Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

[Lyth]

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.

In ARR, most players automatically assumed that PLD was the only possible MT, even though WAR was actually a better choice for many fights. We went through nearly the entirety of FCOB with people insisting that PLD was a superior MT for the first two phases of T13, only for six and seven-man carry groups to discover much much later that WAR was actually a pretty good choice. The problem wasn't the tank design, but player preconceptions. Even really skilled groups had them.

There were some fights in ARR in which the player base felt that a PLD solo tank was "optimal" and your OT would be required to swap to a 5th dps. That's really not cool. Hallowed's ability to bypass and reset stack mechanics played a role in this.

One of the reasons DRK was struggling to find a place in early HW was because players automatically assumed that two-handed weapons were less defensive than a shield. So they were trying to force it into a pure OT role which it wasn't really designed for.

Gordias had its share of problems, but actually seeing two out of four world-first clears on a non-PLD MT did wonders to change people's perceptions of tanks (half of the world-first clears in Gordias were still done on PLD, so it's not like there wasn't any demand). If you wanted to be MT, you no longer had to play PLD. This opened up the doors to not just DRK MTs, but WAR MTs as well. The responsibilities are more balanced as well, and we slowly moved away from the draconian MT/OT system to a more equitable way of divvying up the fights.

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.

Sure. I've worked with some very skilled MTs in ARR who knew to do all those things while stance dancing and taking advantage of strength gear. But survival and aggro are fairly simple when you have 100% Shield Oath uptime and your only combo maximises damage, enmity, and provides a mitigation buff. It was very easy to get by on the bare minimum. It was only later in HW, when the skill set was expanded, you were forced to make trade-offs to make your dps count, that it became more blatantly obvious to non-tanks which tanks were genuinely talented and which tanks were simply coasting. You no longer had the luxury of Halone Shield Oathing your way to victory.

The reason why mandatory interrupts aren't as common is because PLD has a clear-cut advantage over the other two tanks, both in its ability to chain stun and in its ability to silence. These have also historically given rise to situations in which the player-base has considered PLD to be mandatory. There are still fights where these come up, and there were three fights in Midas where these were beneficial, although there were ways to work around the absence of a PLD because the interval between silences can be handled by a single player. Interrupts are not hard to do; it's just a question of whether the player has access to the right skills.

Movement-orientated fights are only recently becoming more common. Skill in this area shows up in both your personal and raid dps. You can easily tell the player who manages to gently guide the boss to a new position without costing autos from both themselves and their melee (you can usually tell the players who have spent some time raiding on a melee dps apart from the ones who have only ever played a tank). This was less obvious in a lot of earlier fights, were you legitimately were a target dummy.

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.

I'm sorry if I offended you. If you like getting compliments from your circle of friends on how indestructible you are, then feel free to play that way. But what I object vehemently to is when players want to remove performance metrics simply because they aren't able to make them. If my dps is terrible, then it's on me to fix it if I want to improve. I'm not going to try to pressure the devs to have dps removed from tanking simply so that I can feel better about myself.

From a mechanics perspective, the whole point of a tank is that you trade offense for superior defense.

Actually, the point of a tank is to know when to trade offense for superior defense. We're frontline combat specialists versed in both. Tanks may have armor, but they also come with a giant cannon.

On my example above, if PLD could transfer Rampart and Sentinel to someone else, it's pretty clear what utility it could bring.
Suppose you have a WAR MT. For each tankbuster, it will probably use Defiance and (at least) one of its "increased eHP" skill. Considering that the effect of tank stance is around the same as Rampart, your WAR MT could stay in Deliverance, use its mitigation skills (Except Inner Beast, which seems to be avoided as much as possible anyway...) as he should have, and stack at least Rampart on top of that. And of course the PLD would stay in Sword Oath during all that.

Thus, having a PLD OT would increase the DPS of the WAR, without needed a personal DPS increase of the PLD of requiring the PLD to stance dance.

This would be pretty cool, and you can kind of do this with Cover. One gripe that I have is that when you're OT, you typically aren't involved with tankbuster mechanics until it's your turn to swap in. I much prefer seeing things like Laser X Sword and Ahk Morn where you're forced to team up with your co-tank to fend off the attack.

Another alternative would be to give the OT a special move to perform a timed counter-attack to debuff the tank buster.