Tanks need to be made more like tanks than DPS with high Defense.

[Connor]

but tHeN tHe CaSuaLs cAnT dO iT

Clearly this is working as intended because anyone should be able to have 100% Netflix uptime on every job, especially tanks and healers. Casuals can’t handle anything more than watching Netflix while pressing random buttons and winning every encounter. (Obviously sarcasm)


Somehow the entire game has to be so aggressively septic for ‘casuals’ that tanks are practically invincible healers, healers just dps, dps press the giant glowing buttons with arrows pointing at them and a sound effect that says ‘PRESS MEEEEE’. Like, somehow casuals should be able to do every piece of content in the game and never feel the slightest bit of stress of pressure in any way whatsoever.

I’m sick of every single criticism of the game boiling down to ‘but what about the casual lobotomites who can’t press buttons?!?!?!

Tank aren’t tanks? Can’t change it because casuals. Healers don’t heal/damage/anything? Too complex, casuals. Dps support going from active to entirely passive? You guessed it, can’t fix because casuals lol

[Carighan]

Yeah but this tricky to do, as I can also see why they want everyone to have a certain damage output for soloing, plus they want a certain "job erasure" during raid mechanics so it's more about the ballet around mechanics than which specific job and role you play during the mechanic.

That being said, for tank gameplay in particular, I would prefer:

* ~50% of your actions don't deal damage.
* These actions instead deal high emnity.
* Damage of the damage dealing actions buffed significantly to compensate.
* Emnity of tank stance reduced/removed.

So that as a tank, your gameplay comes down to balancing your damage output vs your emnity output. You can focus on either exclusively, but that is no good. The goal is somewhere in the middle. And ideally, the two mechanisms have a certain interaction. Say as a Paladin, your mana-spending moves are your emnity tools, but your mana-regenerating moves like the Atonement chain are damage-only, not emnity. As a Warrior, maybe your tank-stance still gives +emnity, but only on healing you do, and of course you do healing via various abilites so that's how you bind enemies. Can use this for job differentiation.

This'd also have the upside that it can make lower levels easier to organize, originally only giving 1 single target and 1 AoE emnity tool (if even that, Warrior could use the same one), and then first give a simple damage combo.

[Valence]

This sounds basically like you're asking to get pre ShB tanking back. Not that I disagree mind you (except on the 50% no damage actions unless you really want to bring Flash back and give it to everyone).

[Post]

It's not even pre ShB at that; by StB parties were mostly able to manage their own Enmity by the ubiquitous access to actions like Diversion and SHIRK (the greatest offender to trivializing enmity generation in favor of dealing damage), and often NIN's action, whatever it was called.

Enmity has gone the opposite extreme way as mitigation/healing, something the entire group handles with a myriad of buttons, some overpowered and some useless. Enmity is handled by two players, three buttons apiece.

Making it something the tank alone has to manage hasn't really made it better or made the overall general gameplay of combat feel like it works better, though., It's become so easily managed that the effect is your 24 man main tank dies (somehow), and the boss manages to tankbuster the next few DPS before an offtank realizes anyone is down and remembers to put on their stance. They probably didn't even realize, they just might have saw the boss move somewhere in the arena that they found annoying and tried to center it, though bosses usually handle that by themselves now, too.

I do think that making tanks have to balance dealing damage and supporting would go a long way to making them feel different than DPS, though. Same for healers. All the better if they can make that support actually necessary (or at least optimal) and then differentiate the way in which each job within the role doles out the support, instead of trying to define each job by a slightly different DPS rotation and slightly different party wide or personal short cooldown oGCD single target degenerative action.

[Laerune]

Give all bosses Doom ability when there is only 1 player left alive. Tank has 1 min to kill boss or wipe.

[Toutatis]

It’s not just the self healing in normal mode, it’s that there’s barely anything to cause something more serious than a papercut to a high level tank. A tank buster? What’s that? Even without mitigation it’s not a threat unless it’s a shared one. Same with vuln stacks: no one should be able to not care about having 5-10+ vuln stacks. A tank should also not be able to take an 8m party stack alone when synched. Unless you can jump off the ledge when your teammates die, it can take a while of not doing anything except stand in everything you’re not supposed to before you die.

Give all bosses Doom ability when there is only 1 player left alive. Tank has 1 min to kill boss or wipe.

If something like this is to be implemented, it should only apply to the latest patch/synched content.

[dwodmots]

It's important for tanks to be able to carry, otherwise we'd have to depend on people like OP to turn on their monitor. That's too much to ask.

[Valence]

[Shurrikhan]

For a short period of time in ARR, WAR's Inner Beast (Fell Cleave without the trait) gave a 30 or 40% mitigation buff for 6s or so. That "forced" WAR to have to think about when they would spend their gauge. Of course, back then, gauge capped at 50 so you'd just be sitting on it thinking about your lost DPS while waiting for a tankbuster.

Yep, though 20%. Inner Beast gave just 20% DR for 6s. Though, since at that time Warrior had zero passive mitigation beyond its armor, that was already enough to care when one used it. (Especially since using it also purged your stacks of Wrath, which gave crit chance and healing received.)

[OliviaLugria]

Tank design should be much closer to healer design. 1 single target button, 1 aoe button, a 30 second damage buff they maintain, and maybe a range attack. Then give them 20 mitigation tools when they really only need 5.