Quote Originally Posted by Kosmos992k View Post
And this is what I do not understand about encounter design in FFXIV. It's overly focused on tank busters so you have to have a tank front and center. (...)

But encounters are frequently designed around a single Boss, large front cleaves and AoE Mechanics that affect everyone.
Then... The encounter design isn't overly focused on tank busters, is it?

Killing the boss ASAP has been a focus throughout almost the entirety of content since the initial raid tiers of 2.0 as fights are either designed such that, in wars of attrition, the boss will generally exhaust the entire party's resources before the boss ever runs out of things to throw at everyone, or there is always a hard enrage built into place to prevent the former. It's one or the other a predominant majority of the time.

So if our gear and abilities are able to largely mitigate the damage of adds, yet the adds could quickly shred the non tanks; the best way for the tank to kill the boss quickly is to maintain good crowd control of the adds, and intercept large focused AoEs.
The first part of what you said are already things, though. As for intercepting large, focused AoEs... Do you mean stack/soak mechanics? Because, otherwise, how is it beneficial at all for the Tank to eat extra, unnecessary damage? That just puts extra strain on the healers, which increasing the chance of failure.

After all, with even rudimentary AI, Bosses should know that killing healers takes priority over tanks, and killing DPS comes next to reduce the rate at which they are taking damage.
But almost no boss in the game is designed like that. I don't even think most MMO bosses in general are designed like that, not counting ones that have an intentional mechanic accounting for such.

Make the tanks earn their living by keeping others alive, make it more interesting than simply popping a CD to mitigate a tank buster.
Pretty sure that Tanks are already doing exactly like that by making sure the boss isn't melting everyone else with its hard-hitting auto-attacks and tank busters.