I heal when I'm feeling lazy because a good healer will have stretches where they don't have to do anything healer-like and neither healer can really spam DPS usefully (Stone II is costly and meh) so the DPS you provide is generally DoT and watch.
The most satisfying thing for me, as a tank, is not seeing big damage numbers. It's seeing big spike boss attacks rendered completely null and void. Get a SCH to adloq you right before a big attack and blow a CD at the right time and you can ignore a Mountain Buster, Incinerate, or even a Death Sentence completely. When you take less damage from a massive burst attack than you would from an auto-attack, it's *incredibly* satisfying, moreso than just seeing a big heal or big damage number because it's such a massive deviation from the norm.I think the reason people stray from tanks is because it feels less satisfying.
A WAR is actually going to see some of the largest damage numbers fly up of any class. An Inner Beast crit when you've got Berserk rolling is going to about as hard as a Full Thrust crit; the same is true of a Butcher's Block with Unchained + Berserk. WAR *does* get to see big numbers fly up and, in fact, is liable to see bigger numbers than BRD (since BRD is all about DoTs and bonus off-GCD attacks). PLD can get some pretty big numbers too, when using Spirits Within (potency 300 attack) with FoF active. PLD numbers won't ever be *as* big, but that's because they get more attacks. Tanks just tend to not notice it as much because they're not focused on their damage.But tanks, they get to stand still and see low damage numbers, and less than flashy mitigation text scroll slowly by.
PLD gets Shield Swipe, which is a 210 potency attack for 40 TP that they can use after a successful block (it's also applies Pacification, but that means next to nothing to NPCs). WARs can cross class Haymaker from PGL. Tanks in ARR have access to the riposte style attacks; the problem is that they suck. Shield Swipe is normal enmity and provides only 6.67 more potency per GCD than the RoH combo. Haymaker explicitly does less and the Slow effect doesn't even do much because it suffers from DR and most bosses are immune to it anyways.Anyone else wonder why tanks don't get something like Haymaker?
What you should really be saying is that the riposte style attacks should be made much beefier, which a lot of tanks actually want, especially PLDs asking for Shield Swipe to do more since it's basically worthless.