What if Tank classes could only meatshield?

[Yorumi]

I find it interesting how unimaginative people are. They bring up games like EQ1 and what tanking was like there as though that's relevant today.

What makes tanking boring in this game, and in most games is a design problem. I love tanking in swtor because it's active and engaged. All 3 tanks play radically differently and must all be learned on their own. You have to actively maintain buffs and debuffs that are short duration and highly subject to fight mechanics. You trigger effects and watch for procs and all that. If your buffs fall off you could be in serious trouble as a fair amount of mitigation is tied to them. There is also a degree of skill in it, shadows for example can renew their kinetic ward on cooldown, but if they do they actually lower their mitigation because of another stacking buff. The difference on parses can be striking.

There are also quite a few more damage type which will affect what cooldowns you use. The difference between a properly timed saber reflect and a poorly timed one is big.

The skill in that game is in achieving maximum mitigation not whether you've read a script and can hit a cooldown every so often while just dpsing. That's the problem with ff14, tanks don't tank they dps. The incoming damage is no threat, and the only thing that's a threat is tank busters that are scripted and known before hand. Mitigation is largely passive, even cooldowns just require a button press and are otherwise passive. Anything you need to maintain is just built into the rotation and hardly given a passing thought.

It's not a matter of forcing tanks into their tanking stance(granted swtor does) it's a matter of making them want to be there. A tank should be contributing to the party, and having fun by tanking, not by dpsing. The difference between a skilled good tank and a bad one should be in how well they mitigate damage not in how much dps they can push out.

[Kydi]

Snip

+1

I agree with every single comment here, with the possible exception of adding more types of damage (just because that would mean the opportunity for ability bloat galore). The biggest issue with FFXIV tanking is that there is no incentive, or often need, to be in tank stance outside of the initial pull (which is debatable in some instances) and tank busters (again, N/A if you're cheesing with HG/Holm/LD). I, along with others, play tank because I like to be the person to take a hit and control the boss, and the skill in that is, in my opinion, maintaining maximum mitigation, and needing to due to there being actual danger outside of busters, not concentrating on maintaining maximum DPS with the minimum required mitigation. I'm certainly not going to say that tank DPS isn't important, but it just seems like FFXIV (and it may not be the game, possibly just the community) makes tank DPS the measure of a good tank, rather than how well they control and manage the boss (positioning, regular swapping) to enable the DPS to dish out the hurt.