How to get people to tank!

[Claire_Pendragon]

While making a job "edgy" and likable aesthetically sounds like it works, we all know it wont be enough to get the average DPS player to stick with the job. (Such as DRK)

There are a few reasons why a person wouldnt main, or switch to playing a tank specialized job.

So needless to say, what is this magic trick that would get more "DPS lovers" to play tanks, and somehow avoid a large percentage of the responsibility of tanking? (More so the fear of their responsibility.)

A job that queues as a Tank, but can not tank.

It applies the "Tank stance" to a "DPS" classified job. (Can not work on healers or tanks)
While this job plays the role of a DPS instead!

The tank stance does as follows;
*Raises mitigation. (chainmail gets the least increase in passive mitigation, then leather, and cloth gets the most)

*Raises threat generated. (passively to everything, but adds a massive amount of threat to all AoE skills, adds increasing threat modifier to consecutive combos, and starts over after the 3rd hit of a WS that has been comboed. Applies a large threat boost to the 3rd spell cast, or WS Cast by phsyical ranged)

*Removes Restrictions. (Positionals work from all sides. Spells cant be interrupted by damage. Possible RDM distance requirements are no longer required)

*All damage dealt is lowered. (So as to balance the increased dmg you will be doing.)

*All movement speed increases have no effect while under this unremovable buff. (This includes sprint! No mage sprinting while tanking. Except you may actually give them a buff of your own, which increases their movement speed at the cost of your own sprint CD.)

*All ranged abilities are now maxed at 15yalms, except those off the GCD, which are now limited to 10 yalms.

*When you use Mitigation buffs on the person with this stance, you gain offensive buffs at the same time.
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Obviously they cant use provoke for tank swaps, so instead, you will have an ability that cuts the threat of a target by 50%, and applies that threat to the current "stance holder".

This makes tank swaps semi more risky, due to not having 1 point of threat over them, and if the tank dies, there wont be enough of a threat lead, to catch back up quickly. So mistakes are much more punishing!

If you die, the "Stance holder" doesnt lose their tank stance. They do lose it if they die.

You can remove the stance from them, but it shares the same CD as the stance itself.

When the stance is removed, you lose a chunk of your dmg, as your offensive CDs cant be used w/o giving someone else mitigation. (Who has the stance on them)
This should make your DPS equivalent of a WAR off tanking.

Now, give it some popular job like Mystic Knight, with Stasis Sword techniques, and watch the queues fill up with tanks, and the DPS players realize they may be forced into tanking as their DPS, maybe even quitting their DPS or going to PotD instead, to prevent being forced into the tank role by these new "tank" jobs.

(Dont pretend people wouldnt want to BE this new job. People would only hate playing WITH this new job in their PT.)
EDIT: (Also give me more ideas on what could go wrong, so as to help flesh out ways to make it work.)

[Rinari]

A job that queues as a Tank, but can not tank.

Why would anyone want that? Groups that need a tank don't want a DPS taking the spot that can't tank. DPS don't want to be forced into the tank roll by some stance forced on them by someone taking the tank slot that doesn't want to tank. Having non-tanks filling the tank role would act as a disincentive to real tanks, who enjoy short queues and 'in need' bonuses. You'd end up with less real tanks! Parties would wipe constantly because players that don't know how to tank would get forced into the 'stance'. It's just bad for everyone all the way around.

The reason more people don't tank is that some players prefer healing, some players prefer maximizing DPS, and some players just want less responsibility. You can change the balance by incentivizing the role more... say boosting the in-need bonuses or giving tanks fun new toys. A new tank job would have helped out there.

Here's a better, more direct way to get more tanks (or whatever is needed): Allow in-need roles to exceed the tomestone cap by a fixed amount. Capped out on your 450? Join DF in the role needed to exceed the cap up to another 200 or so! Then watch those ques balance out, with DPS shifting to raids and tanks/healers joining 4/8 mans to get their 650 for the week!

[Zojha]

You can change the balance by incentivizing the role more...

Or you can change the content to accommodate the imbalance better.
Or you can make content that doesn't rely on the roles - it's not that hard, you only need to replace unavoidable damage with mechanics.

You could adjust dungeons automatically - a group has more than 1 healer? Mobs get a global debuff to their HP and buff to their damage. A group has no healers? Autoattacks/Surefire AoE get replaced with telegraphed AoEs, tethers, stack mechanics etc - you can randomize that even. Lack a tank? Global debuff to damage on mobs, buff to HP, offset by healer adjustments. That's all theoretically doable simply with a global script you can run over the instance after the group is assembled. And it probably would even give the content some replayability because now every run is a bit different.

Trying to get people to tank...and especially forcing people to tank in the way the OP suggests IMO doesn't lead anywhere.

[Makeda]

Or you can change the content to accommodate the imbalance better.
Or you can make content that doesn't rely on the roles - it's not that hard, you only need to replace unavoidable damage with mechanics.

Do note that Guild Wars 2 started out this way, and when it launched an expansion... it put tanking and healing roles into the game, and discontinued development for its 'dungeon system' that has role-free group content.

It just wasn't working.

One common problem seen when you make it so content doesn't NEED a tank or a healer is that groups start refusing to allow tanks or healers to come. City of Heroes is a case in point here - mobs got easy enough to deal with when bringing 'support' roles - buffers and debuffers... and so tanks, healers, and pure DPS all ended up being disinvited to a lot of 'speed runs'. Guild Wars 1 makes another point. You could bring an NPC healer that was 'just acceptable enough' to keep a group barely alive... so player healers got disinvited so as to avoid the risk of a player who wasn't perfect. People preferred a flawed but viable "bot" over the risk of an unknown.

And Guild Wars 2 again makes the extreme example. People learned that they could speed farm content with 'glass cannon' DPS builds - characters that could barely survive any damage at all, but fast players could out dodge/run attacks... so anyone not on a glass cannon DPS build... was told to not show up...

- And that led the developers to make content that needed traditional tanks and healers (Though in GW2 raids, the same character can be both the tank and the healer at the same time).

Trying to get people to tank...and especially forcing people to tank in the way the OP suggests IMO doesn't lead anywhere.

People either like being the center of attention or they don't.

You can't use gimmicks to change this or trick people into liking it.

This is just a fatal problem of anything based around teamwork. Most people do NOT want to be the quarterback, tank, lead vocalist, public speaker, point man, etc... But anything involving teamwork needs someone to step up and do that task. Not so much a leader per se - but a focus for the attention at the least.

[Zojha]

One common problem seen when you make it so content doesn't NEED a tank or a healer is that groups start refusing to allow tanks or healers to come.

Well, true to a degree. That's because both tanks and healers are pretty much just pointless fluff roles that nobody needs unless you force them on players, as they both rely on gimmicks that are only as useful as they are required. That's a core flaw of their very premise and it shows not only in your GW 2 glass cannon example but in our current DPS meta as well: Healers are to maximize DPS and so are tanks. You can see more of that in this game as well: People are not taking Paladins (and Monks and White Mages to some degree) into high performance content, because they aren't contributing enough damage to the party.
All of that is because mitigation and sustain/healing are only ever as valuable as they are required by the game. Once the requirements are met, damage reigns supreme. That's why the Trinity "just doesn't work" -> Whenever it isn't firmly enforced, non-trinity gameplay emerges naturally. It also doesn't work in solo-play, which is why there is nary a pure trinity to be found in games - Every healer and tank is a DPS as well. Non-trinity gameplay is the natural state of games, the trinity only ever "works" if it's brute-forced. You examples only prove that point.

Luckily, here in FFXIV tanks and healers deal respectable amounts of damage, so that they aren't kicked out of content that doesn't require them (like PotD). Even Paladins aren't kicked. They might not be taken by speedrunners, just as they aren't taken by high performance groups, but that's an issue that already exists and can be changed by simply giving them more damage. That is the lesson we can draw from the metagame: In case of doubt, add deeps. As such, I see no reason not to add more content that doesn't require them - unless, of course, SE goes to harshly nerf their damage. Then issues could indeed arise.

As for your latter paragraph, I'll note one thing: Teamwork does not necessitate someone being the center of attention. In fact, roles exist precisely to reduce teamwork in favor of specialization. It's the assembly line model: Instead of having everyone responsible for everything and having constant teamwork and coordination required, you give everyone their own little task/role so they don't need to tax themselves with knowing and doing everything and coordinating. They just do their own thing. That also shows in gameplay: Whether you shadewalker, heal, use storms path or whatever other support ability, you do not interact with another player. You dump it on them. Only few abilities have an interactive component - Cover for example. You have to stay within range of each other. That requires working together, because where you go depends on both people. Using Foes Requiem doesn't require such. Only the bard acts here.
And because of that, whenever you have mechanics that require actual teamwork, even if just a little, all hell breaks loose, as people aren't used to actual teamwork. Most of those don't have a center of attention either - That's the point of teamwork, so that's natural as well.

Now, that's a pretty big rant and it's only tangential to the topic at hand, so I'll put it in spoilers.

In the end, every game with "roles" has the issue that some are more popular than others and only vary rarely does supply meet demand. Last I heard from LoL, they still haven't been able to fix the support role and instead are now forcing people into it via force-fill. I think it's healthier to adjust demand.

[Makeda]

Well, true to a degree. That's because both tanks and healers are pretty much just pointless fluff roles that nobody needs unless you force them on players, as they both rely on gimmicks that are only as useful as they are required.

In the end, every game with "roles" has the issue that some are more popular than others and only vary rarely does supply meet demand. Last I heard from LoL, they still haven't been able to fix the support role and instead are now forcing people into it via force-fill. I think it's healthier to adjust demand.

Yes... tanks and healer are kinda forced roles.

What is a tank but a person sitting there telling 'yo momma' insults and getting hit in the face... so your 4 buddies over here can shoot at the person thus insulted without being interrupted...
Healer at least you can rationalize in a world with magic. (I also play Overwatch, a favorite hero of mine there is the guy who plays good music, and this music somehow inspires people to recover in mere seconds from being shot by a robotic gatling gun monster... because... gaming logic...)

My larger point was that... much as I like the idea of not requiring roles... we see how well that didn't work in Guild Wars 2: popular game and all... but when they did an expansion they scrapped all of their instanced content that didn't require roles. They went so far as to disband the dev team for their dungeons. They replaced it with raids... and changed a few classes into healers... while letting anyone make a tank (if you stack the toughness stat there, raid bosses aggro on you. But to stack that, you have to not stack something else... ie: you give up damage... end result: traditional MMO tank minus a 'taunt' button, but you don't even have to attack to build threat, you just have to have 1 point more armor than anyone else in your raid... so you can stack armor and healing...).

In other words... Guild Wars 2... gave up on not having a trinity.

The reason was that content just couldn't be made to have skillfull challenge without it.

Real world combat involves hiding behind a lot of cover, and shooting at the enemy... and 1 single hit usually ends the fight for the person hit... That won't work in a game. So you need to make things so they trade off blows... and that means the blows can't one-shot the people expected to take them... and that means you either assign someone who can handle heavy hits... you make everything hit really light... or you add a system to let people dodge to avoid damage...

And in GW2, they went with dodge. First few months out nobody could clear even the starter dodge. Then the timer on dodging became easy to spot, people learned to know when it was coming... and suddenly people were clearing the final dungeons... without any defensive gear at all... and doing them in speed runs by stacking pure damage...

And pretty much ALL GW2 content at that point became so easy many people just left the game...

So to fix this... They gave up... changed design leads... and added in a trinity...

When FFXIV messed up big, they brought in Yoshi to take over and make ARR... When GW2 messed up big, they kept it quite, but they more or less did the same thing... they got rid of their devs that put them in that spot, and got new ones to figure out how to add tanks and healers into a game that had promised it's fans it would NEVER have tanks or healers... They did it... and people came back... Maybe not the same people... but the game stabilized...

Before you ask for content here that can skip the trinity... consider what's happened to other MMOs that tried to do that...
- and consider why.

Unfortunately no one has manage to design their way out of this problem...

So instead games have to rely on finding some portion of players that like being the center of attention.

FFXIV's Yoshi is claiming 22% of us like being in the limelight. That's pretty amazingly good if true. I do notice this game has unusually good queue times for me though - as a leveling tank. Which implies that I am fewer than 22%...

[ADVSS]

totally agree on the new toyys, how about a tank that phases or warp strikes, or containment fields/drags mobs in, maybe a ranged bind/stun like abyssal drain, make it crazy fun to play, I still enjoy plunge a lot, i only wish its cd was like 10 seconds

[CafPow]

no

either you like it, or you don't. There is no Problem if you don't.
so, if you don't like it, don't tank and deal with some Tank minority.

[Llus]

Why I don't Q as tank for DF anymore:

Healers and DPS that pull ahead.
DPS and Healers that don't use aggro mitigation tools and then being told that they shouldn't have to because it's not their job.
Healers that don't DPS
DPS that can't actually DPS
Healers that can't heal
Tanks that fight for aggro because they're afraid to turn off their tank stance when they don't need to hold the boss.
Popping into a party in progress and having everyone shit on me because they didn't like their last tank who rage quit on them (at this point, I leave too).

I love tanking. It's really fun. But I'm not going to spend 30 minutes with people to get shit on. So... maybe if that were to change, you'd get more tanks and more tanks running queues. Until then... GLHF

[Shurrikhan]

I love tanking. It's really fun. But I'm not going to spend 30 minutes with people to get shit on. So... maybe if that were to change, you'd get more tanks and more tanks running queues. Until then... GLHF

When the average run time is closer to 15-20 minutes for most groups...

On topic:
I'm with Zojha here. Rather than creating a wonky gimmick temporary tank through a debilitating stance, why not just generate content adaptations, or allow for custom challenges? Bring back those survival-oriented tools that aren't necessarily tank-only, like slows, heavies, binds, etc., and let people work with what they were already given, rather than purposely turning those skills to bloat just to ensure that tanks are never forgone.