Shortage of Tank .......

[kurokawa]

I've tanked to 50, twice, with WAR in 2.0 and PLD in 1.0.

Although I love the game now, tanking via DF is rarely fun.

Most of the time it's incredibly stressful. So much so I've halted my story at Aurum Vale.

Since Stone Vigil I've had players that really don't know what they're doing as they'd levelled through fates. It really shows later in game.

Tanking is hard enough, but unskilled DF parties are making it even worse.

What we have is 'a stressful party role' + 'dodgy/lottery grouping system' + 'fate levelling with no skill required' = mass tank/healer frustration and table-tossing.

I hope the new recruitment boards will bring more responsible people together, but I have no idea why the devs don't just decrease exp for fates and increase it in dungeons to make people learn their roles better.

[moody]

Since I run healer main and am working on tank (Glad at 26 so far) I figured I'd stop in to note that people are jerks to all classes. As a healer I saw plenty of angry tanks assault DPS and Healers for their own shortcomings. I also saw (even more) DPS assault tanks for the same.

As a tank I don't get nearly as much abuse from healers as I expected. Probably because I start off letting people know this isn't my main class and invite critique. However, I get a massive amount of rude commentary from DPS again when they ignore the numbered and marked order or pull additional groups from other places via bad tab rotation.

Playing tank is making me a better healer because I have a better grasp on how alpha strikes effect tanks, how annoying it is to have your interrupt on GCD (Seriously, wtf?) and how frustrating it is to see a snoozing mob wake up because of a pugilist and head straight for the THM. As a result, I take aggro and head to the tank now (on non-AoE centric mobs) so they can easy flash the aggro back. I place my fairies more carefully to make sure the tank gets regen benefits as often as possible, etc etc.

Side note: I'm really enjoying tanking so far. I do a dungeon 3-4 times until I feel it's understood, then grind to the next dungeon and do the same.

[Azoryl]

Every role has it idiots.

I level a BLM to 50... and while most tanks were good, I did have a couple bad ones.

I am leveling PLD now - funny story with that was I was in MAW at the first boss, I told the 2 BLM to have one of them LB. Someone replied "What is LB?" I was in shock. I told them BLM LB does AE damage. So on the 2nd boss, I told them to LB when the 3 little guys spawn. No LB. Finally on the last boss, I told them to LB on the 2nd set of adds. No LB. After we killed the boss, I politely told them, "Learn what LB is, and put it on your bars".

As a WHM, I haven't had a bad experience... except the time I forgot to click off cleric stance at the start of the dungeon and wondered why my heals were just not keeping the tank in a good range. The tank said afterwards" If your going to spam you might want to take off Cleric Stance" . I was so embarrassed. I felt like a complete noob.

[KraggyKor]

"UR a terrible tank" "LERN to hold threat" "Kill urself" (insert derogatory comment of your choice here). These are just a few of the things I've either seen people say to others or read about. I did not change the spelling for effect, but this is what people end up facing. This starts around level 15 when you have to start grouping, it's no wonder many don't continue on the path. As a tank you have to learn how to take a beating from the mobs AND your fellow players sometimes. This may help explain in part why the tank shortage is as bad as it is.

This!

Of course as others have said all MMOs suffer lack of tanks .. though XIV is the first case I've seen where healers are over-abundant .. and it's often because of this.

Of course, the reverse is also true and there are large numbers of jerk tanks infesting the DF, but ultimately XIV's players are responsible for the serious lack of tanks due to the wide-spread abuse they get, as noted here.


@Tricksy: "Makes me happy, now that I invested the time in relic+1 and DL gear. "

Which you soloed because obviously you didn't need a tank?

[HiirNoivl]

The minute I join a pick up someone in FC needs me ... soz.

[Ryutamashiisan]

I also pretty much refuse to tank basically anything non FC related, unless im just helping people out with ifrit/garuda/titan in DF because of peoples horrible attitudes. I have no qualms about my ability to tank however, i also have 0 incentive to play with kind of a-holes that i routinely see flooding everything else I do and all the shouts. I can almost guarantee if the community wasn't so terrible there'd be ALOT more tanks around. As tank you should expect to be the first point of attack from from monsters, not monsters and your own party as well.

[HiirNoivl]

Not to mention that sometimes even tanks get bored of tanking. Tank = FC DF = SMN :3

[Sybreed]

So far I haven't run into any d-bags that cry about my tanking, but on the flip side I have seen the damage FATES have done to this game. I tanked in WoW for 7 years, and let me tell you, some of the DPSers in this game make the average Night Elf Hunter named Legoluzz in WoW look like a tactical genius with lightning reflexes. I've seriously never so consistently grouped with dpsers in an mmo that seemed so ignorant of their role. Stack on top of this the ubiquitous issues with this games wretched netcode causing people to get hit by AoEs even when they're well out of the red, and you have a situation where tanking and healing is stressful as all hell in content that is largely mechanically brain dead simple (everything is absolute snoozefest facereoll till Qarn on up).

[DarkB]

Well Maybe if tanking wasnt 1 2 3 spam with couple more abilities, people would actually enjoy the job.

[BoomerOU]

I rolled a tank to beat the dps queues. Geared my DRG with instant pld queues, and now my pld is getting some gear love to progress in available content.

I highly recommend this (unless my tank queues stop being instant, in which case ... STOP IT)