Holy trinity.. Or maybe not.

[JTribal]

Reasonable Explanation

Yes, thank you for restoring my faith in humanity by providing a clear explanation. Although I'd be concerned about the usefulness of a Bard if this were to happen..

...What I want is for there not to be such an incredibly sharp divide between things that a melee dps can tank, and things that they can not....

To put it in even simpler terms, I want the relative strengths of the classes to be about the same in endgame as they were in the early game.
...The tank does almost as much damage, about 80-90%, as the dps when not in their tank stance. Later this drops to as low as 40%, which is where their current undesirable status comes from. I think 75% would be a good number. So if your average dps does, what, 400 dps in turn 8, your offtank, assuming they geared themselves like a DPS, would be doing 300 or even 350 should you choose to bring one instead of the roughly 250 they do now.

Basically, they need to put more of an emphasis on abilities than on stats.

Sorry, I'm still not understanding what you're getting at, your explanation is extremely contradictory. Do you want more support abilities or a buff in strength or tanks to be removed from the game or what?

Ever heard of a VIT dragoon? Me either

That's because Dragoons are not Tanks, same reason you've never heard of a VIT Summoner, Black Mage, or Monk.

[Immut]

So in actuality we've come full circle and we understood you correctly right from the beginning, and it isn't at all about the fight mechanics. It's about homogenizing all the classes. I personally believe this would be incredibly boring and I know I wouldn't be playing this game if it worked that way.

It's about fixing the problem of nobody wanting a second tank for any content.

Go back to the example of lancers and conjurers. If they had access to every ability in the game to cross class, the current tank classes have abilities that would make sense for a player specializing in defense to have. There is no need for the massive stat discrepancy because the game would play exactly the same, more or less. You would still want abilities like sentinel, vengeance, inner beast, and rampart to block large attacks. You would still want black mage's unparalleled AOE damage abilities, you would still want dragoon and monk's mobility and support skills, you'd still want summoner's battle raise and pets to split damage. The jobs in this game are already specialized enough in their abilities alone, the numbers only serve to limit the number of valid strategies for a given fight.

Yes, thank you for restoring my faith in humanity by providing a clear explanation. Although I'd be concerned about the usefulness of a Bard if this were to happen..

Sorry, I'm still not understanding what you're getting at, your explanation is extremely contradictory. Do you want more support abilities or a buff in strength or tanks to be removed from the game or what?

That's because Dragoons are not Tanks, same reason you've never heard of a VIT Summoner, Black Mage, or Monk.

Ok first off, I can't imagine a tank having something like ballad or paeon, and anything they did get would stack with foe requeim.

But yes what essentially needs to happen for people to stop preferring single tank strategies AND for players to start actually playing tanks is a buff in tank strength AND more support abilities for tanks. Both things need to happen because right now they're the role nobody wants and nobody wants to play. You only take the one because you HAVE to. It's like when your mom makes you take your little brother to the movies with your friends.

And why can tanks dps, but dps can't tank? Kind of unfair, really. Sure, tanks aren't very GOOD at dpsing, but dps don't even stand a chance at tanking, which again divides adds sharply into what must be tanked and what doesn't only because the first does about 4-5 times the damage of the second.

[Jandor]

I think Immut (I don't presume to speak for him) wants almost a hybridization of roles, plus the addition of more roles if you want to frame it like that. You have tank, dps and heals at the moment. It sounds like the idea is to add secondary roles almost, so a Paladin would function as a tank primarily and a buffer secondarily while for example a dragoon could dps as it's primary role and tank an enemy as a secondary role.

The point of contention seems to be that people on this forum tend to assume that the majority of people playing are like them and that most content is a joke to clear. The speed runners will still find the fastest way to clear content and always clear it that way. However for groups that are struggling, taking a Paladin for it's ability to buff defenses, absorb or mitigate damage to other players and cast (in this hypothetical) a cure worth caring about would really help lighten the load on healers for instance. Otherwise useless off-tanks could be useful and actively help clear content they've gone into using duty finder in a way that isn't just trying to maximize their rather poor DPS. As a bonus, providing a more proactive aspect to the tank jobs could theoretically make the jobs more popular amongst players who've so far avoided them due to their percieved simplicity.

[Jandor]

Yes, thank you for restoring my faith in humanity by providing a clear explanation. Although I'd be concerned about the usefulness of a Bard if this were to happen..

Theoretically if tanks were capable of more they'd burn through more MP and/or TP requiring a Bard to keep them fuelled .




Edit: Just to add, I find theorycrafting to be fun and I like it when MMO players find unique ways to clear encounters that the developers didn't forsee. I feel the rigidity of the current classes hinders that creative freedom and that's why I'd like to see the current roles diversified. I also think a game like FFXIV would suffer from it less than other MMOs due to ability of players to level any class on one character and the fact that every 6 months we get an update that makes it substantially easier to gear up alt classes, combined with this hypothetical diversification of roles allowing players of any class/job to play some kind of relevant role using alt gear I think it would be good for the game as a whole.