Is Tank the happiest/most satisfied role right now?

[Absurdity]

Exactly what Oizen said. Since GnB has a builder/spender design it suffers from any downtime where you can't generate resources while WAR gets to happily watch their burst cooldowns count down since they don't have to spend any resources on it. DRK on the other hand just regenerate them passively while doing nothing. As for PLD, I don't even know what it does, but damage doesn't seem to be it's thing this expansion.

Now this absolutely does not mean that I want this changed for Gunbreaker, having to actually execute my rotation correctly for my burst to properly work is something that makes the job interesting to me. And if downtime costs me some dps then so be it.

When I play WAR on the other hand I sometimes even end up breaking my combo when I'm not paying attention because watching the paint on my wall is more interesting, which tends to happen on that job, and it doesn't matter. Oh wow I lost 20 gauge, big deal when I get 3 Fell Cleaves, 1-2 Inner Chaos and a Primal Rend for free every burst window, only requiring me to have the cosmic brain power to press IR on cooldown.

[RyuDragnier]

Exactly what Oizen said. Since GnB has a builder/spender design it suffers from any downtime where you can't generate resources while WAR gets to happily watch their burst cooldowns count down since they don't have to spend any resources on it. DRK on the other hand just regenerate them passively while doing nothing. As for PLD, I don't even know what it does, but damage doesn't seem to be it's thing this expansion.

PLD's a mix. Its main burst damage is basically FoF, Requiscat and the Blades combo. Any downtime means they come off cooldown faster. But the blades also use MP, so downtime restores that as well.

[OdinelStarrei]

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.

I'm going to go really unhinged for a second.

I respect a lot of people on these boards, in-game, even the stream/YT scene. Like, hand to my heart, I really do. I also, despite trying to seem as level-headed as possible, hold a significant amount of hatred towards what has happened, what this game has become, and the community at large.

I can say with zero reservations, in a direct competition between how much I care about FFXIV, and how much I care about random online person, that I care way more about you as an individual, Semirhage, or Lyth, or Sebazy, or tauras, or literally anyone who is willing to at least have a rational discussion about PLAYING FFXIV in good faith, and have that in and of itself be a satisfying experience without the stipulation that I beat my dick in with a brick in bleeding edge content to get even a crumb of job satisfaction.


I'm sick of this shit. Huurrrr it's just burnout!! No. This isn't burnout. It's beyond burnout, it's complete rejection of the game state as it currently is. It's abject hatred. Look at these stats.



I did all the content in Heavensward! I went back and did all the content in ARR! All the content in Stormblood! And even with all my reservations about Shadowbringers, I was STILL IN THERE, and did everything! This expansion? I look at this expansion with such incredible negativity, I almost can't believe I'm still living in the same reality. My tastes in games literally hasn't changed. My life has only gotten easier with time. Something fundamental broke in me this expansion, once I killed Zodiark, and once again when I killed DSR. I cannot even hear the name "Yoshi-P" or the phrases "Job Design" or "Ancients" without getting at least partially pissed off.

Why are you still here, dude? Take care of yourself! That goes for anyone by the way. Are you still enjoying getting ignored 24/7? Are you still loving how people deliberately misinterpret and gaslight you for trying to offer criticism on healers/tanks/content/job design/story/literally anything at all ever. Aren't you sick of "Try it out! Give us feedback!" and then for them to change maybe 1 thing in your favor the entire EXPANSION while spitting in your face for everything else? Why doesn't anyone remember all the times we've been screwed over? Or "If you want to actually play the damn game at a level beyond braindead, please break your head against on-content Ultimates for months!" "If you're ACTUALLY out of content, where's your 10000 Cursed Hoards in PoTD achievement, HUH?" "If all your friends quit, just find new friends who are trapped in this sunk-cost fallacy instead of escaping like a reasonable human!" This is like early 2000s, search up a coding issue or bug or stopcode, you get some knob in a forum who says "PM'd you the fix "-level infuriating at the absolute state of this excuse of a video game. If SE had to choose between something interesting, healthy and experimental but might take more than 0 people to balance/moderate and some people might not like it, or the same cookie-cutter, nutritious gruel we've been served up with as of late, we're getting gruel every single time.

Do yourselves a favor if this at all resonates with you, and leave. This is ridiculous, you have people honestly complaining that people keep asking for actual failure states for being unable to manage dungeon-level encounters and the same builder-spender rotations on all of the jobs, with no meaningful support archtypes. Don't they understand that they've already "won" the battle against people who love gameplay over doing actually NOTHING except talking to each other? Should've been a BLM main, that way I could have one nice thing stay consistently good while everything I love about FFXIV slowly peeled away from me like my skin on a torture rack, hyberbole, naturally. Does this seem "stoic" and "subdued" to you, Renathras? No. This is something I should've said a long time ago, I should've just been angry the whole time instead of hoping for SE to cater to a now minority.

Wasted my money on the figurines, wasted my money on the artbooks and lorebooks, going TO waste my money on fanfest this year, I wasted my time with this game. I wish I never started.

Worst part is, I'll be back next patch for the normal raids, since thinking about even savage makes me want to vomit. Absolute idiot. Complete lunatic.

[RyuDragnier]

[Lyth]

Sure, I can weigh in. 3360 days subbed/1018 days playtime currently, although I'm sure that there are others in here who have been around longer.

I don't really have expectations around what comes of my own feedback, or whether other people agree with me. I've been fortunate in that some of my ideas have had enough backing to produce changes, but there's an element of timing and luck to that. And I know that there are plenty of things that I can't change.

As for any negativity that you might encounter around here, I think that comes with the territory. Players are here to negotiate and advocate for changes that benefit them. You can't be seen as openly happy and content while arguing that your job should be stronger, or whatever else you're after. The problem is that most people don't know when to stop seeking bigger advantages, even if it makes the game less fun for everyone else. But that's just a reflection of human nature. One of the reasons that I like the DRK community in here is because many of the regulars seem to at least have a sense of fairness towards other jobs when bartering for change.

Stormblood was very much a crossroads for this game's design. Prior to that, a lot of fights required tanks to take an active role in positioning the boss like you would see in most trinity-based MMOs that preceded it. The primary reason for the change had to do with the fact that mobs are required to stop to 'cast' any action (auto-attacks included), and movement can prevent and even cancel mob actions. The end result is that the game we currently play is a lot closer to an action MMO's fight design, with less emphasis on support gameplay. But that's been in the works for a few expansions now.

I grew dissatisfied with the tanking situation by Shadowbringers, so I swapped over to melee for this expansion, and it's great to be able to have more of an impact. Unfortunately, as a tank, if you're not actively positioning mobs in a way that supports your team, the only other way that you directly bolster your team's performance is by doing more damage, and we've seen that support gap widen with time. I think that's the crux of the problem that needs to be addressed, but I'll watch and see what they do.

I've also found that I've been enjoying the time that I do play tanks a lot more now that I've had a chance to have a break from tanking. I've started spending more time on GNB in Eureka Orthos and I've been enjoying it a lot. I wish that there was a consolidated thread like the DRK one with ongoing discussion, and I'm curious to see what the job's players want to see in next expansion.

[Kabooa]

As for any negativity that you might encounter around here, I think that comes with the territory. Players are here to negotiate and advocate for changes that benefit them.

And heaven help you if you happen to be on the other side of that, or even just think it would be better to move in a different direction.

[ForsakenRoe]

snip

Hell yeh man, tell it how it is, no remorse, no apologies, just go bankai because trying to act nice and saying 'please can we have a crumb of actual brain activity required from us' is clearly not getting through

[Renathras]

I'm going to go really unhinged for a second.

<goes unhinged>

Well, you certainly did what you said you'd do...

[Iedarus]

Hell yeh man, tell it how it is, no remorse, no apologies, just go bankai because trying to act nice and saying 'please can we have a crumb of actual brain activity required from us' is clearly not getting through

To this day I regret not screenshotting that one post made by a female Au Ra in the DPS forums talking about how overall job satisfaction is at an all time low, even mentioning how every datacenter is bottlenecked on healers. Granted I'm not surprised it got deleted since it was quite vulgar, but it had the exact same energy as Odinel's post.

[Absurdity]

To this day I regret not screenshotting that one post made by a female Au Ra in the DPS forums talking about how overall job satisfaction is at an all time low, even mentioning how every datacenter is bottlenecked on healers. Granted I'm not surprised it got deleted since it was quite vulgar, but it had the exact same energy as Odinel's post.

When the frustration builds up over close to 4 years it's gonna burst out at some point...well, either that or you simply quit and never look back.