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

[Lyth]

Enmity generation is not the hallmark of tanking. "Wait for three sunders before attacking" is so 2004. You don't make enmity "more difficult" by forcing players to toggle between badly coded stances or by getting their NIN to send oGCD enmity to them. You do it by creating complex mob spawn patterns. This is tank design 101. Tanking is about positioning and movement.

It's not just that avoiding death as a tank is too easy. It's also the fact that dying as a tank doesn't have all that much consequence. It's not "Oh, the tanks died and wiped the party". It's "The tank died and two dps got brink from a follow-up cleave despite their co-tank voking and us rezzing the tank 10 seconds later, and now we can't make the dps check." You're much more likely to see a fade to black from a raidwide than you are to see an angry boss oneshotting a tankless raid with autos.

In order for a role to have value, there has to be consequences for failing. Dps is obvious - you die or mess up your rotation, and your team fails the dps check. For tanking and healing to have similar value, they too need to have equivalent raid wipe potential when played poorly. Only then will you appreciate a good tank or healer when you see one. If we don't offer equivalent damage output, we need to offer something else that has make or break potential.

And no, maximising our "aggros" with serial Power Slash combos does not strike me as a good time.

[Satarn]

Enmity generation is not the hallmark of tanking. "Wait for three sunders before attacking" is so 2004. You don't make enmity "more difficult" by forcing players to toggle between badly coded stances or by getting their NIN to send oGCD enmity to them.

Again with the straw man. What part of "actually holding threat in an active way" says "getting their NIN to send oGCD enmity to them"? Free aggro dumps/reducers have been a terrible design, but just because FFXIV has done a piss-poor job with enmity for most of its lifetime, does not mean the entire concept of managing threat is bad in general. Saying it's not "a hallmark of tanking" is just plain wrong. Tank is supposed to keep the party safe and make sure they can do their jobs as smoothly as possible - that includes positioning for DPS, reducing healer strain with active mitigation and making sure both don't get smacked by keeping the enemies' attention. It's not that hard to create an engaging system that requires players to balance their hate and damage output in a similar manner to how healers balance their heals and dps(and no, not by "stance dancing" either, tank stance should've just been a "training mode").

Btw if holding aggro was an actual effort, you'd see way more times when dps get smacked when tank isn't doing their job and with that more dps deaths and stuff getting out of position/spinning - making good tanks more apparently valuable beyond just "not dying". Hell, when hate generation is actually a proper mechanic, it's often healers who get taken out, so it would make consequences even more dire.

Why is it an issue that it's really the dps check that does the raid in, if it's still the consequence of the tank's death? Is your attention span so short that you can no longer make the connection there? Also if it's a cleave misfiring, more often than not it will actually wipe the party as they're stacked, or at least take out enough people that the rest will just die shortly after.

For the record - I'm in no way opposed to autos and tank damage taken in general being more dangerous than it is - in fact I'm all for it(although that comment about making DPS afraid of pulling trash in dungeons was laughable). But making it so only for the non-tanks is stupid, when we could just increase boss/add damage itself and both make tank deaths/aggro loss more lethal and make good mitigation more important, not to mention making healers actually heal a bit more. I do however disagree with a single tank death leading to an outright wipe right away - tanks absolutely need more responsibility, but making just one small mistake from either tank or healer an instant, unrecoverable failure is pretty excessive. Now if you have both tanks die they yes - the boss should mercilessly slaughter the raid in most cases.

Either way, if there's no effort required to keep enemies on yourself and survive by managing your mitigation, then no amount of instant wipes will make tank's skill feel impactful - it will still just be the matter of having the tank or not, just like it is now, not of how good the player is at the actual tanking. Yes, the impact can be also created by making positioning meaningful - I've already mentioned it in every post I've made here - but that doesn't mean we shouldn't aim for the other two aspects to be expanded as well.

[Lyth]

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Enmity only exists because there's a damage output difference between tanks and dps. Why create an engaging system of enmity generation for tanks when you can simply create an engaging system of damage generation for tanks (the latter being what most people are actually asking for, outside of a few like yourself)? Do you know what's more exciting than maximising your fictional damage output? Maximising your actual damage output.

The point where enmity actually matters is on the pick-up. That's actually where the highest risk of a squishy getting smacked around occurs. But the actual test there is knowing where and when the mob spawns, and how to efficiently reposition it. It has nothing to do with balancing out your actual damage output against your mighty power slash combo of fictional damage. Good riddance to that. It's not engaging, clever, or interesting.

I find it strange that you on one hand complain that tanking is too easy because of the enmity changes (which were one of the few things that they got right), and yet you seem to think the idea of tank deaths having more impact is too unforgiving. You can't have it both ways.

[Kabooa]

Enmity only exists because there's a damage output difference between tanks and dps. Why create an engaging system of enmity generation for tanks when you can simply create an engaging system of damage generation for tanks (the latter being what most people are actually asking for, outside of a few like yourself)? Do you know what's more exciting than maximising your fictional damage output? Maximising your actual damage output.

The point where enmity actually matters is on the pick-up. That's actually where the highest risk of a squishy getting smacked around occurs. But the actual test there is knowing where and when the mob spawns, and how to efficiently reposition it. It has nothing to do with balancing out your actual damage output against your mighty power slash combo of fictional damage. Good riddance to that. It's not engaging, clever, or interesting.

I find it strange that you on one hand complain that tanking is too easy because of the enmity changes (which were one of the few things that they got right), and yet you seem to think the idea of tank deaths having more impact is too unforgiving. You can't have it both ways.

I'd give it 50/50 on a good day that it's people asking for more complex gameplay.

"Most" people, if you just go by these forums, argue for a damage boost. Been like that since Heavensward and the accessory threads.

When threat matters, it's an engaging limiter, and makes the great tanks extremely desirable. Wanna know why?

Because it's an active inhibitor on your team. The better your tank, the more your team can do. That's why the removal of threat as all but a binary concept is a bad move. Why Threat dumps are not as good as threat suppression for the play by play between tank and team.

The ironic part here is by completely removing threat from the equation, you have also removed quite a few arguments for increasing tank damage in any avenue.

If tanks only gained a 30% threat bonus, then at a minimum they have to be around 75-76% of the potential of a DPS who bring no ability to suppress their threat. A bad tank actively inhibits their party before we even bring boss behavior and positioning into the equation. A great tank allows the team to unload.

Great tanks become desirable and it's obvious when you have relatively great tank - Because then you aren't getting beat in the face. And that's all meaningless if the tank eats !@#%, the tank positions the boss poorly, and whatever other metric you want to use that all compound upon it. The punishing part of being a tank is failing any one of those responsibilities basically invalidates how good you are at the others.

Threat is what makes a tank. The moment it doesn't matter, you're just a DPS in denial.