What do you guys think is the cause of severe lack of Tank users?

[Rasikko]

Three of them were dumbed down, and that killed a lot of interest right there.

[Canadane]

Hubris.
Tank mains have maintained for years there's extra responsibility and importance that come with the pride of being a tank. Our hubris wanted to keep the club exclusive by making a scary barrier of entry, no matter how much SE wants to lower the difficultly of entry.
And it worked! People don't want to tank. They don't want to be the first person through a straight hallway and get lost. They don't want to be the first to die thanks to a healer messing up, and being afraid people will point at them instead of the healer. They don't want to worry about keeping a boss straight with the supreme difficulty of NOT MOVING for a moment in their life.

It's our hubris that's caused this, and it's the reason people maintain tanks are more difficult or have heftier responsibilities.
Whereas the secret of tanking is, it's the job that looks the most important while simultaneously being the absolute easiest with the least responsibilities. But the majority of players will never see this, and the majority of tanks will never say this. I mean, there's not often a discourse to do so, but even then their hubris may keep them from doing it!

Spread the word that tanking is easy, and hopefully it'll ease up on the tension of bringing in players to try the role.

[Liam_Harper]

The forums have been clear that you have no business tanking if you're not fine with dps running around the dungeon like headless chickens pulling everything if you dare to wait so much as a few seconds on a cd, so I don't pug any sort of dungeon as tank. Most dungeons are fine, but why risk it when the other roles can afk half the run and no one will care as long as stuff dies.

But for max level content, it's just not that interesting, particularly at midcore. Normal has practically no tank swaps and the tankbusters only really kill the undergeared unmitigated. EX typically has about 2-3 and maybe an add or one gimmick. Titania even had no swap. Apart from that you're a blue dps that hits like a wet noodle with a very basic rotation. Tank mitigation is "fine" for the content, but rarely enough for any big glory moments when the healer is down and most of the toolkit is just for reducing the hps requirement for the healer a little. It's just not an exciting job.

[Lyth]

...

Exclusivity is attractive.

People want to be seen to belong to an exclusive club. That's why the answer to "what job is the most complex" is always "the job that I'm maining at the moment".

So what actually creates exclusivity? You need a barrier to entry (i.e. some degree of time investment) and a reward gated behind it (i.e. the ability to make game-changing plays). Of course, it still needs to be accessible so that you can actually get into it and make that initial time investment.

In very early MMOs, that barrier to entry for tanks was gear. So to be a 'main tank', you had to be reliable and available so that gear could be funnelled to you for your team to survive and progress.

But critical factor in all this is visibility. As a new player committing to the role, you have to be able to see how time invested relates to reward. Gear is easy to interpret. Attend raid consistently, get gear, become part of an exclusive club.

Skill is much harder to interpret, and tends to be a lot less visible in this genre. MMOs generally aren't interesting to watch 'high level play' on, as they are information dense. That's part of the reason why games which are designed for watching (i.e. esports) tend to be less of 'watch these twenty skill buttons light up in sequence' and more about positioning, aim, movement, and relatively few visually distinct abilities that everyone can recognise.

So even when someone is doing something relatively skilled in an MMO, it's much harder for a new player watching it to say "in 10000 hours, I want to be able to do that."

This is unfortunate, because tanking is probably the most natural of the three roles to showcase skilled play on, when fights are designed appropriately. Positioning and movement are very intuitive for a viewer, even one with minimal game experience, to visually interpret.

You're not going to sell tanking to new players as being low skill, low reward. You're going to sell it by making it both visible and exclusive. That's part of the reason why WAR enjoyed a boost in popularity in late ARR/early Heavensward. When it was perceived as high skill but less common job and people were doing unique things with it (8 WAR clears, etc.) everyone wanted to be a part of that. When it lost its exclusivity, it lost its value.

[shao32]

I consider it's a mix of diferent factors like the encounter desing,jobs desing and tank anxiety that seems to be comon betwen many new and introvert players.

For the tank anxiety you can't do anything to that since it will be a thing forever and by default that will make tanks and in the same degree healers less popular but for encounter desing and job desing you can do a lot and that's where the current expansion fails so far.

accesibility, what this means and current purpose? they dumped down tanks and his mechanics to make the role be more accesible, jobs like WAR and DRK lose all his complexity and by result all the fun around it for this sole purpose and i have to ask this was necesary? my answer is no, tanks didn't need to be more accesible since if you pick a MAR or a GLA from level 1 you will have the most accesible introduction to the tanking role with fair progresion and a excelent introduction to DRK and GNB if you wanna go to one of those 2 or just keep progresing to more complex versions of those with PLD and WAR with easy understanding of skill and mechanics when they come, so dumped down the entire role at max level for accesibility eliminate the fun and reward of it at being so easy to play it's not interesting to invest anymore.

In resume the role will always have low popularity but the recent changes make all the veterans how use to find so much fun in the past with them like me don't wanna spend more time that the necesary on such degradated role, i personally only tank for my static on savage and nothing more and i do my roulettes as a dps since i find it way more rewarding have to wait extra mins by jumping around my house and having a proper run experience that dealt with being a tank on any content outside of savage.
Tanks archive balance yeah but the cost has been insane and the jobs suffered to much from it, it's just not normal we are complaying that we have clones on the tank and healer roles with the same tools and even the same mechanics (kill yourself requiem inner delirium) with extremly minimun gameplay diferences and Yoship claiming wrongly they focus on job diversity like what we have now is fine combined with the lack and trivialization of all the tanks mechanics, the new trait say the truth you archive tank mastery at level 1 and there is barely nothing to improve outside of that.

so they archive nothing, the new players don't wanna invest on the role bcs anxiety and the veterans don't wanna expend more time than necesary on it, all they propaganda around DRK boosted the popularity of the job but overall there is only dissatisfaction and memes abour how TBN is godly.

[Shurrikhan]

Exclusivity is attractive.

People want to be seen to belong to an exclusive club. That's why the answer to "what job is the most complex" is always "the job that I'm maining at the moment".

Is that why so many people's highest praise of RDM when maining it is that "it's clean and simple", or why so many new people jumped ship onto NIN (while so many of its veterans jumped off)? In XIV, at least, "complex" (or its variants such as "hard to master" or "complicated") seems nearly as often to denote condemnation as praise. Accessibility seems to typically be valued way higher in this game than most.

:: Agreed on all other parts.

[Kabooa]

Do you think it's just lack in number of tank jobs or people simply wanting to do more damage? I've noticed that lot of sprouts jumping into FF14 lately, thanks to(?) Corona, decides to start out as a dps and was simply curious.

Sprouts probably don't have the foreknowledge that people on this forum do.

Even if things were perfectly divided, you would have 25% Tank, 12.5% healer, and 57.5% DPS because that's what's available to start, and it doesn't shift that much.

A new player is going to be drawn more by aesthetics than anything else, and that doesn't favor tanks either.

You want to play a caster, that excludes tanks.

You want to play some sort of gun/bow class, that excludes tanks.

You want to play fist fighter, that excludes tanks, etc etc.

There are less archetypes / fantasies represented by tanks than by the other jobs.

[SamRF]

New players don't want to tank because it looks like the role with most responsibility (seemingly high skill floor).

Veterans don't want to tank because it's the easiest role to optimize (low skill ceiling).

[Marxam]

That's partly due to fights being designed to take control out of the tank. Tanking to me has always been about controlling the flow of battle. Where do I take the boss? How should I position? Is the boss in an area that is accessible to melee DPS with aoe puddles around? Things like this used to be part of a tank's responsibility. Best example is T1 and even T5. Any tank who went through that either sync'd or back in the day knows how important where the boss needs to be or else its a wipe. Current fights boil down to keep boss center and face north*, which is redundant because most of the time the boss recenter's for mechanics i.e. Memoria EX. Some will find it boring and unrewarding and I can see why the tanking damage thread is blowing up right now. Tanks are nothing more than damage sponges for the boss.

Putting back tanks ability to control the flow of battle may not increase the lack of tank users but it will reward those who like to tank or enjoy the responsibility of leading a party.

[BarretOblivion]

Hubris.

Oh yeah, considering tanking is one of the jobs where you screw up everyone dies many love that responsibility. I am not saying you are wrong but... the issue for this expansion is they went too far with making it easy to the point many tanks dipped out of tanking. Tanking needed to get some type of complexity with all the streamlining it got, unfortuantely, that's all we got this expansion. All tanks are basically the same at this point, to a bad degree when the shell is just so bland. 1 combo you get build up charges for something that finally hits decently hard then build it up again. Not fun. There is 0 interesting interactions with the kits, its bland. Then the fights... ugh... for tanks they are terribly bland, especially for OTs they straight up are a snore fest because you do the same thing in all of them almost.

SE took 3 steps instead of taking a half step that they needed this expansion. End game, tanking is dead, its not enjoyable at all. I want to go back to being a DPS for just one raid tier now just so I don't feel bored raiding again.
At least TEA is designed well for tanks.

Finally, yes, tank damage is too low for it to feel like it matters. The absolute cap for Tank DPS is roughly 11k with full BiS gear on some fights. That is with a pink top 1% parse to hit that. Most tanks will only see 9-10k damage which is deflating when physical ranged DPS that are considered weak this tier are doing about 15-16k and AST/WHM are out DPSing tanks.

This also makes doing MSQ a drag as a tank when you get an instance, cause its going to drag out far more than if I were a healer or a DPS. Its not good in either direction.