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

[Lyth]

Oh no, how dare someone suggest that each role bring something of critical value to the table. If that's not achievable, get rid of your trinity design and make everyone a dps. Either is fine.

Tanks have very little impact on gameplay at the moment. Positioning and movement is largely done for you. Raid damage is more relevant than the damage that your tank is taking, even when there's a *dramatic pause* tankbuster. And you often have a substitute tank when one dies.

A tank death should result in a near instantaneous raid wipe. The primary healing challenge should be keeping your tank alive, rather than raidwides. Your tank's mob movement and positioning should always be a essential factor in making raid dps checks. Make tanking into a linchpin role, and the people who actually want to play tank will play tank. Make dps into a linchpin role, and everyone will just play dps instead.

[Quintessa]

You follow the DPS around and they pull, or is the healer you follow around and have pull?

That is not a hallmark for leadership.

[Satarn]

A tank death should result in a near instantaneous raid wipe. The primary healing challenge should be keeping your tank alive, rather than raidwides.

If that was the case then making a single stupid mistake as tank or healer would be a wipe nearly every time. Also making dps more squishy would do jack all to make healing tanks harder. Dying as a tank already leads to straight up wipes way more often than other roles and if not, it's still usually a death or two among the dps, because - despite what you're trying to claim - dps can not in fact tank savage bosses. The issue is that it's just way too easy not to die as a tank, because mitigation is stupid simple and you can even survive messing up many "oneshot" mechs everyone deals with - unlike dps btw.

Yes, tanking feels unimportant and the skill difference is near meaningless, because it's just way too damn easy and main mechanics of tanking(mitigation, aggro, positioning) have been simplified to nearly non-existence - but making it so DPS die when a dungeon trash mob sneezes at them is not going to fix any of that, neither is giving tanks DPS level damage output.

Virtually nobody is disagreeing with the opinion that tanks should bring critical value to the table, so how about you drop that overly-dramatic straw man - but making it so that critical value is achieved with zero effort(because right now you can keep threat by merely existing) is effing stupid and wouldn't actually feel like you're making a difference either. But nah, you gotta pretend everyone just wants to keep tanks shitty and you're the "only reasonable one", even when people disagreeing with you are explaining why the current state of things is bad. Oh woe is you.

[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.

[ReiMakoto]

And most of all, certainly don't adhere to basic conventions of RPG balance.

Hate to umm actually, but umm actually you're refering to conventions of multiplayer balance and not rpg balance. RPG balanced tends towards tanks being amongst the highest single target damage dealers/ highest damge potential in their games and usually having someway to convert their defensive prowess directly into damage, in final fantasy games this usually comes from provoke/cover + counter. Examples include various final fantasy games (most notable being ff4 where cecil is the tank, the highest damage dealer in many situations and can sub in as a healer) ,various Dragon quest titles, xenoblade franchise and i could list others (i play too many rpgs).

You are correct though in a multiplayer setting they do need to balanced against dps players existing and normal rpg conventions not translating into multiplayer as well. Although that being said xenoblade basically is a single player mmo and their tanks are the crazy so who knows.

[Kabooa]

Hate to umm actually, but umm actually you're refering to conventions of multiplayer balance and not rpg balances.

I'll be sure to include multiplayer from now on.

[Mavrias]

Oh no, how dare someone suggest that each role bring something of critical value to the table. If that's not achievable, get rid of your trinity design and make everyone a dps. Either is fine.

Tanks have very little impact on gameplay at the moment. Positioning and movement is largely done for you. Raid damage is more relevant than the damage that your tank is taking, even when there's a *dramatic pause* tankbuster. And you often have a substitute tank when one dies.

A tank death should result in a near instantaneous raid wipe. The primary healing challenge should be keeping your tank alive, rather than raidwides. Your tank's mob movement and positioning should always be a essential factor in making raid dps checks. Make tanking into a linchpin role, and the people who actually want to play tank will play tank. Make dps into a linchpin role, and everyone will just play dps instead.

[Everyone gets damage down or dies because Shiva was poorly positioned for second Biting/Driving] I see.


Me, watching one of the tanks die post adds and Hraesvelgrs big dumb head chew through the party one by one while they get rezzed: yeah, totally, tank death's have no effect on anything.

[Wipes to akh rhais because of either a tank death or accidental aggro switch] yup, nothing to see here.

[wipes to e7s add enrage because poor positioning on the tank's part led to too much vulnerability down] mmhm no impact whatsoever.

[Watches the Executor Summons bird eat the off tank, execute some dps and a healer and tank buster the MT during Crippling Blow, killing them also] nothing to see here.

[Tank dies during Conflag Strike, instantly killing the healer theyre tethered to and then killing the rest of the raid three seconds later unless the other tank reacts fast enough to tank LB] no linchpins here.


Like realistically speaking I think tank design was best during heavensward (except for PLD) but to say that tanks aren't critical and that positioning and mob movement is not impactful rn is disengenuous.

[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.

[Seraphor]

I see it as this. Tanks have three different things to worry about; Enmity, DPS, their own Survival and Party Survival, but I guess you can count that as one thing.
Meanwhile Healers are concerned with Party Survival and DPS, and DPS are only concerned with DPS and their own survival.
It's about having a decent balance between those different facets, and Tanks already had the most to deal with.

I'm perfectly happy with having focus being shifted away (not entirely) from enmity generation, towards Survival via a mitigation rotation, which is what we're seeing. Mitigation is still a Tank centric mechanic.
The problem with enmity is that if you make it a challenge, it becomes a group effort anyway.
If it's possible for DPS to strip enmity off a poor tank and/or a struggle for the tank to take it back, then the DPS need tools to give it back, like they had before.

Now, if Tanks had some kind of additional effect to their rotations that resulted in the upkeep of their currently overpowered tank stance (something like tank stance being on the GCD and having a 30s duration, that is refreshed by your no.3 combo) I'd be on board with that. but otherwise, I think what we have now is better.
It's certainly better than having to choose between enmity and DPS because we all know that never worked.

[Rilifane]

It's SE's philosophy that most fails are and should be salvagable. So asking for single mistakes (like a tank death) to immediately cause a wipe is nothing short of asking for special treatment.
A tank death already does tend to snowball into more problems, deaths and maybe a wipe. Mavrias has given many examples for this. Every boss fight of this tier has several examples of a tank death leading to a wipe or a situation that can only be salvaged by heal LB3 if you're lucky.
On the other hand, unless you're doing e8s with min ilvl, a dead dps won't cost you the kill if everyone else performs at least decently. Let alone a messed up rotation. Seriosly, who cares if the BLM dropped Enochion, the RDM canceled their melee combo, the DRG let Dismebowel drop etc? This is never cause for a wipe. The only time a party might wipe is if it's a log run party where specific people try to go for logs and everyone agrees to wipe when they made a small mistake that could cost them their 99.

And I think you're underestimating the impact a good tank has on the overall flow of a run.
Mitigation is group effort but a huge part comes from the tank. Heart of Light, Dark Missionary, Shake it Off and Divine Veil can all visibly shave off huge amounts of damage over the course of a fight plus the more subtle value of making the difference between having to hardcast and healing via ogcds for healers. Also, Reprisal.
Good single target mitigation that goes beyond "I see TB cast, I push button" also shaves off a large chunk of incoming tank damage, enabling healers to spread out their ST resources more evenly and get away with less, if any hardcasts. Good mitigation support from the OT (escpecially TBN is completely nuts) is immediately noticable.
Uptime strats are mostly dependant on precise positioning of the boss or they completely lose value if the tank messes this up, leading to unneccessary healing while not giving the benefit or more rDPS. Positioning in general makes a big difference for uptime.

All of those things won't show up in your log and you don't get a visible bonus star for extra effort but neither does canceling LB3 animation lock, Addle/ Feint, self-heal, using others' raidbuffs effectively or using the toolkit effectively so the other healer can dps more. And yes, I'm aware that these show up in the "cast" tab but they're not part of the only metric that tends to get compared: deeps.
A tank who performs well is noticable. But not to the extend that it will immediately make people stop and stare in awe. None of the roles have such a huge impact or gap between skill floor and skill ceiling.

But I agree that tanks should have some form of enmity mechanic back that goes beyond "turn tank stance on, done" and the occasional voke/ shirk.
Not stance dancing, though. That's a cheap way of trying to add difficulty. Also, no no-brainer aggro dumps.