Tanking feels unimportant

[Maeka]

every mmo has a shortage of tanks and healers. It’s a combination of people being scared to play them and also that dps numbers are much more visible. People love to see big numbers.

One fix is just to have the games use bigger parties. Somewhere along the line these games got the idea that the problem with queues was bigger parties and so they reduced them to the bare minimum. Problem is that’s the exact wrong thing to do. Larger parties create a better ratio of dps to tanks and healers. Imagine if dungeon parties in this game were 8 members(1 tank, 1 healer, 6dps). You’d have 3 times as many dps as tanks and healers. Notice how it’s alliance raids that always have dps in need.

They’re never going to change the overall distribution of roles that people choose. They’re better off acknowledging the ratio and building systems around it.

Also has to do with the amount of expectations and pressure that people place on them.

Tanks are expected to know the dungeon and the fights before even stepping into it for the first time, tanks are expected to know the layout of a dungeon (at least back before dungeons became linear) and exactly which trash should be pulled, which trash could be skipped safely, and now with linear dungeons, tanks are expected to know exactly how many groups of mobs you pull with each pull.

There are a lot of people who are in such a ridiculous hurry that if you, the tank pulls single groups, a DPS in a royal hurry will run forward and grab the next pack whether you want it or not, or sometimes even healers will do the same.

And then the boss fights. Some of them are not intuitive to just read what they do, though a lot of leveling dungeon bosses are these days, but some of them aren't and that could give people pause.

Contrast that with a DPS where.... as long as you don't stand in crap and you obey the occasional (1) mark on enemies, you're fine. You just kill whatever the tank grabs, just AoE the crap out of everything and single-target the bosses and that's really all you need to care about. It's a lot less mental work and very little if any pressure/expectations on your part.

I started FFXIV playing a PLD. I stopped playing PLD because I got tired of people expecting me to know a dungeon before I even stepped foot in it. So I switched to WHM because I don't want 15-20 minute queues for dungeons.

But lately, I don't really like the whole speedrunning community seeping into normal average random duty finder dungeons so I dunno. Kinda wish SE would put more barriers in dungeons to keep the pulls at 2 groups max.