Keep overpower cone shaped!

[Shurrikhan]

You also forget WAR has 4 other circle aoes i.e. Primal Rend, Steel/Chaotic Cyclone, Decimate and Orogeny. Including the aoe combo that's a total of 6 whereas DRK has one of each type, line, ranged aoe, ground and circle. It wouldn't kill them to add some variety to the aoe combo.

I'm pretty sure they referenced (lack of) variety as the purpose for the change -- that they think it'd be more intuitive for Warrior players for there to be only one AoE shape.

If so, that does seem to say something about their perception of the average Warrior.

[marelooke]

I'm pretty sure they referenced (lack of) variety as the purpose for the change -- that they think it'd be more intuitive for Warrior players for there to be only one AoE shape.

If so, that does seem to say something about their perception of the average Warrior.

To me it seems SE is still under the mistaken assumption that "tanxiety" (and its cousin "healxiety", for that matter) is something caused by the (perceived) complexity of the jobs. One would think they'd have figured out by now (MMOs and the "holy trinity" have been around for a while now...) that this is a purely psychological barrier to the role, not to the individual jobs, due to the perceived "additional responsibility" of the role and no amount of changes, barring outright removing the role, will "fix" tanxiety.

The vast majority of the people that are "tanxious" will still be tanxious if tanking consisted of a single button that said "Unga bunga!", while on the other end of the spectrum there would also be less tanks since they're sucking every little bit of enjoyment out of tanking dungeons with both the direction of dungeon design (those last few dungeons didn't exactly have exciting trash pulls...), and job design (I mean, every tank is the same as far as AoE goes...).

Then again, we're just guessing, since they never bothered actually explaining why they butchered WAR AoE, which makes things even more frustrating.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

snip

I disagree with the notion that people would always be anxious regardless of the complexity of tanks from my own experiences with friends. Tanxiety takes many forms; most of Square's changes are to tackle the one that can be directly changed.

As you said, there is the barrier to even get into the role for most people, but there's a second barrier right afterward - the visibility of when you screw up compared to other roles which equally drives away people that break through the first barrier. Its easy to know when you, as a tank lost aggro and the healer/dps got their faces munched on. It's easy to discern when a tank is undermitigating, etc. Thus, a tank player messing up is easier for the party to call out, and as such, easier for the tank to feel pressure and leave the role after trying to get into it because of anxiety. Contrast a dps player where outside of watching their animations/spell casts like a hawk or using forbidden tools, the only time another can call you out is if you get hit by something/die.

Most of Square's changes are designed to tackle this. When Stormblood had all the stance dancing nuances, it was much more common to find tanks messing up aggro, as plenty didn't understand the nuances between balancing aggro generation with tank stance & doing dps with dps stance. So they made it so losing aggro was infinitely harder in SHB and beyond.

When tanks were undermitigating when using dps stance, it was much easier for them to die or get called out on. So Square made it so the 20% damage mit became baked in to the jobs through a trait so the difference between proper mitigation and less than proper was smaller.

And the thing is? It works. I had no less than five different friends who wouldn't touch tanking with a hundred foot pole pre-SHB, most of them giving reasons akin to 'I want it to be relaxing/don't want to mess up and get called out'. Once tank mastery & the aggro change came into play, many of them were happy to play tanks and got a lot of confidence because the barrier of messing up was dramatically lowered, leaving them immensely more comfortable to try the role. And based on their continued trend of standardizing and making tanks easier to use with kit/ability changes, I have zero doubts their literal exabytes of statistics paint the same story of increasing tank adoption rates the easier they become to use.

It's most likely a similar logic followed on why they changed Overpower - When literally every other tank AOE attack on their basic combo chains was a circle, keeping Overpower a cone was an odd choice, from a design perspective. "But DRK has line aoes!" you might say, but the thing is, as bad play as it is, those aoes are optional to the basic core tank gameplay that is entry level. It's pretty clear Square wants to keep the core functions of each tank job standardized across the board to incentivize swapping/creating a much more welcoming atmosphere / ease of us. One standardized AOE combo, one standardized 1-2-3 combo, rampart, one standardized 30%, one standardized short CD, one "can't die" button, etc. When you jump from one job in the role to the other, every core base feature plays the exact same in function, the only thing you learn is optional higher gameplay kit nuances.

[fafrir]

It's most likely a similar logic followed on why they changed Overpower - When literally every other tank AOE attack on their basic combo chains was a circle, keeping Overpower a cone was an odd choice, from a design perspective. "But DRK has line aoes!" you might say, but the thing is, as bad play as it is, those aoes are optional to the basic core tank gameplay that is entry level. It's pretty clear Square wants to keep the core functions of each tank job standardized across the board to incentivize swapping/creating a much more welcoming atmosphere / ease of us. One standardized AOE combo, one standardized 1-2-3 combo, rampart, one standardized 30%, one standardized short CD, one "can't die" button, etc. When you jump from one job in the role to the other, every core base feature plays the exact same in function, the only thing you learn is optional higher gameplay kit nuances.

It does make sense from a design standard that tanking was simplified to make the role easier to use and inviting to others. However, I would argue circle AoEs for tanking does more harm than good even if the Overpower change was for the sake of consistency. Conal AoEs, while can be tricky to aim initially as well as targeting being sliiiiightly finnicky, does have the advantage of a longer range in front of you while can help with positioning mobs away from the party. With a circle, you are losing 3y in front of you with wasted 5y from the back when you position it and the only way to take full advantage with that is to center yourself in the mobs (although it does work fine with fewer mobs but not so much with bigger pulls). If every role had circle AoEs, it's alright to do despite the enemies will be in different directions attacking the party with the bad, but they don't and that can cause grief. This is one of the reasons why I played WAR over the other tanks because I prefer using cones and now I'm forced to use only circles.

Not to mention DNC, for example, is the only physically ranged DPS without a spammable cone AoE so this change just doesn't make any more sense to me imo.

[Shurrikhan]

To me it seems SE is still under the mistaken assumption that "tanxiety" (and its cousin "healxiety", for that matter) is something caused by the (perceived) complexity of the jobs. One would think they'd have figured out by now (MMOs and the "holy trinity" have been around for a while now...) that this is a purely psychological barrier to the role, not to the individual jobs, due to the perceived "additional responsibility" of the role and no amount of changes, barring outright removing the role, will "fix" tanxiety.

The vast majority of the people that are "tanxious" will still be tanxious if tanking consisted of a single button that said "Unga bunga!", while on the other end of the spectrum there would also be less tanks since they're sucking every little bit of enjoyment out of tanking dungeons with both the direction of dungeon design (those last few dungeons didn't exactly have exciting trash pulls...), and job design (I mean, every tank is the same as far as AoE goes...).

Then again, we're just guessing, since they never bothered actually explaining why they butchered WAR AoE, which makes things even more frustrating.

While, I'd agree that those particular changes didn't much affect "tanxiety" (using a conal was just a matter of aiming at the center mob, fcs, since the base of the cone is still plenty wide and need only clip any pixel of the enemies' oversized rings), I don't believe that "tanxiety" is something wholly static / uninfluenceable.

Heck, just take being a tank in WoW's +10s when the affixes lead to very precise pulls in order to perform careful skips through the shadow realm or by spawning the avatar of Pride. Having that extra matter to keep track of --changing pulling from a pretty basic "skip most things that can be skipped and grab some of the easiest packs extra to make up for it" to rather finnicky and memorization-dependent patterns-- was a huge blow to tank confidence.

Now, that was kind of a perfect storm. Shit actually hurts there, so the tank takes precedent on deciding how much to pull as not to be instagibbed. There's a timer, so there's little time to discuss things anyways. But the crucial piece is that there became a new responsibility that fell only on the tank. There, tanks legitimately had greatly disproportionate responsibility, and so adding a new, unintuitive and difficult practice straw atop that did break many a camel's back tank's spirit.

Now, how do you move tanks away from feeling like they have a significant unique responsibility when they don't? I suspect that's by increasing the outwardly visible responsibility of whichever role would otherwise seem to have the least.

In practice, when running with a Sylphie, that may seem to be the healer, but more often I'd suspect that's the DPS. Given the DPS some cross-role utility (such as by more often interrupting special attacks to mitigate for the tank or save themselves uptime, more ways to rapidly group up enemies or peel summon adds [which would need inclusion] or intercept tracking skillshots for the healer, etc.) for which they'd be responsible to the same degree that tanks and healers are responsible for optimizing their damage.

Once all roles have something beyond just dealing damage, then it's harder to pretend to oneself that, just by being the first typically into the fray, one has taken on unique and arduous responsibilities worth balking at (instead of merely optimizing as one can).

[ForsakenRoe]

Now, how do you move tanks away from feeling like they have a significant unique responsibility when they don't? I suspect that's by increasing the outwardly visible responsibility of whichever role would otherwise seem to have the least.

You can't, so you don't even try, is the solution imo. Not trying to say this in a callous way, but look at FFXIV history. They have removed 'position the boss correctly' from encounters, removed the stance dance for more DPS thing, baked in the old tankstance 20% damage mitigation as a permanent trait, jacked the aggro generation on tank stance up from 5x to 25x or whatever it is, given tanks way higher HP than other roles, and none of it matters because people will still believe that, since the tank is the one at the front doing the pulling, they're the 'leader', and therefore laden with responsibility somehow. Tank is probably the least punishing of the roles in this game, you can eat AOEs others cannot, you have way more defensives if you see you're in bad, you have way more selfsustain tools to get your HP back up.

People go 'but what if I mistime a defensive i'm scare'. My brother/sister in Hyadelyn, the fact you're thinking about using a defensive, even mistimed, makes you better than like 85% of the playerbase

[Shurrikhan]

They have removed 'position the boss correctly' from encounters, removed the stance dance for more DPS thing, baked in the old tankstance 20% damage mitigation as a permanent trait, jacked the aggro generation on tank stance up from 5x to 25x or whatever it is, given tanks way higher HP than other roles, and none of it matters because people will still believe that, since the tank is the one at the front doing the pulling, they're the 'leader', and therefore laden with responsibility somehow.

Okay, but look at what else they removed from, say, DPS:

• crowd-control,
• aggro-increasing and decreasing- tools for snap threat to potentially save a tank or peel for a healer,
• the ability to kite (and nearly all value for doing so),
• the power of their self-mitigation relative to tanks' passive eHP bonuses or healer HPS,
• etc.

And healers, too, have been similarly gutted.

It wasn't that they reduced proportionate responsibility on tanks. They stripped it from everyone, but while healers still have significant redundancies among other roles (especially tanks), tanks do not. As such, you essentially end up with roles comprising of:

• Deal Damage,
• Deal Damage + First-Hit + Pace-setting (Rarely) + Positioning (Rarely) + Some CDs You Don't Just "Hit on CD," and
• Deal Damage + Compensate for Idiots (Variable) + Some CDs You Might Hold Onto (Rarely).

Now, there's a huge difference in degree, of course, between the ceilings in that "Deal Damage" task, but it can easily still look like there's more going on as a tank than a DPS in no small part because they removed those additional categories of tasks from everyone, and thereby made the proportionate differences larger.