Please stop making new Dark Knight threads.

[Lyth]

Passive healing is a very nice advantage to have from a player perspective in the short term, but it's a terrible design decision for an MMO. As it is, FFXIV doesn't do a good job of making tanking dangerous. You're not going to wipe because the tank died and the boss systematically oneshot everyone else with auto-attacks, unlike in other games. There's not nearly enough threatening incoming damage on tanks. The only incoming tank damage that matters is the odd tankbuster that you invuln-swap through anyways, and if you mess it up there's usually a way to pick up the pieces while you get instant-cast raised. The real threats are from raidwides, especially if you have a DPS or two who has just messed up a recent mechanic. That then spirals into you failing either a mechanics check or a dps check and wiping. Tanks have so much extra mitigation and self-healing that you're actually burning those cooldowns to ignore mechanics for uptime rather than actually worrying about surviving. Tanks are so safe to play that they're irrelevant.

While there's a certain appeal for a 'lifesteal' tank to be able to solo content without the need for a healer, they're usually based around intelligent decision-making about when to invoke that lifesteal. If you take Warcraft's Deathstrike as the classic example, you need to know when damage spikes happen to effectively reverse the damage. It's active lifesteal, not passive. But that's what you get when the game designers don't understand tanks and just cater to whatever poorly thought out demands that the playerbase throws out. It's okay for one tank to thematically focus on some form of damage reversal or active, timed self-healing as a unique playstyle. But if more and more tanks come with passive self healing on every attack, you might as well have the bosses ignore the tank and just throw out raidwides. Your healers won't know the difference because they're still ignoring you anyways. It's a bad experience for tanks and a bad experience for healers.

I thought that the bit about Sheltron not mitigating any damage was amusing, and I'm surprised nobody was called out on it. I suppose it's largely a semantic debate about whether you might have blocked it anyways if you fell asleep and didn't press the button, but at the end of the day it's an action that you use to survive a specific attack. Mitigation is pass-fail for this reason. The fact that there's a random chance that said PLD could be grossly incompetent and still survive by means of a lucky proc is besides the point.

Either way, I suppose that my mindset on all this is different. I would expect that if you're a decent player, you want the game to challenge you in ways that push you to get better, and also allow you to differentiate yourself from others by means of skilled play. You want your job to be less powerful at baseline and more powerful when played at a high skill level. Instead, I see so many people demanding that their jobs reward them for breathing. If it's just the job that's powerful, people will just swap to it blindly, and nobody sees it as skilled play. If it's powerful only at high skill levels after time and practice, then people will try to swap to it, fail, and then respectfully note that the job takes skill to do well.

Everyone knew that HW WAR was a powerful job. But everyone respected HW DRK. That's the difference that you want to see in your job. It's that Genji effect - players are drawn to it for that chance to be a game changer, but it requires a skill and time investment to get to the point where you can pull it off.

[ItMe]

I would expect that if you're a decent player, you want the game to challenge you in ways that push you to get better, and also allow you to differentiate yourself from others by means of skilled play. You want your job to be less powerful at baseline and more powerful when played at a high skill level.

I'm surprised that someone as well thought out and imaginative as you only sees one valid way for "decent players" to think.
(that's not supposed to sound aggressive, please don't read it that way, I respect you)

Skill expression is cool and all, don't get me wrong, but I rather enjoy my skill level being tested by the challenges I'm engaged with, by the bosses, and less by how well I can exercise the nuances of my job.

In either case I'm reaching for the skill ceiling and trying to optimize my runs.
-- If a boss is tough, they stand between me and the ceiling.
-- If the rotation is elaborate, it stands between me and the ceiling.
We definitely need a mix of both, but is it really so strange or wrong that some prefer more of the challenge to come from the former than the latter?