Lets stop fighting SE and work with them. What are your ideas?

[Derio]

It's because the last 2 tank mechanic outside of a tank swap is leviathan

[ADVSS]

Everything except one tiny little thing...how they survive. As for healing potency, before level 58, PLD has 0 self healing at all and the only capacity WAR has to heal is 100% tied to its max HP, and thus, vitality.
PLD's Stoneskin back then was affected by max HP, as is Divine Veil, and now, TBN, the most spammable DRK mitigation move, is, again, tied to max HP.

As for enmity, raw attack power is less and less important the more they buff the enmity bonus.

Youre right, and my point about scaling attack power due to the current tank design is so we dont have to see, do so many enmity boosts about every or every other patch. Since 2.0 its been enmity boost enmity boost enmity boost. performance.That to me means that tanks arent currently balanced to scale with other jobs. And removing a scaling stats ability to scale with their performance just means monthly enmity buffs at the expense of being reasonable and having tanks progress just like the other jobs when it comes to performance. Now they dont want to just scale it all on Vit because of "hp inflation", which perhaps your suggestions to make every boss auto attack kill everything but a tank, but i think theyre realizing or stated rather vaguely that they do not want tanks hp to be out the roof high. So from my standpoint. they either need to redo tanking, or continue with cooldown popping, tanks popping tank stance "as a cooldown" literally, thats what they use it for when "dancing" and figure out a whole new way to do the role thats logical and practical.

One possibly terrible way for them to push tanks to stay in stance, since they dont want to scale their attack power anymore, is to have a real tank guage. operate similarly to the craptastic beast guage, except that using cooldowns like rampart would cost "tank guage points" for which the stronger ones would cost more tank guage. Id very much dislike this suggestion, but like one i made earlier with cooldowns actually scaling with vit levels, itd do that sort of thing.

Another way is to cause Tank Stance to scale defensively over time, or in conjunction to said craptastic guage, in that its no longer a poppable cooldown, but a buff that gets defensive stacks, the longer its used. Fight design would have to change though,.

They could keep the meta also, and just have tanks get a trait that scales defense based on hp lost, so that healers crying about how fast tanks go down, would get that artificial buffer Vit acts like. Meaning a lowe the tanks health, the higher their natural defense gets

my personal opinion would be to scale vit/tenacity and make tenacity the same as strength currently is, and have that afect the tanks damage, but thatd require some thought. I think scaling the AP with vit at a reduced amount is just fine, personally. I dont have anything against STR or VIT tanks, and in some terms both arguments hold a tiny bit of water. The problem i have is that SE doesnt want to allow tanks to deal good dps, because dps start crying. They dont want to give them a million hp because eventually, that becomes rediculous, or then people would run tanks even for the slow dps cause theyre unkillable. But they have to do something. The vit/str was something i disliked, because they didnt originally scale it with current damage that going full str went. Over time, the argument flushed. But wait theres more! Tanks get a ton a VIT and they gotta make stuff hit harder, because cure2 wont have a purpose anymore if healers mnd scales like god tier. But if they did that, tanks would deal reliable damage, comparable to dps, and eventually with how vitality is slopped on gear at increasing paces, then that vit tank will start hitting hard like dps. What do we do? Just let tanks have it. At the end of the day, as mentioned in other threads, once the OT position isnt needed anymore after overgearing, most groups replace them with a DPS. I for one, find the role stressful. But a hell of a lot less than PLD 2.0 pre buff,pre anything/ Enmity is a lot easier, but if damage or any performance outside of just to hold hate isnt scaled, you just get benched by the community, as youre not needed any more.

Part of the complaints are well thought of and then part of comments are not even mindful that the job and role isnt that popular, has a low fun factor and a majority would rather play something else. We need tanks more than just to get into queues, and part of that a big part, is the fun factor. Some like to deal comparable damage while staying alive. Why ruin that nbecause some assume all you should do is stand there and get punched at? Ontil they rewrite the entire combat algorithm, or get rid of dps checks/add phases in every boss since ifrit ever, they need to just go "ok we concede: Scale AP with Vit, or VIT/STR, dps can just shut it, since they refuse to tank, and just let both camps be hapoy. "Just getting punched in the face is fun" was said by nobody ever.

[Lyth]

...

Your ability to survive Walking Dead in inversely related to your HP. It's also worth noting that the more HP on TBN, the less likely it is to break and reimburse you with 50 blood, which is kind of what it's designed to do.

Inflating the enmity multipliers only becomes necessary when you have a large discrepancy between tank damage output and dps damage output. If there's a sensible balance and both get progressively stronger with gear, then you don't have to keep changing it every couple of patches.

[Soraki-Muppe]

I get what SE wants, but have they done anything to earn our cooperation on this matter?
Why I ask this is due to how they have designed the fights in this expansion. One EX primal have a tank swap mechanic with a timed tank buster, the other have no reason for a second tank even being there. In Omega there is only one, ONE, add and that is just a tacked on excuse for having two tanks.
On one hand SE adjust the tank jobs in the direction of being more tank and less dps, which would be fine if they also designed the fights so there was a reason for it, it is in their boss design that they fail to earn our cooperation.

Tank swap and add phases.
This is the general way things are done, SE force us to tank swap by adding a mechanic that has become insanely old by now, it is less there to bring anything to the fight and more as a poor excuse for why two tanks are needed.
And that add phase... unless the adds have some reason to be separated and does a lot of damage then this phase can usually be solo tanked.

My ideas for a fix has to do with the design of the fights.
Can they still use tank swaps? Sure as long as it is not the ONLY reason for bringing two tanks.
What about add phases then? Sure if they are designed so that two tanks are required, this meaning the adds has to be apart and they do a ton of damage.
But generally I would say less light show more content.
1: Have adds that will two shot healers spawn outside of an add phase, make them hit so hard that one tank cant deal with the boss and the add at the same time, perhaps the add give a certain debuff.
2: Have lines that the of tanks has to pick up and take away from the group.
3: Have damage sharing for the tanks.
4: Make the boss split and the two parts having to be separated to not buff each other.
5: Split the party with each part having to complete a task, during this time there will be something that a tank needs to deal with that neither dps or healers can deal with.
6: Have debuffs that the tanks have to share, this will one shot dps and healers so only tanks can deal with it.
7: Give the boss spike damage outside the well planed for tank buster, have that damage be a bit more random. Design it so tanks can survive it in tank stance even without cooldowns if healers heal us.
Most if not all of these are thing SE has done before, so I know they can do it again.
Before going further with a fight there are two things SE should ask themselves. 1: Is there a reason a group will always bring two tanks? 2: is there a reason a group will always bring two healers? If yes proceed, if no rethink. IMHO every damn 8-man fight in this expansion has so far failed those questions... heck most would fail the question if there was ever a reason to bring two tanks. Sure the fights look nice and they are fun, but they are not designed with two tanks in mind.

So if SE want tanks to use tank stance more and healers to heal more dps less, then it is on SE to design fights in such a way that there is a reason for us to do so.

[HoodRat]

So if SE want tanks to use tank stance more and healers to heal more dps less, then it is on SE to design fights in such a way that there is a reason for us to do so.

I agree, SE has rarely, if ever, made content where tanks actually need to stack vit/stay in tank stance. The only problem is that they're designing the content to be cleared by the casualest of casuals. So if they design content where the best tanks can't use str accessories and/or stay in dps stance the entire time, your average df tank would have no hope of clearing. Same thing for healers. If your average healer can't make time to dps now, there's no way they'll be able to pass healing checks if SE makes it so there's little to no time for them to dps. I'd definitely say if they took this route it would be a wake up call for people to improve, but based on my experiences with people in this game so far I have little hope that most people would care to improve.

[Reynhart]

Since 2.0 its been enmity boost enmity boost enmity boost. performance.That to me means that tanks arent currently balanced to scale with other jobs.

Frankly, I never had that many issue with enmty, simply because I use my enmity combo as soon as someone is too close. If people wouldn't cry that they have to use it more and lose their precious DPS, we wouldn't need these adjustement...except on Unleash, which potency nerf is one of the worst idea of 4.0

Your ability to survive Walking Dead in inversely related to your HP.

More HP also mean that you're less likey to need Walking Dead. And the value of Benediction increases with your max HP.

It's also worth noting that the more HP on TBN, the less likely it is to break and reimburse you with 50 blood, which is kind of what it's designed to do.

TBN is a mitigation before anything else. More HP means less damage taken.

4: Make the boss split and the two parts having to be separated to not buff each other.

One of the few good ideas from Gordias...and it existed since Turn 1 with Caduceus.

The only problem is that they're designing the content to be cleared by the casualest of casuals.

People enforced STR acc and tanking in DPS stance in Alex Savage, which isn't casual content, while being the only content where the increased DPS actually matters. Kill that possibility, and the meta will fall apart by itself.

[Gravton]

People enforced STR acc and tanking in DPS stance in Alex Savage, which isn't casual content, while being the only content where the increased DPS actually matters. Kill that possibility, and the meta will fall apart by itself.

No it won't. So long as the OT has nothing to do but wait for a swap, the meta will remain the same. When the OT is waiting, he is a dps. Dps have to strive for higher numbers. If he can get higher numbers while in OT, he will strive for it during MT. We all know that will be the mentality of the 1% and thus create the meta. Think about all the endgame content that wouldn't require an OT if the devs didn't enforce the tank swap. So long as we have it tanks are dps at some point or another.

[Falar]

Now that we're on the subject of tanking in-content itself a lot of these ideas come straight from other games.

I am used to the tanks having to share debuffs, cleaves, and constantly swap at X stacks.

FFXIV is its own game and while these mechanics aren't entirely absent from this game I don't know how I would feel about them bringing a lot of these in and making them mandatory. Maybe in Savage only.

Also, a hyper-focus on DPS will never go away. The end goal is always killing the boss as fast as possible so no matter what changes are made the top 1% is going to do whatever it can to maximize DPS.

[Soraki-Muppe]

FFXIV is its own game and while these mechanics aren't entirely absent from this game I don't know how I would feel about them bringing a lot of these in and making them mandatory.

I am not saying that every sort of mechanic that came to my mind should be in every fight, they should mix it up and hopefully come up with other mechanics. What I do want to be mandatory is that when SE design a 8-man fight it has to be designed in a way so that you need 2 tanks and 2 healers, not because SE say so but because the fight itself has mechanics that require it. Otherwise you might as well go with 1tank, 1heal, 6dps.
SE lowered tank dps so they clearly want tanks to tank, yet they design the fights in a way leaving tanks with next to nothing to do beside dps. They have to be consistent, either tanks are more tanky since the game demand this or they might as well give us back our dps and give up on changing the meta.

[Reynhart]

No it won't. So long as the OT has nothing to do but wait for a swap, the meta will remain the same.

No because every OT needs to be able to switch to MT if the MT dies. If wearing STR acc prevent you from surviving as a MT, you'll wear VIT even when OT.