Do we have some stats on how many people play tank right now ?

Despite all that i read here about GNB sounds, DRK being a copy of WAR, or all jobs being streamlined too much, i did never see so many tanks ig. Yesterday there was again 6 of them on my hunt group, "again" because it has become a common occurrence. This would have never happened in SB, dps were way more numerous. Same in my FC, it has gone to a point were people cant group together for a daily roulette because :

Player 1 : "someone for expert roulette ?"
player 2 : "me, invite please !"
Player 1 : "... wait, you dont have any other 80 job than your PLD right ?"
Player 2 : "nope."
Player 1 : "it is not gonna work then, i go as a tank as well."

Back in SB there were way too much dps in my FC, and finding a tank was quite rare. Not the other way around.

So do we have some numbers, even if it is only estimates, on how tanks are popular at the moment compared to SB ? And also about DRK, i see quite a lot of them ig despite all the negativity about this job on this forum. I dont think that SE will make a lot of changes if their stats tell them that there is way more people playing it than before, and that the 5.0 revamp was a sucess.

The newer players tend to go to DRK because it is the posterboy for the expansion.

Yeah, I am seeing more tanks as well now in my FC as well. We have a bunch of Dark Knights and Gun Breakers.

I play Warrior 3x if that helps.

Of course DPS were more numerous in SB: they added two DPS classes. The other factors involving the increase besides GNB being added (and DRK being the posterboy of the expack) are the sheer quality of the tank balance. No matter which tank you enjoy you do fine this entire expansion so far, whereas if you were a RDM, BRD, MCH, DNC, SMN, or NIN/SAM/AST for the first couple months you just got straight screwed. Everybody looked over at the tanks like this https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.c...-493656728.jpg

This expansion after finishing MSQ as DRG and discovering (1) there are absolutely tons of DRG's this time, and (2) PF groups doing Eden's are almost always waiting on either tanks or healers, I switched to DRK. Got to 80, geared up, cleared E1S...

... then spent 3 weeks attempting to find a group that had enough DPS to clear E2S. Not a single PF group i joined could do this. Every single group had a combined DPS that was too low to clear, even if there were no quietus deaths. I parsed a comfortable 7.4k DPS on my DRK and was able to do the entire fight without a single nyx touch several times.

I swapped back to main DPS out of frustration and now I am competing for DPS spots in groups and waiting long long hours for healers and tanks willing to try E2S. I can tank E2S literally any day, any time, but i know 100% for certain that if I swap to tank, the DPSers will simply not be good enough to clear.

My perspective is therefore that there is, as always, way way more DPS than other roles, and the majority of them are not capable of clearing the encounter I am trying to clear.

https://ffxivcensus.com/#class

Thats all

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Originally Posted by Seet

https://ffxivcensus.com/#class

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That site considers any character that has done 4.1 to he current. That means half of them are likely characters that have since changed server or been deleted or no longer subbed...

Right now the tanks are all balanced and seen as fun by their fans.

Right now the healers have powerful heals but the non-healing side of play has been seriously over-slimmed to the point where you’re often only using 1 keybind.

Right now the DPS is balanced like Humpty Dumpy after falling off that wall... it’s a hot mess and the joke is the DPS is just BLM or... reroll...

I am not sure if FFXIV has ever been this badly balanced and broken in clas design... The 5.0 story was so great that issue has yet to boil up to expansion ruining, but I fear Shadowbringers will be remembered as poorly as Cataclysm was for WoW... all the budget went to one thing at the massive expense of other areas... half done races, bad balance, destroyed class design, and it looks like the .x patches risk being about an old expac villain that even when current had no personality...


So it makes sense that a lot of people are looking at tanks. But things are going to boil over at some point.

I think 5.1 will make or break things. The cool vibes of the 5.0 story will be past us, and the balance issues will either be fixed or not, and if Xenos is the story... it’s over...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Seet

https://ffxivcensus.com/#class

Thats all

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Why does this census say there are only 480 active characters in the NA? And its not an abbreviated number either cuz then the total numbers would also be abbreviated.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Seet

https://ffxivcensus.com/#class

Thats all

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Also the census does not show all job stone classes nor does it bear any indication if someone is more actively playing their tank classes now (as opposed to just leveling them and never touching them again).

This is most definitely NOT all.

It's anecdotal, but I've seen quite a bit more "DPS needed" in various roulette's for some time now. Granted, it's much rarer on leveling than it was the first few weeks of xpac, but I still see DPS needed quite a bit on 50/60/70, Alliance, Trial and Normal raids. I think the addition of GBN hit that sweet spot for people who wanted to tank but wanted a more complex rotation as a tank so they could feel a bit more like a DPS. It's not like with DRK in HW where people tried it out cause it was the new hotness but ended up abandoning it leaving the total tank population relatively unchanged. I don't think we have a 25/25/50 parity of tank/healer/dps right now, but I think we're closer than we've ever been.