What to manage as a tank?

[Supersnow845]

Ironic, you're interpreting my words in ways that are convenient to you.

No, unlike you I'm not using a single group that did an exceptional challenge but random players who did a dungeon run with 1 DRK and 3 DPS.
I'm showing that DRK can do the Tank + 3 DPS setup to show you that even if you nerfed Bloodwhetting, you would still have nothing to heal.
The point is to demonstrate that there's little damages going on, using DRK as the lowest point of reference to picture what a BW nerf would look like.

Read again:


From the start, you can’t see the forest for the trees.

And you are doing the same thing by using an “exceptional” (I’m not saying 1 DRK 3 DPS is exceptional just using the same wording) run an extrapolating it to everything. Oh since DRK can do it without a healer that means there is nothing wrong with WAR

When I take my actual dungeon runs the difference between my enjoyment of healing them is night and day because one actually needs me to heal them. Saying “DRK is a good representation of what a WAR nerf would look like” just makes me want to nerf WAR harder, because it’s actually semi interesting to heal a DRK because they need healing, even the runs where a DRK does not use a healer are only possible because the increased DPS allows you to kill the mobs before the mobs kill the DRK. Factoring in average DF damage the DRK absolutely would have died. This goes back to my point that you like to condense my point into believing a I have a weird vindictive desire to nerf tanks for no other reason than wanting them to suffer like healers when in reality it’s because a very large portion of healers being bad is because of how powerful the tanks healing is. If DNC was the actual problem I’d be ranting to DNC mains, if tanks aren’t the problem then who is? Because just saying “there isn’t enough damage” is just saying by proxy that tank sustain is too strong

And let’s say we changed it so that we didn’t nerf BW but instead just dialed up the damage tenfold, by proxy I’ve just nerfed bloodwhetting by a factor of 10, what’s the difference? Or do you only stop at the first half, either nerf sustain or up damage either way your sustain is getting nerfed why does it have to be the latter which is 10* more complex to implement. If your desire is to be self sufficient then there is no way to rectify that with healing design because one of the most core facets of healing design in all MMO’s is to heal the party member taking all the damage (the tank)

You have yet to ever remotely provide a solution to making healer fun in all content that actually involves the healer being the primary healer of ALL party members (including the tank). All you ever do is say “don’t nerf tanks” then just stop there. Okay I won’t nerf tanks, I’ll bump damage up 3 fold, oh look I stealth nerfed you anyway. No “leave the tank alone heal the party” isnt an answer either because in all content there is large stretches of time where the only person taking damage is the tank.

[CKNovel]

And you are doing the same thing by using an “exceptional” (I’m not saying 1 DRK 3 DPS is exceptional just using the same wording) run an extrapolating it to everything. Oh since DRK can do it without a healer that means there is nothing wrong with WAR

The point is to demonstrate that there's little damages going on, using DRK as the lowest point of reference to picture what a BW nerf would look like.

Perhaps you should take time to read or should I need to explain what a point of reference is?
I'm using DRK as a point of reference to show that even if you nerf WAR, you would still end up with "something wrong".

You have yet to ever remotely provide a solution to making healer fun in all content that actually involves the healer being the primary healer of ALL party members (including the tank).

Take time reading before answering with your feelings...
I've mentioned time and time again:
-Increase damage taken by the whole party and add significant raidwides and party wide debuff such as bleeding

ALL packs should have significant tank buster and have raidwides similar to The Strayborough Deadwalk's dolls but hitting harder
Tank excels at single target protection but are limited when helping the entire party.

-Restore Buff/Debuff play

What if packs would inflict a stackable "Physical Vulnerability Up" that would inevitably lead any tanks to be one-shot if the stack is too high?
What if tanks would get snared and unable to get out of AoEs without a Healer help?
As long as the game remains in this HP game we'll never solve the issue and go in a circle.

From the start that's what I want the battle mechanics to evolve into.

[Supersnow845]

snip

Yes and your point of reference is “if you nerfed WAR to DRK then there is still something wrong”. Is there though? That sounds like a fantastic solution to me, I’d love all the tanks to have about as much sustain as DRK, that’s like an optimal solution, your point of reference doesn’t work because it basically just says “imagine a really really good scenario that’s way better than what we have now” and then somehow from there expect me to agree it shows that it isn’t actually a solution to the problem.

And then you didn’t read what I said, I said how would you make it so the healer is fun in all content and allows them to be the primary healer of all party members including the tank and then you proceeded to offer solutions that amount to “healers heal everyone else I heal myself healers can also have some random stuff that isn’t healing”. This is what you aren’t getting, you can tack on 0206910692501692958274 auxiliary systems but you are never changing the fundamental fact that any change to the damage profile against tanks constitutes a nerf to them but it will only nerf them in content explicitly designed around it, you can’t “new systems” your way out of how overtuned the tanks are RIGHT NOW. So if the solutions offered involve fixing them in future content or fixing them in all content I’ll take the latter. This also doesn’t include the fact that your proposed solutions don’t change we would interact with content that only targets the tank

I don’t actually think a lot of your solutions are bad but they 100% read as “we need to start from a foundation of never nerfing the tanks then bend ourselves into a pretzel still trying to make it work”. A lot of your solutions like the debuff play would still work totally fine and wouldn’t require wonky changes like packs having random raidwides because the tank doesn’t need help so the healer needs something else to do even if the first step was nerfing self sustain

[CKNovel]

Yes and your point of reference is “if you nerfed WAR to DRK then there is still something wrong”. Is there though? That sounds like a fantastic solution to me, I’d love all the tanks to have about as much sustain as DRK, that’s like an optimal solution.

Thank you for confirming you don't want to just nerf Bloodwhetting, you want all tank forms of sustain gutted down to DRK level.
So you want tanks to feel as miserable as DRK and Healers.

As I've said, that's crab mentality, to pull others down to your unfun state.

My solutions allows to keep Bloodwhetting as it is while making Healers even more important and opening the door to more job identity and fun utility.
Yours close those door and wants everyone else to do nothing more than their main roles, just for the sake of some healer ego that wants the tank to die if they don't have a healer.
On top of that, healers would just heal the tank, not the party as a whole, which is paradoxal to what you wish for.

[Supersnow845]

Thank you for confirming you don't want to just nerf Bloodwhetting, you want all tank forms of sustain gutted down to DRK level.
So you want tanks to feel as miserable as DRK and Healers.

As I've said, that's crab mentality, to pull others down to your unfun state.

My solutions allows to keep Bloodwhetting as it is while making Healers even more important and opening the door to more job identity and fun utility.
Yours close those door and wants everyone else to do nothing more than their main roles, just for the sake of some healer ego that wants the tank to die if they don't have a healer.
On top of that, healers would just heal the tank, not the party as a whole, which is paradoxal to what you wish for.

Have you ever stopped to consider that I want the other tanks nerfed down to DRK because when I’m the DRK I actually like the level of sustain I have and I like relying on the healer. And when I’m the healer I like the level of sustain DRK has because it’s more fun for me. In both scenarios I don’t seen it as “nerfing the players having fun down to my suffering” because to me suffering on tanks is playing the snoozefest that is WAR. I DESPISE pressing bloodwhetting and just bene’ing myself when the healer is obviously trying and struggling to keep me alive, it just feels like slapping them in the face

Your experience of “I press bloodwhetting and it’s the best button that can be pressed and my entire enjoyment of the tank role comes from presssing bloodwhetting” isn’t universal.

And again you read through like half my point then arbitrarily stop. I’ll spell it out for you then entirety of my solution doesn’t stop at nerfing tank sustain. Amazingly I want tanks to do more, I want agro management, I want positioning, I want agro deflection, I want a interception of another roles damage, I want more damage for healers to heal, I want more varied mechanics, I want pruning of useless heals. There is a lot of things I would do to fix the roles but it has to start with nerfing of tank sustain because otherwise everything else is forcibly bent around compensating for that sustain which is so much harder to balance than not having it. If we built every mechanic “compensating” for how strong BW is then if the tank sucked at properly pressing bloodwhetting or just didn’t press it then that content would become physically impossible. It’s easier to remove something than build it as a baseline when that baseline is so high

[Carighan]

The primary resource to manage as a tank in 8man content is your caffeine level so you don't fall asleep, tbh.

It's sad they removed so many systems that usually make tanks, well, tanks. Most raid bosses position themselved and/or can't be moved in the first place. Emnity is no longer a concept outside of forgetting your tank stance. The CDs for damage reduction are mostly homogenized and also enough to cover all relevant designs, further simplifying aggro as tanks don't need to swap enemies back and forth based on who has timers left to survive stuff. Damage intake on tanks is so low that healers just spam a single nuke while keeping a DoT up, meanwhile the tanks themselves need few enough of their survival tools, too. Bigger actually dangerous mechanics can be covered with invulnerabilities in that brief moment of having to actually pay any attention.

It's sad how simplified our combat system has become in the pursuit of more and more involved raid fight designs. It makes sense on a design level, but I feel they've tipped things over an edge, in particular with tanks which are now more like melee DPS with all-face-positionals.

[BabyYoda]

The primary resource to manage as a tank in 8man content is your caffeine level so you don't fall asleep, tbh.

I always play tanks in RPGs but sure not in FFXIV

It always feels like the game is just trying to give tanks less stress each expansion

Stormbllod was a sweet spot
ShB homonization but people where OK because encounters do damage.
EW where tanks get braindead
DT extension of EW with extra survivability

It is just a braindead job.. from my experience DPS main have an easier time to switch to tanking but not the other way.. I wonder why

[CKNovel]

It's sad they removed so many systems that usually make tanks, well, tanks.
Emnity is no longer a concept outside of forgetting your tank stance.
The CDs for damage reduction are mostly homogenized and also enough to cover all relevant designs, further simplifying aggro as tanks don't need to swap enemies back and forth based on who has timers left to survive stuff.

I really wish we had XIV Classic so people could remove the pink colored lenses.

Let's be honest about Pre-ShB Enmity management:

• Enmity combo were the equivalent of Heal GCDs and we all know their status at the moment.
• Enmity was more managed by the party through actions like Diversion or named Quelling strikes before.
• If you had a Ninja, it was their job to generate enmity for the tank.
• All tanks would do is taunting then shirking to generate extra enmity, which is what we have today.

In conclusion? We still have the same tools for enmity and still using them.
Only DPS and Healers lost their enmity management.

As for CDs? Remember there was only shields and Reprisal, magical mitigation only happened in ShB.
Bonus, Holmgang existed at 180s cooldown

[Supersnow845]

I really wish we had XIV Classic so people could remove the pink colored lenses.

Let's be honest about Pre-ShB Enmity management:

• Enmity combo were the equivalent of Heal GCDs and we all know their status at the moment.
• Enmity was more managed by the party through actions like Diversion or named Quelling strikes before.
• If you had a Ninja, it was their job to generate enmity for the tank.
• All tanks would do is taunting then shirking to generate extra enmity, which is what we have today.

In conclusion? We still have the same tools for enmity and still using them.
Only DPS and Healers lost their enmity management.

As for CDs? Remember there was only shields and Reprisal, magical mitigation only happened in ShB.
Bonus, Holmgang existed at 180s cooldown

Maybe the problem was the fact that the NIN was the party arbiter of agro and not the agro mechanic itself

People always point to NIN as being the reason why the old agro system was bad but never look at the core of the system and realise it worked if you actually stuck it back in the hands of the tanks

Remove overpowered enmity control from NIN, remove the effect shirk had where each tank basically generated the other tanks enmity and then bump up the DPS/healers agro generation as a baseline.

now the tanks HAVE to occasionally resort to tank stance and the agro combos in order to hold agro. There is no “why didn’t you use diversion” or “WHM if you don’t use shroud before medica 2 im not helping you”, it becomes straight up a competence check on the tank to balance their DPS potential with their ability to hold agro.

This is the same concept as upping damage/pruning healing oGCD’s that like the old healing design enforced GCD healing. The only reason GCD healing is looked down on these days is because you generally don’t need it so using it either means someone made a mistake or the healer is less than competent. In a world where every 20 seconds you are faced with the decision of “press succor or die” then GCD’s wouldn’t be looked down on, the same system applies to tank agro

[CKNovel]

Maybe the problem was the fact that the NIN was the party arbiter of agro and not the agro mechanic itself
People always point to NIN as being the reason why the old agro system was bad but never look at the core of the system and realise it worked if you actually stuck it back in the hands of the tanks
Remove overpowered enmity control from NIN, remove the effect shirk had where each tank basically generated the other tanks enmity and then bump up the DPS/healers agro generation as a baseline.

I believe you missed the point.

I pointed out that Enmity management wasn't that big thing everyone believe it used to be and you seem to agree.
While I pointed out NIN, even if you remove it from the equation the result remains unchanged: DPS & Healers managed more the Enmity than tanks.

You're arguing for a comeback of heavier Enmity management and sharing your opinion how it could be done.
I'll discuss that topic when I see actual tank players asking for enmity management but they seems okay with that.