Minor Complaint/Mini Rant

[Sapphidia]

You never played WoW or Rift or SWTOR, did you? Tank damage has ALWAYS been a thing. Some games have handled it differently than others (and some game have changed how they handled it completely during expansions), but ultimately it comes down to the fact that good tanks figure out how to contribute a solid amount of damage.

The difference with FFXIV is that tanks have to sacrifice a heck of a lot of "tankiness" in order to push out that damage. Noone wants tanks to do zero damage, and everyone understands that tank damage is a vital part of raiding/dungeons.

What people object to I think is that tanks -here- are encouraged to avoid all tanking stats, avoid vitality accessories, and spend as much time as humanly possible in their squishy DPS stance. It's the sacrifice - it makes tanks feel more like they're just a DPS class with a couple of cooldowns for tankbusters rather than an actual -tank- class.

Not saying people shouldnt do that, any good tank in FF is currently rocking slaying or pentamelds and trying to push DPS as high as possible by dropping tank stance at every opportunity. but it feels like very odd game design, especially when the mechanics of the game tell us otherwise.

- We can't roll on Slaying accessories when they drop, implying we're "supposed" to use Fending.
- Our tank stances have 5% hit on them implying the devs intended us to gear for only using our DPS stances when attacking from the side/rear.
- Parry is all over our chosen gear, yet everyone acknowledges we want to avoid it.
- 180 crafted accessories arent ingame because devs dont want us using them.

Those are all weird hurdles that tanks look at and go "huh?". Yes, a good tank will just ignore them.

But it still seems really strange if all those mechanics are in the game. The Devs clearly -intend- tanks to be in vitality gear and tanking stance for the most part, yet it's now pretty much viewed as the most suboptimal way to play the class by the vast majority of the informed community.

Something has to change. Either the devs have to alter the class skills/balance slightly to make it clear they intend us to be tanking loads in sword oath, normalise the DPS outputs of the 3 tank classes a bit and allow tanks to roll Need on Strength accessories... or they need to change the mechanics of raids slightly so "tankiness" isnt completely redundant.

Right now it just smacks of unintentional/bad game design.