Quote Originally Posted by aodhan_ofinnegain View Post
Personally I'm more on the boat of encounter design needs to be improved upon by SE that gives tanks more to compensate what's been removed instead of designing fancy orchestrated fights that cater to DPS.
I agree wholeheartedly and feel that encounter design is what really needs to be leveraged to give tanks more direct engagement for the role and to feel like a "tank".
To me being a tank is about keeping control of the fight and making sure that the boss is doing what you want it to do. The design of essentially a tank and spank while navigating general mechanics that affect the whole party doesn't really convey that feeling.
The general mechanics, the tank busters, the dps checks and the stuff they have done so far are good and they should keep doing that, but they need to start adding in more things specifically for tanks to have to control and manage asides from being able to take a beating.
A few things that come to mind are making boss positioning a more important and dynamic thing in encounters, more aggro drops/resets/multi-enemy boss fights that require swapping targets between tanks and other such things forcing tanks to have to utilize on-the-fly aggro tools like provoke, and more mechanics requiring the tanks to actively protect other party members with their abilities. Stuff like that. Then give the tanks more abilities to deal with those mechanics like a stronger defensive to use on others but on a longer recast.
I feel doing things like that would do a lot to make the tank role feel more unique and sell the fantasy of being a protector.