Quote Originally Posted by SonKevin View Post
While it's a repeat of FFXI in that term, it's nowhere near FFXI as a whole. PLD is probably the only class that is having this issue. More so then any others in the past due to the fact that PLDs were never supposed to be DPS. The introduction of DRK really fucked things up. It would have been nice for them to set it up so WARs were more like paper, but did more damage while PLDs were built like rocks, but did little damage. They could make the tanks swap and do their thing and have people figure out how to make it work. On the other hand DRKs and their players like maxing their DPS which is only fueling WARs in wanting to keep tanks as DPSs. It's insane. They need to introduce bosses like Absolute Virtue. That'll teach the community.
I hate to break it to you, but the introduction of DRK didn't screw anything up. PLD is the defensive tank, WAR is the offensive tank, and DRK is the middle ground that can do both, but not as good as either of the other. The problem is by no means the fact that the DRK meant that there was another tank that could put out damage, it's a combination of high DPS checks in endgame content and impatient players in normal content. Everyone wants to rush through content as quickly as possible, and as such they push for everyone to "have" to DPS, and because PLD in particular doesn't have high DPS they pushed STR build WARs to try and clear content 1min quicker. DRK just happened to be there when WAR got turned into even more of a DPS powerhouse, but it's not to blame. People would still be pushing STR build WARs, since 3.0 content started upping the health of enemies by a lot.....

Also, as someone who's secondary is a healer, I personally can't stand STR build WARs. I'll take a low DPS PLD who I don't have to babysit constantly over a high DPS WAR that has the defenses of wet tissue paper, any day. WARs may have higher VIT, but particularly when they're stacking STR equipment and not boosting said VIT even further, they can reach a point where they're literally taking damage faster than it can be healed. I've had plenty of times where WARs would cause me to use all my cooldowns to barely keep them alive, while doing a pull that PLDs and DRKs manage with me just letting Eos heal them while I DPS. Don't get me wrong, I've had some WARs that were actually defensible, and I've had plenty of PLDs and DRKs that were bad, but the number of WARs that were hard to keep up far exceed the number of tanks I've had trouble with of the other classes.....

Again though, the problem is people wanting faster content, and to have easier clears on DPS checks, rather than a problem with the way the classes are balanced. Right now, we don't have content that is focused on healers needing to heal, (barring mistakes or bad players), or tanks needing to be particularly good at surviving or holding aggro, (barring bad healers or DPS with greatly superior gear). The idea of "hard" content right now is almost exclusively high DPS checks, which means that instead of expecting the DPS to do their jobs, players expect the tanks and healers who are having an easy time with their "role" to pick up the slack for the DPS. Don't get me wrong though, as a DPS that puts my all into my role and does considerable damage, I'm still grateful for Tanks and Healers DPSing, because SE has made enemies such beef gates, and some DPS checks so heavy, that if we didn't have the other roles helping us then we'd be having to put in several times as much effort as the other roles have to. This is purely because of how SE has handled the content, by making DPS checks that simply can't be met by DPS players alone.....

I'm also aware that in a way, this isn't SE's fault. It's the community's fault as much as anything because as long as tanks and healers have the ability to DPS, (which is a necessity for solo content), then players will be demanding that those roles DPS as often as possible. The result is that DPS checks that can be met by just the DPS players, are easily demolished if the healers and tanks DPS as well. However, my experience with the PvP aspect of this game has also showed me that removing the ability to DPS with these roles, (specifically healers in this case), means that players simply won't play it because many of them view it as "boring" to heal. I haven't played a whole lot of the PvP, but in all the games I did play of it, I only saw a healer on my side once, while tanks were almost as common as the DPS. The only real solution in endgame content is to make it be more mechanic heavy, with design aspects that are implemented specifically to force tanks to tank and healers to heal, such as high damage, aggro increasing mechanics on non-tanks, status effects that need to be healed off, ect. We see a little bit of this in most content, but rarely enough to force these players to stay with the "role" that they're supposedly filling. This simply becomes more evident in statics, where players are communicating and working to improve rather than DF groups not having a clue what to do.....

EDIT: This is just the two gil I have on the subject matter as interpreted by my sleep addled mind....