Thread: 7.0 Tank Wishlist

Originally Posted by J-Reyno

...

There are two trends that have occurred across the past few expansions. First, the amount of mitigation and self-sustain provided by tanks and healers has steadily increased over time. This is partially because most support jobs see at least one or two defensive additions to their toolkit every expansion, and partially because when a job within a support role gets a new defensive buff, everyone else starts demanding parity. The end result is a net inflation of your mitigation toolkits over time.

The second is that damage output has generally gone down over time. Historically, mobs including bosses were allowed to land critical hits. That created degree of damage variance and unpredictability that you needed to be able to respond to. Bosses also had a higher frequency of tankbusters, which in turn forced more tank swaps. As an example, the opening phase of T9 alone had about four tankbusters in its loop. That's more tankbusters than you see in some modern Savage fights. In between tankbusters, there were fairly regular cleaves, which hit for half your HP and could kill party members if positioned incorrectly. This was at a time when tanks had much fewer defensive abilities than we have now, and PLD had no raidwide mitigation. And you're asking for more mitigation and self-healing tools across all tanks? Have you seen current day WAR?

The reason why we've gotten to this place is because everyone wants to treat this like a single player game where they have personal control over the outcome. That's fine for a DPS player because you're there to do as much damage as possible and focus on your own mechanical execution. The reason why support roles were traditionally interesting was because your performance was interlinked with your team. If you want to survive the incoming damage you do need to rely on your healers for healing and shielding. If you want to have enough mitigation tools to survive incoming tankbusters, you need to swap with your co-tank. Not because the game puts a debuff on you, but because you might run out of cooldowns. This interdependence does mean that sometimes you die for reasons outside of your control. But it also gives you opportunities to shine by cross-compensating and cooperating with your teammates. If you extract this away from tanks, then tanks end up functionally as melee dps on training wheels.

Originally Posted by Lyth

And you're asking for more mitigation and self-healing tools across all tanks?

In the scenario where tanks are consistently pushed to the brink with near-lethal damage? Yes. Which is why I said that they would have to be redesigned, rather than adding a bunch of mitigation and self-healing to their kits in the game's current environment.

It'd be different if tanks had consistently available defensive GCDs that they could weave to contend with more damage or had as many defensive abilities as healers have healing abilities, so there are at least more options and active gameplay for managing threatening damage.

But we don't have that. Tanks in this game are designed with a "just do damage, and then use this defensive occasionally when you need it" mentality. They are not designed from the perspective of actual tanking, active and rotational management of defenses and sustain, being the primary element of gameplay.

And that's what would be needed to actually improve tank engagement imo. Otherwise there's nothing in this scenario for tanks beyond waiting for your healer to fix the problem. Which they can do easily as a role with zero cooldown near-zero resource management sustain.

Originally Posted by J-Reyno

In the scenario where tanks are consistently pushed to the brink with near-lethal damage? Yes. Which is why I said that they would have to be redesigned, rather than adding a bunch of mitigation and self-healing to their kits in the game's current environment.

It'd be different if tanks had consistently available defensive GCDs that they could weave to contend with more damage or had as many defensive abilities as healers have healing abilities, so there are at least more options and active gameplay for managing threatening damage.

But we don't have that. Tanks in this game are designed with a "just do damage, and then use this defensive occasionally when you need it" mentality. They are not designed from the perspective of actual tanking, active and rotational management of defenses and sustain, being the primary element of gameplay.

And that's what would be needed to actually improve tank engagement imo. Otherwise there's nothing in this scenario for tanks beyond waiting for your healer to fix the problem. Which they can do easily as a role with zero cooldown near-zero resource management sustain.

Square can’t even design the healers with this philosophy in mind I have no idea why you expect they will get the tanks right

Going down that path is only going to lead to basically what the healers already are, a pathetic DPS “rotation” while you drown in a wealth of GCD and oGCD defensives that you barely use because they are terrified of upping damage in this game

Don’t get me wrong I fully agree tanking barely exists in this game and that a full “defensive rotation” rather than just “melee DPS with a defensive weave every 30 seconds” is much more interesting but trying to pursue that path in this day and age is just going to lead to a blue version of what the modern healers play like

Though like I put in one of the other threads bloodwhetting even in single target alongside WAR’d other healing is still putting out close to 4500 healer potency per minute, the average healer is only putting out about 5500

Bloodwhetting in cleave content is not the only problem

taking drk into a levelling roulette is almost always a miserable experience. i'd take a dark mind rework. or add another defensive cd for drk that's not so conditional. also, a mistimed abyssal drain right when you get an insta-heal is just unfortunate and wasteful. have the overheal turn into shields. i don't think that'd be too broken or unreasonable.

i'm not calling for dark mind to change into another rampart. though i guess it does sound like that when i used the word rework. i'd appreciate it having a convalescence-like effect, or another "applies slow when struck" effect like arm's length. something small.

it doesn't have to be a dark mind rework, just something would be nice. i wouldn't mind having a weaker tbn instead from 40 - 70, or salted earth giving drks 10% mitigation when they stand on it right when we unlock the skill, even better if we had both.