Quote Originally Posted by Lyth View Post
I'm yet to see an official statement made to this effect.
This is because no one has bothered to ask the devs about that. Maybe whoever here is going to the London Fanfest should grab a mic and ask Yoshida about this during the Q&A.
PLD was no longer the de facto MT for every encounter, as it had been for nearly two years.
There's a difference between PLD not being instant MT and PLD not being wanted at all. So that part is built on a false premise. And I say that as someone who wants all three tanks to stand on equal ground instead of playing musical chairs.
It was no longer enough to simply to gear up with indestructible armor and go afk as a glorified striking dummy while the rest of your raid learned mechanics. Your team now had expectations, and you had to meet them.
This assumes tanks never have to watch out for things on their side, in addition to focusing on staying alive. I'd throw in things like being part of interrupt rotations and grabbing adds, but the first was never used after Coil and the second is rarely ever used.

Survival, aggro, positioning and spatial awareness are all crucial to the tank role. Not sure why you neglect to mention them.
The post points out that the main group who objected to this were "career tanks" from previous MMOs who came into FFXIV with preconceived ideas that tanks were supposed to be nothing more than damage sponges. Problem is, their "careers" weren't long enough.
Here you aim to belittle those who have played tanks before.

The people you're trying to insult are those drawn to the role of tank because they like the idea of holding a mob's attention while their allies stab the mob to death. Those people also know what comes with the role and the trade-off that comes with being a tank.
Stuff about MUDs
From a mechanics perspective, the whole point of a tank is that you trade offense for superior defense. Otherwise you could have any class doing the tanking as long as the healers are able to keep that person alive (basically the problem FFXI ran into once everyone could get -DT gear sets, causing people to mostly toss tanks to the wayside once a fight was learned).

Also keep in mind no one who understands gameplay designs would be against tanks dealing some damage. Otherwise we'd have people calling for the Lineage II Aggression spells (spells that dealt no damage but generated aggro equal to powerful nukes) as a means for all tanks to hold a mob. That's clearly not the case, especially since tanks need to deal some damage to do things out in the world (instead of taking forever to kill anything because your attack scaling is low, which I've seen first-hand) and it gives value to offensive stats since your enmity generated is tied to damage dealt.
Quote Originally Posted by Khalithar View Post
We can start with removing the damage penalty on the tank stances, WoW did this because they realized (correctly I might add) that it's not necessary as long as the DPS stance provides enough of a buff that it's still more damage to be in said dps stance.
WoW had the benefit of mechanics that encouraged tanks to stay in their respective stances, though. Stances had been changed to act as the equivalent of gearing to defense cap by providing enough mitigation to make it desirable to not want to leave Defensive Stance/Blood Presence/Stance of the Sturdy Ox/Bear form as long as you were taking hits to the face (specially since in some cases your key tank mechanics were attached to the stances themselves). You were free to switch after a tank swap, which is fine.