The tanking shortage reasons

[therpgfanatic]

http://i.imgur.com/cEIx1I4.jpg

Stop complaining.

There is a book called How to Lie with Statistics. I suggest you read it, and stop trying to use spreadsheet theorycrafting that requires specific, ideal conditions in order to prove unrelated points.

[Blackheart]

The thread is about reasons people don't like to play tanks.

Tanks do less damage than DPS classes; at least, Gladiator / Paladin do extremely poorly.

The overwhelming majority of gamers do not want to play a melee class that intentionally has a hard time killing enemies. It doesn't fit their concept for what a warrior / knight / gladiator ought to be. It makes leveling harder. It can make things like off-tanking frustrating, as your DPS plays little to no role in the encounter and everyone knows it.

The fact of the matter is although tanks job is to hold the mobs, we do so by attacking them. But when the damage is pathetic, the player feels frustrated. And it adds to the other frustrations from dealing with players who treat the tank players poorly.

Thank you for actually answering my question rather then just spout random insults. I respect that. As to what you just stated, yeah i can understand the mindset, i for one pay little to no attention to my dps as i'm tanking, as far as i see it, as long as i can keep hate and do my job as a tank, i'm good, would alittle more dps hurt? i suppose not, but it shouldn't be a big debate, atleast not to my views as a tank.

[Gladio]

I think that the issue is not in the tank job, playstyle and duties but mainly in the party design.
In FFXIV ARR we have:
- 2 Tanks
- 2 Healers (potentially 1 on < lv30 character)
- 5 Dps (potentially 6 on < lv30 character)

With those number and general classes popularity, the light party composition to compensate this lack of tanks it must to be
- 1 Tank
- 3 DPS
- 1 Healer
Same for the full party (10 members) with the adjustment in the involved contents and drops ratio.
When more popular jobs and classes will be released, THF, DRK, SAM, NIN etc the lack of tanks will increase......except if SE will release the Sephirot job, but in this case the quality of tanking is going to dramatically fall below the 0

[Bardo]

There really isn't a "Tank Shortage" in general.
What's really going on is a tank shortage in party/duty finder specifically.

It's easy to find tanks to do stuff with your linkshell or free company.
But it's an entirely different story in party/duty finder.

Why?
IMO, it's because as a tank you're putting your life in the hands of the healer (you can do surprisingly little to ensure your own survival) and it becomes much more tedious to hold aggro on many mobs at once if the dps don't communicate and focus target.
So if I have a choice, I'll choose to tank for linkshell/free company parties EVERY SINGLE TIME over party/duty finder.

Square had the right idea in introducing additional rewards for tanks to entice them into duty finder groups, but the rewards are frankly insulting. All they need to do is increase the extra gil earned to a respectable amount and the tank problem in Duty finder will go away.

As far as party finder groups are concerned, (and specifically party finder groups for extreme primals...) I think the issue is that none of the extreme primal accessory drops are actually BiS for tanks. So over the course of the first couple weeks, tanks got their weekly win in order to gear up secondary jobs with EX Primal weapons and now they simply have no reason to go as tank. SE should have spent more time thinking about the secondary stats on the extreme primal accessories to make them desirable for tanks. And since myth is so easy to cap now with daily roulettes, the mythology reward isn't enough to keep tanks interested in these fights.

[Soulburn32]

people seem to have no forgiveness to tanks for some reason idk....

dps can make multiple mistakes and either no one will notice or no one really expects them to not mess up

make one mistake as a tank and everyone wants to start judging you and pointing at you

some people think its "boring" its really pretty close to what dps do tbh you just dont get those big flashy numbers to look at while your doing it

[Traek]

Tanking just requires attentiveness. I think this has a lot to do with it. You do constantly have to lead pulls, make everyone happy, yadda yadda, but most of all you have to have *the plan*. You are constantly keeping track of applied stacks/boss ability rotation/Cooldowns/positioning/etc. All classes have it to some extent, but Tanks have it nearly all the time. This is something I love about tanking with my static, but hate putting forth the effort all the time for pug fails.

As much as other classes have some engaging aspects, I think we can easily see where actually paying attention isn't liked very often by the playerbase. Think of Garuda EX, no one wants a melee, because most don't pay attention and run in to their easy death. No one in NA wants to do split method, because god forbid they have to move from a slipstream, or stack for downburst. So people stack ranged and just pew pew until a circle is under them. We see the same melee discrimination a lot in Ifrit EX, because god forbid a melee watches out for howl, and moves around the healer that receives it. When people have to watch for an easy 2 second cast before they run from eruptions, they still fail at it constantly and die. Won't even get into Titan EX and plumes.. and look at the constant complaining over that fight on these forums.

I don't think there is a realistic way to alleviate this issue. It has been the same across every other MMO.

[SpookyGhost]

There is a book called How to Lie with Statistics. I suggest you read it, and stop trying to use spreadsheet theorycrafting that requires specific, ideal conditions in order to prove unrelated points.

While there are factors that weren't parsed (SE debuff affecting the other tank's DPS, for example), the point is that WAR's DPS and PLD's DPS difference are so incredibly marginal that you really shouldn't prefer one over the other. It's like saying "PLD is soooo much easier to heal" when there's literally a 1% healing difference. WAR does more damage in tanking stance but the reason for that should be obvious.

[Yumi_umi]

I think you've hit the nail on the head. The tank more or less controls the party.

But secretly, the healer controls the party and can let whoever they please die. Mostly in my case that is.
As in all the dungeons i am capable of doing the tanks job on mobs and most bosses.

[Soulburn32]

But secretly, the healer controls the party and can let whoever they please die. Mostly in my case that is.
As in all the dungeons i am capable of doing the tanks job on mobs and most bosses.

This from the person that doesn't understand how Medica 2 right before adds spawn could cause aggro problems and wears tank myth pieces on the right side for no real reason.

[Kitru]

Lemme break down the bad to show exactly how little you know.

1. Sword Oath contributes nothing to Rage of Halone damage. Nothing.

Shield Oath has a 20% damage debuff; Sword Oath does not. Since, as a tank, Shield Oath is the standard stance, being in Sword Oath amounts to a 25% increase in damage dealt from what you would normally expect.

2. Marauder weapons have the SAME physical damage as Gladiator weapons; both Bravura Zenith and Curtana Zenith are 46 physical damage. The difference is that Warriors have much better damage in their abilities than Paladins do.

WAR does not have "much better damage in their abilities than PLD do". Heavy Swing and Fast Blade are both 150; Skull Sunder and Savage Blade are both 200; RoH is 260 and BB is only 280. The only reason that WAR sees big, fancy numbers when they're tanking is because of Unchained/Wrath consumers ignoring the Defiance damage penalty. When they're actually both in pure DPS mode, their damage is pretty much identical thanks to the increased damage from Sword Oath that so many people never notice as well as the extra ~50 potency/GCD a PLD gets from its off-GCD attacks (Spirits Within and Circle of Scorn) that WAR doesn't. You probably don't realize that your PLD is doing basically the same damage as a WAR because PLD does its damage in a large number of smaller hits compared to WAR.

3. You are suggesting Paladin DPS is fine because if you spend a bunch of money buying Mega Potions of STR (that last a few seconds and have a LONG cooldown before another can be used) in a specific encounter where the boss has a debuff that makes it take 25% more damage. And when it stacks to be 100% more damage, you crit for 1k so everything is handy dandy?

The OP was specifically responding to a WAR talking about their ~1900 crit in that exact same situation. He wasn't talking about DPS; he was talking about getting to see a big fancy number.

You aren't thinking clearly. In that same situation everyone else is doing x10 or more damage than you are.

And you have no idea what you're talking about. WAR and PLD actually do almost identical damage. While tanking, WAR has an advantage, but only if they're using Unchained/Berserk/IR on CD; as soon as a WAR stops using CDs, PLDs catch up because Fight or Flight is just insanely strong (it provides the same benefit over time as all 3 of the WAR DPS CDs while having no cost, unlike Unchained or Berserk). While they're not in their tanking stances, WAR and PLD actually do virtually identical damage because Sword Oath adds a lot.

[quote]I have invested at least 100+ hours into my Paladin, and am at item lv 74. I crit for around 250 in Crystal Tower. I can't even 1 shot low lv monsters in the starting zones.[]

i74 is basically nothing, especially after 100+ hours. If you're critting for 250 at any point at level 50, you're either completely oblivious and not noticing your actual attacks or so outrageously bad that you shouldn't even be talking because it's risking your life by distracting you from breathing. My PLD is ~i81 and I routinely see crits in excess of 500, even when I don't have FoF up.

Fact: Gladiator's lv50 ability Circle of Scorn allows us to deal auto-attack damage to a group. I don't even know why it has a DoT effect; it's 30% of auto-attack damage over 15 seconds. It may as well not even be on the ability; [I]oh boy, my DoT did 40-something points of damage to a creature with 100k+ HP.

Fun fact: you suck at math as well as reading comprehension. Auto-attack damage is 83.33 pot/GCD, or, for PLDs, 75-80 pot per swing (PLD auto-attacks are only slightly faster than the GCD). The initial hit of CoS is 100 pot, which means that it hits roughly 25% harder than a single swing of your auto-attack. Furthermore, the DoT from CoS isn't 30 potency over 15 seconds; it's 30 potency every 3 seconds for 15 seconds, which means that the DoT adds an extra 150 potency (and something 180 if you get the timing down really well to snag the extra tick). CoS gives you an extra 25 potency per GCD over time, which amounts to about 7% of your total DPS.

It is ironic that they are called Gladiators; they are possibly the worst melee class in PVP.

Except that they're only called Gladiators in the English version. In the game's native language, the name used for them is best translated as "sword specialist". On top of that, I find it hilarious that you seem to think that a class's name should have anything to do with their PvP viability or even the specific application of their class to the game world. A "marauder" isn't an axe wielding monster slayer, which is what the marauder's guild has you do; "marauder" actually refers to someone who raids and pillages, which is something noticeably absent from the marauder storyline. The names are simply there to make the classes look fancier since we, as western gamers, expect more out of class names than a simple statement of the weapon used.