Don't repeat the past a third time, Yoshida.

[Lyth]

Here's the thing. If you want players to play tank, you have to figure out what draws players to the role and what makes them tick. A good tank is a facilitator. We do whatever needs to be done to make the group function more effectively. Sometimes, this means mitigating in a way that assists our healers. Sometimes, this means pushing out more dps so that our damage dealers can make a dps check.

But the most central function of a tank is this: tanks control space. They set up the fight. They control how it unfolds through effective positioning. And they control re-positioning in a way that allows the entire team to maintain good uptime.

You know why tanks care so much about damage? It's because you've given us nothing else to care about. Mitigation is trivial. You have abilities like Holmgang on a 180 second cooldown, which let us negate every second tankbuster. Positioning is trivial. Bosses re-position themselves, re-orientate themselves, and animation lock themselves in place. Your job is to move to where they spawn or jump, and just hold them where they are. It's like the people designing this fights for this game either have never played a tank before, or have no passion for the role. Because content is not designed for tanks, we play like we're a glorified melee dps.

And they're just not listening. With the advent of Stormblood, tank accessories were designed so that they just didn't offer any significant dps progression. So what did we do? We used i270 accessories. That should have been a warning sign in itself. Hey, maybe this design decision isn't what the players want.

You're not going to get us to "play like tanks" by removing the last thing that the role has going for it. The only way that you can do it is by designing content for tanks. Make us position. Give us fights with genuine, unscripted, tank-controlled movement. Make us mitigate.

Even despite the fact that we forced them to make some concessions with our accessory progression, you still hear Yoshi-p mention how tanks do too much damage, as recently as the Las Vegas Fan Fest Q+A. Do you know the one thing that I don't want to hear, as a tank main? I don't want to hear a non-tank main tell me that we're doing too much damage. I want to hear from someone who is equally passionate about tanking. I want to hear from someone who designs content for tanks. And I want to hear from someone who wants to make the tanking experience better for all of us.

People like playing dps, but there will always be a need for tanks. Those new dps players aren't going to want to wait around for hours until they find the odd person still willing to tank for them. You can't bribe us by making WAR into an overpowered supertank. I'm sorry, but Blizzard does barbarians better. This is a Final Fantasy game. Give me my greatsword or gunblade.

Do you know why 1.0 failed? It wasn't because of technical design issues. It was because you failed to listen to the people playing your game. And you're making that exact same mistake again. It's pride and a lack of communication that causes this game to repeat the same mistakes again and again.

[SargentToughie]

Snip

Big +1 to this, would give more if I had the chance to.

During my long tenure as a tank main in this game, it always felt to me like the dev team simply wasn't listening to the concerns or complaints for the playerbase, and would often just smash a baseball bat into our knees for no good reason. The fact that Warrior even launched in the absolutely pitiful state it was in at the start of SB was appalling, no matter how fast it got hotfixed or how hard it got buffed afterwards. Their whole design philosophy going into Stormblood seemed to be to directly attack the players that enjoyed maximizing their damage, at the cost of all else.

It feels like, simply put, we're not listened to. Just like Lyth said above, that Q&A was a big hit to my desire to come back and tank in 5.0, since Yoshida seemed to say almost dismissively that tanks are still doing too much damage.... Okay, and? What are you going to do about it? Are you going to give us more mechanics to deal with? Are you going to change the way that tanks play in this game in any meaningful way? Because as the launch of SB proved, if you just gut tank damage and do nothing else to change the role on a deeper level, you have a mass exodus.

Veteran tanks have complained for years that tanking is boring as sin. Are we ever going to get listened to?

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Veteran tanks have complained for years that tanking is boring as sin. Are we ever going to get listened to?

Yes... if you're a casual player who whines your tank/job of choice doesn't play how you like it to in dungeons.

I wish I were being factious. Unfortunately, a lot of their balance decisions aren't centered around good players trying to push the limits of each individual jobs, but instead around the casual playerbase. Now I get it, they make up the bulk of people playing this game. That doesn't mean it isn't an incredibly shortsighted, and quite frankly poor, design philosophy. Casual content is so laughably undertuned you can queue on classes and breeze through pretty much everything. Sadly, it's this backwards approach that causes so many balancing issues. A prime example of how flawed their approach is are the stupid attack debuffs. When the producer of the game outright says "we don't balance Bard and Machinist around piercing. And giving it to either would make them overpowered" it highlights just how out of touch they are with players who care even the slightest bit about optimization. How, how can you design two jobs and not account for almost 400 damage only one other job gives them? It's taken Bard utterly dominating almost the whole damn expansion—with Dragoon riding its coattails—for them to finally admit, "hey... maybe they were right about this."

Sadly, my speculation regarding tanks isn't a needed overhaul to what few mechanics they have. Instead, I suspect they pull back heavily on abilities like Shirk and Diversion while removing aggro dumps from Elusive, Lucid and Refresh purely because this will force tank stance/aggro combos—in turn weakening tanks. I just cannot imagine they will ever move towards less scripted mechanics because of the perception it would be too hard for casual players. Ironically, it's that design approach that makes tanks want to hyper focus on their DPS. As Lyth said, you've given them nothing else to care about. You can't optimize enmity. Either you're first, second for a specific mechanic, or someone's dead. You can't optimize mitigation since any damage that matters comes in predictable bursts. And you can't position properly for a mechanic since most bosses jump. All you can do is crit your Fell Cleaves.

Sorry, Yoshida. But I'm not going to care about Inner Beast or Defiance when the only optimization tool I have is Crit/D.H Fell Cleaves. Five of them now!

[SargentToughie]

Sorry, Yoshida. But I'm not going to care about Inner Beast or Defiance when the only optimization tool I have is Crit/D.H Fell Cleaves. Five of them now!

Hilarious, that. Inner Beast is one of the best buttons in the entire game for the purpose of actually tanking, but at the same time, it's also so much overkill when tanks just chew on even the Savage level Tank Busters with basic cooldowns/shields, or just ignore them outright with invulns.

It worries me just how correct you probably are. This dev team has shown us time and time again that they're nothing if not apathetic towards the voices of the high level tank players, to the point where so many of us have just straight up abandoned ship.

I just hope that if they administer yet another shortsighted, heavy handed bat to the knees of tanks at the start of 5.0 again, that they learn a harsh lesson from it. Then again, I'd also hoped that the beating they took on SB's launch did that, and here we are again watching history repeat itself.

EDIT: that interview when Yoshida talked about Piercing Debuff, and how it would make BRD/MCH overpowered was actually infuriating. I can't believe I'd forgotten about that until you reminded me. Also, I'm pretty sure that as of 4.4, Piercing Debuff is up to a value of like 500-600ish DPS, isn't it? Or maybe that's the Battle Litany talking, which actually allows DRG to double dip on being a mandatory tag-along to the BRD show, as a proc donkey.

[Deceptus]

Sadly, my speculation regarding tanks isn't a needed overhaul to what few mechanics they have. Instead, I suspect they pull back heavily on abilities like Shirk and Diversion while removing aggro dumps from Elusive, Lucid and Refresh purely because this will force tank stance/aggro combos—in turn weakening tanks. I just cannot imagine they will ever move towards less scripted mechanics because of the perception it would be too hard for casual players. Ironically, it's that design approach that makes tanks want to hyper focus on their DPS. As Lyth said, you've given them nothing else to care about. You can't optimize enmity. Either you're first, second for a specific mechanic, or someone's dead. You can't optimize mitigation since any damage that matters comes in predictable bursts. And you can't position properly for a mechanic since most bosses jump. All you can do is crit your Fell Cleaves.

I agree with this stance but man, oh man, the current decent tanks would REVOLT over this.

[SargentToughie]

I agree with this stance but man, oh man, the current decent tanks would REVOLT over this.

It happened before, during the launch of Stormblood. Tanks were put back on STR, our accessories had none of it, causing tank players to go back and wear i270 accessories. That combined with the fact that tank mechanics in general (especially WAR) got gutted when stance dancing, and you had a tank player base that was right properly outraged.

Do that when also releasing two shiny, new, hotly anticipated DPS classes at the same time? Well the results spoke for themselves.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I agree with this stance but man, oh man, the current decent tanks would REVOLT over this.

And I will be among those tanks. Like I said, if we could optimize tank mechanics which also required tank stance, I'm all for the change. If I'm sitting in Defiance because daring to dip out for more than an Inner Release window causes the BRD to immediately rip makes for very uninteresting gameplay. I'm basically being told, "No. You can't optimize your DPS because we don't like you doing damage. Sit in tank stance like a good girl even if the extra mitigation/HP is completely unnecessary."

As others have already stated, tank stance just isn't fun in its current inception. It's the equivalent of healers getting Cleric Stance back but being unable to use it in eight man content. Healing wouldn't magically become more interesting. You'd just be standing around or contributing paltry DPS because the devs were too afraid (or stubborn) to innovate.

Something you have to be mindful of when insisting tanks and healers should just do this one thing and "suck it up." If enough players revolt, we all suffer. You'll have less tanks and healers because what enjoyment those players had was taken away. In fact, if healer DPS were nerfed significantly enough, you'd likely see statics moving towards a 1-1-5 comp; forcing healers to solo heal the entire fight. Why? Well, there isn't much point to bringing two healers when both will sit around idle for half the fight. And since every fight can be solo healed, well... you've now opened a new can of worms.