DPS stressors vs. Mitigation stressors

[Ultimatecalibur]

Some corrections/Observations:

Ultima's Bane -> That is an example of a hard swap. You must swap before 5 stacks or you die, end of story.

Its soft because the swap can happen at one of several points rather than a swap must occur at this one point. Depending on dps it was actually possible to avoid some swaps as the debuff would fall of while Ultima Weapon was doing a phase transition cast.

Spiny Plume -> The penalty for not swapping the Spiny Plume wasn't against the tanks, it was a hard party wide bust for tank incompetence. If you got three stacks, you would explode causing massive damage to everyone, generally only survivable with VIT melded accessories/latency/raise luck. This is a unique mechanic that I have not seen repeated in this fashion.

The explosion was an AoE but it hardly covered the full battlefield. The Spiny randomly targeting the person that was either number 1 or number 2 in enmity (due to most OTs not holding spot 2 on the enmity list it would randomly go after the healer) and the wipe mostly occurred if it chased after a healer during a sisters phase and the tanks didn't grab it of the healer at the right time. They have not repeated it in full due to the Spiny being too easy to kill with random ogcd AoEs and post-provoke shield lobs/tomahawks and the NA/EU playerbase coming up with an unintended tank arrangement for the sisters which caused problems with the swaps.

Ifrit Ex -> Due to the chain tether, swapping was controlled by the fight, often requiring a tank to take the full 5 stacks of Suppuration, and to try and swap while the OT still had the chain would result in the chained tank's death.

The tank tether only occurred during Nails and was more there to force the OT and tethered dps to stay in proximity while the dps was on the nails. If you swapped just before the phase started the tether was rarely a problem because the tether would end before the other tank got full stacks. It was more a problem if the MT went into the phase with 2 or more stacks potentially forcing them to tank with max stacks until the tether ended.

Turn 4 Dreadnaughts -> The first Dreadnaught needed to eat the 4 spiders, because otherwise physical DPS would go resource dry, necessitating resource singing, lowering raid DPS, failing the overall DPS check of the fight. This phase was proceeded by the double Spinner Rook + 4 spider phase, so you needed to have resource for AOEing that. The only Dreadnaught not fed spiders in this fight would be the second one, ideally.

Feeding was an intended mechanic but number of Spiders fed and how damaged they were before feeding was supposed to be a variable in strategies. You had plenty of time to kill 1 or 2 Spiders before feeding the rest to the first Dreadnaught without running out of TP, but feeding them all from the start was faster and only really possible with the durability of a Vit Paladin.

The tank meta "changed" starting in Second Coil. DPS checks started to really ramp up then, and it became apparent that not a lot of people were up to them, resulting in many groups only using two tanks if absolutely necessary, in order to have more DPS in the group. Tanks also started regularly full timing either pentamelded i70 accessories or STR accessories entirely, in order to help meet these checks. The Turn 8 boss was the first boss in the game to have over 1 million HP, having about 1.01 million HP iirc. There was also a Dreadnaught add with just under 100k HP. With a hard enrage time of 11 minutes, this meant the raid needed to do one hundred thousand damage every minute. This required a raid DPS of somewhere in the ballpark of 2000, and a good DPS at the time in entry level gear was capable of roughly 300~400. A good tank, in entry level gear, but with STR or Pentamelded accessories was sitting around 200~250. Every little bit mattered.

That was mostly because T8 expected the party to be in full weathered tomestone or better gear. Weapon upgrades were locked behind RNG (Wave/Tidalwave (no tokens here to guarantee) and Animus relics) or multiple weeks of tomestone grinding (Soldiery weapons). The OT swapping to Strength accessories was an easy way to boost average party dps especial since T6 and T7 could be stingy and drop only Fending and Healing accessories multiple weeks in a row.

I don't think that Ultima HM was particularly unique, even by current standards. Although I will say that Diffractive Laser was interesting in the fact that it was an unmarked tankbuster with no castbar and could be quite dangerous in certain parts of the fight depending on what mechanics it synced up with. I think modern tankbusters have lost their teeth not just because of how easily available invulns are, but also because they don't really sync up with other outgoing damage like autos. Oh no. The boss is charging his laser. For five minutes. With a castbar. What ever shall we do.

A lack of regularly occurring big hit psuedo-busters is one of my biggest complaints about modern fight design. No reason for the healer to keep the MT topped off if no attack in the next 30s can threaten them and we can't get much use out of Tenacity and Sheltron/Raw Intuition/Heart of Stone/The Blackest Night when all the tankbusters are covered by Rampart, 30% cooldowns and invulns.

Garuda Ex was unintentionally really interesting. It just so happens that NA/EU players did the fight incorrectly and brute forced it. You were supposed to have Garuda on one tank, Superna on the other, and Chirada on the dps who stacked for downburst. Double Wicked Wheels were never supposed to be a thing.

That formation also left Provoke free for use to swap the Spiny at less risk of a mistake.

Titan Ex solo tanking was a function of the fact that Hallowed was broken at the time and prevented stack application, allowing for stack resets.

Stack resets also happened with the phase transitions if they occurred slightly before Mountain Buster was coming up in Titan's rotation. If your dps were good enough and MT tough enough, you didn't need to tank swap or use Hallowed Ground until phase 4.

Twintania was meant to force a swap on Death Sentence with the healing debuff. We just happened to ignore it with Lustrate.

Death Sentence came out too often for that as Provoke was on a 40s cooldown. Every so often you were forced to take 2 Death Sentences between swaps.

T1/Caduceus is really the only one of these which doesn't really follow the current pattern. Irregular arena. Soft enrage where your tanks rotate cooldowns until the boss dies or the tank dies. It's incredibly simple, and yet it does mitigation in a way that's somewhat interesting. And invulns aren't quite so overpowered in this sort of scenario.

Also factor in that DpS could use the optional adds to reduce the damage up stacks and you have a fight were better mitigation and healing means greater dps output on the boss.

[Elkanah]

Pretty much nailed everything i ever couldve said as well. Lyth is right about all of it.
Even if ARR had the HOLY trinity, it was still skewed by the cross class system, they even ripped tank abilities like bloodbath off of tanks because they should be DPS actions, and people are using the holy trinity as an excuse for the role to be further butchered. Was most fun ARR to HW, got weird but managable in SB and now its just downright a joke to what it started as. As stated 1 2 3 can easilly be 1 1 1 next expansion. Carry potential was a big part of it, cause it felt great to live through that 1% etc as well.

Removing Bloodbath from tanks was actually something that never made sense to me. That's something you should be able to use (especially in trash mobs and aoe). Removing the HP absorb from steel cyclone on warrior, among other HP recovery options during things that hit you more intensely. I found it odd they made it just DPS specific after those changes.

[ADVSS]

Removing Bloodbath from tanks was actually something that never made sense to me. That's something you should be able to use (especially in trash mobs and aoe). Removing the HP absorb from steel cyclone on warrior, among other HP recovery options during things that hit you more intensely. I found it odd they made it just DPS specific after those changes.

Totally agree. And it wasnt that tanks only had it, most dps got it from cross class anyway. But again, without provoke, tanks really didnt need a cross role ability, really. Arms length is great, ill give them that, but besides those two directly, and provoke specifically, i mean...they sort of had to remove skills like brutal swing that were already there to make up some pseudo cross role list that frankly, they didnt need to. Bloodbath just makes no sense at all, cause it belonged to marauder anyway. It may be much more useful for DPS who deal more damage and get more life back as a result, but still. I mean how hard would it have been to just adjust foresight to do what rampart does instead of take it off the pld skill list? Just my gripe for sure but when B4B gets rewritten and convert gets rewritten, it just makes no sense why they couldnt just do that, except that they needed to make up some skills to make an arbitrary list that otherwise would have only had "provoke" which probably means before the change, the tanks were already fairly equal with their cd and skills, so they just deleted them and made them optional but mostly manditory anyway. They seem content with tank balance, but probably all it is really is their dps output range is where they want it...which brings us back to the discontent and main subject of this thread i guess... thats what SE considers role "balance" so...

[Lyth]

Bloodbath should never have been a cross-class ability. Just designate a tank as your vampire tank, and give them all the lifesteal effects.

Role actions were a dumb idea from the start because they essentially took unique abilities that gave jobs their identity and donated them out for everyone to use. DRK and WHM were particularly hit hard by Stormblood's role action system. If you want player choice, then you need a job specific talent tree system.

...

Provoke was always reserved for Spiny, regardless of whether you used the JP or the NA approach. Garuda and Superna automatically swapped aggro tables when Chirada hit 50%. That was the "tank swap." NA players didn't understand this because both were on the MT, so they jumped and just came back.

Regardless, I think fight variability is essential to making meaningful tanking and healing gameplay. If the fight plays out the same way every time, then anyone can do it. You can create the most elaborate fight choreography in the world, but if it's completely scripted with set timestamps, it's always going to be inferior fight design even when pitted against Warcraft's most basic tank and spank, let alone their more elaborate stuff.

[TheRealQuah]

The problem with all of this is that you are making these proposals on your opinion of what tanking should be.
SE design the game, jobs and fights and have decided that tanking is something else. It's their game so it's their choice.
This game is based around doing the most damage you can, whilst barely surviving. It has been that way for over 5 years. Stacking mitigation is not fun.
Tanking is only "braindead" if you aspire to do the absolute bare minimum of what is required of you.

You speak as someone who has never done savage or ultimate content, or experienced actual difficulty in mechanics and combat. Tank mitigation checks exist. Punishing tank mechanics exist. Healer checks exist. And if you go into E3S at the intended item level, the tank buster will straight up kill you.

[Sauteed]

I think I am fortunate in that I just don't care about savage or ex stuff. Heroes Gauntlet was good enough for me in that you could actually legit use things like interject to stop white mage enemies from using protect and you could actually miss a mob or two when collecting them at an initial pull because they stop and use abilities or spells. I felt like there we little elements of randomness in that particular dungeon that make it enjoyable compared to say Malikas Well or even Matoyas Relict.

Coming off the everything is scripted would go a long way in improving tanking enjoyability also. Knowing something is going to happen at whatever percentage is about as fun as watching golf to count the claps between swings.. it just sucks and misses the point of fun. The do the scripted mechs and dps dps dpstjskaofisn play style is old and not fun. Add in entire groups who are elitist and looks down their nose at someone for not eating sleeping breathing this crap and you've got recipe for extremely unenjoyable gameplay.. then dev's like base the rest of the games classes and around the 2 to 3% of players that actually do this content most of the time.

[Absurdity]

The problem with all of this is that you are making these proposals on your opinion of what tanking should be.
SE design the game, jobs and fights and have decided that tanking is something else. It's their game so it's their choice.
This game is based around doing the most damage you can, whilst barely surviving. It has been that way for over 5 years. Stacking mitigation is not fun.
Tanking is only "braindead" if you aspire to do the absolute bare minimum of what is required of you.

You speak as someone who has never done savage or ultimate content, or experienced actual difficulty in mechanics and combat. Tank mitigation checks exist. Punishing tank mechanics exist. Healer checks exist. And if you go into E3S at the intended item level, the tank buster will straight up kill you.

The ideas actually remind me a lot of oldschool WoW, probably the most boring tanking experience I've ever had.
It was simply "stack defensive stats and then stand there and get hit in the face". You simply got all the gear with Defense Rating (actually mandatory to a certain point to make you immune to getting crit, or your HP would simply be binary), Block Rating, Parry Rating, Stamina, etc and then you would stand there and spam two buttons that did 0 damage because you obviously had no offensive stats and most of your "active" mitigation had a cooldown somewhere between 10-60 minutes.

Add in entire groups who are elitist and looks down their nose at someone for not eating sleeping breathing this crap and you've got recipe for extremely unenjoyable gameplay.. then dev's like base the rest of the games classes and around the 2 to 3% of players that actually do this content most of the time.

Except that the boring job design wasn't the fault of "savage elitists" but of people who couldn't tell you their rotation if it slapped them in the face, didn't know anything besides Shield Oath existed and spammed their single target enmity combo like there was no tomorrow.

[Sauteed]

Except that the boring job design wasn't the fault of "savage elitists" but of people who couldn't tell you their rotation if it slapped them in the face, didn't know anything besides Shield Oath existed and spammed their single target enmity combo like there was no tomorrow.

No they balance every job around this "end game" experience that fewer people than pvp even bother with. Maybe the percentages are close. But we are balanced around it is what I meant.

[Sauteed]

Will agree most players don't want to step up their understanding of mechanics or their jobs they just want to level stuff to 80 or whatever caps are current instead of be 1 class most of the time. I just find everything too samey and bland to want to level everything to 80.

[Leiron]

Mitigation checks should not be a measure of whether you picked the 'tank stat' over the 'dps stat'. It should be a measure of how well you use active mitigation tools to keep yourself alive on a moment to moment basis.

Warcraft soundly thrashes this game as far as tanking and healing gameplay is concerned. They've appropriated everything that has historically made this game worthwhile, and improved on it. Only selling point at the moment here is the story, and that's variable. Tanks need to start feeling relevant again, and fast.

Warcraft and healing really isn't that different from FFXIV and I say that as someone who has tanked mythic 15+ dungeons and mythic raids.
Sure, there are some tanks that have interesting mitigation effects such as Blood DK's, but ultimately, the best tanks in the game are similar to this one.
High damage, high amount of mitigation abilities, with various tank swaps being based off debuffs that increase magic/physical damage.
Result?
Prot Warrior and Brewmaster Monk being the go to for all progression, with Blood DK being the go to for the most recent mythic raid tier due to abuse of borrowed power mechanics.
That's why going into shadowlands, Brewmaster monk is going to remain the best tank because their mitigation ability just makes everything laughable while still putting out decent damage.

Healers are also similar here, where they need to dish out damage in between healing, which has made healer classes such as Druids and Paladins a necessity for high level content.