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

[BarretOblivion]

Many of the people I know that gave up tanking this expansion did so because they didn't like hitting like a wet noodle. It's not so bad in group content and the like, but hoboy do you notice how much your damage sucks when you're just doing things out in the world. Once made acutely aware of their savagely curtailed damage, many began to examine their performance in various forms of group content and elected to just go DPS. Another complaint I've time and time again is the lack of self-sustain (unless you're a paladin), which I think most people would agree is a very bad hole to leave in a tank's toolkit. Feeling so gimped compared to before is already a fairly substantial blow, but it becomes even more of an issue when you throw in the extra responsibility of tanking and subsequent blame-magnet status.

I, personally, still main a tank, but I often find myself being annoyed; either by my lack of damage comparative to what it used to be, or by my inability to self-sustain for a reasonable length of time after my healer(s) have gotten themselves killed. Part of the enjoyment of being a tank prior to ShB, at least for me, was being able to prevent some wipes simply by having sufficient self-sustain and damage to finish some fights on my own even after everyone else had died. These days it feels more like you're just there to get hit in the face and do a few mechanics that the DPS/healers can't. You probably won't be pulling off many galaxy brained (or mongoloid, for that matter) plays that save groups from wipes, because our ability to do so has mostly been kicked out from under us.

Well said. Whenever I do content outside of groups as my tank it feels so darn painfully slow because of how weak we are. Truely, it takes forever to do anything as a tank, so much so its almost a requirement of tanks now to have a dps job leveled to do msq or fates. Its just... so apparent our damage is far too low for what they balance everything around when we have almost no sustain. The solo 'ability' of tanks for just general content is a spotlight for how bad of a situation we are in. Yes, we definately need reworks for all tank jobs basically come 6.0 and the role in general, and take a good hard look at the OT role of a raid, but good lord we need help NOW to at least make it a bearable wait till then. When I see long time tanks bailing out of tanking because of how unrewarding it is to play well as a tank knowing some healer is riding your arse or surpassing you while DPS are miles ahead of you, yeah it gets deflating, no matter what "your parse number" on FFLOGs says. Just bring back tanks to dealing 12% each contribution towards the raid instead of this 10% BS.