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

[ReiMakoto]

There's room between "Tanks do nothing" and "tanks do too much".

We sit north of the middle ground. Their contribution is meaningful at all stages of the content, from week 1, to farm, to speedrunning.

Wether it is meaningful or not is quite subjective. In previous expansions a tank who put out an excellent performance made a more noticable impact on the overall clear time as the difference between high and middling performance was much larger. Now when i strive for that higher performance I do not find it as impactful, tank players can die and still get above average total damage, and the overall clear time in much more heavily weighted on dps and healer performance. As ive said before Im playing primarily off tank this tier and outside of the raiden add in e5s (which can be dealt with by dps or the mt with enough coordination) i feel basically vestigial until the latter half of shiva and even then im more often than not just popping mitigation to make autos hit for less. For me the satisfaction is two fold, the gameplay and the final number, right now both are lacking, I only find gnb fun gameplay wise but most of the time im just playing like a dps, and numbers wise you dont feel like the threat you used to.

[Shurrikhan]

Wether it is meaningful or not is quite subjective. In previous expansions a tank who put out an excellent performance made a more noticable impact on the overall clear time as the difference between high and middling performance was much larger. Now when i strive for that higher performance I do not find it as impactful, tank players can die and still get above average total damage, and the overall clear time in much more heavily weighted on dps and healer performance. As ive said before Im playing primarily off tank this tier and outside of the raiden add in e5s (which can be dealt with by dps or the mt with enough coordination) i feel basically vestigial until the latter half of shiva and even then im more often than not just popping mitigation to make autos hit for less. For me the satisfaction is two fold, the gameplay and the final number, right now both are lacking, I only find gnb fun gameplay wise but most of the time im just playing like a dps, and numbers wise you dont feel like the threat you used to.

I get that and would similarly like to see a whole lot more from both output and gameplay, but I despise the idea much of these suggestions have taken as implicit warrant in this thread that as long as tanks are 'required' anyways, no amount of overpowering their tanking capacities (enmity output, eHP, and healing GCDs spared through mitigation) should ever have an impact on or balance against their output. That way of thinking just treats tanks -- and, if extended, healers -- not as having toolkits with valuable resources, but rather like a subscription fee for DPS to be able to play, existing by rules of their own rather than in any shared economy with the other roles. And it all too often ignores that those "fees" or "keystones" or what have you, however vital, are not going to be made more entertaining just for being made more inherently valuable.

I want to see more damage from tanks, but I'd also like to see far more of an influence from active means of mitigation as well, and ideally to return to compromises between pure damage output and eHP where tuned not just to offer only one real option the vast majority of the time. If that means siphoning away some of their bloated passive eHP and passive mitigation, so be it.