Quote Originally Posted by Vahlnir View Post
Since the beginning of the game it has ALWAYS been about dps, from dungeons to raids to Fates. There was a bit less of a focus on it for tanks from ARR to Stormblood though but that never stopped them from trying.
Not quite.

In any game, good tanks and healers will try to optimise their damage output once the basic survival requirements have been met. In ARR, players very quickly learnt that those survival requirements were fairly low. To add to this, things like STR/crafted accessories allowed tanks to do damage that was on par with (and in some cases exceeding) the lower end of the DPS player spectrum.

A lot of FFXIV tanks liked this because it meant that tanking was a role that had a lot of carry potential. Healers struggling with a tough mechanic? No problem, keep yourself up with bloodbath. DPS accidentally bound all their buttons to auto-attack? No problem, you were the reason that they made the dps check anyways. Everyone else dead? No problem, just Holmgang/Berserk that last 1% and get your team that cutscene.

Problem is this, though. The dev team doesn't understand these motivations. In ARR, they assumed that you stood in tank stance with full VIT accessories and maxed out parry/accuracy gear. In Heavensward, they started to catch on to this and tanks were hit by progressive nerfs to their itemization and damage output. Surely tanks are just there to hold the boss still and absorb damage! Can't have them embarrassing the DPS players that make up the bulk of the sub money, now can we?

First, they targeted our primary stats. Late Heavensward brought in a lot of failed attempts to readjust VIT and STR and dissuade us from using melee dps accessories. Stormblood brought in Direct Hit, while simultaneously limiting its access to tanks and healers. It also locked tanks out of melee dps accessories, while the accessories that we did have access to had no progression in STR stats.

One of my favourite moments in this was when they responded to the tank complaints about the lack of stat progression on their accessories. "What do you mean you do less damage? Oh, you must mean that you want more enmity. Here, have some emnity buffs." <snicker> And then tanks threw those new Stormblood accessories out the window, grabbed their old i270 melee dps STR accessories, and proceeded to do damage on par with their BRDs again. Oh how fast they backpedalled then!

And now we have the present situation. The devs learnt from their previous mistakes and our previous sneaky tricks, and have just flat out scuppered tank damage output. So that style of gameplay that you enjoy? It's been systematically targeted and stamped out. And it will probably get worse from here.

The problem is that removing the dps elements from tanking have actually revealed how shallow tanking is at baseline. Mob movement is full of jank and stutter, because they can't move and activate abilities at the same time (even Warcraft circa 2004 could do this properly, but 1.0's potato code fails us yet again). Bosses move, orientate themselves, and lock themselves into place in case your tank's movement causes the fight script to break (which is the same reason why we can't have knockback/draw in effects in PvE anymore).

As for mitigation, this game is so scripted and we have such easy access to invulns that it just becomes an issue of pressing the correct cooldowns at the correct timestamps. And I feel that if this was the primary reason that tanking interested you, you'd probably be marginally more interested playing a healer (not that they find the present state of gameplay anymore interesting than you do.)

In short, we have neither the DPS carry potential of early expansions, nor do we have the mitigation/positioning challenges that you'd find in, say Shadowlands.

I think this game is great if you're a DPS player, and right now that's where all the carry potential is. Great cinematic fights, interesting story. But tanks and healers might as well not exist in these scripted fights on rails, without any real threat outside of team jump rope. They don't have impact. And people play those roles specifically to have impact and to carry. And when you can't, your options are to either switch to DPS, or find a game that values its tanks and healers.