Final Fantasy XIV - The old tank stance system
FFXIV constantly changes to keep up with the modern gaming style. Currently if you are playing as a tank, you have an ability which you need to use to generate enough enmity so the mobs are hitting you and not the rest of the party. This is just an on-off type of ability, so if you are the only tank, you switch it on at the beginning of the fight and then leave it alone. If there are 2 tanks, only the main tank has it on, and the other tank will use it if there is an additional mob which needs to be tanked separately or if the main tank dies.
But this was not always the case. Back in the old days, tanks had a defensive and a damaging stance, and DPS who had a high damage output had the ability to transfer some of the enmity they generated onto the tank, to prevent pulling the mob off them. But tanks also love to do damage, so often it was a very dangerous dance of the stances, where they stayed in their damaging stance as long as possible, and only switched on the defensive stance when they absolutely needed it.
I can see why this system got reworked, as it required a certain level of skill to manage your stances effectively, not die but also do enough damage (raids usually have an enrage timer, so certain amount of damage output is needed to complete the fight in time, and for this tanks and healers are also required to do enough damage).
Damage-hungry players pushed this system to its limit in one encounter, but to be able to explain this, I also have to tell you briefly about how the Summoner job worked back then. The summons had their own HP and you had a toolkit of heals and shields to keep them alive. One such summon, Titan, which was a tank-type summon was so strong, that in a specific encounter a Summoner was tanking the boss, so both tanks could stay in their damaging stance... or just do the fight without a tank and bring more DPS.
Here is a video from Mr Happy explaining how this strategy worked, but it's very heavy with FFXIV technical terms, so might only say something to those who are familiar with the game:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/DjPiQ2Q_bCQ?feature=oembedI wish I started to play the game sooner and could experience this era, as I think it gave a lot of variety to the game and enough entertainment for high-end players. Though as Mr Happy mentions in his video, it was also leading towards unacceptable behaviour in party finder, where people would exclude tank players from their groups and insist on bringing more DPS. Also by making the game more simple and streamlined helps a lot to bring in new players who are not hard-core raiders, but at the end of the day an MMO can only function until there are enough people playing it.
There is still one content where you can do such shenanigans, in Bozja, the big open-world field operation content you get special abilities, including one for DPS where they can get bigger HP and mitigations as well as a skill to provoke mobs off someone. The other is the new Variant dungeons, where you have similar abilities as well and you can even solo it on a DPS.
Hopefully the new field operations content we are getting in Dawntrail will have similar things again, it's letting people have fun and experiment with things while keeping the main game newbie friendly.
Hope you enjoyed today's Final Fantasy history lesson, will see how many of these I can come up with for this bounty :D
