Tanking feels unimportant

[ReiMakoto]

This is without bringing up how Darkside is not a buff that demands attention or interacts with your kit in any way outside of a flat damage boost. It's a like a participation trophy for pressing the edge button once a minute after your opener, instead of something you have to plan a weapon combo for like Storm's Eye. I think Darkside upkeep should be the "filler" content your brain is concerned with during the 50 seconds where there is nothing else happening, like how MP/Blood was in SB, because right now, it's kinda just there. But this has been talked to death, I just wanted to clarify these two points in particular.

Darkside also used to be a more nuianced tool, even in SB, cos if you were running a coordinated team you could toggle darkside in downtime to get mana shifts and refreshes if your team had them spare, allowing you to push dps further

[SargentToughie]

As a recently retired DRK main I personally feel the changes to DRK were fine. were they perfect? no, but the class at least feels smooth when understood and played correctly. imo from what I see a lot of is people miss how hectic and busy the job was in SB but being busy and producing results are very different things. I feel like the SB DRK was a whole lot of buttons and management for very little results compared to other tanks and that's what the devs saw too. just my opinion don't get rabid on me here. dark arts spam was horrible but the changes now reflect tanks in general being thrown into the easy mode bin with a label that reads "free queues for everyone".

now that I've switched to healing, it's far more engaging and difficult (still need a lot more experience) and the general feel of the role is far more important then tanking. I'm not trying to directly compare the roles but if you're a garbage healer, the impact on yourself and your group far far far outweighs being a garbage tank since most healers will just pop CD's and heal through the stupid. this is why I mentioned more tank specific mechanics outside of mitigation. if you dumb down a role there needs to be a counterbalance.

That's always been the case, though. If anything tanks have more impact on the speed of a run now than ever, thanks to the fact that we don't need to gimp our damage in order to keep control of trash packs in dungeons, and as far as Raids go tanks play the same as they ever did, with about the same level of damage. All the tanks actually have fairly adequate DPS kits now, no more just spamming Flash/Total Eclipse and limping your way through a dungeon pretending you're helping.

I can't speak for DRK because I've only played it enough to ever get it to the xpac's max level, but are you really going to try and say that both WAR and PLD got put in the 'easy bin' along with it when literally PLD and WAR both got more tools strapped onto the rotation they were doing at the end of Stormblood? Sure, WAR used to be vastly more complex with initial launch Inner Release, but I'm talking more about the leap from Stormblood to Shadowbringers.

Healers have always, always had more direct personal impact than tanks, since the launch of ARR. I remember leveling White Mage in 2.4, and feeling the same exact way back then that you do now. That said, the role is still pretty piss easy, and has plenty of problems all it's own, especially now. You talk about Tanks having been lobotomized, healers have literally been neutered of all their damage abilities, sans one nuke, one DoT, and a few other little buttons sprinkled in like Assize.

[Ultimatecalibur]

That's always been the case, though. If anything tanks have more impact on the speed of a run now than ever, thanks to the fact that we don't need to gimp our damage in order to keep control of trash packs in dungeons, and as far as Raids go tanks play the same as they ever did, with about the same level of damage. All the tanks actually have fairly adequate DPS kits now, no more just spamming Flash/Total Eclipse and limping your way through a dungeon pretending you're helping.

I don't really think most of the complaints are based around dungeon content. I believe the complaints are more focused around Raid and Ex Trial content. It feels like a majority of the fights have little actual boss positioning, add handling, orb soaking, mine sweeping or interrupting in the 11 non-Ultimate fights compared to the same tiers of content in previous expansions.

[Sawamura]

Well mostly problem is SE dumb down too much tank mechanic and less unqiue and boss position.

Tank raid in 2.0-3.0 use to be more fun and feel more impact for tank.

[SargentToughie]

I don't really think most of the complaints are based around dungeon content. I believe the complaints are more focused around Raid and Ex Trial content. It feels like a majority of the fights have little actual boss positioning, add handling, orb soaking, mine sweeping or interrupting in the 11 non-Ultimate fights compared to the same tiers of content in previous expansions.

Not enough people partake in the EX/Savage content in this game for me to assume that's the default viewpoint. Besides, Instanced Trials have basically been around the same difficulty and level of involvement since Heavensward, so why would these complaints only start popping up now? Instead, basically the only things I'm seeing from this thread are "Enmity control is easy now" and complaints about DRK specifically. Shoot, even the OP is mostly just complaining that they don't get comms despite what they perceive as good performance.

All that aside, the harder content in this game is actually decently involved. E2S thru Ultimate all require both tanks to be on-point, and have multiple instances where if a tank misses a swap, or doesn't budget their mitigation (both personal and party wide) properly, they could end up killing the party. Hell, even as early as E2S, entire strats are made or broken by the MT's ability to properly steer the boss. This says nothing of E3S's constant swaps and multiple tank-specific flares, Black Smokers, or just E4S existing at all and perpetually dumping out damage forever.

EDIT: Oh, and Hades EX! Literally 3 of the 4 different phases in that fight have tank specific mechanics that if they don't accomplish, they wipe the party.

[Renkei]

I personally enjoyed being Blue DPS, my only regret is that they never gave longer combat chains and Positional Attack to tanks, your probably thinking WHY POSITIONALS, I'd it'd be cool to do front and side stuff and have tank stance Nullify positional Requirements at a damage penalty but still reduce damage, I understand the removal of DPS Stances, but why not make no stance the DPS stance to fix button bloat??? I thought it would be interesting to play a Class that requires you to hit from the Front and Flanks. I don't think E1-E4S had anything problematic for Tank Enmity or required Shirks as much as previous fights from the other expansions, so yeah they did get simplified, but tanks didn't need to be simplified in my Opinion.

[Maeka]

I personally enjoyed being Blue DPS, my only regret is that they never gave longer combat chains and Positional Attack to tanks, your probably thinking WHY POSITIONALS, I'd it'd be cool to do front and side stuff and have tank stance Nullify positional Requirements at a damage penalty but still reduce damage, I understand the removal of DPS Stances, but why not make no stance the DPS stance to fix button bloat??? I thought it would be interesting to play a Class that requires you to hit from the Front and Flanks. I don't think E1-E4S had anything problematic for Tank Enmity or required Shirks as much as previous fights from the other expansions, so yeah they did get simplified, but tanks didn't need to be simplified in my Opinion.

Let's not and say we did.

I hate positional requirements with a passion.

There's so many things that can (and do) go wrong with positional requirements. Boss throws AoEs down right next to his butt or his sides? You lose DPS. Tank likes the drag the mobs around and you need to hit his flank? You lose DPS because that's literally impossible (in fact hitting it in the back is almost impossible while an enemy is on the move). Tank decides it's a great idea to keep the mobs right next to a damage zone on the ground where you can't get to anything but the front of the mob? You lose DPS.

Tank thinks it's OK to tank stuff up against a wall? You lose DPS.

You're fighting a mob with a HUGE targeting circle, where trying to go between back and flank takes more than a GCD to do? You lose DPS.

And now, you want to apply this to tanks? Okay, sure, let me spin a dragon to the side so he can unleash his breath on some poor DRG that's just trying to stab it in the side because I'm trying to hit it in the side too. Awesome! Or, if I put tank stance on and ignore the positional requirements, I'm still losing DPS, just because? That goes against current tank design. They wanted to get *away* from Stance = DPS loss.

[KalinOrthos]

I personally enjoyed being Blue DPS, my only regret is that they never gave longer combat chains and Positional Attack to tanks, your probably thinking WHY POSITIONALS, I'd it'd be cool to do front and side stuff and have tank stance Nullify positional Requirements at a damage penalty but still reduce damage, I understand the removal of DPS Stances, but why not make no stance the DPS stance to fix button bloat??? I thought it would be interesting to play a Class that requires you to hit from the Front and Flanks. I don't think E1-E4S had anything problematic for Tank Enmity or required Shirks as much as previous fights from the other expansions, so yeah they did get simplified, but tanks didn't need to be simplified in my Opinion.

1) No stance is already the DPS stance. You turn off your tank stance so that you don't accidentally turn the boss by pulling aggro. If you're talking about no stance being an actual damage buff, please, please, for the love of god, please leave tank/DPS stance dancing back in stormblood where it belongs. The further we get from people screaming at us because we'd rather be in tank stance, the better. The only thing that really needs to be addressed by stance dance removal is that Warriors got literally nothing to compensate for their entire kit revolving around it.

2) Why, why, why would you think giving tanks positionals is a good idea? No, really, in what world is it a good idea?

[Tohe-Spidhire]

Tanking is actually a crowd control role. I disagree that the tank be the expected expert of a given dungeon or a trial. It is simply not always the case.

Regardless, there are two types of groups (Setting RP aside):

A) People that enjoy completing a dungeon or trial at a moderate pace, solving encounters as they go.
B) Speed runners that want to maximize the "efficiency" of their "gameplay.” (mocking quotes intentional)

There are three options:

1. Join the duty finder and take your chances.
2. Support an FC that has a specific goal of (A).
3. Support an FC that has a specific goal of (B).

[Bright-Flower]

I'm thrilled with the tank stance changes in SHB. And while I can't speak for warrior or DRK, paladin rotation has only improved with every expansion from dull and lackluster in ARR to finally feeling complete in SHB.

Having tanks sacrificing defense to eke out all the dps they could felt like backwards design to me. I much prefer the new stance system, where you just leave it on as main tank, or if off tanking toggle it so that you remain above the non tanks on enmity in raids/trials so that the boss goes to you and not the party if the MT goes down.

Enmity combos were like TP. Maybe with different game design they could have been interesting, but they way they were in prior expamsions they just weren't interesting and were rarely used outside of an opener.

I would like to see more things were positionin gmatters in casual content though. Sohm Al Hard's steam vents or the water spouts in arboretum hard for example were fun things to position the enemies for a debuff. I like things like those. Swapping stances to eke out more damage? No thanks.

Though maybe this was more fun for DRK/WAR, I play paladin where all sword oath did was give us extra auto attack damage and make our gauge fill on auto attacks rather than blocking and holy spirit, and we had (and still have) no offensive abilities to direclty use our oath gauge on so it never really felt rewarding to be in swoard oath anyway. Maybe it was better for the other tanks.