Quote Originally Posted by ForteNightshade View Post
The tanks having self-sustain has very little, if anything, to do with solo-ing MSQ content. Every single tank could still accomplish that without ever touching their self heals. They're only needed when you're meme-ing old EX or Savage fights.

They're added to give tanks flavor and survivability in harder content so they aren't solely reliant on a healer. Otherwise, they'd be even further reduced to DPS that occasionally press a CD. Furthermore, tanks having self-sustain isn't really the problem here. A Warrior could literally never touch any one of their self heals and at one healer would be even remotely stressed about it. After all, there's a reason Dark Knight is meta despite it's complete lack of healing. There's so little healing required it just doesn't matter. So the tank with none but deals the highest damage wins.
I would agree with your elaboration, with the exception of "further reduced to DPS" because they still have a suite of mitigation abilities and also care the most about positioning. Also, XIV is already a DPS-driven game--all of the jobs are already "reduced to DPS." The problem is that tanks get DPS mini-games while healers get single-button DPS spam.

I also think the "flavor" is quite irrelevant, since there are many different ways to give a tank flavor than self-sustaining through self-heals. If they in fact do need more to do outside of DPS, perhaps the raid design should focus more on forcing them to single-target DPS- or healer-busters. But I think healing themselves--on top of being, as you observe, mostly unneeded--is treading too much on the already quite narrow role of healers.

And blah blah I've already talked at length in this thread about how the self-sustain is really just the devs' way of making the game relatively fail-proof because XIV cares more about reeling in new casual players than challenging their skill. But I still think Arthur hit on perhaps the one thing that is the biggest culprit for healer irrelevancy.