So a number of the top threads in this forum have been describing a good bit of discontent with how tanking plays currently. It's become mindless, and the core functions of tanking (controlling enemies and surviving) have become trivialized by content design and job design. Indeed, those core functions of tanking have become so homogenized that, when you focus on them, there is no fundamental difference in how tanks accomplish them.
Where tanks DO have variety these days is in their DPS rotations, and how they accomplish their damage output--and in that design, SE has actually done a pretty good job at making them feel different. WAR is slow and steady, PLD has DoTs and has to do a bit of weaving, DRK has an interesting resource management system, and GNB is fast-paced and a bit spammy (from what I've heard - don't have that one up, yet).
For new tanks and for people who haven't played tanks because they thought it was intimidating, this design paradigm is probably a good thing. The focus is mostly on your rotation, and you don't really have to worry too much about whether or not you'll survive or whether or not you'll hold aggro. But for career tanks? For people who liked managing enmity and survivability? This paradigm is painfully dull.
This is an idea to fix that.
Back in my WoW days, when they launched Mists of Pandaria, they introduced a notion to tanking called Active Mitigation, which replaced the previous idea of gear-based mitigation and combat table coverage that had grown since Wrath. The gist of it was that, through your rotation and normal gameplay output, you would build up resources that you could then spend on mitigation--basically taking the design of Blood DKs and trying to make all tanks play in a similar fashion. To support this, they made it so that gear-based mitigation had diminishing returns, such that tanks would fundamentally take more damage, and need to use this new mechanic to survive. In theory, it was a decent idea, but in practice, it was a mess, and made tanking very broken for the classes that hadn't already employed such a system.
I honestly strongly dislike the notion of Active Mitigation, of having to do a specific dance just to survive in content, but I also know that I had a bad experience with it. WoW's implementation of Active Mitigation was and has been (to my knowledge) shaky at best, but I also know that there's a strong chance that such flaws are because the system was designed by Blizzard. To date, SE has done a very good job at making the game enjoyable, and I think that, if they tried their hands at adding something like Rotational or Active Mitigation into FFXIV, they could actually make it work.
Instead of having shared buttons for mitigation, each tank could have a unique method of mitigating incoming damage, which could be built around how the jobs play. Some of the jobs have a bit of this already, but making it more impactful, more relevant, more necessary, more engaging, and then expanding it to all of the tanks, would go a long way towards making tanking fun again.
What are your thoughts?
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Where tanks DO have variety these days is in their DPS rotations, and how they accomplish their damage output--and in that design, SE has actually done a pretty good job at making them feel different. WAR is slow and steady, PLD has DoTs and has to do a bit of weaving, DRK has an interesting resource management system, and GNB is fast-paced and a bit spammy (from what I've heard - don't have that one up, yet).
For new tanks and for people who haven't played tanks because they thought it was intimidating, this design paradigm is probably a good thing. The focus is mostly on your rotation, and you don't really have to worry too much about whether or not you'll survive or whether or not you'll hold aggro. But for career tanks? For people who liked managing enmity and survivability? This paradigm is painfully dull.
This is an idea to fix that.
Back in my WoW days, when they launched Mists of Pandaria, they introduced a notion to tanking called Active Mitigation, which replaced the previous idea of gear-based mitigation and combat table coverage that had grown since Wrath. The gist of it was that, through your rotation and normal gameplay output, you would build up resources that you could then spend on mitigation--basically taking the design of Blood DKs and trying to make all tanks play in a similar fashion. To support this, they made it so that gear-based mitigation had diminishing returns, such that tanks would fundamentally take more damage, and need to use this new mechanic to survive. In theory, it was a decent idea, but in practice, it was a mess, and made tanking very broken for the classes that hadn't already employed such a system.
I honestly strongly dislike the notion of Active Mitigation, of having to do a specific dance just to survive in content, but I also know that I had a bad experience with it. WoW's implementation of Active Mitigation was and has been (to my knowledge) shaky at best, but I also know that there's a strong chance that such flaws are because the system was designed by Blizzard. To date, SE has done a very good job at making the game enjoyable, and I think that, if they tried their hands at adding something like Rotational or Active Mitigation into FFXIV, they could actually make it work.
Instead of having shared buttons for mitigation, each tank could have a unique method of mitigating incoming damage, which could be built around how the jobs play. Some of the jobs have a bit of this already, but making it more impactful, more relevant, more necessary, more engaging, and then expanding it to all of the tanks, would go a long way towards making tanking fun again.
What are your thoughts?
Continue reading...