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

[Shurrikhan]

The reason why the idea of healers or dps pulling irritates tanks is it encroaches on the tanking role. The reason why tanks keeping themselves up with Clemency spam irritates healers is not because healers are ever so concerned about opportunity cost and impact on their tank's big big numbers, but because it encroaches on the healing role. Like what, you don't think I can heal this well enough? When WARs were outdpsing BRDs in ARR, that was seen as encroaching on the dps role. It's a nice feeling to be able to 'carry' and fill in for an area of weakness in another role, but it also makes that role become redundant.

My role, as healer, was to best support the party through the dungeon.

When Total Eclipse spam amounted to less than Holy spam, atop being the more limited resource, I'd have encouraged PLDs to Clemency spam. Heck, I might be annoyed if they refused to ever do so. It was 1200 relative healing potency that allowed for my 168 relative potency AoE and stun vs. their relative 88 potency.

When Clemency could only be used in a narrow window and at opportunity cost of a 375-potency AoE, however, that's a waste that makes it harder for me to support the party through the dungeon by doing the most I can, in the context of the party, with each GCD.

"Encroachment" had nothing to do with it. I need to feel engaged, which is best served by a certain range of control -- enough to allow for prediction and deliberate action, but not so much as to preclude* would-be interactions entirely.

(*Let's consider this as referring only to those interactions which wouldn't just be replaced with something going in a more preferable manner, such as the same pull, more or less, being executed a much more singular, clean manner rather than varying shades of messiness. These are things like using your party as extensions of yourself to better perform tank tasks, rather than cutting off those would-be limbs by, say, refusing to accept their kiting ranged mobs into position without taking or losing damage. One just makes gameplay haphazard and therefore reduced the perceived skill ceiling by muddying it with chance. The other is an increased skill ceiling that makes use of others atop your own toolkit.)

Either everyone should be allowed to be able to cross-compensate, or nobody should be able to. If we want dps players to be absolutely critical to the success or failure of a dps check by scaling back tank and healer damage output, then the same thinking should be applied to other roles. If your tank dies, the mobs should oneshot everyone else and cause an instant wipe with no hope of recovery. If your tank doesn't position well, then either you die to the mechanic or your dps can't optimise well enough to pass the check. Healing kind of has that built in already, in that timing errors and deaths cause wipes.

While I'd generally agree with the principle, this is another case where the reductionist option is a bit too tasty to the devs, despite its undoubtedly ill effects down the lines, that I'd dare offer it to them, mostly because it leans to heavily on, for lack of a better term, negative value. Worse, it offers them the "fairness" excuse for gutting even more gameplay, to the detriment of everyone. Shared misery does not progress make. Instead, we're led down the path to something along the lines of "Why am I valuable, despite just idling here? Because if I'm not here, you all die to a compositional check. I'm therefore the most important person in this party. Now let me get back to my Netflix."

"Boring task A must be done consistently by its relevant <bored task slave A> or everyone dies" does not make task A any more appealing. Value shouldn't be formed primarily by holding gameplay hostage. Co-dependence can be a good thing to a degree (i.e. where it fosters interactions, enjoyable from each of the perspectives participating in it), but it should never be used in place of gameplay that would be enjoyable in itself. Give me more to intercept. Make me care about my positioning and my angles. Give me that active mitigation. Give me trade-offs of damage and defense. But don't leave me with the same 3-5 brain-numbing pseudo-tasks alone and expect me to be happy about it just because there's more "at stake". That amounts, in essence, to little more than "Press this button once per second or the world blows up. Only you can do it!!!"

In contrast, if we want to make tanking checks super soft and fluffy so that the mobs hit everyone with pillows while waiting for the tank to be rezzed and healed, then tanks should be able to provide themselves with self-sustain and put out damage that makes the stragglers in the dps department look up in awe. You want to carry? So do we. And guess what happens when you move that carry potential away from what has historically been the most tryhard role in the trinity? We switch. Go figure.

:: Altogether fair. Agreed. Though luckily those aren't the only two options available to us.

Now that would be some mad tank user I want in my squad

Before I became a mentor, I assumed that was at least sort of the norm for would-be mentors. I had count-down macros on my 12-button I'd hit whenever seeing a Bene/Raging/Deployment Tactics/Holmgang/etc. just to set off Windows timers a CD-minus-5-seconds later. (Eventually, I started tracking them more instinctively -- knowing that you'd have Raging and Ley Lines only once 5 seconds wasn't all that useful anyways for chainpulling, and I hadn't bothered with the stuff back in ARR when it mattered more anyways-- and moved my markers and waymarkers over to that more comfortable position.)

Boy was I sadly mistaken.