Tanking feels unimportant

[Quor]

Your attitude is the most cancerous here, "I'm right and everyone else is wrong, how dare someone else be more right than I". There is very little discussion with you unless someone happens to agree with you.

Chemotherapy is known for it's harshness. But to make an omelette, you gotta break a few eggs.

My major issue is this - on the one hand, many people on this forum (rightly) ask for greater complexity and challenge in the tanks while at the same time advocating against the usage and sometimes for the outright removal of the things that make each tank unique. This is rarely addressed in any meaningful manner outside of the discussion that relates to tank dps. In essence, the attitude is that if it's not helping kill the boss faster then it's useless and should be ignored in favor of literally anything else. This ignores the very real fact that sometimes these non-damage skills can save a person's life, something that is certainly worth more than a single GCD of damage from a non-DPS. The gist of this thread is that tanking feels unimportant, but I know for a fact on each of the tank jobs I've done something clutch that saved a life and ultimately the run.

But to many on this forum, that doesn't matter. All that matters is damage. This is a terrible attitude to take, and will only lead to further homogenization of not only the tank role but all the roles if followed to it's logical conclusion.

During prog and clears, accidents happen outside the normal flow of a fight, and in most cases, especially in ultimate, it is gg better to wipe and start over.

"Most" cases becomes subjective. 95% and barely into phase 1? Sure, restart it. Sub-10% in the final phase with dps looking lit when someone makes a flub right before a raid-wide and that little extra bit of healing will save their life? Of course you'll use Clemency. Any decent tank would. You certainly wouldn't call it a wipe and restart. So it most definitely does have value, by your own admission no less.

But yes most of the time in clears, things shouldn't go wrong, it's expected of people that they've learnt the fight, since they have cleared it, so they shouldn't screw up normally.

Again with that weasel word, "most." For the moment when "most" doesn't happen, SE has given us tools to use in order to do what they envision part of what a tank should do; watch over and protect their team. PLD happens to have a nice direct heal, and it's part of what makes the job unique, but WAR, DRK and GNB all have means of doing something similar.

Rei is correct in that if you need a paladin to cast clemency to consistently get through a segment of a fight, healers are doing something wrong, using a solo healer run of ultimate is a poor counter argument, when the point was made where two healers are present like in standard party comps.

"...using a solo healer run of ultimate is a poor counter argument..." is something I never thought I would see someone say seriously. It's a testament to the power of the skill when used correctly (and in this case, creatively).

Of course in outlier and very extreme levels of play sure, you would get the paladin to help with healing at certain points, but those are heavily co-ordinated uses, not thrown out because some mistake happened. You aren't solo healing ultimate if the runs don't go perfect either.

Most of the arguments about "optimal" rotation and "ideal" situations talk of those qualities in the context of how quickly a boss can be killed. 5 DPS surely kills a boss faster than 4 DPS. By the logic many on this forum employ, the optimal way to do TEA is now single healer with a PLD tank support healing via Clemency. You can be damn sure the lost GCD's on the part of the PLD are more than made up for by the extra DPS.

But you see, this is the issue I have with this attitude. "Optimal" and "ideal" are nice goals to shoot for, but when they get enforced the way they often are on this forum (and elsewhere), as if the only way to play is the "optimal" way and the "optimal" way is expected 100% of the time, and all job discussion revolves around the "optimal" way it ignores anything that disagrees with this hegemony. I have a healthy distrust and hatred of hegemony. It's stifling and stagnant, killing innovation in the name of conformity for the sake of conformity. It's no different than the monkey-and-ladder study done decades ago. I've seen too many people talk about how terrible Clemency is and why does PLD have a "wasted" skill on this heal because the "optimal" way to play is to dedicate every GCD to damage. And here comes this group, thinking outside the box, clearing the hardest content in-game right now with a solo heal, largely due to the healing power proper use of Clemency can give.

Guess that's the new "optimal" now isn't it? Outlier or no, if someone is going to argue that dps is the most important thing, then they have to agree that this is the new meta. It has more overall dps by a good margin and it does it by leaning heavily on tank healing. This goes in the face of all conventional wisdom, and yet was spectacularly successful. Of course, I don't want to see this become the "new optimal." It's simply a nice illustration of my point. All you need is a single data point to disprove a claim. You can't just decide to ignore an outlier because it's inconvenient. And yes, all the major polling and stat companies out there most definitely are screwing it up royally when they do the same thing.

Which is contradictory to the very point you started with, to the point you finished with.

My point was - and has always been - that we are given tools for a reason and these tools help define each job as a distinct entity. That reason most definitely is not to dedicate every ounce of energy to dealing as much damage as possible to the point where we ignore our non-dps tools. Or worse yet, start to advocate for their removal on the basis that this will somehow improve the job in some way. Homogenization and hegemony are my enemies, and if that means I'm a bit harsh at times then so be it.