FF14 players need to just go play their game. The game is so boring and every role just is auto-pilot. If that’s what you want from a game, then go play FF14 and leave WoW alone.
Gods forbid a role is approachable and straightforward, and doesn’t require an external site to ‘sim’ and optimize.
There is such a thing as overcomplication.
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And you think this is an issue for WoW tanking? because it’s not, that’s mostly a DPS thing.
Holding aggro is actually too easy in WoW as is. But it’s at a level where it’s just challenging enough that I feel like it can appease both sides.
Besides none of this optimization is an issue until you want to play higher difficulty end-game content. You can play casual WoW. Nobody is stopping you.
Oh goodness, please tell me you’re not keen on that dark age where Warriors had to stack sunder, DPS had to sit around and do nothing for entire phases of a fight lest they pull aggro too hard and unless you literally taunted you were kinda just guessing where the boss was pointed at any given moment.
Nope. I’m just saying in DF it’s really not that difficult to hold aggro. If you reduce the role to “everything attacks me because I’m the tank by default” you are fundamentally taking away the role’s purpose and skill.
You could argue you still have to know a lot as a tank, it is probably the most overwhelming role to jump into. But it’s rewarding and, frankly, once you get an understanding of the role I’d argue… it’s the easiest? Outside of tanking in N/H/M raids, high keys, etc.
This is true. Though I think FF14 swings the pendulum a bit too far in the other direction. The lack of any talent choices or ways to customize your kit make every member of a particular job feel basically the same. In fact even end-game gear is much less varied than it is in WoW with really only two options for max ilvl equipment per slot. You can use those and materia to move some secondary stats around and you can definitely optimize those per job… but I find that in the big picture it doesn’t really have that large of an effect on things. The end result is that jobs in FF14 feel significantly more cookie-cutter than they do in WoW.
But WoW does love its customizability and sims. There’s a lot more moving parts to a character in WoW and that’s both a blessing and a curse. I think it’s more necessary than in FF14 though given that WoW is significantly more willing than FF14 is to require unique utility or change up how valuable different damage styles are. (IE: Cleave/AoE/Burst/Sustain)
I don’t really think either game would benefit much from changing to match the other in this case though. Mostly because either one changing would require a fundamental restructuring of how the game approaches combat design and I don’t really see that working out.
For FF14’s sake I think that the only thing they should really change in terms of tank design is to be a bit more liberal with their active mitigation design in order to make the actual tanking part of tanking more involved with their moment rotation. The largest system shock to me when I tank in FF14 is that I mostly just do a simpler DPS rotation and use an oGCD defensive when the tank buster icon appears over my head. Even the mitigation that’s supposed to be more frequent (Bloodwhetting, Heart of Corundum, Holy Shelltron, Oblation) are still cooldowns that I’m saving for specific moments rather than something I’m maintaining for the whole time that I’m actively tanking. (Think Shield of the Righteous or Ironfur). It results in me feeling like I’m only a tank during tankbusters rather than for the entire time I’m being attacked with the rest of my time spent being blue DPS. But I suppose that’s true of class design in FF14 more broadly as well.
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Nice. You explained it better than I could because I’ve only played FF14 briefly a few times. All I know is I used to main tank in WoW, so when I went to FF14, naturally, I mained tank there as well… and I was left with the most empty feeling ever. Eventually I went to play another role, and soon enough I just left the game entirely because it’s clearly not my game and that is OKAY.
I’m glad there is an MMO out there like FF14… but please, let WoW have its identity, the challenge and learning process of WoW is what keeps me coming back. If I don’t have to try, I lose interest. WoW has effectively appealed to both casuals and tryhards and everything in between with its system.
If they were to change tank to like it is in FF14 I think that would be the nail in the coffin for WoW.
It’s not a tank issue.
It’s a dps popping all cds before the tank gets one gcd issue.
Typically the tank can get aggro back fairly easily though.
Really only dangerous for melee dps to do this, you may only get aggro for a second, but if your melee, that one second means you’re getting slapped. Ranged dps typically don’t have to worry as much, the mob might start walking towards you, but the tank can typically get it back before it reaches them.
From a melee perspective, if you don’t wanna die every pull, make sure tank gets a gcd or two before unleashing maximum burst. Easy.
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I’d agree with that. I think tanking is the easiest role in both WoW and FF14. Well raid tanking at least. I’m less sold on dungeon tanking in WoW. But in raids (of any difficulty) the tank in both games shares mostly the same responsibilities as the DPS but are exempt from certain mechanics with an easier damage rotation. The tradeoff is that they become for boss positioning, tank busters, and tank swaps. I don’t think that’s an even trade given that positioning for most bosses is pretty straightforward, only rarely being more complicated than “point the boss away from the party” and tank busters and swaps just boil down to “push button when game tells you to push button.”
Dungeons in WoW are a little different since somehow routing became part of a tank’s responsibility and I think that’s more difficult than DPS responsibilities. Plus I think it’s more difficult to survive particular trash packs on Fortified week than it is to survive bosses when they’re not doing a tank buster. Trash is the hardest part of FF14 dungeons as well but dungeons in FF14 don’t matter since they don’t have anything even remotely like M+. Dungeons in FF14 are all straight hallways, exactly two sets of two trash packs between each boss. Even if I’m doing a completely new dungeon in FF14 I know the route because it’s always the same.
They’ve been trying to make dungeons a more challenging part of the end-game economy in FF14 with the introduction of Criterion dungeons. But I think they miss the mark somewhat. As of right now, FF14 has no comparable alternative to M+ and that’s fairly significant. It creates an entire gap in encounter design that FF14 just simply does not have that WoW does.
I’d even add that it’s only dangerous for specific melee specs to do this. Not every melee spec is as bursty during their CD window to rip threat off the tank. For instance when I play Feral, I don’t give any thought to it at all since while I do do a lot more damage after popping Incarnation, that damage is concentrated into a ton of bleeds rather than a single GCD’s-worth of large hits. Meaning that my aggro-gain is spread out over enough time that the tank gets plenty of attacks in to secure the aggro lead.
The only thing I think aggro really means in WoW is that DPS shouldn’t attack enemies before the tank completes the pull and sets down roots. If you attack enemies on the go you might end up with some problems (assuming you’re not right on the tank’s butt). From a selfish perspective though, you’d want to hold you fire until the pull is complete and the mobs are all grouped up anyway otherwise half the pull is gonna miss out on your burst CDs.
Yeah pretty much. DH, pal, evoker. Got a lot of on-pull burst.
It’s weird how managing aggro was entirely a dps responsibility for the longest time, and then some shift happened where they no longer are responsible for anything.
When I play melee dps, if I pull aggro and die at the start of the pull, that’s 100% my fault.
I dunno about that though. At the end of the day, you need to be durable, capable of holding aggro, and surviving spike damage in the form of tankbusters. How you reach that point is largely irrelevant, which is why I’ve always seen talent trees as developer traps rather than anything really beneficial. In content where the game shapes itself around the PCs (TTRPGs), talent trees make much more sense because the referee can alter the world to accommodate and cater to the choices of their players, while fixed worlds can only cater to so much. Since fights end at 0, anything you take that doesn’t get the enemy to 0 faster is pretty much a wrong talent, but then Blizzard goes and puts abilities that should be baseline into the trees making them skippable and leading to frustration with players that lack tools they didn’t know they’d need. What also doesn’t help is these aren’t specs that follow the same general theme, these specs entirely change how the class functions, so then there’s another layer of confusion (though I will admit as a WoW → FFXIV player in the past when I learned that MRD/WAR was tank I was kinda floored).
Tanking stance: Your Allies don’t notice it - but your enemies do. It’s a tiny detail, one so small you would miss it if you weren’t looking.
Even as you carry your sword and shield, you’re flipping them off. FOR THIS YOU SHALL FEEL THE RAGE OF THE FIRELANDS
They certainly run that risk. I’ve run with main tanks before that fall into the “traps” and pick talents that are simply bad and as a result can’t be relied upon to survive normal encounter damage whether it be a tank buster or no. However I do still prefer talent trees not because of the ability to choose the wrong answer, but for the ability for there to be multiple correct ones. This is largely dependent on encounter design though. The ability to change your build to withstand more physical/magical damage or more sustained/burst damage or whatever is the part that’s interesting to me. And in return that means that Blizzard is able to design more varied fights because they know that players are able to specialize into different niches depending on what’s required of them. After all, the great downfall of specializing in a niche is that your investment is only rewarding if that niche is actually important. You could look at talents like Remove Curse, Hibernate, or even Skull Bash for more direct lock-and-key examples.
Sure each individual fight may only have one correct answer for your kit. But since end-game is not just one fight that opens the door for more correct answers when you look at endgame as a whole. I think there’s value in that since it lets various pieces of endgame content feel more varied even if they’re all the same level of difficulty.
The only place I’ve seen ANYONE take threat from the tank no matter the skill level is in low level dungeons where things are wonky. Upper levels /max level the only time threat is taken from the tank is if the the mob hasn’t been hit by said tank. If you are taking threat from the tank you are attacking a mob you aint got no business attacking.
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Mm, I guess my philosophy is a little different. My ideal approach would be to ensure every class and spec could clear the content on-offer without talent trees at all, then add the trees as flavorful options to tweak things a bit. Yes, this turns talents into more of a ‘win harder’ button but I think I would rather make the game a bit shallower while filling in those potential pitfalls than have a deep game littered with ‘wrong choices’ in character advancement. That said, I’m a lot more forgiving of the ‘wrong choice’ approach if there is sufficient signposting of ‘no, you REALLY want this.’
An example of the above: in the game System Shock 2, you can build out your character with a surprising amount of depth and variation; getting access to new weapons, unusual skills, cybermods, etc. There is a point however where you must hack something to progress.
The problem here is that hacking is an optional skill; you can complete the game to that point without learning how to hack at all. That said, while the need is sudden, the game blares about how useful hacking in through both mechanics (you can hack just about anything, from turrets, camera, vending machines, and even loot creates) and narrative (audio and text logs describing the effects, good and bad, that even amateur hackers have on ship systems). So the game essentially screams ‘you really want the Hack skill.’ Your mission support at that point even straight up gives you enough advancement points to invest in the Hack skill if you don’t have it, and there’s an upgrade station not too far away.
Even for those immune to such coercion however, by this point your character has had the opportunity to pick up multiple IcePick items (these items automatically hack a target object regardless of skill, but are consumed afterward). The problem here is that these items are, again, optional to find, pick up, consumable and can be ‘sold’ without a way to recover them. The idea is that with how rare they are in the game, as well as the importance emphasized with Hacking, that the player would hold onto them for something they really want or need to hack, and a common vending machine isn’t such a target.
So while yes, you can land yourself in hot water and be unable to carry on with the game any further, you have to actively disregard every suggestion the game gives you about the Hack skill (and at this point you’re DEEP into the game) and intentionally dump or waste items designed to give non-Hackers a means and an edge to hack things they might want to hack. As far as I have seen, WoW does not signpost this well at all so people have no idea what is truly important for their class without going external. I myself get extreme anxiety in group content because I don’t have or really enjoy using add-ons, so I have no means to easily measure or identify performance or skill issues outside of ‘is the group still alive, Y/N.’
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Some of you are really invested in this thread lmao. in here writing full essays.
I hate tank stance. DKs forgetting frost presence is annoying. But those days are over.
Oh yes, stance-dancing rightfully went the way of the dodo.
I wish Blizzard took more flak for breaking popular addons. People just forget they existed rather than criticize the blue god.
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Why?
Tanks already have a passive increase in threat generation, plus the taunt system.
If you feel tanks threat generation is too low, then you should ask for that to be increased, but we don’t need FF system for this.
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