[Discuss] Bringing back mitigation-damage interaction

[Mikey_R]

I think a lot of stuff is getting lost or obfuscated here, so I want to bring it back to the start.

The initial idea was, a tank defensive that reduces the tank's damage in some way in order to use a defensive action.

The first thing we need to ask is why? The tank role has never had the expectation of reducing their own damage in order to increase their own defence, except maybe in the early days of the game where tanks used tank stance. Getting towards the end of Final Coil, tanks did start using DPS stance when tanking but it didn't really catch on until HW where it was expected of tanks to use DPS stance, especially when you had WAR and DRK who were 2 powerful tanks that were fully capable of doing so. From then on, it has been DPS stance all the way through, including SB. This distinction is now no longer present.

This is one reason why I say it is a bad idea. It isn't something that has been drilled into people from the start and so adding it now is just going to cause backlash. You mention simplifications escalate, yes, they do, however, this is something that has been simplified from the past, this is just how it has always been.

Onto the next point. Why does the tank have to sacrifice their own damage for the potential for a healer to gain damage? No other role or job in the game does this. You can say a healer might have to waste a GCD on healing to save a DPS from dying, but that has a much higher tangible reward to DPS and it is expected of the healer to sacrifice some of their damage for the betterment of the group. It has never been the case for tanks to do the same. Even if we were to assume tanks did have that responsibility, you cannot guarantee the healer takes that chance, which then leads to a raid damage loss and you have reduced your own DPS for the potential for more damage, but it wasn't taken. I can compare that to raid buffs. In theory, you put out a raid buff and everyone else has the potential to utilise it. However, there is the potential someone does not, which is obviously bad, however, I have not sacrificed my own DPS to get the raid buff out there, it is down to the other player to make use of it.

Again, gong back to mitigation kits. Tanks have these tools that can use to mitigate damage at no cost to damage, why suddenly add something that does? For something 'different'? Maybe, try different defensive means to make them more exciting rather than reducing the tanks damage first. This will make tanks feel more unique and it won't be a button you want to avoid.

Going to fight flexibility, I don't see how the idea comes into this at all. You say it reduces fight flexibility, but the only way that can happen is if you throw several hard hitting attacks in sequence where your defensives cannot cover it, which also then implies this damage reduction is readily available fairly frequently. However, if you go from a fight like that to a fight where there are less hard hits and your normal defensive kit will suffice, this second fight will likely to be favoured by not only tanks, but healers too, as they have their own cooldowns to worry about as well. This is before the fact that, if healers do run out of cooldowns and have to resort to GCD healing, it gets rid of the initial benefit you set out to achieve anyway. There is a reason you cannot just spam out tank busters, or constant raid wides, it just isn't fun.

Again, unless Healers having access to GCD heals somehow makes them less like healers, I fail to see how having similar options that allow for tanks, ultimately, the same combined sustain+offense output but a higher maximum individually for either (more ability to choose between offense and sustain) would be awful for tanks, especially given the increased sustain requirements and diversity among fights' incoming damage that added flexibility would allow.

Defining what should ever be possible off of a narrow present context only acts to make those contexts permanent. Is the current healing situation something we really want to make permanent? Do we never want to attempt things outside of entirely scripted fights?

How the healing kit currently operates, or potentially operates has no implications as to whether a tank's mitigation tool should or should not reduce said tank's damage output. I have said it in this thread, healers should be rewarded DPS wise for their GCD healing contribution (as, again, forcing a healer to GCD heal isn't expected unless in high end content, so people will want a reward for it). Which is also funny because if you want healers to GCD heal more, by reducing the tanks damage for mitigation, you heal with a GCD heal, which is another way the benefit isn't taken advantage of.

Again, it might have worked in the past, but it just will not work now.

Yeah like HH. It would put back some of the tank responsibility of good positioning into play, especially with how often raidwides happen in relation to tank busters. It would also necessitate some good cd usage since the first two ppl to be hit with the raidwide will always take a majority of the dmg. Falling back on reprisal might not be effective since you want to save those for situations where there are partner splits and raidwides. Situations where the tanks can only cover half of the party.

Regardless, the increased hitbox, stationary and re-centering bosses really has shifted tanks into pusedo dps since they don't have to do anything outside of swap for TB's. You gotta give the tanks something to do and wild charge raidwides are a good start. It doesn't have to be like HH but the idea is that the tank needs to protect the party and they can do that by standing in front and taking the brunt of the hit.

This, on the other hand, is what is missing from tanks. The potential to feel like a tank by protecting the party and not just necessarily just by popping your raid wide mitigation. In wild Charge, you take an active role in mitigating damage by not only your own defensives, but also in your positioning. I have also stated a few times how CC could be used to make fights more interesting by having them change how boss attacks work. There are plenty of things than can be done to make a tank feel like a tank without having to resort to reducing the tanks damage. If you want to point out simplifications to the game, you should be concentrating here, where it matters most. The tank gameplay.

[Shurrikhan]

I think a lot of stuff is getting lost or obfuscated here, so I want to bring it back to the start.

The initial idea was, a tank defensive that reduces the tank's damage in some way in order to use a defensive action.

The initial idea... from what post? The first post merely asks a spitball question about tank stances, be they for defense or enmity. The second, mine, immediately points out that tank stances are NOT required for decisions in of output (between greater offense or sustain) and that, especially if healers' contexts weren't so abysmal right now, we could easily see situations where at-cost flexible options to mitigation see optimal use even without that being the difference between life and death in that moment.

There's no insistence on CD -> take damage debuff -> defensive action unlocked.

Note that "sustain" is anything that keeps you and/or allies alive for longer. In any fight won by reducing the enemy's HP to 0 (so, every fight in XIV and most fights in every other MMO), its value is ultimately the rDPS difference you get for spending that much less time dead or under Weakened/Brink of Death.

• By and large, in the present context, most of each healer's sustain is "flat", not timing-sensitive. The total amount of damage negation or restoration rarely vary with incoming (Exaltation) or past (Macrocosmos) damage intake. And rarely would --not that either see use-- a Regen create less total effective potency than a Cure II, because we aren't so stressed by incoming damage that we'd ever have to preempt it with something that may eventually overheal nor that we'd have to forgo the over-time option with greater maximum potency. As such, it ends up extremely simple.
• On the other hand, especially until Endwalker, the majority of tank sustain has been timing-sensitive; affecting a dense period of damage intake with % damage reduction or % damage recovery (a Death Strike -style action) is hugely more valuable than affecting a shallow period of damage intake because the sustain that most tank actions produce is not only potentially bottlenecked by but even scales with that context.
• Unlike flat actions (just plain healing, especially where it's not bottlenecked or complicated in any way), time-sensitive actions can see optimal use some of the time even while being unnecessary at others.

The tank role has never had the expectation of reducing their own damage in order to increase their own defence, except...

So, that "never" is... half the time tank stances were in the game, despite tank stance's gains being pathetically undertuned relative to its costs and a largely unusable mechanic on all but WAR due to its costs in changing stance.

How the healing kit currently operates, or potentially operates has no implications as to whether a tank's mitigation tool should or should not reduce said tank's damage output.

It is literally the same question of GCD heals on healers.

If the present context has turned GCD heals into "useless bloat", then you have two options:

1. You remove GCD actions, just as tank's control over their outputs were removed, thereby locking the game even further into hyperscripted but simple timing puzzles with their answers searchable online, or
2. You revert the massive simplifications of healer gameplay and gutting of healing requirements such that healers' 1-50 portion of their kits are actually still compatible with endgame (while increasing their offensive ppgcd in compensation for GCDs likely to be lost to healing --be that through returned or new downtime actions or simple buffs-- thereby improving their solo experience, too).

It's the same damn thing.

Removing all offensive/defensive control from tanks forces combat design to be increasingly precisely and invariably scripted (with any randomizations being wholly interchangeable insofar as the defensives used), because you cannot otherwise push tanks to their limits without breaking them during minimum item level. It also means every fight has to either be the same in its tank damage or has to just not even really push them, because every tank only has that identical set of CDs, with no flexible space.

That lack of output control homogenizes tank defensives and fight design, both. And it makes tanks feel less like tanks, just as surely as leaving healing requirements so low (or reducing healing them even further as to retain accessibility) so that healer CDs are wholly sufficient in themselves and then removing healer GCDs, instead of improving healing requirements/contexts, would make healers feel less like healers.

This, on the other hand, is what is missing from tanks.

It's not just one or the other. And the more tanks' available interaction with fight design remains constrained around that (homogenized) set of tank CDs alone, the less can be done to leverage being a tank in interesting ways.

Insisting on having ONLY a strict set of homogenized CDs gives you ONLY what mechanics could align with all of them or could equally be done by any DPS with a personal anyways. It's an unnecessary constraint, and it makes no more sense than asking for GCD heals to be removed instead of improving that context.

If you want to point out simplifications to the game, you should be concentrating here

This is such a blatant and unnecessary whataboutism.

To point out that tanks (re)gaining control over their outputs (higher damage ceiling, but generally averaging to about the same personal DPS and perhaps slightly higher consequent party DPS in practice under optimal use of at-cost mitigation) would increase the variety and depth of tank mechanics that can be included in our fights is not somehow mutually exclusive with wanting more tank mechanics. It's futureproofing largely for that purpose.

Without that flexibility, fights are more constrained because you literally have to build around that finite resource (those CDs), which in turn constrains how different tanks can be from one another, since you can't push the limits of any single one without either causing imbalance or making the others identical, because there is literally no fallback, no flex, no room. It's just those CDs. That's all you get for gameplay. That's all you get for fight design.

All for what, to satiate a try-hard's no-clear's refusal to actually math anything out and their insistence instead that anything with direct cause cannot be a net gain, or that a fight is unclearable because not dying would cost them 80 potency? What is the reason for insisting that tanks should have nothing analogous to GCD sustain (percentile mitigation, in their case) nor Aetherflow trade-offs between damage and sustain? Who would be victimized by making it so we could open up fight design and have tanks actually play more differently from one another, including in their actual tanking (not just their Blue DPS rotations)?

[Mikey_R]

All for what, to satiate a try-hard's no-clear's refusal to actually math anything out and their insistence instead that anything with direct cause cannot be a net gain, or that a fight is unclearable because not dying would cost them 80 potency? What is the reason for insisting that tanks should have nothing analogous to GCD sustain (percentile mitigation, in their case) nor Aetherflow trade-offs between damage and sustain? Who would be victimized by making it so we could open up fight design and have tanks actually play more differently from one another, including in their actual tanking (not just their Blue DPS rotations)?

How would it makes tanks different? You either need it, or not, doesn't matter what tank you are, you use it at the same time, you haven't changed anything.

You could make the fights more RNG, but what happens when you do the fight the first time and you have to spend a lot of time in tank stance and the second time you don't need to because the damage never came out frequently enough?

But, the big question is WHY? Why is it necessary? I could, again, point out everything, but why does a tank have to sacrifice their damage to put up mitigation? It isn't going to change anything anywhere near as much as you seem to expect.

As for the comment about 'losing 80 potency', my response would be, what is the point? If you have something that is so inconsequential that it doesn't even matter, why have it in the first place? It is there for no reason other than some misguided sense of 'role flavour' that serves no purpose other than, I'm losing a small amount of potency that someone arbitrarily added for no reason.

Also:

So, that "never" is... half the time tank stances were in the game, despite tank stance's gains being pathetically undertuned relative to its costs and a largely unusable mechanic on all but WAR due to its costs in changing stance

People still learning how the game plays isn't a good metric for gauging how effective a mechanic is. If we were to go back to the ARR days, but still had out knowledge and experience now, can you honestly say people would still be in tank stance when tanking, or, would they be in DPS stance. I would bet, with 99% confidence, that they would be in DPS stance. HW was the main turning point for most of the community with SB being the full switch over. Also, Warrior only used it occasionally when Unchained was available to negate any downsides to using tank stance. That should tell you all you need to know. Also, if you are calling the tank stances 'undertuned' (by which I assume you mean the defensive benefit is too small but the offensive hit is fine) then you are talking about a potency loss of more than 80, it is going to be quite a significant hit and this is before talks of whether it is an oGCD, what defensive benefits it provides etc. Which brings up the point, we have both been living in hypothetical situations where I am assuming something similar to what we used to have, however, you seem to have a different idea. Maybe it would be beneficial if you actually provided an example or 2 of what you expect with a defensive stance, a solid foundation to base a discussion on is better than talking from 2 different buildings after all.

[Shurrikhan]

You either need it, or not, doesn't matter what tank you are, you use it at the same time, you haven't changed anything.

No, that is literally not the case.

Again, are you unable to receive value from any defensive that isn't absolutely necessary to survive? Should Vengeance, unless absolutely needed to survive, only ever be popped during raid-buffs for its counter-attack damage, its actual sustain value be damned? By all means, see whether some 400k of missing mitigation produces more rDPS just from buffing those counterattacks than it does from healer GCDs saved.

There are times when a defensive is necessary to survive against the next hit.
There are times when a defensive is necessary now in order not to die to a later hit soon after (against which your HP could not otherwise be sufficiently recovered by the time it hits).
And there are times when a defensive is necessary for neither but is nonetheless worth some amount of rDPS due to the healer or DPS offensive output thus afforded.

All it takes for at-cost defensive to be worth casting is for the rDPS likely to be produced to exceed its opportunity cost.

The greater the likely reward and/or lower the opportunity cost, the more situations it will be used for. The lower the likely reward and/or greater the opportunity cost, the more situational that tool will be. That is normal. That is fine.

I'm looking for a balance point --via context and per the strength of the added skills relative to those they share resource costs with-- wherein each kit should have a skill or two optimally used with moderate frequency in Savage content, even if less often as one nears/reaches BiS, and maybe another than is more situational.

Why does a tank have to sacrifice their damage to put up mitigation? It isn't going to change anything anywhere near as much as you seem to expect.

Apply your question to any other role:

Why did healers have to "sacrifice" their damage to heal (for, ultimately, massive rDPS gains over not doing so)?

• Because it allows a further degree of flexibility to fight design that having solely CDs cannot provide, and, when the healing requirements are not pathetically low, allows for far greater skill expression than simply Dosis/EuDosis spamming every GCD. Note also that the more we've made healing "free", the more healers mixed agency and relative maximum rDPS has been squished.

Why do DPS have downtime actions? Why not just remove downtime altogether?

• Because having downtime actions allows for a further degree of flexibility to fight design due to not needing to be so painfully constrained to giant hitboxes, minimal meaningful movement requirements, zero sync optimizations, etc.

Moreover, again, there is no cost to the overall personal DPS tanks would produce. The only difference is, again, that they can now further choose between offensive and sustain outputs, with the maximum of both increasing even though the total would remain almost identical.

I've noted repeatedly that their output ceiling would be raised, increasing the change in their damage as their skill and party coordination increase and making tanks a more lucrative pick (rivaling or sometimes even surpassing DPS) for coffers among statics. How is allowing tanks more palpable progression and actually being a competitive choice for gear allocation... a bad thing?

People still learning how the game plays isn't a good metric for gauging how effective a mechanic is.

You're the one who brought up usage as if it were an indicator not only of incidental quality, but fundamental design quality. I merely pointed out that if players increasingly learned how to drop it over the course of Heavensward, that's still half of the period for which tank stances existed, not merely a blip on the radar.

a potency loss of more than 80, it is going to be quite a significant hit and this is before talks of whether it is an oGCD, what defensive benefits it provides etc.

No, there is no gauging of opportunity cost that lies outside of what costs AND benefits it has. You literally cannot compare two things without both things.

To say that anything that costs 80+ potency is going to be crippling regardless of its rDPS gains... is bonkers. You may as well say that AST can never be taken because Fall Malefic is 80 potency short of Dosis III, despite AST clearly producing more party DPS.

Maybe it would be beneficial if you actually provided an example or 2 of what you expect with a defensive stance

Again, I am not the one suggesting a defensive stance. I have never suggested a defensive stance; I merely pointed out why the ones present from ARR to SB were pathetically impotent.

I feel like, outside of maybe a single tank if they could thematically leverage it far enough, it's an unnecessarily clunky way to achieve the purpose I desire (allowing tanks more swing in their outputs, as to free up fight and tank kit design and better reward tanks' awareness of and coordination around team dynamics).

So why do you keep asking for defensive stance mock-ups... from me? They're not my idea. I don't particularly want them.

__________

I would rather see further variance in tank kits as permitted by not making them beholden to just the same precise template of rigid CDs.

For instance, I might like to be able to spend Beast Gauge on Inner Beast (Self-Healing and Defense from damage dealt) and Steel Cyclone (self-healing from damage dealt), with higher relative gauge generation (perhaps spending only 40 per skill), instead of just sharing the same old 25s on-demand. And I'd rather see WAR be able to spend gauge on a Warcry that extends some of Warrior's effects to be split over nearby allies rather than just a plain 90s raid mit and an overpowered on-demand-alternative/external in Nascent Flash.

That kind of extra flexibility would both free up fight design and toolkit design, and ultimately allow tanks' experiences with a given fight not to be damn near entirely interchangeable.