Tanking feels unimportant

[SargentToughie]

Well for 1 tanks lost alot of our job skills that kinda added a bit of depth to staying alive, anticipation, convelesence, aggro management is now completely gone, and oh DRK basically became 2.0 WAR. Oh yeah, they also lost stuff to their classes generally speaking too. Lets not also forget although our classes didn't change... that's the entire point. We got almost NOOOOTHING from lvl 70-lv80 NOOO CHANGES, so we are expected to play the exact same jobs for 4 years? (namely PLD/WAR) Why did we get ignored? ARR to HW expanded the jobs in meaningful ways, SB changed all tanks again fairly radicully from HW... so why the -blam- did tanks get shafted this expansion? For the removal of tank stance? That's the excuse????

There is a difference between straight forward and one look at a job and I figured out 95% of the job with the only thing to learn is an opener. WOOOOOOOOOW.

Let's try to pull this apart one at a time.

- I don't have any comments on the DRK changes, since I don't play DRK. A few DRK players in my circle love the job right now, but most forum people seem upset. I'm sorry that DRK isn't satisfying to you this expansion.

- Awareness, Anticipation, and Convalescence were all meme buttons, and you'd basically never use them independently and rely upon them as worthwhile cooldowns. In fact, I'd argue that the buttons we did get in their place- Modified Shelltron, Modified Raw Intuition, Heart of Stone: these short duration, short CD mini-mitigations make for more interesting defense management, since you can juggle them between major CDs. Not to mention new Reprisal, we got Arm's Length, we actually have just as many defense buttons as before, with more raid utility in the form of Heart of Light and Dark Messiah.

- Aggro Management, as I've argued before, was never fun. 10 seconds in tank stance, 2 enmity combos. At best this delayed the time it took before you started your DPS rotation, at worst it desynched your buffs for the entire fight. An enmity combo done meant less meter for WAR, and it meant less MP, and less Blood for DRK and PLD, not to even go into the fact that certain buffs/abilities straight up couldn't be used while in Tank Stance, Blood Weapon. Doing an enmity combo, being in Tank Stance, did nothing but delay the parts of your job that were fun to use, and this was true for Heavensward and Stormblood- it's what pushed me away from the role for that whole expansion.

- On the subject of nothing changing: What exactly are you expecting? We got a new tank in Gunbreaker, and the one tank that did see robust, extensive mechanical changes, everybody on these forums seems to hate. Paladin and Warrior mostly saw iterations and small improvements, which are indeed for the better. This is a game with 17 jobs, and the devs can't afford to throw out everything that they had previously in order to give each job this "new experience" that a good bulk of players don't even want. If I like how current Paladin, or Warrior play, what happens next expac when I've got a new job wearing Warrior's clothing? I'm probably as pissy as the DRK players are right now with the new DRK they hate so much.

On that same note, bear in mind that most of the jobs in this game retain the same skeleton over time. None of the DPS jobs chained all that much either, with the exception of MCH, which got an extreme overhaul to fix the inherent design flaws. You say tanks got shafted this expansion, everybody got "shafted" by your definition, which I don't agree with. The only people I feel should be rightfully outraged are the healers, who got stripped down to one nuke, a DoT, and AoE, and a few frilly side buttons like Assize.

- On learning a job and it's simplicity: This is an MMO, not Tekken. Good job, you can read tooltips and use the internet. You can now master every single job in this game.