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.

[Satarn]

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.

Eh, I'm not seeing it. Pretty much everything in solo just falls over super fast, unless you consider not literally oneshotting everything "far too slow" and instances scale to your role afaik - otherwise dps checks would be impossible to do as anything but a DPS job. As for sustain, you have to take into account that tanks take way less damage than any other role, especially if you start using CDs, so you don't even need to heal yourself as often. I've gone through SHB MSQ on DRK and it was perfectly fine, despite the job being on the lower end of dps for the role and having by far the worst self heals.

I definitely agree that in endgame content tanking feels unimportant and only there to automatically take damage(although I feel it's more about our role responsibilities being unengaging, rather than just low dps), but not that there's any issue of being "too weak" to solo things. There is a problem with soloing on tanks being boring though, because the jobs are just boring to play overall, in and out of the party.

[Canadane]

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

Half the time they can. A small pack doesn't exactly hit too hard in many cases.
But you could also do you job and take over so everyone can get out of there quicker.

The amount of arrogance and pride from tanks is one of the reasons I play tank. Just so I don't have to deal with this in a dungeon lol.

[Mavrias]

I didn't respond to it because it wasn't relevant to our previous discussion about Clemency use.

It was literally in response to your comment about tanks not having anything to do regarding mitigation and positioning, which you brought up and was the bulk of YOUR post, which i quoted in it's entirety. You can scroll back up and look.

[Kabooa]

In case anyone thought tanks were being too reasonable, raising them to "12%" based on the pretty bars requires anywhere from a 20-34% buff to Tank potency based on which metric you care to talk about, or a reduction of non-tank damage by approximately 24.5%, or a combination of the two.

[BarretOblivion]

In case anyone thought tanks were being too reasonable, raising them to "12%" based on the pretty bars requires anywhere from a 20-34% buff to Tank potency based on which metric you care to talk about, or a reduction of non-tank damage by approximately 24.5%, or a combination of the two.

Okay, that's fine. Cause Healers kicked and screamed last expansion and the beginning of this expansion to do more damage. (Dealt with enough greedy healers in our static to get rid of that I am sick of the 'elite' healers). I think it would be fine to nerf them down, or heck just balance next tier around tank damage being better. FFS people are still struggling to kill Shiva if they don't do an uptime strat for Light Rampart with no deaths.

[Satarn]

Okay, that's fine. Cause Healers kicked and screamed last expansion and the beginning of this expansion to do more damage. (Dealt with enough greedy healers in our static to get rid of that I am sick of the 'elite' healers). I think it would be fine to nerf them down, or heck just balance next tier around tank damage being better. FFS people are still struggling to kill Shiva if they don't do an uptime strat for Light Rampart with no deaths.

Where and when? The main complaints about healer dps, both during SB and early SHB have been about specific jobs(WHM in SB and AST at SHB launch) and in comparison to other healers, not other roles. The current requests for more dps skills have nothing to do with output - healer dps hasn't gone down with removal of skills, rather the opposite(but mostly due to adding even more ogcd heals, not direct buffs, which is another issue entirely) - but with gameplay engagement/complexity.

Healers pushing for more dps, sometimes to the point of chadding their co-heal or letting people die, doesn't have anything to do with asking for their damage to be buffed - they're just attempts at optimization, even if at times bad ones.
Do you also think that a BLM standing in AoE and dying to finish a cast, is asking for their job/role to be buffed by doing so?

I think there is some merit to people asking for tanks to have higher contribution to total rDPS, or healers less(mostly by just forcing them to gcd heal a bit), but so far you're specifically just pulling weird, made up arguments out of your behind.

[Absimiliard]

I wouldn't consider a potency increase for tanks to be unreasonable at all, at least for the purposes of giving back the damage that was arbitrarily removed. So long as they don't boost tanks to be approaching DPS levels of damage, what's the harm?

[Kabooa]

I wouldn't consider a potency increase for tanks to be unreasonable at all, at least for the purposes of giving back the damage that was arbitrarily removed. So long as they don't boost tanks to be approaching DPS levels of damage, what's the harm?

If you actually go back and work the math at the gamestate when the thread was created, this worked out to around, being extremely generous to favor the tanks in those numbers, about 2%. 100-200 DPS.

The current game state can see this increase to about 3-5% as a corrective adjustment.

Okay, that's fine. Cause Healers kicked and screamed last expansion and the beginning of this expansion to do more damage. (Dealt with enough greedy healers in our static to get rid of that I am sick of the 'elite' healers). I think it would be fine to nerf them down, or heck just balance next tier around tank damage being better. FFS people are still struggling to kill Shiva if they don't do an uptime strat for Light Rampart with no deaths.

I didn't say healer. I said non-tank.

As in, every single DPS and Healer job would need to see about a 24.5% reduction.

In order to get Tanks to 12% and -only- attain it by reducing healer damage, you would be reducing healer damage output by 121% - as in bringing the healer is worth less than leaving the slot empty.

[JisKing98]

I honestly think all 4 tanks are just boring to play. They all feel the same, some moves do the same thing just with a different coat of paint. The idea that if YOU mess up, everyone dies. That fear causes ppl to hesitate to take that responsibility and instead look to the other roles/jobs.