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

[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.