Homogenization and Simplicity in Tank Roles

[Kaixern]

Whenever it's about tanks or healer, i don't have that much faith for the future unfortunately.

There are only two main points which are being constantly focused nowadays on those roles (from what i've seen) :

And it's either, do the visuals of the class look nice and is it effective/viable (which are of course important).
But when it comes to the gameplay, the fun, the synergy, the depth, this either doesn't exist or just keep getting erased (just my view).

At first sight it would seem like everyone here is pessimistic/negative or whatever on the subject, but in the end it's just people (tank and healers mains for the most part) that are used to the state of those roles, and rather that pretending it's okay, be honest with it.

I'm sure even if SE cuts more of the gameplay and identity of the classes people will still play those and say they are good, but for those informations related to homogenization, as stated higher in the posts, we will maybe have to wait the media tour.

(But honestly please stop butchering those classes, i view myself as a casual and i still like depth and complexity, i don't want to keep bashing my head on the keyboard, or having to go for high parse runs in order to expect maybe having fun with my class, it's the equivalent of the meme saying "after 100 hours of playing the story it gets better". The classes should be fun and interesting to play from the start, as well as the joy from discovering all the gameplay subtilities from them in the long run, but as i said before, only my opinion, and sorry for the slight post deviation)

[Shin96]

At first sight it would seem like everyone here is pessimistic/negative or whatever on the subject, but in the end it's just people (tank and healers mains for the most part) that are used to the state of those roles, and rather that pretending it's okay, be honest with it.

It's hard to be positive when the developers have already decided where Tanks and Healers will go. I think it's safe to say that they won't change direction, because regardless of wether these changes were popular or not, I think the sheer success of 5.0 has proven that the Tank and Healer changes remained unchallenged among the community.

Tanks and Healers share responsiblity and your casual gamer (god forgive me for using this term) wants to have nothing to do with it. They'd rather avoid any complications by simply turning on the Tank stance and let that do the work for them. From a Tank main perspective, that player isn't supposed to play Tank but due to these changes they can be a blue DPS with instant auto aggro. No effort or work is required, and all of this culminates to a lack of purpose.

[Grimoire-M]

Snip.

Keep in mind that a major part of the reason tank stances didn’t have tension was the fact that most DPS and healers had some form of enmity reduction or cut built into their kits. I don’t advocate for tank stances coming back if those actions have to come with them, because then the party trivializes the aggro problem. If you’re not worrying about mitigating hits and/or aggro I don’t see a point to them either. Unchained, on the other hand, felt like it should have been part of every tank’s toolkit back then. That kind of opt-in mode for extra mitigation/sustain on Warrior was interesting, though probably better done as a stand-alone cooldown that’s tailored to each tank’s current kit, ala nascient, but ideally more involved than that.

[Jirah]

SHB and debatably after 2.0 they’ve been on a crusade to dumb things down, every time someone says “this job hard” gives em all the justification they need

[Derio]

I just hope they give tanks more shiny things and have it to where all tanks have their aoe combo before lvl 50. There needs to be more involvement with the tanks in general. I dont think we will see any major tank changes in the live letter. It will be mostly healers and SMN getting updated this next expansion.

[ItMe]

But if you want to tell me that all those tanks sitting in Grit/Defiance/Shield Oath while capped on gauge and constantly breaking their combos would suddenly become top players by just turning their tank stance off then you're

I fear you are grossly exaggerating their comment.

[Absurdity]

I fear you are grossly exaggerating their comment.

The simple act of turning it off made you automatically perform better than half of the tanks doing content without any real effort exerted. Now it mainly depends on how you execute your rotation and your uptime.

I think not.

Simply turning your tank stance off did not make you automatically better than half of the tanks, unless you were already better than them and in that case it doesn't even matter if you're in tank or dps stance.
The 2nd point makes it sound like executing your rotation and maximizing uptime were somehow irrelevant before ShB and all you had to do was turn your tank stance off.

Both points are either vastly exaggerated for the sake of argument or, if we're less charitable, flat out nonsense.

[AziraSyuren]

I think not.

Simply turning your tank stance off did not make you automatically better than half of the tanks, unless you were already better than them and in that case it doesn't even matter if you're in tank or dps stance.

Yeah it did. The difference was 15-25% more damage, which is enough to turn a green parse into a high blue/low purple. A mediocre tank that used their stances correctly absolutely was automatically better than half of all tanks who didn't. Mathematically. There's absolutely no hyperbole whatsoever.

[Lyth]

50th percentile is hardly the pinnacle of tanking. But if you looked at the bottom 50th in Heavensward, most players in this range had an absurd amount of tank stance uptime to the point that they completely scuppered their own performance. It's like showing up to a race to find that half of the people haven't even filled in the entrance application. Oh you're so great. But are you really? Why compare yourself to someone who isn't even in the running? While if you redistributed the top 50th such that 50th is the new zero, then you can actually start to look at mechanics, uptime, rotation, buff/DoT management, and so on, and get a clear sense of how improvements in each develop your skill progression as a player. That's essentially what removing tank stance did. It removed an artificial barrier to entry that really didn't take all that much skill to overcome. Just a bit of awareness about how the game works.

Healers had this problem as well. It was like the bottom 80th in Heavensward weren't really using cleric stance, and a sizable portion of healers weren't actively attempting to do damage at all. I know "showing up is the first step", but that's a bit ridiculous. Compare yourself to someone who is actually trying, for Azeyma's sake.

We're talking about preventing a 20-25% damage loss just by turning off a single button. You could probably be functionally afk for a quarter of the fight and break even with that. That's a lot to compensate for through pure uptime. It'd have been even worse than playing with a WAR who couldn't keep Eye/Slashing up (you'd be shocked at how many people were sitting at 60-80% uptime on this sort of thing, despite being considered relatively 'decent' in the standings - I'm not at all surprised that they decided to simplify DoT/buff/debuff management from Stormblood on given how big of a skill differential existed with these). In fact, I suspect you'd actually be better off spamming Halone with tank stance off than you would throwing in the occasional dps combo with tank stance on. So many of the old systems (stances, gearing for STR, avoiding Parry, avoiding Accuracy beyond cap, avoiding enmity combos in general) just gave you massive gameplay advantages by just having a bit of know how that the average player did not. I find these sorts of advantages boring, because they're completely passive and take no mechanical skill to execute. Which is why it's nice that they're gone from the game. I'm all for making things more accessible if it means that players focus more on the stuff that actually matters from a mechanical skill standpoint (uptime, buff/DoT management, etc.)

I think that if you really want to challenge tanks, though, then you need to give tanks back control over boss movement and force us to constantly reposition the boss and raid out of dangerous mechanics. The real test of uptime is when you have to perform a relatively high APM portion of your rotation while simultaneously having to reposition the boss and mitigate. That's where you see a skill differential actually come out. As much as I hated A7S at release, I still think it's the best designed tank fight that we've seen in this game (not that there's ever been much competition). Seeing a competent tank maintain full uptime while backstepping during cat phase (i.e. actually knowing when the boss stops for autos and cleaves, allowing melee dps to smoothly move with you without losing positionals) and strafe lock stunning incoming hearts was glorious. You'd actually make melee dps jealous with the mechanical ceiling on that. It's basically art.