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

[Carighan]

What could be rewarded for a proper counter instead of DPS and which pros/cons would that have compared to rewarding DPS? Why would rewarding e.g. a heal not be better?

Maybe for a Pally in particular getting a free heal would be better, yes. In particular if it has to be used on someone else, never yourself. Very fitting and all that. Or maybe even automatic, if you block it'll heal someone for X% of Clemency, but unless you are absolutely the only person with any health missing, it'll never target yourself.

[IhzaMhaskova]

It is worth noting that I do not think it is going to be really strict. Having gone back over the Paladin section of the dev panel, Holy Sheltron and Intervention both have similar sounding buffs (Surcoat/Shield of Satisfaction and Surcoat/Shield of Answer), so it is likely that, even if Paladin is not infront of the boss, they can still proc their counter moves. Whether a similar system is in place for the Off tanks, we obviously do not know, but I suspect there will be (though, obviously it will not be counter based).

I imagine it's going to end up in a region where PLD/8.0 tanks would *prefer* being MT with the others as OT but that they can switch without losing much/if anything.

[Carighan]

I imagine it's going to end up in a region where PLD/8.0 tanks would *prefer* being MT with the others as OT but that they can switch without losing much/if anything.

And that'd be ideal because it would also mean it's absolutely identical to how it is now where some tank classes prefer MT or OT.

And it would also be terminally boooooring as it means that once again tanks have no unique upsides or downsides. Yes those ought to ideally be per-class not per-subrole, but I take my wins where I can get them. Hopefully.

[IhzaMhaskova]

And that'd be ideal because it would also mean it's absolutely identical to how it is now where some tank classes prefer MT or OT.

And it would also be terminally boooooring as it means that once again tanks have no unique upsides or downsides. Yes those ought to ideally be per-class not per-subrole, but I take my wins where I can get them. Hopefully.

I'm hoping that EU Fan Fest gets a lot more information on the combat changes, MT/OT differentiations, and what "seasons" will be in a comprehensive way.

As it currently stands I wish they had left the info out of NA Fan Fest and not said anything until they had something of substance to show because the limited info we did get does a lot to cause potential concern and little to cause excitement.

[Mikey_R]

As it currently stands I wish they had left the info out of NA Fan Fest and not said anything until they had something of substance to show because the limited info we did get does a lot to cause potential concern and little to cause excitement.

This is a difficult one as I understand the frustration, we have snippets of things with a lot of 'we are still ironing out exactly how it is going to work, look forward to it', however I suspect they also wanted to show us, look, we are listening, we have massive changes coming to the game and we want everyone to be aware of it. This is not going to be DT2.0, but something different. This is also why they wanted to show some job gameplay far ahead of where we normally see it, we hear you wanting to get away from the battle cycle, so this is what we are working with.

If you were to choose between a fan fest that didn't show anything new and seemed just like the others, or, one where they showed they want to make massive changes, which one would you chose?

[ReallyMadCow]

Please reconsider splitting tanks into fixed Main Tank and Off Tank roles by job.

My concern is that this will damage the tank population long-term. There will obviously be huge initial hype around the new tank, but once that settles, the only players likely to feel fully satisfied will be Paladin mains and new tank mains. Warrior, Dark Knight, and Gunbreaker players may feel like their jobs have been officially labelled as “lesser” or secondary tanks, even if that is not the intended message.

That kind of perception matters. Many tank players enjoy being able to main tank on their preferred job, and being told their job is now naturally an off-tank could push people away from tanking entirely. This could make tank queues worse, especially after the launch hype fades.

Please consider either giving every tank both Main Tank and Off Tank options through a stance/toggle system, or avoiding fixed MT/OT labels by job altogether.

[Carighan]

If you were to choose between a fan fest that didn't show anything new and seemed just like the others, or, one where they showed they want to make massive changes, which one would you chose?

Not the person you quoted, but I think I kinda agree with them. And then to answer your question, I'd have not shown specific classes during the first fan fest until I'm ready to at least show 50%+ basically, importantly at least one of each role, some comparative examples (at least one pair of DPS and healer and tank from the same sub-role so I can show how they differentiate) and varied specific examples of combat not just the target dummy. It's okay if a fair few classes are still in the oven, but enough for players to get a more specific idea maybe.

And then before that - like this fanfest - I'd have talked in generics. With lots of "why" and info about the design process more. Show individual abilities if need be (like the Dragoon separated side positionals) but not whole jobs and not specific examples.

Although to be fair I don't see it as as big issue either. MMORPG communities enjoy doomchanting, hence any information at all would have had this effect of endless OMG THE SKY IS FALLING threads. But it'd be smarter from a communication perspective to go generics -> specifics -> whole classes over the three fanfests, IMO.

[Mikey_R]

Although to be fair I don't see it as as big issue either. MMORPG communities enjoy doomchanting, hence any information at all would have had this effect of endless OMG THE SKY IS FALLING threads. But it'd be smarter from a communication perspective to go generics -> specifics -> whole classes over the three fanfests, IMO.

I don't necessarily agree. By giving too little info to start with, you open up the door for more questions than answers, which only fuels the doomposting. You've seen what we have already with only half of the tank sub roles shown, how would that be if they showed neither of them? Even if they went into some detail that Paladin will have a counter off of Holy Shield which gets stronger if timed right, and an OT has this specific mechanic, it still doesn't really tell you about the jobs themselves. Even talking about Dragoon side positionals, if that is all that is mentioned, are people going to assume nothing has changed much about the rotation, it's still going to be fairly rigid with fixed places the positionals come up? Considering we know that isn't the case, would false assumptions be made about other jobs that turn out to not be true?

Then we get to showing them, if you want to have 2 jobs from each sub role, you are looking at 10 jobs in total, they took about 10 minutes per job in the dev panel, so you are looking at close to 2 hours just for that, then you want to add in fight examples as well? Pretty sure they don't want something to last that long, especially since Fan Fest is not just about the panels they put on, so they likely don't want to take up too much time.

And while yes, we are left with many questions now, I do still think this is the better way to go about things with everything considered. However, either way, the community as a whole is going to be ravenous for information and no matter how it was delivered, it probably wasn't going to be right or they didn't divulge enough for us. I should just think ourselves lucky we even got as much as we did.

[IhzaMhaskova]

This is a difficult one as I understand the frustration, we have snippets of things with a lot of 'we are still ironing out exactly how it is going to work, look forward to it', however I suspect they also wanted to show us, look, we are listening, we have massive changes coming to the game and we want everyone to be aware of it. This is not going to be DT2.0, but something different. This is also why they wanted to show some job gameplay far ahead of where we normally see it, we hear you wanting to get away from the battle cycle, so this is what we are working with.

If you were to choose between a fan fest that didn't show anything new and seemed just like the others, or, one where they showed they want to make massive changes, which one would you chose?

It's not the worst thing in the world to announce early but there's so many questions left unanswered and worries over how early in development it looked for something releasing in less than a year.

[Derio]

Probably the biggest problem is they are introducing this split along with the imbalance of MT and OT numbers. When they did the healer split it was even 2-2.

If anything this is just currently a PR nightmare that was overshadowed by the evolved mode and other many changes.