Shortage of Tank .......

[juniglee]

I main a tank, and for a change of pace, I am now currently trying to level a Black Mage. My Black Mage is currently Level 42.

However, I got here because of FATE grinding. If I had a choice, I would have liked to be able to run dungeons over and over again instead. However, we all know how long DPS queues are, and at best, if I ask my FC to run Brayflox with me (because I want that Battlemage set), it's easy enough to find a healer, but not a tank. I've always ended up pugging the tank, and even with a party of 2 DPS and 1 healer, it takes me 30 minutes to find a tank at best - this is also including the fact that I queued for all cultures (J/E/D/F), and I play on a Japanese server.

I don't get why this is the case, but I believe it points to a number of factors:
- There's nothing in it for tanks in lower level dungeons. I agree that right now I would probably not want to tank anything pre-Haukke, because I simply cannot get out of not using Rage of Halone anymore.
- Dungeons do end up taking a long time to complete, especially at lower levels. You can't really expect to speed run stuff like Sastasha, or Tam-tara. Toto-rak is probably the worst - the ambience, and general design of the dungeon just makes me sleepy tanking it.
- This is not related to dungeons, but the fact that there are more healers might be due to the fact that there are 3 Disciple of Magic classes, in comparison to 5 Disciple of War classes. The 3 Disciple of Magic classes pretty much interact with one another, this means that irrelevant of stats, their gears can somewhat be re-used among the classes. BLM can cross with ACN, SMN/SCH can cross with both THM and CNJ, and WHM can cross with THM. I find that most people who have previously mained a Disciple of Magic class, usually end up picking up WHM or SCH fairly early on too.
- In another relation to the point above, I also find that people who have previously played a Disciple of War class would probably end up re-classing to another Disciple of War class later on. However, Marauder is the least popular option because of all the horror coil stories these people would probably have heard of. Those who do run Gladiators, simply do it to get it to 50, they do not want to tank low level dungeons, as tank is more gear dependant than the other members. They also do this by repeatedly spamming FATEs, not by levelling via dungeons. I don't think I've ever met a tank in my times running Brayflox as a BLM, who has said that their WAR/PLD is their 2nd class.