Would you want stances to come back?

[SargeTheSeagull]

I don't strictly mean defense stance and dps stance. More like abilities that are permanent until deactivated that have an upside and downside. That is one element that I miss from tanks pre-ShB. I sucked ass at the game at the time and barely did any high end content but there was something satisfying about popping defiance when you knew you weren't gonna need extra aggro or defense (or was it hp?) for a while.

[SargeTheSeagull]

For that matter, I did have a little thought the other day. Not a tank main so this probably isn't a perfect idea but: For PLD. What if FoF was turned from just a dps buff to a stance? Oath gauge wouldn't be generated by auto attacks anymore. While FoF is active you get vfx swords behind you (shout out to papachin) and it slowly drains your MP, slowly enough that if you do your rotation correctly you can keep full (or nearly full) uptime, and that is what allows you to generate oath gauge. Each attack you deal or attack you block while FoF is active generates X oath gauge.

[Rithy255]

Would I want stances back?

Hard question and depends on how it would actually be implemented honestly. I think I'd prefer having stances over the current tank design though as I simply will not want to play tanks if they feel the same next expansion.

So honestly I'd kinda be pro experimenting with stuff like stances again.

[Absurdity]

I would like to see stances make their return, but I would not bring back the damage penalty for using your defensive stance. That would just lead us back to pre-ShB where you wanted to spend as little time in it as possible.

[DRKoftheAzure]

Stances can come back if enmity management becomes meaningful. Which will never happen, sadly. Damage penalty from tank stance can stay in the dumpster where it belongs, since DPS stance would already exist, and you don't need to penalize players any further like that.

[Renathras]

Seconded on the "It depends on how they are implemented" position.

The worst thing was having stances but then just using attack stance all the time anyway and trying to stay out of tank stance as much as possible. I'd love something dynamic, like FF13 when you swapped to your all Sentinel Paradigm (which you could do on the fly and, when you did it, reduced incoming damage for the party by something like 50%) as a reactive defense, but FFXIV's netcode may not allow for that, and Holy Shelltron/etc's initial 4 seconds of boosted defense may be the closest to that which exists.

The problem is, anything that is "X or damage" in this game is always bad design, because "or damage" will always win between the theorycrafters, the community in general, and the fight design. Everyone's trying to be efficient, eek out as much damage as possible, and get the clears/boss HP to 0 that everything else takes a back seat, even when they arguably shouldn't.

So any decisions, to be meaningful, must be "X or Y" where neither X nor Y are "damage". And I'm not really sure how much of that there is. The only thing I can think of - and I'm not even sure this would WORK (or HOW it would work) - would be "mitigation or threat", where the tank(s) are on a tightrope of using their threat stance to get and maintain an agro lead, but then swapping to their defense stance during harder hitting portions of the encounter, but where doing so means the DPSers will catch up to their threat if they stay in it too long, creating a tension between "do I have enough threat lead to hold this defense longer, or do I need too get back into threat stance before I lose agro here?"

...which in practice would just stress out tanks and healers, so is probably also a terrible idea.
(Granted, it could be fairly flexible while still being tight ENOUGH that it's a consideration but not a constant fear, but...)

.

At the end of the day, stances just...don't work well in a game like this. Stances work well in games where there's meaningful choice, and you don't have meaningful choice when "or damage" is on one side of the balance, unless the enrage/damage requirements are super lax and somehow don't speed encounters/increase efficiency over other options. I'm just not sure how to do that.

[Mikey_R]

For that matter, I did have a little thought the other day. Not a tank main so this probably isn't a perfect idea but: For PLD. What if FoF was turned from just a dps buff to a stance? Oath gauge wouldn't be generated by auto attacks anymore. While FoF is active you get vfx swords behind you (shout out to papachin) and it slowly drains your MP, slowly enough that if you do your rotation correctly you can keep full (or nearly full) uptime, and that is what allows you to generate oath gauge. Each attack you deal or attack you block while FoF is active generates X oath gauge.

That sounds like a concept not unlick HW DRK's Darkside, where your MP drained slowly and through the use of other actions, you kept it high whilst also making sure you had enough to use Dark Arts.

However, I will ask the obvious question, why? Why have 2 stances where the only thing differentiating them is how you generate Oath? (You have already said they shouldn't have a DPS difference and you can keep your MP high, despite it draining), so all that is left is generating Oath via AA or actions.

Even if you want to say it might feel different to play, just because of the MP drain, does it really do that? You would just do your rotation as normal and nothing changes, it has become change for the sake of change without actually affecting anything, so what is the point?

This is what you have to consider when you want stances, they shouldn't be something you just turn on at the start of a fight and be done with it, that isn't interesting. It should also have meaning as to when you use it. You shouldn't use a stance to swap to for a few GCDs before swapping back, that is needless busy work for nothing.

If you want an example of (at least in my opinion) what would be a good stance system, you can look at BLM. AF and UI can be considered stances, each of them do different things and swapping between them doesn't get in the way of other things. They are also not there to solve a certain mechanic and are baked into the rotation.

On the other hand, if we go by Renathras' idea of having an enmity stance and a defensive stance, you have to consider how you want to balance it all. How is enmity going to be balanced around player skill/gear, how tight do you want this balancing to be. If we then go to the defensive stance, how strong do you want it to be? Too strong and you make it mandatory, too weak and you make it useless. Which ties into how it conflicts with the enmity stance. Too strong mitigation, you have no time to build enmity, too weak and you might as well not use it. You can say it is balanced around only being needed for tank busters or high damage moments, but at thta point, why not just make it a mitigation cooldown just like everything else as that is what you have made of it (which, coincidentally, then makes enmity stance the only things left, which is the current tank design).

I will say again, stances shouldn't be a one and done choice at the start of a fight, you should have reason to swap between them during your rotation and they should complement each other in achieving a coherent rotation that makes sense.

[SargeTheSeagull]

snip

Yeah sorry I typed that up in a hurry yesterday. One of my bigger complaints with oath gauge is that it’s used almost exclusively on holy sheltron. Thematically it would be more fitting for paladin’s resource management to be based around mitigations in general instead of only one. I still haven’t fully thought this through but imagine paladin had a handful of unique mitigations with each one consuming different amounts of oath. Like HS would consume 50, bulkwark could consume like 25, a new mit could have a super short CD but consume 100 oath something like that. Maybe they could tie oath into things like reprisal or divine veil. Obviously numbers and effectiveness would need a hell of a lot more thought than I’ve put in here but I just miss resource management. Especially on PLD since you don’t even need to think about MP anymore.

[Mikey_R]

Yeah sorry I typed that up in a hurry yesterday. One of my bigger complaints with oath gauge is that it’s used almost exclusively on holy sheltron. Thematically it would be more fitting for paladin’s resource management to be based around mitigations in general instead of only one. I still haven’t fully thought this through but imagine paladin had a handful of unique mitigations with each one consuming different amounts of oath. Like HS would consume 50, bulkwark could consume like 25, a new mit could have a super short CD but consume 100 oath something like that. Maybe they could tie oath into things like reprisal or divine veil.

One of the issues then becomes, how are the other tanks being handled? You are effectively restricting PLD's access to various mitigations, however, if the other tanks are left as is, they have freer access and so are more versatile. You also cannot put these defensives behind the tanks gauges as they are used offensively and mixing a gauge with offence and defence means you aren't using it for defensive purposes.

Regardless, I will agree that Oath Gauge is pretty pointless. I have already said what I think just tying various defensives to it isn't the best idea (Even if you want them to be additional actions, this just adds to PLD's current problem of button bloat), however, if we consider it an offensive gauge, I don't see how it could be used other than something you fill and just dump in the burst phase, which isn't exciting either. It is in a very weird spot.

[SargeTheSeagull]

One of the issues then becomes, how are the other tanks being handled? You are effectively restricting PLD's access to various mitigations, however, if the other tanks are left as is, they have freer access and so are more versatile. You also cannot put these defensives behind the tanks gauges as they are used offensively and mixing a gauge with offence and defence means you aren't using it for defensive purposes.

Oh absolutely, keeping offense and defense resources separate is a must. They could always add passives to PLD that generates extra oath, like if every divine veil barrier is fully absorbed the oath is refunded. Or if you mitigate X damage with passage it fills the oath gauge. A thought that's come to mind more and more as I play other MMOs is that each tank's tankiness is very loosely defined in 14. Each tank mitigates in largely identical ways. Yeah, paladin doesn't have a huge self barrier like DRK and GNB doesn't have immediate self heals like WAR but other than those, nearly every CD is just a defense bump. It would be an interesting thought experiment to think what would be fitting for each tank were they to all get new defensive kits. DRK could be all about personal barriers and debuffing targets to deal less damage. WAR could lean heavy into the "too angry to die" theme and have a ton of CD's that get more potent the lower your HP is.