Off tank mechanic Ideas

[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.

[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.

[Carighan]

Plus it's important to keep in mind that Emnity is also just DPS. It raises the DPS ceiling for your actual DPS in your party.

Hence it's usually an either-or: Either you focus on group interdependencies, and a tank's primary game is causing the maximum amount of Emnity possible as otherwise your DPS cannot deal more damage (old WoW did it a lot where tank swaps included a forced percentual aggro drop, which meant that there's over a long fight an absolute aggro ceiling). Or you focus on personal damage generation (and emnity is usually a secondary effect of this) and this is ultimately the same but with less explicit dependence.

Importantly, "maximum emnity" is also just an output number. As this directly increases how much damage the DPS can deal, there's factually very little difference to actual gameplay between focusing on emnity vs personal DPS. Both maximize output, the former just uses a number not explicitly shown.

What you could do is make Emnity an inherently short-term stat, that decays rapidly at all times. All emnity is lost after 20 seconds or so. Meaning that you need to burst a lot during burst phases or you'll lose aggro ,but between that can chill a bit, and this in turn allows more flexibility with the loadout. But also this means you're just once again syncing all burst timers in class design, no?

And don't get me wrong I'd do that rework:
* Massively curb tank DPS, they're now always the lowest.
* Massively curb emnity generation and make optional elements of the combat design that cause even less damage but even more emnity.
* Retool all 4 existing tanks around this "max your emnity output"-game instead of "max your DPS output"-game. As said above, this in turn creates the ability for the DPS to deal damage in the first place, so there's plenty damage-component to the gameplay already!
* I'd not necessarily do it via tankswitching, that'd be better if that's just one job that does that. Others could have branching combos to select between more-emnity vs emnity-is-fine-deal-more-damage (or reduce CDs or so). Or use their mitigation to also max emnity so it's a do-I-really-want-that-now tradeoff (say Warrior causes massive emnity from healing).
* Add tankswaps and emnity decay mechanics to all combat involving 2+ tanks. No exceptions. There is no offtank, all bosses either attack top 2 targets, have 2-player-cleaving autoattacks, or force tank swaps by deleting X% of current target emnity every so often.

But it's important to keep in mind that this mostly changes the number you optimize for, this could at no loss of complexity nearly all be done for just damage output, too (not 1-to-1, but equivalent).

[AmiableApkallu]

*snip* What you could do is make Emnity an inherently short-term stat, that decays rapidly at all times. *snip*

In my fantasy world, that is how things would work. Bosses and trash mobs have very short memories. They're angry at whoever hit them last, and if they're getting hit from all sides, then they're angriest at whoever hit them the hardest.

It ought to be a regular occurence that a DPS with a good (or lucky) burst of damage wins the honor of being the primary target, even in the presence of good tanks. Because that leads to some interesting possibilities — or, well, interesting relative to what we have now:

• The DPS gets thwacked with a couple of auto attacks. Now, healers might have to spot heal someone who isn't the tank and who also hasn't made a mistake.
• The DPS gets nominated for a tank buster. Now, the tank needs to find a way to redirect or intercept the damage to themselves. Think taking a tether or PLD's Passage of Arms, but more creative.

What I'm trying to get at here is that there is an opportunity here to break up the tank-buster-and-raid-wide damage profile and to make tanking more than just, "lol, do (the right kind of) damage."

[YovelaLindswood]

In my fantasy world, that is how things would work. Bosses and trash mobs have very short memories. They're angry at whoever hit them last, and if they're getting hit from all sides, then they're angriest at whoever hit them the hardest.

It ought to be a regular occurence that a DPS with a good (or lucky) burst of damage wins the honor of being the primary target, even in the presence of good tanks. Because that leads to some interesting possibilities — or, well, interesting relative to what we have now:

• The DPS gets thwacked with a couple of auto attacks. Now, healers might have to spot heal someone who isn't the tank and who also hasn't made a mistake.
• The DPS gets nominated for a tank buster. Now, the tank needs to find a way to redirect or intercept the damage to themselves. Think taking a tether or PLD's Passage of Arms, but more creative.

What I'm trying to get at here is that there is an opportunity here to break up the tank-buster-and-raid-wide damage profile and to make tanking more than just, "lol, do (the right kind of) damage."

So more like how it was in arr and hw. DPS were capable of ripping. As a blm in hw if I didnt rip agro every other add pack I felt like I wasnt living my best life. Sadly as they keep making tanks tankier and tankier they've had to up the add damage to account for it. Biggest downside is now if you're a dps and something looks at you you take so much damage its insane. I remember tanking on mnk with friends or running ramuh ex with a smn tanking with titan tot. If they wanted to allow those kinds of fun interactions you suggest they would have to seriously rebalance a lot of content and all tanks.

[Valence]

The thing they've done with the great ShB butchering of the battle system when it comes to tanks is:

- Bake Tank Stance (aggro x1.7, mitigation +20%, damage -20%) into Tank mastery.
- Readjust for tank damage by cranking up raw potencies across the board.
- Bake the enmity combo (aggro x6-8 ish) into the damage combo.
-> Averaging the whole tank aggro generators to a x10 multiplier in the current tank stance.

So essentially as a tank now you have the old tank stance by default without losing damage, you have the full aggro generation of the old stance + enmnity combo without having to manage the enmity combo since it's been removed. We're not even speaking about all the crazy brainless self heals tanks got in EW and beyond yet, but just by HW/SB standards, playing a tank with this you're already playing with cheat codes.

[Atreus]

What would be the benefit though?

More engaging gameplay. Doesn't mean it has to come back in the exact same form it was before. If I had to design it myself, I'd likely consider stances giving you access to different skills for different situations.

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.

Yes, you wanted to optimize your time in DPS stance but you still needed tank stance for enmity spikes and mitigation. Still more engaging than it is now.

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.

I mean, god forbid players do what they need to do when the situation calls for it.

[Shurrikhan]

More engaging gameplay. Doesn't mean it has to come back in the exact same form it was before. If I had to design it myself, I'd likely consider stances giving you access to different skills for different situations.



Yes, you wanted to optimize your time in DPS stance but you still needed tank stance for enmity spikes and mitigation. Still more engaging than it is now.

Tank stances' mitigaton was never "needed". At best it was an rDPS-wash when tanking consistently high damage (so, only during W2W trash pulls) or free rDPS when one lacked any AoE damage anyways (pre-Stormblood Paladin).

Of course, if the defensive value was necessary or at least occasionally an rDPS gain (through healer GCDs saved), then you'd at least have a more real challenge of minimizing your time spent under it to just those moments where it's necessary or rDPS-beneficial or that *and* minimizing total swaps if there were a GCD cost to the swap. That'd require rather sweeping changes to healer toolkit, damage intake, tank passive mitigation, boss damage profiles vs. tanks, and so forth, but those might all be beneficial regardless.

Similarly, Enmity "spikes", unless on a new unit / add spawn, likewise didn't require any swap back to Tank stance. You simply used enough tank stance at the start, swapped to DPS stance once you had enough to ride out the rest of the fight, and never looked back.

Now, if Enmity were to fade over time, then you'd create loops wherein you'd swap into and out of Tank stance as infrequently as you could while also being in it as little as you could, but I'm not sure that'd be much more entertaining even then.

Tl;dr: It's possible, but far from quick or easy, to make tank stances compelling, and simply adding one lever of agency does not necessarily increase difficulty or engagement any more than a cheat toggle would and the opportunity costs that would be used in swapping stances may devalue or remove the space for other optimizations, so the addition has to be mindful of its contexts.

I mean, god forbid players do what they need to do when the situation calls for it.

I think the point was that it was never felt rewarding so much as just a way to make up for others refusing to use their free tools (Diversion, enmity drops, Voke-Shirk cycling, etc.), feeling instead like an fee (a cost to more interesting optimizations just to deal with others' incompetency or being last on the gear totem-pole). It was never enough mitigation to free up more party damage from the healer than it cost the party through the tank's swapping to and from it and/or the damage penalty under it.