Off tank mechanic Ideas

[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.

[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).

[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.

[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.