How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Kalise]

The fundamental problem with balancing Tanks is that they are both never truly Tanks (gameplay-wise), nor ever not entirely tanks (in terms of % mitigation output and its relevant costs to other outputs). They vary in tankiness only as a DPS varies in DPS-ness during CDs, despite healers following an obviously far different and far more sensible design paradigm, even if the majority of the game's fights are a lackluster mess in terms of healing required.

Which is an issue, given that solving it can only really come at the expense of essentially redefining the entire combat system from the ground up:

- Increasing the amount and frequency of damage so that there are more opportunities to mitigate and to heal.

- Increasing the amount of interactivity from Tanks in regards to mitigation.

- A deviation away from fixed percentile CD's and passive mitigation in favour of potency based skills to scale with gear.

- An overhauled stat system to make picking stats have more depth and impact upon mitigation potential.

- Completely redesigned Tanks so there's more actual interactivity beyond a barebones DPS combo.

All this is certainly in SE's power to do, if a relatively large amount of work (Though, one that they need to address irregardless, if they want to do something about all the ShB Healer feedback. Either they start planning for a 6.0 combat overhaul or decide to go full meme and effectively remove Tank and Healing roles from the game and continue with mere DDR encounters).

Though, one that will be hampered by SE's need to babyproof everything. Where they won't make changes because they don't want to get lazy people to face up to the fact that in order to beat some content you have to actually bother playing the game. Since, instead of implementing any sort of tutorial for how to play, they seem to prefer just dumbing down everything to the level where these people can beat content without even trying.

I've mentioned about it in another thread, how it is in fact possible for them to facilitate teaching players, especially for non-MSQ content if they want to keep that stuff completely braindead so people who just want FFXIV: A Visual Novel can still progress:

They often simply dumb down mechanics and gameplay to try and appeal to the lowest common denominator (I.e. Billy No-Brain) rather than actually facilitate TEACHING people how to play.

Like, we have the Halls of the Novice which is a good beginner intro to classes. But it's not mandatory and so people don't and likely won't access it (Since it is kind of out of the way)

We could have also gotten "Halls of the Intermediate" "Halls of the Artisan" and "Halls of the Master" to teach people up to Savage level of character mechanics. Heck, these could be made mandatory in order to access Max Level Roulette, Expert Roulette and High End Duties respecitvely while rewarding a box full of min ilevel gear for said content (So, currently, a bunch of 430, 450 and 470 gear respectively)

It would be so easy to implement such a thing so that people can experience playing a role without it feeling awkward due to the nice rewards of a free set of catch up gear (Instead of needing to farm out Tomestones and then grind a single Raid boss to get your weapon) whilst also locking out purely optional content (Also, only in the form of roulette for the easier stuff)

Though, at this point I don't know if SE will go against the status quo and do much other than continue to dumb down all jobs until we're all just using Healer's 2 button DPS rotations and playing DDR in Dungeons/Trials/Raids which are all just 1 boss in an arena...