Hi everyone. I've been playing FFXIV since release & MMOs for around a decade. By day I work as a professional game designer+developer. Through my time playing FFXIV, I've developed my critiques of the game's systems, and I thought I'd like to publicly share the result of some of my designbrain clinking its gears. I'd like to welcome discussion, and I'd enjoy brainstorming with you all, but it's only fair I confess I'm mostly making this thread to bring some things to the developer's attention, if possible.

Suggestions I make, when I do, will largely be paladin-centric as a limit to my experience, but I've also played warrior a bit and heard much of friends' experiences with it. I'd like to largely avoid making specific suggestions, as I believe the development team will ultimately have the best judgement in any specific matter.

I'm targeting tank design, because I often hear players express frustrations with the role. Please do not consider this a comprehensive analysis, but simply an idea dump I've done for leisure in my spare time.


1. Enmity manipulation is the core of tanking, yet lacks complexity to create fun dynamics to play with.

Outside of gearing well, there is no in-combat way to increase your enmity generation during pinch situations, and there's nothing you can do if your party out-paces your enmity generation. This is largely a non-issue due to careful number balancing on the developer's part.

Tank design faces the challenge that, if enmity is too hard or infeasible to expect players to build sufficiently (keeping mob attention), then the whole party breaks down.
Even in high level encounters, tanks have a very limited toolset for generating enmity. It's something you could say is taken for granted within their design, yet makes up a huge component of their function. This is a particularly huge issue in low level content, where tanks often struggle to maintain enmity for lacking their full suite of enmity-building skills.

How obfuscated this element of their design is makes learning the tank role a significantly larger hurdle for new players compared to other role. Even in the player UI, enmity is given a largely backseated display compared to other elements (like health and MP), which suffer even worse for their lack of self-evidence; for anyone who doesn't know what the symbols & bars mean, they'll have no way to know what they're looking at represents enmity. The term itself, enmity, even goes largely unexplained. Even the excellent (through frequently smothering) Active Help System does very little to explain these UI & mechanics, which are crucial tools to playing your role; very frequently, new tanks in low level duty finder groups will often need intricate coaching from other players. This creates a lot of friction in the group & an unnecessary burden on other party members, sometimes even resulting in the duty failing for the tank being unable to adapt so quickly.

2. Tanks, geared and played well, can do very little to make further impact on an encounter

The second core component of tanking that follows keeping enmity up is taking damage. Tanks are tanks because they're a better damage sponge than other players, each class/job having their own utilities for doing so. Beyond timing cooldown usage well in tune with the demands of the fight, there's little tanks can do to further impact the encounter. Paladins are especially bad in this regard, where due to their low dps potential & skill complexity (which mostly comes from defensive cooldown management), off-tank duties practically leave them sitting around with their hands in their pockets.

3. Many players choose tank roles, seeing their Tough & Powerful aesthetics, and choose them expecting to be damage dealers, becoming either sorely disappointed with what they get or flat out not playing their role at all.

4. Boss encounter design reflects how little tanks have to offer in party dynamics, often giving encounters boring gimmicks(ex: towers in Labyrinth of the Ancients' Behemoth fight) or extraneous adds(ex: almost everything) to make use of any tank that's not holding the boss. Or even more recently, reducing the slots given to tanks, such as in Syrcus Tower.

5. Tank debuffs (Pacification, Stun, etc) have, at best, very niche uses and at worst none at all. Paladin has a good chunk of their abilities dedicated to these types of effects, yet are completely useless in many fights due to the immunity system. Why should players have these tools if they're largely inapplicable, except in very marginal ways? Why not design encounters to leverage & challenge these tools in interesting ways, knowing that the players have them, rather than making them simply useless?

6. Tanks have few faculties for manipulating mob positioning. Many DPS classes have skills to bring them closer to or farther from mobs in some way, yet Tanks curiously lack these, despite them often needing to manipulate mob positions the most. While Holmgang is a notable exception, it's clearly designed for different circumstances, and lacks applicability as a significant gap closer for its 6y range. This creates many tedious circumstances for tanks, especially when they struggle to peel aggro from a partymate in unfortunate situations.

So as a conclusion:
1. The enmity system often proves to be a needless barrier to new players, and tanks lack the faculties to utilize the system in any interesting way.
2. Tanks lack potential to impact the fight outside of keeping enmity & being as little a strain on healers as possible.
3. Tanks don't function like DPS classes, despite them giving off that impression to new players.
4. Encounter design often reflects how little tanks have to add to party dynamics.
5. Tank debuffs (Pacification, Stun, etc) have, at best, very niche uses and at worst none at all.
6. Tanks have few faculties for manipulating mob positioning, despite that often being their responsibility.

My personal suggestions are as follow.
Most importantly, I'd like to advocate for reworking the UI to make enmity mechanics more self-evident. As a corollary to that, as enmity generation is often a trivial but crucial task, I believe it should be made easier for tanks to generate and hold it, and making *what* you do once you have that enmity a more critical element of the class design. Tanks should be given better faculties to contribute to the fight & support their party; Cover and Rage of Halone's strength debuff are good examples, yet rarely give chance to apply in any meaningful way. While giving tanks more DPS capability, and also more complexity for Paladins, could solve certain issues for off-tanking, I believe it alone wouldn't be a comprehensive solution to making tank, on a fundamental role level, more enjoyable to play. People like doing a lot of damage, they like that feeling of being indestructible; why not leverage the role fundamentals to synergize this? For instance, WoW has a mechanic called 'Vengeance', which increases your damage output for holding enmity on mobs; it gives players a fun thing to play with that works into their role's responsibility. I'm not suggesting implementing this exact mechanic, but it's a good example of making the tank role fun in areas this game often leaves tanking more tedious & stressful than it need be, especially in comparison with other roles' design.