Yoshida on Patch 3.2 Content - Famitsu Translation

[therpgfanatic]

I played GLA/PLD since day 1, and now I have a DRK 60 and WAR 58, and I tell you: Tanks are OPs right now and I think lower Tank dps is a fair thing.

Solo content (fates/side quests/main quests/job quests/leves): Tanks can kill things almost as fast as dpss, plus survive a lot longer and deal with 2 or 3 enemies at once. Dpss can't.

Bullcrap. PLD / GLD is one of the weakest soloing classes in the game, especially during story mode battles. Back when I did my relic quest, all the map farming for alexandrite had to be done on my SMN because I couldn't solo any of the encounters involving more than 3 mobs on my PLD, even with my chocobo specced out for healing.

The whole idea that solo tanks will outlast mobs of enemies in a MMO is extremely antiquated game design thinking. Wars of attrition result in the one under attack to be defeated, not the other way around.

The lack of AoE for PLDs is a real killer. And don't nobody even suggest Circle of Scorn is an AoE attack; go pop into Satasha NORMAL unsynched on a 60 PLD and try to kill a mob with Scorn, it won't even half their health bars. It's auto-attack without the bonus from Sword Oath. On lv 15-18 mobs, and being max level, Circle of Scorn won't even kill trash many levels below a PLD, let alone put a meaningful dent into enemies the same lv as the PLD.

Players need to set aside the "holier than thou" attitudes and use every opportunity someone legit complaints about bad game design as an golden chance to talk about how awesome of a gamer they are to do things in spite of the bad design. It doesn't send any united feedback that gets the issues addressed when you bury your head in the sand like that.

The devs want more tanks to run in DF pugs, but they don't want to do the one key thing that would make a difference; put tank DPS on par with DPS classes if the tank is in a party. It works like this in most MMOs, namely the most popular one (WoW, where tanks tend to top the parsers) and the world doesn't end.

When players of tanks feel like they are helpless to clear encounters because of bad DPS players, it makes them not want to run PUGs at all. No matter what bonus they get, no matter what special mount can be obtained. None of that is worth a dungeon run taking over half an hour because some idiot BLM / BRD doesn't want to use their AoE to kill trash and melee DPS who ignore their rotations to spam one skill for the entire dungeon run, or wipes caused because even when the tank tries they can't kill mechanic-crucial adds the DPS are utterly ignoring in favor of just focusing on the boss.

I get so tired of dealing with morons in PF that I just plain abandon the party these days rather than try to argue with people who either want to be jerks or just don't care about learning the basics of their class. I'd rather eat a half hour wait time penalty as my character sits AFK than spend that time wiping because there's nothing I can do to compensate for players who won't do their proper rotations or purposely ignore boss mechanics requiring them to do anything more complicated than attack the boss from the rear.

Party content (primals, dgns, raids): Outside dps checks, we don't have ANY reason to bring a dps to party content. You can go with 6tanks and 2healers and clear any content ( again, outside dps checks). If you do a party with 6 dps and 2 healers, everyone will die eventually. 0 chances to clear any content.

Not true, several DPS have party buffs or enemy debuffs that are very helpful to an encounter. Whether specific players actually use these abilities or not is another issue, but all DPS have some kind of added utility beyond just dealing damage. That's usually how DPS are balanced in party mechanics in MMOs. The tank by themselves can't solo the same DPS as a pure DPS class, but in a party the tank can if the DPS employ their utility skills. This is how most MMOs work these days to avoid the issue FFXIV has with few people wanting to tank because it usually results in the tank at the complete mercy of the DPSers and healers to be good in order for a dungeon clear to occur, and given tanking is a role with the most responsibility it's something a lot of people don't want to do by its very nature. Intentionally making tank DPS the lowest in the game sends the message to players that if they tank, no matter how good they are, they are at the total mercy of other randomly selected people being good at their classes to clear even normal dungeons and cannot compensate for their shortcomings in any meaningful way.

You want to see more tanks in the Duty Finder, then make tanking in Duty Finder less frustrating. The only way to do that is allow the tank to have enough DPS to take down those adds during a boss fight that cause party wipes if the DPS don't take them down. It's not that complex to understand. Sure, in a perfect world the DPS would do their jobs perfectly every time but this is reality and she is a harsh mistress. A significant portion of the playerbase chooses to not play their class in an even semi-optimal way that makes these perfectly designed encounters unbreakable walls to overcome, and tanks generally would not care as much if the DPS were loons if we could overcome some of these mechanics ourselves during a PF run.

People -- especially the devs -- need to stop thinking of "highest defensive ability" as some kind of special advantage that tanks have. It's not. The only reason tanks need high defensive ability is because you made PvE enemy difficulty centered around stronger enemies dealing tons of damage at scheduled intervals. As can be seen in PvP, high defensive ability amounts to zilch in the face of continuous high damage output which DPS classes can deal.

It's probably not ironic that in the new PVP event, the devs don't intend tanks to meaningfully contribute to their group beyond picking up medals.