Homogenization and Simplicity in Tank Roles

[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.