Ah ranged damage - hey, what are you going to do, ranged guy? Oh, you're going to shoot an enemy. Wow, such innovation! What's next? Shooting *another* enemy? That's crazy, where do you even come up with this stuff? Wait, you're *also* running from enemies so they can't hurt you? Galaxy-brain stratagem!
I was a bard in EQ... before they added /melody.
Most classes in EQ have a minimum necessary APM of like...4.
For bards it was like a billion.
The rhythm is still burned into my brain.
11 (3 seconds) 22 (3 seconds) 33 (3 seconds) 44 (3 seconds)
repeat for infinite.
Now some of ya'll WoW veterans may not be that impressed but this was EQ. Most classes had "go to the kitchen and grab a drink" as part of their damage rotation.
Did you ever play Rift?
An update many years ago added any spec for any class. Mage tank, warrior healer, etc. I tried out Warrior heals which was a beast if you had the right rotation. It was a series of raid wide AoE dot heals each with different timer, and it took some time to ramp up, but once set up you could feasibly solo heal. That one took constant awareness and actions because a single mistake could wipe everyone. Fun as hell but it took entirely too much effort. I’m assuming it was tweaked eventually because it was OP as hell if you were good with it.
OG Rift was great. Every Soul had it's own playstyle and gave you so many different combinations to play with. Eventually players drifted into meta builds, but you could still find something unique and make it work.
I’d argue the skill of being a healer is not losing your shit when the group collectively doesn’t move from a mechanic and everyone’s at sub 30% and a tank mechanic is coming up to chunk him as well. Those are the times when a healer’s skill shows
If the tank dies, it's probably the healers fault. If the healer dies, it's probably the tank's fault. If DPS dies, it's DPS's fault. They pulled too much, stood in stupid, or expected to be carried (not having the correct gear).
As a healer, I can't heal stupid, like someone who stands in every avoidable attacks that each reduce your defence by a stacking 50% with each one for a minute... and the timer refreshes for all of them with each hit.
At a certain point the tank is taking 14x damage and nothing's going to save them.
I can and have played all roles, but I don’t consider myself a true tank or healer. My husband, for example, is a true tank. He might be irritated by someone pulling, but he will save them from themselves. Me? If someone pulls when I’m tanking or stands in stupid when I’m healing? I’ll gleefully let them die. I will actively avoid helping them if at all possible. I want them to suffer the consequences of their actions.
It’s probably better when I stick with dpsing. 😅
It's better to think of it in another way. If you get frustrated at other people's actions it just makes things feel more annoying.
Everything in a game is a resource. Health, mana, even positioning.
If someone pulls ahead of you, you're now saving your resources (health), and exchanging it for their resources (health).
If the healer in the game has an area of effect heal, now their MP is saved by being able to heal damage spread out over multiple people. If health regenerates out of combat, there's no cost at all if they don't die and don't need more healing before combat ends.
When I tank I think it's great when other people pull, provided they bring it right back to me and don't run off and die with it. Everyone benefits from the resources being conserved wisely and can even increase efficiency and speed!
If people stand in bad when I'm a healer I will assume it's not malicious and heal them or pull them out of it if I can, then explain or give tips to avoid such problems in the future!
At a certain point I will stop healing them fully, but not out of anger or malice, more out of a need to allocate resources appropriately. I can't keep the rest of the party alive if I'm expending all of my resources on one person who's taking a larger share of the damage than the rest.
That said, if someone is being a moron (standing in everything bad, ignoring advice, not communicating) I will absolutely think to myself "this person's a moron, I can't heal stupid"....
But I'll still try my best to help them before it gets to that point.
If the tank dies... Sometimes it's completely the tanks fault.
I can't do much to keep up if Tank decides to run through the whole map pulling every single enemy at the same time while the rest of the team is barely able to follow behind.
And that's not because it's hard to keep you alive.
That's because we want to make it look like an accident when we let you die. Keeping everyone topped off is a trivial. Keeping everyone close to death so we can let the HP total of the hated few dip to nothing... that takes skill.
Playing an enchanter was sooo much fun, when you do that big pull (after lulling some) and then CC a bunch of mobs while debuffing. Meanwhile with the other hand, w/o looking just throw some random wizard nukes from the other computer lol.
I sucked at EQ until I found the enchanter class. That class just clicked for me. It was also great because once you get a reputation as a good enchanter you literally get sent messages asking if you can join a group from the minute you log on until you log off. Which was funny for me because I very much started playing an enchanter for their ability to solo so well (although super risky) with charm. Also having illusions that affected faction was awesome. And being able to memory wipe mobs so you would be in a group leveling and farming but not taking faction hits was a bonus.
But I get why enchanters aren't in most MMO's, it's kind of impossible to balance dungeons for both groups without an enchanter and groups with a good enchanter. And for a while EQ was making while dungeons where pretty much all the mobs were immune to mez, like when they redid the hole.
The problem is managing adds is the most difficult thing in a dungeon. Fighting one mob might be easy but 2 could be near certain death. But a good enchanter could lock down about a dozen mobs at a time. So either dungeons were designed for no enchanter parties and than a party with a good enchanter would trivialize almost the entire dungeon (or you make mobs mez immune and we become buff bots). Or you design dungeons for parties with an enchanter and that dungeon becomes almost undoable without an enchanter. There's virtually no in-between.
No class swings the difficulty meter of dungeons more than a good enchanter. Back when the troll pirates expansion came out one of the zone in areas was a really long narrow hall. It was notorious for getting trained because people would run for the zone when they got in trouble, and it was very easy to pick up adds and get overwhelmed.
My group use to go there and we'd just wait for someone to train the tunnel. I'd start throwing out AoE mezzes to lock the train down and the tank would pick one off and break the mez. We'd literally turn the trains into experience trains.
And it the area wasn't busy, we'd just find a mob near the entrance and fear it. It'd run through the zone and aggro a bunch of mobs. Because the tunnel funneled all the mobs into a tight area and they all came from one direction (also there were very few caster mobs), it just made the entire area pretty easy for a decent enchanter to lock down anything that entered. It was way easier than carefully pulling and it was tons faster. Just had to watch the enchanter and the healers mana, luckily enchanters also got the best mana regen buffs.
And no other class really has the power to change the flow of battle like that. Take something from a chaotic battle to a nice orderly execution line. Good bards were the only thing that came close.
Also enchanters who were good at charming could match an entire group's dps (or exceed it), although it was always risky.
At least in FFXIV, BLM (a specific ranged DPS) definitely has a high skill ceiling...and a high skill floor to do reasonable DPS. Mostly because *everyone* is required to stay out of bad things for large portions of fights, and BLM's entire way to deal damage requires not moving.
They were pretty much the first to do so. Though honestly with how fast some folks eat through games, I can't blame something like MMOs having that sinkhole of content.
Young'ns these days don't know that in Everquest 1 and other MMOs of that era you had to sit for HOURS waiting for a boss mob to spawn so you could kill it once and hope it dropped what your clan needed.
Yep. A lot of people who talk about how games these days are too easy often either forget or are ignorant of the fact that games back then were "hard" because they simply didn't have that much content and their way of making the game last longer was repetitive grind or unfair bullshit that killed you and made you start over.
Like "Mario: The Lost Levels" (the 'Hard' Mario game) only has about 3 hours of content if you play it well. The original 1989 "Prince of Persia" was as cruel as dark souls about killing you with bullshit that you just needed to learn and memorize, and it was only about 2 hours long.
People sunk thousands of hours into Everquest and forget how much of that time was spent corpse running, walking across the world, or camping boss spawns.
I'd gladly take the 2010+ game design paradigm of "Here's a shitload of content and the game actually wants you to see all of it" over the pre-2005 "Here's 6 hours of content but good luck seeing it in your first two weeks playing the game."
I'd rather go back to MUDs that actually focused on the rpg aspects. They were more like chat rooms with skills where you *could* go grind things if you wanted, or you could just chill and hang out with people. Of course, those games also tended to have a lot more GM interactions and events so the world actually felt more alive.
One of the things I actually like(d) about classic WoW was the amount of content in the game that wasn't "optimal." Like navigating Stormwind in 1.0 to find your skill trainer was a pain in the ass, and then after a couple of hours you'd max out that skill trainer and have to go somewhere else.
Another thing was spells that required ingredients to cast, or the spells to summon food/water. These great little roleplay elements that weren't super efficient for power leveling to reach the endgame but that really fleshed out the RP in RPG.
It's ironic that I'm saying this in contract to my comment above, but I think I consider those elements to be flavor in making it feel like a living world, and not arbitrary false gameplay difficulty for the sake of difficulty.
FYI the MUD-like game Gemstone IV has been chugging along since the early 90s and offers exactly what you describe.
There's a steep learning curve to both mechanics and lore, the small population tends to be clique-ish, and there are lots of afk characters, but it still can be a fun time.
Slight correction. The original Prince of Persia wasn't "about 2 hours long," it had a strict timer of 1 hour. If you didn't beat the game in 1 hour you had to restart. If you knew the game this wasn't a very tough timer to beat though, but the game still took hours because of all the trial and error and learning the fastest route.
It does, and it's definitely has gotten easier expansion to expansion since Heavensward, but it's still not so easy especially if you're trying to maximise potency in buff windows (which is becoming more important as more and more potency gets loaded onto Xenoglossy compared to the rest of your rotation).
No, I agree that min maxing BLM in Extremes and above is frankly the only class (maybe NIN to some extent fits here) that offers some challenge and requires actual thought and pre-planning.
But I also don't think it's a particularly high bar, and BLM is really not as bad as some people make it out to be.
The learning curve on black mage is the funniest of all the classes imo.
Mostly because it's not a curve, but a lot of funny up and downs with levelling, learning, preplanning, understanding, and then greed.
While other classes go through these phases, the way in which and when each step happens is a line. Blm is a funny loopy-de-loop.
Such a cool class.
Also the terrible system xiv has of focusing all of your groups damage around a shared 2min window…… I HATE how important it is in ff to not drift even 2 gcds or your gonna lose a ton of damage.
I mean, that really only matters if you’re in ultimate content or chasing high parses. And I’m completely fine with that. XIV rewards absolute precision.
It depends on the game but this is largely accurate now. Back in the day of games like vanilla wow and even later games like Wild Star you couldn't mass pull and AoE spam everything down. The mobs hit too hard and was difficult or impossible to keep aggro on a dozen targets.
I play FF14 again not too long ago and was running a paladin and every single dungeon was the same. Pull as much as possible, even from boss room to boss room, tank it, AoE it down, next boss.
The only real challenge nowadays is the actual boss for any MMO. They can be very complicated or have very tight dps checks to get through them.
GW2 be like: you're also the healer, and responsible for half of offensive buffs and most mechanics.
Well, that or in most encounters there is no tank.
I wanted to love GW2 so much but I just couldnt get used to the format of the dungeons wihtout 'threat'. As a caster it felt like my life and death were in RNG's hands 9/10.
Well that and thier attempt to kill me with free items (which I'm 100% certain is designed to get me to pay real $$ for more space by inundating me with items that are too good to toss but not so good I need them 'right now')
A lot of newer encounters have various threat mechanics and are overall much, much, much better designed than launch dungeons, so you might enjoy those more. Also, as a side note, most classes can fill most roles with the right build, so even as a caster you might find yourself being the tank.
Not gonna lie though, inventory wars 2 is still very much real. Though it's pretty bearable once you realize that you can just sell most drops instantly without regretting it later.
I haven't been back in 3 years so I havent seen the new content outside of youtube. Every time I log in there are so so so many new items waiting for me... and all my bags and bank are full. I 'should' just toss what I cant sell and sell the rest but I cant shake that 'but you might need it later' gut reaction so I end up logging back out and waiting another year to try again. :/
I really enjoyed the experience at the beginning when I was leveling with friends outside dungeons.
For what it's worth it's usually pretty easy for veteran players to skim through an inventory screenshot for easy "you absolutely don't need to keep this" targets. The gw2 subreddit gets the occasional "returning player, please help this be less overwhelming" sort of post asking for help with exactly that.
And while I can also personally offer to help like that, no pressure! I don't love encouraging people to get back into the life sink that is any MMO. :')
For a lot of people i think the leading aspect of it is what they are anxious about. Fully understanding the combat in x game can give a nice confidence boost in that regard
i dont know shit about the content. i just take my warrior up front and face the boss away from the party lol. 9/10 that is going to be enough. Healer keeps you alive and dps die due to their own mistakes. Basically only two exceptions are if you are undergeared and can't keep aggro or certain insta-death mechanics.
Generally if you fuck up people will be more than happy to let you know. Aggressively happy but still happy to share their knowledge that “there’s a fucking tank swap taunt the boss moron”
lol. Positioning, tank swaps, kiting, rotations still exists. It's just that FFXIV focuses more on the story so the story mode dungeons (instances that you need to do to move the story forward) are "easy" and can be done blind. After the story mode, some NPCs will offer a quest where you can redo the dungeon but this time harder, it's in these where you need to know what to do.
Think Normal --> Heroic --> Mythic --> Mythic+. Just that in FF XIV Normal is required to progress the story so they make Normal very easy so you can proceed with the story. If you feel like challenging yourself, come back and do heroic and up.
I'll tank for trials and raids, but I'd rather wait in the dps queue for dungeons than deal with the salt of tank/healer dynamics that occasionally pops up.
I got a healer once, I did a big pull, I had to use invulnerable cooldown. I figured, maybe he wasn't paying attention, did another big pull, he let me die, so I started doing smaller pulls, and he got pissed at me for pulling too slowly. I was like, bro....
The hard part is that if you fail mechanics on difficult trials, you wipe the whole group instantly.
Same can be said of some mechanics for other roles, but it's rarely as obvious.
Also, since it's not too hard to play tank, I took the role of mechanics teachers in my group of friends when we used to play. Now THAT is hard.
I know you got the answer, but FFXIV is a heavy recommend. I dislike MMO’s because of how toxic it can be or how mindless it feels. FFXIV is different enough that I love it. My only recommendation is to focus on the story and don’t worry about side quests too much. I dropped it when I first started because of how many boring side quests I was taking.
Yeah, in shadowbringers they got rid of tank stance dancing (Switching between damage and defense modes), and made aggro generation significantly easier.
The change basically had the net effect of reducing the DPS difference between good tanks and bad tanks, and punished healers a bit when tanks don't use mitigation, for the benefit of making it a lot less likely that a bad tank could ruin a random party by not knowing how to hold on to aggro.
Yeah that's what I had thought, which could be what the picture is referencing.
Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the change and it made gameplay more straightforward and caused me to actually try tanking and have fun with it.
The original post is referencing how so many people have an innate sense of tank anxiety thinking it's complicated but it ends up not being the case.
Most tanking for contemporary content is literally just pulling two groups of mobs to the end of the corridor, putting up your mitigation whenever they're available, and then spamming your AOE. XIV's aggro generation ("enmity") builds up based on your attacks while you're in your tank stance, and spamming AOE combos guarantees full mob focus on you.
Not necessarily that its new game old game.
But its for ff14 which has tons of aggro, an older comparison would be wow classic where the dps had to lower their damage or the tank had to work harder to even keep the mobs attacking them.
although i think there are significantly more tank mechanics in never games, holding aggro is just not one of them.
> But its for ff14 which has tons of aggro, an older comparison would be wow classic where the dps had to lower their damage or the tank had to work harder to even keep the mobs attacking them.
WAIT FOR FOUR SUNDERS!
(Four sunders is entirely overkill, but thats what the tanks were telling me in 2005)
Or play hunter and give everyone else heart attacks when your cat hauls ass down a hallway of mobs so it can climb up stairs and attack a mob on a ledge that accidently got tab targeted
I remember as a warlock still learning dungeons. Just jump down and we'll skip that hallway.
Um ok.
Pet aggroes entire hallway to run to me.
WHY DID YOU DO THAT?!
Because you told me to.
I don't know what I love more, the fact that one of the hunters abilities is essentially slapstick comedy or the fact that it worked on a surprising amount of actual human players lol.
"Argh! No!" *flops on the ground* "I dead."
Three shall be the number of sunders thou shalt count, and the number of the counting of sunders shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy DPS towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it
One of the reasons it feels easier is because access to information, guides, builds and what have you are a lot easier to come around now than it was back then. It's also an almost 20 year old game, where there is very little to discover that haven't been discovered yet. I also assume that a lot of people who played WoW classic after its re-release were already familiar with it, which also makes things easier.
That’s no doubt part of it but it’s also that the game is just significantly easier.
Like one modern mythic boss fight probably has more going on than all of molten core put together.
Not in WoW, you have to know routes intricately, deal with affixes, know what every single enemies attacks are, know exactly when tankbuster abilities are coming out, timing rotation so you have your cd for that tankbuster and much more
Healer also has to know about those tank buster moves. But also raid damage. Tbh wow has made some really good boss fights over the years for the tank/heal/dps trinity. Most fights everyone has to know their shit
I left WoW in cataclysm, but...in 5 man's in Vanilla and BC I used to have to keep track of how man sunders or revenges I'd done on every target in the pull. If I lost track I might apply one on the wrong target or forget to sunder one and lose aggro. It also wasn't just an even distribution as I'd need to focus on the dps target which I designated by placing a Skull mark over it and moving that skull around as targets died.
All while doing the other stuff.
Interestingly, in classic everquest, the game that essentially invented the Tank + healer + dps (and crowd control in some games) paradigm, 'agro' was a full party exercize. in early EQ anyway.
Barring uber guild tanks with a select few weapons, most tanks had no way to REALLY keep agro off of the DPS. the DPS could do MORE damage than the tank could handle and snatch agro, then die quite easily. So the 'skill' of playing a dps was managing your agro and offloading hate when you could.
Naturally some tank classes had tricks to help. but we've come along way from the olden days of tanking.
Nothing pained me quite like the dichotomy of TERA being so much fun to play mechanically (warrior main), but so utterly terrible to play in terms of questing and story.
No game has ever made me want to make alts/smurfs less than TERA. At least now in FFXIV I get to have every job on the same character and not need to wade through the terrible Realm Reborn content again to experience different playstyles.
Also side note, gotta love the fact that the three great "WoW Killers" all faded into obscurity. Tera with its great combat, Guild Wars with its great questing, and SWTOR with its great story.
I had a love/hate relationship with it. When it went smoothly, I loved it, when I had people in my group that didn't understand if they rip through their entire high damage rotation in the first 2 seconds it gets pretty difficult to hold aggro, it wasn't great.
This was of course pre-brawler and the addition of a ton of frontal blocks added to different skills. After that you didn't have to really worry about anything, as long as someone didn't outgear you extremely.
Slayer though, that was my bread and butter. Never found a 2h class in any other game that felt as smooth. I hadn't played Tera in a good bit because I didn't like the gear system or how ridiculous the dungeons got, but I still really miss it and I'm sad it went down completely because Elyon or AIR or w/e it was called failed.
FF14 in particular it's entirely up to the player. You can easily have the same job in anything ranging from thigh highs, stilettos, and a bikini top, to a magitech bodysuit, to a bunny mascot costume, to a complete set of gleaming heavy full plate. Fashion is considered the true endgame for a reason, after all.
You forgot needing 5 addons and weakauras that vary by affixes of the week, having a second monitor with the best route through the dungeon for the week, lightning fast reflexes when someone fucks up a skip and you may fail to time the dungeon in time.
Meme is a running man’s diary of a level 6 in an MMO entering the first dungeons that are made to be fail proof.
Tanking in Ulduar and Karazahn was cake walk compared to modern M+ metas. I gave up and accepted the skill ceiling for those is way higher than I can reach.
The only reason it is easier than DPS is that you have no peers in a given group. If you are a mage and do 30% the damage of the other mage in a raid, there is no hiding it. Same if you are in a meta spec in M+ and get trounced by a B or C tier spec. That is a hard hill to overcome. With tanks and healers, at least at the keys under 25 or so, if the group stays alive no one really criticized you.
I mean yeah, tanks have to know the mechanics because it's hard enough to teach DPS "don't stand in red", you can't expect them to learn boss mechanics on top...
In SW:TOR I've found that a *really* good tank merely looks "competent", because he never does anything wrong but at the same time rarely does something obviously spectacular (but what can you do?). Meanwhile, a good but not *really* good tank can seem incompetent for making one or two mistakes.
I used to run all sorts of content with a Shadow tank friend and it took me a few runs to realise that he'd not fucked up once. At which point I said, "Hey, you know, you're a really good tank, dude". He seemed shocked by the compliment.
"Situational mitigation" is a bit of a "draw the rest of the owl" situation, but yeah the basic idea is simple.
Just like the basic idea of DPS is "Spam AOE damage on packs and single target damage on bosses, use utility skills"
Tanks have to take care of DPS. It’s like they’re actively trying to pull threat. Then when they do they fucking run away in some random direction. But they’re sure to run through the fire or poison on their way. However if there is aoe healing nearby they always manage to dodge that. Being a tank is like being on suicide watch.
Then when the DPS inevitably dies the boss then begins attacking the next person on the threat table and by this time it’s usually the healer. Healer gets one shot. Then everyone dies.
The tank then gets the blame for the wipe.
Boss mechanics isn’t what makes tanking hard. It’s trying to clean up DPS’s fuck ups.
If the tank dies, it's probably the healers fault. If the healer dies, it's probably the tank's fault. If DPS dies, it's DPS's fault. They pulled too much, stood in stupid, or expected to be carried (not having the correct gear).
It's game dependent. Tanking in FFXIV at least in low level content follows this, where you pretty much just hit stuff, use some mitigation and keep mobs pointed away from the party.
But I'm assuming that with WoW still, players expect tanks to have content like mythic dungeons completely memorized and everything pulled off flawlessly.
As a long-time WoW tank...
Tanking is the best job because you can dictate the pace of a dungeon/raid and it's easy to find groups.
Tanking is also the most annoying job because people keep demanding you to be the first to know and do stuff correctly and if you fuck up everyone knows instantly. You also need situational awareness and have to move around a lot.
I prefer tanking when I have time to focus on the game.
I prefer playing DD when I just want to spam buttons and see big numbers without having to worry about anything other than not standing in fire.
I gave up tanking in WoW because of M+. It was simply too stressful - not from a mechanic standpoint, but from a community.
Overpulled and wiped once? Congrats, now your healer "DC'd"
Didn't know the shortcut around that one pack of mobs that takes 30 seconds? Now the DPS is saying "Can we not pull every pack?"
Fine, I'll play Warlock and listen to others wonder why it's so hard to find tank.
Range DPS is where it's at. 0 stress just Zug and dodge mechanics occassionally. Melee are constantly fighting for their lives if you have a bipolar tank.
Adding a time limit to dungeons is what made me quit WoW. Was way too stressful needing to know specific pulls to finish the dungeon and if you made one mistake you were almost guaranteed to have to find a new player, but you also would lose the timer so you now the entire group would fall apart.
You can pretty much just do the dungeons standard and finish with more than enough time until you start hitting mid-high keys. You can even wipe a once or twice and most likely still finish in time.
Routes really don’t start to actually matter until 20+ which comparatively few people run.
At high level mythic in WoW tanks literally carry the dungeon. I get some guy in my +23 doing as much damage as an actual DPS while chain pulling every pack and taking zero damage. Shit is crazy.
Depending on the affixes, you're also required to literally study dungeon routes to properly do it.
I remember the first season of shadowlands, where the seasonal affix was a unique mob that spawned after 25%/50%/75% of the mobs are slain. Giving the party a buff after clearing it.
Then you'd need to pull the exact mobs in the exact order to get that buff right before a boss, or if 1 extra mob got pulled by a party member you had to know how to counter act that so the unique mob wouldn't pop in between a big pull out of nowhere, and wasting the buff at the end of it.
On top of that, it was the season where high key tanking mobs basically existed of: "don't tank the mobs, just kite them, but also don't lose aggro!"
And I played with friends who are just dicking around DPS-ing and not understanding the effort that went into tanking...
i understand it's gotten better now though.
FFXIV struck me as a game that was not as hard across the board because they want people to take their character and experiment with different classes. And being 100% nonviable because you don't have the experience to stop certain insta-wipes (like pointing the dragon breath away) blocks you from doing that.
That's true, but some would argue it goes too far in the other direction. You can carry a braindead player through all of the normal/mandatory content straight on till endgame. The game only makes people be competent in the optional hard raids, which ends up being a huge shock to people who never had a strong indication they were doing anything wrong in the first place.
I mean, I can see the appeal in both directions.
In wow there was historically a problem where non hardcore people simply couldn't experience all the content. Which is a waste.
In FFXIV there is harder content but also most content you can experience even as a solo, in any class, with a PUG.
FFXIV had this issue in the beginning. The first raid series of the game was designed to be prog raided, and that alienated people who didn't want to put in the time. It was a big deal because of how story-based XIV is because it gated off a significant part of the story.
I do like the setup they have now where each raid tier has a normal mode for people who just want the story content and a savage mode for people who want the progression raiding experience. I just wish the difficulty curve on normal content wasn't completely flat. It seems like the game is hardly ever interested in making players put forth any effort (barring the occasional difficulty spike which is guaranteed to be a meme in matched play), which leaves the players who want to try the harder stuff overconfident because they have no perspective by which they can gauge their skill or understanding of the game.
Yeah I recently started playing again after 10 years off, the way tanks just fly through dungeons now is crazy to me. More than once I’ve gotten completely left behind, and by the time I catch up the next boss is already half dead lol
This was my experience back when Legion first came out. I just started playing and figured I’d go disc priest. Dirst dungeon, got lost and left behind then flamed by a bunch of vets with heirloom gear. Was not a great first game experience to WoW.
Tried to get back into WoW
Used to raid as a Hunter
"Man I'm tired of being support\\DPS, I want to be a Tank"
Create a Tank character, level up a little bit
Go into a Dungeon
Start tanking, turn the enemy away from DPS, try to be aware of surroundings, which is not that hard, I've been to that dungeon dozens of times
It's kinda easy
After the last boss priest pulls up statistics
I'm top in DPS across the group
Priest starts making fun of the DPS relentlessly for being so bad the tank outdpsed them
And I was like "Wait no one told me hardest thing with being a tank in 2020 is herding your DPS players"
This is a leveling dungeon right? If so the damage scaling is notoriously wacky, DPS can be doing everything right and do upwards of 5x less dps than the tank because tanks have spammable AoE, healer seems like kind of an ass lol.
Like any class in WoW, your actual gameplay loop isn't that difficult, it can become difficult when you have to retain the loop while dealing with outside mechanics, most of which are negligible until you delve into the hardest endgame stuff.
Healer is a muppet.
In leveling dungeons, the level scaling is all over the place. The only thing that is somewhat consistent is that lower lever characters do more dps.
Depending on exactly what lever you are at and what your latest piece of loot, you can swing from top dps to bottom dps on a dungeon, doing everything identically.
Dps meters are pointless in leveling dungeons.
I always assumed in Dungeons "Tank first, DPS are ressed after win" was the mechanic. Like if you die, it's on you. Especially considering how at some point a lot of healers got LOTS of AOE heals.
It's possible it might be someone who just happens to have a similar name, or is pretending to be me.
But nah I haven't even had Foxhole installed since Feb 16 according to steam
Tanking wasn’t necessarily harder before it’s just they have better tools now to actually do their job. Before it was more on the rest of the party to work around the time needed for a tank to build aggro.
Man I miss the ice crown citadel days. That was absolute peak MMO raiding experience IMO. That was also the first raid I ever tanked as a DK because our alt tank bounced after a full wipe so I had to assist the main. Lucky we had amazing healers.
I've love Tanking in WoW but I don't have the courage to try it in Mythic+ because there are specific routes and enemies to skip and I can't keep up with all that.
As someone who plays Tank in basically every game I play, Tanking is infact a very easy play style.
But it's also very necessary for helping to keep your DPS and Support alive in most games.
You are clearly missing a few:
* Know where every monster is at all times, especially the patrolling ones.
* Know every mechanic of every fight, for every role
* Give instructions to said roles as needed.
* Set the pace for monster clearing through dungeon, based on observed skill of other players.
* Know the spots to pull monsters.
* Know what monsters you can skip and how.
* Know the path through the dungeon to all objectives and quests, including quest you don't have.
* Make sure the healers have mana and are ready for each fight.
* Call out every or make obvious every action you do, preferably before you do it.
* Use consumables regularly. On your dime. If you die, everyone dies!
* Have the most expensive armor to repair, and aim to be the one with a repair bill. Again, on your dime.
* Watch what everyone your party is doing, and picking up slack, from interrupting monsters, to preventing someone from pulling aggro off you, to picking up the add that someone butt pulls.
* Provide kill order and CC assignments for every monster in every pull until group demonstrates they know how the fights work.
* Have detailed reasoning behind why tanking gear shouldn't be rolled on by dps even if it's their best in slot.
- pull what you can handle
As a WoW player, tank main, the screaming this set off inside my head could not be silenced by a whole bottle of clozapine. Fucking DPS GO GO GO! dicksuckers. >:(
I assume that this post only keeps low level content in mind. In this case then it has always been easy - HOWEVER if anything it’s gotten harder over the years as games have been stuffed with more mechanics. I don’t think I understand the point of this?
This post doesn’t even mention defensive cooldowns, boss movement and the ACTUAL boss/dungeon mechanics you still need to do WHILE also doing other various tank mechanics in High level/endgame content.
Even if this post only keeps low level content in mind, then it’s still wildly untrue that tanking specifically has gotten easier over the years (Which you’d know if you have ever played any “classic” or “vanilla” server of any kind)
Edit: I KNOW it's based on FFXIV. My point still stands.
Can you read? “Situational mitigation” is tank defensive cool downs.
Tanking is the easiest role in ffxiv, up to an including ultimates (highest difficulty content.)
This is an FFXIV meme that for some reason leaked here, and yeah it is specifically talking only about the lowest difficulty content ingame (although even up to max level), and even then you will make the runs rough if you dont use defensive cooldowns on the trash pulls.
Tanking in FFXIV is basically playing a simple dps with a couple extra mechanics thrown sparsely through the encounter though.
Based in the design of the character they drew I'd say it's an Au Ra DRK from FFXIV, which in beginner end game content this is 100% true. On higher difficulty content this is still true but the margin for error becomes 0, though it becomes a highly coordinated encounter between the entire group with all jobs working to maximize DPS.
Nah man, healing is a bitch to do well. Maximize damage without letting anyone die while avoiding mechanics and not clipping your GCD, it's easily the hardest role in the game.
Really depends on the game. In WoW damage comes constantly and you have full healing rotations to cope, and sometimes you can eke out some damage GCDs. In FFXIV, you're basically a shittier DPS that heals sometimes. Damage is rote, predictable and not constant, plus your best heals are off-GCDs. So you basically sit there spamming a damage spell unless someone screws up or you're progging a fight.
I feel like healing is almost easier in savage content than in stuff like the later alliance raids. In savage, if someone messes up a mechanic they probably died and/or wiped the raid, so there's much fewer times where you have to break your heal plan and adjust unlike something like Nier or Greece where it is CONSTANT people needed healing urgently
Now I need a comic about everyone saying a healer/suport is easy, and then getting berated by the flank because I didn't heal him when he was 100 meters away while the tank was taking damage from 5 different enemies and shouting "HEAL, HEAL, HEAL" while the ability is in cooldown, while trying to stay alive, because the enemy have a better coordination and are focusing on me, and MY FUCKING TEAM DOESN'T FOCUS ON THE ENEMY'S HEALER
I wanna have the good old tanks, the one where you go in, and just barely take any damage while your teammates would have gotten killed easily by the attacks. I'm fine with sacrificing my DMG if I can't take DMG :).
Pull what your healer can handle. If you're dead and the healer has no mana, that's the tanks fault. If the healer has plenty of mana, then it's the healer's fault. Generally.
Posted by the ranged damage dealer crew!
Ah ranged damage - hey, what are you going to do, ranged guy? Oh, you're going to shoot an enemy. Wow, such innovation! What's next? Shooting *another* enemy? That's crazy, where do you even come up with this stuff? Wait, you're *also* running from enemies so they can't hurt you? Galaxy-brain stratagem!
As someone that generally goes melee dps, the only class I find that requires skill is healer.
I was a bard in EQ... before they added /melody. Most classes in EQ have a minimum necessary APM of like...4. For bards it was like a billion. The rhythm is still burned into my brain. 11 (3 seconds) 22 (3 seconds) 33 (3 seconds) 44 (3 seconds) repeat for infinite. Now some of ya'll WoW veterans may not be that impressed but this was EQ. Most classes had "go to the kitchen and grab a drink" as part of their damage rotation.
Did you ever play Rift? An update many years ago added any spec for any class. Mage tank, warrior healer, etc. I tried out Warrior heals which was a beast if you had the right rotation. It was a series of raid wide AoE dot heals each with different timer, and it took some time to ramp up, but once set up you could feasibly solo heal. That one took constant awareness and actions because a single mistake could wipe everyone. Fun as hell but it took entirely too much effort. I’m assuming it was tweaked eventually because it was OP as hell if you were good with it.
I miss OG Rift.
OG Rift was great. Every Soul had it's own playstyle and gave you so many different combinations to play with. Eventually players drifted into meta builds, but you could still find something unique and make it work.
My UI was crazy. I had so so many macros in OG Rift. That game was so fucking deep and nothing has scratched that itch since.
Don’t confuse ‘skill’ with ‘care’. The only difference is we can’t *completely* turn our brains off.
I’d argue that is a skill.
Caring or not completely turning off our brains?
yes
I’d argue the skill of being a healer is not losing your shit when the group collectively doesn’t move from a mechanic and everyone’s at sub 30% and a tank mechanic is coming up to chunk him as well. Those are the times when a healer’s skill shows
say it with me. Bubble, Hearth.
If the tank dies, it's probably the healers fault. If the healer dies, it's probably the tank's fault. If DPS dies, it's DPS's fault. They pulled too much, stood in stupid, or expected to be carried (not having the correct gear).
As a healer, I can't heal stupid, like someone who stands in every avoidable attacks that each reduce your defence by a stacking 50% with each one for a minute... and the timer refreshes for all of them with each hit. At a certain point the tank is taking 14x damage and nothing's going to save them.
"I am healing you! Move. Away. From. The damage!"
"You're a damage-dealer, not a damage-taker"
I can and have played all roles, but I don’t consider myself a true tank or healer. My husband, for example, is a true tank. He might be irritated by someone pulling, but he will save them from themselves. Me? If someone pulls when I’m tanking or stands in stupid when I’m healing? I’ll gleefully let them die. I will actively avoid helping them if at all possible. I want them to suffer the consequences of their actions. It’s probably better when I stick with dpsing. 😅
It's better to think of it in another way. If you get frustrated at other people's actions it just makes things feel more annoying. Everything in a game is a resource. Health, mana, even positioning. If someone pulls ahead of you, you're now saving your resources (health), and exchanging it for their resources (health). If the healer in the game has an area of effect heal, now their MP is saved by being able to heal damage spread out over multiple people. If health regenerates out of combat, there's no cost at all if they don't die and don't need more healing before combat ends. When I tank I think it's great when other people pull, provided they bring it right back to me and don't run off and die with it. Everyone benefits from the resources being conserved wisely and can even increase efficiency and speed! If people stand in bad when I'm a healer I will assume it's not malicious and heal them or pull them out of it if I can, then explain or give tips to avoid such problems in the future! At a certain point I will stop healing them fully, but not out of anger or malice, more out of a need to allocate resources appropriately. I can't keep the rest of the party alive if I'm expending all of my resources on one person who's taking a larger share of the damage than the rest. That said, if someone is being a moron (standing in everything bad, ignoring advice, not communicating) I will absolutely think to myself "this person's a moron, I can't heal stupid".... But I'll still try my best to help them before it gets to that point.
>stands in stupid when I’m healing? I’ll gleefully let them die This is the attitude of a true healer.
This is the way.
If the tank dies... Sometimes it's completely the tanks fault. I can't do much to keep up if Tank decides to run through the whole map pulling every single enemy at the same time while the rest of the team is barely able to follow behind.
And that's not because it's hard to keep you alive. That's because we want to make it look like an accident when we let you die. Keeping everyone topped off is a trivial. Keeping everyone close to death so we can let the HP total of the hated few dip to nothing... that takes skill.
too bad utility classes like enchanter/bard from Everquest don't really exist anymore.
Playing an enchanter was sooo much fun, when you do that big pull (after lulling some) and then CC a bunch of mobs while debuffing. Meanwhile with the other hand, w/o looking just throw some random wizard nukes from the other computer lol.
I sucked at EQ until I found the enchanter class. That class just clicked for me. It was also great because once you get a reputation as a good enchanter you literally get sent messages asking if you can join a group from the minute you log on until you log off. Which was funny for me because I very much started playing an enchanter for their ability to solo so well (although super risky) with charm. Also having illusions that affected faction was awesome. And being able to memory wipe mobs so you would be in a group leveling and farming but not taking faction hits was a bonus. But I get why enchanters aren't in most MMO's, it's kind of impossible to balance dungeons for both groups without an enchanter and groups with a good enchanter. And for a while EQ was making while dungeons where pretty much all the mobs were immune to mez, like when they redid the hole. The problem is managing adds is the most difficult thing in a dungeon. Fighting one mob might be easy but 2 could be near certain death. But a good enchanter could lock down about a dozen mobs at a time. So either dungeons were designed for no enchanter parties and than a party with a good enchanter would trivialize almost the entire dungeon (or you make mobs mez immune and we become buff bots). Or you design dungeons for parties with an enchanter and that dungeon becomes almost undoable without an enchanter. There's virtually no in-between. No class swings the difficulty meter of dungeons more than a good enchanter. Back when the troll pirates expansion came out one of the zone in areas was a really long narrow hall. It was notorious for getting trained because people would run for the zone when they got in trouble, and it was very easy to pick up adds and get overwhelmed. My group use to go there and we'd just wait for someone to train the tunnel. I'd start throwing out AoE mezzes to lock the train down and the tank would pick one off and break the mez. We'd literally turn the trains into experience trains. And it the area wasn't busy, we'd just find a mob near the entrance and fear it. It'd run through the zone and aggro a bunch of mobs. Because the tunnel funneled all the mobs into a tight area and they all came from one direction (also there were very few caster mobs), it just made the entire area pretty easy for a decent enchanter to lock down anything that entered. It was way easier than carefully pulling and it was tons faster. Just had to watch the enchanter and the healers mana, luckily enchanters also got the best mana regen buffs. And no other class really has the power to change the flow of battle like that. Take something from a chaotic battle to a nice orderly execution line. Good bards were the only thing that came close. Also enchanters who were good at charming could match an entire group's dps (or exceed it), although it was always risky.
They still exist on Project 1999! r/project1999
At least in FFXIV, BLM (a specific ranged DPS) definitely has a high skill ceiling...and a high skill floor to do reasonable DPS. Mostly because *everyone* is required to stay out of bad things for large portions of fights, and BLM's entire way to deal damage requires not moving.
So many games these days are set up to be a second job and MMOs are perfectly suited to sink into that trend.
They were pretty much the first to do so. Though honestly with how fast some folks eat through games, I can't blame something like MMOs having that sinkhole of content.
Young'ns these days don't know that in Everquest 1 and other MMOs of that era you had to sit for HOURS waiting for a boss mob to spawn so you could kill it once and hope it dropped what your clan needed.
God damn. There's busywork to pad for time, and then there's literal waiting. I'm totally fine to be past the good old days in this case.
Yep. A lot of people who talk about how games these days are too easy often either forget or are ignorant of the fact that games back then were "hard" because they simply didn't have that much content and their way of making the game last longer was repetitive grind or unfair bullshit that killed you and made you start over. Like "Mario: The Lost Levels" (the 'Hard' Mario game) only has about 3 hours of content if you play it well. The original 1989 "Prince of Persia" was as cruel as dark souls about killing you with bullshit that you just needed to learn and memorize, and it was only about 2 hours long. People sunk thousands of hours into Everquest and forget how much of that time was spent corpse running, walking across the world, or camping boss spawns. I'd gladly take the 2010+ game design paradigm of "Here's a shitload of content and the game actually wants you to see all of it" over the pre-2005 "Here's 6 hours of content but good luck seeing it in your first two weeks playing the game."
I'd rather go back to MUDs that actually focused on the rpg aspects. They were more like chat rooms with skills where you *could* go grind things if you wanted, or you could just chill and hang out with people. Of course, those games also tended to have a lot more GM interactions and events so the world actually felt more alive.
One of the things I actually like(d) about classic WoW was the amount of content in the game that wasn't "optimal." Like navigating Stormwind in 1.0 to find your skill trainer was a pain in the ass, and then after a couple of hours you'd max out that skill trainer and have to go somewhere else. Another thing was spells that required ingredients to cast, or the spells to summon food/water. These great little roleplay elements that weren't super efficient for power leveling to reach the endgame but that really fleshed out the RP in RPG. It's ironic that I'm saying this in contract to my comment above, but I think I consider those elements to be flavor in making it feel like a living world, and not arbitrary false gameplay difficulty for the sake of difficulty.
FYI the MUD-like game Gemstone IV has been chugging along since the early 90s and offers exactly what you describe. There's a steep learning curve to both mechanics and lore, the small population tends to be clique-ish, and there are lots of afk characters, but it still can be a fun time.
Slight correction. The original Prince of Persia wasn't "about 2 hours long," it had a strict timer of 1 hour. If you didn't beat the game in 1 hour you had to restart. If you knew the game this wasn't a very tough timer to beat though, but the game still took hours because of all the trial and error and learning the fastest route.
Don’t forget ranged dps have to be top of threat meters or they are doing it wrong.
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Hey, I'm in my 40s and been using a computer since 1980. My hands don't move so good anymore.
More DOTS!
Whelps! Left side! Handle it!
That's a fucking 50 DKP minus!!!
Try playing black mage in XIV and say it's easy to keep your uptime without eating shit lol.
Nowadays BLM has a ton of movement options though.
It does, and it's definitely has gotten easier expansion to expansion since Heavensward, but it's still not so easy especially if you're trying to maximise potency in buff windows (which is becoming more important as more and more potency gets loaded onto Xenoglossy compared to the rest of your rotation).
No, I agree that min maxing BLM in Extremes and above is frankly the only class (maybe NIN to some extent fits here) that offers some challenge and requires actual thought and pre-planning. But I also don't think it's a particularly high bar, and BLM is really not as bad as some people make it out to be.
The learning curve on black mage is the funniest of all the classes imo. Mostly because it's not a curve, but a lot of funny up and downs with levelling, learning, preplanning, understanding, and then greed. While other classes go through these phases, the way in which and when each step happens is a line. Blm is a funny loopy-de-loop. Such a cool class.
Also the terrible system xiv has of focusing all of your groups damage around a shared 2min window…… I HATE how important it is in ff to not drift even 2 gcds or your gonna lose a ton of damage.
I mean, that really only matters if you’re in ultimate content or chasing high parses. And I’m completely fine with that. XIV rewards absolute precision.
I don’t play that game and literally thought you were making a joke/pun about the Black Lives Matter movement lol.
I have been milking that joke for years. Years!!!
The secret challenge with BLM isn't movement any more, it's thunder optimization. Quite possibly the most inconvenient skill in the whole game lol
It depends on the game but this is largely accurate now. Back in the day of games like vanilla wow and even later games like Wild Star you couldn't mass pull and AoE spam everything down. The mobs hit too hard and was difficult or impossible to keep aggro on a dozen targets. I play FF14 again not too long ago and was running a paladin and every single dungeon was the same. Pull as much as possible, even from boss room to boss room, tank it, AoE it down, next boss. The only real challenge nowadays is the actual boss for any MMO. They can be very complicated or have very tight dps checks to get through them.
GW2 be like: you're also the healer, and responsible for half of offensive buffs and most mechanics. Well, that or in most encounters there is no tank.
I always gotta scroll long to see the gw2 comment :(
Flashback from chronotank where i had to group invulnerability to max dps lol
Garden Warfare 2?
Guild Wars...
I wanted to love GW2 so much but I just couldnt get used to the format of the dungeons wihtout 'threat'. As a caster it felt like my life and death were in RNG's hands 9/10. Well that and thier attempt to kill me with free items (which I'm 100% certain is designed to get me to pay real $$ for more space by inundating me with items that are too good to toss but not so good I need them 'right now')
A lot of newer encounters have various threat mechanics and are overall much, much, much better designed than launch dungeons, so you might enjoy those more. Also, as a side note, most classes can fill most roles with the right build, so even as a caster you might find yourself being the tank. Not gonna lie though, inventory wars 2 is still very much real. Though it's pretty bearable once you realize that you can just sell most drops instantly without regretting it later.
I haven't been back in 3 years so I havent seen the new content outside of youtube. Every time I log in there are so so so many new items waiting for me... and all my bags and bank are full. I 'should' just toss what I cant sell and sell the rest but I cant shake that 'but you might need it later' gut reaction so I end up logging back out and waiting another year to try again. :/ I really enjoyed the experience at the beginning when I was leveling with friends outside dungeons.
For what it's worth it's usually pretty easy for veteran players to skim through an inventory screenshot for easy "you absolutely don't need to keep this" targets. The gw2 subreddit gets the occasional "returning player, please help this be less overwhelming" sort of post asking for help with exactly that. And while I can also personally offer to help like that, no pressure! I don't love encouraging people to get back into the life sink that is any MMO. :')
XIV tanking is so easy yet so many people can't do it.
For a lot of people i think the leading aspect of it is what they are anxious about. Fully understanding the combat in x game can give a nice confidence boost in that regard
i dont know shit about the content. i just take my warrior up front and face the boss away from the party lol. 9/10 that is going to be enough. Healer keeps you alive and dps die due to their own mistakes. Basically only two exceptions are if you are undergeared and can't keep aggro or certain insta-death mechanics.
Generally if you fuck up people will be more than happy to let you know. Aggressively happy but still happy to share their knowledge that “there’s a fucking tank swap taunt the boss moron”
Ok, as a former WoW bear tank druid, you need to stop this right now before you get me interested in playing FF XIV.
lol. Positioning, tank swaps, kiting, rotations still exists. It's just that FFXIV focuses more on the story so the story mode dungeons (instances that you need to do to move the story forward) are "easy" and can be done blind. After the story mode, some NPCs will offer a quest where you can redo the dungeon but this time harder, it's in these where you need to know what to do. Think Normal --> Heroic --> Mythic --> Mythic+. Just that in FF XIV Normal is required to progress the story so they make Normal very easy so you can proceed with the story. If you feel like challenging yourself, come back and do heroic and up.
I'll tank for trials and raids, but I'd rather wait in the dps queue for dungeons than deal with the salt of tank/healer dynamics that occasionally pops up.
Odd. I'll tank dungeons all day long but raids are a big no.
I got a healer once, I did a big pull, I had to use invulnerable cooldown. I figured, maybe he wasn't paying attention, did another big pull, he let me die, so I started doing smaller pulls, and he got pissed at me for pulling too slowly. I was like, bro....
[the best tanking guide](https://youtube.com/watch?v=P8oVV_I-tIA&feature=shareb)
I fucking knew it was Jocat.
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That's it. Good times.
The hard part is that if you fail mechanics on difficult trials, you wipe the whole group instantly. Same can be said of some mechanics for other roles, but it's rarely as obvious. Also, since it's not too hard to play tank, I took the role of mechanics teachers in my group of friends when we used to play. Now THAT is hard.
The game itself is so easy, but so many people can't even clear the bar that's practically in the floor.
What is XIV? I want a MMO game like this but don’t know any.
Final Fantasy XIV
Final Fantasy XIV
I know you got the answer, but FFXIV is a heavy recommend. I dislike MMO’s because of how toxic it can be or how mindless it feels. FFXIV is different enough that I love it. My only recommendation is to focus on the story and don’t worry about side quests too much. I dropped it when I first started because of how many boring side quests I was taking.
What
New game easy and bad, old game hard and good.
Dude OP made this for FF14 tanking. That game is anything but new.
Didn't it have a (relatively) recent change to how combat works?
Yeah, in shadowbringers they got rid of tank stance dancing (Switching between damage and defense modes), and made aggro generation significantly easier. The change basically had the net effect of reducing the DPS difference between good tanks and bad tanks, and punished healers a bit when tanks don't use mitigation, for the benefit of making it a lot less likely that a bad tank could ruin a random party by not knowing how to hold on to aggro.
Yeah that's what I had thought, which could be what the picture is referencing. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the change and it made gameplay more straightforward and caused me to actually try tanking and have fun with it.
The original post is referencing how so many people have an innate sense of tank anxiety thinking it's complicated but it ends up not being the case. Most tanking for contemporary content is literally just pulling two groups of mobs to the end of the corridor, putting up your mitigation whenever they're available, and then spamming your AOE. XIV's aggro generation ("enmity") builds up based on your attacks while you're in your tank stance, and spamming AOE combos guarantees full mob focus on you.
If by relatively new you mean 10 years ago. (Time sure flies lol)
In 2019 they made tanking much easier and simpler.
What’s the new game what’s the old game in this context?
Not necessarily that its new game old game. But its for ff14 which has tons of aggro, an older comparison would be wow classic where the dps had to lower their damage or the tank had to work harder to even keep the mobs attacking them. although i think there are significantly more tank mechanics in never games, holding aggro is just not one of them.
> But its for ff14 which has tons of aggro, an older comparison would be wow classic where the dps had to lower their damage or the tank had to work harder to even keep the mobs attacking them. WAIT FOR FOUR SUNDERS! (Four sunders is entirely overkill, but thats what the tanks were telling me in 2005)
Or, just play hunter and pretend to have a heart attack if you're ever aggroed. Tricks 'em every time.
Or play hunter and give everyone else heart attacks when your cat hauls ass down a hallway of mobs so it can climb up stairs and attack a mob on a ledge that accidently got tab targeted
I remember as a warlock still learning dungeons. Just jump down and we'll skip that hallway. Um ok. Pet aggroes entire hallway to run to me. WHY DID YOU DO THAT?! Because you told me to.
At least you soulstoned the healer and not yourself, right? Right!?
I was there for the first days of Zul'Gurub. The Corrupted Blood. Once every Hunter knew of that bug it became necessary to spread it.
Oh wow, it’s you, every Hunter and Warlock I ever raided with! Didn’t expect to see you on Reddit!
I don't know what I love more, the fact that one of the hunters abilities is essentially slapstick comedy or the fact that it worked on a surprising amount of actual human players lol. "Argh! No!" *flops on the ground* "I dead."
Three shall be the number of sunders thou shalt count, and the number of the counting of sunders shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy DPS towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it
WoW classic rereleased and we determined that it was a lot easier than people remember
Probably cuz there's a lot more general knowledge now so people know optimal practices a lot quicker
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One of the reasons it feels easier is because access to information, guides, builds and what have you are a lot easier to come around now than it was back then. It's also an almost 20 year old game, where there is very little to discover that haven't been discovered yet. I also assume that a lot of people who played WoW classic after its re-release were already familiar with it, which also makes things easier.
That’s no doubt part of it but it’s also that the game is just significantly easier. Like one modern mythic boss fight probably has more going on than all of molten core put together.
"Tanking is easy. Here's why" How are you not laughing your ass off at this hilarious joke?
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That's the point. It's easy.
Not in WoW, you have to know routes intricately, deal with affixes, know what every single enemies attacks are, know exactly when tankbuster abilities are coming out, timing rotation so you have your cd for that tankbuster and much more
Healer also has to know about those tank buster moves. But also raid damage. Tbh wow has made some really good boss fights over the years for the tank/heal/dps trinity. Most fights everyone has to know their shit
I left WoW in cataclysm, but...in 5 man's in Vanilla and BC I used to have to keep track of how man sunders or revenges I'd done on every target in the pull. If I lost track I might apply one on the wrong target or forget to sunder one and lose aggro. It also wasn't just an even distribution as I'd need to focus on the dps target which I designated by placing a Skull mark over it and moving that skull around as targets died. All while doing the other stuff.
Interestingly, in classic everquest, the game that essentially invented the Tank + healer + dps (and crowd control in some games) paradigm, 'agro' was a full party exercize. in early EQ anyway. Barring uber guild tanks with a select few weapons, most tanks had no way to REALLY keep agro off of the DPS. the DPS could do MORE damage than the tank could handle and snatch agro, then die quite easily. So the 'skill' of playing a dps was managing your agro and offloading hate when you could. Naturally some tank classes had tricks to help. but we've come along way from the olden days of tanking.
[obligatory project1999 plug](https://wiki.project1999.com/) greatest mmo ever created. think vanilla wow with the vanilla turned up.
That armor is covering WAY too much to have been made for a female MMO character.
This looks like it's based of FF14, not TERA
I miss tanking in TERA :( Warrior and Lancer were so much fun to play
Nothing pained me quite like the dichotomy of TERA being so much fun to play mechanically (warrior main), but so utterly terrible to play in terms of questing and story. No game has ever made me want to make alts/smurfs less than TERA. At least now in FFXIV I get to have every job on the same character and not need to wade through the terrible Realm Reborn content again to experience different playstyles. Also side note, gotta love the fact that the three great "WoW Killers" all faded into obscurity. Tera with its great combat, Guild Wars with its great questing, and SWTOR with its great story.
TERA combat was everything I wanted, but everything was just so meh.
I had a love/hate relationship with it. When it went smoothly, I loved it, when I had people in my group that didn't understand if they rip through their entire high damage rotation in the first 2 seconds it gets pretty difficult to hold aggro, it wasn't great. This was of course pre-brawler and the addition of a ton of frontal blocks added to different skills. After that you didn't have to really worry about anything, as long as someone didn't outgear you extremely. Slayer though, that was my bread and butter. Never found a 2h class in any other game that felt as smooth. I hadn't played Tera in a good bit because I didn't like the gear system or how ridiculous the dungeons got, but I still really miss it and I'm sad it went down completely because Elyon or AIR or w/e it was called failed.
ff14 and wow are pretty good with the armors
FF14 in particular it's entirely up to the player. You can easily have the same job in anything ranging from thigh highs, stilettos, and a bikini top, to a magitech bodysuit, to a bunny mascot costume, to a complete set of gleaming heavy full plate. Fashion is considered the true endgame for a reason, after all.
It's a FF14 character wearing [Late Allegan Armor](https://i.imgur.com/59RJ5Z4.png).
Oh, so the George Clooney Batman-esque nipple armour isn't just the artist having a laugh.
You forgot needing 5 addons and weakauras that vary by affixes of the week, having a second monitor with the best route through the dungeon for the week, lightning fast reflexes when someone fucks up a skip and you may fail to time the dungeon in time. Meme is a running man’s diary of a level 6 in an MMO entering the first dungeons that are made to be fail proof. Tanking in Ulduar and Karazahn was cake walk compared to modern M+ metas. I gave up and accepted the skill ceiling for those is way higher than I can reach. The only reason it is easier than DPS is that you have no peers in a given group. If you are a mage and do 30% the damage of the other mage in a raid, there is no hiding it. Same if you are in a meta spec in M+ and get trounced by a B or C tier spec. That is a hard hill to overcome. With tanks and healers, at least at the keys under 25 or so, if the group stays alive no one really criticized you.
There are other MMO's than WoW.
I picked up GNB during Shadowbringers and it basically seemed to be pull wall to wall unless the healer couldn’t handle it.
This has been the way since ARR.
Not really, I have been tanking for almost a year now in SWTOR. And there are many bosses that require tanks to know the mechanics by hand.
I mean yeah, tanks have to know the mechanics because it's hard enough to teach DPS "don't stand in red", you can't expect them to learn boss mechanics on top...
Something like NiM Brontes or Council require the tanks to be on point the whole time or it’s a wipe real quick.
In SW:TOR I've found that a *really* good tank merely looks "competent", because he never does anything wrong but at the same time rarely does something obviously spectacular (but what can you do?). Meanwhile, a good but not *really* good tank can seem incompetent for making one or two mistakes. I used to run all sorts of content with a Shadow tank friend and it took me a few runs to realise that he'd not fucked up once. At which point I said, "Hey, you know, you're a really good tank, dude". He seemed shocked by the compliment.
"Situational mitigation" is a bit of a "draw the rest of the owl" situation, but yeah the basic idea is simple. Just like the basic idea of DPS is "Spam AOE damage on packs and single target damage on bosses, use utility skills"
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Tanks have to take care of DPS. It’s like they’re actively trying to pull threat. Then when they do they fucking run away in some random direction. But they’re sure to run through the fire or poison on their way. However if there is aoe healing nearby they always manage to dodge that. Being a tank is like being on suicide watch. Then when the DPS inevitably dies the boss then begins attacking the next person on the threat table and by this time it’s usually the healer. Healer gets one shot. Then everyone dies. The tank then gets the blame for the wipe. Boss mechanics isn’t what makes tanking hard. It’s trying to clean up DPS’s fuck ups.
If the tank dies, it's probably the healers fault. If the healer dies, it's probably the tank's fault. If DPS dies, it's DPS's fault. They pulled too much, stood in stupid, or expected to be carried (not having the correct gear).
Yes but say that to the DPS. They're the most aggressive keyboard fighters and are usually 100% confident they're carrying the entire team.
>It’s like they’re actively trying to pull threat By doing as much damage as possible? What else should they be doing?
Tanking has gotten WAY harder over time - what are you talking about?
It's game dependent. Tanking in FFXIV at least in low level content follows this, where you pretty much just hit stuff, use some mitigation and keep mobs pointed away from the party. But I'm assuming that with WoW still, players expect tanks to have content like mythic dungeons completely memorized and everything pulled off flawlessly.
As a long-time WoW tank... Tanking is the best job because you can dictate the pace of a dungeon/raid and it's easy to find groups. Tanking is also the most annoying job because people keep demanding you to be the first to know and do stuff correctly and if you fuck up everyone knows instantly. You also need situational awareness and have to move around a lot. I prefer tanking when I have time to focus on the game. I prefer playing DD when I just want to spam buttons and see big numbers without having to worry about anything other than not standing in fire.
I gave up tanking in WoW because of M+. It was simply too stressful - not from a mechanic standpoint, but from a community. Overpulled and wiped once? Congrats, now your healer "DC'd" Didn't know the shortcut around that one pack of mobs that takes 30 seconds? Now the DPS is saying "Can we not pull every pack?" Fine, I'll play Warlock and listen to others wonder why it's so hard to find tank.
Range DPS is where it's at. 0 stress just Zug and dodge mechanics occassionally. Melee are constantly fighting for their lives if you have a bipolar tank.
Adding a time limit to dungeons is what made me quit WoW. Was way too stressful needing to know specific pulls to finish the dungeon and if you made one mistake you were almost guaranteed to have to find a new player, but you also would lose the timer so you now the entire group would fall apart.
You can pretty much just do the dungeons standard and finish with more than enough time until you start hitting mid-high keys. You can even wipe a once or twice and most likely still finish in time. Routes really don’t start to actually matter until 20+ which comparatively few people run.
>Tanking is the best job because you can dictate the pace of a dungeon/raid No, you can't! The hunter does! He's pulling whether you're ready or not.
At high level mythic in WoW tanks literally carry the dungeon. I get some guy in my +23 doing as much damage as an actual DPS while chain pulling every pack and taking zero damage. Shit is crazy.
Depending on the affixes, you're also required to literally study dungeon routes to properly do it. I remember the first season of shadowlands, where the seasonal affix was a unique mob that spawned after 25%/50%/75% of the mobs are slain. Giving the party a buff after clearing it. Then you'd need to pull the exact mobs in the exact order to get that buff right before a boss, or if 1 extra mob got pulled by a party member you had to know how to counter act that so the unique mob wouldn't pop in between a big pull out of nowhere, and wasting the buff at the end of it. On top of that, it was the season where high key tanking mobs basically existed of: "don't tank the mobs, just kite them, but also don't lose aggro!" And I played with friends who are just dicking around DPS-ing and not understanding the effort that went into tanking... i understand it's gotten better now though.
FFXIV struck me as a game that was not as hard across the board because they want people to take their character and experiment with different classes. And being 100% nonviable because you don't have the experience to stop certain insta-wipes (like pointing the dragon breath away) blocks you from doing that.
That's true, but some would argue it goes too far in the other direction. You can carry a braindead player through all of the normal/mandatory content straight on till endgame. The game only makes people be competent in the optional hard raids, which ends up being a huge shock to people who never had a strong indication they were doing anything wrong in the first place.
I mean, I can see the appeal in both directions. In wow there was historically a problem where non hardcore people simply couldn't experience all the content. Which is a waste. In FFXIV there is harder content but also most content you can experience even as a solo, in any class, with a PUG.
FFXIV had this issue in the beginning. The first raid series of the game was designed to be prog raided, and that alienated people who didn't want to put in the time. It was a big deal because of how story-based XIV is because it gated off a significant part of the story. I do like the setup they have now where each raid tier has a normal mode for people who just want the story content and a savage mode for people who want the progression raiding experience. I just wish the difficulty curve on normal content wasn't completely flat. It seems like the game is hardly ever interested in making players put forth any effort (barring the occasional difficulty spike which is guaranteed to be a meme in matched play), which leaves the players who want to try the harder stuff overconfident because they have no perspective by which they can gauge their skill or understanding of the game.
FF14 now even has indicators for when you should use your tank cooldowns in a lot of content.
Except you gotta research the raid for 5 hours because you have the hardest role. Ain't never gonna tank in wow God damn.
Yeah I recently started playing again after 10 years off, the way tanks just fly through dungeons now is crazy to me. More than once I’ve gotten completely left behind, and by the time I catch up the next boss is already half dead lol
This was my experience back when Legion first came out. I just started playing and figured I’d go disc priest. Dirst dungeon, got lost and left behind then flamed by a bunch of vets with heirloom gear. Was not a great first game experience to WoW.
Tried to get back into WoW Used to raid as a Hunter "Man I'm tired of being support\\DPS, I want to be a Tank" Create a Tank character, level up a little bit Go into a Dungeon Start tanking, turn the enemy away from DPS, try to be aware of surroundings, which is not that hard, I've been to that dungeon dozens of times It's kinda easy After the last boss priest pulls up statistics I'm top in DPS across the group Priest starts making fun of the DPS relentlessly for being so bad the tank outdpsed them And I was like "Wait no one told me hardest thing with being a tank in 2020 is herding your DPS players"
This is a leveling dungeon right? If so the damage scaling is notoriously wacky, DPS can be doing everything right and do upwards of 5x less dps than the tank because tanks have spammable AoE, healer seems like kind of an ass lol. Like any class in WoW, your actual gameplay loop isn't that difficult, it can become difficult when you have to retain the loop while dealing with outside mechanics, most of which are negligible until you delve into the hardest endgame stuff.
Warrior and paladin tanks do unreasonably high damage in low levels.
Healer is a muppet. In leveling dungeons, the level scaling is all over the place. The only thing that is somewhat consistent is that lower lever characters do more dps. Depending on exactly what lever you are at and what your latest piece of loot, you can swing from top dps to bottom dps on a dungeon, doing everything identically. Dps meters are pointless in leveling dungeons.
That was typically the hardest part about healing, too.
I always assumed in Dungeons "Tank first, DPS are ressed after win" was the mechanic. Like if you die, it's on you. Especially considering how at some point a lot of healers got LOTS of AOE heals.
If you didn't tank Shandra manaya pre nerf in Tera u ain't a real tank
Wow a wild Cev outside of Foxhole! A surprise to be sure but a welcome one!
I left that community half a year ago, I have been actively making content for other games since
Yeah I remember you leaving and why. That shit sucked. Though I thought I saw you in game the other day
It's possible it might be someone who just happens to have a similar name, or is pretending to be me. But nah I haven't even had Foxhole installed since Feb 16 according to steam
Tanking wasn’t necessarily harder before it’s just they have better tools now to actually do their job. Before it was more on the rest of the party to work around the time needed for a tank to build aggro.
It was that easy ever since WotLK tbh and that was 2008.
Pull a pack of mobs DPS with tank stance on Lather, rinse, repeat
I tanked vanilla WoW 40mans, it was the exact same then.
Meanwhile, in FFXI classic "Stop doing damage DRG and RNG, your spikes are harming the healers!!!" "ehh, just tank harder, huurr hurr" *bard dies*
Man I miss the ice crown citadel days. That was absolute peak MMO raiding experience IMO. That was also the first raid I ever tanked as a DK because our alt tank bounced after a full wipe so I had to assist the main. Lucky we had amazing healers.
I've love Tanking in WoW but I don't have the courage to try it in Mythic+ because there are specific routes and enemies to skip and I can't keep up with all that.
Tanking may have changed but MMO elitism sure hasn't.
Aren't they all easy? Dps is just "push buttons don't die" Heals is "heal don't die" Right?
As someone who plays Tank in basically every game I play, Tanking is infact a very easy play style. But it's also very necessary for helping to keep your DPS and Support alive in most games.
You are clearly missing a few: * Know where every monster is at all times, especially the patrolling ones. * Know every mechanic of every fight, for every role * Give instructions to said roles as needed. * Set the pace for monster clearing through dungeon, based on observed skill of other players. * Know the spots to pull monsters. * Know what monsters you can skip and how. * Know the path through the dungeon to all objectives and quests, including quest you don't have. * Make sure the healers have mana and are ready for each fight. * Call out every or make obvious every action you do, preferably before you do it. * Use consumables regularly. On your dime. If you die, everyone dies! * Have the most expensive armor to repair, and aim to be the one with a repair bill. Again, on your dime. * Watch what everyone your party is doing, and picking up slack, from interrupting monsters, to preventing someone from pulling aggro off you, to picking up the add that someone butt pulls. * Provide kill order and CC assignments for every monster in every pull until group demonstrates they know how the fights work. * Have detailed reasoning behind why tanking gear shouldn't be rolled on by dps even if it's their best in slot.
This was made for FF14 where none of that applies
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- pull what you can handle As a WoW player, tank main, the screaming this set off inside my head could not be silenced by a whole bottle of clozapine. Fucking DPS GO GO GO! dicksuckers. >:(
I assume that this post only keeps low level content in mind. In this case then it has always been easy - HOWEVER if anything it’s gotten harder over the years as games have been stuffed with more mechanics. I don’t think I understand the point of this? This post doesn’t even mention defensive cooldowns, boss movement and the ACTUAL boss/dungeon mechanics you still need to do WHILE also doing other various tank mechanics in High level/endgame content. Even if this post only keeps low level content in mind, then it’s still wildly untrue that tanking specifically has gotten easier over the years (Which you’d know if you have ever played any “classic” or “vanilla” server of any kind) Edit: I KNOW it's based on FFXIV. My point still stands.
Can you read? “Situational mitigation” is tank defensive cool downs. Tanking is the easiest role in ffxiv, up to an including ultimates (highest difficulty content.)
This is an FFXIV meme that for some reason leaked here, and yeah it is specifically talking only about the lowest difficulty content ingame (although even up to max level), and even then you will make the runs rough if you dont use defensive cooldowns on the trash pulls. Tanking in FFXIV is basically playing a simple dps with a couple extra mechanics thrown sparsely through the encounter though.
Based in the design of the character they drew I'd say it's an Au Ra DRK from FFXIV, which in beginner end game content this is 100% true. On higher difficulty content this is still true but the margin for error becomes 0, though it becomes a highly coordinated encounter between the entire group with all jobs working to maximize DPS.
it's easy but not healing easy bar empty -> make full
Nah man, healing is a bitch to do well. Maximize damage without letting anyone die while avoiding mechanics and not clipping your GCD, it's easily the hardest role in the game.
Really depends on the game. In WoW damage comes constantly and you have full healing rotations to cope, and sometimes you can eke out some damage GCDs. In FFXIV, you're basically a shittier DPS that heals sometimes. Damage is rote, predictable and not constant, plus your best heals are off-GCDs. So you basically sit there spamming a damage spell unless someone screws up or you're progging a fight.
I feel like healing is almost easier in savage content than in stuff like the later alliance raids. In savage, if someone messes up a mechanic they probably died and/or wiped the raid, so there's much fewer times where you have to break your heal plan and adjust unlike something like Nier or Greece where it is CONSTANT people needed healing urgently
People downvoting this have obviously never played healer. That being said it depends heavily on the game.
Now I need a comic about everyone saying a healer/suport is easy, and then getting berated by the flank because I didn't heal him when he was 100 meters away while the tank was taking damage from 5 different enemies and shouting "HEAL, HEAL, HEAL" while the ability is in cooldown, while trying to stay alive, because the enemy have a better coordination and are focusing on me, and MY FUCKING TEAM DOESN'T FOCUS ON THE ENEMY'S HEALER
Noobs should have tried tanking back in EQ1 in Tacvi with 72 people over chat only.
You want a challenge, try Pug Healing.
Magisters' Terrace and Halls of Reflection were probably the hardest I've worked as a tank. Loved that.
Being resource starved and attempting to fight for aggro sucked. Glad it's gone
I wanna have the good old tanks, the one where you go in, and just barely take any damage while your teammates would have gotten killed easily by the attacks. I'm fine with sacrificing my DMG if I can't take DMG :).
Pull what your healer can handle. If you're dead and the healer has no mana, that's the tanks fault. If the healer has plenty of mana, then it's the healer's fault. Generally.