Are tanks currently too OP?

[ItMe]

[snip]

Those are some interesting videos.
Thanks for sharing them~
And this youtuber is surprisingly well spoken considering they're multi-tasking during the recording lol

And the youtube comments are usually a minefield but there are some good ones here, especially beneath your 3rd vid.

[Kabooa]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U0FGnHMiB4

Tank's aren't OP. We just have taken advantage of the additions to our jobs over the years to balance out the DPS checks of raiding. Healers DPSing more and more over the years is now "normal" in dungeons since the content is not even hard.

Show me the all melee, all ranged, all caster, all healer variation of this, and maybe you might have a point.

Two of them plain can't be done. Casters would favor all Summoner/Red Mage. All Healer at least has the benefit of being able to mega-shield.

It's funny you linked Diamond weapon too, one of the lowest DPS check trials instead of this fun one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gi05HqdMSs

Are these tanks at the top of the game?

Absolutely.

Can you do it with any other role?

Not a !@#%ing chance.

[Argyle_Darkheart]

To my mind, tanks would only be considered "OP" if the path of least resistance involved replacing other roles with more tanks or if their presence otherwise rendered other roles redundant (being so strong defensively that a healer was replaced by a DPS, for example).

This isn't really happening, as far as I'm concerned--certainly not as the surest path to success.

Solo content (or soloing content) is its own beast. If you want balanced solo content, then Bozja is probably the closest thing (thanks to a specifically balanced system of additional actions and items).

[Vyrerus]

you do realize that deep dungeons were specifically made to be able to be solod by any job, right?

To floor 100, yes. To floor 200, no. They literally put that in, just for the people who loved POTD/Deep Dungeons so much that it was their version of, GLHF (Good Luck, Have Fun).

Without the spin exploit, you pretty much need to have RNG bless you with steels, even now. Though not so much for tanks, who finally are able to do the solo, due to increased potencies in SHB. There are some monsters you just don't fight, depending on your job, and if the floor only gives you those to fight and no steels... there goes 4 hours of your life.

[Sqwall]

Show me the all melee, all ranged, all caster, all healer variation of this, and maybe you might have a point.

Two of them plain can't be done. Casters would favor all Summoner/Red Mage. All Healer at least has the benefit of being able to mega-shield.

It's funny you linked Diamond weapon too, one of the lowest DPS check trials instead of this fun one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gi05HqdMSs

Are these tanks at the top of the game?

Absolutely.

Can you do it with any other role?

Not a !@#%ing chance.

Yes perhaps that is a better example. And one that I was routing for when I saw it last year. It was VERY clutch in the end. I really want that to be the argument though. I think the tank, healer, dps "holy trinity" is fundamentally broken. Damage from each party member is welcome, but as a tank I should not be expected to be the clutch deciding factor if my DPS is low. I would honestly give up 25% of my damage output on all tanks and give it to the DPS classes to offset the gap. Because it doesn't matter for tanks to be at the top of the damage meter.

But this is FFXIV, and DPS is king with ALL content. Zerg through dungeons, zerg through MSQ, and zerg through 24-man raids. This will always be the norm as long as the community complains about should be doing godlike DPS. Hell I ran a puppets bunker a while ago and we were doing so much DPS we were skipping boss mechanics since we were killing them so fast, which would make the healers BORED out of their minds since nobody was taking damage.

SE needs to go back to the drawing board with Endwalkers and MAKE THE GAME A CHALLENGE. Give me a reason to log in and do my dailies, give me a reason to work with a team to finish content. I love those moments when my friends get in a NEW dungeon and try to figure it out, and the satisfaction of succeeding even at dungeons. WoW Cataclysm did this PERFECTLY with the heroic dungeons, and were an amazing challenge. People cried that is was to hard, but I enjoyed the grueling challenge. And my gear was WELL earned AND noticed. People would ask in town for heroic runs and guides all the time just by the gear I was wearing and this was just dungeon gear....not even raid!

The game needs to have an incentive to go through ALL content then just speed run for tomestones, gear, whatever. Once player skill get's better over time and teams work together instead of just trying to be the highest DPS it will be like Dark Souls gratification.

Sorry about the rant, but I just love this game so much and I would like to keep it fresh in the coming years.

[Lyth]

It's completely arbitrary to subdivide DPS into so many sub-roles. It's not like we have roles dedicated to ranged physical tanks or melee healers.

A MNK would make for a pretty good tank substitute with its damage reduction and bloodbath. RDMs can heal and raise. Titan Hard was tanked at gear level by a Dragoon back in ARR. I think the reason why we don't see it being attempted more often is because it's doesn't have quite the same entertainment/watch value. People watch and play tanks to see them surviving against difficult odds.

Survivability is a central theme in tanking. Trying to solo content on tanks is not a new thing in MMOs. We're the most likely to try it, especially if the game doesn't allow for kiting.

I think that if tanks were truly OP, they'd be the most played role. Progression raid groups would preferentially gear their tanks as a priority, because they're the driving force for the clear. That's really not the case.

[ForteNightshade]

snip

There's quite a bit of revisionist history going on here. Heavensward dungeons were just as laughably easy for the most part as the subsequent expansions. Xelphotal stands as one of the easiest "Expert" dungeons in the game's entire history. We also had horrendously poor paced dungeons like Anti-Tower and Hullbreaker (Hard), which forced baby pulls due to the devs briefly attempting to stop the wall pull meta. The backlash we saw as a result is why they eventually settled on what we have now in terms of trash. Likewise, those "Crazy enrages" only apply to A1-8. Creator is roughly on the same level as Eden's Promise; maybe a slight bit higher (Cruise Chaser was far more a wall than Thancred). You're also forgetting the sheer insanity that was HW Warrior with Bloodbath.

While I don't disagree tanks will likely only see a marginal percent increase to their DPS, this actually is part of the problem. With the reduction of tank mechanics we've seen in Shadowbringers, tanks have essentially become gimped DPS and little else. So nerfing their damage only serves to drive players away as the role neither has unique gameplay for their role nor the damage output to compensate. Being nearly unkillable is cool and all. At least until you realize it doesn't really matter in content that also matters. I'm never going to be able to survive current Savage fights as the last man standing unless the boss is at 0.5% and zero mechanics are coming up.

[Sqwall]

So nerfing their damage only serves to drive players away as the role neither has unique gameplay for their role nor the damage output to compensate. Being nearly unkillable is cool and all. At least until you realize it doesn't really matter in content that also matters. I'm never going to be able to survive current Savage fights as the last man standing unless the boss is at 0.5% and zero mechanics are coming up.

Good points. I suppose I never really cared about how much damage a tank does. I suppose I have only ever cared about how much damage I can mitigate/absorb to fulfill my role rather then being top tier tank DPS. If I wanted to do that I would have rolled SAM.

Ugh. FFXIV has been nothing but a DPS fest and it's annoying. I just wish it was possible to try fights without an enrage timer, and make the bosses more lethal by making the attacks random order vs. a lovely ballet. It just becomes....calculated.

[Absurdity]

The issue with that is that tank's supposedly primary role "tanking the boss and mitigating damage" is stupidly easy. Sorry but you can't tell me that pressing one of the 4+ "take less damage" skills each tank has requires in any way more brain power than pressing Second Wind or Addle does on a dps, especially when you always have enough mitigation for every mechanic.

So mitigating damage, the "tank thing", doesn't have much going for it, what else is there? Enmity might as well not exist anymore, Boss positioning is barely hanging on as a tank mechanic, so right now dps is the only other thing to keep a tank engaged with their role and I guess make you stand out from every other tank.

But wait, doesn't this mean we're basically just a dps with a comparatively super simple rotation and bad dps? Yes, it does.

[OrpheusKappa]

Nope, just dungeon bosses being terribly undertuned.