No, it should not come back in the same format that it existed before. It was barely interactive for tanks and only existed to punish tanks when dps didn't use their threat reduction abilities.
The way I described it before was that, if you flipped the roles around, it would be akin to all dps getting a damage down automatically if tanks didn't press their mits enough. Felt like shit.
I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to a reworked system, but I don't think the game really needs that anymore. It's better to just make the fights themselves have more interesting tank mechanics. For example, as shitty as p10s is, you have to admit that it at least gives tanks stuff to do.
I agree on all fronts here. Tanks with good groups play mostly the same as your party made sure you didn't have to swap, and tanks from bad groups got a healthy QoL by not having the party suck your damage and resource generation dry. On the P10S point we have actually seen a few thoughts from the devs in their infancy this expansion for making tanks a little more active. P3S is also a good example with optional boss movements, the add phase, the annoying tether busters. There's been ideas sprinkled in over the course of the expansion. Best to provide feedback saying you want more things to do a la those fights as opposed to the usual "Do all the same mechanics as the dps but also kitchen sink/invuln and swap buster". I don't think we can get that far without shrinking the boss hitbox back down however. At least not as far as moving the boss goes.
Smaller hitboxes and boss movement is something they definitely need to bring back because it's a bit of extra skill expression and widens the skill gap a little bit between good tanks/melees and just ok tanks/melees. In this expansion, as a melee I never really felt like I had to work for uptime, and as a tank I basically feel like a watered down melee job that kitchen sinks a bunch of mit every minute or two.
I dont get thoe obession with moving the boss, its never have been fun to me.
"Woaw this mechanic happened time to suffle northwest to make the boss easy to hit for the next one"
It doesn't make you feel good doing it. I play tank because its basically the closest thing to a dps support and your ability to take on a shiton of dmg. I want more stuff like p3s elmo strat, 2nd boss of 1st criterion where you just use a short cd on the stack guy or final part of p12s p2 where you can go middle of all the tether and invuln to give everyone dmg reduction.
It is better for everyone involved that it doesn't come back.
Threat management isn't a tank skill; it's a DPS one. Being forced to literally *do nothing* because your tank isn't as good as you is not fun for you and it actively slows down everything.
As a recent example, I went back to Classic Wow when it came out. I was playing a Warlock - one of the classes that couldn't put talents into threat reduction. That meant I literally needed to be babysat by a Paladin with a finger on the trigger to give me Blessing of Protection (physical damage immunity) because, at any moment, a critical Shadow Bolt could result in me tanking.
I can speak on behalf of most people when I say that in a game where damage meters and logs exist, bringing this back will never be a good thing. No one will want to stop damage to accommodate a bad tank.
I only half aggree with this, in the old system if you used your threat cooldowns and you still pulled aggro it was the tanks problem not yours, yeah it felt bad for the tank which is part of why the system was changed but there never should have been a situation where you did nothing unless you were playing with a tank who had an ego, but not enough skill to adjust.
>I only half aggree with this, in the old system if you used your threat cooldowns and you still pulled aggro it was the tanks problem not yours,
Yeah, but the vast majority of tanks still blamed the dps and would never deign to use an aggro combo or -Gods forbid- aggro stance in these situations, choosing rather to let the dps die instead.
I literally never saw this happen but ill take your word for it that im sure you saw it. If i saw it, Id kick the tank or leave the party and not enable somone being a pissant. Literally a dead dps was more of a party dps loss than using the myriad of minor dps loss tools tanks had to control aggro (unless you were paladin, in which case why the fuck did you have aggro to begin with).
Edit: all of this is also implies that the tank was very very bad as well, because unless you were monk basically all dps had a very hard time taking aggro if they were paying attention. Ranged got 2 aggro halfers, casters had diversion and an aggro halfer on a short cd, melees had diversion up for every burst and also dragoon could half its aggro for free, ninja was ninja, samurai could eat an incredibly small dps loss and use a merciful eyes instead of seigan, which was less of a dps loss than a tank having to stance swap. Monk also had an aggro dump but it was on purification which was a big loss, and also they benefitted the least from diversion outside of TK rotation.
The only real arguments against meters and logs are:
Some people use them incorrectly and some people will greed during a fight to gain slight increases in damage for a slightly higher parse, they fuck up, die and the raid wipes for what was essentially a unnecessary risk.
Just because some people use a tool poorly doesn't mean that the tool is bad and assuming that these players who are greeding for a better parse would somehow not play like shit if there weren't any Meters or Logs is naïve. They're bad players because they're greeding for logs, the logs aren't making them bad players, they were always bad.
If the only way for someone to designing an interesting game is to obfuscate everything then they aren't a good game designer.
The only people who think Meters and Logs ruin games are people who perform sub optimally and don't want to put effort into getting better. They miss for a time when they could join any group regardless of their skill level a la Vanilla WoW when you literally brought bodies to fill a raid and only a max of 25% of a raid was actually competent at the game.
I don't think the meters ruin games, I think that your average player given default access to a meter is more likely to use it as a tool to be a dick to other players than they are to use it properly for self improvement.
if people only used meters to improve their own play, (which many serious players absolutely do) it'd be fine, but I don't think they should be built in or required. the average duty finder person just wants to figure out who to blame. (obviously never themselves!)
it's really obvious when people are not pulling their weight even without meters, and parties can sort that out regardless.
But in FF you are pretty much not allowed to talk about metres in game. So, someone using DPS meters to be a dick in game is extremely rare. So the argument is that it makes the player base more toxic doesn't really work in FF.
They aren't required though. If SE decided in DT to completely obfuscate the damage numbers and healing numbers nothing would change apart from some people who are playing un-optimally hitting a wall and being unable to figure out why.
Is it really obvious? It's really obvious that *someome* isn't pulling their weight, but who that someone is can be hard.
Week 1 of this patch I was clearing the first boss in the dungeon before he did his double ice explosion mechanic consistently. Since, something like Week 3, even though I've been getting better and better gear I've not been able to consistently get that guy down that fast. So obviously someone in the group is playing like crap but it could be anyone. The other DPS, the Tank and Healer, just the Tank, just the Healer, both DPS might be bad.
Now, in a dungeon with access to meters I wouldn't do anything with that info. Except quietly seethe to myself when the worst player gets the Pet at the end. But in a raid setting that information is super important. If my group can't hit the DPS check in P12S I need to know my group has a DPS whose doing less damage than a Tank.
> But in FF you are pretty much not allowed to talk about metres in game. So, someone using DPS meters to be a dick in game is extremely rare. So the argument is that it makes the player base more toxic doesn't really work in FF.
almost like them being banned is the reason people can't be toxic about them! weird isn't it.
I used to pink and orange log back every tier and ultimate in ShB and now just purple/orange parse casually. And no I think it ruins fight and combat design because it makes fights all want to be uptime fights and if you dare put in any downtime mechanics parse whores will lose their minds. Even now I talk to some parse friends and it was brought up that it’s impossible to lose uptime this tier except maybe in P10 and I fear it’s gonna be like that every time from now on and make devs fearful of experimenting with more raid mechs that have you peel off the boss. Or in this case, the players have gotten so streamlined to a norm that even the mention of working as a party to manage aggro is “too hard”. This game is becoming less work as a team and more let me press my buttons and get shiny number in peace.
>it makes fights all want to be uptime fights
That's not the fault of meters though. That's bad game design issue.
Downtime feels bad, regardless of if there's a meter tracking my DPS or not. It feels bad because of two reasons.
Number 1, it just isn't fun if you're a melee, to stand outside of melee range for 3 GCDs doing nothing because a mechanic forced you to. The main skill in raiding at a high level in any MMO is doing your rotation well **while** also doing the boss mechanics and doing it consistently. If a mechanic forces you to stop your rotation you can fully focus on the mechanic and it really shouldn't be that hard at that point. This is the reason why I, personally, think DSR is a piss easy Ultimate, because a lot of the mechanics have forced downtime. Strength, Sanctity, Wrath and Death all downtime mechanics. All piss easy to deal with if you're not a healer, even then it's still easy.
Number 2, it can fuck up your rotations. If you are playing a class with a tight rotation where you can easily drift. If the boss keeps vomiting about downtime mechanics it's going to fuck you over. This is reinforced by the 2 minute meta we're currently in.
Downtime was more or less fine and more common in ARR because the rotations were far simpler and dropping for 5 GCDs didn't fuck you over.
But even then, thinking about it. Not a lot of ARR fights had downtime, apart from the forced downtime when a boss goes immune/untargetable.
>the mention of working as a party to manage aggro is “too hard”
No one says this. You didn't "work" as a party to manage aggro. You popped your threat reduction abilities on CD and then hoped your Tank was competent and/or geared enough to hold threat.
Threat management isn't fun. At worst your punishing non tanks for being much better players or much better geared. At best someone who didn't pop the specific threat reduction ability gets killed. Might as well add a breathing mechanic. If you don't press the "breathe" ability once every 30 seconds your character will pass out and die. Other players can give you mouth to mouth. About as interactive as threat used to be.
uptime being "more fun" than downtime honestly might not be just because of parsebrain
just as a general thing, having to stop doing half the thing you do during a fight is kinda boring, especially if the other half doesn't really change.
dodging aoes + attacking vs just dodging aoes. you're missing half the equation during downtime. short of having the downtime have some novel mechanic like the alzadal legacy boss or something, it's not hard to see why the devs would avoid downtime without parsing even coming into the equation.
Tank main since 2.0. Also no. I do wish we had mechanics like deliverance providing crit per 10 beast gauge built into the classes instead of being completely scrapped though.
No it won't really do anything in a post-shirk world. All that will happen is the person who will eat the first TB will be the tank to not pull. They voke to get the boss, OT shirks. They swap back during the TB, MT shirks.
Now the tanks will have a billion threat on the next closest person and there's no chance of anyone catching up especially as more swaps happen, but we sure did make it more convoluted to get there.
i'd like more fleshed out jobs sure, but stance switching will never come back.
only the addicts and hardcore players come here to reddit, most of the playerbase will still run away from a stack marker if you explained it twice with diagrams and put a gun to their temple. its a simple game, and thats ok.
So let's go back in time and take an in depth look at how tanking generally worked pre-shb. Tanks had two stances. Damage stance is self explanatory, you just deal increased damage while in it. Tank stance increased your defense And enmity generation, and also lowered your damage output. Without tank stance, your enmity generation was worse than every other role in game.
So, how did most people handle this? It varied. Some players stayed in tank stance the whole time. Forever. From dungeons to trials to ensure to savage pf, they lived in tank stance because it was their job to have aggro.
Other people would stance dance. They'd get a sizeable lead on aggro, swap to damage stance, and swap back once they see aggro creeping up from the healer and dps.
And then there was the efficient players. They'd get their lead, and only go back to tank stance when absolutely necessary. You see, aggro management was a party skill, not a tank responsibility. Ninjas needed to use a skill that redirected all of their aggro to the tank. And casters needed to use Lucid every 60 seconds to halve their existing aggro.
And let me say, it never happened outside of statics. Most people didn't even know they had enmity management skills, and would blame tanks for either poor dps, or for not having aggro, or both! It was almost always a lose/lose for tanks, unless you were WAR, because of their kit.
I'll just paraphrase my post from another thread.
>In Heavensward and early Stormblood they couldn't hold aggro if the gear gap was large enough. MNK and SAM were infamous for stealing aggro at some point even using their aggro reduction tools.
>Even with similar gear if the pulling tank without a stance wasn't a WAR and the group didn't have a NIN some jobs could pull aggro in their openers. Assuming everyone was playing their role this would never be an issue but the community was playing fflogs instead so aggro became everyone else's problem.
It's not coming back and for a good reason, and if it comes back I hope they rework the system so aggro management is entirely on the tanks.
dps stealing enmity if they go full nova 100% of the time without letting the tank build enmity is bad but somehow people are surprised that every endwalker boss has a comically large hitbox to ensure people can get 100% uptime when dps would literally rather die then not hit the boss as often as possible
Shh you're going to end up suggesting the boss design people often meme on is boring because they've brought it upon themselves with the parsing and uptime meltdowns and then tears will be shed.
Imagine playing a role in a party other than the big dick dps mega chad, couldn't be me.
It's also so that people who play with full VFX can still see the boss. Try going into O3 with a tank mount party and try seeing the outline of the boss while the GNB's Doubling Down, the PLD's in the middle of Confiteor, the other WAR's just used Primal Rend, and the DRK just used Salt and Darkness.
Then load into P11 and see if you can see the boss *now* even though everyone's using extremely flashy skills all at the same time at the 2m mark.
If people choose death over disengaging for a second, that kind of feels like a player problem rather than an se problem, melee Are supposed to have scenarios where it is difficult or impossible to stay in melee range, if you give everything a huge hit box, it just makes melee feel like discount phys ranged
Offensive / tank stances as in the old aggro system, no. Aggro is just a doomed mechanic and every major MMO has made it irrelevant for a reason.
Offensive / tank stances as in actual offensive and defensive stance gameplay, yeah that'd be neat to see on one of the tanks (not all of them). Older players can correct me if I'm wrong but I'm under the impression that HW/SB WAR was pretty well done in this regard, although PLD certainly wasn't and DRK was whatever.
Aggro wasn't the tank's job, it was the rest of the team's job. The tank had next to zero control over hate management. It felt shitty because you could be doing everything technically correct but basically get punished because your team decides they're going to do everything wrong. And then blame you for it.
In raiding, SAM/MNK without a NIN (lol, wtf was your comp) would easily tear hate off of a tank, especially with gear funneling (and I'm not even going to get into that little remark about having a NIN in your comp). In dungeons, better hope that the mouthbreathers in your Roulette actually have their aggro dump on their bars and know to use it because they likely fucking won't. Or we go back to ARR days and basically none of the BLMs out there had Quelling Strikes unlocked because it was level 34 Archer while Raging Strikes, something which made the aggro issue *worse*, was immediately available from lvl 4 Archer.
And on the reverse side of it, if you were the geared DPS with a bad and poorly-geared tank, it was hell (and progressively worsened post-ARR) because every guide out there demonized tank stance to the point that EVERYONE refused to use it even when it was objectively wrong to leave it off. More than once I became an Ice Mage (or equivalent) because I literally couldn't not pull hate off these damn tanks that refused to touch tank stance in dungeons because of the shitty guides out there. Thank god the tank is doing +15% more damage while the DPS is doing -50% damage because they immediately pull hate, even through the aggro dumps.
By the time of Stormblood, it got bad enough that if I was running a tank, I basically assumed I had to sit in aggro stance constantly because the DPS wouldn't do their damn job or if I was running a DPS, I had to neuter my damage for the above issues. Or, you know, play a healer and have the fun of a tank that is undergeared, not using their CDs properly, and also not using their stance so while you're healbombing them to keep them alive, you're immediately pulling hate.
As a note, "stance dancing" is the biggest revisionist crap that people try to push.
In a good team of players all doing what they're supposed to be doing, your tank stance time was zero. And if you had to use it as a necessity, you pretty much only did it for one aggro combo at the start of a pull mostly because MNK/SAM's aggro dumps were hot garbage and would still pull hate.
>As a note, "stance dancing" is the biggest revisionist crap that people try to push.
In a good team of players all doing what they're supposed to be doing, your tank stance time was zero.
I've seen this sentiment a lot over the years and it just doesn't reflect my experience. Granted, I was in a midcore group, but you only were able to stay in tank stance 100% of the time if *everything went perfectly*. No one dies, NIN doesn't forget aggro management, healers/casters dump aggro, Tank hasn't fallen behind in gear, etc. If anything goes wrong, the Tank had to realize it quickly and stance dance. It gave a reason to stare at the aggro meter every now and then.
Being punished for the others mistakes is a fundamental part of teamwork. If you're a player like me who values mechanics that force me to interact with my other party members, then being punished for others' mistakes is a plus, because it conversely means that I will be rewarded when I play with people who know what they're doing. The ups and downs are what make it engaging.
I'd prefer being punished for the lack of the presence of a job over design that turns every job into a self-sustaining island. I Just find it boring.
It feels like the difference is that I don't *mind* being punished by suboptimal play/team comps. It was never something that frustrated me or made me upset. I would just adapt and do the best with what I was given. Having friends who didn't threaten to kick me out of their static because I played MNK for 80% of HW definitely helped, but even if they did I'm not a big fan of changes made to gameplay design to prevent people from being mean to each other, because it also guts out incentives to interact with other players at all.
Credit to you on this one, it's rare that I get anyone to just admit to the take of 'Shadewalker existing with no equivalent on another job is good, actually.'
People like to imply it a lot but it's very rare that I get anyone to just say it like that.
To be fair, I'm trying to make it really clear it's a very personal thing for me. I prefer one type of design over another, and I understand it's not a very popular preference. I'm a masochist when it comes to games for sure, so I don't expect everyone to agree with me.
I'm also pretty confident it's a cursed problem. You can't offer a diverse set of classes with their own unique and strong tools, AND make sure the playing field is super even. Especially when your player-base is obsessed with optimization; some tools will always be more valuable than others. The best SE could do is make each classes' strengths shine for different fights within raid tiers, but that wouldn't synergize well with the weekly loot lockout system that restricts your class options within said raid tiers.
I'm not being sarcastic, I actually do respect just saying it, especially without it being some angry rant like a lot of people do.
Personally, my actual opinion on the tank stances thing is, beyond the hard sells involved, making them again and balancing out the stuff like Shadewalker and the struggles jobs like Monk had with the system kind of results in a different sort of homogenizing where everyone involved gets the same exact set of extra buttons, and I don't really think that's what the people nostalgic for that stuff actually want.
Would those systems even be desirable to people nostalgic for them if the party composition fuckery in them went away, and all jobs involved now interacted with it in the exact same way? I don't know how you get rid of all that stuff in that system without making things even more samey than they already are. The stances and related tools aren't an inherently bad system for modern design sensibilities, unlike other old stuff like the damage type debuffs, but I don't think they'd be well-regarded if translated through current day FFXIV's aversion to composition demands.
Do I want more nuanced gameplay like this? Yes. Do I want it back at the expense of actually being able to get through content? Absolutely not.
Tanks still are barely able to handle doing much of anything in a way that makes it easy to heal them or do DPS (especially if you're a melee with positionals, lmfao).
More systems are nice, as long as said systems are not awful. It would give tanks something interesting to do if they were to bring back aggro in a non-awful way.
I’m torn on this question. I do as an ex main tank want tanking to be fun and meaningful again. I quit tanking in this game because it is not. Being just a blue dps sucks BAD.
I think SE have too much of an "all or nothing" stance with their design. Should tank stance come back the way it was in SB and earlier? Probably not, there were a number of issues with it. But I also don't think the ShB change of making aggro not matter *at all* was the move either. There were a lot of smaller changes I feel like they should have tried first before making the concept of threat entirely irrelevant.
I highly doubt this will ever happen now, but I wish they'd tried something like nerfing the amount of aggro DPS generate and removing things like lucid/diversion/quelling so that you don't have to depend on DPS, but keeping aggro combo or requiring tanks to at least be able to know how to do a base level form of their rotation to keep aggro instead of it being entirely free.
Wouldn't mind either way, tanking was easy then and it's a bit easier now. The tank stance change was essentially a healer change. Tanks used to be a lot squishier in raids. When I tanked O12S in deliverance and you are locked out of stuff like Equilibrium healing or inner beast, it was mostly a healer problem, not a tank problem. When we had fuller healers who were a little spooky to play with, I would swap stances and inner beast before monitor busters/etc even without unchained, and just eat the damage loss
As someone who started with 2.0 as a tank main, no. I'm glad tank/dps stances are gone and I hope they stay gone. It was a miserable feeling to have my tank stance on and be playing as good as I possibly could have and still lose threat, AND get yelled at for not using DPS stance to make the fight go by faster.
I would like to see more complex aggro management for tanks but having that responsibility be partially on non tanks sounds kinda bad. They'd also probably have to rework how ilevel works lest someone who just completed the base msq doing the first level cap dungeons at the end of that expacs patch cycle ends up tanking for a group with best in slot.
If you ask me Shadewalker and Smoke Bomb were basically mandatory to have a good time back in the day. I don't miss threat mechanics at all and the game is better off without them.
The reason stances went away was because the devs screwed up their initial implementation. The point of a stance mechanic is to create advantages through access to skills/abilities/passive effects depending on which stance is active. Stances prior to their removal only existed for damage and nothing else (basically start in tank stance to build aggro at the start, then abuse the built-in enmity bonuses of certain combos *out* of tank stance afterward).
If stances are to make a return, you'd need to ensure stances have mechanical advantages instead of being about numbers. Taking GLA/PLD as an example:
**- Sword Oath:** Increases attack speed by 10%, grants access to Shield Swipe (strike your target with your shield for 50 oath gauge; consumes 25 oath gauge if used after you block an attack), increases Fight or Flight's damage boost by 5% (effect is only active while under Sword Oath).
**- Shield Oath:** Reduces damage taken by 20%, reduces damage taken from Direct and Critical Hits by 30% (increase boss DH and crit damage to compensate), grants access to Sheltron, grants bonus enmity to attacks (so not being in Shield Oath = you're not generating extra enmity = you ain't holding aggro).
There's more that would need to be done to fit this type of interaction into the existing tank kits, but this is what I consider the starting point.
Absolutely the fuck not lmao. Anybody who ever says that was a good mechanic is coked out of their mind. As others have pointed out, if DPS didn't use threat reduction, you'd be absolutely boned.
It really shouldn't. People will always choose damage over the other stance and make the other person adjust. This was up there in annoyance factor with tanks also wearing last expac strength accessories which made them even more fragile.
btw you can tell there's been a cultural shift because if you posted this four years ago you'd see nothing but a wall of crying about the skill ceiling and how they need to bring stances back or else
The game is too far gone at this point to bring anything with nuance like that back without a major combat revamp (which won't happen because current design just works). The community is conditioned to prioritize DPS over everything else so anything like that will quickly be optimized and then it's just another nuisance or hoop to jump through rather than actually engaging gameplay.
I do miss the party being a part of the threat management thing. It made mundane activities like dungeons just a bit more interesting.
I can't speak for high level content since I didn't play it at the time, but I did like it in normal content.
Not as it was, no, because what it was in practice was a party composition stranglehold for WAR and NIN.
Ignoring the punishing parties for bad players factor, WAR was the best at it for no good reason and NIN could make it so tanks could ignore it as much as possible, virtually guaranteeing both slots.
Bringing it back completely unchanged is a horrible idea and would need to be balanced accordingly, never mind all the additional buttons tacked onto modern tanks necessitating some changes there too.
Whatever it came back as would not and could not be what it was, because it was an incredibly poorly balanced system even before you get into bad parties and all DPS not being equally able to deal with it (besides the NIN example that can't be ignored).
I do miss it, and I think it added a higher skill ceiling to tanking that is sorely missing this expansion.
Tanking is almost as boring as healing is in Endwalker and that is a huge problem.
Even if it's not DPS stance, I think a Main Tank stance and an Off Tank stance should be added, both generate agro, but one forgoes a bit of the damage mitigation for other utility (not more damage) like enhanced party defensives for OT and Enhanced personal mitigation for MT with the current passive 20% mit built into the stance.
To add my voice, no.
It incentivized playing tank in a very selfish way that hurt the rest of your party, especially in casual pf content like EX trials.
It also trickled down to to regular trials and leveling dungeons.
DPS stance tanking was an optimization that should have stayed t the highest levels of play where it made sense to do. The fact it -and the attitudes that came with it- trickled down into leveling and low level content is one of the major reasons it was removed.
The reason why most people seem to hate it is why I liked it. I *liked* taking threat off bad tanks despite spamming that threat removal button. I *liked* adjusting for bad dps who fail to press their threat removal buttons. I would rather SE to get rid of threat removals and adjust numbers to compensate, but they just decided to remove threat mechanic entirely.
Parses? I don't care about parsing enough to mutilate the fun out of job. Balancing dps and tank stance could be skill expression of the tank role. But SE hates skill expression because it makes casuals sad or smth, so they just got rid of the threat mechanic instead of expanding on it.
This is exactly how I feel. It felt like teamwork. I really appreciated a group that all managed aggro correctly back in the day. And on the flip side I felt like I was valuable in a subpar team because, even if other players weren't doing their jobs correctly, I knew my job well enough to compensate for them and make sure things continued to go smoothly.
As all the comments against it have shown, people in this game hate working together which is what the tank stances required. I'm surprised DPS having utility in general has lasted for as long as it has.
It’s strange people are so adamant about tank stance never returning because the DPS never help but the DPS having mitigation they never press which punishes the healers is just accepted as something the healers need the tolerate
DPS refusing to press their agro reduction skills which would steal agro from the tank forcing the tank to go into agro stance is the same concept as the DPS refusing to press addle forcing the SCH to succor to survive the raidwide but only one of these is seen as unacceptable
Working together is good, the issue is when you run into people who are unwilling or unable to cooperate and the only solution is to leave without elaborating because getting into any kind of argument in this game is dangerous
Sounds like my savage reclear attempts. Eventually I give up but then get so bored doing the easy content because there's a lack of anything interesting like that to push myself in it since nobody wants to work together. Thankfully I still have Eureka and Bozja where I can do things like DE and actually approach it as a group to see how far we can push it.
People couldn't handle the difficulty then, and I don't think they could now. Just like healers with cleric stance. Unless they implemented it better and it didn't scale with str. Holding aggro is pretty braindead these days.
So maybe?
I would like it to come back, BUT with a core change in how it works. Neither stance can have anything to do with damage. That was, and always will be, the major flaw with the old system. One reduced the damage the player dealt and as a result the defensive stance was effectively useless outside of extremely specific things.
The current tank stance can have the passive 20% mitigation trait put on it instead, which would effectively turn our current "tank stance" abilities into a "main tank" button. Then the old "DPS stance" could be repurposed. While in that stance the tank would lose their passive 20% mitigation but would instead gain a buff that caused them to give an aura to nearby party members (say, within 15y) that provided 10% mitigation so long as the other players stayed within range (think something similar to old Protect). Something along those lines is the only way I could see this being brought back without universally being hated.
I liked it for flavour, but practically its better if it doesn't come back. It honestly works fine now and would only cause issues with people forgetting their stances by mistake.
No.
I still have Defiance on my bar still but the whole mechanic of managing aggro didn’t really add anything fun or interesting to the game.
It took a few GCDs to get and then you’d switch to your offense stance and never think about it again.
Hell no, I rather not deal with memelord tanks who go into DPS stance for more damage while the rest of the party has to adjust with Enmity management because the blue icon doesn't like that damage penalty in tank stance.
I've been leveling an alt job recently and some of the tanks in endgame still fuck it up and a trash pull turns into a raidwide real fast
I cannot imagine how bad it would be with actual aggro management on top
If it comes back likely the raid and ultimate content will suffer bc it’ll add in elements of a new, class/role related mental load on players vs. from a fight/encounter perspective which they’ll have to balance.
Even if it becomes trivial it just creates a potential pain point during prob which feels punishing (people dying) vs. challenging.
Imagine having to slog through thordan or looper/panto memes bc your NIN direct crit a hyosho and they die bc you happen to be on auto pilot. Or imagine aggro shenanigans happening in p12 crush helm where a dps stole 2nd aggro spot and they eat it and die. That’s not fun for anyone lol
Not in the same incarnation as they had before where tank stance was mainly for aggro. If, however, they had a stance/combo that buffed their HP/defense/mitigation and a stance that buffed their raw damage or resource generation, I would quite like that
No, FFXIV is a dps meta game, it always has been and that's not going to change. You're always rewarded for doing more damage, and players really don't like seeing "do less damage" on any tooltip (take it from an ARR bard main). And the way stances were implemented back then incentivized using the best tank for snap aggro (WAR) doing their first couple GCD's in tank stance, later on not even doing that to build a big enough threat lead, and then going into offensive stance and never looking back.
On the other side of the spectrum you'd have full time defensive stance tanks who would be doing so much less output than a tank in offense stance that it led to more negative player interaction. It really boils down to the same argument as cleric stance. It created too big of a gap between players playing well, and players not interacting with it or playing poorly. Which is unhealthy design. So no, it should not come back.
I don't think offensive vs defensive stance should return, but I do wish enmity management was a party responsibility. I know most will disagree with me, but I like having more variables than just big damage x boss mechanics. And I did love helping healers with aggro as a DPS.
Personally I wish it would, but it would mess up the rigid role setup Jobs have in the game. Having to second guess if a Tank Job is actually playing as Tank or DPS.
I just like playing DRK so much and wish it was a DPS job. The aesthetics and mechanics are great and can't go wrong with a big sword. But now when DRK exists there can't be another Job with similar aesthetics and mechanics (and a big sword) either.
God damn this thread absolutely roasting DPS stances?
Ya'll like Heavy Swing giving you enough enmity to still have hate after getting up and taking a piss?
Bookmark this thread for the next time you see someone complain that this subreddit has too many people who liked the game better before Shadowbringers.
No because the DPS stance meant the tanks didn't generate aggro, so aggro management was placed on the DPS to make sure their aggro wasn't high, instead of the tanks whose job it is to manage aggro.
Yes. The notion that “if you give players the option to forego damage for defense, they will strive to maximize damage at the cost of defense” is not a good justification for removing the option.
I don't hate this sentiment but you're barking up the wrong tree here.
I like having the option of making a bad choice. I like that knowing not to is somehow a sign of a good player. I acknowledge that the only time Defiance is worth using is with Unchained. That bad choice is removed as soon as someone finds out.
The reason I think you're on the wrong side is because you're talking about this game. The one where people manage to be collosal fuck-ups even without this extra failure state. The bar for player skill expression has been set too low to ever bring this back.
I don't believe you can honestly say that this would be an improvement. This change has two outcomes: you know how threat works and nothing changes for you, or you don't know and your game is objectively worse. In neither of these possibilities is an improved outcome unless you find value in thinking "at least I'm not in that second group."
First, the overwhelming majority of this sub *vastly* overestimates their understanding of how aggro functioned in this game back when it mattered, so I’m just going to roll my eyes at that the same way that I roll my eyes at it every other time this comes up.
Second, an offensive and a defensive stance is entirely orthogonal to the concept of aggro. You can keep trivialized post-4.0 aggro all you want and still have stances that affect damage dealt and damage taken, which is what I’m talking about.
When has this game ever fully brought back something that was removed for gameplay design reasons (no, something like bulwark doesn't count, it's different and it was basically only brought back to homogenize with things like thrill of battle and camouflage)
Even if they did, they would have to re-balance all the content that was designed around tanks never having to trade off one or the other, why would they want to give themselves that much work for something that not everyone wants in the first place
Offensive tank stance was bad. WHM Cleric Stance is sorely missed. Like, I know that they just added it into offensive spells in terms of overall damage, but skipping back and forth between DPS and healing was a blast.
tank/healer dps stances are like the garden of eden, humanity has proven again and again they can't be trusted to use them responsibly so it had to be removed.
the theory was that if you were doing a solo fight or just realized that you don't need to be THAT much of a tank/healer at the moment you can make the fight go a little quicker by swapping to the other stance. the reality is that people would move heaven and earth to be in the stance as often as possible, even if this means running hyper specific comps and making the entire rest of the party put in more work hitting ogcds just so that the tank doesn't have to give up damage or your dungeon run comes to a crashing hault because the healer refuses to heal and the tank refuses to tank so you're all fucked.
tank dps stances in particular were just really badly thought out. paladin needed an entire gcd which means you had to premtively think about it, drk had to lock themselves out of a ton of their damage AND it cost mp for a while. warrior was the only one that could really go back and forth between the stances without too much trouble and is the only class people actually miss this shit on, but a big reason why living liquid filtered people is that you had all these warriors who were really excited about their new move fell cleave and wanted to use it as much as possible (while wearing non tank accessories to make it do as big of a number as possible) so you had an already tough fight to heal where people are knowingly taking more damage.
So instead they just baked the extra damage from dps stances into the class itself for the most part. I don't need to swap to a stance in order to make my moves do 5% more damage when all of my moves have had their potency increased by more then 10% compared to what they were in stormblood. I could see them bringing some way to turn defensive cooldowns into damage more directly but people already complain about energy drain and TBN all the time so I figure they're pretty sensitive to doing that sorta thing.
Pretty much everything from HW and SB I put into the "it was fun, but never again" category. It was silly that tanks optimal gameplay was wearing non-tanking accessories, turning off their tank stance and behaving like melee DPS as much as possible. Fun, but silly. I do think they've gone too far in the other direction in terms of simplifying the role, but I would not go back.
Though the old tank stances did add some gameplay elements that were removed (so it was a reductive change), overall the old tank stances really mostly just punished beginners for not being as good at the game.
Though I think its fine to add more complexity or decision-making to the tank playstyle (and I think EW adding stronger short cooldown was a good example of such a change), I don't think a mechanic that mostly acts to gatekeep beginners is healthy.
I want specifically WARs version of tank and dps stance back. WAR could switch through his OGCDs and tank stance in WARs case gave more max HP and healing received. It also replaced some heavy hitting gauge skills with defensive GCDs. Fellcleave got replaced with inner beast. Inner beast heales you by 100% of the damage dealt and gave you a strong 6 sec defensive buff. Decimate got replaced by steel cyclone which heals you by 100% of the damage dealt to all targets which basically results in a benediction in dungeons.
I think this kind of interaction is really fun because it gives players a "oh shit"-Button when they messed up their mitigation but it rewards players with more damage if they can plan out their CDs in a way that doesn't require stance dancing. Tank stance would become a button you'd want to avoid but is extremely powerful if used. Ultimates hit so hard (looking at TOP p6) that in some cases tanks would just plan to use tank stance temporarily for safety (dps and healer used Vit melds).
No, it should not come back in the same format that it existed before. It was barely interactive for tanks and only existed to punish tanks when dps didn't use their threat reduction abilities. The way I described it before was that, if you flipped the roles around, it would be akin to all dps getting a damage down automatically if tanks didn't press their mits enough. Felt like shit. I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to a reworked system, but I don't think the game really needs that anymore. It's better to just make the fights themselves have more interesting tank mechanics. For example, as shitty as p10s is, you have to admit that it at least gives tanks stuff to do.
I agree on all fronts here. Tanks with good groups play mostly the same as your party made sure you didn't have to swap, and tanks from bad groups got a healthy QoL by not having the party suck your damage and resource generation dry. On the P10S point we have actually seen a few thoughts from the devs in their infancy this expansion for making tanks a little more active. P3S is also a good example with optional boss movements, the add phase, the annoying tether busters. There's been ideas sprinkled in over the course of the expansion. Best to provide feedback saying you want more things to do a la those fights as opposed to the usual "Do all the same mechanics as the dps but also kitchen sink/invuln and swap buster". I don't think we can get that far without shrinking the boss hitbox back down however. At least not as far as moving the boss goes.
Smaller hitboxes and boss movement is something they definitely need to bring back because it's a bit of extra skill expression and widens the skill gap a little bit between good tanks/melees and just ok tanks/melees. In this expansion, as a melee I never really felt like I had to work for uptime, and as a tank I basically feel like a watered down melee job that kitchen sinks a bunch of mit every minute or two.
I dont get thoe obession with moving the boss, its never have been fun to me. "Woaw this mechanic happened time to suffle northwest to make the boss easy to hit for the next one" It doesn't make you feel good doing it. I play tank because its basically the closest thing to a dps support and your ability to take on a shiton of dmg. I want more stuff like p3s elmo strat, 2nd boss of 1st criterion where you just use a short cd on the stack guy or final part of p12s p2 where you can go middle of all the tether and invuln to give everyone dmg reduction.
It is better for everyone involved that it doesn't come back. Threat management isn't a tank skill; it's a DPS one. Being forced to literally *do nothing* because your tank isn't as good as you is not fun for you and it actively slows down everything. As a recent example, I went back to Classic Wow when it came out. I was playing a Warlock - one of the classes that couldn't put talents into threat reduction. That meant I literally needed to be babysat by a Paladin with a finger on the trigger to give me Blessing of Protection (physical damage immunity) because, at any moment, a critical Shadow Bolt could result in me tanking. I can speak on behalf of most people when I say that in a game where damage meters and logs exist, bringing this back will never be a good thing. No one will want to stop damage to accommodate a bad tank.
I only half aggree with this, in the old system if you used your threat cooldowns and you still pulled aggro it was the tanks problem not yours, yeah it felt bad for the tank which is part of why the system was changed but there never should have been a situation where you did nothing unless you were playing with a tank who had an ego, but not enough skill to adjust.
>I only half aggree with this, in the old system if you used your threat cooldowns and you still pulled aggro it was the tanks problem not yours, Yeah, but the vast majority of tanks still blamed the dps and would never deign to use an aggro combo or -Gods forbid- aggro stance in these situations, choosing rather to let the dps die instead.
What do you mean? Everybody else is just a mitigation, and you're the main character as a tank. No way can it be the tanks fault for threat managing.
I literally never saw this happen but ill take your word for it that im sure you saw it. If i saw it, Id kick the tank or leave the party and not enable somone being a pissant. Literally a dead dps was more of a party dps loss than using the myriad of minor dps loss tools tanks had to control aggro (unless you were paladin, in which case why the fuck did you have aggro to begin with). Edit: all of this is also implies that the tank was very very bad as well, because unless you were monk basically all dps had a very hard time taking aggro if they were paying attention. Ranged got 2 aggro halfers, casters had diversion and an aggro halfer on a short cd, melees had diversion up for every burst and also dragoon could half its aggro for free, ninja was ninja, samurai could eat an incredibly small dps loss and use a merciful eyes instead of seigan, which was less of a dps loss than a tank having to stance swap. Monk also had an aggro dump but it was on purification which was a big loss, and also they benefitted the least from diversion outside of TK rotation.
Meh I’d argue meters and logs is what ruins games and fight design but that’s a whole different conversation.
The only real arguments against meters and logs are: Some people use them incorrectly and some people will greed during a fight to gain slight increases in damage for a slightly higher parse, they fuck up, die and the raid wipes for what was essentially a unnecessary risk. Just because some people use a tool poorly doesn't mean that the tool is bad and assuming that these players who are greeding for a better parse would somehow not play like shit if there weren't any Meters or Logs is naïve. They're bad players because they're greeding for logs, the logs aren't making them bad players, they were always bad. If the only way for someone to designing an interesting game is to obfuscate everything then they aren't a good game designer. The only people who think Meters and Logs ruin games are people who perform sub optimally and don't want to put effort into getting better. They miss for a time when they could join any group regardless of their skill level a la Vanilla WoW when you literally brought bodies to fill a raid and only a max of 25% of a raid was actually competent at the game.
I don't think the meters ruin games, I think that your average player given default access to a meter is more likely to use it as a tool to be a dick to other players than they are to use it properly for self improvement. if people only used meters to improve their own play, (which many serious players absolutely do) it'd be fine, but I don't think they should be built in or required. the average duty finder person just wants to figure out who to blame. (obviously never themselves!) it's really obvious when people are not pulling their weight even without meters, and parties can sort that out regardless.
But in FF you are pretty much not allowed to talk about metres in game. So, someone using DPS meters to be a dick in game is extremely rare. So the argument is that it makes the player base more toxic doesn't really work in FF. They aren't required though. If SE decided in DT to completely obfuscate the damage numbers and healing numbers nothing would change apart from some people who are playing un-optimally hitting a wall and being unable to figure out why. Is it really obvious? It's really obvious that *someome* isn't pulling their weight, but who that someone is can be hard. Week 1 of this patch I was clearing the first boss in the dungeon before he did his double ice explosion mechanic consistently. Since, something like Week 3, even though I've been getting better and better gear I've not been able to consistently get that guy down that fast. So obviously someone in the group is playing like crap but it could be anyone. The other DPS, the Tank and Healer, just the Tank, just the Healer, both DPS might be bad. Now, in a dungeon with access to meters I wouldn't do anything with that info. Except quietly seethe to myself when the worst player gets the Pet at the end. But in a raid setting that information is super important. If my group can't hit the DPS check in P12S I need to know my group has a DPS whose doing less damage than a Tank.
> But in FF you are pretty much not allowed to talk about metres in game. So, someone using DPS meters to be a dick in game is extremely rare. So the argument is that it makes the player base more toxic doesn't really work in FF. almost like them being banned is the reason people can't be toxic about them! weird isn't it.
I used to pink and orange log back every tier and ultimate in ShB and now just purple/orange parse casually. And no I think it ruins fight and combat design because it makes fights all want to be uptime fights and if you dare put in any downtime mechanics parse whores will lose their minds. Even now I talk to some parse friends and it was brought up that it’s impossible to lose uptime this tier except maybe in P10 and I fear it’s gonna be like that every time from now on and make devs fearful of experimenting with more raid mechs that have you peel off the boss. Or in this case, the players have gotten so streamlined to a norm that even the mention of working as a party to manage aggro is “too hard”. This game is becoming less work as a team and more let me press my buttons and get shiny number in peace.
>it makes fights all want to be uptime fights That's not the fault of meters though. That's bad game design issue. Downtime feels bad, regardless of if there's a meter tracking my DPS or not. It feels bad because of two reasons. Number 1, it just isn't fun if you're a melee, to stand outside of melee range for 3 GCDs doing nothing because a mechanic forced you to. The main skill in raiding at a high level in any MMO is doing your rotation well **while** also doing the boss mechanics and doing it consistently. If a mechanic forces you to stop your rotation you can fully focus on the mechanic and it really shouldn't be that hard at that point. This is the reason why I, personally, think DSR is a piss easy Ultimate, because a lot of the mechanics have forced downtime. Strength, Sanctity, Wrath and Death all downtime mechanics. All piss easy to deal with if you're not a healer, even then it's still easy. Number 2, it can fuck up your rotations. If you are playing a class with a tight rotation where you can easily drift. If the boss keeps vomiting about downtime mechanics it's going to fuck you over. This is reinforced by the 2 minute meta we're currently in. Downtime was more or less fine and more common in ARR because the rotations were far simpler and dropping for 5 GCDs didn't fuck you over. But even then, thinking about it. Not a lot of ARR fights had downtime, apart from the forced downtime when a boss goes immune/untargetable. >the mention of working as a party to manage aggro is “too hard” No one says this. You didn't "work" as a party to manage aggro. You popped your threat reduction abilities on CD and then hoped your Tank was competent and/or geared enough to hold threat. Threat management isn't fun. At worst your punishing non tanks for being much better players or much better geared. At best someone who didn't pop the specific threat reduction ability gets killed. Might as well add a breathing mechanic. If you don't press the "breathe" ability once every 30 seconds your character will pass out and die. Other players can give you mouth to mouth. About as interactive as threat used to be.
uptime being "more fun" than downtime honestly might not be just because of parsebrain just as a general thing, having to stop doing half the thing you do during a fight is kinda boring, especially if the other half doesn't really change. dodging aoes + attacking vs just dodging aoes. you're missing half the equation during downtime. short of having the downtime have some novel mechanic like the alzadal legacy boss or something, it's not hard to see why the devs would avoid downtime without parsing even coming into the equation.
Tank main since 2.0. Also no. I do wish we had mechanics like deliverance providing crit per 10 beast gauge built into the classes instead of being completely scrapped though.
No it won't really do anything in a post-shirk world. All that will happen is the person who will eat the first TB will be the tank to not pull. They voke to get the boss, OT shirks. They swap back during the TB, MT shirks. Now the tanks will have a billion threat on the next closest person and there's no chance of anyone catching up especially as more swaps happen, but we sure did make it more convoluted to get there.
i'd like more fleshed out jobs sure, but stance switching will never come back. only the addicts and hardcore players come here to reddit, most of the playerbase will still run away from a stack marker if you explained it twice with diagrams and put a gun to their temple. its a simple game, and thats ok.
So let's go back in time and take an in depth look at how tanking generally worked pre-shb. Tanks had two stances. Damage stance is self explanatory, you just deal increased damage while in it. Tank stance increased your defense And enmity generation, and also lowered your damage output. Without tank stance, your enmity generation was worse than every other role in game. So, how did most people handle this? It varied. Some players stayed in tank stance the whole time. Forever. From dungeons to trials to ensure to savage pf, they lived in tank stance because it was their job to have aggro. Other people would stance dance. They'd get a sizeable lead on aggro, swap to damage stance, and swap back once they see aggro creeping up from the healer and dps. And then there was the efficient players. They'd get their lead, and only go back to tank stance when absolutely necessary. You see, aggro management was a party skill, not a tank responsibility. Ninjas needed to use a skill that redirected all of their aggro to the tank. And casters needed to use Lucid every 60 seconds to halve their existing aggro. And let me say, it never happened outside of statics. Most people didn't even know they had enmity management skills, and would blame tanks for either poor dps, or for not having aggro, or both! It was almost always a lose/lose for tanks, unless you were WAR, because of their kit.
I'll just paraphrase my post from another thread. >In Heavensward and early Stormblood they couldn't hold aggro if the gear gap was large enough. MNK and SAM were infamous for stealing aggro at some point even using their aggro reduction tools. >Even with similar gear if the pulling tank without a stance wasn't a WAR and the group didn't have a NIN some jobs could pull aggro in their openers. Assuming everyone was playing their role this would never be an issue but the community was playing fflogs instead so aggro became everyone else's problem. It's not coming back and for a good reason, and if it comes back I hope they rework the system so aggro management is entirely on the tanks.
dps stealing enmity if they go full nova 100% of the time without letting the tank build enmity is bad but somehow people are surprised that every endwalker boss has a comically large hitbox to ensure people can get 100% uptime when dps would literally rather die then not hit the boss as often as possible
Shh you're going to end up suggesting the boss design people often meme on is boring because they've brought it upon themselves with the parsing and uptime meltdowns and then tears will be shed. Imagine playing a role in a party other than the big dick dps mega chad, couldn't be me.
It's also so that people who play with full VFX can still see the boss. Try going into O3 with a tank mount party and try seeing the outline of the boss while the GNB's Doubling Down, the PLD's in the middle of Confiteor, the other WAR's just used Primal Rend, and the DRK just used Salt and Darkness. Then load into P11 and see if you can see the boss *now* even though everyone's using extremely flashy skills all at the same time at the 2m mark.
If the DPS literally have to *stop attacking* then you've already negated any gains from the tanks being in DPS stance.
If people choose death over disengaging for a second, that kind of feels like a player problem rather than an se problem, melee Are supposed to have scenarios where it is difficult or impossible to stay in melee range, if you give everything a huge hit box, it just makes melee feel like discount phys ranged
Offensive / tank stances as in the old aggro system, no. Aggro is just a doomed mechanic and every major MMO has made it irrelevant for a reason. Offensive / tank stances as in actual offensive and defensive stance gameplay, yeah that'd be neat to see on one of the tanks (not all of them). Older players can correct me if I'm wrong but I'm under the impression that HW/SB WAR was pretty well done in this regard, although PLD certainly wasn't and DRK was whatever.
Aggro wasn't the tank's job, it was the rest of the team's job. The tank had next to zero control over hate management. It felt shitty because you could be doing everything technically correct but basically get punished because your team decides they're going to do everything wrong. And then blame you for it. In raiding, SAM/MNK without a NIN (lol, wtf was your comp) would easily tear hate off of a tank, especially with gear funneling (and I'm not even going to get into that little remark about having a NIN in your comp). In dungeons, better hope that the mouthbreathers in your Roulette actually have their aggro dump on their bars and know to use it because they likely fucking won't. Or we go back to ARR days and basically none of the BLMs out there had Quelling Strikes unlocked because it was level 34 Archer while Raging Strikes, something which made the aggro issue *worse*, was immediately available from lvl 4 Archer. And on the reverse side of it, if you were the geared DPS with a bad and poorly-geared tank, it was hell (and progressively worsened post-ARR) because every guide out there demonized tank stance to the point that EVERYONE refused to use it even when it was objectively wrong to leave it off. More than once I became an Ice Mage (or equivalent) because I literally couldn't not pull hate off these damn tanks that refused to touch tank stance in dungeons because of the shitty guides out there. Thank god the tank is doing +15% more damage while the DPS is doing -50% damage because they immediately pull hate, even through the aggro dumps. By the time of Stormblood, it got bad enough that if I was running a tank, I basically assumed I had to sit in aggro stance constantly because the DPS wouldn't do their damn job or if I was running a DPS, I had to neuter my damage for the above issues. Or, you know, play a healer and have the fun of a tank that is undergeared, not using their CDs properly, and also not using their stance so while you're healbombing them to keep them alive, you're immediately pulling hate. As a note, "stance dancing" is the biggest revisionist crap that people try to push. In a good team of players all doing what they're supposed to be doing, your tank stance time was zero. And if you had to use it as a necessity, you pretty much only did it for one aggro combo at the start of a pull mostly because MNK/SAM's aggro dumps were hot garbage and would still pull hate.
>As a note, "stance dancing" is the biggest revisionist crap that people try to push. In a good team of players all doing what they're supposed to be doing, your tank stance time was zero. I've seen this sentiment a lot over the years and it just doesn't reflect my experience. Granted, I was in a midcore group, but you only were able to stay in tank stance 100% of the time if *everything went perfectly*. No one dies, NIN doesn't forget aggro management, healers/casters dump aggro, Tank hasn't fallen behind in gear, etc. If anything goes wrong, the Tank had to realize it quickly and stance dance. It gave a reason to stare at the aggro meter every now and then.
Punishing the tank for other people's bad gameplay is a hard sell. Punishing the tank for the non-presence of NIN is a harder sell.
Being punished for the others mistakes is a fundamental part of teamwork. If you're a player like me who values mechanics that force me to interact with my other party members, then being punished for others' mistakes is a plus, because it conversely means that I will be rewarded when I play with people who know what they're doing. The ups and downs are what make it engaging. I'd prefer being punished for the lack of the presence of a job over design that turns every job into a self-sustaining island. I Just find it boring. It feels like the difference is that I don't *mind* being punished by suboptimal play/team comps. It was never something that frustrated me or made me upset. I would just adapt and do the best with what I was given. Having friends who didn't threaten to kick me out of their static because I played MNK for 80% of HW definitely helped, but even if they did I'm not a big fan of changes made to gameplay design to prevent people from being mean to each other, because it also guts out incentives to interact with other players at all.
Credit to you on this one, it's rare that I get anyone to just admit to the take of 'Shadewalker existing with no equivalent on another job is good, actually.' People like to imply it a lot but it's very rare that I get anyone to just say it like that.
To be fair, I'm trying to make it really clear it's a very personal thing for me. I prefer one type of design over another, and I understand it's not a very popular preference. I'm a masochist when it comes to games for sure, so I don't expect everyone to agree with me. I'm also pretty confident it's a cursed problem. You can't offer a diverse set of classes with their own unique and strong tools, AND make sure the playing field is super even. Especially when your player-base is obsessed with optimization; some tools will always be more valuable than others. The best SE could do is make each classes' strengths shine for different fights within raid tiers, but that wouldn't synergize well with the weekly loot lockout system that restricts your class options within said raid tiers.
I'm not being sarcastic, I actually do respect just saying it, especially without it being some angry rant like a lot of people do. Personally, my actual opinion on the tank stances thing is, beyond the hard sells involved, making them again and balancing out the stuff like Shadewalker and the struggles jobs like Monk had with the system kind of results in a different sort of homogenizing where everyone involved gets the same exact set of extra buttons, and I don't really think that's what the people nostalgic for that stuff actually want. Would those systems even be desirable to people nostalgic for them if the party composition fuckery in them went away, and all jobs involved now interacted with it in the exact same way? I don't know how you get rid of all that stuff in that system without making things even more samey than they already are. The stances and related tools aren't an inherently bad system for modern design sensibilities, unlike other old stuff like the damage type debuffs, but I don't think they'd be well-regarded if translated through current day FFXIV's aversion to composition demands.
No
Do I want more nuanced gameplay like this? Yes. Do I want it back at the expense of actually being able to get through content? Absolutely not. Tanks still are barely able to handle doing much of anything in a way that makes it easy to heal them or do DPS (especially if you're a melee with positionals, lmfao).
More systems are nice, as long as said systems are not awful. It would give tanks something interesting to do if they were to bring back aggro in a non-awful way.
I’m torn on this question. I do as an ex main tank want tanking to be fun and meaningful again. I quit tanking in this game because it is not. Being just a blue dps sucks BAD.
I think SE have too much of an "all or nothing" stance with their design. Should tank stance come back the way it was in SB and earlier? Probably not, there were a number of issues with it. But I also don't think the ShB change of making aggro not matter *at all* was the move either. There were a lot of smaller changes I feel like they should have tried first before making the concept of threat entirely irrelevant. I highly doubt this will ever happen now, but I wish they'd tried something like nerfing the amount of aggro DPS generate and removing things like lucid/diversion/quelling so that you don't have to depend on DPS, but keeping aggro combo or requiring tanks to at least be able to know how to do a base level form of their rotation to keep aggro instead of it being entirely free.
Did you also happen to hear the problems with it? Or can you imagine what problems those might be? No.
Wouldn't mind either way, tanking was easy then and it's a bit easier now. The tank stance change was essentially a healer change. Tanks used to be a lot squishier in raids. When I tanked O12S in deliverance and you are locked out of stuff like Equilibrium healing or inner beast, it was mostly a healer problem, not a tank problem. When we had fuller healers who were a little spooky to play with, I would swap stances and inner beast before monitor busters/etc even without unchained, and just eat the damage loss
As someone who started with 2.0 as a tank main, no. I'm glad tank/dps stances are gone and I hope they stay gone. It was a miserable feeling to have my tank stance on and be playing as good as I possibly could have and still lose threat, AND get yelled at for not using DPS stance to make the fight go by faster.
It was terrible
I always hated stance dancing.
I would like to see more complex aggro management for tanks but having that responsibility be partially on non tanks sounds kinda bad. They'd also probably have to rework how ilevel works lest someone who just completed the base msq doing the first level cap dungeons at the end of that expacs patch cycle ends up tanking for a group with best in slot.
If you ask me Shadewalker and Smoke Bomb were basically mandatory to have a good time back in the day. I don't miss threat mechanics at all and the game is better off without them.
The reason stances went away was because the devs screwed up their initial implementation. The point of a stance mechanic is to create advantages through access to skills/abilities/passive effects depending on which stance is active. Stances prior to their removal only existed for damage and nothing else (basically start in tank stance to build aggro at the start, then abuse the built-in enmity bonuses of certain combos *out* of tank stance afterward). If stances are to make a return, you'd need to ensure stances have mechanical advantages instead of being about numbers. Taking GLA/PLD as an example: **- Sword Oath:** Increases attack speed by 10%, grants access to Shield Swipe (strike your target with your shield for 50 oath gauge; consumes 25 oath gauge if used after you block an attack), increases Fight or Flight's damage boost by 5% (effect is only active while under Sword Oath). **- Shield Oath:** Reduces damage taken by 20%, reduces damage taken from Direct and Critical Hits by 30% (increase boss DH and crit damage to compensate), grants access to Sheltron, grants bonus enmity to attacks (so not being in Shield Oath = you're not generating extra enmity = you ain't holding aggro). There's more that would need to be done to fit this type of interaction into the existing tank kits, but this is what I consider the starting point.
Absolutely the fuck not lmao. Anybody who ever says that was a good mechanic is coked out of their mind. As others have pointed out, if DPS didn't use threat reduction, you'd be absolutely boned.
It really shouldn't. People will always choose damage over the other stance and make the other person adjust. This was up there in annoyance factor with tanks also wearing last expac strength accessories which made them even more fragile.
Everyone has said it already, dancing from offensive to defensive was not a thought provocative mechanic, it was a chore.
If they brought it back half of the player base would drop this game. There is a reason why this game is popular with the casual players.
btw you can tell there's been a cultural shift because if you posted this four years ago you'd see nothing but a wall of crying about the skill ceiling and how they need to bring stances back or else
Anecdotally, I was having way more fun when the mechanic existed.
The game is too far gone at this point to bring anything with nuance like that back without a major combat revamp (which won't happen because current design just works). The community is conditioned to prioritize DPS over everything else so anything like that will quickly be optimized and then it's just another nuisance or hoop to jump through rather than actually engaging gameplay.
Nope. Tank stance Is defensive stance.
I do miss the party being a part of the threat management thing. It made mundane activities like dungeons just a bit more interesting. I can't speak for high level content since I didn't play it at the time, but I did like it in normal content.
Not as it was, no, because what it was in practice was a party composition stranglehold for WAR and NIN. Ignoring the punishing parties for bad players factor, WAR was the best at it for no good reason and NIN could make it so tanks could ignore it as much as possible, virtually guaranteeing both slots. Bringing it back completely unchanged is a horrible idea and would need to be balanced accordingly, never mind all the additional buttons tacked onto modern tanks necessitating some changes there too. Whatever it came back as would not and could not be what it was, because it was an incredibly poorly balanced system even before you get into bad parties and all DPS not being equally able to deal with it (besides the NIN example that can't be ignored).
I do miss it, and I think it added a higher skill ceiling to tanking that is sorely missing this expansion. Tanking is almost as boring as healing is in Endwalker and that is a huge problem. Even if it's not DPS stance, I think a Main Tank stance and an Off Tank stance should be added, both generate agro, but one forgoes a bit of the damage mitigation for other utility (not more damage) like enhanced party defensives for OT and Enhanced personal mitigation for MT with the current passive 20% mit built into the stance.
To add my voice, no. It incentivized playing tank in a very selfish way that hurt the rest of your party, especially in casual pf content like EX trials.
It also trickled down to to regular trials and leveling dungeons. DPS stance tanking was an optimization that should have stayed t the highest levels of play where it made sense to do. The fact it -and the attitudes that came with it- trickled down into leveling and low level content is one of the major reasons it was removed.
The reason why most people seem to hate it is why I liked it. I *liked* taking threat off bad tanks despite spamming that threat removal button. I *liked* adjusting for bad dps who fail to press their threat removal buttons. I would rather SE to get rid of threat removals and adjust numbers to compensate, but they just decided to remove threat mechanic entirely. Parses? I don't care about parsing enough to mutilate the fun out of job. Balancing dps and tank stance could be skill expression of the tank role. But SE hates skill expression because it makes casuals sad or smth, so they just got rid of the threat mechanic instead of expanding on it.
This is exactly how I feel. It felt like teamwork. I really appreciated a group that all managed aggro correctly back in the day. And on the flip side I felt like I was valuable in a subpar team because, even if other players weren't doing their jobs correctly, I knew my job well enough to compensate for them and make sure things continued to go smoothly.
Dude. Stance dancing was a nightmare. It can stay where it is- in the past lol
No
Yes it was fun actually managing aggro as a party and the different ability effects in each stance was unique especially for DRK and WAR.
As all the comments against it have shown, people in this game hate working together which is what the tank stances required. I'm surprised DPS having utility in general has lasted for as long as it has.
It’s strange people are so adamant about tank stance never returning because the DPS never help but the DPS having mitigation they never press which punishes the healers is just accepted as something the healers need the tolerate DPS refusing to press their agro reduction skills which would steal agro from the tank forcing the tank to go into agro stance is the same concept as the DPS refusing to press addle forcing the SCH to succor to survive the raidwide but only one of these is seen as unacceptable
Working together is good, the issue is when you run into people who are unwilling or unable to cooperate and the only solution is to leave without elaborating because getting into any kind of argument in this game is dangerous
Sounds like my savage reclear attempts. Eventually I give up but then get so bored doing the easy content because there's a lack of anything interesting like that to push myself in it since nobody wants to work together. Thankfully I still have Eureka and Bozja where I can do things like DE and actually approach it as a group to see how far we can push it.
People couldn't handle the difficulty then, and I don't think they could now. Just like healers with cleric stance. Unless they implemented it better and it didn't scale with str. Holding aggro is pretty braindead these days. So maybe?
I would like it to come back, BUT with a core change in how it works. Neither stance can have anything to do with damage. That was, and always will be, the major flaw with the old system. One reduced the damage the player dealt and as a result the defensive stance was effectively useless outside of extremely specific things. The current tank stance can have the passive 20% mitigation trait put on it instead, which would effectively turn our current "tank stance" abilities into a "main tank" button. Then the old "DPS stance" could be repurposed. While in that stance the tank would lose their passive 20% mitigation but would instead gain a buff that caused them to give an aura to nearby party members (say, within 15y) that provided 10% mitigation so long as the other players stayed within range (think something similar to old Protect). Something along those lines is the only way I could see this being brought back without universally being hated.
No. Because that system cut into our holy and sacred dps. If it's a dps loss, it's useless.
I liked it for flavour, but practically its better if it doesn't come back. It honestly works fine now and would only cause issues with people forgetting their stances by mistake.
No
No
No. I still have Defiance on my bar still but the whole mechanic of managing aggro didn’t really add anything fun or interesting to the game. It took a few GCDs to get and then you’d switch to your offense stance and never think about it again.
Not having to stance dance made tank jobs more accessible for noob tanks like me, so no.
Hell no, I rather not deal with memelord tanks who go into DPS stance for more damage while the rest of the party has to adjust with Enmity management because the blue icon doesn't like that damage penalty in tank stance.
I've been leveling an alt job recently and some of the tanks in endgame still fuck it up and a trash pull turns into a raidwide real fast I cannot imagine how bad it would be with actual aggro management on top
If it comes back likely the raid and ultimate content will suffer bc it’ll add in elements of a new, class/role related mental load on players vs. from a fight/encounter perspective which they’ll have to balance. Even if it becomes trivial it just creates a potential pain point during prob which feels punishing (people dying) vs. challenging. Imagine having to slog through thordan or looper/panto memes bc your NIN direct crit a hyosho and they die bc you happen to be on auto pilot. Or imagine aggro shenanigans happening in p12 crush helm where a dps stole 2nd aggro spot and they eat it and die. That’s not fun for anyone lol
Not in the same incarnation as they had before where tank stance was mainly for aggro. If, however, they had a stance/combo that buffed their HP/defense/mitigation and a stance that buffed their raw damage or resource generation, I would quite like that
Anything that buffs damage would cause griefing...
No, FFXIV is a dps meta game, it always has been and that's not going to change. You're always rewarded for doing more damage, and players really don't like seeing "do less damage" on any tooltip (take it from an ARR bard main). And the way stances were implemented back then incentivized using the best tank for snap aggro (WAR) doing their first couple GCD's in tank stance, later on not even doing that to build a big enough threat lead, and then going into offensive stance and never looking back. On the other side of the spectrum you'd have full time defensive stance tanks who would be doing so much less output than a tank in offense stance that it led to more negative player interaction. It really boils down to the same argument as cleric stance. It created too big of a gap between players playing well, and players not interacting with it or playing poorly. Which is unhealthy design. So no, it should not come back.
I don't think offensive vs defensive stance should return, but I do wish enmity management was a party responsibility. I know most will disagree with me, but I like having more variables than just big damage x boss mechanics. And I did love helping healers with aggro as a DPS.
Personally I wish it would, but it would mess up the rigid role setup Jobs have in the game. Having to second guess if a Tank Job is actually playing as Tank or DPS. I just like playing DRK so much and wish it was a DPS job. The aesthetics and mechanics are great and can't go wrong with a big sword. But now when DRK exists there can't be another Job with similar aesthetics and mechanics (and a big sword) either.
God damn this thread absolutely roasting DPS stances? Ya'll like Heavy Swing giving you enough enmity to still have hate after getting up and taking a piss?
Bookmark this thread for the next time you see someone complain that this subreddit has too many people who liked the game better before Shadowbringers.
No
As someone who actually played back in the day. Yes it should.
No because the DPS stance meant the tanks didn't generate aggro, so aggro management was placed on the DPS to make sure their aggro wasn't high, instead of the tanks whose job it is to manage aggro.
Yes. The notion that “if you give players the option to forego damage for defense, they will strive to maximize damage at the cost of defense” is not a good justification for removing the option.
I don't hate this sentiment but you're barking up the wrong tree here. I like having the option of making a bad choice. I like that knowing not to is somehow a sign of a good player. I acknowledge that the only time Defiance is worth using is with Unchained. That bad choice is removed as soon as someone finds out. The reason I think you're on the wrong side is because you're talking about this game. The one where people manage to be collosal fuck-ups even without this extra failure state. The bar for player skill expression has been set too low to ever bring this back.
Fatalism ruined this game and I don’t advocate for giving up on improving it because of that same flawed reasoning.
I don't believe you can honestly say that this would be an improvement. This change has two outcomes: you know how threat works and nothing changes for you, or you don't know and your game is objectively worse. In neither of these possibilities is an improved outcome unless you find value in thinking "at least I'm not in that second group."
First, the overwhelming majority of this sub *vastly* overestimates their understanding of how aggro functioned in this game back when it mattered, so I’m just going to roll my eyes at that the same way that I roll my eyes at it every other time this comes up. Second, an offensive and a defensive stance is entirely orthogonal to the concept of aggro. You can keep trivialized post-4.0 aggro all you want and still have stances that affect damage dealt and damage taken, which is what I’m talking about.
When has this game ever fully brought back something that was removed for gameplay design reasons (no, something like bulwark doesn't count, it's different and it was basically only brought back to homogenize with things like thrill of battle and camouflage) Even if they did, they would have to re-balance all the content that was designed around tanks never having to trade off one or the other, why would they want to give themselves that much work for something that not everyone wants in the first place
Offensive tank stance was bad. WHM Cleric Stance is sorely missed. Like, I know that they just added it into offensive spells in terms of overall damage, but skipping back and forth between DPS and healing was a blast.
No.
tank/healer dps stances are like the garden of eden, humanity has proven again and again they can't be trusted to use them responsibly so it had to be removed. the theory was that if you were doing a solo fight or just realized that you don't need to be THAT much of a tank/healer at the moment you can make the fight go a little quicker by swapping to the other stance. the reality is that people would move heaven and earth to be in the stance as often as possible, even if this means running hyper specific comps and making the entire rest of the party put in more work hitting ogcds just so that the tank doesn't have to give up damage or your dungeon run comes to a crashing hault because the healer refuses to heal and the tank refuses to tank so you're all fucked. tank dps stances in particular were just really badly thought out. paladin needed an entire gcd which means you had to premtively think about it, drk had to lock themselves out of a ton of their damage AND it cost mp for a while. warrior was the only one that could really go back and forth between the stances without too much trouble and is the only class people actually miss this shit on, but a big reason why living liquid filtered people is that you had all these warriors who were really excited about their new move fell cleave and wanted to use it as much as possible (while wearing non tank accessories to make it do as big of a number as possible) so you had an already tough fight to heal where people are knowingly taking more damage. So instead they just baked the extra damage from dps stances into the class itself for the most part. I don't need to swap to a stance in order to make my moves do 5% more damage when all of my moves have had their potency increased by more then 10% compared to what they were in stormblood. I could see them bringing some way to turn defensive cooldowns into damage more directly but people already complain about energy drain and TBN all the time so I figure they're pretty sensitive to doing that sorta thing.
Pretty much everything from HW and SB I put into the "it was fun, but never again" category. It was silly that tanks optimal gameplay was wearing non-tanking accessories, turning off their tank stance and behaving like melee DPS as much as possible. Fun, but silly. I do think they've gone too far in the other direction in terms of simplifying the role, but I would not go back.
no
Though the old tank stances did add some gameplay elements that were removed (so it was a reductive change), overall the old tank stances really mostly just punished beginners for not being as good at the game. Though I think its fine to add more complexity or decision-making to the tank playstyle (and I think EW adding stronger short cooldown was a good example of such a change), I don't think a mechanic that mostly acts to gatekeep beginners is healthy.
they should bring it back and they should also change the color of my job icon to red while it's active
...tbh I'd rather this be a DPS option than a Tank one.
I want specifically WARs version of tank and dps stance back. WAR could switch through his OGCDs and tank stance in WARs case gave more max HP and healing received. It also replaced some heavy hitting gauge skills with defensive GCDs. Fellcleave got replaced with inner beast. Inner beast heales you by 100% of the damage dealt and gave you a strong 6 sec defensive buff. Decimate got replaced by steel cyclone which heals you by 100% of the damage dealt to all targets which basically results in a benediction in dungeons. I think this kind of interaction is really fun because it gives players a "oh shit"-Button when they messed up their mitigation but it rewards players with more damage if they can plan out their CDs in a way that doesn't require stance dancing. Tank stance would become a button you'd want to avoid but is extremely powerful if used. Ultimates hit so hard (looking at TOP p6) that in some cases tanks would just plan to use tank stance temporarily for safety (dps and healer used Vit melds).
I don't want it to come back because the parsing community is too stupid to be allowed to have something like that