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.

[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.

[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.

[Atreus]

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

[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

[Shurrikhan]

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; it's a fault of how SE implemented it in the first place

It kind of is, though, at least for so long as a "tank stance" meant both enmity and mitigation.

It essentially means that enhanced enmity generation doubles as a 'mitigation training wheels stance', which in turn means that you either make Enmity nearly a non-issue or you devalue any sort of risk-reward aspect from deciding between defensive and offensive capacity.

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

It didn't work then, no, but you also have to go through quite the chain of changes to make them work decently for once, and probably a significant few more to make them actually compelling... at which point... are those even really "tank stances"?

But anyways, if I had to bring them, I'd start by making the Enmity component less cheesable, leaving that a more active component of the tank-and-damage-dealers relationship and gameplay loop while allowing the tank stance to be more of a fall-back form of mitigation.

• All Enmity generated now scales with target "awareness". Two-thirds of Enmity generated from the rear of an enemy or other "blindspot" is split among the whole party. One third of Enmity generated in partial awareness is split among the whole party. (This ultimately means that in a party of 4, attacks from a blindspot would get only 50% the normal enmity and from a half-blindspot would get only 25%. The rest disproportionately goes towards tanks, as seen below.)
  
  
• A tank's portion of Enmity 'stolen' from allies increases with the tank's proximity and position relative to the enmity affected and/or the ally, up to 50%. Additionally, they may steal up to 50% of the Enmity of allies attacking from roughly the same angle. I.e., the more noticeable the tank is, the more of the damage/healing from an unknown source gets attributed to it, and standing between the mob and the source of damage will attribute more of the source's damage to you. (This also better allows tank enmity to scale with that of their party, instead of making the tank's gear an indirect bottleneck to each DPS's output or the like.)
  
  
• All "tank stances" are now just on or off and are oGCD. By simply being toggleable off, they can be dropped even mid-animation, if one wants, and sets a minimum uptime for the tank stance to act as punishment for the snap mitigation the tank stance may generate. The only bonus Enmity these tank stances generate are to maximize aggro theft and increase enmity by just a bit more than what would be lost from having one's damage reduced. GAMEWIDE CHANGE: All actions, including deactivations, may now be properly queued.
  
  
• Other, additional minor costs may very, as may recast times; e.g., if a tank stance generates constant healing instead of %DR and is therefore less cheasable for immediate damage nullification, it may have a shorter recast or penalty for activation.
  
  With all that, you should have a stance that retains for accessibility even while (A) allowing tanks to take quite a bit more damage and (B) making tanking itself a bit more iconic, rather than just being a way to reduce overall party gameplay by having a fat dps hit something at least once per fight before acting like any other dps except with half its rotational complexity swapped out for some fight-scheduled bonus oGCDs.

[YovelaLindswood]

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

I actually like this. Bring back the two 123 combos. One for agro and one for dps. Let all aoes just generate threat for dungeons and such. Though i'd condense the combos into 1 button each as pressing 123 isnt really depth. Its just bloat. I genuinely miss the two combos. Having tanks swap to ot by just hitting their dps rotation and having the oncoming tank voke and do a quick threat rotation sounds more fun in general.