Tank Stances and the Return of Job Flavour

[Absurdity]

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.

I get the idea and I would love to get some flavour back in the form of stances. But the unfortunate reality is that DRK and WAR only ever used their tank stance for like 9 seconds after pulling, PLD never wanted to be in tank stance at all and as long as one stance is more of a gain than the other then there is effectively only one stance.


You could probably make stance dancing a thing if bosses had mechanics that absolutely required your tank stance to survive but you would have to make tank stances provide roughly the same baseline mitigation and of course SE would need to change encounter design.

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.

They have a visual distinction but barely any mechanical. Shields are useless in most cases since they're so weak you need to heal anyway, the fairy is a braindead oGCD, the star theme of AST is just a different coat of paint for "aoe heal here" and SCH as well as WHM have resource management in the form of aetherflow or lillies, AST being the only somewhat unique one with it's cards...and it's MP issues lol. All healers spend their downtime, which is a lot this expansion, pressing a dot every 30 seconds and spamming one button for the rest of it.


Making their abilities have a different sparkle doesn't make for very engaging gameplay.

[Limonia]

I'd rather have it they give tanks other new interesting things to do than switching between stances.

I'm not against giving tanks more aggro management stuff, but I didn't like what we had with the tank and dps stances, as only dps stance was actually viable. It wasn't fun, and didn't work properly, what with having to use tank stance was a sign of bad play for some people.

[Saix027]

You could probably make stance dancing a thing if bosses had mechanics that absolutely required your tank stance to survive but you would have to make tank stances provide roughly the same baseline mitigation and of course SE would need to change encounter design.

They did once actually, that not stopped people of switchign regardless and blame the healer or others, Orbonne Monestary as example, without tank stance no tank survived the tankbuster on the third boss, but people ignored it because they were not MT, yet people still only looked at damge, the worst in this how SE gived in changing tank accesoires to strength because people cried, it is ironic how people call others whining if things are hard but if they cry for such "elitism" it is ok. Now we have this mess we are in.

[bundythenoob]

I've updated the OP with some ideas to curb a bit of the damage from the DPS stance and to try to give it some form of utility.
Thanks for the input guys. I'm really upset at the execution of the job homogenisation, but I would hope that some flavour in the future can be returned. there's nothing wrong with making the jobs easier to perform, but when it comes at the cost of the unique gameplay identity, that's where it gets upsetting.

[Vyrerus]

They did once actually, that not stopped people of switchign regardless and blame the healer or others, Orbonne Monestary as example, without tank stance no tank survived the tankbuster on the third boss, but people ignored it because they were not MT, yet people still only looked at damge, the worst in this how SE gived in changing tank accesoires to strength because people cried, it is ironic how people call others whining if things are hard but if they cry for such "elitism" it is ok. Now we have this mess we are in.

Huh? No tank needed their tank stance to live through TG Cid's tank buster. You just needed a strong cooldown and to be topped off, like with every tank buster. Like, if you needed the 20% mitigation from a tank stance, then WAR would be unable to tank it lol.

[Absurdity]

They did once actually, that not stopped people of switchign regardless and blame the healer or others, Orbonne Monestary as example, without tank stance no tank survived the tankbuster on the third boss, but people ignored it because they were not MT, yet people still only looked at damge, the worst in this how SE gived in changing tank accesoires to strength because people cried, it is ironic how people call others whining if things are hard but if they cry for such "elitism" it is ok. Now we have this mess we are in.

1. no you did not need tank stance for that buster, I know because I tanked the thing...
2. they put strength on tank accessories because duh, tank damage scales with strength and once your HP reaches the threshold where you can easily survive mitigated busters and raidwides vitality has barely any use. In HW you simply used dps accessories (except for that brief time where tanks actually scaled with vit) because you did not need the extra HP but with Stormblood that wasn't an option anymore due to accessories being job specific. That has less to do with elitism and more to do with people not wanting to gimp themselves by wearing gear that's essentially useless, or would you be fine if melee dps suddenly only had intelligence on their accessories?


Elitism is apparently now used interchangeably with "common sense"

[aodhan_ofinnegain]

1. no you did not need tank stance for that buster, I know because I tanked the thing...
2. they put strength on tank accessories because duh, tank damage scales with strength and once your HP reaches the threshold where you can easily survive mitigated busters and raidwides vitality has barely any use. In HW you simply used dps accessories (except for that brief time where tanks actually scaled with vit) because you did not need the extra HP but with Stormblood that wasn't an option anymore due to accessories being job specific. That has less to do with elitism and more to do with people not wanting to gimp themselves by wearing gear that's essentially useless, or would you be fine if melee dps suddenly only had intelligence on their accessories?


Elitism is apparently now used interchangeably with "common sense"

Also worth noting, levelling tanks during early SB was an absolute nightmare for tanks in dungeons due to aggro issues from missing a significant amount of main stats. SE had to buff enmity generation on tanks AoE skills. I actually advised some players to use i270 STR accessories as they were struggling with aggro, and it made a world of difference.

But as you said, apparently common sense = elitism, its a sad time we live in.

[bundythenoob]

Also worth noting, levelling tanks during early SB was an absolute nightmare for tanks in dungeons due to aggro issues from missing a significant amount of main stats. SE had to buff enmity generation on tanks AoE skills. I actually advised some players to use i270 STR accessories as they were struggling with aggro, and it made a world of difference.

But as you said, apparently common sense = elitism, its a sad time we live in.

I remember the days of the struggle as a tank all the way back to ARR. I always thought that tanks should get their tank stance at lv 15 and their dps stance at lv 30, but at least we got that now... even if it is just a blue emnity button

[ForteNightshade]

They did once actually, that not stopped people of switchign regardless and blame the healer or others, Orbonne Monestary as example, without tank stance no tank survived the tankbuster on the third boss, but people ignored it because they were not MT, yet people still only looked at damge, the worst in this how SE gived in changing tank accesoires to strength because people cried, it is ironic how people call others whining if things are hard but if they cry for such "elitism" it is ok. Now we have this mess we are in.

Not only did you never need tank stance. Cid auto targets the three tanks. You literally don't need aggro at all that fight as he will always target a tank so long as they're alive. I know because I tanked him in full Deliverance day one.

Tank accessories were changed to strength because tanks scale off that stat. They subsequently made them job specific because tanks were still using slaying accessories for Susano and Titania. It was pretty much inevitable outside of initial prog, they'd attempt it in Savage too. Damage has always been king in this game because you only need enough HP to survive the scripted mechanics. Having an extra 10k means nothing if you don't actually need it.

[Vyrerus]

I think you meant Lakshmi, not Titania. xD