Homogenization and Simplicity in Tank Roles

[Lyth]

Button counts have changed less than you might think.

Presently, if you exclude role actions, PLD has 26 buttons, GNB has 25 buttons, and DRK and WAR have 23 buttons. Even in Heavensward, tanks were in the 28-30 button range, but they also had correspondingly fewer cross-class actions that you could have active at a given time. And you'll also have to remember that this development of having actions sharing a button is a newer development. Previously you'd have abilities like Defiance and Deliverance on different keybinds.

You'll find that a lot of this push towards 'complexity' comes from people who don't actually want it. The Reaper job that was showcased during the last live letter was fairly complex. Four different resource systems, lots of context-specific buttons that change actions depending on what buffs you have active, and relatively fast gameplay. Even the burst window opts, while involving some degree of button spam, also reduces your GCD while it's active. The response? "This looks too fiddly". "I don't want positionals." And this is a really streamlined job. If you actually listened to those players, though, what would your response be? "Destroyed," "Easymode," "1-2-3" etc. And it probably would be the same people talking. There eventually comes a point when you've tested out both extremes of 'fiddly' and 'easymode' over a eight year period, and you can safely ignore the kneejerk reactions that players make to changes.

...

I thought that things like this were interesting when I played WAR in ARR, but they don't actually matter.

The only thing that we care about with mitigation is staying alive. As an example, let's say the boss that you're doing progression on finishes with an PBAoE before their enrage cast. Do you move out of the AoE? It really depends on whether you can survive it. If it's going to kill me no matter what I do, then I move out at the last safe moment to do so. Otherwise, I'd just pop all my remaining mitigation and stay on the boss. And I certainly wouldn't expect that damage to be healed up. It doesn't matter, because there's probably going to be no outgoing damage during the enrage cast.

The issue with mitigation on tanks is that we're the role least in danger of dying in any given encounter. If the primary focus is on raidwide damage and avoidable one-shot mechanics, who dies first? It's your ranged or your casters, who tend to have lower HP totals. Tanks don't care about raidwides. The reason why tanks historically have higher HP totals and higher defensive attributes in MMOs is because they're supposed to be the first player to die, before the boss proceeds to oneshot the raid with auto-attacks. If your tank dies, you lose. Even in earlier fights, you just had a much bigger fear of death on tank. I remember entering T9 for the first time and watching every third hit be a cleave that took away 2/3 of my health. Right now, it's swung to the opposite extreme, and we're burning our unused defensive actions to cheese mechanics to gain more uptime. It's like playing melee dps with a cheat code.

You actually have to design raid content to put all that defense, both passive and active, under some degree of stress. Which means that the overwhelming bulk of the outgoing damage needs to be on your tank, not on your raid group. Then gimmicks like this can be more interesting.