How to get people to tank!

[Zojha]

You can change the balance by incentivizing the role more...

Or you can change the content to accommodate the imbalance better.
Or you can make content that doesn't rely on the roles - it's not that hard, you only need to replace unavoidable damage with mechanics.

You could adjust dungeons automatically - a group has more than 1 healer? Mobs get a global debuff to their HP and buff to their damage. A group has no healers? Autoattacks/Surefire AoE get replaced with telegraphed AoEs, tethers, stack mechanics etc - you can randomize that even. Lack a tank? Global debuff to damage on mobs, buff to HP, offset by healer adjustments. That's all theoretically doable simply with a global script you can run over the instance after the group is assembled. And it probably would even give the content some replayability because now every run is a bit different.

Trying to get people to tank...and especially forcing people to tank in the way the OP suggests IMO doesn't lead anywhere.

[Makeda]

Or you can change the content to accommodate the imbalance better.
Or you can make content that doesn't rely on the roles - it's not that hard, you only need to replace unavoidable damage with mechanics.

Do note that Guild Wars 2 started out this way, and when it launched an expansion... it put tanking and healing roles into the game, and discontinued development for its 'dungeon system' that has role-free group content.

It just wasn't working.

One common problem seen when you make it so content doesn't NEED a tank or a healer is that groups start refusing to allow tanks or healers to come. City of Heroes is a case in point here - mobs got easy enough to deal with when bringing 'support' roles - buffers and debuffers... and so tanks, healers, and pure DPS all ended up being disinvited to a lot of 'speed runs'. Guild Wars 1 makes another point. You could bring an NPC healer that was 'just acceptable enough' to keep a group barely alive... so player healers got disinvited so as to avoid the risk of a player who wasn't perfect. People preferred a flawed but viable "bot" over the risk of an unknown.

And Guild Wars 2 again makes the extreme example. People learned that they could speed farm content with 'glass cannon' DPS builds - characters that could barely survive any damage at all, but fast players could out dodge/run attacks... so anyone not on a glass cannon DPS build... was told to not show up...

- And that led the developers to make content that needed traditional tanks and healers (Though in GW2 raids, the same character can be both the tank and the healer at the same time).

Trying to get people to tank...and especially forcing people to tank in the way the OP suggests IMO doesn't lead anywhere.

People either like being the center of attention or they don't.

You can't use gimmicks to change this or trick people into liking it.

This is just a fatal problem of anything based around teamwork. Most people do NOT want to be the quarterback, tank, lead vocalist, public speaker, point man, etc... But anything involving teamwork needs someone to step up and do that task. Not so much a leader per se - but a focus for the attention at the least.

[Zojha]

One common problem seen when you make it so content doesn't NEED a tank or a healer is that groups start refusing to allow tanks or healers to come.

Well, true to a degree. That's because both tanks and healers are pretty much just pointless fluff roles that nobody needs unless you force them on players, as they both rely on gimmicks that are only as useful as they are required. That's a core flaw of their very premise and it shows not only in your GW 2 glass cannon example but in our current DPS meta as well: Healers are to maximize DPS and so are tanks. You can see more of that in this game as well: People are not taking Paladins (and Monks and White Mages to some degree) into high performance content, because they aren't contributing enough damage to the party.
All of that is because mitigation and sustain/healing are only ever as valuable as they are required by the game. Once the requirements are met, damage reigns supreme. That's why the Trinity "just doesn't work" -> Whenever it isn't firmly enforced, non-trinity gameplay emerges naturally. It also doesn't work in solo-play, which is why there is nary a pure trinity to be found in games - Every healer and tank is a DPS as well. Non-trinity gameplay is the natural state of games, the trinity only ever "works" if it's brute-forced. You examples only prove that point.

Luckily, here in FFXIV tanks and healers deal respectable amounts of damage, so that they aren't kicked out of content that doesn't require them (like PotD). Even Paladins aren't kicked. They might not be taken by speedrunners, just as they aren't taken by high performance groups, but that's an issue that already exists and can be changed by simply giving them more damage. That is the lesson we can draw from the metagame: In case of doubt, add deeps. As such, I see no reason not to add more content that doesn't require them - unless, of course, SE goes to harshly nerf their damage. Then issues could indeed arise.

As for your latter paragraph, I'll note one thing: Teamwork does not necessitate someone being the center of attention. In fact, roles exist precisely to reduce teamwork in favor of specialization. It's the assembly line model: Instead of having everyone responsible for everything and having constant teamwork and coordination required, you give everyone their own little task/role so they don't need to tax themselves with knowing and doing everything and coordinating. They just do their own thing. That also shows in gameplay: Whether you shadewalker, heal, use storms path or whatever other support ability, you do not interact with another player. You dump it on them. Only few abilities have an interactive component - Cover for example. You have to stay within range of each other. That requires working together, because where you go depends on both people. Using Foes Requiem doesn't require such. Only the bard acts here.
And because of that, whenever you have mechanics that require actual teamwork, even if just a little, all hell breaks loose, as people aren't used to actual teamwork. Most of those don't have a center of attention either - That's the point of teamwork, so that's natural as well.

Now, that's a pretty big rant and it's only tangential to the topic at hand, so I'll put it in spoilers.

In the end, every game with "roles" has the issue that some are more popular than others and only vary rarely does supply meet demand. Last I heard from LoL, they still haven't been able to fix the support role and instead are now forcing people into it via force-fill. I think it's healthier to adjust demand.

[Makeda]

Well, true to a degree. That's because both tanks and healers are pretty much just pointless fluff roles that nobody needs unless you force them on players, as they both rely on gimmicks that are only as useful as they are required.

In the end, every game with "roles" has the issue that some are more popular than others and only vary rarely does supply meet demand. Last I heard from LoL, they still haven't been able to fix the support role and instead are now forcing people into it via force-fill. I think it's healthier to adjust demand.

Yes... tanks and healer are kinda forced roles.

What is a tank but a person sitting there telling 'yo momma' insults and getting hit in the face... so your 4 buddies over here can shoot at the person thus insulted without being interrupted...
Healer at least you can rationalize in a world with magic. (I also play Overwatch, a favorite hero of mine there is the guy who plays good music, and this music somehow inspires people to recover in mere seconds from being shot by a robotic gatling gun monster... because... gaming logic...)

My larger point was that... much as I like the idea of not requiring roles... we see how well that didn't work in Guild Wars 2: popular game and all... but when they did an expansion they scrapped all of their instanced content that didn't require roles. They went so far as to disband the dev team for their dungeons. They replaced it with raids... and changed a few classes into healers... while letting anyone make a tank (if you stack the toughness stat there, raid bosses aggro on you. But to stack that, you have to not stack something else... ie: you give up damage... end result: traditional MMO tank minus a 'taunt' button, but you don't even have to attack to build threat, you just have to have 1 point more armor than anyone else in your raid... so you can stack armor and healing...).

In other words... Guild Wars 2... gave up on not having a trinity.

The reason was that content just couldn't be made to have skillfull challenge without it.

Real world combat involves hiding behind a lot of cover, and shooting at the enemy... and 1 single hit usually ends the fight for the person hit... That won't work in a game. So you need to make things so they trade off blows... and that means the blows can't one-shot the people expected to take them... and that means you either assign someone who can handle heavy hits... you make everything hit really light... or you add a system to let people dodge to avoid damage...

And in GW2, they went with dodge. First few months out nobody could clear even the starter dodge. Then the timer on dodging became easy to spot, people learned to know when it was coming... and suddenly people were clearing the final dungeons... without any defensive gear at all... and doing them in speed runs by stacking pure damage...

And pretty much ALL GW2 content at that point became so easy many people just left the game...

So to fix this... They gave up... changed design leads... and added in a trinity...

When FFXIV messed up big, they brought in Yoshi to take over and make ARR... When GW2 messed up big, they kept it quite, but they more or less did the same thing... they got rid of their devs that put them in that spot, and got new ones to figure out how to add tanks and healers into a game that had promised it's fans it would NEVER have tanks or healers... They did it... and people came back... Maybe not the same people... but the game stabilized...

Before you ask for content here that can skip the trinity... consider what's happened to other MMOs that tried to do that...
- and consider why.

Unfortunately no one has manage to design their way out of this problem...

So instead games have to rely on finding some portion of players that like being the center of attention.

FFXIV's Yoshi is claiming 22% of us like being in the limelight. That's pretty amazingly good if true. I do notice this game has unusually good queue times for me though - as a leveling tank. Which implies that I am fewer than 22%...

[Zojha]

The reason was that content just couldn't be made to have skillfull challenge without it.

And that reason is bogus because it implies that every game without a trinity can not present a skillful challenge. This statement completely precludes all single-player games (including the Dark Souls series) from having any sort of skillful challenge as well as most competitive games ever, whether real or electronic. Fighting games, MOBAs, shooters, dungeon crawlers...

If you're asking me, that's complete nonsense. It's proven to be nonsense further when you realize that in order to create challenge in games with a trinity, you have to ignore the trinity - We call that mechanics. Avoidable AoEs thrown at the ground, attacks that require you to do certain things in order to avoid their effects. Stack, Spread, Hide behind a pillar, press a button, tethers of all kinds, turn away, stack with a set amount of players, stay on high ground, stay on low ground, interact with objects etc etc... they are numerous. All of those completely ignore the trinity. In order to make fights remotely exciting, you have to ignore, remove and otherwise circumvent the trinity already.

And yet you stand here, saying that fights cannot be made a skillful challenge with out it? When all of the skillful challenges in the game rely on massively circumventing it?

The only "mechanics" of the trinity are: You take damage and there's nothing you can do about it - Autoattacks, Tank busters, Damage Up Stacks, Prey, Raid Wide AoEs. And the non-trivial ones rely on the same principle of dodge: You have to time the mitigation buff/heal right or someone dies. The principle you just claimed was so easy that people left a game over it.

My apologies, but perhaps YOU should be the one considering why things are as they are, because what you are saying makes no sense.
I'll also note that those 22% refer to the official census numbers, which in past censi has always been the number of jobs of that role at 31 or higher. Whether they play it or not is a completely different matter. This means it includes people who picked up DRK, got one level and then never touched the job again. It shouldn't be taken as a reliable number.

And the connection between enjoying tanking and liking the limelight is and stays shaky at best - tumblr is full of people trying to get into it, yet only few of them main or even play tank. I'll continue to cast doubts on that.

[Moomba33]

My main issue with tanking is I don't like the feeling of leading.
Your mistakes being really noticeable adds to the stress but that's true of healing as well and I love healing as much as DPSing.

The other issue is I'm not comfortable with making big pulls at all. I pretty much don't tank anything at level cap unless it's for friends because I know I can't keep up the pace expected by the community.

[ADVSS]

The other issue is I'm not comfortable with making big pulls at all. I pretty much don't tank anything at level cap unless it's for friends because I know I can't keep up the pace expected by the community.

it took me a really long time to even consider speed tanking, well untill i started to level dps in 2.0 the only downside of the new cross role system will be having people level other classes to get an understanding of how they operate. Now, when I do tank, its usually speed mass pulling, you can thank evellinh smn and blm for that. Ubless i get 2 melee, then they get the chain pulling cause no way in hell am i standing in the moshput for 5 minutes blowing all my cooldowns and the healers oomp and theyre still not dead

[Rinari]

The other issue is I'm not comfortable with making big pulls at all.

The only complaints I've had about my tanking are due to normal pulling. I really haven't figured it out yet. I usually pull a single pack for the first pull to judge DPS, and if they are really fast, I'll do double pulls from there on out. My ability to judge the DPS is still lackluster though, so I often don't have a good grasp of what a random group is capable of. Sometimes they complain about the first pull being too small (like I should know what they can do already?), or sometimes I judge them to be mediocre but they want bigger pulls. I'm probably too conservative in my estimates, as I've never pulled larger than the group could handle to the point of wiping. The complaints are rare and most groups will quietly go along with whatever I do anyway, so it's not a big deal really. I do wish I could be better at the 'when' for big pulling, but I think that just comes from experience that I don't have yet.

[Makeda]

And that reason is bogus because it implies that every game without a trinity can not present a skillful challenge. This statement completely precludes all single-player games (including the Dark Souls series) from having any sort of skillful challenge as well as most competitive games ever, whether real or electronic. Fighting games, MOBAs, shooters, dungeon crawlers...

My apologies, but perhaps YOU should be the one considering why things are as they are, because what you are saying makes no sense.

You say you want to get rid of tanks.

I present to you an actual current MMO, Guild Wars 2, that tried to get rid of tanks, and failed to do so. An MMO that had to patch tanks AND healers into the game in order to make it's content work.

You then try to counter me not with another no-tank MMO, but with SINGLE PLAYER games. And you call my point nonsense? Yours is not even on topic.

Please try again, without the 'bogus' non-MMO example. Bring me an example of an MMO that has done successful group content without needing tanks or tanks+healers. Perhaps, as you say, you should be considering WHY things are as they are... and not trying to use non-MMOs to argue MMO design.

You might want to start by looking over Guild Wars 2 with a very critical eye - examine what it did when it tried to be an MMO without tanks, examine why that failed, and examine why it now has a trinity based raid system. In there, in an actual MMO - you will likely find you 'WHY', or if you can - you will find what they could have done instead and be able to present that in a way that fixes all of their things their developers were unable to find solutions to.

[Drakkaelus]

Bring me an example of an MMO that has done successful group content without needing tanks or tanks+healers..

I think the problem was the fact that Guild Wars 2 just promoted zerging everything to death. Hell, WoW had that problem for years and they stick to the trinity.

All I can think of is City of Heroes. They had tanks and healers but content generally didn't require it (though a well rounded team made things go much smoother). Monster Hunter is built around group content that doesn't rely on a trinity. But, that also has a level of interactivity and control that traditional MMOs generally don't provide.