Is Tank the happiest/most satisfied role right now?

[BasedRagnarok]

I'm a Paladin, I am happy with it. Even though I am eating all the hits it helps to know that I am supporting my team over all.
So yeah I am happy with tank.

[Derio]

I dont think we are happy. We are just dealing with what we got until 7.0 where we will have more to complain about. Tanks are in a decent spot right now. Not bad, but not necessarily good either. However there are other roles that have way bigger problems than us

[Absurdity]

I dont think we are happy. We are just dealing with what we got until 7.0 where we will have more to complain about. Tanks are in a decent spot right now. Not bad, but not necessarily good either. However there are other roles that have way bigger problems than us

Pretty much. Tanks aren't absolutely terrible, unlike healers. They're okay and about what you would expect considering how terrible the current combat design is in general.

Which doesn't mean tanks are in a great spot, we just have bigger issues to deal with first or the issues tanks suffer from aren't specific to the role and more of a general job design problem.

[Hierro]

I'm still upset about DRK turning into a WAR clone. Now, I love WAR don't get me wrong, but I played DRK when I wanted something different to shake things up. Like, when you enjoy sweet candy, spicy candy, or sour candy. But instead sour just got replaced with more sweet, and no sour candy is made at all. Now, these forums are all way too quiet for my taste, there used to be discussion back in the day. There used to be things to fight over. Not anymore. No one bitches like they used to, and that's a shame cause I thrived off that.

[Renathras]

I'm still upset about DRK turning into a WAR clone. Now, I love WAR don't get me wrong, but I played DRK when I wanted something different to shake things up. Like, when you enjoy sweet candy, spicy candy, or sour candy. But instead sour just got replaced with more sweet, and no sour candy is made at all. Now, these forums are all way too quiet for my taste, there used to be discussion back in the day. There used to be things to fight over. Not anymore. No one bitches like they used to, and that's a shame cause I thrived off that.

Hop over into the Healer forum. Lively there.

DPS forums are quite a bit, too.

That was why I posted this thread, I noticed the Tank forum was a lot more subdued and stoic. Which... ...I suppose fits the Tank archetype, now that I think about it.

[OdinelStarrei]

Hop over into the Healer forum. Lively there.

DPS forums are quite a bit, too.

That was why I posted this thread, I noticed the Tank forum was a lot more subdued and stoic. Which... ...I suppose fits the Tank archetype, now that I think about it.

I don't think it has anything with the archetype. The tank players I've met in this game over the years were just as white-hot furious about their role as anyone else is. When tanks got simplified, mains were pissed. The only saving grace was that when ShB had all these changes, we had GNB on top to occupy some of the conversation. The difference is that we didn't get gutted as hard as healers did, and at most skill levels each tank still has enough differentiation to be passable. It's the gradual slide into bland sludge the entire combat loop is going through that is a much bigger problem..

I can only speak for myself, but the tank roles is where I posted the most, because there was a period where people thought their feedback was actually important for tanks. But, it's not. If the things people liked about tanking back in the day are confirmed not to come back, there's little point in posting about it. The real differences you're looking for in tone is because everyone who cared enough to scream loudly about tanks has already packed up and left. What, are they gonna un-rework WAR, DRK, AND PLD for me because I don't like most of the changes since SB, or especially in EW? Of course not. There's no point in posting rants here any longer, because the game is going to go in a direction like many here vehemently hate, a few of us begrudgingly accept, and a portion who don't care either way or gladly accept the atomized remnants of our job/encounter design with open arms. Reading previous conversations here, we're honestly lucky the monkey's paw that is stitched to the tank role didn't reach through the screen and punch us in the mouth. As a minority of people who even bother to post anything on the forums at all, it's better to just accept the permanent misery of the situation, and cope with it as best as possible.

Healers and DPS who haven't internalized this fruitless suffering will do so eventually. I, and I guess other veteran tanks just gave up sooner than they did, and were replaced faster by newer tanks who didn't lose anything, that's all. It doesn't matter how much logic a conversation contains or how much you write and cite, there's only one direction we're going in. Mediocrity. And mediocrity doesn't deserve such passion, personally.

[Lyth]

...

Tank rotation gameplay hasn't really changed that much over the years. You could probably make a case from ARR to Heavensward (remember ARR PLD?) but I think if SE released live 'Heavensward servers' in the current era players would very quickly realize that they were more unhappy with the old job designs than they are now. The two things that have changed is that tanks have noticeably less carry potential as far as dps output is concerned, and fights have de-emphasized traditional movement and positioning in favor of ARPG style bosses that control their own movement. But that ship sailed in Stormblood.

Personally, I don't think the problem is around listening to feedback. I've seen absolute proof that they do, and I'm grateful that they've directly responded to my suggestions in the past. The problem that I see is that it's very difficult to get a constructive discussion in here around how to make the game environment better for everyone, rather than getting mired in self-interest. Players are overly concerned about what the 'competition' is doing and getting. 'Oh you introduced a new job? Well that job is boringly easy. Mine's more difficult. Why doesn't my job do more damage than them? Why do they have a cool new movement ability and a bubble shield? Where's my movement ability and bubble shield?' And I can't help but look at this from the outside and wonder at all the bitter feuding and miserable elbowing over advantages.

I don't want a competitive edge over everyone else. That's so unsatisfying. I want a level playing field, and encounter/action design that allows for more spatial problem solving. If anything, take the intrinsic job advantage, as long as I still have the opportunity to outplay you through skillful use of mechanics. That's actually the main quality that I loved about Heavensward DRK. It wasn't actually the job design at all. It was about an experience that was unique to that particular time. You can't recreate it just by blindly copying it and bringing it back into the present.

The discussions that I find the most interesting are around new actions. If you could decide what the next three actions for your job will be in the coming expansion, what would they be? You will invariably get a lot of dry responses, such as requests to copy over cool abilities from other jobs (hand-me-downs) or uninspiring requests for yet more combos (please have the game tell me what button to press next). But then I look at actions like Ingress/Egress and it makes me feel really good about the game. Could you store up actions like the Relativity mechanics in E12S? Could you create a save point that returns players back to a location after a certain amount of time has elapsed? Can you create a warp point between two parts of an arena with a fixed number of uses? Could you put down an interactable that other players can use? What haven't we seen yet that could result in interesting skill expression? I think a lot of this comes down to movement abilities, but I want to see more of these types of discussions.

[Semirhage]

Personally, I don't think the problem is around listening to feedback. I've seen absolute proof that they do, and I'm grateful that they've directly responded to my suggestions in the past. The problem that I see is that it's very difficult to get a constructive discussion in here around how to make the game environment better for everyone, rather than getting mired in self-interest. Players are overly concerned about what the 'competition' is doing and getting. 'Oh you introduced a new job? Well that job is boringly easy. Mine's more difficult. Why doesn't my job do more damage than them? Why do they have a cool new movement ability and a bubble shield? Where's my movement ability and bubble shield?' And I can't help but look at this from the outside and wonder at all the bitter feuding and miserable elbowing over advantages.

It's not like the community arrives at this point out of nowhere. Square Enix has a pattern where, in the process of creating a "new" job, blatantly either copy or remove/steal parts of an old one. Then they make the "new" ability more potent, cost less, have a lower cooldown, work the same way but with the clunk removed from the new one (but not the old one), whatever to bring players to the new job. Players of the old job go "Hey. What? Why didn't you just fix my job if you were going to do that?" See: Dancer, Astrologian, Sage for prime examples.

[Lyth]

It's not like the community arrives at this point out of nowhere. Square Enix has a pattern where, in the process of creating a "new" job, blatantly either copy or remove/steal parts of an old one. Then they make the "new" ability more potent, cost less, have a lower cooldown, work the same way but with the clunk removed from the new one (but not the old one), whatever to bring players to the new job. Players of the old job go "Hey. What? Why didn't you just fix my job if you were going to do that?" See: Dancer, Astrologian, Sage for prime examples.

AST (and DRK) were probably unintentional in this regard. The problem with ARR's design was that they only introduced two tanks and two healers. PLD and WHM were very much the standard archetypes for each that you see in trinity MMOs, and WAR and SCH ended up being whatever else the devs felt like adding. The end result was that WAR and SCH were grandfathered into a lot of advantages that gave them dominance over the next few expansions. When AST and DRK were introduced, there wasn't really a lot of design space left over to create new jobs within the role. So while they were probably intended as a sort of 'middle ground' between the original two tanks/healers, they ended up replacing the weaker of the two in Heavensward, and then traded places over the next few expansions.

DNC and SGE are probably better examples, but they were created with a specific purpose - to create alternatives for BRD and SCH such that they don't feel like a mandatory raid slot. And that was very much a needed change. You just get tired of always seeing the same jobs in every comp.

But that's actually much less common. What we see more often is players specifically asking for actions that they enjoy on other jobs to be brought over to their own. WAR was probably the biggest offender in this regard from Heavensward into Shadowbringers. Where's my Plunge? Where's my Divine Veil? Where's my TBN? We all complain about homogenization, but we also insist on keeping up with the Joneses. I personally think the better solution is to just give every job unique advantages that cannot be directly compared with each other. If you can make a numerical comparison between two actions, there will always be a clear winner. If you can't, then balance becomes a lot more interesting. It also means that if you stop copying actions across, you see less hand-me-downs and more creative actions that we haven't seen before. But the playerbase needs to buy into that and be willing to accept that their job won't be equally good at everything.

[Renathras]

It's not like the community arrives at this point out of nowhere. Square Enix has a pattern where, in the process of creating a "new" job, blatantly either copy or remove/steal parts of an old one. Then they make the "new" ability more potent, cost less, have a lower cooldown, work the same way but with the clunk removed from the new one (but not the old one), whatever to bring players to the new job. Players of the old job go "Hey. What? Why didn't you just fix my job if you were going to do that?" See: Dancer, Astrologian, Sage for prime examples.

This is kind of a different argument than "not listening to feedback".

Personally, I don't think the problem is around listening to feedback. I've seen absolute proof that they do, and I'm grateful that they've directly responded to my suggestions in the past. The problem that I see is that it's very difficult to get a constructive discussion in here around how to make the game environment better for everyone, rather than getting mired in self-interest.

Agreed.

I think what the issue is that that people often say "Devs don't listen to feedback" when what they mean is "Devs aren't doing the thing(s) we're asking for".

The Devs may very well be LISTENING/READING feedback. Yoshi P seems to be very aware that Healer players (at least some of them) are upset at the state of Healing and very vocal about it, for example. The issue seems to be that the Devs have decided they don't want to go a certain route (e.g. more damage rotations/complexity for Healers), and so they're trying to figure out what else they can do instead, while players asking for more damage abilities insist the Devs aren't listening to their feedback when the Devs clearly ARE, they just don't want to implement those specific solutions.

The worst part is when the monkey's paw strikes - woe be to anyone who complains their Job does "more work" but isn't rewarded enough (in their mind, with more damage), because the corrupt-a-wish monkey's paw will, every single time, smite your DPS kit into homogenized simplistic gruel so you'll never have to complain of doing more work that isn't compensated again. (It's shocking to me how many people still make that complaint given the historic results of those Jobs that do it enough...)

And as you say, people often ask for things other Jobs have instead of just playing those other Jobs. SOMETIMES it's warranted (if something is effectively mandatory - like all Healers have to have a Raise, for example), but often, it isn't, and the result is people get homogenization because they literally asked for it.

I agree that uniqueness is the solution, but that requires people accepting their Job won't have things that everyone else has. And as long as those things aren't essential, it isn't a problem. Expedience isn't essential, for example. Cover isn't essential. But they can be useful or interesting to have.

EDIT:

I do agree that, in a lot of cases, Jobs have changed less than people often make them out to have. In some cases, they have changed more, though.

It's funny to me how often people insist BLM hasn't changed, for example, considering every level cap, your optimal rotation has been completely, in some cases WILDLY, different. Contrast RDM, where the rotation has been effectively identical since it was released, just adding a new ability that is conditional to use (Enchanted Reprise in ShB, Magicked Barrier in EW) and an additional stinger on the tail end of the burst combo. PLD had changed far less (well, until 6.3, anyway...), though I think Tanks are one of the roles that HAS actually changed somewhat (the Jobs, I mean, but also the role)