Results of a reddit job satisfaction poll

[ForteNightshade]

The tank changes pretty much dumbed down tanking to literally turn on tank stance, hit boss, have aggro. There's no more managing that factor. I mean if they dumbed down that aspect, why not dumb down CDs too. Just give all tanks 50% damage reduction so they dont need to manage tank CDs either. Even then, for making tnaking easier, they failed to increase the skill ceiling when it comes to rotation or other aspects. In the case of DRK, they made it even easier in that department. So it was a downward trend for style and skill for tanks, and that sucks.

And they did it for one reason: To get more people to play tank. If you take this consideration with how homogenious Healer is getting, I would not be surprised if it went down teh same route - Over simplify the kit to get more players to play healer.

As for other skills like Apoc and what not, that was their solution to breaking metas. You need less synergy with other classes to be optimal. In SB, Ninja was almost a must have cause of TA. Not anymore. Which is good, but its also bad. Again, things got simplified.

This is not a good trend IMO for the game, cause once you drop player skill expectations, it almost never comes back. Look how many people say the EX for the relic weapon is way to hard and is akin to savage content.

The irony is they wound up with less healers, or at the very least, the status quo. Although, who knows. Maybe there are more in the earlier expansions, and that's the number they're focusing on. The dev team has a bad tendency to cater extremely heavily to new players but not consider maintaining the interest of long term players. Sadly, I can't exactly say it isn't working for them given the numbers ShB has boasted.

As much as I enjoy current Tanks shape (and find it probably the best rework so far in terms of funcionality and opening possibilites, even though for some people the role became boring), the community's focus on "we need more damage, you need more damage, everyone need more damage" baffles me. I know that our encounters with their dps cheks design are partly at fault for this, but it's still annoying. I'm a tank, I'm playing my job to tank.

At this point, what we should have is not redesigning jobs (again) but going away from "do as much damage as possible" design to "do mechanics right and clear the encounter thanks to this". To be fair, it already works like this to some extent, it just would be nice if it was the main focus, with mechanics that obviously separate each role from each other so people would actually feel that some things can be only done by a specific role, and not by "blue/green/red dps". Because just redesigning jobs again and again won't really help without a bit of tweaking on battle design itself, it should happen in tandem.

What else is there for tanks to focus on? Even prior to the enmity changes. There was literally zero importance to the actual tank complexity beyond "hit a CD before the tank buster." The community's focus on damage derived from the game incentivizing nothing else. Prior to Shadowbringers, Tank Stance was complete garbage; essentially punishing tanks with a massive damage penalty for no reason as the community showed they could hold aggro without stance. Furthermore, mitigation is finite—more so in a game with scripted encounters. If I know Vengeance will be enough to comfortably survive the tank buster, adding Rampart isn't going to make it better. I'm just wasting a CD.

People need to stop pointing the finger at the community for the blue and green DPS mindset. They are both the result of FFXIV being a damage centric game with minimal focus or reward for playing defensive. When you make everything about damage, people tend to only concern themselves with damage.

Unfortunately the Tank community communicated, by way of the behavior that I described before, that they just want to do more damage. So now you can put on a stance and whale away. I know not every tank was like this--many also took their roles seriously and enjoyed the challenge of maintaining a balance between enmity and dps but unfortunately a large portion of the community decided they liked it better when everyone else did their job for them, so now you can just wear a stance and dance (but not stance-dance, them days are over).

Because everyone else had a more efficient way of handling it. Diversion had no cost associated with its usage whereas tank stance did; a 25% penalty to your damage. It wasn't simply a tank loss but a whole party loss. Fun fact, the DPS loss in Stormblood was so high for tanks, it was actually a party wide gain if Monks used Purification. Let that sink in for a moment. It was a party gain for a DPS to give up one of their more potent abilities than having the tank go into tank stance and do a combo or two, Warrior with Unchained notwithstanding.

That isn't the community not wanting to "do their job." It's poor design that tank stance was so arbitrarily bad no one wanted or needed to use it.