Is there any tanks that feel like your playing a tank and not a DPS ?

[Sqwall]

Sadly, things aren't as tank-centric as they once were. Hopefully that will change, as the most recent savage tier has a lot of challenging stuff for a tank to handle that makes you feel more like an actual tank instead of a blue pseudo-dps

Aren't as tank centric? Ok...Hey astro wanna take this tank buster? Go 'head! NO? ...how about you SAM wanna Third Eye this Ruby Weapon - Stamp? Oh that's not strong enough? tchhh fine! *pops Hallowed Ground while rolling eyes* I suppose if I have to do this tank centric mechanic....If I have to.... I guess.

[Quor]

Aren't as tank centric? Ok...Hey astro wanna take this tank buster? Go 'head! NO? ...how about you SAM wanna Third Eye this Ruby Weapon - Stamp? Oh that's not strong enough? tchhh fine! *pops Hallowed Ground while rolling eyes* I suppose if I have to do this tank centric mechanic....If I have to.... I guess.

Man, I don't even know where to start here.

Compare Ruby, or Titania, or Innocence, or any of the current ShB EX trials to the Four Lords from SB, or the madness that was Thordan EX or Sephirot EX when they were released. Of the ShB EX trials, none of them stand out from a tank perspective. Byakko had an aggro drop/tank buster/stack aoe/vuln debuff combo that changed it's target position based on where Byakko was in the arena. Seiryu had a tank buster that needed to be done exactly right or else the raid wiped, and his adds and aoe's required each tank to know how and where to position at the right time, in addition to managing their rotation and cooldowns. Suzaku was the "easiest" of them all, but positioning and timing were still important. A mistimed provoke meant the wrong half of the arena was now a death zone, and good luck finding a group of dps and healers who were aware enough to move out of the way in time.

To be fair, savage fights in ShB aren't bad on average. E2-4S were pretty simple, with E1S being the only real challenge early on. But it was quickly outclassed by gear. E5S is a bit trickier, as there's some fun stuff for the OT to do and the MT has a decent amount of positioning to worry about. E6S and E7S have quite a bit of important tank stuff to do, and E8S is no slouch either. I'm looking forward to what E9-12S will bring us. But as far as EX trials and the first 1/3 of savage go? ShB has been very tame for tanks. Deltascape and Gordias savage were far more complex than Eden's Gate savage was.

Ultimately, that's what I'm talking about in regards to "tank-centric" stuff. Tank busters are the simplest way of making a tank-centric "mechanic." They can be fun and challenging like Gardablo in E6S, or they can be something boring that you just invuln through like in E4S. Stuff like the add phase in E7S, the arbiter in E5S, the uptime positioning in E8S, tanks managing movement and cooldowns during WL2...that kind of stuff is the good shit. That's the kind of tank-centric stuff that has been largely lacking in ShB.

Besides, everyone's seen a DPS survive an EX tank buster before. I saw a BLM soak Stamp like a boss the first week Ruby was released. Sure, it took Manawall and Benison and he only had less than 1k life left afterwards as the WHM frantically Bene'd him to full health, but he survived it. That ain't much different from a tank using a cooldown and the WHM throwing Benison on them instead, only with less panicked use of major healing cooldowns after the fact.

[Awha]

Sort of off topic, though I have to ask. It feels as if I am alone when it comes to missing when people aggro was a group effort? Speaking towards tanks that wanted to maximize dps.

[Liam_Harper]

As PLD & WAR I've taken down the Qitana Ravel boss ALONE from 15%. Sure, it wasn't Savage, but there's plenty of testimony on this forum of tanks making clutch plays. Lemme quote one of my faves for you. It's someone becoming a DRK main from the thread "What did your favorite job used to play like?"

Come off it.

In WoW I soloed current content World Bosses, tanked heroic Raid bosses without a healer from 30%, soloed most of Mythic +10 bosses. I could take tankbusters that were meant to be shared with 8 other raid members by myself with a combination of 4 cd's and perfect timing.
This game is not WoW (that was in the past anyway, the game is rubbish now) and DK's were silly good at solo. But the ordinary guy just died while the player who knew that toolkit inside out could do amazing things. You were equally responsible for your survival for an entire fight, not just tankbusters. That's what I'd like to see more of. That was tanking.

In ff14 our best is "I soloed 15% of a wet noodle boss on casual theme park mode". It's pathetic that we think that's great and highlights just how bad tanking is.

[Kabooa]

Sort of off topic, though I have to ask. It feels as if I am alone when it comes to missing when people aggro was a group effort? Speaking towards tanks that wanted to maximize dps.

You're not alone.

The current implementation of threat basically doesn't matter. Just have an unchanging value in order of who aggros, and provoke changes that by moving you to the top or Shirk by moving you down one.

And, like resources, if threat doesn't matter, just get rid of it.

[ItMe]

Come off it.

In WoW I soloed current content World Bosses, tanked heroic Raid bosses without a healer from 30%, soloed most of Mythic +10 bosses. I could take tankbusters that were meant to be shared with 8 other raid members by myself with a combination of 4 cd's and perfect timing.
This game is not WoW (that was in the past anyway, the game is rubbish now) and DK's were silly good at solo. But the ordinary guy just died while the player who knew that toolkit inside out could do amazing things. You were equally responsible for your survival for an entire fight, not just tankbusters. That's what I'd like to see more of. That was tanking.

In ff14 our best is "I soloed 15% of a wet noodle boss on casual theme park mode". It's pathetic that we think that's great and highlights just how bad tanking is.

Or... maybe I'm just not very good lol :P
I've also only played for about a year so I don't have a large variety of stories yet and was just trying to share something I thought was cool. Sorry if I offended you?


So then, could you provide an example of what you'd consider a clutch play? I'm a little confused because before you said

Now that was fun. Those both healers dead, 10% boss and squeezing every last bit from your toolkit ...and pulling off a kill, you lived for those moments.

[EliciaVenom]

Come off it.

In WoW I soloed current content World Bosses, tanked heroic Raid bosses without a healer from 30%, soloed most of Mythic +10 bosses. I could take tankbusters that were meant to be shared with 8 other raid members by myself with a combination of 4 cd's and perfect timing.
This game is not WoW (that was in the past anyway, the game is rubbish now) and DK's were silly good at solo. But the ordinary guy just died while the player who knew that toolkit inside out could do amazing things. You were equally responsible for your survival for an entire fight, not just tankbusters. That's what I'd like to see more of. That was tanking.

In ff14 our best is "I soloed 15% of a wet noodle boss on casual theme park mode". It's pathetic that we think that's great and highlights just how bad tanking is.

I am going to have to disagree with this, I see FFXIV as more of a combined group effort than being able to solo bosses from obscene amounts of health left. A tank on this game has nice amounts of mitigation where they can do a lot of things without other jobs (outside of savage content) but you shouldn't have to.

Now granted in SB I soloed last boss from The Burn from 40% ish of health as a PLD, and in ShB I soloed Normal Ruby first phase from 67% as a DRK only to meet a DPS check at 5% which I obviously could not do alone - but that was the point, a tank cannot do everything alone in this game but still has the responsibility for their party to some degree (ex: I cannot take all their damage if they get bit by avoidable things). Each role has responsibility, even if we can get by without them part of the time. The versatility makes things fun and tanks being capable to do things they normally do not need to worry about in normal content also makes things interesting.

[Quor]

You're not alone.

The current implementation of threat basically doesn't matter. Just have an unchanging value in order of who aggros, and provoke changes that by moving you to the top or Shirk by moving you down one.

And, like resources, if threat doesn't matter, just get rid of it.

This is the ultimate goal I fear. I enjoyed threat management actually being something that required input via a threat combo and awareness on the part of the DPS/healers. Not this lazy-man's threat where multipliers on tank stance are so huge you can hold a boss simply by spamming your combo opener.

[LeonKeyh]

So then, could you provide an example of what you'd consider a clutch play? I'm a little confused because before you said

I'm wondering this as well if we could have a little more color on this. I'm typical a DPS player in MMOs and have recently (end of April) jumped into FF14, and even more recently actually started playing a few tank classes.

I hear a lot of feedback about the homogenization of the tank classes and a lot of complaints about how tanking is currently. But I am having a hard time seeing the ideal state that most people seem to be pushing towards. I'd very much like to hear in detail what caused this clutch play. Is it high mitigation cooldowns with very low duration combined with a rotation that provides optimal healing? Is it well placed stuns/interrupts whenever the enemy is using an ability? What does this ideal state look like?

I got a decent amount of information from another topic here talking about what they hope for 6.0, but the hope all seems to be just a "better differentiation" between a good and bad player. It sounds like Liam has an actual example of what he found fun and it would be interesting to hear what actually caused that.

[Jandor]

Sort of off topic, though I have to ask. It feels as if I am alone when it comes to missing when people aggro was a group effort? Speaking towards tanks that wanted to maximize dps.

You're not alone, I also preferred when it was something to think about. Enmity wasn't exactly hard to manage, but neither is popping cooldowns really, and popping cooldowns has to carry nearly the whole tanking part of the job now.