Quote Originally Posted by J-Reyno View Post
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There are two trends that have occurred across the past few expansions. First, the amount of mitigation and self-sustain provided by tanks and healers has steadily increased over time. This is partially because most support jobs see at least one or two defensive additions to their toolkit every expansion, and partially because when a job within a support role gets a new defensive buff, everyone else starts demanding parity. The end result is a net inflation of your mitigation toolkits over time.

The second is that damage output has generally gone down over time. Historically, mobs including bosses were allowed to land critical hits. That created degree of damage variance and unpredictability that you needed to be able to respond to. Bosses also had a higher frequency of tankbusters, which in turn forced more tank swaps. As an example, the opening phase of T9 alone had about four tankbusters in its loop. That's more tankbusters than you see in some modern Savage fights. In between tankbusters, there were fairly regular cleaves, which hit for half your HP and could kill party members if positioned incorrectly. This was at a time when tanks had much fewer defensive abilities than we have now, and PLD had no raidwide mitigation. And you're asking for more mitigation and self-healing tools across all tanks? Have you seen current day WAR?

The reason why we've gotten to this place is because everyone wants to treat this like a single player game where they have personal control over the outcome. That's fine for a DPS player because you're there to do as much damage as possible and focus on your own mechanical execution. The reason why support roles were traditionally interesting was because your performance was interlinked with your team. If you want to survive the incoming damage you do need to rely on your healers for healing and shielding. If you want to have enough mitigation tools to survive incoming tankbusters, you need to swap with your co-tank. Not because the game puts a debuff on you, but because you might run out of cooldowns. This interdependence does mean that sometimes you die for reasons outside of your control. But it also gives you opportunities to shine by cross-compensating and cooperating with your teammates. If you extract this away from tanks, then tanks end up functionally as melee dps on training wheels.