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

[BarretOblivion]

You're actually the one putting the group in danger of wiping because you are refusing to do your job by your own admission.

My job is to tank in a dungeon the appropriate amount of adds that I feel is optimal baised off of the groups performance. If I feel like DPS is too low, I am going to pull medium. If I feel as if the healer isn't keeping me healthy enough to where I need to use more cooldowns than I should be I'll pull medium.

When a healer ignores a tank and rushes ahead to pull adds, yes, that is the HEALER putting the party at risk. Go on healer, pull a boss or an add that can quickly kill you. There is a reason good healers want the least amount of damage for themselves to take so they only need to heal 1 person. Again, you want to be an idiot and pull more than I am pulling for a reason... kiss the dirt and learn your lesson. Impatience is not the same as being optimal. Optimal means taking into consideration the things around you rather than looking at an eyehole of yourself thinking "yeah everything is fine on my screen".

I had plenty of times a healer pulled extra and we wiped because they got overzelous and I told them I was out of cooldowns for reasons, but NOPE GOTTA PULL EVERYTING HERPADITY HERP!
Priority to guage how the group is doing is not the healer's job, that is the tank's job. A tank can quickly tell if DPS is enough to warrent massive pulls baised of their cooldown timers and usages directly. I can also tell how a healer is doing baised off how low they like pushing my HP values, and I feel as if its too risky, oh well, deal with medium pulls.

[Canadane]

If your healer is pulling more mobs for you then you've misjudged your healers skills and should tank up and do the job people want you to.

[Mavrias]

My job is to tank in a dungeon the appropriate amount of adds that I feel is optimal baised off of the groups performance. If I feel like DPS is too low, I am going to pull medium. If I feel as if the healer isn't keeping me healthy enough to where I need to use more cooldowns than I should be I'll pull medium.

When a healer ignores a tank and rushes ahead to pull adds, yes, that is the HEALER putting the party at risk. Go on healer, pull a boss or an add that can quickly kill you. There is a reason good healers want the least amount of damage for themselves to take so they only need to heal 1 person. Again, you want to be an idiot and pull more than I am pulling for a reason... kiss the dirt and learn your lesson. Impatience is not the same as being optimal. Optimal means taking into consideration the things around you rather than looking at an eyehole of yourself thinking "yeah everything is fine on my screen".

I had plenty of times a healer pulled extra and we wiped because they got overzelous and I told them I was out of cooldowns for reasons, but NOPE GOTTA PULL EVERYTING HERPADITY HERP!
Priority to guage how the group is doing is not the healer's job, that is the tank's job. A tank can quickly tell if DPS is enough to warrent massive pulls baised of their cooldown timers and usages directly. I can also tell how a healer is doing baised off how low they like pushing my HP values, and I feel as if its too risky, oh well, deal with medium pulls.

That's a lot of (blatantly untrue) nonsense when you already said you'd cause the wipe by moving "so [your] AoEs don't hit those adds."


That's great that you want to punish the healer by not hitting the adds. Meanwhile, the DPS who are doing their job and killing things are most assuredly going to rip off the healer with their own AoE skills and are absolutely going to be right to say "hey tank, how come youre not holding threat?" and then kick you when your answer is "because im mad at the healer."

[Shurrikhan]

My job is to tank in a dungeon the appropriate amount of adds that I feel is optimal baised off of the groups performance.

While it is true that there are some rare cases where pulling smaller can be more optimal (assuming you're tracking your entire party's cooldowns and the timings therein coincidentally allow for such), in the vast majority of situations where the healer would ever bother pulling for you, it's because you've misjudged what that appropriate amount is.

Now, if you've got a DPS who refuses to AoE and they're assuming they can spam Cure II to get your through the same things you did with cooldowns and only 2 packs as with no cooldowns and 3, they're the idiot. But, that's the rarer case.

[Lyth]

The question of what to do if healers or dps pull for you has been done to death and is irrelevant to the thread topic.

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.

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.

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.

[Mavrias]

The question of what to do if healers or dps pull for you has been done to death and is irrelevant to the thread topic.

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.

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.

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.

Speak for yourself, the reason i would prefer paladins not use clemency is because the lost dps from clemency makes the dungeon longer. I don't really give a crap about it "encroaching on the healer role." In fact, if a tank is using cooldowns properly and everyone is melting things, fairy heals and recitation excog are the only heals needed to get through a wall to wall pull at cap. But, i guess you only play with healers who prefer to spam basic gcd heals and keep the tank at 100% health at all times?

If a healer or dps getting to a trash pack rustles your jimmies so hard, you should probably make an effort to get there before them. Or, switch roles, if you don't have it in you to understand that other players also have a say in how fast the dungeon goes.

The only bards that were getting outdpsed by warriors were super bad bards. The same is true today, tanks can still outdamage dps players that don't have a clue what they're doing.

[Minnel]

While it is true that there are some rare cases where pulling smaller can be more optimal (assuming you're tracking your entire party's cooldowns

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

[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.

[ty_taurus]

As someone who has never tanked and doesn't really want to tank, I have to say it has little to do with the responsibility of the role. I will say I'm a bit intimidated by the job as a controller user since I don't feel like there's an easy way to target specific enemies quickly and efficiently, but it's something that I'm sure I'd figure out with practice.

The main reason I don't tank is because none of the current tanks are aesthetically or stylistically appealing to me. I have 0 interest in heavy armor classes in RPGs. If there ever comes a day where a magic tank or agility tank is made, then I might feel obligated to check them out.

The DPS role gets to benefit from 3 major styles (Melee, Ranged, and Caster), why can't we get a light armor or magic tank and a melee or physical ranged healer?

[MistakeNot]

If your healer is pulling more mobs for you then you've misjudged your healers skills and should tank up and do the job people want you to.

If they pull more mobs, they clearly want to tank them - and should be allowed to do so.