Please Reconsider Splitting Main and Off-Tank Roles Based on Job

[Carighan]

I dunno, I would rather them try out this instead of having all 4 (well, 5 with EC) tanks be almost palette swaps of each other. Can I see problems, both in terms of gameplay and the community reaction, to this? Yeah. I just would still rather have those issues than having all tanks be allrounders and never have any specialization ever, because specialization is scary and we can't have that.

Exactly this.

[Kishin12345]

I still think the difference will be very small or won't matter at all. You will play the role and not the job.
The healer split killed astro's sect gameplay. We only lose and win nothing. All this does is force players to bring a certain tank comp rather than allowing them to play what they prefer. Or if you can still play any tank comp you like then the split might just get reverted in the coming expansions.
Just like many ideas and systems that got such heavy backlash from the start.
I know many tank mains being very uncertain if they will still enjoy tanking or if they drop tanking entirely.
It's just such a weird decision. I know not a single tank that is happy about this, it's more some kind of fear if i had to descibe it, maybe uncertainty?
We should not split healers either. Each healer should just be skilled at shielding and regen healing. At least so much that they can clear any duty on any difficulty if played properly.

Also what if the only true difference between mt and ot is the counter? We know that countering is a mt feature. So the new mechanic enforcing a mt for savage and ultimate could just be a tank buster that needs to be countered, which ot couldnt do?

[Lyth]

The tank role split is not a prerequisite for having unique tank designs. The Evolved mode showcase for DRG demonstrated that the dev team was willing to experiment with damage reduction on jumps, as a nod to dragoons in earlier Final Fantasy games. That doesn't mean that every melee job needs to now copy this to maintain parity.

If they wanted the tanks to not be palette swaps of each other, they absolutely could. We've only gotten to the current state because of an obsession with maintaining equivalence between the tanks at the expense of job flavour. If you make tanks unique, there will be necessarily be situations where one will have an advantage over the others. That's fine as long as it's not the same tank for every situation.

The reason why people are more bothered by this split is because the fight designs for tanks can be very asymmetric. You can still choose between H1 or H2 as a shield healer or a pure healer and still have some interesting variations on how you experience the same fight. If you design an obligate MT, then you take away that choice from players entirely (and let's face it, there isn't a great track record for designing fights that are simultaneously engaging for both tanks).

You could argue that the split will be inconsequential in the end (because people will proc counters off of raidwides, because the damage differences from utilizing counters will be negligable, or because double MT or double OT will end up accidentally being a meta pick due to balance issues), but those scenarios all indicate a design failure rather than a successful design.

What I'd like to see is either a discussion about how they've weighed the potential drawbacks of this split, or a Q+A session where they field players' concerns about the changes to the role. Then we could put these worries to rest.

[Carighan]

The tank role split is not a prerequisite for having unique tank designs.

Technically correct. The best kind of correct.

However in the context of why people complain about the upcoming split, it should be noted that making each tank "properly unique" also means they're now effectively 5 tank sub-roles (not just 2 as in EC). Each tank will be the premier tank for a specific context, and will be clearly superior in that context. Not a problem to me personally - in fact I'd love that. Best times in MMORPGs I've played was when class identity was strong even if it cost (some) balance. Always the years each MMO felt best.

It works okay-ish in the context of DPS because there, the balancing metric is ultimately much simpler. Even then, assuming no other melee DPS gets the damage reduction Dragoons do (which I hope they don't, as it'd make DRG really unique) there will be plenty situations where you want to bring a dragoon for sure as they can cheese an otherwise annoying mech. And vice-versa where their sky jump is effectively a wash. But, like I said, we're talking a tank mechanic difference on a damage class. That's easy to avoid massively issues with.
To translate this to tanks, all tanks would still tank 100% the same (so no MT/OT split and neither unique tanking capabilities per-tank either, all tank CDs and base HP and all stay ~equal as now). But their damage systems and patterns would be very unique. This can work, but due to FFXIV's extreme focus on damage output, could still cause the same problem. Really this is something they avoid out of sheer coincidence with non-damage differences on damage-role classes, nothing else.

But anyhow my main point is that if someone dislikes an MT/OT split (as in, "I want the boss to look at me" vs "I want to be the tank the boss doesn't look at"), then having five fully unique tank specialities is the same but in more extreme. You'd end up with something like "I handle add spawns", "I tank physical-attacks-only-or-mostly bosses", "I'm the one to tank bosses with DoTs or other piercing damage", etc etc. Which again, to me is fine, in fact I'd love that. But it doesn't help people who already dislike splitting into two specialities if they go for five instead. But that in turn is why I don't mind the MT/OT split, in fact I actively desire it: It's a step in the right direction. Yeah it's two specialities instead of five, but hey, huge step in the right direction!

The reason why people are more bothered by this split is because the fight designs for tanks can be very asymmetric. You can still choose between H1 or H2 as a shield healer or a pure healer and still have some interesting variations on how you experience the same fight. If you design an obligate MT, then you take away that choice from players entirely (and let's face it, there isn't a great track record for designing fights that are simultaneously engaging for both tanks).

Not the correct comparison. MT and OT in the EverCold contest are subclasses not raid-plan positions, while H1 and H2 are raid-plan positions. You can trivially go onto H1 as the shield healer and on H2 as the regen healer, even if most do it the other way around. But, equivalent to that, right now in virtually all fights you can swap the tank positions, and the fight works perfectly fine. Yes ideally you also flip R and M positions, but given current gear levels if you wipe because of a few missed 40 potency positions your problem really wasn't the boss looking south, honestly.

What you describe is this:

* The Scholar plays as the regen healer. You bring a Sage + a Scholar, and the scholar never ever ever casts a shield or so, they exclusively do Physick and Emergency Tactics stuff and oGCDs to restore raw health.
* Or, the White Mage plays as the shield healer. You bring an Astro + a White Mage, and it's now the White Mage's fault if the group dies because they didn't have enough shields on them.

See how that has issues? And that's the equivalent.

[Terhix]

What I'd like to see is either a discussion about how they've weighed the potential drawbacks of this split, or a Q+A session where they field players' concerns about the changes to the role. Then we could put these worries to rest.

They seem to keep their reasoning close to chest as per usual, the closest we got is from the same famitsu interview, machine translated:

(...) It hurts a little to hear people ask, "Should Warriors study how to be a sub-tank?" We've received similar comments from Dark Knight players as well, but in Evolved Mode, one person must be the main tank and the other the sub-tank, and adjustments must be made accordingly. Of course, we've made sure to create a fun experience unique to being a sub-tank, so I hope you can look forward to that positively.

So they're clearly aware of the concerns, all the way up to Yoshi, but seem determined in their direction regardless. If they can make off-tanking fun on its own rather than just being the same role as MT but with fewer responsibilities (with very few exceptions like P2 in TEA) that sounds good to me. Whether they will succeed or not time will only tell.

[Mukuku]

So they're clearly aware of the concerns, all the way up to Yoshi, but seem determined in their direction regardless. If they can make off-tanking fun on its own rather than just being the same role as MT but with fewer responsibilities (with very few exceptions like P2 in TEA) that sounds good to me. Whether they will succeed or not time will only tell.

There is too little info to know. To be honest if the counter can proc off other party members I still don't understand exactly what makes holding aggro relevant. I don't see why they cannot devise a system that is aggro-agnostic and avoid a lot of drama, but maybe it's exactly how it will be and we are worrying for nothing.

[Derio]

I cant really see how the split will matter when PLD looks to have most if not all of its supporting tools still available. This means that either OT will get more party utility or the slide is just PR talk.

[DjGameKing]

I agree with Carighan's assessment. Plus, I do think there is a little bit of grace to be given to the devs when the tanks before ShB were consistently in a state of complete disaster when they did have job identity.

* Launch ARR: WAR is so unplayable that they basically don't exist, double PLD is meta.
* 2.1 and onward: WAR so giga buffed it was arguable whether double WAR is actually better, but generally both tanks play together fine.
* HW: do I even need to bring this one up? PLD so down in the dumpster it repeatedly got locked out of PF groups and this wasn't because of its damage (which was also bad). It was because HW was obsessed with doing magic damage from enemies and PLD was a physical mitigation tank. WAR was god king tank, now the definitive tank you weren't ever replacing, especially since it didn't care what damage was being thrown at it. DRK was really good because it was the magic damage tank in the magic damage expansion.
* Launch SB: WAR was terrible, honestly down in the dumps. PLD got so buffed, they essentially swapped places with where WAR was during HW. DRK was mostly vibing, but people didn't like it compared to HW much.
* 4.1 SB: WAR got buffed a ton, it was quite good at this point. PLD got slapped down a little, but nothing too bad. DRK remained the same.
* 4.2 and onward: WAR got changed into the job we know it today basically and was on top once more. PLD still very good, it just got shot for its damage again. DRK same old, same old, despite appearing in O4S, UCoB and UWU world firsts.
* 5.0 until today: all tanks basically get their final iterations. PLD gets reworked at 6.3 because it did quite bad into the burst meta that existed in EW.

Even in my write up, SB was relatively fine for the tanks when looking at them objectively, but that didn't mean that people actually liked all tanks. This is the fabled time they had job identity. We can argue that this is the best, most interesting time for these jobs, since they were actually allowed to be different. I'd slightly argue against that last part, since even in this period, tanks mostly were similar in stuff like how to stay alive, but whatever.

Tanks could be different without this split, don't get me wrong, but the reality is that they likely wouldn't be. Whether that is because the devs refuse to have them different or whether that is that the devs pivot after the community has abandoned one tank for an entire expansion again... again. So I would rather them try this, hopefully make the tanks interesting enough from their damage profiles while also giving them their own boxes to fill with the subroles.

Also, like Carighan said: Evolved MT/OT =/= MT/OT role assignments. If anything, we might finally rename these spots to T1 and T2 to fall more in line with everyone else.

[Carighan]

Also, like Carighan said: Evolved MT/OT =/= MT/OT role assignments. If anything, we might finally rename these spots to T1 and T2 to fall more in line with everyone else.

Now that you mention that, it's so weird that we don't do that already. We don't say PR and MR, we say R1 and R2. We don't say RH and SH, we say H1 and H2. We don't name raid positions after raid roles!

So why do we say MT and OT instead of T1 and T2?!

[Mukuku]

So why do we say MT and OT instead of T1 and T2?!

Arguably only the tank that holds aggro is effective "tanking the boss", while the other is effectively not tanking and waiting for their turn, e.g. a tank swap or adds etc... Hence "main" and "off".

Note that this makes the tank situation fundamentally different form other roles. E.g. between R1/R2/M1/M2 all can deal damage to the boss at the same time, so by design damage dealers don't get in a "main/off" relationship between each other as tanks do.

That's why IMHO it can be problematic to compare the tank roles' split to other roles in terms of impact, unless the devs are using "main/off" in a somewhat novel way that does not imply having or not having aggro.