Welcome to Members' Corner! Each month, we run a bounty asking the community to tell us about the subjects close to their hearts. So far, we've published pieces on tomahawk throwing, the modern reverberations of Bristol's historic links to the slave trade, the warning signs of pancreatic cancer, and the art of photography with a dedicated camera. This week, we're publishing Lanah Tyra's breakdown of a now-extinct Final Fantasy XIV mechanic: the tank stance system. It’s a real historical gem from the annals of gaming history. Take it away, Lanah:

—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Final Fantasy XIV constantly changes to keep up with modern gaming trends. Currently, if you are playing as a tank, you have an ability which you need to use to generate enough enmity so the mobs focus on you and not the rest of the party. This is an on-off toggle, so if you’re the only tank, you switch it on at the beginning of the fight and then leave it alone. If there are two tanks, only the main tank has it on, and the other tank will use it if there’s 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 players with 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 deal damage, so often it was a very dangerous dance of the stances, in which 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, and also do enough damage (raids usually have an enrage timer, so a 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 alongside a toolkit of heals and shields to keep them alive. One such tank-type summon, Titan, was so strong that in one specific encounter, a Summoner could tank the boss instead. This would allow both tanks to stay in their damaging stance, or even better, tanks weren't required at all and more DPS could be used instead.

“Here is a video from Mr Happy explaining how this strategy worked, but it's very heavy with FFXIV jargon, so it may go over your head if you're not familiar with the game:

“I 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 the party finder, where people would exclude tank players from their groups and insist on bringing more DPS. Also, making the game more simple and streamlined helps to bring in new players who aren’t hardcore raiders.At the end of the day, an MMO can only function when there are enough people playing it.

“There are still two places in which you can do such shenanigans though. In Bozja, the big open-world field operation, you get special abilities, including one for DPS in which they can get bigger HP and mitigations as well as a skill to provoke mobs. The other is the new Variant dungeons, where you have similar abilities as well and you can even solo it as a DPS character.

“Hopefully the new field operations content we are getting in Dawntrail will have similar things again, as it's letting people have fun and experiment with things while keeping the main game newbie friendly.”

—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks to Lanah for digging deep into her encyclopaedic Final Fantasy XIV knowledge to shed light on one aspect of the game newer players will never experience. Feel free to tag her and fire over any questions in the comments.

Our third edition of the Members' Corner bounty is live right now, so if you have a subject in mind you'd like to write at length about and potentially win some cash for, head on over to the bounty page and get involved.

Some text in the bounty submission featured here has been amended for brevity. You can find the original wording at the bounty post.