Lack of tanks in the game

[Pizzaparty7]

Raising the rewards is a good start for fixing tank shortage. Honestly, once your tank is geared up (easy to do with instant DF queue) there isn't much incentive to do anything outside of coil and EX modes. I, for one, will be more likely to run roulettes and such if there is a better reward. Between housing advances and glamours, I forsee a lot of new cash sinks in 2.2 and beyond.

[OmegaSinX]

Honestly, I don't think SE needs to give people incentives to play tanks because alot of people already love playing tank. I believe the reason for the shortage of tanks is because of 2 reason.

1. End Game is more unforgiven on Tanks and Healers.

- It requires more attention and more foresight to be a good Tank and Healer. While most DPS can go into the fight knowing nothing about the fight and may still win; it will most likely mean a wipe if a Tank or Healer is abysmal. Also, End Game mechanics dont make it any easier on us. I find it kind of stupid that even with the best gear in the game that we can still be 1-shotted by unavoidable attacks (e.i Wicked Wheel, Death Sentence, Fed Dreadnaugh etc). I understand Content has to be hard to keep people playing, but there are othere ways to make content hard without getting hit like a truck hits a fly. I dont recall getting 1-shotted like this in FFXI or WoW (Sorry, End Rant) This puts people off and alot of people dont want that responsibility out of fear of criticism.

2. Toxic Attitudes
- I think this is the True reason why we have fewer tanks than we use to have, and giving us mounts wont change that. Being a good tank is harder than it looks, but most people (*cough*DPS*cough) dont understand that and rage on the tank or healer as soon as the team fails. And its petty, people result to name calling (Noob, Bad, Trash, the list goes on). If this happens enough times to one person without thick skin, it can become stressful leading them to eventually quit playing Tank.

[Shurrikhan]

I think the main issue is just that true role isolation comes with a price. That, and the idea that good tank = knows dps; good dps threat management = knows tank. A good tank knows the threat periods for each dps class, or else (over)compensates enough, to never be pulled from unless heavily outgeared or a dps starts a new mob with a Firestarter crit, etc. But a bad dps, for instance, will not realize that pulling a Heavy Thrust at the same time as his MRD (no Defiance) tank's Heavy Swing, will pull, if only for a second, or that Bloodletter and Straight Shot in the same GCD is a 290 potency that the tank can't cover until his second move in the enmity combo, when it can be adjusted for by as little as using it a GCD later. Often as the number of really good tanks increases, so too does the number of dps unconscious to threat mechanics. Usually the dungeon grind is enough to gradually figure out how that works for first-time dps, but many simply don't seem to think of it as an issue of learning. That's one of the critical problems--personality, in a sense--along with the simple fact that one often never really *has* to get threat-work down as dps even during the dungeon leveling experience. (And not at all anywhere else.)

That said, I've done more Stone Vigil's with DRG or Bard tanks than PLDs or Warriors, sometimes with better results even. It just takes coordination. When tanks get bored of the job, its usually because they've given up on holding the subtle maximum of what they can do by playing according to their party, which in some compositions is more challenging than maximizing dps, or they never realized that that was an issue to begin with. Threat isolation (one dps, usually bard holding/kiting solely melee enemies, being untouched by the healer, so that the heals on the other dps, likely tanking ranged, don't pull at all), Binds, Sleeps, etc. a lot of that doesn't even figure into some player's minds until they're forced to use it because some tank writes "sry, dinner" and leaves at the start of a dungeon.

Generally, healers and tanks must both know enemy mob's dynamics. DPS just need to know tank dynamics to an extent and only when much more geared, and kill stuff fast [fast enough to oblige kill order or eliminate abilities by killing their users, in some cases]. DPS are therefore more internally complex to compensate for what little they need to watch in the battlefield.

(That's not to say that tanks couldn't afford to become more complex in their own right--it would just likely mean that eventually dps would have to re-enter the issue of threat management and learn how to deal with it, likely while yelling nonstop at their tanks for doing the best their class is capable of...)

It's kind of a tough issue... Perfect tanking can be interesting for a while, but as long as there's not much benefit in the fine edge of it, or in maximizing your own damage while still properly holding threat, the tank role is fairly dull simply because the classes are somewhat dull. But if we were to get more tanks with more interesting internal mechanics to worry about, it's hard to say if they could perform that job correctly, while already faced with a sort of a dps-clan that are well-rutted in a certain unnegotiable idea of what dps itself should be like. Maybe if dps were given more ability to snap-tank or, better yet, assist (rather than just make up for) the tank within the interplay of positioning and mitigation, that bridge would be a bit easier to cross, but it's still pretty vague to me.

tldr: During the leveling process, I like tanking for the most part because people can still pull from me if I don't watch my enmity. I liked being an undergeared tank in AK with AF+1/Zenith dps. I like tanking as a warrior when I can go full out on dps or really need to hit each mechanic of the fight correctly to survive, but in other circumstances I'd really just rather play melee dps and try to perfect my rotation while dodging nonstop. If it's a DF, I'd rather go healer and dps because that's the position I can put the most variance in compared to most healers I see. I think that's the case for a lot of would-be tanks. It's just not quite interesting enough if someone else can do it well.

Edit: (to above) I'm damn glad we can still be one-shotted by certain attacks if we've no CDs up. 90% of health or so would be fine as well, but anything less than that would make tanking rather dull. I don't mind if a healer has to make up for it in preparation and reaction, but between healer and tank someone really should have to know the fight, not just meatshield it. I just wouldn't like it if anything short of Twintania-(relative)level monsters could one shot melee with their CDs up (i.e. DRG with Keen Flurry and Foresight), partly because I would like to see dps become more tank-capable situationally (not as a replacement for real tanks without 'real' and optional changes).

[Steffie]

I like the way tanking is right now, maybe *slight* improvements on enmity gains for certain skills, but something like tripling the threat on Flash would just turn this game into WoW.

I agree with this guy. Part of the reason why i really enjoy tanking in this game is that you actually have to pay more attention than WoW tanking. I played a Death knight tank for 2 years and i can count the number of time i got aggro stolen from me. 4 TIME. Generating threat in wow is hilariously easy that i usually doze off on dungeons finders in tank and spank boss. It will probably never happen in FFXIV since the moment you doze off, a mob probably start attacking other ppl. Other improvement that i wanted in here is for the Provoke to be a bit more WoW-like in that you got like a 3 second grace to build more threat rather than +1 threat which the current provoke does.

[LukeyP666]

Being thick-skinned and knowing how to learn from the criticism is the key to tanking, in my opinion.

This is actually my first ever MMO, but I'm a life-long FF Fan, and always felt like I missed out on FFXI, so jumped at the chance to play 2.0.

I remember back to picking my starting class, not having any idea on the roles that they would play, and decided to go with the Marauder and their giant axe because surely they would do huge damage... How wrong I was....

Was constantly plagued by people telling me 'L2P' and calling me a noob throughout my levelling process, but the criticism only spurred me to get better at the role, and not run away and roll a DPS class instead.

The first time I decided to sit up and take notice was when I reached Aurum Vale. I'd been stuck on it for days and days, continuously getting to the final boss and wiping due to people not AOE'ing the mobs down... Until I found the perfect party through Duty Finder - A White Mage and two Black Mages. Perfect, I thought - Huge AOE damage for the final boss. First boss, no problems, second boss and I could not hold hate to save my life, so they all left, calling me a noob and a bad tank.

Instead of re-rolling, I went away and watched videos, read up on how to be a better Tank and how to use my skills to their full potential, and hey presto, the next DF group I joined, we one-shotted the entire dungeon.

Tanking for me is all about being thick skinned and *learning* from the criticism, no matter how rude and obnoxious people are. We all seem to be saying DPS are the obnoxious ones, but I've come across loads of rude Tanks in my time while levelling other classes.

In terms of making Tanking more attractive, I really don't think giving mounts and extra rewards will make people take it up, because I really do think it takes a different kind of personality to play a Tank, which sadly, this game definitely seems to be lacking.

[lxSch]

I haven't been tanking for long (but have been playing long enough to know what to do in every dungeon) and have been given a lot of wrong info from new dps/healers. Some adds are untankable, some of them explode and die on their own, many people don't follow attack order and then say i should focus on tanking adds better, many people use damage cooldowns before i do my hate combo and then start running in circles (especially bards) while still firing in panic and then say i should tank better.
If i was new to mmorpg or even FFXIV particularly i would think it's my fault. Maybe new tankers think it's their fault and overall tanking is a task too hard for them, so they resign.
I have seen many new tankers who didn't know much about tanking and nothing about particular dungeon, still they did their role great without any taking advices.
Yet there are some wannabe-tanks who read or hear somewhere wrong info on what they should do and then try to repeat it exactly as they were instructed, yet it causes repeatable wipes and they refuse to change their tactics.

[RyuDragnier]

My problem with tanking is that it feels so...boring compared to DPS. There's a lot of variety in DPS, going from low maintenance run-and-gun ala Bard, to high maintenance rear to flank Monk rotations. Every DPS has its own flavor and is fun to play. Compare that to tanks who just grab the aggro and just sit on it. To many, there's nothing fun about just sitting there rotating through enemies and doing crap damage when you could be a class that's rotating through enemies killing them fast. Plus well...in most instances tanks have the easiest jobs in terms of avoiding AoEs and whatnot, and comparing a "oh I need to move to avoid this obvious attack aimed for me" moment to a random "HE AIMED FOR ME, NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!" panic moment, it's pretty obvious which seems more fun.

[PanzerIV]

I think part of the reason why there seems to be a tank shortage is because the party size is fairly small. There can only ever be 2 DDs and 1 healer for every tank in a duty finder party. If the party size was bigger, it might alleviate the wait times and allow for more job variety as well.

[Delorean]

Toxic Attitudes

I always hear this, but I rarely get it. I know a lot of players don't appreciate a tank who isn't very good at their job yet, but I can count so few times that I have actually ever been berated for playing poorly in the damn near decade that I've spent playing MMOs.

I've really honestly seen more tanks acting like punks than I have seen players treat them like crap.

I think the real problem is the value of a tank. If you make tanks require more to serve their groups, it puts heavier stress on players who already have a fair amount of difficulty clearing content that is in it's present state. If you make their job easier, the value of a tank starts to become non-existent.

There are a lot of groups that are very capable of moving through a large chunk lower end content without a tank. Tanking is just a very questionable role if you ask me.

It's like a DPS that does less damage and you only need to take big hits.

[Kirinichibon]

Tanks increase group damage by keeping mobs organized and allowing healers to keep everyone safe and dps themselves. Tanks also do a decent chunk of damage.

The group's goal is to kill all the things. Everyone is dps in some way.