What makes tanking fun?

let's have a positive post shall we?

for me tanks are fun because:
- full control over encounter.
- higher responsibility.
- most of the time boss feels like 1vs1 or 2vs1 which is I like.

What makes tanking fun for you? not only in FFXIV but tanking in general

1. Feeling like a DPS with heavy support options, Personally I'd argue tanks need more fun rotations but tanks at least have semi interesting dps kits compared to healer.
2. being able to save people, while healers are obviously capable of this, tanks are actually very good at preventing party members from going down if you're weary of your party members which i like, because it gives me something to look out for.
3. controlling the pace of dungeons, I like to wall to wall I know i can do it effectively too, being a dps or healer it's frustrating when a tank doesn't pull a lot and the dungeon takes ages.
4. feeling like the "main character" this ones more silly, but when you have aggro it obviously "feels" like you're the actual threat which i personally prefer over being on the side lines.

Personally I think tanking is fun in ff14 but i will argue that they should have better dps options still it's lacking.

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Originally Posted by BabyYoda

let's have a positive post shall we?

for me tanks are fun because:
- full control over encounter.
- higher responsibility.
- most of the time boss feels like 1vs1 or 2vs1 which is I like.

What makes tanking fun for you? not only in FFXIV but tanking in general

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I like them becasue:
-no responsibility
-basically invincible
-taking the jobs of healers

I like them because they're more engaged in the fights and mechanics and there aren't awkward dps breaks for you while your supports handle mechanics.
Like damn thinking back to P8S PII I'm pretty sure the fight doesn't even ask a dps player to do anything other than press rotation for a solid minute before anything even happens.

The role has the coolest jobs in the game. You get the classical one handed sword job with Paladin, you get the iconic Warrior job from Final Fantasy I, you get DARK KNIGHT with greatswords! you get the GUNBLADE JOB! While melee dps are stuck with weeb sword jobs like Samurai and Ninja, or a caster in Red Mage who doesn't use their sword the whole time, tanks get THREE flavors of sword jobs to fulfill the Main Character Fantasy.

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Originally Posted by BabyYoda

let's have a positive post shall we?

for me tanks are fun because:
- full control over encounter.
- higher responsibility.
- most of the time boss feels like 1vs1 or 2vs1 which is I like.

What makes tanking fun for you? not only in FFXIV but tanking in general

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Unironically, Cover. That's it.

Unless you're asking what MADE tanking for me, then :
- Enemy facing and crits on your rear
- Positioning
- Aggro control
- Death through attrition (I'd rather have a model where you get blooded a lot instead of a model where you keep healing a lot... but clemency doesn't count, if all tank self healing was tied to opportunity cost + resource cost that matters like clemency, I'd be a lot more okay with it already)

Honestly its the main character energy for me. The boss is fighting you while you have 3-7 people backing you up.

Boss strongest hit is designed for you.

You start every encounter.

There is a reason why all tanks except gunbreaker have been poster childs for expansions

- main character vibe
- high apm/fun rotation (for gnb at least)
- good looking weapon/armor
- you can carry (tbn/hoc/cover)
- figuring out which mechanic you can ignore to gain uptime
- CDs optimization

Among the only jobs that can clutch save a party member or create more opportunity.
Many times I've been able to save a healer or a fragile party member by throwing cover or heart of corundum at them.
Common players often misunderestimate the value of boss placing which makes them loose a GCD, especially when the boss is at the edge of the arena and jumps to another spot.

My favorite role is support DPS, since the ranged role felt terrible at it I played tank and felt at home.

I enjoy being able to (slowly) solo most dungeon bosses as a tank if the healer goes down, to pull out a win for the team. Makes me feel like a hero.

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Originally Posted by kiotsukete

I enjoy being able to (slowly) solo most dungeon bosses as a tank if the healer goes down, to pull out a win for the team. Makes me feel like a hero.

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Something dark knight can rarely do because no self sustain. That's exclusive to the other 3 tanks and it would be nice to see dark knight no longer exempt from the club of soloing dungeon bosses from 90% for those times when it would be a big time save. Great example being that first boss of the 99 dungeon. I've yet to see a party not go through 5+ healers before clearing just that boss. DT is really where SE stopped pulling their punches

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Originally Posted by AnjouMaaka

Something dark knight can rarely do because no self sustain. That's exclusive to the other 3 tanks and it would be nice to see dark knight no longer exempt from the club of soloing dungeon bosses from 90% for those times when it would be a big time save…

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True, sorry to DRK players but that’s why I prefer to run dungeons on tanks other than DRK. Though I do wonder if it’s necessarily a good thing that the other tanks have so much survivability without needing a healer for backup.

I recently had a healer dc after the 1st boss of the lv97 dungeon. I’m not even all that great at tanking, but was able to trio all the way to the end on WAR pulling one trash pack at a time with just DNC waltz and samba for support before a healer replacement matched in the middle of the last boss. That was a pretty fun tanking challenge, if a bit slow.

Some other fun things about tanking:
- Instant (or near instant) DF queues.
- Almost always get adventurer in need bonus.
- Easy comms just for taking hits to the face in place of others.

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Originally Posted by AnjouMaaka

Something dark knight can rarely do because no self sustain. That's exclusive to the other 3 tanks and it would be nice to see dark knight no longer exempt from the club of soloing dungeon bosses from 90% for those times when it would be a big time save. Great example being that first boss of the 99 dungeon. I've yet to see a party not go through 5+ healers before clearing just that boss. DT is really where SE stopped pulling their punches

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“Those times it would be a big time save”

So never

Seriously for a bit I was content to ignore this thread but god damn guys “I’m a solo god who can ignore my party in a trinity game” should not be a desirable endpoint

You know what I like about tanking- agro management, protecting my party, maybe even dying for them, keeping the boss on me while my party does other important things, pulling damage on to myself from them

Do people seriously enjoy being immortal with zero actual challenge behind it. Like tanks aren’t even immortal because of gear or skill, they are literally just immortal because they exist

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

“Those times it would be a big time save”

So never

Seriously for a bit I was content to ignore this thread but god damn guys “I’m a solo god who can ignore my party in a trinity game” should not be a desirable endpoint

You know what I like about tanking- agro management, protecting my party, maybe even dying for them, keeping the boss on me while my party does other important things, pulling damage on to myself from them

Do people seriously enjoy being immortal with zero actual challenge behind it. Like tanks aren’t even immortal because of gear or skill, they are literally just immortal because they exist

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That's literally the reason people mod other games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Factorio. So they can feel like a god. Because that's what they find fun. It's also like the only skill expression that tanks still have that's actually meaningful and sometimes helpful. Not all tanks have the guts, much less the knowledge needed, to pull off the solo finish of a dungeon boss.

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Originally Posted by AnjouMaaka

That's literally the reason people mod other games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Factorio. So they can feel like a god. Because that's what they find fun.

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Yes and modding a single player game is not remotely the same thing as inherent class design in a trinity MMO

If you want to be an immortal god then go mod a single player game, not affect 3/7 other players fun to achieve said goal in a trinity MMO

Pressing bloodwhetting isn’t guts or skill. Even if it was again skill shouldn’t include affecting other players ability to enjoy the game

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Yes and modding a single player game is not remotely the same thing as inherent class design in a trinity MMO

If you want to be an immortal god then go mod a single player game, not affect 3/7 other players fun to achieve said goal in a trinity MMO

Pressing bloodwhetting isn’t guts or skill. Even if it was again skill shouldn’t include affecting other players ability to enjoy the game

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Your view is very narrow-minded, and that's likely because you don't play tank, and you don't even do the challenging content where tanks are not as immortal as you claim they are. They are not really that immortal in dungeons, and it takes serious skill as a tank to make it look that way, but we can all agree that Bloodwhetting is very powerful and that you hate that about warrior. The solution is to overcome that with content design and bring the other tanks up to warrior for their tank cooldowns.

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Originally Posted by AnjouMaaka

Your view is very narrow-minded, and that's likely because you don't play tank, and you don't even do the challenging content where tanks are not as immortal as you claim they are. They are not really that immortal in dungeons, and it takes serious skill as a tank to make it look that way, but we can all agree that Bloodwhetting is very powerful and that you hate that about warrior. The solution is to overcome that with content design and bring the other tanks up to warrior for their tank cooldowns.

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No your view is narrow minded because you absolutely refuse to see any solution besides “every tank has to be as good as WAR” completely ignoring the fact that that would completely destroy any skill expression of the tanks because then they would just be equally as good at pressing overpowered CD’s which doesn’t help anyone. Your solution only “benefits” someone of your skill or below, for anyone above your skill level it just shoves the ceiling down closer to the floor

DRK is the current tank that actually has some measure of ability to express their skill because they aren’t immortal and their defensives and offensives interact. I don’t want DRK’s skill expression to be shoved down into “press the win button” like WAR has (and arguably PLD as well, GNB still has expression on its rotation complexity)

And as a regular savage PLD i am 100% functionally immortal in the current savage, autos from the boss challenge me like maybe twice in the entire tier, why does the boss even have autos if they do so little

I think I should be able to run the dungeons solo on my own as a DPS job and have the tools to run faster than the tank to make sure they aren't relevant anymore. That's what I like doing in unsynced content as a DPS after all.

Completely ignored the part where I said "overcome that with content design."

Because you can “overcome this with content design” without building it on top of the shaky foundation of overpowered tank CD’s that necessitate a hard floor for the tanks and make balancing incredibly messy

If BW is worth an arbitrary number (let’s say 100) and the damage to the tank is say 50, you don’t up the damage to 150 then make every tank have 100 as a baseline because it both makes it harder to balance and ensures that if the tank can’t press that 100 button then the entire thing becomes unclearable while also providing no benefits

Reducing tank sustain to a 25 and leaving damage at a 50 is way more viable, future proofed and easier to balance than trying to balance of the foundation of assuming every tank starts with a 100

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Because you can “overcome this with content design” without building it on top of the shaky foundation of overpowered tank CD’s that necessitate a hard floor for the tanks and make balancing incredibly messy

If BW is worth an arbitrary number (let’s say 100) and the damage to the tank is say 50, you don’t up the damage to 150 then make every tank have 100 as a baseline because it both makes it harder to balance and ensures that if the tank can’t press that 100 button then the entire thing becomes unclearable while also providing no benefits

Reducing tank sustain to a 25 and leaving damage at a 50 is way more viable, future proofed and easier to balance than trying to balance of the foundation of assuming every tank starts with a 100

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Yeah, seeing this makes me glad people like you aren't on the job design team, cause tanks would still be stuck in ARR with TP still being a thing.

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Originally Posted by AnjouMaaka

Yeah, seeing this makes me glad people like you aren't on the job design team, cause tanks would still be stuck in ARR with TP still being a thing.

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You have yet to provide any sort of valid path as to how this “buff all the tanks and then compensate for them” is supposed to work, petty insults achieve nothing

First point- If you buff every tank to WAR level you are reducing their skill ceiling for anyone who views dungeon tanking as easy- either refute that or accept that because right now as someone who views dungeon tanking as easy this would constitute a straight nerf to tank ceilings in my head and as a tank player would make dungeons more boring. Where is my say in this as an example, I represent a fraction of the tank playerbase as well

Second point- how do you intend to compensate for this increased buff for both tanks and healers? If I’m a tank you’ve lowered my skill ceiling what am I supposed to do now? I’m a healer, all 4 tanks now make my role completely redundant what am I supposed to do now? I’m a DPS I don’t like being dead on the floor while the tank solos the boss. What am I supposed to do now?

Based on your answer to point 2 how then do you intend to reconcile your answer to point 2 with the fact that you also have outright stated you like the tanks being self sufficient?

This is where your entire logic falls apart. Either you want every tank to be self sufficient or you don’t. If you do want every tank to be self sufficient you are both negating the healer role and reducing the experience/enjoyment of anyone who views WAR’s low ceiling as stifling compared to GNB or DRK’s. If you don’t want tanks to be self sufficient but instead want high healing but still a reliance on the healer that circles back to the arbitrary number explanation I gave before where it’s better to nerf the currently out of line tank healing than it is to try to base everything off of it considering both end points lead to the same amount of “power” for the tanks

Please provide a form of actual logical refutation to my points because as it stands the only people I see who benefit from your proposal are people who sit just barely above the floor of their class (not an insult just a description) who want the ceiling pulled down so it doesn’t look far away to the detriment of both healers and tanks who like high ceilings like I do. I genuinely find WAR boring AF, if you buffed DRK’s healing to WAR’s level that would directly contribute to a lesser enjoyment I get out of playing tanks (irrespective of my opinions as a healer)

I'm trying to understand how we came from 'what makes tanking fun' to the current conversation. If you're looking at standard dungeon content, the most successful speedrun strat is one tank of your choice combined with either double or triple PCT (depending on how much speed benefit you can get out of having access to Peloton). If anything, it looks like PCT is what's replacing Healer. I'm sure there's some deep seated irony in all this, but I'll let you figure that one out.

Tangents aside, I think that the most interesting part of tanking is positioning/movement, simply because there's so much room for tanks to differentiate themselves if you give them true control over an encounter. I especially liked fights where the boss snapshots your current position as a reset point after mechanics, simply because of the optimization potential. Mitigation is a distant second, especially when you have interesting cleave patterns without obvious tells or just entertaining tankbuster mechanics. Personal damage optimization is probably the least exciting tanking 'selling point', simply because there's an entire role that just does that better.

My bad, maybe it’s because I said I find soloing dungeon bosses as a tank, thus saving my party from a complete wipe, felt heroic and was fun for me. Since this thread was supposed to about what’s fun about tanking. Naturally, what’s fun for one person won’t always be fun for another.

As someone who only casually plays tank for daily roulettes, yes I do find it fun to be able to imagine myself as a shonen anime hero enacting vengeance on a dungeon boss after it takes out the rest of my team. Because in the past, the healer going down almost always meant a wipe and restart which was not fun, much less a healer dc that often meant a party disband and requeue which was especially not fun as DPS.

I did also say that I wondered if it was necessarily a good thing for tanks to be so survivable that they don’t need a healer for backup.

Not sure what the right answer is here, and of course everyone is entitled to give their opinion and feedback. But I think whatever solution SE comes up with won’t be equally fun for everyone and that’s life. Plenty of other great games out there to play.

Sorry for another long message in your thread, but this guy doesn't get the message.

It's nothing you've said. He has habitually done this across many threads here, with no new material to speak of. And he seems to have a weird obsesssion with thinking he's an authority figure on tanks without actually playing tank (that's why he's asking to be refuted even though he's already pre-refuted himself with ignorant comments.)

He saw a warrior go so ham in a dungeon that they looked immortal and decided he doesn't like that. He has no clue that the job balance is centered around raid design, not dungeons. Heck, even in WoW, tanks are able to solo some dungeons, or at least they were at one point. I haven't played since Mists of Pandaria so if anyone who's played more recently can confirm if it's still like that, feel free to do so.

If he wants tanks to not be able to do that, then he picked the wrong MMO for it.

I find being able to carry if the healer is bad to be fun. It's a nice way of expressing my skill as a tank. That's why tanks have single target shareable abilities. But I also find the role we play in savage to be fun as well. My static is always thanking me for handing out Oblation and TBN.

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Originally Posted by AnjouMaaka

Sorry for another long message in your thread, but this guy doesn't get the message.

It's nothing you've said. He has habitually done this across many threads here, with no new material to speak of. And he seems to have a weird obsesssion with thinking he's an authority figure on tanks without actually playing tank (that's why he's asking to be refuted even though he's already pre-refuted himself with ignorant comments.)

He saw a warrior go so ham in a dungeon that they looked immortal and decided he doesn't like that. He has no clue that the job balance is centered around raid design, not dungeons. Heck, even in WoW, tanks are able to solo some dungeons, or at least they were at one point. I haven't played since Mists of Pandaria so if anyone who's played more recently can confirm if it's still like that, feel free to do so.

If he wants tanks to not be able to do that, then he picked the wrong MMO for it.

I find being able to carry if the healer is bad to be fun. It's a nice way of expressing my skill as a tank. That's why tanks have single target shareable abilities. But I also find the role we play in savage to be fun as well. My static is always thanking me for handing out Oblation and TBN.

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You are arguing with a made up persona of me and you still get things wrong

I’ve specifically told you I regularly do savage as a PLD, it’s my second class behind SCH when I actually bother to do savage. I have just as much “authority” as you put it as you do to discuss tank issues especially when I’m discussing my problems with tanks from the perspective of why I don’t like playing tank, you’ll know when my grievances as a healer creep in. How many times do I have to tell you that way tanks play in the modern game for me is bad regardless of my opinions as a healer

Please argue with my points, arguing with a strawman achieves literally nothing. You asked for forgiveness for a long post then posted an absolutely vapid word salad that adds nothing to the conversation. “Oh he’s so bad” “oh he saw x thing I made up in my head once”. Do you ever actually argue points, it’s like pulling teeth with you

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Originally Posted by BabyYoda

What makes tanking fun for you? not only in FFXIV but tanking in general

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While I'm not exactly a tank main, I have done a lot of different types of content on it. What makes tanking fun for me is:

1) Controlling the boss and positioning them during major mechanics so the melee can get both uptime and positionals.
2) Counting autoattacks and mechanics to mitigate the untelegraphed cleave feels really good.
3) Using my entire toolkit to try and salvage a run gone wrong, like saving the person with 5 vuln stacks by throwing a Cover on them.

I used to enjoy soloing bosses when my entire team went down back in HW/SB because it was a lot more fun, not really enjoyable to do it now because I know I won't die unless I do something really stupid.

1. Most versatile role that can do almost all of the content with least dependency on other players
2. Is possible to share gear with 4 jobs, so can flex within role easily. Also there is far less difference in gameplay between MT and OT than pure/shield healer.
3. Often has unique mechanics to deal with
4. Is easier to play as sturdiness makes it forgivable/allows to greed for uptime/just simpler. Good job when you want to focus on content instead of rotation.