DPS stressors vs. Mitigation stressors

[Sqwall]

I have been wondering what everyone's thoughts are about tanking direction in 6.0 and what it's going to be like.

With the changes that came in 5.0 to tanking and many believing tanking is "braindead" I wonder is that so bad? I believe it's the content that is braindead and not the job you play.

Warrior is comfy as hell with 5.3 changes, but players say it's SOOO braindead now compared to Stormblood Warrior iteration. To me it's fun now more then ever as all I have to do as a Warrior is play the game, and don't have to worry to much about my rotation. Where it's a large part of my job, but not the end of the world if I mess up an Eye buff.

Holding hate is no longer an issue and good riddance to stance dancing. So the DPS stress is no longer there for tanks, but is a factor in high end content?. I believe as tanks we should have this stress pushed from DPS to mitigation. Tank Mitigation Checks should be a measure of a tanks survivability. Much like a DPS check is the measure of a parties DPS capabilities, and if not met enrage occurs.

Proposals:
-More lethality in the boss mechanics for the tanks. 1 tank buster every phase is not enough. Having a tank stack direct hit makes no sense when we should stack tenacity and tenacity needs to be impactful in mitigation.

-Keep the enrage timers but make all DPS do way more damage in 6.0, and since holding hate is easy this shouldn't be an issue for DPS pulling hate from the tank.

-Mitigation checks. Tanks need to be able to mitigate a large hit and survive, and this tank check needs to involve BOTH tanks. Where if a boss hit's x2 in a row that would kill a tank, but if a tank stacks mitigation over damage he will survive. If he dies on the first hit....the second hit goes to the next tank...and if they dies....well. E3S is good example of this, but I survive even though I have Direct Hit melded which is just backwards of tanking. This is Tank Check

-Raid wide boss AOE's should be more lethal also and require tanks to use there party mitigation together in prep for healers spamming AOE heals. This already done, but nearly EVERY high end content but as scripted events. These need to take place during the battle and be almost to strong for healers to heal through, they need tank party mitigation to curb the damage. This is Heal Check

I'm trying to tease more focus on more team oriented gameplay then just simply "DPS the thing until win". The Braindead isn't the dumbing down of jobs...it's the braindead content that only challenges one aspect of the game. DPS and the ever looming enrage.

Rather it should be TANK, DPS, HEALS strong enough? Not everyone does Savage, and SE still calls it casual and everyone can do it? And the measurement on doing Savage is your DPS high enough? Just backwards thinking. There should be a tank mitigation dummy and a healing dummy to test out savage content.

DPS isn't everything, unless your a DPS.

[Lyth]

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.

[Sqwall]

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.

I agree to a certain degree here. I too have come from WoW style of tanking and agree with the sentiment. However, think you misunderstood what I meant by mitigating damage vs. melded mitigation. Or maybe I didn't explain well enough so for that I admit.
Example: Tank buster incoming. I would use Rampart or Sentinel, Vengeance, Shadow Wall, Nebula, etc., to counter the damage. Yes I would take a percentage off the amount of the tank buster, but's it's not enough. Let's say a tank's mitigation tools are good for reducing damage, but they aren't enough to ward off the damage of a high end raid boss tank buster. You need something else to get you over the mitigation check. More HP? Possibly, but VIT melds are gone and potions/food only get you so far.

That is where Tenacity comes into play. Tenacity should provide a much larger bonus to tanks ability to mitigate incoming damage taken.
Let's say this tank buster does 100,000 damage and compared to my stats let's say for math sake I have 100,000 HP. If I didn't use Vengeance (-30% damage taken) I would be one shot, but I use vengeance anyway.
I take 70,000 damage. Leaves me with 30,000 HP remaining. Not bad

But let's put that tank buster into a whole new light. Let's say it does 125,000 damage and I still have 100,000 HP. Uh oh, that's going to most surely kill me. We HAVE to use vengeance and reduce the damage taken again to prevent dyeing. This is a tanks job!
125,000-30%=87,500 damage HP of 100,000-87,500= 12,500! OK I LIVED! phew! Glad I have those cooldowns that I need to time correctly, and use effectively to stop that damage form killing me. No amount of DPS would have saved me.

But this is unrealistic, since we have inherent damage reduction modifiers. Defense, VIT, tenacity, block, parry, and not to mention healing shields. The list goes on. Just how much damage would a raid boss need to do to fully DESTROY a tank with everything used to prevent death?

[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.

[Lyth]

...

There are a few fundamental differences.

The first, and most basic, is mob movement. In order to activate abilities in FFXIV, mobs can't move. If they move, the ability cancels. You can see the difference immediately if you start tanking a mob and go on a little journey together. In Warcraft, the mob just follows you around smoothly and does whatever attacks it needs to do (unless it's ranged, in which case it does this at max range). If you silence a caster, it goes back to following you at melee range so that it can punch you. In FFXIV, you have move, auto attack. Move auto attack. Move two second cast. Move four second cast. Are you coming, or what?

It gets worse. Let's say that you have a boss that's programmed to perform an ability at a set HP threshold. In FFXIV, if the boss is continuously moving, the ability never activates. Players were breaking older fights by just spinning the boss really quickly. So to prevent that, everything now happens at preset timestamps. That's a pretty big limitation in fight design. You can see here that at baseline, even if you had the best encounter designers, this game is always going to feel inferior to tank on simply because the baseline coding is poorly implemented. And while you could blame 1.0 coding for it, if we can't get a fix for this 10 years later, there's no point expecting things to get better.

Tanks are always interested in optimising damage output while mitigating incoming damage. How effective they are at each of these things varies from game to game and expansion to expansion. But if mitigation becomes too effective, and tank damage falls off too much, then tanking loses value as a role. That's what's happened with FFXIV. Historically, players enjoyed tanking because their damage output was very high (on par or even surpassing some dps jobs). We've seen a progressive drop off in tank damage output because, as per the dev team, tanks are just 'there to take damage'. And while mitigation has never been particularly difficult, it's become progressively easier. I think there are a few reasons for this, including a shift to more scripted fights and a concerted effort from the dev team to make tanking more "accessible" (read: low effort, low reward).

Like you said, Warcraft's Brewmaster is a fairly consistent pick for progression, with strong, consistent mitigation but middling damage output. Historically in FFXIV, those same characteristics would have been viewed as a liability. Tanks are expected to survive at baseline irrespective of what they do, because the devs are afraid of letting a tank wipe the party outside of team jumprope. So unless you fall asleep and don't press the invincible button during the five minute tankbuster cast, you're probably going to sit at max HP. In contrast, Warcraft tanking doesn't really let you take survival for granted, even at baseline.

I think both game development teams have made a conscious effort to separate out tank and dps player damage output, despite a strong player preference for tanks doing competitive damage. But there has to be something outside of that that gives tanking value. FFXIV tanks have limited control on mob movement because of the 1.0 jank that I mentioned earlier. Mitigation is de-emphasized because most relevant tank damage occurs at fixed timestamps using invuln-swap. There is little real benefit to bringing a good tank over a mediocre one. If you want tanks to contribute less to the raid dps pie, then you have to find some other way to make skilled tanking essential to clear the encounter.

[Masked-dingus]

All that is a big part of the reason, obviously
Add to that, the fact that the game is being oriented to make any type of plater can access any content and plays any job, and yes i don't see any bright future for tanking inf FF XIV

[Sqwall]

Tanks are expected to survive at baseline irrespective of what they do, because the devs are afraid of letting a tank wipe the party outside of team jumprope. So unless you fall asleep and don't press the invincible button during the five minute tankbuster cast, you're probably going to sit at max HP.

Mitigation is de-emphasized because most relevant tank damage occurs at fixed timestamps using invuln-swap. There is little real benefit to bringing a good tank over a mediocre one. If you want tanks to contribute less to the raid dps pie, then you have to find some other way to make skilled tanking essential to clear the encounter.

Sorry for dissecting your comments, but I believe you hit the nail on the head here.

For me as a tank there is no REAL danger in tanking outside of tank busters and heavily scripted events where my one goal for both is to just stay alive to continue tanking. We agree here.

Where I want to add to the dialogue is that I really don't care how much damage I do as a tank, as long as it's enough to hold hate (which is no longer hard), and that I have the cooldowns to keep me going.

Where I would like the dev team to revisit the HOLY TRINITY is, "Should bosses be MORE dangerous in checking what you need out your tank.

Example: you meet the ilevel for a extreme encounter, and watched a video. But the tank keeps dieing with normal attacks overwhelming them. This makes no sense as they have cooldowns to use right?

Well the normal idea for tanks now is to save the cooldowns for tank busters, raid wides, and other various tank specific mechanics. But what about the passive idea of a tank?

This makes me wish tenacity or a block rating, parry rating were more prominent for tanks. In order to be a competent tank you need to buy into the idea that I need more mitigation to survive OUTSIDE tank busters, scripted events.

DPS is great but if I can't survive then it falls to the next tank, and healers insta raising me, with weakness.

Shadowbringers heavy handedness literally pulled that idea for tanks being tanky and nerfing block, parry ripped apart, and dodge non existent, tenacity a joke. Now it's all about your cooldowns and using them at the perfect time. Everything else is just "meh".

A bad tank can survive with a great healer, but a Great tank will survive on their own until they need a healer.

[Satarn]

In order to be a competent tank you need to buy into the idea that I need more mitigation to survive OUTSIDE tank busters, scripted events.

This part - yes, totally. However this part:

This makes me wish tenacity or a block rating, parry rating were more prominent for tanks.

Absolutely not. There isn't anything even remotely engaging about stacking tenacity, parry, vit or what have you. It's not a challenge, there is no room for skill expression, it's just a gear check, nothing more. It literally does not affect gameplay itself at all. At most I could see stacking tenacity as a way for less confident tanks to make up for their bad cd usage at a cost to dps - just like tank stances used to do - in order to keep role more accessible without the skill ceiling being as pathetically low as it is currently.
How tough a tank is should be coming mainly from what they are doing during the encounter, how they are using their cooldowns and other defensive actions. That does not need to be limited to only tank busters however and it doesn't even have to be a binary dead/alive dichotomy.

Before Shadowbringers, most tanks would sit in their DPS stance all the time, reducing their passive mitigation and majority of them was only using their cooldowns for TBs just like now - that was far from optimal however, because the damage from autos and other sources was more significant and less predictable(crit autos for example), not to mention healers had less ways to heal without "wasting" their gcds to do so. Mediocre tanks could still survive with decent healers covering for it, but it would come at a cost of reduced healer dps. An actual good tank however, was planning their mitigation to minimize as much damage as possible through the entire encounter, rotating CDs even outside of the scripted big hits.
All the changes done to tanking, healing and encounter design have made the difference between bare minimum and good mitigation meaningless, since it no longer makes an impact on raid dps via healers. That is the issue, not the passive stats.

As for the positioning aspect, while the game itself is indeed written very poorly in regards to enemy movement, devs used to work better with it in the past. It wasn't as good as in other games perhaps, but Omega raids still had way more positioning to them than Eden and the bosses didn't constantly teleport to the middle like they do these days, so it clearly can be done better, even with the game's limitations.

I would also like to see more complex dps mechanics make a return for tanks, regardless of the maximum output(although ideally doing real well with a harder rotation should reward great dps, obviously). That is on top of our tanking responsibilities needing to be more engaging. I'm fine with half the tanks having braindead rotations to provide more accessible options, but at least one tank job coughDRKcough should be a challange in all three aspects - positioning, survivability and dps.

[Leiron]

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This occurs in WoW as well, the only difference is that the mobs are given instant cast abilities to compensate. Any mobs with a cast will cancel if you step out of range, where as in FF, once the cast is done, it will hit. The only reason ranged mobs do it as maxed range, is simply because they are programmed to cast as soon as possible. So they won't get any closer to compensate, which is why LOS is so effective. The only difference in terms of autos is that it looks smoother, but you'll find the damage from mobs as you drag them is still rather consistent because of the programming.
As for WoW, the reason bosses cast their moves without issue is simply because they are given infinite range, OR, instant cast abilities. It is how the devs overcome those issues, which also cause a number of issues.
Regardless though, this is less tank/heal and more of an encounter matter in which case, i do agree WoW does do it in much more interesting ways.
As for Brewmaster, tis is ONLY for progression, at which point, you swapped to Warrior/Paladin, or whatever did the most damage because you could get as much damage as possible.

Tanking is legitimately the easiest role in WoW, because survival just isn't hard at all.

Ultimately, WoW only succeeds in terms of how they design encounters which are interesting, but in terms of tanking balance, FF wins and allows you at least the opportunity to play a different class.
WoW has issues where some tanks are just completely unviable in content because of those encounters, but outside of going the FF route, its hard to balance

[Jukebox12]

the Mitigation is good we don't need more mitigation it will make the game way to easy. the only way that tanks need to mitigate more and the healers to heal more is when ff14 up the difficulty to at wow or near wow. if they did that tanks and healers would need to complete rework and i don't think that will happened anytime soon