Is Tank the happiest/most satisfied role right now?

[Nihility]

It sort of depends on content level. For everything below savage/ultimate tanks are pretty much great

for stuff where dps checks run rampant, tanks are more unbalanced than what would be comfortable. Paladin is also in kind of a weird place I would think since they gutted it and turned it into "just keep pushing buttons!"

healers, imo, are a nightmarish mess. The dps level that groups expect of them on top of having to manage all those healing cooldowns is kind of yikes. Only people I've met that like it are the ones that play the game longer hours than a full time job

DPS are weird to me, Every single one of them has some mechanic I outright despise except I guess summoner but that's only because summoner is so braindead boring it doesn't seem to actually have any mechanics in the first place. Which I guess is just a way of saying don't think I'm qualified to weight in on them

[Renathras]

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While it's not apparent on a cursory inspection, due to the way Lilies work, WHM has the most involved DPS rotation of the Healers and the fewest GCDs spent on its spamnuke. Despite "Glaremage" being the name, WHM casts Glare less in an average encounter than SCH casts Broil or AST casts Malific - AST is the worst offender here. Stone/Aero spells also never made any sense for WHM and were a legacy of the Class system of 1.0. I think the issue starts to be when adding buttons "just to add buttons". WHM having 1-2 more damage buttons doesn't really achieve anything unless those buttons are interesting, and most proposals tend to be "another DoT" or "a GCD CD spell like Plegma", neither of which are particularly interesting. To use a Tank example, it's like PLD's Goring Blade now, which has been widely panned and attacked since the changes since it's just a button for the sake of it being there and most players seem to want it either changed or removed because it doesn't bring anything to the table other than unnecessary hotbar bloat.

SGE is kind of a more complex issue since it was introduced this way, so if anything, it'd make more sense to change SCH back to its SB form (since the Devs seem set against going back to the HW days) instead of SGE, since this is the only way SGE has ever been. But either would probably be fine, just not both. The one thing that does get me is the notion that Healers press only one button, which isn't true of any of the Healers as far as I can tell unless you literally aren't doing your role/job.

But, it's also why I think they should separate them more. WHM and SGE being what they are today wouldn't be an issue of AST and SCH didn't have almost the same rotations that they do. There's a thread in the Healer forum ("Healers then and now") which was an uncharacteristically calm and rational discussion as far as the Healer forum goes, and where the posters actually talked about how WHM, SCH, and AST have changed over time and their current issues. SCH's biggest one, surprisingly to...pretty much everyone...is that Broil having a 1.5 sec cast time has totally removed any other buttons from their common rotation since they no longer have any reason to use Ruin 2 in most cases, leading to their core rotation being only Broil with one Biolysis every 30 seconds. WHM, on the other hand, has the most DPS buttons considering at least 4 of your GCDs per minute are Afflatus and you have some mild skill expression in trying to land Misery during a buff window while not overcapping Lilies.

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lol, fair enough!

I agree on DPS. SMN I like, RDM and MCH and NIN I kinda like, but you're right in that all but SMN have at least one thing that I just REALLY despise that keeps me from liking any of them. Though I disagree on SMN - I actually find it really fun to play - I agree that the rest all seem to be a case of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsqHEmMao8w "No catch...although we are technically in New Jersey." Even the ones that seem more or less "I think I like this" tend to have ONE something that makes them ridiculously obnoxious.

I liked old PLD okay, but I think new PLD is actually better and more flexible, though it baffles me that the Devs didn't buff its potencies in 6.35. The entire point of the rework was to shift it to fit the 2 min meta so it could be balanced to do damage comparable to the others. Yet it doesn't, which kinda defeats the whole point. They need to buff it a bit to make up that and actually justify the rework.

I do think Tanks are in a better place than Healers because they actually DO have that diversity. GNB is what SGE should have been, a Tank, but designed to appeal to Melee DPS players in a mechanical sense. On the other end of the spectrum, you have WAR which is pretty braindead easy. Somewhere in the middle you had DRK (complex burst, easy filler; much like NIN or MCH) and PLD (technical Job, with sustained damage and rotational profile; much like BLM or DRG). Granted, PLD was made into WAR2, but the Tank role at least still has the spread thanks to GNB and DRK...existing.

And yeah, Healing is pretty nuts these days because it's a game of CD management more than it is of proactive and reactive skill use and on-the-fly picking the right spell for the situation/needs of the moment and near future. Which is oddly why people find it more fun in things like 24 mans because of how chaotic those situations are and how they require more on the fly thinking and GCD healing use and less "It's time T+445 seconds into the fight, so per the healing plan, I use CD Y here...", which some people love but many people absolutely hate. Would be nice if the Healing role could take a page from the Tanking one, I think. It's definitely strange when you feel more like a healer running a level 30 Sunken Temple dungeon than running a level 90 dungeon.

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But yeah, it seems the main complaints from Tanks are number tuning/balance and a dislike of large/sweeping changes to Jobs (e.g. PLD rework), as well as some structural annoyance with encounter design not allowing them to really TANK like they used to...

[Lyth]

I hate games like League of Legends and GW2 because they went that way with it. I like being a Healer and a Support, and on more rare occasions, a Tank. In almost every game I play that has any kind of roles, those are my preferences, in roughly that order. If everyone's just different flavors of DPS...I'm not sure I'd play such a game. That sounds absolutely miserable. More dps on a Healer seems to defeat the entire purpose, but that aside, clutch saves (and defense/barriers) are what is fun to me. I can't imagine anyone liking that kind of game. I get that some people do, but...ugh, yeah, I'd probably quit if they did that. Or if it had launched that way, I'd never have gotten into it in the first place.

The elephant in the room is that it's convenient for a lot of tank and healer players to have these roles continue to function as second-rate DPS. You're always going to have a subset of 'purists' who feel that tanks are just there to soak damage and healers who feel that they should only be keeping the party alive and nothing more. So the act of merely trying to push out damage in these roles intrinsically makes you a higher percentile player than you would be actually playing a true DPS, due to the lack of competition. Big fish, small pond. If you have the confidence to play DPS, however, the role just has a lot more carry potential because of how large the difference in output is nowadays. It's the same reason why some people lament the loss of the old tank stance system, despite it being clunky and the fact that it really did nothing to make you really push yourself as a player. Simply keeping it off for the fight put you in the top 25% of players. It made you look good for no real effort, which was why people felt good about its existence despite it adding nothing of value to gameplay.

What's really frustrating about the shift in the role over time is that in ARR/Heavensward you had engaging tank movement with a lot of little tricks you could do to really improve your group's uptime, while putting out competitive dps (that often let you pull ahead of actual DPS players). So playing tank really felt like being the lynchpin of the team. That has been largely eroded from Stormblood on. I think the dev team see it as making these roles more accessible, but you end up with a situation where new players are afraid of tanking because they think it requires a lot of knowledge and effort, and experienced players don't want to tank because they know they can provide a much, much greater impact as DPS.

I also think that these two roles are limited by the legacy of 1.0. Mob movement in this game is a lot less fluid than even circa 2004 World of Warcraft, due to the requirements that mobs be stationary to auto/use actions as well as the snapshotting. There even is a historical bug on some older fights where forcing movement on mobs cancelled abilities that you shouldn't be able to cancel, or in some cases prevented them from executing any actions, linked to that same stationary requirement. This is one of the reasons why there was a significant change in fight design going into Stormblood, and why all of the knockback/draw-in effects generated by players were removed from PvE (the classic example was the Holmgang cancel on Wavetooth Sagahin's Dreadwash in Leviathan Ex). If they wanted to improve tank and healer gameplay, they'll need to address how actions get executed in this game (which is actually something I'd like to see much more than a graphical engine overhaul).

Snapshotting issues also means that there's less room for reactive gameplay, which is one reason why everything is so scripted. The one place I really like playing healers in is PvP-focused games, simply because it requires you to read what the enemy team is doing and react on the fly to their coordinated burst. But again, that really requires you to have very responsive healing systems that allow for fast reactions (i.e. GW1's 1/4s cast Transfuse Health).

[SargeTheSeagull]

My complaint with tanks is largely the same as it is with healers. They all feel very homogenous (similar rotations, mostly identical cooldowns) and recent fight design making them just feel like easy DPS (bosses auto-positioning, infrequent/negligible auto attacks, massive hitboxes). Plus they have so much self sustain that you almost never feel like you could die unless your cotank fails to provoke. I do think tanks need the fewest adjustments of the roles, but this is more a comment on how bad healers are and how dull DPS have become than it is praise for current tank design.

[RyuDragnier]

My complaint with tanks is largely the same as it is with healers. They all feel very homogenous (similar rotations, mostly identical cooldowns) and recent fight design making them just feel like easy DPS (bosses auto-positioning, infrequent/negligible auto attacks, massive hitboxes). Plus they have so much self sustain that you almost never feel like you could die unless your cotank fails to provoke. I do think tanks need the fewest adjustments of the roles, but this is more a comment on how bad healers are and how dull DPS have become than it is praise for current tank design.

1. The only tanks who feel relatively similar in rotation are DRK and WAR.
2. It's not easy DPS when the boss likes to throw something you have to mitigate into a double oGCD window.
3. DRK has no self sustain.

[Oizen]

1. The only tanks who feel relatively similar in rotation are DRK and WAR.
2. It's not easy DPS when the boss likes to throw something you have to mitigate into a double oGCD window.
3. DRK has no self sustain.

I don't think its unfair to say that tanks have homogenized to the point where all of them are similar.

[RyuDragnier]

I don't think its unfair to say that tanks have homogenized to the point where all of them are similar.

Defensive cooldown mitigation without taking extra effects into consideration, they definitely are. Add in the effects and they're not as similar. DPS is mostly not similar. GNB builds up cartridges to use, PLD does a 1-2-3 leading into bonus attacks, DRK and WAR basically unga bunga press hurt buttons...much to DRK's detriment.

[Elizasylen]

Yes it's easy enough to enjoy and you have enough agency that you don't depend on others as much.

[TheMisled]

As a (former) PLD main, very not happy at the moment. They butchered the PLD job for the sake of "fixing" it but managed to not even do that. It feels like GNB at home and I honestly can't recommend due to how boring it is, how much worse it is in general content, and how GNB feels like it just does everything better than it. Tanks are starting to blur into each other with this 2 min window bs and I'm rapidly losing the desire to play this game, I haven't even really touched any of the 6.3 content

[Marxam]

Tanks are starting to blur into each other with this 2 min window bs and I'm rapidly losing the desire to play this game,

Sadly that's really the only way these business' function. It's only when their bottom line starts getting affected that they begin to care and sadly I relate to your sentiment. They've created a design philosophy that caters to casual gamers which historically has only shown short term gains with long term detriments. Nothing wrong with it per se but it's probably why you see long time players wish for the old playstyles, not that it was even difficult to grasp but rather everything had a meaning and place regardless of niche. Now its just push on cd and everything will naturally line up whereas before every job had their "own" timings.

I've basically stopped trying to offer advice as they are adamant on making the game a certain way, one which no longer appeals to me, but one last advice I will give them is to play test on a controller. For a dev team that is always concerned about button bloat they fail to understand how to overlay "dead buttons" over abilities that proc them. For example; Inner Release allowing the use of Primal Rend. You have two buttons that realistically only need to be one because if you never press Inner Release then you will never get access to Primal Rend thus making it a dead button.

The irony is that Bloodwhetting and Chaotic Cyclone in PvP literally works that way and it works intuitively and only takes up one button slot. The rise of 2 min meta means that there will be more "dead buttons" that are only proc'd by another button just to keep it in line with two mins, or worse, buttons that have multiple charges that only get used every two mins to fluff up the shallow rotation of some jobs.