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.

[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.

[Absurdity]

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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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Hanayumi]

They usually only go into deep details, IF there are some major changes to the job. That being said while many people hated how much they simplified Tank, a greater majority like it including the Devs, soo... huge doubts we'll see any changes to overall tank gameplay.