Opinions: Should tanks work for aggro?

[Jpec07]

So the tanking model that FFXIV has employed in dungeons has never been one where you've needed to really work for your enmity (at least, not since Heavensward, really - it was a bit in ARR if I remember right, but it hasn’t been the case in a long time). As someone who was a career tank in WoW for many years before making the jump to the greener pastures of FFXIV, this has always made me a little sad. The current state of tanking is one that, while incredibly balanced (all four tanks are viable and function well in current content), is also obscenely boring. It really became boring in Shadowbringers, with the removal of the notion of separate stances for tanking and DPS. Every dungeon is the same: pull as much as you can, pop your CDs in descending order of effectiveness, and AoE until the cows come home while dodging the color orange--and there isn't even any danger in doing this unless you or your healer is severely undergeared. Even dungeons where it supposedly matters, like the frogs in Dohn Mheg, don’t really do much if you ignore the mechanic.

In what I'll call "classical" MMO tanking, tanks had to worry about a lot with any given encounter. Enmity generation mattered. Mob positioning mattered. Kill order mattered a lot of times. Crowd control like long-term stuns and saps and polymorphs mattered (and could make the run much smoother if done right). Interrupts mattered. Overpulling, even when well-geared, was an extremely risky exercise that even the tanks with the best gear avoided. Tanking had an aspect of it that was exerting control over the instance and the encounter, and leading your group in how to best approach a dungeon. A good tank used their party members’ unique aspects to their advantage, and knew how to navigate challenging encounters, and how to adapt to changing circumstances. Classical MMO tanking was about encounter management, and the best tanks were the ones that could manage the encounters the best.

But in FFXIV, none of that matters. You don’t have to work for enmity. You don’t need to have your rogue sap the caster or your mage polymorph the berserker. You don’t have to wait for patrolling mobs that will fork you up if you’ve got other mobs with them. You don’t have to be careful how you pull--in fact, the game rewards pulling recklessly. You don’t have to do much to plan out your mitigation, and half the time, you don’t even need it. You don’t have to be strategic with how you approach a given challenge, if they can even be called that. Tanking, and specifically tanking dungeons in FFXIV, is nothing like what classical MMO tanking was.

And look at the result. Tanking was made much more approachable by removing all but the most basic components of classical MMO tanking, and so we have a lot more people in FFXIV who are willing to try it. The formulaic aspect of just having to hold hate on everything by spamming your AoE combo makes it easier for people to learn how to evaluate the pace of damage coming in, and the best sequence for their cooldowns. They’re able to learn and focus on their rotations while dodging orange markers on the floor with very little that would actually endanger them. For a classical tank who’s used to dancing the line between success and disaster, this design of the game is incredibly boring, but for someone who wants to try tanking out? This design is ideal, because they can try it and contribute to their party’s success without worrying too much about whether or not they’re going to screw up and cause a wipe.

As a result, queue times for the other roles are lowered because tanks are more common, or because more people are willing to queue as a tank. In some cases you’ll still see long queues for DPS, but if you’re in an FC, there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to get someone to come tank for you, where they wouldn’t if tanking was the challenge classical tanks are used to.

The danger with this design is that classical tanks are going to feel alienated, and will gradually abandon the role. Without the stimulation of all of the other things that tanking used to involve, they’ll find it boring and shift to other, more stimulating roles, all while lamenting to their friends that tanking is not what it once was (and sounding like grumpy grandparents the entire time). And they may even abandon the game. Healing is not as engaging as tanking, and the challenge of most DPS jobs is memorization and learning the beats of an encounter to be able to maximize output--trivialities to a classical tank.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a middle ground. Having encounters that challenge classical veteran tanks will alienate the newer tanking generation, and having encounters that cater to the newer generation will bore and alienate the veterans. And unfortunately, given how little the game seems to be built to support more complex encounter designs (based on how comparatively little utility is built into other jobs vs. a game like WoW), the likelihood of FFXIV moving towards that sort of design seems very low to me.

Is there an answer to whether tanks should have to do more classical tank things? I don’t think there is. Making tanking more challenging in the classical sense will make it so fewer people want to tank, but at the same time, keeping tanking as comparatively simple as it is will also make fewer people want to tank (albeit, I’m pretty sure, to a lesser degree).

So, for me, as a bored classical MMO tank, I’ll just resign myself to doing goofy all-tank Expert Roulettes and Trials and Raids with my friends where we can do stuff the game isn’t technically designed to do, and where more of the enjoyment comes from the company I’m keeping than the role I’m playing. Besides, healing as PLD is actually a lot of fun--and I suspect it’s because it’s not what the job was designed for, and so is actually somewhat challenging sometimes.

[ReynTime]

I think this was mentioned, but enmity should have been a thing to be managed in combat, by all three roles. It was something else to the now way too streamlined and scripted combat. It wasn't super RNG but it was something you had to deal with in more or less doses in certain fights that added another layer of complexity IMO. I mean, if we can't have freaking party combos because "every job needs to be viable even though in this game you can have 17+ jobs in one character" at least keep the freaking enmity management.

[Khalithar]

Short answer, no.

Long answer:

A tank's role isn't aggro management, rather the tank role's entire purpose is mitigating enemy damage in the most efficient way possible and aggro management is only a small part of that. It also includes optimizing enemy position for dps uptime (faster kills = less damage done), mitigating tank busters and aoe damage with cooldowns, reprisal, and our various party wide defenses, managing the amount of enemies we grab per pull in dungeons to manage incoming damage vs efficiency vs what the healer can handle, and doing all of that while dealing with the other mechanics that the boss does.

Now for my part I considered aggro management to be the least interesting part of the role in general as focusing on all that other stuff is what I prefer to focus on. Also, in practice when they eliminated the tank stance damage penalty and I could focus on everything else without having to glance at the aggro bar in the party list (since I no longer had to toggle stance on and off) I found the entire experience much more enjoyable as it let me focus entirely on maintaining my damage, positioning, and boss mechanics. I'd been asking for a similar change to the tanking and aggro system for ages and I got exactly what I wanted and once I actually got to use it in practice? I considered it better than the old system in every way.

[DRKoftheAzure]

Short answers, no.

Long answer:

A tank's role isn't aggro management, rather the tank role's entire purpose is mitigating enemy damage in the most efficient way possible and aggro management is only a small part of that. It also includes optimizing enemy position for dps uptime (faster kills = less damage done), mitigating tank busters and aoe damage with cooldowns, reprisal, and our various party wide defenses, managing the amount of enemies we grab per pull in dungeons to manage incoming damage vs efficiency vs what the healer can handle, and doing all of that while dealing with the other mechanics that the boss does.

Now for my part I considered aggro management to be the least interesting part of the role in general as focusing on all that other stuff is what I prefer to focus on. Also, in practice when they eliminated the tank stance damage penalty and I could focus on everything else without having to glance at the aggro bar in the party list I found the entire experience much more enjoyable as it let's me focus entirely on maintaining my damage, positioning, and boss mechanics. I'd been asking for a similar change to the tanking and aggro system for ages and I got exactly what I wanted and once I actually got to use it in practice? I considered it better than the old system in every way.

There so many things with what you said that do not work in a classical tab target MMO... and a lot of these things that you said only really work in a action MMO like Black Desert Online and Phantasy Star Online 2 just to name a couple examples... and because Final Fantasy 14 falls into classical tab target MMO, that means a lot of the things you are okay with only work in the short term and MMOs by design are to you to play as long as you possibly can without playing anything else because it also has the pay-to-play model that somehow has free-to-play elements that do not mesh with the payment model it's using(see World of Warcraft in how it is struggling) there is also the fact that unless there is a steady flow of money going into the game any other projects are going to be delayed or canceled if keeping the MMO up is top priority... though this isn't the thread for that discussion...

Aggro management is probably what made the mechanics that are just the boss auto positioning for some kind of attack less boring than they are now as it was something you still had to pay attention to whiles also making sure that bosses didn't just 1-2HKO someone that wasn't a tank from auto attacks alone... and you could do any content without Provoke or "tank stance" and it will yield the exact same results as using those abilities and chances are that 1-3 people are going to get upset that I even remotely suggest something like that and the devs see that as 30,000 times the amount of people getting upset about it and listen to them and force enemies to tether to the tanks just people stop complaining about it...

Bosses just auto position for the players, and by 6.0 aggro might as well just tether to tanks automatically, further alienating players from what made them go to the role of tank in the first place, tank busters and raid wide AoE damage might as well not exist considering how infrequent they are becoming, tank swaps become even more pointless because, again, how infrequent they are becoming, and even trash mobs in dungeon dungeons might as well be training dummies that do damage but don't move, and any mechanics that bosses would have had are just replaced with auto-attacks and everyone (with the exception of the small handful that are okay with it) will ABOSULUTELY HATE IT which means the devs and Square-Enix would need to do damage control but by then it would be too late to save FF14, and yes the devs WOULD do all of that JUST TO SPITE US PLAYERS AND FANS... and it's not a matter of "if" but "when" it happens... and WHEN it DOES happen; I TOLD YOU SO!

[Ultimatecalibur]

and any mechanics that bosses would have had are just replaced with auto-attacks

If anything the exact opposite has and will continue to happen. Boss fights have progressively gone more and more from hp% based phased auto-attack rotations with phase based mechanics to tightly scripted timeline based mechanic dances that rely mostly on pattern memorization as each expansion has released.

[DRKoftheAzure]

If anything the exact opposite has and will continue to happen. Boss fights have progressively gone more and more from hp% based phased auto-attack rotations with phase based mechanics to tightly scripted timeline based mechanic dances that rely mostly on pattern memorization as each expansion has released.

Would you put it past the devs to replace that with just stock auto attack damage...?

[Ultimatecalibur]

Would you put it past the devs to replace that with just stock auto attack damage...?

Yes, I can conclude that the devs have no intention making fights less mechanically complex by returning to the stock auto-attack rotations of ARR and HW. My fears are that the tanks' role in future fights will tend more and more towards vestigial as auto attack damage becomes even more meaningless.

[Sani2341]

I think Tanks should work for something to make playing them engaging.

Before ShB that something Was aggro.

Healers still have to put in some work to keep the party alive (and get rewarded with more time pressing their 1 dps Button for doing it Well)
And dps naturaly still work to Deal as much dps as possible.
But for Tanks, aggro was replaced with nothing. Mitigation is still just 'press one of these when necessary.' and for most of Them, while still better of than healers, their dps Rotation is not as engaging as most dps's.

Now i do not want sb aggro back, as it in the end was just busy work and rarely mattered after a few gcds ime.

But there needs to be something to do That's not just 'be a worse dps'.
In WoW Blizzard decided to move Mitigation from something mostly passive to something you'd need to activly build resources for to use. Now SE doesn't need to go that same Route, But they need to add something to make tanking engaging and fun again. As is, only Thing i do with my blue dps is to do some o3n once a week to slowly Grind Towards the Tank mounts.

[Claire_Pendragon]

Ive thought about this before, and if I were to argue a middle ground between what we have now, and what we had before, it would be this;
*Make all high threat generation moves AoEs. (Minor adjustments to buffs)
This fulfills the purpose the devs created the current tank system, where tanks can go into dungeons and have endless threat in AoE scenarios. For boss fights, they wont want to use AoE on a single target, other than for initial threat. Additionally they can increase the threat generation on their ranged pull. (Also, Provoke has a sizable amount of threat attached as well. So WARs can just focus on ramping up to their buff, while using voke/equilibrium for initial threat)

This will feel similar to what SB had, but instead of wasting button space with enmity bloat, it will just be in the AoEs, giving them a dual purpose. (Tank stance will still multiple threat, but somewhere slightly above SB, but not as high as it is currently)

[Anhra]

I support the idea of tanks having to work alot more for aggro, it would also be great if every boss becomes rathalos EX in terms of behaviour unless the tank does his job correctly, but thats just my opinion on the topic at hand. If any DPS has trouble with managing their aggro in such fights, they could gain a set of skills that influence aggro in different ways for each jobs, just to have more spices on the market (and remove the party utility and self heals they have, that is something a healer should have. If you need healing as dps and youre on your own then buy potions, oh and fix those too while youre at it squeenix)