ARR/HW/SB tank vets: how do you feel about the current state of tanks?

[Mikey_R]

I would prefer a system that was “you need to drop into tank stance at some points or you are going to lose agro and the DPS can’t help you keep it without going in tank stance

If you really want, you can simulate such a system with the current tank stances, with some caveats of course.

First, don't have tank stance up when pulling with Shield Lob, Unmend, Tomahawk or Lightning Shot. These already have a 7x enmity multiplier baked in, so adding the 10x multiplier from tank stances would be unfair.

From there, just drop your tank stance when you think it is a good time to. Just bear in mind with your proposed system, you will be in tank stance longer, just because of your lower enmity multiplier. With that in mind, the longer you have the stance up, the less damage you are doing, which, compounded with the first point, means even lower damage than you might otherwise expect. Which then leads to the next point, since you are doing less damage, due to stance, you will need to be in stance longer to generate the extra enmity to make up for that lost damage.

This is before we even consider enmity combos and hoping that you don't want them implemented as they were in the past (lower damage for more enmity but with no resource generation).

As an edit, I forgot to mention just tracking enmity accurately gets harder and harder as a fight increases in length.

[Kaixern]

I played (and mained) DRK since Heavensward and in every game i played i cared more about the class identity/gameplay of the class i played rather than having the biggest potency or having all of my skills having for only positive being "functional"

That should, i think, show how i feel about the current state of my main class (that has been going worse by the years)

[Valence]

In conjunction to whatever system they could make on the job side, I do feel that if they're so keen into reintroducing creative mechanics into encounters, they could bring back aggro resets, and potentially force tanks to use provoke in some specific sections other than for tank swapping. Imagine for instance a specific add that's programmed to be intent on killing a dps/healer and starts with a huge aggro onto them already, then you'd need the off tank to voke it out of the target.

[CKNovel]

Started as WAR at ARR end/start HW, played DRK then to finish maining GNB at the end of ShB. Very happy with the (general) state of tanks.

There's not much to say about tanks before SB/ShB, their DPS rotation were almost copy pasted:
-Maintain your dot
-Maintain your special debuff (Strength down for PLD, Intel down for DRK, Slashing down for WAR)
-All tanks had one enmity combo they'd press once, tank swap were often "Taunt, activate tank stance", similar to Taunt + Shirk we have today but it used to be slower. Bonus point if you had a NIN, you wouldn't put tank stance on at all.

All tanks lost their dot GCD, debuff combo and enmity combo.

Warrior barely changed outside of that, they just added more and more GCDs/oGCDs to the job until today. WAR has been the biggest winner.
Paladin was always in a weird spot. Its magic phase got added in Stormblood and expanded upon with each expansions and things move a bit so PLD would fit better in 2 mins meta. I feel PLD today is better than any other iterations.
Gunbreaker was added after the big changes, its kit just got expanded upon. It only lost Rough divide's damage.

Dark Knight has been the biggest loser of all four, it got reworked to remove the dark art spam and replace it with many other oGCDs and Edge of Darkness spam.
Its gauge could be hidden and you would not know about it, you'd be able to keep it up 99% of the time. The job simply doesn't feel engaging.

[DRKoftheAzure]

There's not much to say about tanks before SB/ShB, their DPS rotation were almost copy pasted:
-Maintain your dot
-Maintain your special debuff (Strength down for PLD, Intel down for DRK, Slashing down for WAR)
-All tanks had one enmity combo they'd press once, tank swap were often "Taunt, activate tank stance", similar to Taunt + Shirk we have today but it used to be slower. Bonus point if you had a NIN, you wouldn't put tank stance on at all.

Nowadays, people would call all of that more stimulating than what we have now, and I would not blame them for thinking or even saying it, though AoE combos are now going to AoE enmity combos in 7.01, which may or may not cause balancing issues for raids and trials because single target stuff that isn't the one ranged attack you get at level 15 doesn't have increased enmity effect... yet...

[Post]

The worst thing about tanks right now in my mind isn't the absence of enmity as a mechanic or them largely forgetting to have enemies need to be positioned or their current imbalance or their insistance on removing all the cool animations from DRK to add in milquetoast, damageless gap-closers.

No, the worst thing is that they all do the role the same way; they just have roughly equivalent cooldowns that they all press at the same times compared to Pre ShB where there was some overlap because of cross class/role actions, but even small things like Reprisal/Storm's path debuffs went from being applied differently with different opportunity costs to uniformity. And then you had big things, like PLD being all easy access cooldowns and WAR having some of those but more 'build to spend' mitigation like Inner Beast, and DRK being 'balance empowering your mitigations for MP/damage'.

It's easy to see why they moved away from this over time; it was all very hard to optimize in a world of fight design where ultimately only damage mattered and they stopped including mechanics that might make you want to play it safer, like boss crits or adds showing up or lower HP pools/no passive mitigation without tank stance or auto attacks continuing during boss casts or much less telegraphed unavoidable damage.

But, the flavor of the tank jobs was heavily impacted by this decision IMO. Even GNB which was born into this 'all tanks play the same' world feels like it has some unique potential explored by its PvP kit where its offensive Gnashing Fang combo is empowered by its Draw to provide party support or self survivability as it attacks, but given they've streamlined so much about the combat system it's hard to envision what support such a kit could even provide that tanks aren't already all stepping into with actions like Shake It Off or Nascent Flash, again, uniformly.

[Arohk]

Dark Knight is just as bad as always, the rest is good.

[aodhan_ofinnegain]

No one wanted to use tank stance because you could externalise enmity to the DPS/healers in SB or in HW you just had internal tools within DPS stance that increased enmity

I would prefer a system that was “you need to drop into tank stance at some points or you are going to lose agro and the DPS can’t help you keep it without going in tank stance

Nobody wanted to reduce their damage when you could just scream at the DPS to do it for you, that was old tank stance problem

Sorry but no. Most people that wanted to get the most out of their job hated tank stance and aggro combos they're ancient relics of old school tanking in an era that doesn't suit modern MMO players.

It always felt awful sat in tank stance know I could be doing 20% more damage, if only I didn't have some arbitrary system that only one job could effectively circumvent while two jobs had to suffer, there was 0 parity in it, the system was shit, and rose tinted glasses do not save how shit it was.

Go play another MMO, if you want old school tanking or suck it up, and deal with the fact this is the system we have now and it is a lot fairer to tank players than what we had before.

[Post]

I always felt that the optimisation that came from willingly giving up extra mit or health and enmity to deal more damage was way more fun than optimizing my sorry excuse of DPS rotation.

It was a unique risk and rush that DPS jobs did not get to enjoy, so it felt fitting that the optimisation was THERE instead of... What we have now which doesn't even include oGCD damage dashes on two tanks even though we already all had charges and the ability to stitch stock a gap-closer if we needed one at no damage penalty at all since ShB.

They used to be able to have bosses that ignored enmity, too, and that would be a fun gimmick as a tank because I could really go full bore, now those same bosses are played exactly the same the tank is always played. Full bore.

Now I have more defensives that I often need and no way to use them to increase my damage. My rotation is basically solved with no thought or teamwork.

[ForteNightshade]

Stance dancing was bad because they added stupid broken abilities to NIN that allowed tanks to not have to stance dance which made it feel bad when you did have to

NIN never should have been able to give its agro to the tank essentially making the NIN the controller of agro and not the tank (the other big agro offender being WHM with its AOE healing and it’s only agro reduction ability being tied to mana regen which was also garbage)

I would actually support stance dancing returning if it was actually a tank mechanic they were forced to engage with. Like say current tank stance became 2* agro but 0.75* damage and DPS stance was 1* agro and 1* damage and NONE of the DPS or healers had any skills that interacted with agro

So stance control and agro generation combos (or even oGCD’s that generated more agro that were stance independent) were actually a skill check on the tank, not just the tank sitting in DPS stance screaming at the NIN to give them agro

Even without Ninja, stance dancing was never really a thing despite how much it gets glorified around here. If you were running Warrior, and you absolutely were in HW/SB, Unchained and Voke/Shirk spam was more than enough to hold off everyone except a very optimized Bard, White Mages spamming overheals or people refusing to use Diversion. In those cases in was always better to simply let them eat autos unless said attack would be lethal. What largely ended up happening is newer or more conservative tanks refused to ever leave tank stance, which meant they were doing significantly less damage throughout the whole fight for no intrinsic benefit.

If they were to even consider bringing back that version of the enmity system, it cannot come with a 25% penalty nor lock tanks out of their most potent abilities. That alone will always push them to avoid tank stance like the damn plague. Additionally, enmity can't be so easily generated otherwise we're right back to voke/shirk spam. Finally, while I did like aggro being a party mechanic, it's hilariously toxic because so many DPS simply won't use Diversion. I'll openly admit to letting more than a few die because I got sick and tired of them expecting to sit in Defiance. Samurai and Black Mage players were notorious for it. Nonetheless, it's all a moot point, really, because the old enmity system is as likely to come back as Cleric Stance.