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

[Kabooa]

There's actually no restriction on how raid damage is divided up, as long as the total proportion of raid damage from tanks, healers, and damage dealers sums up to 100%. The claim that healers would have to do "negative damage" (i.e. heal enemies with their attacks) to even partially restore what we had previously is absurd.

People like seeing their actions have impact. Damage is probably the simplest and most straightforward way in which this happens. Tanks want to do damage. Healers want to do damage. Damage dealers want to do damage. Let's not pretend that this isn't the case, or try to shame tanks and healers for being honest about what they want. In the absence of offering more damage, you have to at the very least offer some other way for players in these roles to have play-making potential.

Blind number demanding is what I bring out the numbers for, as well as exposing how little weight arguments like "contribution" actually have, as they are arguments that do not uniquely work for tanks. I also point out through analysis why an argument either does or doesn't have merit.

I'll also point out every time I've prompted others to do their homework so they aren't talking out of their rear, they don't.

You know.

Inviting them to back up their assertions without just pointing at the rainbow bar and saying "SEE!?!?!".

For example: "12%" isn't a coincidence. It's basically early Heavensward, where Tanks gutted their EHP in order to have more damage. Which is a fair trade off. Doing so at the time put tanks at around a 130% passive EHP advantage over DPS.

You cannot do this now with tanks in their current state. Tanks sit at around a passive 250% EHP advantage over DPS.

Putting this into perspective, lets assume we have a stance toggle that magically makes it all fair. We'll even put on a 45s recast so you commit to it and if you do it at the wrong time, you get kerfluffled.

The toggle, aiming to put them at around 80-85% the average DPS, would look as follows.

'Rainbow Toggle'
Effect: Reduces Defense to 0 and maximum HP by 25%. Increases damage dealt by 40%

[Lyth]

...

You can't equate defensive attributes with damage output.

Defensive attributes on dps and healers are just there for raid-wide damage. It's silly to suggest that this is a coveted advantage that tanks are hoarding over dps and healers.

Tanks are not doing less damage because of the changes to the stance system, or because they have more defense than healers and dps. They're doing less damage because this is an agenda that the devs have been pushing since mid-Heavensward. But that damage-focused gameplay was the only thing masking a progressive decline in the quality of fights from a tanking perspective.

[Kabooa]

You can't equate defensive attributes with damage output.

The basic balancing pendulum of RPG systems is attack vs defense.

You give up one to gain in the other.

You can add more pillars to add more layers, such as healing capability, control capability, buffing capability, etc, but the end result of this is a more or less equal total budget that one class can hold at a time compared to another.

If you have a problem with encounter and/or class design, then focus your energy there instead of a potency boost.

[Lyth]

The basic balancing pendulum of RPG systems is attack vs defense.

You give up one to gain in the other.

That may be a popular trope in standard single-player RPGs, but it doesn't really apply to MMOs.

Remember when dragoons had lower magic defense that was impacting their survivability against magic raidwides in ARR (i.e. Megaflare)? Remember when crafter/gatherer gear had more magic defense than dragoon gear? Imagine if, when they fixed the issue, they then proceeded to penalise dragoons so that they did less damage. Should they be penalised now for maiming set pieces having more net defensive stats than other dps set pieces? Should they do less damage than healers because they have more defensive stats than healers? Should black mages do less damage than physical dps because the bulk of incoming damage to dps players is magic damage? You have to compare like with like.

Again, the only reason that defensive stats have gameplay value on non-tank jobs in raid content is because of raid-wide damage. Your explanation does not hold water.

It's briefly exciting to see how high your HP values can be inflated to. But that isn't a substitute for having gameplay impact.

[Kabooa]

That may be a popular trope in standard single-player RPGs, but it doesn't really apply to MMOs.

Again, the only reason that defensive stats have gameplay value on non-tank jobs in raid content is because of raid-wide damage. Your explanation does not hold water.

It's briefly exciting to see how high your HP values can be inflated to. But that isn't a substitute for having gameplay impact.

Single player RPGs don't have to follow that design, because it doesn't matter if options are overpowered. Final Fantasy is actually the greatest, most widespread example of character classes going away in favor of just the character. Earlier RPGs featured classes with diverse strengths and weaknesses, but they were gone as early as 6, not returning until around 9, and then gone again in 10, 12, and 13.

Saying it doesn't apply to MMOs depends entirely on the MMO in question. An MMORPG using the trinity system absolutely follows this design schemata.

If we are comparing like with like, the DPS range from 16-22% mitigation from defense, with "Chain" having higher Physical than Magical, "Leather" have equal, and "Cloth" having higher magical than physical. They average to about 20% mitigation when it's all said and done. The mages (Casters and healers) have nearly 10% less HP than the physical classes (melee and ranged).

They are, effectively, within 10% EHP of each other, and their damage ranges are within 10% of each other. The rest of their kits are mostly comparable but with different aspects.

In ARR, you gave up EHP to gain damage.

Hey, remember in Heavensward? You gave up EHP to gain damage.

Stormblood? You gave up EHP to gain damage.

Basically every point of FF14's history that has allowed you to gain damage has done so at the expense of EHP. Why should our changes to tanks not include that design goal?

Why shouldn't increasing the tank ceiling not come with appreciable risk?

Potency alone doesn't increase the weight or impact of gameplay in any manner but artificial ones. Much like it's 'briefly exciting' to see HP values soar higher, it's equally brief in seeing Hard Slash go from 6000 to 6600. It'll be lost in the cacophony of numbers that follow.

There is no feedback in raw potency boosts, but there's extremely satisfying feedback in gameplay focus that leads to higher numbers (RE: Tornado Kick Monk).

[Lyth]

...

Tank stances aren't really a good example of a trade-off. The phrase 'trade-off' implies that you're giving up something of value. If you give up something which has no value, it's not a trade-off.

What happened with tank stances and accessories is better described as emergent play. The devs expected that we would turn on stance to tank, and turn it off when we were not. You mentioned ARR. In ARR, you would open in defiance regardless of whether you were MT or OT. Why? Because you could get the critical hit bonus as well as access to Inner Beast while you were in your Unchained window, which briefly gave you more damage than when you were out of stance. We used tank stance when the devs didn't expect us to, and we didn't use it when the devs expected us to. We used gear that we weren't supposed to. But instead of rolling with it, the devs kept implementing changes to our abilities and stat progression to force us to comply with their original vision. Tanks have probably had more revisions to their damage formula across the expansions than any other role.

By the by, most non-tank gear seems standardised such that your defense and magic defense stats sum to roughly the same amount, regardless of role. The one notable exception are dragoons (which is the obvious counter-example that you still haven't addressed), for the historical reason dating back to ARR that I mentioned in my previous post. But that has no bearing on their dps, because quite frankly, variations in defensive stats are not irrelevant to non-tank job's gameplay so long as they survive raid-wides, and thus no trade-off is involved.

If your claim was true, variations in defensive stats in non-tanks would correlate with variations in their damage output. They do not.

I remember that one time that the devs believed that they were creating a meaningful "trade-off" between defensive stats and offensive stats. What was it called again? Oh, right, Parry. Giving up something irrelevant for something of value is no trade-off at all.

[Kabooa]

If your claim was true, variations in defensive stats in non-tanks would correlate with variations in their damage output. They do not.

What happened with Tank stances and accessories is you still gave up defense for damage. You can use whatever technical term you want to mask it, but that's what you did.

I said Attack vs Defense is the basic pendulum. The DPS roles have more than just attack vs defense to consider as they're the most volatile role in terms of what shifts. I'm not going to go into detail here, you can go read the DPS forums and hear everyone there make their case.

[BarretOblivion]

Single player RPGs don't have to follow that design, because it doesn't matter if options are overpowered. Final Fantasy is actually the greatest, most widespread example of character classes going away in favor of just the character. Earlier RPGs featured classes with diverse strengths and weaknesses, but they were gone as early as 6, not returning until around 9, and then gone again in 10, 12, and 13.

Saying it doesn't apply to MMOs depends entirely on the MMO in question. An MMORPG using the trinity system absolutely follows this design schemata.

If we are comparing like with like, the DPS range from 16-22% mitigation from defense, with "Chain" having higher Physical than Magical, "Leather" have equal, and "Cloth" having higher magical than physical. They average to about 20% mitigation when it's all said and done. The mages (Casters and healers) have nearly 10% less HP than the physical classes (melee and ranged).

They are, effectively, within 10% EHP of each other, and their damage ranges are within 10% of each other. The rest of their kits are mostly comparable but with different aspects.

In ARR, you gave up EHP to gain damage.

Hey, remember in Heavensward? You gave up EHP to gain damage.

Stormblood? You gave up EHP to gain damage.

Basically every point of FF14's history that has allowed you to gain damage has done so at the expense of EHP. Why should our changes to tanks not include that design goal?

Why shouldn't increasing the tank ceiling not come with appreciable risk?

Potency alone doesn't increase the weight or impact of gameplay in any manner but artificial ones. Much like it's 'briefly exciting' to see HP values soar higher, it's equally brief in seeing Hard Slash go from 6000 to 6600. It'll be lost in the cacophony of numbers that follow.

There is no feedback in raw potency boosts, but there's extremely satisfying feedback in gameplay focus that leads to higher numbers (RE: Tornado Kick Monk).

Bringing back DPS stance would indeed give tanks a way to create a better way for us to define a skilled group tank, between a regular old tank (one of the reasons I prefered the DPS/AGGRO stance choices of tanking). Would SE be willing to bring it back? Dunno. It's hard to say, cause more players would be scared of tanking again, but we would also get mroe experienced tanks back. So hard to say really.