What do you guys think is the cause of severe lack of Tank users?

Do you think it's just lack in number of tank jobs or people simply wanting to do more damage? I've noticed that lot of sprouts jumping into FF14 lately, thanks to(?) Corona, decides to start out as a dps and was simply curious.

Imbalance of apparent responsibility vs. apparent reward. Granted, apparent responsibility and apparent reward depends on one's (typical) groupmates, but on the whole, if you seem to get less enjoyment/respect/performance out of a given amount of responsibility (especially of a sort others can see and will hold you to), interest rapidly declines.

Tank is the highest responsibility job and I wouldn't recommend it to people as a first class to play.

They lead the way through the dungeon, and everyone else just has to follow them.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

Tank is the highest responsibility job and I wouldn't recommend it to people as a first class to play.

They lead the way through the dungeon, and everyone else just has to follow them.

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Yeah it's real hard to do that and not let the DPS die when they run ahead.

I'd say it looks to have high responsibility but it's no where near what it actually looks like. Just hit your CDs in this order and you'll be fine.

Besides the responsibility aspect that was previous mentioned, it could be possible that tanking just isn't as interesting to play anymore compared to other roles. Even at the current level cap, casual game play for 3 of the tanks is mostly just turning on stance, 1-2-3/4, inner beast/req/delirium phase, use defensive CDs, and movement.

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Originally Posted by MerlinCross

Yeah it's real hard to do that and not let the DPS die when they run ahead.

I'd say it looks to have high responsibility but it's no where near what it actually looks like. Just hit your CDs in this order and you'll be fine.

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I'm on the JP Elemental data centre and it is very rare to see people running ahead of the tank. On the rare occasion that a tank is new and doesn't realise they're supposed to be leading, the rest of the party will usually wait and try to nudge them along.

Therefore, there is more pressure and responsibility on the tank to lead the party, and it is easier to learn a dungeon as DPS.

I'm going to rub against the grain a bit here, and say it's the perceived difficulty & responsibility that tanking has. The talk surrounding the class and the people saying the class has so much more pressure/responsibility creates more pressure and anxiety than the role actually deserves to have. I've found that while there's some initial trepidation towards tanking the anxiety tends to drop fast once you've actually done it.

Leadership in the group tends to be fluid as well, often passing more to the most charismatic person in the party rather than role. The tank may be ahead of the group but that doesn't mean they're necessarily the leader. In fact, a majority of the content doesn't really need or have a leader. Most of it is pretty linear and easy enough that simply keeping a steady pace as a group with the tank in the foremost position allows the party to blast through everything in no time. Unless you're wanting to imply that being a little further ahead of the group is indicative of leadership in which case... lol

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Originally Posted by Iscah

I'm on the JP Elemental data centre and it is very rare to see people running ahead of the tank. On the rare occasion that a tank is new and doesn't realise they're supposed to be leading, the rest of the party will usually wait and try to nudge them along.

Therefore, there is more pressure and responsibility on the tank to lead the party, and it is easier to learn a dungeon as DPS.

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And yet on NA, there’s no upper limit to “YOLO” rushers in dungeons. Not even by DPS solely, if seen Tanks just take off before the healer is ready. Different playing manners across different regional servers who knew?

I still say it’s easier than most people think/expect it to be mainly due to that initial stage fright of leading and messing up. Then you notice it’s a puddle, not a lake and that just kinda goes away.

Tanks mistakes are seen, you can't tell with a healer because it could easily just be the tank not mitigating. DPS mistakes won't be seen unless enrage. That's the pressure.

The reason is how tanks are designed currently, nothing challenges you as a tank other then leveling and pulling dungeons outside of that bosses in EXs and some Savages either don't move or auto position themselves and outside of positioning and living we only do DPS which our DPS isn't rewarding this expansion. I can do 10k DPS as a DRK and a co-DPS can do 14k but their DPS makes it or break it mine doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, not only that but every tank has way too many CDs for any situation where you won't die whatsoever even with 1 measly tank CD.

This expansion it's great they balanced tank DPS with getting rid of things like slashing resistance, making them more accessible but it came at a cost, as it stands tanking is the least rewarding role when played right you're a downgraded DPS that can survive a beating while hitting the boss with a foam bat. I'm hoping 6.0 changes it but i'm not very hopeful the only reason I haven't quit raiding is because my static needs me as a tank and if I swapped to a DPS it'd just make things inconvenient since I've been a tank main since I started the game.

That's just my 2 cents.

Three of them were dumbed down, and that killed a lot of interest right there.

Hubris.
Tank mains have maintained for years there's extra responsibility and importance that come with the pride of being a tank. Our hubris wanted to keep the club exclusive by making a scary barrier of entry, no matter how much SE wants to lower the difficultly of entry.
And it worked! People don't want to tank. They don't want to be the first person through a straight hallway and get lost. They don't want to be the first to die thanks to a healer messing up, and being afraid people will point at them instead of the healer. They don't want to worry about keeping a boss straight with the supreme difficulty of NOT MOVING for a moment in their life.

It's our hubris that's caused this, and it's the reason people maintain tanks are more difficult or have heftier responsibilities.
Whereas the secret of tanking is, it's the job that looks the most important while simultaneously being the absolute easiest with the least responsibilities. But the majority of players will never see this, and the majority of tanks will never say this. I mean, there's not often a discourse to do so, but even then their hubris may keep them from doing it!

Spread the word that tanking is easy, and hopefully it'll ease up on the tension of bringing in players to try the role.

The forums have been clear that you have no business tanking if you're not fine with dps running around the dungeon like headless chickens pulling everything if you dare to wait so much as a few seconds on a cd, so I don't pug any sort of dungeon as tank. Most dungeons are fine, but why risk it when the other roles can afk half the run and no one will care as long as stuff dies.

But for max level content, it's just not that interesting, particularly at midcore. Normal has practically no tank swaps and the tankbusters only really kill the undergeared unmitigated. EX typically has about 2-3 and maybe an add or one gimmick. Titania even had no swap. Apart from that you're a blue dps that hits like a wet noodle with a very basic rotation. Tank mitigation is "fine" for the content, but rarely enough for any big glory moments when the healer is down and most of the toolkit is just for reducing the hps requirement for the healer a little. It's just not an exciting job.

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Originally Posted by Canadane

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Exclusivity is attractive.

People want to be seen to belong to an exclusive club. That's why the answer to "what job is the most complex" is always "the job that I'm maining at the moment".

So what actually creates exclusivity? You need a barrier to entry (i.e. some degree of time investment) and a reward gated behind it (i.e. the ability to make game-changing plays). Of course, it still needs to be accessible so that you can actually get into it and make that initial time investment.

In very early MMOs, that barrier to entry for tanks was gear. So to be a 'main tank', you had to be reliable and available so that gear could be funnelled to you for your team to survive and progress.

But critical factor in all this is visibility. As a new player committing to the role, you have to be able to see how time invested relates to reward. Gear is easy to interpret. Attend raid consistently, get gear, become part of an exclusive club.

Skill is much harder to interpret, and tends to be a lot less visible in this genre. MMOs generally aren't interesting to watch 'high level play' on, as they are information dense. That's part of the reason why games which are designed for watching (i.e. esports) tend to be less of 'watch these twenty skill buttons light up in sequence' and more about positioning, aim, movement, and relatively few visually distinct abilities that everyone can recognise.

So even when someone is doing something relatively skilled in an MMO, it's much harder for a new player watching it to say "in 10000 hours, I want to be able to do that."

This is unfortunate, because tanking is probably the most natural of the three roles to showcase skilled play on, when fights are designed appropriately. Positioning and movement are very intuitive for a viewer, even one with minimal game experience, to visually interpret.

You're not going to sell tanking to new players as being low skill, low reward. You're going to sell it by making it both visible and exclusive. That's part of the reason why WAR enjoyed a boost in popularity in late ARR/early Heavensward. When it was perceived as high skill but less common job and people were doing unique things with it (8 WAR clears, etc.) everyone wanted to be a part of that. When it lost its exclusivity, it lost its value.

I consider it's a mix of diferent factors like the encounter desing,jobs desing and tank anxiety that seems to be comon betwen many new and introvert players.

For the tank anxiety you can't do anything to that since it will be a thing forever and by default that will make tanks and in the same degree healers less popular but for encounter desing and job desing you can do a lot and that's where the current expansion fails so far.

accesibility, what this means and current purpose? they dumped down tanks and his mechanics to make the role be more accesible, jobs like WAR and DRK lose all his complexity and by result all the fun around it for this sole purpose and i have to ask this was necesary? my answer is no, tanks didn't need to be more accesible since if you pick a MAR or a GLA from level 1 you will have the most accesible introduction to the tanking role with fair progresion and a excelent introduction to DRK and GNB if you wanna go to one of those 2 or just keep progresing to more complex versions of those with PLD and WAR with easy understanding of skill and mechanics when they come, so dumped down the entire role at max level for accesibility eliminate the fun and reward of it at being so easy to play it's not interesting to invest anymore.

In resume the role will always have low popularity but the recent changes make all the veterans how use to find so much fun in the past with them like me don't wanna spend more time that the necesary on such degradated role, i personally only tank for my static on savage and nothing more and i do my roulettes as a dps since i find it way more rewarding have to wait extra mins by jumping around my house and having a proper run experience that dealt with being a tank on any content outside of savage.
Tanks archive balance yeah but the cost has been insane and the jobs suffered to much from it, it's just not normal we are complaying that we have clones on the tank and healer roles with the same tools and even the same mechanics (kill yourself requiem inner delirium) with extremly minimun gameplay diferences and Yoship claiming wrongly they focus on job diversity like what we have now is fine combined with the lack and trivialization of all the tanks mechanics, the new trait say the truth you archive tank mastery at level 1 and there is barely nothing to improve outside of that.

so they archive nothing, the new players don't wanna invest on the role bcs anxiety and the veterans don't wanna expend more time than necesary on it, all they propaganda around DRK boosted the popularity of the job but overall there is only dissatisfaction and memes abour how TBN is godly.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Exclusivity is attractive.

People want to be seen to belong to an exclusive club. That's why the answer to "what job is the most complex" is always "the job that I'm maining at the moment".

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Is that why so many people's highest praise of RDM when maining it is that "it's clean and simple", or why so many new people jumped ship onto NIN (while so many of its veterans jumped off)? In XIV, at least, "complex" (or its variants such as "hard to master" or "complicated") seems nearly as often to denote condemnation as praise. Accessibility seems to typically be valued way higher in this game than most.

:: Agreed on all other parts.

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Originally Posted by Minnel

Do you think it's just lack in number of tank jobs or people simply wanting to do more damage? I've noticed that lot of sprouts jumping into FF14 lately, thanks to(?) Corona, decides to start out as a dps and was simply curious.

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Sprouts probably don't have the foreknowledge that people on this forum do.

Even if things were perfectly divided, you would have 25% Tank, 12.5% healer, and 57.5% DPS because that's what's available to start, and it doesn't shift that much.

A new player is going to be drawn more by aesthetics than anything else, and that doesn't favor tanks either.

You want to play a caster, that excludes tanks.

You want to play some sort of gun/bow class, that excludes tanks.

You want to play fist fighter, that excludes tanks, etc etc.

There are less archetypes / fantasies represented by tanks than by the other jobs.

New players don't want to tank because it looks like the role with most responsibility (seemingly high skill floor).

Veterans don't want to tank because it's the easiest role to optimize (low skill ceiling).

That's partly due to fights being designed to take control out of the tank. Tanking to me has always been about controlling the flow of battle. Where do I take the boss? How should I position? Is the boss in an area that is accessible to melee DPS with aoe puddles around? Things like this used to be part of a tank's responsibility. Best example is T1 and even T5. Any tank who went through that either sync'd or back in the day knows how important where the boss needs to be or else its a wipe. Current fights boil down to keep boss center and face north*, which is redundant because most of the time the boss recenter's for mechanics i.e. Memoria EX. Some will find it boring and unrewarding and I can see why the tanking damage thread is blowing up right now. Tanks are nothing more than damage sponges for the boss.

Putting back tanks ability to control the flow of battle may not increase the lack of tank users but it will reward those who like to tank or enjoy the responsibility of leading a party.

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Originally Posted by Canadane

Hubris.

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Oh yeah, considering tanking is one of the jobs where you screw up everyone dies many love that responsibility. I am not saying you are wrong but... the issue for this expansion is they went too far with making it easy to the point many tanks dipped out of tanking. Tanking needed to get some type of complexity with all the streamlining it got, unfortuantely, that's all we got this expansion. All tanks are basically the same at this point, to a bad degree when the shell is just so bland. 1 combo you get build up charges for something that finally hits decently hard then build it up again. Not fun. There is 0 interesting interactions with the kits, its bland. Then the fights... ugh... for tanks they are terribly bland, especially for OTs they straight up are a snore fest because you do the same thing in all of them almost.

SE took 3 steps instead of taking a half step that they needed this expansion. End game, tanking is dead, its not enjoyable at all. I want to go back to being a DPS for just one raid tier now just so I don't feel bored raiding again.
At least TEA is designed well for tanks.

Finally, yes, tank damage is too low for it to feel like it matters. The absolute cap for Tank DPS is roughly 11k with full BiS gear on some fights. That is with a pink top 1% parse to hit that. Most tanks will only see 9-10k damage which is deflating when physical ranged DPS that are considered weak this tier are doing about 15-16k and AST/WHM are out DPSing tanks.

This also makes doing MSQ a drag as a tank when you get an instance, cause its going to drag out far more than if I were a healer or a DPS. Its not good in either direction.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

On the rare occasion that a tank is new and doesn't realise they're supposed to be leading, the rest of the party will usually wait and try to nudge them along.

Therefore, there is more pressure and responsibility on the tank to lead the party, and it is easier to learn a dungeon as DPS.

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This is true because when I heal and see the tank doing slow pulls I usually pull a bit more for them. They don’t need to worry because I’ll keep them alive. I wouldn’t of pulled extra if I couldn’t handle the healing. New tanks if you see your healer do this, trust them. Don’t get bitter and stop playing. You might learn something.

It also helps break that comfort zone when you see what is possible to achieve when healer and tank are in sync. Just remember that in most instances the healer could probably tank the whole dungeon themselves. So don’t worry.

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Originally Posted by LalafellDown

This is true because when I heal and see the tank doing slow pulls I usually pull a bit more for them. They don’t need to worry because I’ll keep them alive. I wouldn’t of pulled extra if I couldn’t handle the healing. New tanks if you see your healer do this, trust them. Don’t get bitter and stop playing. You might learn something.

It also helps break that comfort zone when you see what is possible to achieve when healer and tank are in sync. Just remember that in most instances the healer could probably tank the whole dungeon themselves. So don’t worry.

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I've had several tanks get mad when I did this and l've made a post about it before on these forums, in which by far most seem convinced you should never do this as healer because it seems to violate some arbitrary etiquette.

5.0 Patch that made tanks a worthless meatshields with zero damage or gameplay depth whatsoever. Tanks right now are there just to hold the boss, they feel useless and boring, there is nothing exciting to play them it feels like door holding boys so others (dps) could have fun. You could play one hand and spam one aoe, nobody gives a crap about what you do on your tank, your contribution to dps is so sheet that it doesnt matter and i bet next patch paladin is going to be bis tank due to the clemency, people instead of dpsing will be expected to heal themselves and let healers dps, mark my word.
I started lvling all 3 healers and dont even care to cap tomestones anymore, thats how bad it is right now.

Tanks have little too little to do and little difference between each other. This I feel was implemented to GIVE tanks some mechanics to do.... but it feels unnecessary because it was already an easy job to begin with.

Truthfully, I kind of miss fighting DPS for aggro. Watching those folks creep up in enmity and thus provoking little creative ways to stay ahead.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

Sprouts probably don't have the foreknowledge that people on this forum do.

Even if things were perfectly divided, you would have 25% Tank, 12.5% healer, and 57.5% DPS because that's what's available to start, and it doesn't shift that much.

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But by even level 50 the ratio starts to normalize around a 2 Tanks:2.5 Healers:5 DpS ratio.

The only places you see tanks not being the one of the most in demand roles is Alliance Raids (which have a 1:2:5 ratio) and Savage+ Raiding which puts a lot more responsibility on Healers.

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A new player is going to be drawn more by aesthetics than anything else, and that doesn't favor tanks either.

You want to play a caster, that excludes tanks.

You want to play some sort of gun/bow class, that excludes tanks.

You want to play fist fighter, that excludes tanks, etc etc.

There are less archetypes / fantasies represented by tanks than by the other jobs.

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Even in those MMOs that do allow tanking with those archetypes the Tank:Healer:Support: DpS ratio still ends up being something like 2:2.2:2.2:5.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

Even in those MMOs that do allow tanking with those archetypes the Tank:Healer:Support: DpS ratio still ends up being something like 2:2.2:2.2:5.

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I mean.

We're not shown any numbers here so, you know.

Just standard tank forum stuff.

You're right. These numbers are completely fabricated. Surely there are more than enough tanks, and Square Enix has nothing to worry about. Let's cater more to dps, because that's where the sub money is. They will fund us with their pretty cash shop glamours.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

You want to play a caster, that excludes tanks.

You want to play some sort of gun/bow class, that excludes tanks.

You want to play fist fighter, that excludes tanks, etc etc.

There are less archetypes / fantasies represented by tanks than by the other jobs.

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The sad thing is that for each of those aesthetics / archetypes / fantasies, I can think of an MMO that allows for them as a tank. Kung Fu Master, Kineticist, Sapper, what have you -- in a more diverse vision class design as a whole, there's just so much more that can be done with the tank line-up.

I don't think that's the lead reason are tanks are few here, but damn... a little diversity beyond sword, big axe, big sword, and gunny-sword might be nice.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

You're right. These numbers are completely fabricated. Surely there are more than enough tanks, and Square Enix has nothing to worry about. Let's cater more to dps, because that's where the sub money is. They will fund us with their pretty cash shop glamours.

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In perfect distribution, you'd have less tanks than DPS, and only slightly more than healers.

So the answer to "Why are there not as many tanks" is muddled, especially because no source for the numbers are provided.

But hey, continue to make it an 'us vs them' argument. Whatever does it for you.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

The sad thing is that for each of those aesthetics / archetypes / fantasies, I can think of an MMO that allows for them as a tank. Kung Fu Master, Kineticist, Sapper, what have you -- in a more diverse vision class design as a whole, there's just so much more that can be done with the tank line-up.

I don't think that's the lead reason are tanks are few here, but damn... a little diversity beyond sword, big axe, big sword, and gunny-sword might be nice.

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Sounds like it's time for a #ParadigmShift

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Originally Posted by LalafellDown

This is true because when I heal and see the tank doing slow pulls I usually pull a bit more for them. They don’t need to worry because I’ll keep them alive.

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What makes you think that is why they did not pull more?
When I tank I really hate if other people pull extra mobs. Too many mobs means that I can't keep track of where all of them are, I can't avoid their AoE attacks, I may have trouble keeping aggro on all of them and won't notice if some get away from me.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

You're right. These numbers are completely fabricated. Surely there are more than enough tanks, and Square Enix has nothing to worry about. Let's cater more to dps, because that's where the sub money is. They will fund us with their pretty cash shop glamours.

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There are plenty of tanks, but lots of them do not want to tank in PUGs. Other players are the main reason for that.

As someone who has no interest in being a main tank but does occasionally tank for fun:

-I prefer to play either a caster or a sneaky type and tanks are neither
-I prefer being at range so I can see more of what's going on
-I have more fun going into fights blind which is extra punishing for tanks
-The role is more punishing in general: A dps fucks up it's fine, a tank fucks up it's more likely to be a wipe.
-I don't like leading
-Animation delays in this game suck donkey balls and make things that should be simple like picking up a pack of mobs more difficult
-I don't want other players' blood on my hands
-Apparently they're boring to play now
-Knowing when to use cds or cc or taunt swap is not obvious and you have to know beforehand, no addons allowed to help, and again it's more punishing for tanks

That's about it. The last one is probably the biggest thing for me, other than not being particularly interested in the jobs themselves. Like if there was an option to have different types of enemy abilities have different colors or something that'd be a huge help.

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Originally Posted by MistakeNot

What makes you think that is why they did not pull more?
When I tank I really hate if other people pull extra mobs. Too many mobs means that I can't keep track of where all of them are, I can't avoid their AoE attacks, I may have trouble keeping aggro on all of them and won't notice if some get away from me.

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What?
*blinks*
Eeeeeh?
That's your arguement? Can't hold hate? In this day and age where 2 aoe skills makes you the lead on hate by a country mile?

Couple of thoughts...

(1) I actually see less healers than tanks since 5.0 when they butchered SCH and AST. This is when I switched to tanking full time.

(2) I wasn't tanking full time before that because people expect tanks to know the fight perfectly even if the content is 1 day old. It can honestly get stressful at times and sometimes I really just don't want to deal with it.

(3) It doesn't bother me now because I just don't care what anyone says in game anymore lol... *hidden skill: IDGAF Activated*

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Originally Posted by ElazulHP

Couple of thoughts...

(1) I actually see less healers than tanks since 5.0 when they butchered SCH and AST. This is when I switched to tanking full time.

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So I am going to kinda agree/disagree with you. I think it depends on the time. 3 weeks ago there were 0 tanks in the discords or reddit looking for statics to fill tank roles. These last 2 weeks its been healers. I think it basically flip flops between the two. However, the fact there is a brand new tank class released and then all of a sudden the available tank population has dropped like a rock has magnified the issues with tank design right. If we had a new healer released then the same could be said for healers.

This expansion its not really a tank shortage. Its a healer shortage. Most time a healer has a much faster queue than tank even when the duty finder has adventurer in need as tank.

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Originally Posted by Derio

This expansion its not really a tank shortage. Its a healer shortage. Most time a healer has a much faster queue than tank even when the duty finder has adventurer in need as tank.

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Maybe it's just the times I tend to play, but only once in every few Expert Roulette queues for the past few weeks have I even waited a full minute as DPS anyways. I've gotten as many instant-queues as those over 4 minutes, with a maximum of 8.

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Originally Posted by Derio

This expansion its not really a tank shortage. Its a healer shortage. Most time a healer has a much faster queue than tank even when the duty finder has adventurer in need as tank.

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I've found this to be the case as well. It seems like Adventurere in Need defaults to Tank when it's unclear for the system. Generally though, there's imo no way tank is in more demand than healer. I get much faster queues as healer when leveling and at endgame as well.

As tank i only feel like another burden for the healers, you can take more hits than a dps and that's it. Almost all defensive CDs are the same and dont work with each other. War can use thrill of battle before shake it off or use nascent flash before inner chaos to heal himself and someone else, tanks need more things like this.
Aggro management didnt need to be completly gone. For a new tank in stormblood trying to play without tank stance on was a pain so i see why they got rid of aggro combos and diversion. Imo that much is ok as long as you replace it with something else. At least making an OT use shirk more often or just another provoke button to push when you dont have anything else to do.
The dps rotation for tanks are almost all like this : 1,2,3.1 or 3.2, push another button to avoid capping on mp, blood gauge etc... I think all mele dps have something to share with tanks, even mch has "inner release" now come on xD.