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

[Mithia]

Tanks identity aka gameplay and how they operates should always being the first priority when you design an job and balance always have to come on top of that and no the other way around, why? bcs if you make balance by making the gamplay almost the same with minor diferences then all jobs feel the same with little no varianc, when other jobs like the dps have really good diferences in how they operate the jobs hitting a vastly superior amount of player demogaphic playstyles, it's unfair.

Ah yes, let's make warriors deal the most damage and have the most hp for class identity.

Surprise! Every static wants a Warrior!

Who do we take for an OT?

Well, there is the Dark Knight that has decent damage and are great against magic damage!
And then there is the Paladin that has the weakest damage output but hey! They have dIvInE vEiL!

All statics run War/DRK.

But hey, it's all in the name of class identity that the PLD doesn't deal the same damage as WAR or DRK because they have a shield!

Thats why despite the balance problems HW and SB where way superior in tank desing due how diverse they use to be in they gameplay outside of being far more complex so more fun to optimice, now if we talk about balance and tanks capabilitys thats always can be balanced by touching numbers or adding the same key effect to other tanks in key skills, the problem they didn't want to do that and now all tanks sucks in this too, practically you are choosing diferent branchs of the same base class with minnor diferences betwen them wich is a poor design over all and kill the purpose of have 4 jobs on the same damm role.

Ye your right, optimizing was fun, if you were a warrior. WAR/WAR was a great duo for log runs. So much fun for the other tank jobs.

The biggest problem with the design of HW/SB was the absolute need to be able to execute the job well enough to maintain agro, on top of that you were also expected to drop your tank stance so you could dps freely. This was very difficult to balance for new players to ease into the role so most of them just didn't try. It's not accessible and it was way above the difficulty of dps or healers.