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

[Lyth]

It's fundamentally different. The very act of tanking requires you to have the mob's attention. The role itself entirely about control. That's why it attracts the personality types that it does. That's also why self-positioning mobs are tanking anathema. If you're not controlling a given mob, you're not tanking.

In order to heal something, in order to save your teammates, people need to take damage. That's always happening.

You want more tanks? You need more tankable mobs to control and manoeuvre. You want more healers? You need more incoming damage and more opportunities to clutch save your team. To treat us like we're all equivalent "support players" slaving at the behest of dps demonstrates a complete and utter lack of understanding of what drives people to pick these roles. And that's why dps mains like yourself should never, ever dictate decisions regarding tanking or healing. You just don't get what we do.

[Kabooa]

You want more tanks? You need more tankable mobs to control and manoeuvre. You want more healers? You need more incoming damage and more opportunities to clutch save your team. To treat us like we're all equivalent "support players" slaving at the behest of dps demonstrates a complete and utter lack of understanding of what drives people to pick these roles. And that's why dps mains like yourself should never, ever dictate decisions regarding tanking or healing.

You really need to stop this "Us vs them" mentality.

I'm not the one "Treating you" like anything.

You are the one constantly making assumptions based on what you think I play at the moment. As if "Maining" a job gives someone more right than another.

I have tanked, healed, and DPS'd in every MMO I've played.

[AnotherPerson]

You want more healers? You need more incoming damage and more opportunities to clutch save your team. To treat us like we're all equivalent "support players" slaving at the behest of dps demonstrates a complete and utter lack of understanding of what drives people to pick these roles.

Actually, if you want more healers, you have to give an actual DPS rotation / something to do during downtime because not everyone wants to just heal when playing a healer. Making a healer do nothing but healing gets boring REAL fast. SE has already tried making healing easier by giving more oGCD healing. Did it bring more people into healing? Nope. If anything, it made those who played healer stay away from the job because they had nothing to do during down time besides healing and pressing one single DPS button every single time. At this point it's not a debate because SE made certain fights require healer DPS in order to pass the trial. It's a bad mindset to have when people think healers should only heal. Progressing through MSQ as a healer means you have to use attack skills. They don't just magically go away during battle when you are in a party.

There is a broad spectrum of players who can heal efficiently, heal decently with a decent tank, and those who need every single part of their kit to heal because they aren't effectively using their kit, a tank either doesn't mitigate or is under-geared. People don't need more incoming damage and opportunities to save the team. The healing kit is made to take into consideration for all those potential possibilities. Instead of needing to use the healing kit to its fullest, it's made so if you are good at healing efficiently, you are encouraged to do something else (aka DPSing to help progress through a fight faster). This gives the maximum contribution to your role in supporting a party.

A healer has NO dps rotation. Literally 1 DoT, 1 attack, 1 AoE. On top of healing and making sure everyone stays alive. Healers that beat tanks at DPS means tanks aren't DPSing well. That healer would be putting more effort than the tank who actually has a DPS rotation because of the way enmity is managed right now. Healers that want more incoming damage and opportunities to save your team can just play savage level content or play content at min ilvl.

If it's not because a class/job is boring, the main cause of people not wanting to tank or heal is responsibility. Responsibility to do their jobs on top of DPSing. All blame is on them. That keeps a lot of people away from those respective roles. The second reason would be due to personality factor - a leader personality is more oriented to play as a tank and a more supportive personality type is going to end up playing a healer. That's just how things are - because it's a RPG and their personalities are drawn to that playstyle. Both healers and tanks have it rough, and that's why majority of the players are DPS roles.

[Lyth]

In my opinion has to do with the lack general progression in terms of the ranking role within FFXIV. In some aspects we have a regression, the ranking role has limited interactive feed back as to show the difference from a great tank and a good tank. That lack of identity well for me personal makes me question why I play tank. Sure we have markers like FFlogs, but the general gameplay loop at the core is simplistic that optimizing the role is kind of meh.

That's a broader issue within MMOs in general, because people are less inclined to sit and watch high level play as they would say an FPS or MOBA (in part because it's more information dense and less visual). So you're more likely to reinforce whatever habits you get into in a given fight rather than finding a more efficient approach.

But there's also progressively fewer opportunities for tanks to showcase their ability, outside of doing damage. That in turn goes back to the issues that I previously raised about fight movement.

...

This is a tangent, but it's an interesting one. You said it yourself. This is a downtime problem.

Where does that downtime come from? We're too strong defensively, and incoming damage is too predictable. oGCD heals are a mixed bag. Whack-a-mole GCD healing is monotonous. But so is having nothing to heal because the tanking and healing cooldowns are too powerful.

Personally, the one place where I prefer healing to tanking in games is under PvP conditions. The main reason for this is because damage is unpredictable and there are opportunities for clutch saves. And when you do damage, there's usually an opportunity cost associated with it, rather than it being a filler rotation before you go back to whack-a-mole again.

Similar to tanks, you can redesign the rotations all you want, but this is first and foremost a fight design problem. There is not enough pressure placed on tanks and healers to justify their defensive toolkits. You need to experience attrition. It's also amazing how much of an impact even a little bit of randomness can have on an encounter (and I don't mean cue-based randomness where the boss signals to you which branch is next).

Remember the wrecking balls in A7S? There was nothing complex about them. They weren't even all that unpredictable. But it meant that your navigation route as a tank was different from run to run. You need a certain amount of consistency in fights to learn the mechanics, but predictability creates tedium. Especially when we're recycling mechanics as it is.