Homogenization and Simplicity in Tank Roles

[Lyth]

...

No, it's absolutely correct. There was a clear direct inverse relationship between tank stance uptime and percentile. If I could identify two things that a player could change that would have the single greatest impact on their performance, it would be using STR gear in place of VIT gear (outside of 3.2-3.3, and when you were allowed to do so), and turning off tank stance. (No, fixing your Scourge uptime just pushed you from 80th to 90th. Even you did it correctly with tank stance on, your damage output would still be terrible. Always start with the basics.)

It's worth remembering that with tanks and healers, there was a subset of the playerbase who either didn't understand or believe how we used stances in optimization. "What do you mean turn off tank stance when I'm tanking? Won't I die? Won't I lose aggro?" When in reality, neither of those things were likely to happen, and you just had to get over the psychological barrier to doing so. Now that the damage penalty from tank stance is gone, there's one less barrier to entry for making those players competitive. So now, that same player who was unintentionally hampering their own dps by keeping stance on, is suddenly performing just as well as you because they know how to press the 1-2-3 buttons like you do and have half decent ping. And you're just not as good as you thought you were.

And please don't tell me that enmity management without stances required skilled play. It mostly relied on raid comp, and there were always work-arounds. Snap enmity did take some fight knowledge, but the last time that was interesting was the T13 adds. Equilibrium trivialized add pickup. And the only place where I'll buy the 'stance dancing' argument from a mitigation standpoint is if you're doing a tougher fight at a lower gear level, like A4S/A8S. Anything from Creator on into Stormblood most definitely did not require stance, and it really was just as simple as turning off the button. I can't tell you the number of people who I've seen have massive jumps in their performance just by trying it out. It's really that simple. The truth hurts. Sorry not sorry.

If you want to bring back some 'good ol' times' unnecessary convoluted archaic rubbish to create a skill differential with, bring back directional autos instead. They were at least somewhat entertaining and involved some degree of actual mechanical skill. I miss strafe lock gliding.

[Absurdity]

...

No, it is absolute nonsense that just turning your tank stance off magically doubled a bad tank's dps.

Were the stances a difficult mechanic? No, you had it on for about 8 seconds after the pull and then never touched the thing again.

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 deluding yourself...and to counter your anecdotal evidence, I've seen a lot of those back in Stormblood.

Actually any halfway competent tank that I met already knew that they should make use of their dps stances. You know which people sat in tank stance all day? The kinds of tanks that spammed Rage of Halone 24/7 and randomly flip flopped between casting unbuffed Holy Spirit and Clemency while still somehow managing to die to tank busters in 24mans.

To any tank that knew what they were doing the stances weren't even a question on their mind but that was my entire point, you needed to atleast know what you're doing and a lot of tanks simply did not know more than to press the first 1-2-3 combo they unlocked while leveling.

This isn't some kind of defense of the old stance system, the only thing I miss about them were the additional job mechanics tied to the stances, but your original point

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.

is completely exaggerated, false and paints a very wrong picture of tank gameplay before Shadowbringers.

I said before that dps stances on tanks rewarded you for playing correctly and I still think that is true because the process was: Learning your rotation to the point that you can hold a boss without tank stance -> drop tank stance -> even better dps.


When looking at tank performance however you have to start with the base assumption that you're tanking in your dps stance, because you're comparing competent tanks, not those that can barely press their buttons enough to keep aggro in their tank stance.
And when you look at competent tank performance back then, just like now, it was entirely based on rotational execution and uptime, because playing in your dps stance wasn't some magical dps boost, it was the basic starting point, together with knowing your rotation, for playing tank correctly.
Since your own enmity generation in dps stance was entirely dependant on your own dps output you still had to do more than just spam 1-2-3, because no amount of Lucid Dreaming, Smoke Bomb and Shadewalker would keep an 8-9K dps BLM from ripping the boss off of a 3K dps tank without their tank stance on.