Warrior is OP! Paladin is OP! Make one tank class and be done with it....

[Duelle]

OP misrepresents things by attempting to use the buff-nerf rollercoaster as a reason to not have working rosters for tanking.

Learn the different playstyles of the two, and understand that they mitigate damage DIFFERETLY.

Playstyles and mechanics are one thing, one being built to work and the other being built on a faulty premise is another. Kindly learn to differentiate.

If there is always room for an on/off tank, don't be pissy if you can't be both ALWAYS. Such is good game design, actually, encouraging cooperation and variety between classes.

Encounter mechanics are what encourage a raid to work together to oversome a boss, not whether there are main and off-tanks involved. And as someone who's tanked for years, I have done both main and off-tanking on the same class. Thus, your assertion is false and poorly developed.

Unfortunately this is exactly what many people want. WoW, while doing wonders for expanding the audience of MMO players, also watered everything down to be accessible to absolutely anyone. So that anyone could tank/heal/dps regardless of their class. Due to WoWs success most other recent MMOs have also followed this formula in an attempt to steal a sliver of WoWs player base. So for a large majority of "MMO" players, this has become par for the course, and the idea of requiring a specific role to do a specific thing is "UNFAIR AND UNBALANCED".

Requiring roles is par the course, because the roles are tank, heals and DPS. What people developed a hatred for is their favorite classes being designed to be inferior for the sake of niche gameplay. You obviously weren't there when mages (all three specs) were sat out for the entirety of Sunwell Plateau for not being "ideal" DPS. You weren't there when paladins, shaman and druids fought an uphill battle to be more than healbots to their raids. You weren't there when warriors struggled to convince their raids they could DPS if specced and geared for it instead of the eternal tank pigeonhole.

It's not fun playing a class and then finding out you were intentionally designed to not be good enough. Being able to change classes never made that any less wrong and never will, because if a guy wants to run as a WAR for his whole tanking career through the life of FFXIV he damn well has the right to do so and the game should accomodate that. I can main and off-tank as a PLD (I also did it as a prot warrior, which plays similarly to PLD), and I sure as hell would expect and want the same for WAR and any future members of the tank roster.

What it all boils down to is will there be a niche for both classes? Everything that makes a good main tank also makes a good off tank. So having one class relegated to the lesser role (off tank) while the other can effectively do both would be a bad situation.

This.

PS: Just to get it out there, I'll admit some of the reactions are jumping the gun. We're not seeing "top" FC's going on record saying WAR is inadequate, but anyone who has paid attention to how MMO communities move and think is right to show some concern. For the FFXI fogies, it wasn't too long ago that the players became convinced DRG was a gimp class that didn't warrant its existence, not to mention the BS in 1.0 where WAR outperformed PLD. People are right in not wanting that sort of thing to repeat itself.