Fine, Bloodwhetting is too OP

[CaedemSanguis]

To be honest, I'm still at a bit of a loss as to what the current 'target audience' for tanking is looking for as a challenge. What's your proposed skill check? How do you differentiate a skilled tank from an entry-level tank?

Mainly LB usage to save your party, cover/tbn/bw/hoc/clemency to save a party member/prog further
aside from the classic "good dps, consistency, fast learning"

It's not DPS, because tank DPS is underwhelming and most of your hotbar space is dedicated to defensives.

For instance I dont find DRG/RPR/VIP harder or easier than GNB or DRK in terms of dps optimization

It's not timing mitigation, because you invuln-swap everything and have on-demand burst healing.

I invite you to clear DSR P7 as a tank, or TOP P6, or even any criterion savage dungeon

It's not positioning, because a lot of fights are self-positioning and your melees probably already have learned how to compensate for your positioning errors even in the few cases where the game even allows you to make them. It just feels like a lost cause at the moment.

Yeah that's fair, a good tank should care about positionnals but dps also have tools

[Lyth]

The main way in which tanks differentiate themselves currently is positioning. I know that many tanks go through a phase of being convinced about the overwhelming significance of their DPS contributions, but nobody else shares that perception. This is just common sense - less of your toolkit is dedicated to doing damage because of mitigation bloat (taking up more than 1/3 of your actions) which in turn makes your rotations intrinsically simpler. Your contributions are evaluated and weighted by the devs at significantly less (in part because they want you to be able to fully concentrate your mental energy on invuln-swapping the 4-5 fixed-timestamp tankbusters without dying and accidentally causing a raid damage loss through a swiftcast-raise). In return, you can feel super important in dungeon content and not have to worry so much about vuln stacks on failed mechanics. You can be the big fish in a small pond. That's likely the main reason why some people still defend the progressive gameplay simplifications to the role instead of speaking out against it. Which is a shame, really, because you should want to encourage competitive-minded players and give them a skill differential to distinguish themselves for good performances.

Mitigation checks are pass-fail. A good mitigation check will make you ration out your cooldowns, and historically you wouldn't have needed to draw on end phases of ultimates for outlier examples of that. That's not entirely expected, however, because most players aren't interested in sitting around on their hands watching a support prog their mitigation strategy. You're largely interchangeable with a lot of other tanks equally capable of doing the exact same check at the same level of consistency (especially if you're on a half-decent DC). I think invulns are a big part of the problem, since they generally let you remove a tankbuster of your choice from the equation and let you bypass swap/split mechanics. Holmgang's recast in particular is much too low, even after being raised to 4 minutes. At minimum, the recasts should all be longer (probably in the range of 6 minutes). Alternatively, they should find a way to phase out invulns with a tier of high level mitigation (i.e. something in the 80% range) so that you're still forced to do mechanics and ration out cooldowns, although that may require revising some damage numbers on older content. Another option would be to routinely incorporate debuff effects that make incoming damage just flat out ignore invulns and force swaps.

I think the current tank approach to self-healing also detracts from your mitigation experience because all the emphasis gets placed on all or nothing tankbuster-level damage. Many of the pre-Creator fights had a lot of outgoing damage in autos and cleaves that would flat out just kill you if you didn't work as a team with your healer (or perfectly time short mitigations on unmarked cleaves, like on A3S). Part of the tanking experience involved sitting at extremely low health totals and knowing whether the next auto would kill you or not if it crit (as well as knowing the precise timing of said auto). These built-in rotational regens and on-demand burst heals are just there to comfort new tanks (especially the type of player who tends to chant at their healers to 'HEAL' when they drop below 90% HP) and make tank gameplay more or less stress free.

No, positioning checks are the last bastion for tanks, and Criterion does have some decent examples of this (especially Rokkon). I get the feeling that the fight designers mostly gave up on manual positioning after Midas, but you do see some moments of brilliance every so often. This is a much better soft check because you're trying to maintain uptime for both yourself and your DPS while anticipating mechanics. Incorporating more random elements (bees/cats/bouncing metal balls) represent another way to keep this fresh and interesting and introducing some moment-by-moment tank decision-making, but my feeling is that they will always hold back massively on difficulty when it comes to random elements like that (even ones that can be baited).

[CKNovel]

For instance I dont find DRG/RPR/VIP harder or easier than GNB or DRK in terms of dps optimization

I invite you to clear DSR P7 as a tank, or TOP P6, or even any criterion savage dungeon

Yeah that's fair, a good tank should care about positionnals but dps also have tools

I can't stress that enough, before claiming not being able to see a job responsibility, one should always experience the game as that role before making any claims on it.
Imagine if people started to downplay the difficulties of jobs such as garbage collector because they "only collect garbage and put them on a truck".

I've played Reaper and Viper in high-end content, I can confidently say they don't feel harder than any tanks.
Mitigation timing is important especially with the 15s long mitigation that can cover many hits. In Savage it's a bonus, in Ultimate it's necessary.
Bonus, in M3S and M4S, you can have your melees greed safely GCDs by putting short cooldowns on them, see the Divebomb or when M4S breaks the platform.

Positionning shouldn't be downplayed, I've seen too many tanks who have no idea about positionning and thinking "it's not important the melee can deal with it anyway".

[Lyth]

Also you:

The Coil (hunter & swiftskin) have side and back positionnal but are both green.
To be fair I'm being massively skill checked by the positionnals I wish at least it would be easier to read if we're going to end on a side or back positional. I know it depends on the GCD you start but after a burst, you can easily forget with what you started.

Viper feels completely different between Extreme 1 and 2, but I'm fine with not playing perfectly.

It's important to play to your strengths. Tank gameplay was never going to be about engaging DPS rotations. That's just a game design consequence, because you're playing with only half the action set of an actual DPS job. You're misleading yourself if you think that getting to be a pretend DPS on training wheels in any way compensates for what the tank role has lost over the past few expansions.

Instead, look at where tank gameplay has been eroded: in snap enmity, in positioning, and in mitigation. The first two are generally fight design dependent, but without significant revisions to both the power and availability of mitigation tools (and self-healing), tanking is going to feel less satisfying in a lot of content.

What you need is a change in design philosophy, and I hope that the discussion around potential 8.x reworks highlights this. The problem is that there are a subset of tanks who thinks that excessive defensive power = better, when the focus needs to be on creating more gameplay opportunities for tanks to demonstrate skill through good positioning and well-timed mitigation. And sometimes scaling back power creep and mitigation inflation creates those opportunities more effectively than adding to it.

[CKNovel]

Also you:

You're really never going to let go of this specific quote aren't you?
Remember when it was? 2 months ago? It's time you move on.

Guess what, things changes and people get better. Because I acknowledged I got skilled issue by the positionnals I exactly knew what to improve.
Yeah, might surprise you but it works like that. Admitting your weakness is the first step to tackle them.

It was the same thing with any jobs, I learned where I would fail and aim to correct them.
Your behavior is exactly why people don't want to share their struggles and people have a problem when being told they get a case of "skill issue".

[Carighan]

I dislike how much the positioning-game got trivialized because ~all bosses teleport back to the middle and re-orient for ~all mechanics.

It's so lame.

[Lyth]

...

I can recall what people said on this forum ten years ago. Don't worry, you're not the only one. But I'll be reading your words back to you every single time that you make a 'confident' contradiction. Judging from the trends around the length of expansions, I expect we'll get a good three years or so out of this quote.

But it's not really a competition between roles. If your goal was to absolutely push the limits of DPS optimisation, you'd be maining an actual DPS job. That's just common sense. It's good to broaden your experiences, but at the end of the day there's always an opportunity cost involved with how you invest your time. What I'm questioning is how we can make tanking worth that investment again. That means playing to your strengths. How can we make mitigation more engaging? How can we make positioning more engaging? Are there elements of enmity generation (especially snap enmity) that can be used to keep tanks engaged? It's the combination of these things that makes tanking unique. Without it, you're just left with a third-rate DPS subcategory on training wheels. You might as well get rid of the role altogether at that point.

I want tanking to have a skill differential again because I want the role to be worth going back to. I've watched them progressively rip out everything from the role that I once was passionate about, only to replace it with this auto-regen, on-demand burst healing nonsense that caters to the lowest common denominator. Let's bring skill expression back to tanking. Part of this is encounter design dependent, I get it. But a really good starting point would be to rebuild how defensive toolkits are put together from the ground up. And I think actions like Bloodwhetting, Shake it Off, and Holmgang are at the epicentre of this defensive powercreep.

[Lyth]

I dislike how much the positioning-game got trivialized because ~all bosses teleport back to the middle and re-orient for ~all mechanics.

100%. That was probably the final straw that wore me down, personally.

There's some hope here, though, because the past tier was a little better than most. I'm hoping that they'll continue to improve in future encounter designs.

[CKNovel]

I can recall what people said on this forum ten years ago. Don't worry, you're not the only one. But I'll be reading your words back to you every single time that you make a 'confident' contradiction. Judging from the trends around the length of expansions, I expect we'll get a good three years or so out of this quote.

But it's not really a competition between roles. If your goal was to absolutely push the limits of DPS optimisation, you'd be maining an actual DPS job. That's just common sense. It's good to broaden your experiences, but at the end of the day there's always an opportunity cost involved with how you invest your time.

"I won't do it because I don't want to invest time."
But you have the time and energy to remember what people say on this pointless forum 10 years ago?

If you rely on ad hominem instead of hard facts and experience, your arguments lack a foundation.
Beyond your opinion you've exposed no facts that can contradict anything.

Opinions aren't facts. I don't want to run in circle again because you have confidence in your missplaced opinion.

As for mitigation, it's fine. What we have currently with physical/magical split is better as we just brainlessly used them on every raidwide. It's good that for once, they're not the same used everywhere.
If you want "something else" it's the game that requires more combat mechanics. As long as XIV remains a number game where only damage and HP matters, we'll always run to the same problem.

[Lyth]

??

No matter how 'confident' you are in your abilities, being good in one role is always going to come at the cost of being even better at another. It's called deskilling, and it's true of any procedural task. If you want to be the best DPS player you can be, then you have to invest your time into playing DPS and maintain that focus. The same is true for tanking.

Currently, it's not worthwhile to be a skilled tank because the game does not reward it. It is, however worthwhile to be a skilled DPS.