Feelings on FF14's Trinity System?

[ty_taurus]

I don't think you can attach any kind of DPS bonus to being the main or off tank, it will inevitably create issues with people not wanting to take the spot that makes them do less damage for basically no reason.
We already had that problem when all it did was mess with your opener and I doubt you're gonna get that out of the playerbase at this point.

The other issue with frontal positionals, depending on what they end up doing, is bosses with any kind of AoE busters or cleaves.

Personally, I hate having to curb design ideas based on people being whiny brats. So I do not accept that as a counter argument against the actual design of the mechanic.

[Absurdity]

Personally, I hate having to curb design ideas based on people being whiny brats. So I do not accept that as a counter argument against the actual design of the mechanic.

Whining aside, I just don't consider punishing the tank for essentially doing their job is a good design idea.
It's basically just bringing back the tank stance penalty but without the option of turning it off.

Punishment mechanics are fine when you can actually do something about it, you can't not have a main tank.

[ty_taurus]

Whining aside, I just don't consider punishing the tank for essentially doing their job is a good design idea.
It's basically just bringing back the tank stance penalty but without the option of turning it off.

Punishment mechanics are fine when you can actually do something about it, you can't not have a main tank.

Why is it a "punishment" though? If it's factored in as an expectation of the role, how is that any different than the difference in DPS between roles, or even sub roles of DPS? Also, you do have an entire rest of a kit to potentially play around with. While one action might offer less damage while main tanking, another could offer more. You could have multiple tools that shift in value depending on what position you're at as a Tank, and trying to reserve resources for when you're one or the other could become a new aspect of skill expression.

[AmiableApkallu]

To take maybe a slightly different tack on the OP's question:

Solo duties where there are clearly many, many other people around you utterly fail to take advantage of the trinity. If I'm running the MSQ as a healer, maybe the solo duties should focus on my ability to heal everyone else. If I'm running the MSQ as a tank, maybe the solo duties should put me at the vanguard, drawing the attention of the enemy and keeping them occupied. If I'm running the MSQ as a DPS, maybe the solo duties should really test my ability to squash the enemy before they overrun everyone else.

[Oizen]

Obviously we just need to bring back tank stance dancing except adjust the values so that one emnity combo cant hold the boss indefinitely.
DPS stance could drop the -20% hidden potency nerf tanks have and also drop the baked in 20% mitigation as well

Which will never happen but one can dream.

[Zairava]

Obviously we just need to bring back tank stance dancing except adjust the values so that one emnity combo cant hold the boss indefinitely.
DPS stance could drop the -20% hidden potency nerf tanks have and also drop the baked in 20% mitigation as well

Which will never happen but one can dream.

Getting stance dancing back and needing to manage aggro myself with a proper design is a pipe dream I'll never see realized

[Rithy255]

Getting stance dancing back and needing to manage aggro myself with a proper design is a pipe dream I'll never see realized

That's the sad part about it, it was never really tried out properly. I wish we had the chance to at least have a interesting aggro/stance system but instead what we got was press aggro button now you tank... Which is about as intense as FF14 healing so I guess they're consistent on that.

Even worse actually tanks are still being dummed down despite removing stances, as a long time PLD player 6.3 rework couldn't be bothered to even try and keep its second combo path. In general tanks rotation's are just spamming 1, 2, 3 over and over and over. At least make the dps rotation intresting.

[Supersnow845]

How about as a balance compromise tank healing was nerfed but we bring back active mitigation and channeled mitigation?

I think everyone agrees that
1) the tank being a proverbial ping pong ball between the healer and the boss isn’t fun for the tank
2) the healer being deleted by the tanks gross level of incidental healing isn’t fun for the healer

So what if we made the way tanks respond to mistakes more like the way healers respond to mistakes.

Healers arguably have the most “agency” of any role in the game as they are free at any time to drop damage to correct mistakes and they can use a lot of their heals in an attempt to protect themselves against the something that would have killed them. Tanks meanwhile have near zero agency but they have “corrected” this by buffing them so far they don’t need any agency because they are immortal. What if instead of just a ridiculous amount of passive healing the tanks could use mitigation that’s on the GCD or powerful channeled mitigation like say chelnion gate they can use to correct mistakes or protect themselves even if the healer is incompetent.

So rather than bloodwhetting just healing autos passively if your healer is asleep and you are getting chunked by autos you can drop a GCD to use a GCD mitigation to better protect yourself. If you fatfingered holy Shelton and now you need to soak a tower rather than desperately hoping the healer will recognise your dilemma and shield you you can instead drop 2-3 GCD’s to chelonian gate to survive the mechanic

[Gullis]

one of the pieces are missing

If the devs continue on this path of putting more and more powerful heals on tanks then they should go all the way and reduce from a trinity to a duality of just dps and tanks. This half hearted approach is the worst of both worlds. Healers are less and less needed for their healing but their damage aspect is mindnumbingly boring. Job design in pvp is much more coherent in what it is trying to achieve and it has dialed back the trinity immensely.
I think SE needs to decide on one approach. Embrace the trinity and dial tank sustain back massively or embrace pvp logic and make every job a dps with different extras and built in healing. Both are valid approaches, this current middle path pve job design is on is not.

This said it perfectly

[Valence]

The idea was more like, the front positionals are for the main tank, not the off tank, like the positional effect is increased enmity generation. But I think the bigger flaw isn’t actually with the positionals themselves but bosses that don’t have positionals and thus always trigger them. Like if you’re facing a wall boss, the off tank would be triggering the extra enmity as well.

Maybe it would make more sense to have certain actions that have different effects based on if you’re at the top of a target’s threat table or not. Like if you’re at the top of the threat table, the action inflicts a damage down debuff and further increases enmity. If you’re second on the threat table, the attack deals increased damage.

Just add the enemity increase from front positionals baked into tank stance, problem solved.

"Additional effect: increases enmity generated from hitting certain actions from the Front."

How about as a balance compromise tank healing was nerfed but we bring back active mitigation and channeled mitigation?

I think everyone agrees that
1) the tank being a proverbial ping pong ball between the healer and the boss isn’t fun for the tank
2) the healer being deleted by the tanks gross level of incidental healing isn’t fun for the healer

So what if we made the way tanks respond to mistakes more like the way healers respond to mistakes.

Healers arguably have the most “agency” of any role in the game as they are free at any time to drop damage to correct mistakes and they can use a lot of their heals in an attempt to protect themselves against the something that would have killed them. Tanks meanwhile have near zero agency but they have “corrected” this by buffing them so far they don’t need any agency because they are immortal. What if instead of just a ridiculous amount of passive healing the tanks could use mitigation that’s on the GCD or powerful channeled mitigation like say chelnion gate they can use to correct mistakes or protect themselves even if the healer is incompetent.

So rather than bloodwhetting just healing autos passively if your healer is asleep and you are getting chunked by autos you can drop a GCD to use a GCD mitigation to better protect yourself. If you fatfingered holy Shelton and now you need to soak a tower rather than desperately hoping the healer will recognise your dilemma and shield you you can instead drop 2-3 GCD’s to chelonian gate to survive the mechanic

Yeah I like the idea of dedicated a certain amount of GCDs on tanks to dramatically protect themselves for a short duration, but that would definitely conflict with the amount of oGCD defensives they already have (rampart, etc), much like healers currently have a problem with bloated oGCD heals at no cost. They'd probably need to turn rampart and the 30% mitigation tool into those GCDs and make them more akin to chelonian and whatnot.

Pretty radical change either way.