Best Tank

[Jican]

*snip*
It depends -entirely- on your healers.

I don't care which tank you are, >50% of the time you are just going to get face smashed, regardless of whether you're in tank or dps stance, there is ZERO skill here in just mitigating the steady incoming damage.

Once you get past using CDs for tank busters there is nothing more to see.
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Well, someone's on her high horse. Yea, healers play a very important role, but endgame? Your tank(s) die, you die shortly after. And depending on the skill of your tanks, they can either suck hard and not be able to mitigate damage enough for your super powers to keep them alive regardless your "skill" or they can do an amazing job and you only have to give them a passing regen and move on to avoiding mechanics.

Also, without dps, you and your tanks can sit there till your mana is bled dry, and then guess what, you get to sit there and look stupid for the remainder of the short fight after that point. Everyone plays a vital role, and if anyone's slacking, you'll put extra stress on those doing their best to make it all work. That's the entire point of a PARTY, you know, TEAMWORK.

I know a lot of your kind, the arrogant holier than thou attitude of healers like you are a god-sent and your poo don't stink. I find players like you to be toxic and usually too arrogant to improve past a certain point, blaming everyone else for your short-comings and dropping out when the going gets tough. "Tanking is a joke?" Give me a break. That kind of talk is saved for those that either don't know anything about another job, or simply suck at it and moved to a class they can handle.

I will agree with you on one point. The DPS drivin fights between tanks talking crap about how much damage they do. Guess what, DPS is an added bonus, how much damage did you soak up and mitigated? That should be the real thing to look for. Let DPS worry about pushing numbers, tanks need to be more worried about how well they can soak the damage.

[pandabearcat]

Well, someone's on her high horse. Yea, healers play a very important role, but endgame? Your tank(s) die, you die shortly after. And depending on the skill of your tanks, they can either suck hard and not be able to mitigate damage enough for your super powers to keep them alive regardless your "skill" or they can do an amazing job and you only have to give them a passing regen and move on to avoiding mechanics.

Also, without dps, you and your tanks can sit there till your mana is bled dry, and then guess what, you get to sit there and look stupid for the remainder of the short fight after that point. Everyone plays a vital role, and if anyone's slacking, you'll put extra stress on those doing their best to make it all work. That's the entire point of a PARTY, you know, TEAMWORK.

I know a lot of your kind, the arrogant holier than thou attitude of healers like you are a god-sent and your poo don't stink. I find players like you to be toxic and usually too arrogant to improve past a certain point, blaming everyone else for your short-comings and dropping out when the going gets tough. "Tanking is a joke?" Give me a break. That kind of talk is saved for those that either don't know anything about another job, or simply suck at it and moved to a class they can handle.

I will agree with you on one point. The DPS drivin fights between tanks talking crap about how much damage they do. Guess what, DPS is an added bonus, how much damage did you soak up and mitigated? That should be the real thing to look for. Let DPS worry about pushing numbers, tanks need to be more worried about how well they can soak the damage.

You don't understand, I am a tank main (well, after our static's tank left, I was a SMN before). I am not saying this because I feel that it requires more skill to be a healer, or that the burden is entirely on the healer's shoulders.

What I mean is I feel so powerless as a tank to help the healer out. I have to save my big cooldowns (as a pali there are really only 2...and for tank busters rampart isn't even enough by itself) for tank busters. In between, I have almost nothing. Bulwark is alright for adds, but for big boss melee swings it is hit or miss in effectiveness (and block is only 20%), does nothing vs magic. Foresight + awareness are a joke.

Templar's Will doesn't even work on a lot of knockbacks. I can't do anything once my cooldowns are out for aoe pulls...again I must rely on my dps to bear the brunt of it by killing it before my cooldowns run out.

I cannot change my rotation to go into a more defensive one, nor can I "bank" some sort of resource to let me take less damage like a warrior can.

What I mean by "it depends entirely on your healers" means that your gearing strategy, your entire playstyle's efficacy depends on whether your healers can keep you up...NOT on whether or not you can help them keep you up, does that make sense? In that respect I have very few options in my playstyle, besides just knowing when to use my cds my rotation is mind numbingly boring and has no variation or procs, nor can I "change it up" depending on situation.

Perhaps I can throw out a stun or two on trash packs but then I'm out of tp as well...

I hope you understand a bit more what I mean. I am not bashing tanks or healers or anything, its just that there is no time to "shine" as it were. There is nothing to differentiate me from the ocean of other tanks aside from gear - I cannot "carry" a raid like a good healer or good dps can...the success of a raid is almost entirely based on 1, people not standing in stuff and 2, maximum dps output.

I even try to be as good as I can - saving sheltron like I used to save inner beast, etc. I try to cover my cotank or a dps soaking an ability, I try to divine veil before raid damage. But it doesn't even seem to matter - ONE time I saved a DRK tank during living dead (but again...this was because the raid failed a mechanic, and the healers failed their healing, not a proactive decision on anyone's end), but really it seems so futile. I don't think I am even saving my healers any mana because they never run out - at most I give them one more gcd to dps. I clemency when offtanking and sometimes I see an effect but more often than not it is just overhealing and my healers have it covered, and it makes me feel like I could've just done another attack to be more effective. Woohoo.

To put it another way...a robot mindlessly pushing buttons (as long as he moves out of AoE) would be 90% as effective of a tank as I am. Hell most tank busters you can even live through (just with more healer strain) w/o any cds...so even not doing anything the raid will go on. I feel very much just like a suit of armor placed there to distract the enemy while my raid dances around and does the real work.

EDIT: sorry for this extremely long post, and I hope you read it as not a rant but an explanation of how I (and I think many others) might feel.

Also I wanted to respond to this:

I'm not sure what other mmorpgs you have been playing. But tanks are almost the same in the ones I've played. With the exception of Lineage 2. FF14 actually gives tanks a lot of tools for mitigation. But its relatively balanced. In old school mmorpgs like Lineage 2, tanks would have mostly all mitigation skills and little to no ability to be offensive. The result being that doing things outside of a group was near impossible. My opinion is tanking is easy if you are good at it, but hard if you are bad at it. But that can apply to dps and healer archetypes as well.

I will pick 3 of the MMOs I am most familiar with to explain a bit about what I'm talking about - what is interesting is all 3 have different tanking paradigms and I feel shifting FF14 towards any of those would be far superior to our current state.

1. SWToR - one of the first MMOs that I main tanked in. What was great about this game's tanking was threefold. First was the difficult tank rotations. They were just as hard if not harder (at first) than the dps rotations. Connected with this fun system was the fact that the talent trees (again, at first, I quit before the "specialization" overhaul) were fluid - you could choose how you built your tank and going "all in" on the tank tree was not necessarily the answer. Second, was the resource system. Some might've found it boring (the "autoattack" skills you had to use) but as an assassin tank and powertech tank it was essential to manage your resource correctly to keep threat as well as maximize mitigation.

The third thing SWToR had going for it was gearing choice. If you remember the component system they used literally every secondary stat could be swapped in and out. This meant you could build tanks however you wished. I was one of the first theorycrafters for assassin tanks at least, and we had a different mitigation options for every tier of content, and different playstyles therein.

2. TERA - obviously, a very different, but then again, I would say "not so different" type of game. Tanking in this game was EXTREMELY skill based. Not only did you have to hold threat, but you had to manage your difficult to regen resource, find time between boss attacks to generate threat/generate mana, and you HAD to block/avoid every big boss attack or you just died. Healers were just there to buff and handle "mandatory" raid damage - if you got hit as a tank you were a pancake. Warrior tanks at least - proudest moment was going through an entire boss without taking damage at all. Managing cooldowns, invincibility frames, stuns, positions, and aggro made this one of the most amazing games ever to tank - and one of the best games to showcase your tanking skill. Would recommend +100 for gameplay, would not recommend -100 for the grind and the pay to win.

3. WoW, obviously. WoW has an extremely long lifespan...and thus many, many iterations of tanking, far too many to really list here. I started playing in wrath (a wrath baby, as we were known) but even since then tanking has undergone severe changes. First of all, tanking rotations in WoW (yes, even the pali rotation) had variation, and here is the key thing: the rotation was not the core of the class. The rotation was merely there to maintain baseline aggro and gain resource - more exciting resources than "mana" or "tp" you know. You actively consumed or regenerated the resource to prove your tanking worth. A good tank was easy to spot vs a bad one. The MoP (was it cata?) class resource and tanking revamp also completely changed things.

For one thing "total combat table coverage" if you knew what that meant was removed - previously palies and warriors could completely negate all chance of a "normal" hit from the boss table. Every attack was either avoided (dodge + parry) or mitigated (block). This meant they never had any damage randomness - at least 30% and at most 100% of damage was auto removed, made them very powerful.

This was changed to the new "active tanking" system which while it gets boring after a while, still meant there is a skill gap in tanking. If you were a good tank, you'd know how to use your active mitigation (this meant a short cooldown, moderately powerful - think 30%, damage reduction that consumed "resource") to lower many big hits, rather than relying on huge tanking cooldowns and just sitting there twiddling for ages.

So...tl;dr: at least 3 things to make tanking more interesting

1. More gearing variety. Parry shouldn't be the only tanking stat, and it shouldn't suck so hard. Vit stacking should not be the norm. We should have more gearing choice in our way of mitigating damage - there should be more than just one "tanking set" for everyone.

2. More rotational complexity, fewer button bloat - but this is a design choice and EVERY class imo suffers from this, but again not everyone agrees on this, so meh.

3. Active tanking - or smaller cooldowns like Sheltron and Inner Beast that allow the tank to take control of how and when they want to mitigate damage, instead of relying on 2 minute cooldowns for all damage.

4. More interesting resource - TP/MP is the most boring, lazy resource in the world. It serves no purpose. Give us (and dps) more interesting resources to use, and active ways to regenerate/consume it.

[Domira]

I MTed a warrior from wow vanilla but switched to paladin from bc onwards. Tanking in FF14 isn't too much different than it was in WoW during that period. Paladin was just as boring in wow as it is in FF14 lol. They were so boring that they had to revamp them and give them holy power (I think that is what its called).

[Domira]

Not that it is easy, or hard, but because we have SO FEW tools compared to other MMOs to actively manage our damage intake.

I'm not sure what other mmorpgs you have been playing. But tanks are almost the same in the ones I've played. With the exception of Lineage 2. FF14 actually gives tanks a lot of tools for mitigation. But its relatively balanced. In old school mmorpgs like Lineage 2, tanks would have mostly all mitigation skills and little to no ability to be offensive. The result being that doing things outside of a group was near impossible. My opinion is tanking is easy if you are good at it, but hard if you are bad at it. But that can apply to dps and healer archetypes as well.

[SpookyGhost]

I don't care which tank you are, >50% of the time you are just going to get face smashed, regardless of whether you're in tank or dps stance, there is ZERO skill here in just mitigating the steady incoming damage.

I agree, to an extent. Zero is a bit of a stretch, but I'd say "very little" is correct. Big hit is coming soon -> pop CD is the jist of it. There is, however, a rhythm to when and where you pop what CD. It's essentially your absolute bare bones MMO tanking meta, which is why most tanks wander off trying to improve their DPS vs improving their ability to mitigate damage. I actually enjoy WAR MT a lot simply because I have to keep a very careful watch on my resources in fights like T13 (well, before lvl60 faceroll).

There is a GCD to GCD rotation for mitigating everything in that fight, including Flare Breaths, that changes and needs to be adjusted depending on when you push what phase. I think this sort of thing is about as extensive as XIV tanking is going to get, which is unfortunate but I wasn't really expecting it to get any better since 2.0.

Oh, also, even if you did 200 more dps? It will kill the boss ...10 seconds faster. Wonderful.

200 DPS increase from anyone is a 200 increase to raid DPS. If a Monk did 200 more DPS, would you complain?

[Loudexplosions74]

There is so much butt hurt prevalent throughout this thread, I feel bad for any of the new players who come in to read this and see what the heck kind of tanking community they are getting in to. To put it bluntly, each tank has their perks and their negatives, though the DRK could use a small buff to put them on even footing with WAR and PAL. The whole best tank thing is based on situation.

[pandabearcat]

Hence "the rotation wasn't the defining point of the class". People are hung up on that, of course the main rotation is gonna be boring...but it doesn't have to be, if your rotation includes skills that build/spend resource, that actively impact your survival.

Tank rotations could use some spicing up, but really it is the switch to active mitigation that made tanks actually skillful.