually tank the boss.

so the idea was for new players to keep their tank stance on and get defencive benefits to help them when they are tanking, but that veteran players who got the hang of the content could switch to the OT stance whenever they needed certain boosts to their damage or utility. in teh case of DRK and WAR, they would have a slightly tougher time choosing when to drop OT stance since they can have both active, but that would only give new players some goals to work towards. With the current SHB emnity changes, tanks could eventually learn to swap between the stances at the right time. I tried to make both stances equally appealing in terms of what part of the kit they would bolster, but I didn't try to make OT stances do too much more damage, since you ideally would be trading defence for damage when u swap stances.

[HeulGDarian]

what im trying to say is it doesnt matter, cause of the need to always push for dps. people would always stick to dps stance after the first combo no matter the defensive benefit.

[bundythenoob]

what im trying to say is it doesnt matter, cause of the need to always push for dps. people would always stick to dps stance after the first combo no matter the defensive benefit.

I see what you mean, which is why I tried to get the OT stance to not push so much damage out that it makes the defencive utility of the MT stance irrelevant. i'm sure theres a way to tweak the stances so that damage doesn't matter, but I couldn't think of anything to do so for PLD and GNB. WAR and DRK would effectively play with both on if theyre MT and only drop it to gain the defencive benefits, so I guess it's more to do with balancing GNB and PLD OT stances to include more utility maybe?

[HeulGDarian]

I see what you mean, which is why I tried to get the OT stance to not push so much damage out that it makes the defencive utility of the MT stance irrelevant. i'm sure theres a way to tweak the stances so that damage doesn't matter, but I couldn't think of anything to do so for PLD and GNB. WAR and DRK would effectively play with both on if theyre MT and only drop it to gain the defencive benefits, so I guess it's more to do with balancing GNB and PLD OT stances to include more utility maybe?

5% dps was enough for warrior to always stay at his dps stance.

[Kabooa]

5% dps was enough for warrior to always stay at his dps stance.

30%.

Defiance still had the 20% penalty.

105 / 80 = 31.5%, not counting the raw difference in potency between the Not-The-Same abilities, or the 5% or so that came from proper Beast management.

[Awha]

Another person mentioned it in another thread aggro as if stands does not really matter. I get having to manage aggro was not fun depending on your group having to weave aggro dumps on cooldown was tedious for some players, and if a tank wanted to maximize damage aggro became a group effort.

I truly miss the old system, but I get in the grand scheme the current system remoces group variance, and creates a baseline experience that everyone can expect out the gate.

[Lyth]

ARR's WAR is the only iteration of a tank job that actually used stance dancing. And that was only because Defiance with Unchained up was a dps gain due to IB and the crit bonus. From Heavensward on, you generally just stayed in Deliverance if you were playing optimally, unless the dps loss from an Unchained pull translated into a raidwide gain.

Stances, as they have previously been implemented, don't work. The best setup is where you swap from one oGCD stance directly into another. Clicking off a stance has latency associated with it and does not function as a true oGCD. GCD stances are even worse. Stances with dps costs associated might as well not exist.

Stance dancing doesn't exist, especially when one stance is a dps loss. In order to have a job built around "stance dancing", swapping stances needs to be part of the core rotation of the job, such that it's optimal to rotate through your stances to access different abilities. The instant that one stance has a consistent dps advantage over the others, you just stay in that stance permanantly. You need to provide incentive for players to rotate between stances in order for it to become part of a job identity.

[Vyrerus]

The easiest way to make switching to tank stance mandatory would be to make it so that defensive cooldowns of all types could not be used without having your stance on. No one would like that.

[Brandedblade]

Don't know what jobs you've been playing to come to that conclusion but it certainly weren't tanks or healers.

sch still has shields, fairies, and resource management, ast still has stars and cards, and whm has flowers and big numbers....those seem pretty distinct to me.