How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Shurrikhan]

Nah, people err towards DPS....]

...In FPS's such as Overwatch or TF2, the big influential plays are made by the Tanks (Reinhardt and Heavy) or Healers (Typically Ana, but Mercy has the biggest potential payout when she gets a full team revive. While Medic with his Ubercharge is literally the only way to push into many defences). Yet everyone wants to be Mr Shooty.

You realize everything I've just said about apparent responsibility vs. apparent reward and sense of (in)dependence also applies in every example you've given here, and proportionately to exactly that?

As soon as apparent responsibility was flipped by bringing out the 1/3/2 experimental format in OW, for instance, where fights were much more obviously made or broken by DPS, dps became the bottleneck for more reason than just there being fewer tanks in the mix. In the double-sniper meta, snipers had the most agency, but also the most responsibility and by far the least leniency and quickly became one of the most disliked roles except among those who truly believed they could carry (and were quickly shamed into humility by their 'deservedly' toxic teammates if they couldn't actually follow through).

And let's be frank, TF2 hasn't half the "MOBA components" of OW, which in turn ought to have fewer than an MMO, and HotS and DotA2, at least, show proportionately less lean towards ADCs as their responsibilities increase and late-game overpoweredness decreases.

Wherever responsibility is more observed than seemingly rewarded, people shy away. That DPS have so often come out ahead only points to a poor balance between roles. It's not a matter of taking someone new to a game with tanks/fighters, damage specialists, and supports and watching them be gravitationally sucked towards that central, shiny red role. It's a matter of what they do and how they do it.

(And even then, OW is almost always a 1- to 2-minute queue for a tank, 2-minute queue for a healer, and a 3-minute queue for a solo-queue DPS, and despite the horror stories that stuck us with Role Queue, the vast majority of teams did flex off DPS into working compositions; it just still allowed for ingenuity and playing to a party's strengths (mechanical skill, awareness, tactics-mindedness, etc.). And people did seem to be a fair bit more aware of what the other roles actually need in order to best support each other back before that split.)

Though I admit, the number of Trinity games that offer interesting Tanking is pretty low.

And yet you're convinced that tanks are avoided only because the inherently and always more attractive DPS role exists, and nothing to do with

I dare say because we're still in the wake of WoW and all the subsequent WoW-clones that thus all use the same system of "Tank do more threat" > "Tank use CD for Tankbuster" as their entire role.

Frankly, "WoW Clone" would be a rather gross overestimation of our present tanking situation.

Well... During StB, Defiance and its tools WERE pure waste. Acknowledging the facts about the game doesn't mean you don't know how to conceptualize actual tanking.

I never said otherwise, nor did I ever say that tanks "don't know how to conceptualize actual tanking". The difference is in how they pointed out the problem. We had multi-role players (typically midcore or more casual) who predominantly asked that Defiance, Grit, and Shield Oath should be less of a waste, and Savage tank-mains who insisted that tanking skills of mutual cost with damage output have only ever been and can only ever be a waste and therefore should be removed from the game. Given that we did in fact get the latter, the latter seems to have clearly been the more influential. This wasn't a "DPS-pandering" change. It was made, likely in equal parts, in response to tank-mains and for the imagined "New Player"-kun.

I will agree completely that the devs should have done more to read between the lines despite there being very direct requests for exactly what we got and outright dismissal of anything that didn't take SB's facts as the way things ("bloat" of Defiance and its ilk aside) should and would work, but we can't honestly say that the suggestions of well-placed tank mains before didn't point us right to where we ended up.

<From> Adding more mitigation won't do anything to fix that.... <to>...These are glaring issues that would be easily apparent to anyone who's actually played a Tank in the game. Just like many of the issues Healers have is incredibly apparent to anyone who's played Healer in the game. Yet, here we are, with Tanks still being just barebones DPS and Healers getting yet more healing GCD's they never use. If this doesn't suggest that Tank/Healer designs are coming from a bunch of DPS mains, I don't know what would.

Has nothing to do with my post. What part of my taking issue with XIV increasingly ridding tanks of their core mechanics and responsibilities and turning them into a nameplate + a dps kit is my "absolving them" of doing... exactly that? And for what it's worth, while I've certainly seen melee request that their tanks be less idiotic in dungeons or that their groups stack in the middle of the boss's hitbox so they can continue to position while participating in stacking mechanics, I have not once seen a DPS request that tanks no longer be allowed to position bosses. That change came out of left field.

[Kabooa]

Has nothing to do with my post. What part of my taking issue with XIV increasingly ridding tanks of their core mechanics and responsibilities and turning them into a nameplate + a dps kit is my "absolving them" of doing... exactly that? And for what it's worth, while I've certainly seen melee request that their tanks be less idiotic in dungeons or that their groups stack in the middle of the boss's hitbox so they can continue to position while participating in stacking mechanics, I have not once seen a DPS request that tanks no longer be allowed to position bosses. That change came out of left field.

For what it's worth, auto positioning bosses is less of an issue when the mechanic they auto position for is inflexible. That said, we could certainly use more mechanic strings similar to E7's add phase. I got some strong Mogushan Vaults vibes from that, and that concept (Mobile fight divided among multiple enemies) not only can be a great template for a boss fight, it has a great example in the Stone Guard from the aforementioned Mogushan Vaults on Heroic mode. Personal favorite to tank.

[Shurrikhan]

For what it's worth, auto positioning bosses is less of an issue when the mechanic they auto position for is inflexible. That said, we could certainly use more mechanic strings similar to E7's add phase. I got some strong Mogushan Vaults vibes from that, and that concept (Mobile fight divided among multiple enemies) not only can be a great template for a boss fight, it has a great example in the Stone Guard from the aforementioned Mogushan Vaults on Heroic mode. Personal favorite to tank.

That whole era has quite a few tanking gems... /nostalgia

Oddly enough, the most fun I have now is on the terrifying combinations like, say, Teaming-Skittish-Necrotic, where DPS are finally forced to play a part in my and their survival.

[Awful]

That whole era has quite a few tanking gems... /nostalgia

Oddly enough, the most fun I have now is on the terrifying combinations like, say, Teaming-Skittish-Necrotic, where DPS are finally forced to play a part in my and their survival.

Yeah I do miss me some Mythic+ with the affixes and seasonal affixes 14 almost has that they could put the Pomanders in from PotD as an incentive for buffs/boons but they'd have to redesign dungeons too which I doubt would happen. I also played Classic back in the fall while playing this and going from Classics dungeon vs 14 there's no "scary" mobs in 14, like in Classic in Stratholme Live side there's Battlemages that'll AoE your group that do TONS of damage, Scarlet Gallants that'll Crusader Strike your tank for big damage, Mobs that'll heal and mana burn your healers and bubble at low health, those are some examples but 14 never has any real threatening enemies in dungeons sadly.

I do agree though I miss those examples you gave like Teaming where DPS have to worry about threat, Tyrannical weeks were tough on some bosses, same with Fortified, even the seasonal affix with Bwan'samdis where you'd kill a % amount of trash and it comes back to life to decimate your group always kept me mindful of what trash to skip and what to kill for that %.