I think that one of the problems that SE is running into is that they tend to interpret player feedback very literally.

At the start of this expansion, for example, there was a lot of feedback from players about being forced into VIT only accessories. We may be tanks, but we still want to see our abilities have an impact when they hit. Instead of presenting this as "we don't want you to completely nerf our damage output", players said "we're worried about holding enmity" to try to justify the point. Cue 4.01, and a series of enmity boosts from the devs. The point was not about enmity. It was about damage.

The 4.1 change is similar. The WAR community as a whole pushed the idea that "we have less 'utility', so we should do higher damage". 'Utility' is a nebulous term that defies consensus. The dev response was to buff "utility" by turning Shake it Off into a powered-up version of Divine Veil. But the point was never about 'utility'. It was about damage.

It's simple enough to understand why damage output gains such a focus. For one, it's often been treated as a surrogate for skill. We've built up a culture of "I might not be able to do mechanics, but hey, check out my dps up until the point where I wiped the raid." There's also a sense since HW, especially at lower skill levels, that WAR is a good job to play if you want to give the illusion of doing high dps, without the pressure or technical skill required to play an actual dps job. It's a safe haven where you can hide under the radar.

The newest vogue has been job "difficulty". Not out of choice, but because all other excuses have been exhausted. "WAR should do more dps because it's more technically difficult to play." This is a hard sell. Players generally do not play jobs to the same level of competency. If you've sunk hundreds of hours into WAR, that's time that you didn't invest in the other two tanks. It's a very subjective concept.

The other problem is that there's a fine line between describing something as "difficult" and admitting personal weakness. Likewise, players often describe challenging things as "easy" to inflate their own skill. When players like Xeno go on about how difficult WAR is, the implication is not supposed to be that they're struggling with it. You're supposed to be impressed. As someone once aptly put it: Hardest job = my job, easiest job = your job.

The problem now is that people are scraping the bottom of the barrel for reasons why WAR could be more difficult, many of which would baffle a longtime player of the job. "B-but what if I pop all my buffs, and then, instead of pressing my highest potency attack again and again, I stare off blankly into space for two minutes?" as if this is somehow unique to WAR. I get second-hand embarrassment from reading some of these complaints. A part of me always hopes that a dps main doesn't stumble into the middle of this sort of discussion. It reflects badly on all of us.

As icing on the cake, of course, the devs once again take it in a completely different direction. "So WAR is too difficult, you say?" It's like they have selective hearing about the word "dps" when it comes to tanks.

This thread is correct. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But it's not entirely the devs' fault. Be careful what you wish for.