Off tank mechanic Ideas

[YovelaLindswood]

Anyone got any ideas for engagement as the off tank? Given you're the most versatile player in the team at the time being a non positional locked glorified dps theres a lot of potential for engaging team gameplay.

- One idea is position based interventions. Like a cone shared hit where the person closest to the boss or object somewhere in the arena takes the lions share of the damage.

- Double boss fights designed around splitting the party in two light parties with one boss each.

- Refurbisher 0 was fun but could be refined. I'd actually like to see off tanks have movement responsibilities like interacts or guiding adds to be killed in certain spots to accomplish objectives. MT's goal is to be perfectly still as often as you can for positionals so it'd be nice to see forced movement for the off tank.

I feel like locking some of these things behind ultimates is missing out. The game in general could use less brutally precise mechanics and more diverse interesting mechanics or movements in their place.

Tear my ideas up or give me some of your own. I'm interested in fun new mechanic ideas or improvements to mine.

[Carighan]

Oh we had a fair share of CAoEs or LAoEs where the first 2 targets (or 1 target and it's 2 of the AoE) takes extra damage. Even got a few of those in 4 man dungeons like in Variants.

It's never used consistently (same as having two targets to tank) sadly, but it exists. Wish they'd use it more, yeah. I also feel they should bring simple forced swap back&forth back from older MMORPGs, where the boss stacks a debuff on the tank with each autoattack, increasing subsequent autoattack damage. So you have to swap every few stacks.

[Altina_Orion]

Honestly, something as simple as tank busters giving physical vuln for 30+ seconds or something like that would work so that swaps are required. And then raidwides could do physical damage and the tank has to mitigate to survive raidwides.

[YovelaLindswood]

Oh we had a fair share of CAoEs or LAoEs where the first 2 targets (or 1 target and it's 2 of the AoE) takes extra damage. Even got a few of those in 4 man dungeons like in Variants.

It's never used consistently (same as having two targets to tank) sadly, but it exists. Wish they'd use it more, yeah. I also feel they should bring simple forced swap back&forth back from older MMORPGs, where the boss stacks a debuff on the tank with each autoattack, increasing subsequent autoattack damage. So you have to swap every few stacks.

I miss the arr extremes that did that with tank busters. Titan and ifrit were both really fun fights.

[Atreus]

I want DPS stances back. Sword Oath, Deliverance, Darkside. Bring it all back.

[Shurrikhan]

Anyone got any ideas for engagement as the off tank? Given you're the most versatile player in the team at the time being a non positional locked glorified dps theres a lot of potential for engaging team gameplay.

1. One idea is position based interventions. Like a cone shared hit where the person closest to the boss or object somewhere in the arena takes the lions share of the damage.
   
2. Double boss fights designed around splitting the party in two light parties with one boss each.

These (and many variants that are still fundamentally the same as one or the other) are generally my go to. After all, a tank's only unique offerings are personal mitigation used to provide external mitigation and the snap-threat through which to use the first against directly targeted attacks, so all will ultimately be a shade of either or of simple MT-OT swaps.

Kite and voke a bomb-mob back and forth? Basically the second.
Kill a mob in a certain position to make a safe zone? Mostly the second.
Aim cleaves at allies in order to immunize them to something yet more dangerous later? The first, even if it feels opposite.
Baiting friendly firing boss attacks at adds? The first, if only indirectly tankish.

[Rithy255]

I want DPS stances back. Sword Oath, Deliverance, Darkside. Bring it all back.

Aslong as sword oath isn't just auto attacks I agree.

[Carighan]

I want DPS stances back. Sword Oath, Deliverance, Darkside. Bring it all back.

What would be the benefit though?

The old ones were understandably removed as they had no upsides, only downsides, because of the fact that "extra mitigation" has no value in FFXIV because tank DPS beats healer DPS. So tanks want to spend all their resources on damage if possible, while making healers heal less is never worth it if it would cost tank DPS to achieve that.

Hence staying in DPS stance as much as humanly possible. And that's why they were removed, it wasn't a player-interactive thing, it was a "Do I haaaaave to be in def stance? Siiiiigh, okaaaaay mum...", swap over, do the bare minimum, swap back.

[Rithy255]

What would be the benefit though?

The old ones were understandably removed as they had no upsides, only downsides, because of the fact that "extra mitigation" has no value in FFXIV because tank DPS beats healer DPS. So tanks want to spend all their resources on damage if possible, while making healers heal less is never worth it if it would cost tank DPS to achieve that.

Hence staying in DPS stance as much as humanly possible. And that's why they were removed, it wasn't a player-interactive thing, it was a "Do I haaaaave to be in def stance? Siiiiigh, okaaaaay mum...", swap over, do the bare minimum, swap back.

The problem is that Tank vs Dps stance can actually be solved if we properly made aggro management the tanks job and less "free"

You say that tanks went into tank stance then swapped back, but that's not the fault of tank stances existing its a fault of how SE implemented it in the first place (which their only solution ever has been to remove it if it don't work instead of trying to fix it). Frankly they struggle to implement anything non dps related without making them extremely boring which is how we got current tank and healer design to this day.

If tank stances generated enough aggro to stay topped up but lets say tanks DPS stances generated next to nothing or even lessened aggro over time then their would actually be reasons to have a tank stance for off tanks. You could even have off tanks be more faster and have more to do, because they wouldn't be using much self mitigation anyway. Which makes off tank actually more fun instead of being slow defensive DPS, you'd also have to have good synergy and timing with your MT if you wanted to make sure you both can tank double busters ect.

I feel like people are only against "tank stances" because it didn't work in Stormblood and clearly that means it can't work at all

[Valence]

What would be the benefit though?

The old ones were understandably removed as they had no upsides, only downsides, because of the fact that "extra mitigation" has no value in FFXIV because tank DPS beats healer DPS. So tanks want to spend all their resources on damage if possible, while making healers heal less is never worth it if it would cost tank DPS to achieve that.

Hence staying in DPS stance as much as humanly possible. And that's why they were removed, it wasn't a player-interactive thing, it was a "Do I haaaaave to be in def stance? Siiiiigh, okaaaaay mum...", swap over, do the bare minimum, swap back.

The upside was aggro management, and skill expression through damage/aggro management. Tank stance was not an enmity stance (even though it helped) as much as it was a safety button, which offered a lower skill floor for less confident or skilled players (in fact most casuals ran dungeons in tank stance back then). More confident or skilled players would drop it in order to crank out more damage, or would turn it back on if damage got too spicy.