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

[DWolfwood]

I personally don't see a lack of tanks in the game. I know there's some personal bias there as a tank myself, but I always look at PF and tank spots tend to fill as fast if not faster than DPS. I still gotta wait in queues for duties too.

I think there's a lack of healers, but I think that's because the jobs just look relatively lame.

Everyone who claims this either has Rose-tinted glasses on or doesn't want to admit that simple actions were letting them greatly increase their dps at little risk and tries to justify it by claiming the enmity game was "fun" and not forgettable.

Neo-Exdeath is more an example of why the old system was bad.

I agree with this. Tanking in this game has never been more than just DPS'ing with auto-aggro help.

Comparing this game to previous expansions is a joke compared to games where your rotation is mostly attempting to keep aggro. One reason is this game has zero sense of aggro decay.

[BarretOblivion]

TBH, its like healers right now. Live Letter releases, tanks are actively listening hoping for something, and devs say "nah, lets fix the two DPS and a mana issue with 1 healer". Tanks then go "alright, ignore us AGAIN". Halfway through an expansion so far, almost 0 buffs or needed changes to the tank role in general outside of WAR getting QoL changes that haven't helped its play numbers at all and a duration increase that was made for dungeons. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW THANKS.

[bundythenoob]

I too was listening to the Live Letter (at like 4am for me), and after the grueling half hour or so of listening to those changes to the group posing, they FINALLY got to the Job adjustments, only to get about 5 mins worth of content. No slides, no mention of tank or healer adjustments, nothing about moving skills around, nothing about pet ghosting, no simple QOL changes. just a few DPS announcements and AST mana. how upsetting

[shao32]

Seems that the dev team feel like making us wait for the next expansion for any kind of ajustment/rework it's right at contrary that MNK (Wich don't get me wrong, they deserve the change after so many expansions waiting for them), I won't expect anything until 6.0, it's pretty clear they are satisfied with the balance they archived and anything else can wait while they solve the fun problems of the DPS.

At least AST and WAR get minor stuff, enjoy it guys better than nothing.

[HeulGDarian]

Seems that the dev team feel like making us wait for the next expansion for any kind of ajustment/rework it's right at contrary that MNK (Wich don't get me wrong, they deserve the change after so many expansions waiting for them), I won't expect anything until 6.0, it's pretty clear they are satisfied with the balance they archived and anything else can wait while they solve the fun problems of the DPS.

At least AST and WAR get minor stuff, enjoy it guys better than nothing.

In before 6.0 comes and they say, we heard your pleas we need to make stuff more ACCESSIBLE, heres a list of what remained cause the list of skills removed is too long.

[Absurdity]

I've never been so bored while tanking as in ShB so far. Sure you got your few hours of optimization in savage but then it's back to smashing my face against the keyboard in dungeons or farm content.

Gnb is probably the only tank that's even remotely engaging. Unfortunately playing gnb makes other annoying aspects of the game a lot more jarring, like positioning bosses.

Now most of the time those things autoposition themselves which is a whole different issue but on the few occasions you actually have to move them correctly it's as if they were 2 ton potato sacks with arthritis and no legs. And god forbid you're in your Gnashing combo or you have Rough Divide on cooldown, say goodbye to your GCD. Best example, the E7s addphase. It's not in any way difficult but the reaction time of those things to your movement is the speed of continental drift. Probably the only time I'm glad that warrior's rotation is so braindead.

[lolmont]

I’m a new player and just started out playing a tank, so far I’ve been enjoying it a lot. But I think the main reason is as many other people said is they don’t want the “responsibility” that comes with tanking.

[Marxam]

Everyone who claims this either has Rose-tinted glasses on or doesn't want to admit that simple actions were letting them greatly increase their dps at little risk and tries to justify it by claiming the enmity game was "fun" and not forgettable.

Neo-Exdeath is more an example of why the old system was bad. The resets were there to punish the MT not being in tank stance which "the enmity burst at the start of the fight then dps stance for the rest" meta pushed for.

Funny how some people see it as a punishment to be a MT where as I see it as a tank check reminding you "hey do you have aggro? good cuz now you don't and you got 3 secs to get it back or my next attack is going for one of your team mates".

You didn't need to "carefully deliberate your rotation" and it was just about as automatic as being in tank stance the whole time: Generate a big lead at the start of the fight and then mostly maintain the lead with dps rotation and circle-shirking on cooldown/tank swap. Using enmity combos outside an openner just said you were undergeared or the MT died at some point.

Speaking as WAR, they still had BB combo which was higher in potency than SP and SE so for min-maxing you are using your enmity combo even when you are OT. Can't remember if the other tanks had this issue but suffice to say you had to use your enmity combo occasionally outside of the initial pull because a dps and healer can catch up to you. I still prefer the old system of tank aggro vs what we have now where you just put it up and start doing combos, though I feel I may be in the minority where I believe that a tank should focus on controlling enmity and not just put up a buff and call it a day.

They had to do it because the dps meta was making it difficult to tune fights based on tank dps. Tanking in dps stance was letting MTs deal close to 50% more dps than intended in fights while maintaining sufficient enmity and they didn't want to punish those players who played as they intended, so they removed the dps penalties from the tank stances and normalized OT and MT rotations.

Both sides are to blame for this. FFXIV dev team for not balancing content correctly and the players at the top of the spectrum forcing playstyles on others below them. I always questioned if they tuned fights with the tank stances at the appropriate levels and if they did was there a skill bias to it being done in-house? They design the fights so its strange to see the shift from Coil where you had parties screaming "STOP DPS!" to avoid phase push vs. now, where all you see is keep pushing DPS. On the flip-side, players who maximize their job then force others to emulate it is wrong. However, is there something wrong with wanting to become a competent player who knows their job when in high end content, and expecting the same from others? I personally don't think so and if that required you to stance dance for max dps then that's what was needed. In any other content it wouldn't matter but there would always be some @$$hat in a low lvl dungeon screaming to do more dps. I still see it today in high lvl content where suddenly PF uptime soccer seems to be the norm and most of those just fail. Whatever happened to proper execution of mechanics? and if you need soccer uptime to clear with how late in the patch we are in then nothing will save you. The same parties also drag the HoH tethers across the arena so melee can't hit the boss while in the safe zone so pick your poison, but I digress.

The DPS meta has been set in stone since Gordian so removing tank stances while not giving anything back to the tanks was too drastic in this expansion. They should have first given all tanks the same trait and 10 sec cd between Tank and OT stances instead of just gutting it entirely. I truly believe this is why tanking is in a rut and seeing all the empty tank slots in PF on resets is small indicator of whats to come. Tanking is all about enmity control and putting up a buff that guarantees it to you 100% is too drastic of a downgrade. Tanks in ShB are just DPS with defensive cds.

[Vyrerus]

Neo-Exdeath is more an example of why the old system was bad. The resets were there to punish the MT not being in tank stance which "the enmity burst at the start of the fight then dps stance for the rest" meta pushed for.

The resets were at least interesting, and forced either tank to get enmity back. I lost track of the amount of times that tier that my own tanks in my second static would try to spike hate back up without re-entering tank stance, even during prog.

I personally found myself wishing that the fight had more of those resets, because it's clear from fight designs like that, that they can and have designed fights where you couldn't just circle shirk your way to no responsibility outside of your defensives and swapping.

Like the swap in the midst of Hello World in O12S, where if you tried circle shirking in the beginning, then shirk wouldn't be up for that, so that whole tactic couldn't be used.

They're both examples of why the old system was good. It really let players showcase their own priorities. Heck, the enmity resets in Neo-Exdeath even cut off Ninja's enmity controlling balls, while causing everyone else to think about postponing their own agro management role actions (which I hated that they gave those to everyone).

Also I say it's a load of croc that they claimed it was too hard to balance fights based off of tank DPS variance. Back in Gordias/Midas they didn't give a flying rip, fully expecting both tanks to be full time DPS stance just about, cause those checks were pretty dang rough. They made the change that they did to enmity to trim out the role action enmity management skills that they put on every DPS, a good thing, because enmity management should rest in the hands of tanks alone. This method lets anyone do tank without having to think about enmity at all. All the coordination and thought behind it, gone. Very newbie friendly. Very yawn inducing.

[Vyrerus]

Even historically, tanks didn't manage enmity. Ninjas did.

Ninjas only acted as enablers, prolonging tanks' lead on enmity. And only in groups that actually had them, and then only in groups where the Ninja was on point with that sort of thing. Even with a good Ninja, the inevitable would eventually occur, and tanks would have to do the dreaded enmity combo aka their job.