Homogenization and Simplicity in Tank Roles

[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.