How do we feel about tank damage right now?

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Originally Posted by Lyth

There is a balancing point at which both roles have something to contribute and be valued for.

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You mean like where we sit right now?

How about you start mentioning some numbers and sources here - You know, so we aren't obfuscating things. Specifically - Give me your desired points. How much you want, show me where in the game history you want to reference that from and the gamestate you want it to represent.

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Originally Posted by TheRealQuah

Just some points which address your contributions in this thread

1 - Tank damage needs to be halfway between DPS and Healers. Before any discussions about making tanks more engaging (which needs to be had), there needs to be a base to work from. Healers are doing more damage that tanks now, and it's only going to get worse next tier. This isn't about tank pride or wanting big numbers. Healers doing more damage breaks the game. There are already technically times where a PLD using clemency is an overall rDPS gain, and more scenarios where things like this happen are only going to get more prevalent the higher iLvl gets. At an extreme level, it gets to the point where you wouldn't take a tank at all, because letting a DPS take a buster and raising them with weakness will be an rDPS gain. This will happen if tank damage is not addressed.

2 - Enrage timers now are not tight, outside of the first 2 weeks. I don't know who's been telling you for 3 expansions otherwise, but they're wrong.

3 - The fact you have to use Rath EX as an example to attempt to prove your points speaks for itself. This is a fight deliberately designed to NOT be a normal FF fight and to be as close to a monster hunter fight as the the battle system allows. It is completely irrelevant in any discussion about job balancing whatsoever.

4 - The majority of people in this thread are talking about endgame tanking, have extensive experience of it, and I know in the case of some, contribute to theory crafting on the subject. The likes of Rei and Shao are good tank players who actually have knowledge of endgame tanking so I'd say their opinions hold a bit more weight.

5 - Stop contradicting yourself. Shao did not "blame" healers anywhere. "Healers out damaging us is more a problem on the Healer end than on the Tank end", "quit blaming it on the Healers". Make your mind up.

6 - I'm pretty sure you could clear any of the fights with 3 tanks now. But people don't. Because it's quicker not to. In fact, I see people attempting to solo tank fights way more often. If you are at the point where you need to take 3 or more tanks because the only way you can clear is tank privileging mechanics, then you don't deserve to be challenging that content.

Between this thread and Silverquick in the other DPS thread, what is it with the trend on this forum of people having an opinion on savage content balancing, when they don't have any experience of it?

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Okay. Let's do this.

1) Halfway between DPS and Healers... how? Halfway above Healers? Below DPS? A combination of half of each? Yes, how you word it might matter when dealing with math and formulas. However I personally would like to go 25% 25% 50% for Tanks, Healers and DPS. We can make Tanks go up to 35% or so. Healers dealing more damage is a failure on the Devs to manage the Healers, not the tanks. Granted they failed on both issues but they are not linked to one another and I dislike people trying to force that. Put a different way, we shouldn't blame Healers for having so much damage, we should blame the Devs for not giving Healers more to do, which is something we Tanks could ALSO use. "Not about tank pride or wanting big numbers", history has proven you wrong but okay(Read, People jumping on the WAR bandwagon in Heavensward). And yet if you cast it, you will get flamed for daring to use Clemency until it becomes the meta to do so. I also question why you think the Item level is going to spike that high to the point you can do that DPS only. Please, I would like to see someone take all DPS into Titan 2.0 and see how that works out, never mind the group having to balance aggro so the boss isn't flipping between BLM and SAM.

2) If Enrage timers are not that tight, then why are people complaining about them so much and that we need more damage to push them? And if they aren't that tight, why do tanks need more damage to push the non threatening enrage timer? It's either a threat or it's not a threat. Or is the issue that Item Level makes fools of everything after X time, regardless of how much damage your built in kit does?

3) You view it as irrelevant, I view it as a test bed. A way for them to experiment with trying new mechanics, temp comp, and other ideas. I found it fun, interesting, and I hope they take the right lessons and feedback from it. I dread them taking other ideas from it though, like the push for Tank Damage.

4) I actually do value Shao's insights, I just disagree with them more from a Dev and Community side of things. I do truly want to see this car get turned around but then I see some responses and just think "Well might was well let them step on the gas and end it faster". If Shao thinks they can help turn things around and convince other people, more power to them but I'm not expecting things to change due to both community and devs.

5) I did not say Shao blame them, at least outright. I just see so much hate on "OH healers deal more damage than us, woe oh woe, we can't have that can we", so how about the community pulls up thier pants and own up to the fact they don't want to be below the sticks and books? Oh no, not like that won't change next expansion. As for the Contradiction, you seem to want to force that. Healers do more damage than us so we need more damage; no no no. Healers do more damage due to a failing on the Devs to get their gameplay this expansion, not because their damage was heavily spiked/favored over us. They just have far more time to DPS than they should, something the devs didn't account for. If anything, I'm blaming the devs over how they handled Healers, not healers themselves. Now I asked this before, if Healers got the damage nerf, would you Tanks be happy now that you're above them in the Logs? Oh wait, you don't need to tell me. I can take a guess.

6) It's quicker if everything goes right. If it was safer and far faster than what we have now thanks to our 'poor poor' dps, which is something people in this thread seem to want, I question if we would have this issue.

Oh and you didn't number it but
7) Let's just seal off the forums to the elites then. But until that happens, I'm going to have a voice in this which questions why people want to be DPS's on Tanks and suggest that more Damage is simply a band aid of a solution at least, and the wrong direction for balance at worst.

People seem to hate tanks/tanking here, so why not just remove that entirely then? I ask you, what do you people have to lose from that considering there's not much left of Tanking anyway.

People don't hate tanks tanking here, the pace at which you are able to build strawmen is frankly astounding.

On the point of extra tanks in a party, if anything it would make fights harder not easier if we took the 75% tank damage value even. Lets take shiva as an example, if youre taking an extra tank for "safety" that means youre worried about being hit by avoidable mechanics, being hit by this in shiva gives you a hefty damage down, combined with the fact that youre still outputting less dps, youre going to at the very least have to deal with more mechanics which is harder than a faster clear time dealing with less mechanics. Also include the points i made about targetting earlier and youre making your lives more difficuly by taking more tanks.

On the point about enrages, the people youre hearing complain about tight enrages probably arn't experienced raiders or dont raid at all, a team full of basically competent people post week 2 or so will have the dps to clear. The reason why we want more dps is to feel more valuable towards lowering clear times further, its not just about beating enrage, its clearing fights faster and better, something which more damage allows tanks to have a greater influence on. With tanks on lower damage, you essentially can coast by because clear time is much more heavily impacted by your dps players and to an extent healer players (healers have the largest damage varience). Making tanks account for a bigger portion of the pie AS A STARTING POINT should the way to go for increasing relevance and satisfaction playing the jobs who want to optimise.

Finally your point on people flocking to warrior, yeah so? More people tanking is a good thing and warrior and drk were actually very close in terms of damage in heavensward, and having tanks be 70% of the damage of a dps didnt lead to dps being replaced in parties in the slightest

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Originally Posted by ReiMakoto

its clearing fights faster and better

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Two things.

1) By coming at it from the angle of contribution, you are simultaneously taking this away from the other roles. What justification can you give that couldn't be used for the other roles against tanks, who also just want "Their piece of the pie"?

What makes "Tank" so deserving of a bigger piece that it must take it from the others?

2) The content is done. If Tanks got any increase in 5.3, content in 5.3 and on will be tuned around it - You'll get your wish for Shiva, but then Not-Ultimecia comes out and you're back where you started.

Enrage timers are not based on only the DPS jobs - They include the tanks and healers. If 5.2 dropped with a 10% increase for tanks, Shiva would have had more health, and it still would have been a 14 minute fight (12, if we're being pedantic)

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Originally Posted by MerlinCross

I don't see how it's debunked. If the damage a tank is given allows the team to STILL Clear, a DPS slot is going to be taken, how is this hard to understand? If you can still clear with a third tank, why would you not take it instead of say, MNK, or at this point Ninja which was the lowest DPS I saw for a bit. Yes I'm taking into account Party Diversity Bonus for this. If you can clear with 3 tanks, why would you not take 3 tanks? People will use the easiest, most practical, and most consistent way to beat a fight; that's just how things are. Look at people complaining about the DPS teir lists and BLM being basically a must pick these days because the math shows it's good so the community follows. I've already covered this before, people will follow the math.

And if the math ever comes up that 3 tanks is better, safer, and more consistent way to clera; guess what the meta becomes. I don't think this is hard to understand; if there's little to no difference between the end result, a tank is a better choice as it can eat a DDR mess up and not instant die.

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Why would a team pick 3 tanks in content with tight enrage timer?

Your math simply does not add up, why would anyone optimize their team for normal easy content that could be done with one hand? The team optimization appears when there is a necessity, mainly in savage/ultimate content and nowhere else.

No one in their right mind would ever pick a third tank for a sake of making it "safer", because joining static you are required to know the mechanics and do as little mistakes as possible, people already are playing safe enough to the point where second healer almost does not even cast any GCD healing. Thinking teams are going to take a third tank is just a wish, if a tank were 25-30% weaker than dps it would not make them choose a tank over dps, simply because 30% extra dps is 30% extra dps in a game where players go through great lengths in order to increase the dps even by 1%. A lot of statics refuse to take redmages or machnists into their team because their dps is on average lower than the others, so what makes you think they would go for a third tank that does 70% of dps? It would not be optimal even in the slightest in a content with enrage timer, even in normal content its far better to finish the fight faster than later avoiding unnecessary mechanics and potential mistakes.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

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That bit of the pie came from us to begin with. And we're not unreasonable. We don't want it all back, just part of it back. Perhaps not to the point where a well played tank is doing more damage than a lower tier ranged. But at least to the point where a very well played tank is capable of embarrassing a very poorly played dps. A scary thought, I know.

I know that the devs cater to dps players like you intrinsically because of sub numbers and all, but they're not going about it in a particularly bright way. As long as we're part of the 'trinity', you can ignore us at your peril. Otherwise, enjoy your queue times~.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

That bit of the pie came from us to begin with. And we're not unreasonable. We don't want it all back, just part of it back. Perhaps not to the point where a well played tank is doing more damage than a lower tier ranged. But at least to the point where a very well played tank is capable of embarrassing a very poorly played dps. A scary thought, I know.

I know that the devs cater to dps players like you intrinsically because of sub numbers and all, but they're not going about it in a particularly bright way. As long as we're part of the 'trinity', you can ignore us at your peril. Otherwise, enjoy your queue times~.

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I play tanks too, you know. The queue time means nothing to me.

Your "pie" was always inflated by the other roles buffing you. The only other jobs they were less selfish than were Black Mage and White Mage.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

I play tanks too, you know. The queue time means nothing to me.

Your "pie" was always inflated by the other roles buffing you. The only other jobs they were less selfish than were Black Mage and White Mage.

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I don't ever recall healers out DPSing tanks at any time beforehand and they get the very same buffs we get so.... what's your point? DPS got the buffs too. The game has shifted towards DPS then Healers, for gear priority and DPS priority now while tanks must wait till the end of the tier to get gear because its now 'optimal' to do so.
By all means, argue that tank gameplay sucks, but expecting SE to give tanks reworks when we are a year away from the next expansion isn't going to happen anymore. We are at the cut off time where an entire role would be even considered reworked during an expansion. At this point, take what we can get and at least get Tanks at the point where they should be for damage and importance in these fights, because right now the questions aren't "can a healers solo heal this fight?" now its "can we replace an off tank in this fight?"

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Originally Posted by MerlinCross

People seem to hate tanks/tanking here, so why not just remove that entirely then? I ask you, what do you people have to lose from that considering there's not much left of Tanking anyway.

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It's not really about hating tanks/tanking.

It's about having an actual effect with what you do.

Tank duties, literally amount to:

1) Hold aggro

2) Don't die

After that, the only thing you can do, is maximize damage.

Given that duty 1 is auto-completed by merely existing, due to how XIV's aggro system has functioned, you then focus on duty 2.

Though, duty 2 is completed by, not standing in the bad and pressing CD's during tank busters.

So, with minimal effort, we're down to focusing on damage.

However, with low damage output, there's little reason to try and optimize what little we have to do (Which is mostly just uptime). Like, what's the point in trying to play that bit better if the result is so marginal anyway, especially in relation to the overall parties damage output? This is also exacerbated by Tank DPS being heavily focused towards their IR windows which further reduces the actual benefit of you know, playing well and having higher boss uptime.

Yes, given the choice of simply damage buffs or more gameplay depths (Especially for tank related duties) most Tanks will opt for the latter.

However, such a thing would require a massive overhaul of the games systems. Meanwhile, damage buffs, would help make playing well to get higher uptime, oGCD weaving and resource management have more of an impact and thus bring more satisfaction in the game as it exists right now.

Since the game as it exists right now is what is currently the most relevant because that's what we can play right now. That's also what we're going to have to play for the next year and a half too. A system overhaul of the likes we'd love to see won't happen until AT LEAST 6.0. So why not ask for the thing that will actually be relevant for us for the next year and a half? As opposed to asking for stuff that will only be at minimum, implementable after then?

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Originally Posted by BarretOblivion

I don't ever recall healers out DPSing tanks at any time beforehand and they get the very same buffs we get so.... what's your point? DPS got the buffs too. The game has shifted towards DPS then Healers, for gear priority and DPS priority now while tanks must wait till the end of the tier to get gear because its now 'optimal' to do so.
By all means, argue that tank gameplay sucks, but expecting SE to give tanks reworks when we are a year away from the next expansion isn't going to happen anymore. We are at the cut off time where an entire role would be even considered reworked during an expansion. At this point, take what we can get and at least get Tanks at the point where they should be for damage and importance in these fights, because right now the questions aren't "can a healers solo heal this fight?" now its "can we replace an off tank in this fight?"

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Arguing to give them damage buffs also doesn't do anything but address feelings. From an objective standpoint, the numbers ultimately mean nothing so long as the tanks are close enough to each other to not render one invalid, and so long as the tanks are in a suitable zone (Hint: They are). Speed Runners are excellent at abusing the game - But they are not what we should try and balance the game around.

The DPS and other healers (Not White Mage) brought those buffs. This expansion took most of those buffs and folded them back into the classes that brought them. In short - Coming at this from an angle of "Damage Contribution" shows that most of you don't understand what contribution means. Whoever brings that Damage is the one who contributed. You can go back to any logs pre-shadowbringers and work this out to figure out where each class landed on "Contribution".

Hint: The Tanks, Black Mage, and White Mage dip the most. The astro, ninja, Dragoon, and a few others increase the most. "Damage contribution" is not the angle you should be coming from.

Tanks are disproportionately affected by this as the weakened buffs will go to other DPS. The DPS whom they were close to (Bard, Red Mage, Ninja) got their buffs folded back into them. It really doesn't take much to understand how this affects rainbow standings.

Gear priority is a player issue. If you disagree with how your group handles loot, talk to them. The moment your group can kill Shiva, the distribution does not matter.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

Arguing to give them damage buffs also doesn't do anything but address feelings. From an objective standpoint, the numbers ultimately mean nothing so long as the tanks are close enough to each other to not render one invalid, and so long as the tanks are in a suitable zone (Hint: They are). Speed Runners are excellent at abusing the game - But they are not what we should try and balance the game around.

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Power levels also entail opportunity costs which in turn entail task assignment and difficulty. Drop one's contribution rate too far and the party-wide opportunity cost of having them cheese mechanics (at uptime loss) becomes a non-issue and player skill on that job/role becomes increasingly nil in terms of contribution to the party. Once over X applicable/general skill level, with someone of lower skill to take one's place, one would be doing a disservice to their party by remaining in the role that contributes less between tiers (i.e. the party would do more, on the whole, by having the more skilled player swap off, say, tank, and the less skilled player take the tank's place).

I agree with most of your points on the whole, but we should seek to do more than just balance a role against/within itself with only gimmicks to oblige that role's use with no more broadly connected sense of economy or skill-reward.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Power levels also entail opportunity costs which in turn entail task assignment and difficulty. Drop one's contribution rate too far and the party-wide opportunity cost of having them cheese mechanics (at uptime loss) becomes a non-issue and player skill on that job/role becomes increasingly nil in terms of contribution to the party. Once over X applicable/general skill level, with someone of lower skill to take one's place, one would be doing a disservice to their party by remaining in the role that contributes less between tiers (i.e. the party would do more, on the whole, by having the more skilled player swap off, say, tank, and the less skilled player take the tank's place).

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We are nowhere near that level, nor are the concerns of individual parties / players and their decisions on what roles to play within our breadth of discussion.

The discussion is "Do tanks need more?"

The answer is no, but as I've said at basically every interval this thread comes back up, a small corrective adjustment up is fine. At the time of creation, that was about 2%. At the current state, this can be 3-5% depending on how much of a boost the Ranged get, if any, in 5.3.

It also won't mean anything in the end, but that's basically been the outcome of every flavor of "Muh Accessories" thread that came about.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

We are nowhere near that level, nor are the concerns of individual parties / players and their decisions on what roles to play within our breadth of discussion.

The discussion is "Do tanks need more?"

The answer is no, but as I've said at basically every interval this thread comes back up, a small corrective adjustment up is fine. At the time of creation, that was about 2%. At the current state, this can be 3-5% depending on how much of a boost the Ranged get, if any, in 5.3.

It also won't mean anything in the end, but that's basically been the outcome of every flavor of "Muh Accessories" thread that came about.

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Again, I agree on the whole. At present, we're not in that situation that demands any significant increases to output, even if it may quite nearly demand more engaging gameplay.

My point was only the goal. Specifically, I don't believe that "the numbers ultimately mean nothing so long as the tanks are close enough to each other to not render one invalid". That's a start, and absolutely necessary, of course, but I don't find balancing a role among only itself as a sufficient goal. There should be a sense of knowing what X role costs you in terms of other roles, and there being an apparent balance between the roles, with one ultimately ending up at or very near to 2/4/2 because of that balance rather than gimmicks alone.

I realize I'm using the term "gimmick" here loosely. I probably also extend that definition further than most, including even vulnerability mechanics to oblige swaps in place of simply needing to rotate CDs, and the like. I essentially consider something a gimmick when it acts as a composition check rather than an output check. If something outright requires a role more so than it requires a given amount of eHP, HPS, or DPS (even if that's normally limited to a tank, healer, or dps, respectively), it leans into "gimmick" territory for me.

When I'm playing a role -- any role -- I like to feel like a toolkit that ultimately forms my responsibilities, not a classification that a bunch of parts are later added to by obligation alone. If I'm a "Tank", it should be because I have so much capacity and gameplay revolving around tanking, rather than just being told I'm a Tank, getting a goodie bag that says "Tank" on it with a handful of mitigation skills to pop at preset times. When design aims merely to balance roles unto themselves, where things are specifically "tank" skills rather than "mitigation", etc., with no sense of shared currency between each role, that latter, shallow feeling inevitably starts to appear and make itself increasingly obvious.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

When I'm playing a role -- any role -- I like to feel like a toolkit that ultimately forms my responsibilities, not a classification that a bunch of parts are later through into by obligation alone. If I'm a "Tank", it should be because I have so much capacity and gameplay revolving around tanking, rather than just being told I'm a Tank, getting a goodie bag that says "Tank" on it with a handful of mitigation skills to pop at preset times. When design aims merely to balance roles unto themselves, where things are specifically "tank" skills rather than "mitigation", etc., with no sense of shared currency between each role, that latter, shallow feeling inevitably starts to appear and make itself increasingly obvious. [/INDENT][/INDENT]

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I actually want to touch on this as I do agree with it. I don't feel like I'm a tank anymore. I feel like I'm a lower end DPS given 4 'don't die' buttons, and adding more damage is only going to make that feeling more apparent to me and after a certain point, other people.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

Arguing to give them damage buffs also doesn't do anything but address feelings. From an objective standpoint, the numbers ultimately mean nothing so long as the tanks are close enough to each other to not render one invalid, and so long as the tanks are in a suitable zone (Hint: They are). Speed Runners are excellent at abusing the game - But they are not what we should try and balance the game around.

The DPS and other healers (Not White Mage) brought those buffs. This expansion took most of those buffs and folded them back into the classes that brought them. In short - Coming at this from an angle of "Damage Contribution" shows that most of you don't understand what contribution means. Whoever brings that Damage is the one who contributed. You can go back to any logs pre-shadowbringers and work this out to figure out where each class landed on "Contribution".

Hint: The Tanks, Black Mage, and White Mage dip the most. The astro, ninja, Dragoon, and a few others increase the most. "Damage contribution" is not the angle you should be coming from.

Tanks are disproportionately affected by this as the weakened buffs will go to other DPS. The DPS whom they were close to (Bard, Red Mage, Ninja) got their buffs folded back into them. It really doesn't take much to understand how this affects rainbow standings.

Gear priority is a player issue. If you disagree with how your group handles loot, talk to them. The moment your group can kill Shiva, the distribution does not matter.

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This is a terrible argument. Just because all X type of role are within close proximity in damage to one another does not make them 'balanced'. Its the same argument you would have to make for Physical ranged DPS this tier being substantially lower than all other DPS to the point teams are starting to run double caster over a physical ranged DPS. It makes the role entirely flawed and underperforming, that is where tanks sit. You can keep the current balance of tanks within DPS of each other, but that doesn't mean that tanks should not be more important to the overall group wide damage performance so that the argument can be made for gear progression to be equal between healers and tanks. Right now, its a waist/unoptimal to allow a tank to get gear until DPS and Healers have gotten theri gear. Tanks dont' gain enough damage from new gear, and more HP doesn't matter with how the game is currently balanced around tankbusters/incoming damage. So why would any group that cares a little about optimal play even consider allowing tanks to gear up at this point? Just clear the final fight and everyone get a mount. You are done then. Just have the tanks at crafted gear why don't we?

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Originally Posted by BarretOblivion

Just clear the final fight and everyone get a mount. You are done then. Just have the tanks at crafted gear why don't we?

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8 weeks of clearing puts everyone in their gear. Why does the order matter?

Further - The scholar and Astrologian pull ahead by virtue of their raid buffs - AKA not damage they are personally dealing. Which means the only healer you would want to gear before the tanks from a 'damage' perspective is white mage.

Gear priority is a player issue. if you don't like how your group does it, take it up with them.

The Physical Ranged DPS compete with the other DPS roles.

The tanks compete with no one. They do not compete with healers, they do not compete with the DPS. They compete only with each other. Meme compositions and speedrunning are their own area, and should remain separate.

It doesn't really matter what retrospective claim the devs, or you for that matter, come up with to explain away a bad decision. They could have assigned extra dps to all jobs containing the letter 'm'. Hey look, that fits too. If you don't offer people a reason to want to tank, they won't tank.

And right back at you: why don't you wait eight weeks for gear, then, if it doesn't matter so much? Let's aim for a scenario where tanks get gear over dps then, if you're indifferent to it.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

It doesn't really matter what retrospective claim the devs, or you for that matter, come up with to explain away a bad decision. They could have assigned extra dps to all jobs containing the letter 'm'. Hey look, that fits too. If you don't offer people a reason to want to tank, they won't tank.

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As long as you have a trinity system people will never want to tank or heal. That is a fact and has been like that in all games that feature the trinity system. Unless you go full hybrid where every class is a damage dealer, tanks and healers will never be popular.
In trinity games tanks and healers have always relied more in personal preference rather than incentives. People that want to play tanks and healers will play tanks and healers. The only way you can make people who don't like these kind of class play tanks and healers is to make them overpowered/broken and attract the kind of people who always play the best class.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

And right back at you: why don't you wait eight weeks for gear, then, if it doesn't matter so much? Let's aim for a scenario where tanks get gear over dps then, if you're indifferent to it.

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Gearing priority is completely irrelevant to tank damage. As long as your primary requirement in order to clear bosses is damage gear will always go to damage dealers first. Unless they change the tanks to do more damage than damage dealers or make a fight require an X amount of VIT or tenacity from the tank in order to clear, tanks will never get priority over damage dealers in gear. The problem with gear is the fact that is drops a coffer rather than a specific piece. As long as it drops a coffer, tanks and healers will get their gear last in the current raiding climate.

The main reason why dps jobs are popular is because there is a low amount of team responsibility. You can jump in and play it like a single player game.

The quality that attracts a specific personality type to tanks or healers is that very same sense of team responsibility. It's the idea that you can make an impact on your teammates to help them succeed. And be thanked for it.

At the moment, the only way that you can help your teammates succeed is by providing a raid dps buff. Anything else (mitigation, enmity, keeping your team alive) is an expectation. Failure to do so will irritate your team, but doing so successfully will never earn you a word of thanks.

If you don't give tanks and healers a way to feel needed and rewarded, the very personality types that would seek out those roles ordinarily will lose interest in playing them. Everyone is focused on where the sub money is, but these are the people you actually need to be winning over. Because when your queues dry up, your new players dry up.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Everyone is focused on where the sub money is, but these are the people you actually need to be winning over. Because when your queues dry up, your new players dry up.

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Unless you spend all your time and effort implementing a Trust system instead of fixing Tanks and Healers...

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Oh wait!

Fair point. They should probably get Thancred to tank for all the new dps players that they're going to convert over from tanks and healers. Bring him over to raid content too, these bosses tank themselves.

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Originally Posted by Ivellior

As long as you have a trinity system people will never want to tank or heal. That is a fact and has been like that in all games that feature the trinity system. Unless you go full hybrid where every class is a damage dealer, tanks and healers will never be popular.

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Even as someone who prefers the best of the "full hybrid" (or "generalist") model over the best a trinity system ("passively specialized') would have to offer, this seems rather disingenuous.

People dislike healing and tanking when the roles become merely nominal, are composed primarily of uninteresting (takes on their) responsibilities, comparatively low skill ceilings, or relatively little reward therein.

When the roles are crafted well, tanks and healers can be every bit as well-liked as damage-dealers.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Even as someone who prefers the best of the "full hybrid" (or "generalist") model over the best a trinity system ("passively specialized') would have to offer, this seems rather disingenuous.

People dislike healing and tanking when the roles become merely nominal, are composed primarily of uninteresting (takes on their) responsibilities, comparatively low skill ceilings, or relatively little reward therein.

When the roles are crafted well, tanks and healers can be every bit as well-liked as damage-dealers.

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I have NEVER played a game where tanks and healer/support classes ever matched the popularity of a dps class. Doesnt matter the genre. Moba, fps, ARPG, MMO, whatever. Your assertion that they are disliked purely out of poor design is false. Unless you are asserting that no game ever has actually created 'well crafted' tanks and healers.

The only time tanks have to wait for anything is when you skew the required numbers to extreme levels like 24 man raids with a 5 to 1 ratio of dps to tanks.

Tanks and support/healers are objectively never as popular as dps with the only exceptions being small windows when a game makes an extremely overpowered tank or support class that (usually) does more damage than a dps. So the only way to make a tank more popular than a dps is to make it better than a dps. Hmmm. So no, better designed trinities do not bring them to parity in popularity.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

It doesn't really matter what retrospective claim the devs, or you for that matter, come up with to explain away a bad decision. They could have assigned extra dps to all jobs containing the letter 'm'. Hey look, that fits too. If you don't offer people a reason to want to tank, they won't tank.

And right back at you: why don't you wait eight weeks for gear, then, if it doesn't matter so much? Let's aim for a scenario where tanks get gear over dps then, if you're indifferent to it.

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If your only reason to tank is the rainbow bar, the devs aren't the problem.

And we divide gear equally, because our team isn't a week 1 team, and thus our distribution is irrelevant. And even in week 1 teams, the moment you can kill the last boss, distribution is irrelevant.

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Originally Posted by Izsha

I have NEVER played a game where tanks and healer/support classes ever matched the popularity of a dps class. Doesnt matter the genre. Moba, fps, ARPG, MMO, whatever. Your assertion that they are disliked purely out of poor design is false. Unless you are asserting that no game ever has actually created 'well crafted' tanks and healers.

The only time tanks have to wait for anything is when you skew the required numbers to extreme levels like 24 man raids with a 5 to 1 ratio of dps to tanks.

Tanks and support/healers are objectively never as popular as dps with the only exceptions being small windows when a game makes an extremely overpowered tank or support class that (usually) does more damage than a dps. So the only way to make a tank more popular than a dps is to make it better than a dps. Hmmm. So no, better designed trinities do not bring them to parity in popularity.

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People play dps classes because of big numbers and powerful feeling when dealing damage, thats basically it.

Those who claim numbers doesnt matter are lying to themselves.
If tanks were close to dps numbers then a lot more people would have played tanks, they have big weapons, nice glamours and overall look great.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Even as someone who prefers the best of the "full hybrid" (or "generalist") model over the best a trinity system ("passively specialized') would have to offer, this seems rather disingenuous.

People dislike healing and tanking when the roles become merely nominal, are composed primarily of uninteresting (takes on their) responsibilities, comparatively low skill ceilings, or relatively little reward therein.

When the roles are crafted well, tanks and healers can be every bit as well-liked as damage-dealers.

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"People" don't dislike when healing and tanking roles become merely nominal.

Tanks and Healers dislike that.

"People" in general tend to err towards DPS roles.

Then, for reasons that are beyond my comprehension, developers then think people err towards DPS roles because Tank/Healer roles are too stressful and then make them merely nominal... Then wonder why all the Tank and Healer players they DID have, jump ship xD

Support roles in video games tend to be unfavoured. Even more so when most people play unorganized games with random matchmaking. Often due to the fact that if you're supporting completely braindead idiots, you don't get anywhere and boy are there a lot of braindead idiots in multiplayer games... Which is completely irrelevant to how well designed the roles are. Some examples of this, would be things like in MOBA's, you have Io in Dota2 and Janus in Smite whom have a large portion of their power devoted to support (Io gets lots of healing, Janus can let people walk through walls) but in random games these are absolutely horrible to play because without co-ordination and comms their amazing kits become near useless... (However, their popularity rises dramatically the more competitive the setting where people play with static teams with comms). I'm also sure a lot of people have played Tank/Initiator roles in MOBA's and had the perfect initiation, locking down all 5 enemies while their team... Stands there with a finger up their backside instead of actually engaging...

Typically, games that offer a better representation of supports are ones where the supports are fully functional DPS in their own right, whom can merely transition into a tanking/healing role with minimal effort. For example, in Anarchy Online, Enforcers, Soldiers and Doctors are all reasonably popular because they DPS decently with interesting mechanics.

Enforcers become giant and it's funny to be an Atrox Enforcer who then ends up being a 50 ft tall mass of muscle that smacks enemies around with I Beams (Yes, the steel construction girders).

Soldiers are one of the only classes in the game that can use assault rifles and so get easy access to the powerful Full Auto skill as well as nice reflect shields and potato armour.

Doctors get DoTs, 3 different lines of DoTs to be precise as well as Treatment buffs allowing ease of equipping higher level implants (Which also makes them extremely popular for their buffs, just like Traders) they also have the double edge sword of all their weapon skills being equally crap so they literally have a choice to specialize in whatever they want as well as being decent in PvP (Since the game has a thing where you can only take 1/3rd of your health in one go making high alpha damage classes like Agent, Shade and Nano-Technician less good... Well, at least until NT gets their Cyber-deck and gets Izgimmer's Triple which hits 3 times and thus can bypass this particular restriction...)

Really, the only thing these classes need to do in order to go full Tank/Healer, is start using aggro/healing skills in addition to their normal stuff (Or using other ways to generate aggro, such as sitting down in combat)... While keeping their DPS intact. With Soldiers being capable if they put in the effort to get the required gear, of being the highest DPS job in the game and Enforcers being not too bad on DPS either.

Of course, games tend to shy away from allowing Tanks and Healers to have their cake and eat it, by slapping on "Hybrid Tax" to make them arbitrarily less damaging so people actually play the "Fun" classes... I guess AO gets around that by the nature of how flexible their trinity is for most game content, with the plethora of other classes being able to provide support in lieu of Enforcer/Soldier + Doctor combo (Fixer, Adventurer and in a pinch, Agent can all provide healing. While Fixer, Adventurer, Engineer and Keeper can all fulfil a Tank role. With Bureaucrat being able to CC heavily enough to negate the need of a tank or healer in a lot of content) so it's less noticeable that the "Tank" classes are able to smack things hard.

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Originally Posted by Izsha

I have NEVER played a game where tanks and healer/support classes ever matched the popularity of a dps class. Doesnt matter the genre. Moba, fps, ARPG, MMO, whatever. Your assertion that they are disliked purely out of poor design is false. Unless you are asserting that no game ever has actually created 'well crafted' tanks and healers.

The only time tanks have to wait for anything is when you skew the required numbers to extreme levels like 24 man raids with a 5 to 1 ratio of dps to tanks.

Tanks and support/healers are objectively never as popular as dps with the only exceptions being small windows when a game makes an extremely overpowered tank or support class that (usually) does more damage than a dps. So the only way to make a tank more popular than a dps is to make it better than a dps. Hmmm. So no, better designed trinities do not bring them to parity in popularity.

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You're probably never going to get Tanks and Healers to be as popular as DPS for a number of factors. But at the same time you should be doing something to try and not only keep the players you have now, but also get more players into said roles. A well crafted kit and gameplay can help with keeping players invested. Which right now is only really the faster DF times and a far better chance at "In Need" rewards. Yeah, cause those will keep someone in this role. I mean this isn't a completely unique thing to Tanks and Healers; how many DPS players move to a new one if their job starts feeling either stale, or gets changed to be 'worse'. Sure they're staying within the same role but people will move on if they aren't having fun with a job/role. We need more than just extra rewards for playing Tanks.

Personally, I'm one of those players that does like playing Tank/Healer/Support in other games, such as Mobas. Yes I realize I'm the exception, not the rule. But again, FF14 makes me feel like a Meaty DPS or a DPS with Heals. How is it that WHM feels more RDM than RDM but that's a separate issue.

I started as a DPS because I wasn't sure I could handle the responsibilities that came with either role. It was something I looked into doing later on in my time with the game(Around Heavensward). Now I DPS because I just find it more rewarding and more honest about what it is. And to me, simply adding more numbers isn't going to make either role more fun.

The only reason to do anything, irrespective of role, is the rainbow bar. And that is absolutely the devs' problem.

You don't need to generate the same amount of interest in tanks and healers as you do dps. Party slots are designed with the expectation that we're merely 1 in 4. It's also not like you have to do anything particularly intelligent to 'create' these players. You just have to create the gameplay that we're looking for. The problem is that game design is being driven by how a dps player might envision tanking and healing works, rather than how a tank would envision tanking or a healer would envision healing. Tanks are not just there to take damage. Healers are not just there to cast heals. Our worlds do not revolve around dps players, nor should they. We're here to help, but we're definitely not here to serve.

And if you fail to provide that experience, we'll find it elsewhere. And you'll be left with dps players looking for their single-player game experience. Hopefully the AI serves them better.

I agree the problem lies with the game design. But increasing damage will not fix the problem. They need to make actual tanking or healing matter. It would make a tremendous amount of difference for both tanks and healers if they increased the boss auto-attack damage by 200% or more for example. It would actually force both roles in doing what they are supposed to do.

Adding damage to tanks is nothing more than a band-aid. Not to mention that if they do add more damage, people will just keep asking for more and more damage. As people will never be happy unless they do the most damage. That goes for all classes not just tanks. If they increase tank damage, healers will ask for more healer damage and then damage dealers will ask for more damage, which will end up with tanks on the bottom. And it just goes on and on in a never ending circle.

Finally, they are selling a trinity game. When a new player comes here and sees healers, dps and tanks labels he expects the healers to heal, the tanks to tank and mitigate and the dps to do damage. When a player plays GW2 and reads their class descriptions he sees a hybrid system with no dedicated tanks or healers. They should either go full hybrid or do a proper segregation of classes. Right not, neither the side that wants damage/hybrid tanks, nor the side that wants trinity style tanking is happy.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

The main reason why dps jobs are popular is because there is a low amount of team responsibility. You can jump in and play it like a single player game.

The quality that attracts a specific personality type to tanks or healers is that very same sense of team responsibility. It's the idea that you can make an impact on your teammates to help them succeed. And be thanked for it.

At the moment, the only way that you can help your teammates succeed is by providing a raid dps buff. Anything else (mitigation, enmity, keeping your team alive) is an expectation. Failure to do so will irritate your team, but doing so successfully will never earn you a word of thanks.

If you don't give tanks and healers a way to feel needed and rewarded, the very personality types that would seek out those roles ordinarily will lose interest in playing them. Everyone is focused on where the sub money is, but these are the people you actually need to be winning over. Because when your queues dry up, your new players dry up.

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Damage however has nothing to do with responsibility. Damage only matters in end game content. In end game raids tanks have the least responsibility of all. Besides pressing the tank buster button, an occasional add or tank swap, tanks have the least mechanics to do. They can also safely "fail" the most mechanics, as they will rarely get one shot. DPS have much more responsibilities mechanics wise and have almost no leniency of failure, as they will usually die if they get hit by a mechanic. In raids, as far as mechanics goes, tanks are easy mode. Especially in the latest raids where the bosses even auto position themselves.

In normal content (24man raids, normal raids, dungeons etc) where personal responsibility for tanks and healers matters a lot more, damage means absolutely nothing (unless the entire group is severely undergeared).

If you want to feel rewarded and believe that damage is the only way to provide that, then you should be playing a damage dealer and be the 1st or 2nd on the damage list.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

And if you fail to provide that experience, we'll find it elsewhere. And you'll be left with dps players looking for their single-player game experience. Hopefully the AI serves them better.

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Hope you find it.

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Originally Posted by Izsha

I have NEVER played a game where tanks and healer/support classes ever matched the popularity of a dps class. Doesnt matter the genre. Moba, fps, ARPG, MMO, whatever. Your assertion that they are disliked purely out of poor design is false. Unless you are asserting that no game ever has actually created 'well crafted' tanks and healers.

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Certain MMOs have at least crafted periods of well crafted tanks and healers, during which time they were roughly just as popular.

Did these periods include those where, for instance, tanks were reduced to meat-shields or their awareness required was 'streamlined' to merely needing to stack an inflated threat/enmity metric briefly before going on as normal? No. Because that's just a whole lot less interesting, even, than what gameplay looks like without any tanks (where far more awareness and timing is required).

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Originally Posted by Kalise

"People" don't dislike when healing and tanking roles become merely nominal.

Tanks and Healers dislike that.

"People" in general tend to err towards DPS roles.

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"People" in general tend to err towards roles with greatest apparent reward per amount of apparent responsibility required. You can think of these rewards as largely "moments of glory" or instances where everything clicks.

For an XIV DPS, these instances can occur regardless of your team and therefore require far less responsibility and offer far more control relative to healers or tanks, but that need not be the case.

That case occurs, again, when roles are made nominal, unbending classifications, when tasks require "Tanks" more so than "mitigation", "Healers" more so than "healing", and "Damage-Dealers" more so than "dps" or "burst damage" because they remove the capacity for other roles to meaningfully contribute in those tasks.

Consider the difference between what tanking looks like in a game with enmity/threat, defensives, counters, and basically everything else that makes up a tank's toolkit, but with no tanks, and what tanking looks like in a game with said Tanks. On average, the latter actually has less tanking, by which I mean there is less tanking-related gameplay in terms of actual decisions, awareness, positioning, and so forth related to protecting one's team or their offenses while sabotaging the enemies or thwarting their offenses. Much is replaced with simply tossing up some "threat" and thereafter replacing the various tasks of interception, disruption, kiting, and so forth with something automatic. It becomes a matter of "Why tank when you can just be a Tank?"

And despite having thereby gutted the gameplay involved in tanking, for instance, because those benefits are now the result of passive specializations instead of actual actions that you, a "tank", have greater access to or benefit from but others can and must nonetheless contribute in, those responsibilities are removed from other "roles". Thus, the responsibility gap is increased. There is no point in putting non-tanks through the ringer of having to actually to tank, even if that part of their kits hasn't yet been shed as dead weight, because it's so just so much easier to trade good use of a toolkit (actual tanking) out for passive specialization anyways (nominal "tanking"). Now you have fewer moments of glory or instances in which everything "clicks" available to tanks even while moving massive areas of responsibility over to them alone.

And then we wonder then why Tanks, rather than tanking, end up with so much passive benefit that the group is badly dependent upon with so little apparent reward, and why the role that still mostly retains its complexity and moments of glory but only some third of its original potential responsibilities that would have required broader awareness ends up highly popular by comparison...

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Originally Posted by Lyth

You don't need to generate the same amount of interest in tanks and healers as you do dps. Party slots are designed with the expectation that we're merely 1 in 4. It's also not like you have to do anything particularly intelligent to 'create' these players. You just have to create the gameplay that we're looking for. The problem is that game design is being driven by how a dps player might envision tanking and healing works, rather than how a tank would envision tanking or a healer would envision healing. Tanks are not just there to take damage. Healers are not just there to cast heals. Our worlds do not revolve around dps players, nor should they. We're here to help, but we're definitely not here to serve.

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I doubt asking tanks what tanking should look like would necessarily give you a role more distinct from or altogether satisfying than what we have now. I doubt also that what we have now is a "dps player's view of what tanking should be".

Consider what a tank-less (i.e. 3-DPS) party must do in the upper floors of PotD to survive. Enmity is certainly a part of that, far more so than its ever been for actual tanks in XIV. But so is CC, kiting, swap-ins without Provoke, and so forth.

How is that more clearly point to the tanks we have than now, say, the tank veterans on the forums across SB complaining that Defiance and its tools were pure waste, admonishing any and all mitigation that would be excessive or didn't adhere to optimal schedules?

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

"People" in general tend to err towards roles with greatest apparent reward per amount of apparent responsibility required. You can think of these rewards as largely "moments of glory" or instances where everything clicks.

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Nah, people err towards DPS.

Even when other roles can provide more "Moments of glory" and said "Moments of glory" are much more impressive, people still gravitate towards DPS.

Consider this in relation to other games and genres. In a MOBA, the biggest, flashiest plays are done by the initiator. They get the sick set ups that allow their team to press their buttons and get the teamfight win. Yet, everyone wants to be the "Carry" that just stacks damage and right clicks on people (Or otherwise, spends half the game hitting mindless NPC's)

In a number of MMO's, healers have brought about the biggest and most influential moments of glory, by the nature of clutch heals/CC/shields etc. In ones where healing is actually well designed as opposed to the trash we get from most popular ones. Yet everyone still wants to be the DPS.

In FPS's such as Overwatch or TF2, the big influential plays are made by the Tanks (Reinhardt and Heavy) or Healers (Typically Ana, but Mercy has the biggest potential payout when she gets a full team revive. While Medic with his Ubercharge is literally the only way to push into many defences). Yet everyone wants to be Mr Shooty.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Consider the difference between what tanking looks like in a game with enmity/threat, defensives, counters, and basically everything else that makes up a tank's toolkit, but with no tanks, and what tanking looks like in a game with said Tanks. On average, the latter actually has less tanking

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That depends on how the games are designed.

I've seen plenty of non-trinity games where the general strategy is the boss just ping pongs around the place getting kited while it swaps aggro constantly depending on who's arbitrarily the most threatening target (Which isn't nearly as well defined as "Who's doing the most damage" or "Who's actually using tank mechanics")

Meanwhile, I've also seen some trinity games offer a lot more in terms of actual tanking. With what springs to mind is playing Warrior in Tera where your primary means of mitigation was using iframes on a dodge roll (Which meant, you not only had to time it right, but you had to plan around the resources for your rolls as well as boss movement depending on the direction you rolled) as well as Riftstalker in Rift where your primary means of mitigation was teleporting about the place and getting damage reduction shields for doing so, which again, lead to a lot of resource management and boss positioning as each teleport had a unique destination.

Though I admit, the number of Trinity games that offer interesting Tanking is pretty low. I dare say because we're still in the wake of WoW and all the subsequent WoW-clones that thus all use the same system of "Tank do more threat" > "Tank use CD for Tankbuster" as their entire role.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

I doubt also that what we have now is a "dps player's view of what tanking should be".

Consider what a tank-less (i.e. 3-DPS) party must do in the upper floors of PotD to survive. Enmity is certainly a part of that, far more so than its ever been for actual tanks in XIV. But so is CC, kiting, swap-ins without Provoke, and so forth.

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I honestly doubt that they even bother thinking much about upper floors of PotD/HoH.

Since, there are achievements available for doing them solo, but literally only one job in the entire game can do it and even then, there's very, very few people who've actually done it.

I wouldn't even be surprised if they didn't even playtest the upper floors with 3x DPS and they simply did it with a 1/1/1 set up and were like "Yes, this is technically possible to do within our game. It's good to go"

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

How is that more clearly point to the tanks we have than now, say, the tank veterans on the forums across SB complaining that Defiance and its tools were pure waste, admonishing any and all mitigation that would be excessive or didn't adhere to optimal schedules?

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Well... During StB, Defiance and its tools WERE pure waste. Acknowledging the facts about the game doesn't mean you don't know how to conceptualize actual tanking.

Heck, as it stands, we have excessive mitigation to the point where essentially the only reason to bring 2 tanks to raids is because of Tankbusters hitting 2 targets. Adding more mitigation won't do anything to fix that.

It also doesn't absolve the devs of making Tanks simply have the bare basics of a DPS rotation as their entire gameplay with a few oGCD defensive buttons to press when boss says to. The 123 rotation and IR burst is pretty much the skeleton of mDPS with no added frills or depth (Heck, unlike actual mDPS we don't even get any variation in 123 combos. Such as how DRG goes up to a 5 point combo, how SAM uses 2 different 3 point combos and a 2 point combo, how MNK uses 1.5-2 different 3 point combos with more emphasis on positionals. No, we just get 123 with WAR having a second "3" to press every 3rd string and PLD having the same but also a 4th button to spam instead of a combo...)

Nor does it absolve them of simply making "Tank" mechanics into literally a Tankbuster and that's it. With bosses auto-positioning (Which sounds like "We don't like it when tank move boss. Hard to DPS. Make boss move itself. Easy to DPS!") and otherwise Tanks simply focusing on the same global mechanics as DPS do (Which sounds like "It's fun for us, so it should be fun for them right?")

These are glaring issues that would be easily apparent to anyone who's actually played a Tank in the game. Just like many of the issues Healers have is incredibly apparent to anyone who's played Healer in the game. Yet, here we are, with Tanks still being just barebones DPS and Healers getting yet more healing GCD's they never use. If this doesn't suggest that Tank/Healer designs are coming from a bunch of DPS mains, I don't know what would.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

Nah, people err towards DPS....]

...In FPS's such as Overwatch or TF2, the big influential plays are made by the Tanks (Reinhardt and Heavy) or Healers (Typically Ana, but Mercy has the biggest potential payout when she gets a full team revive. While Medic with his Ubercharge is literally the only way to push into many defences). Yet everyone wants to be Mr Shooty.

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You realize everything I've just said about apparent responsibility vs. apparent reward and sense of (in)dependence also applies in every example you've given here, and proportionately to exactly that?

As soon as apparent responsibility was flipped by bringing out the 1/3/2 experimental format in OW, for instance, where fights were much more obviously made or broken by DPS, dps became the bottleneck for more reason than just there being fewer tanks in the mix. In the double-sniper meta, snipers had the most agency, but also the most responsibility and by far the least leniency and quickly became one of the most disliked roles except among those who truly believed they could carry (and were quickly shamed into humility by their 'deservedly' toxic teammates if they couldn't actually follow through).

And let's be frank, TF2 hasn't half the "MOBA components" of OW, which in turn ought to have fewer than an MMO, and HotS and DotA2, at least, show proportionately less lean towards ADCs as their responsibilities increase and late-game overpoweredness decreases.

Wherever responsibility is more observed than seemingly rewarded, people shy away. That DPS have so often come out ahead only points to a poor balance between roles. It's not a matter of taking someone new to a game with tanks/fighters, damage specialists, and supports and watching them be gravitationally sucked towards that central, shiny red role. It's a matter of what they do and how they do it.

(And even then, OW is almost always a 1- to 2-minute queue for a tank, 2-minute queue for a healer, and a 3-minute queue for a solo-queue DPS, and despite the horror stories that stuck us with Role Queue, the vast majority of teams did flex off DPS into working compositions; it just still allowed for ingenuity and playing to a party's strengths (mechanical skill, awareness, tactics-mindedness, etc.). And people did seem to be a fair bit more aware of what the other roles actually need in order to best support each other back before that split.)

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Originally Posted by Kalise

Though I admit, the number of Trinity games that offer interesting Tanking is pretty low.

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And yet you're convinced that tanks are avoided only because the inherently and always more attractive DPS role exists, and nothing to do with

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Originally Posted by Kalise

I dare say because we're still in the wake of WoW and all the subsequent WoW-clones that thus all use the same system of "Tank do more threat" > "Tank use CD for Tankbuster" as their entire role.

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Frankly, "WoW Clone" would be a rather gross overestimation of our present tanking situation.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

Well... During StB, Defiance and its tools WERE pure waste. Acknowledging the facts about the game doesn't mean you don't know how to conceptualize actual tanking.

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I never said otherwise, nor did I ever say that tanks "don't know how to conceptualize actual tanking". The difference is in how they pointed out the problem. We had multi-role players (typically midcore or more casual) who predominantly asked that Defiance, Grit, and Shield Oath should be less of a waste, and Savage tank-mains who insisted that tanking skills of mutual cost with damage output have only ever been and can only ever be a waste and therefore should be removed from the game. Given that we did in fact get the latter, the latter seems to have clearly been the more influential. This wasn't a "DPS-pandering" change. It was made, likely in equal parts, in response to tank-mains and for the imagined "New Player"-kun.

I will agree completely that the devs should have done more to read between the lines despite there being very direct requests for exactly what we got and outright dismissal of anything that didn't take SB's facts as the way things ("bloat" of Defiance and its ilk aside) should and would work, but we can't honestly say that the suggestions of well-placed tank mains before didn't point us right to where we ended up.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

<From> Adding more mitigation won't do anything to fix that.... <to>...These are glaring issues that would be easily apparent to anyone who's actually played a Tank in the game. Just like many of the issues Healers have is incredibly apparent to anyone who's played Healer in the game. Yet, here we are, with Tanks still being just barebones DPS and Healers getting yet more healing GCD's they never use. If this doesn't suggest that Tank/Healer designs are coming from a bunch of DPS mains, I don't know what would.

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Has nothing to do with my post. What part of my taking issue with XIV increasingly ridding tanks of their core mechanics and responsibilities and turning them into a nameplate + a dps kit is my "absolving them" of doing... exactly that? And for what it's worth, while I've certainly seen melee request that their tanks be less idiotic in dungeons or that their groups stack in the middle of the boss's hitbox so they can continue to position while participating in stacking mechanics, I have not once seen a DPS request that tanks no longer be allowed to position bosses. That change came out of left field.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Has nothing to do with my post. What part of my taking issue with XIV increasingly ridding tanks of their core mechanics and responsibilities and turning them into a nameplate + a dps kit is my "absolving them" of doing... exactly that? And for what it's worth, while I've certainly seen melee request that their tanks be less idiotic in dungeons or that their groups stack in the middle of the boss's hitbox so they can continue to position while participating in stacking mechanics, I have not once seen a DPS request that tanks no longer be allowed to position bosses. That change came out of left field.

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For what it's worth, auto positioning bosses is less of an issue when the mechanic they auto position for is inflexible. That said, we could certainly use more mechanic strings similar to E7's add phase. I got some strong Mogushan Vaults vibes from that, and that concept (Mobile fight divided among multiple enemies) not only can be a great template for a boss fight, it has a great example in the Stone Guard from the aforementioned Mogushan Vaults on Heroic mode. Personal favorite to tank.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

For what it's worth, auto positioning bosses is less of an issue when the mechanic they auto position for is inflexible. That said, we could certainly use more mechanic strings similar to E7's add phase. I got some strong Mogushan Vaults vibes from that, and that concept (Mobile fight divided among multiple enemies) not only can be a great template for a boss fight, it has a great example in the Stone Guard from the aforementioned Mogushan Vaults on Heroic mode. Personal favorite to tank.

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That whole era has quite a few tanking gems... /nostalgia

Oddly enough, the most fun I have now is on the terrifying combinations like, say, Teaming-Skittish-Necrotic, where DPS are finally forced to play a part in my and their survival.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

That whole era has quite a few tanking gems... /nostalgia

Oddly enough, the most fun I have now is on the terrifying combinations like, say, Teaming-Skittish-Necrotic, where DPS are finally forced to play a part in my and their survival.

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Yeah I do miss me some Mythic+ with the affixes and seasonal affixes 14 almost has that they could put the Pomanders in from PotD as an incentive for buffs/boons but they'd have to redesign dungeons too which I doubt would happen. I also played Classic back in the fall while playing this and going from Classics dungeon vs 14 there's no "scary" mobs in 14, like in Classic in Stratholme Live side there's Battlemages that'll AoE your group that do TONS of damage, Scarlet Gallants that'll Crusader Strike your tank for big damage, Mobs that'll heal and mana burn your healers and bubble at low health, those are some examples but 14 never has any real threatening enemies in dungeons sadly.

I do agree though I miss those examples you gave like Teaming where DPS have to worry about threat, Tyrannical weeks were tough on some bosses, same with Fortified, even the seasonal affix with Bwan'samdis where you'd kill a % amount of trash and it comes back to life to decimate your group always kept me mindful of what trash to skip and what to kill for that %.