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

[SamRF]

One thing that might be worth considering, is the fact that tanks only seem to be in shortage before endgame. The endgame normal mode raids really don't seem to have tank shortage, I definitely get faster queue as DPS sometimes.

I'm seeing this pretty often lately:


Roles seem especially balanced in latest normal raids, however all other lvl 80 content also seem to have much less of a Tank shortage (except for outdated trials perhaps). I also often see DPS as adventurer in need for Normal Raid Roulette (8-man).

Something else that's pretty interesting is the fact that roles seem much more balanced when you're playing at odd hours (e.g. early morning, late night). It's not uncommon for me to get instant leveling roulette and 50/60/70 roulette as DPS when I queue at odd hours, while at normal hours I'd always be at spot 50 or something in role queue and have to wait at least 10-15 minutes.

[BarretOblivion]

One thing that might be worth considering, is the fact that tanks only seem to be in shortage before endgame. The endgame normal mode raids really don't seem to have tank shortage, I definitely get faster queue as DPS sometimes.

I'm seeing this pretty often lately:


Roles seem especially balanced in latest normal raids, however all other lvl 80 content also seem to have much less of a Tank shortage (except for outdated trials perhaps). I also often see DPS as adventurer in need for Normal Raid Roulette (8-man).

Something else that's pretty interesting is the fact that roles seem much more balanced when you're playing at odd hours (e.g. early morning, late night). It's not uncommon for me to get instant leveling roulette and 50/60/70 roulette as DPS when I queue at odd hours, while at normal hours I'd always be at spot 50 or something in role queue and have to wait at least 10-15 minutes.

For general gameplay sure, you can find tanks and get fast queues. For end game searching for tanks be it statics or PF its really barren. I had to leave my previous static for about a 4 week period before I joined back again (TLDR; Drama with the DPS wanting me gone so they could have their friend replace me, but then they got stuck on E7S and then disbanned. Everyone else learned about the reasoning behind it and they asked me to come back.) I joined about 7 statics during this period trying out the times and the mindsets of these statics but 5 of them commented on how they had been searching for a tank for weeks. Scouring through reddit, discord, and PF you find out there are very few tanks looking for groups, but you can see quite a few groups looking for tanks (its really close to healers) however there are a good chunk of healers looking for groups. End game tanks are leaving, there is no denying this, for a variety of reasons.
1) Lack of feeling of impact to the raid group regardless of skill (DPS from optimization is one aspect of this.)
2) Poor Enocunter Design with Tanks in Mind. (E5S and E7S are the main culprits with E6S being a close third).
3) Grief of tanks overall kits. They are unsatisfying to play/optimize and have a very samey loop between all 4 of them that just feels like you are playing a different skinned tank rather than an entirely different tank class.

[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.

[Neoom]

One thing that might be worth considering, is the fact that tanks only seem to be in shortage before endgame. The endgame normal mode raids really don't seem to have tank shortage, I definitely get faster queue as DPS sometimes.

I'm seeing this pretty often lately:


Roles seem especially balanced in latest normal raids, however all other lvl 80 content also seem to have much less of a Tank shortage (except for outdated trials perhaps). I also often see DPS as adventurer in need for Normal Raid Roulette (8-man).

Something else that's pretty interesting is the fact that roles seem much more balanced when you're playing at odd hours (e.g. early morning, late night). It's not uncommon for me to get instant leveling roulette and 50/60/70 roulette as DPS when I queue at odd hours, while at normal hours I'd always be at spot 50 or something in role queue and have to wait at least 10-15 minutes.

For sure tank has most need in EX dungeons, and normal raid and pretty often in trials from my experience? But for sure Alliance raids/roulette has the longest wait time for tank for only needing 3 of them compared to the 15 dps you need.
And I think the fact you get fast ques as dps late at night is that its not busy time, most people main dps, but play during day/reset time so the later it goes the more people get offline so the remaining dps are in need ofcourse. I just don't think it justifies the fact that in fact there is lesser tank players than anything else. Too lazy to copy now, but someone above said that tanks are ALWAYS needed in PF and statics while from my experience dps slots go in a second the pf is up. Tanks are just so boring to play for most, I myself can play a raid or two and then won't go again for a week.

[Marxam]

Speaking as a WAR main I can say this patch WAR got nothing "new" this expansion. The Job is okay but a far cry of 4.0. All we got is potency buffs via Inner Chaos and Chaotic Cyclone, convalescence got reworked into ToB, Inner Beast self heal and 20% mitigation got split into Nascent Flash and Raw Intuition. It still plays the same but it feels clunkier and less engaging. Fun is subjective but I honestly feel like I'm not doing much to the group outside of keeping tank busters outside of the party. They also took away the one thing that made me love WAR and tanks in general and that is the self sustain. Those clutch moments are what I live for, and SE took that away. Also the tool kit is far too homogenized. There's no depth in the end game which is where most people who stick with tanks end up.

[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.

[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.