How to get people to tank!

[darzok]

Its not that hard you just need to go watch the vids on youtube for what ever are planning to do. If you do wipe or mess up most people are ok with it but a few people are just utter muppets and will have a little rage about it but its not that common but sooner or later you will come across one.

[LilLemay]

-snip about holding aggro in low dungeons-

This response may be super late, but I've always kinda had the feel that maybe up to level 30 tanks first attack (fast blade, heavy swing, the drk one) should have innate increased emnity, and then once you hit level 30 that gets traited off into more damage

so at level 1 the ability would read "x potency, increased emnity" then at level 30 you'd get a trait like ''heavier swing'' that takes that increased emnity off and instead adds more potency to it

[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.

[Dreggit]

I just saw a thread that got deleted that said that they hated getting pallies in dungeons, now, I didn't get around to reading it before the thread was removed, but allegedly people were supporting it, or so I'm told. As a pally main that makes me sad

[winsock]

Lots of people try tank. Many quit because they understandably screw stuff up due to lack of experience, then get critized for it.

If you want more tanks, don't cry when they make the mistakes they need to make to learn the role.

[darzok]

Lots of people try tank. Many quit because they understandably screw stuff up due to lack of experience, then get critized for it.

If you want more tanks, don't cry when they make the mistakes they need to make to learn the role.

Never happen people in game seem to expect a tank will do every thing right first time every time and any error is down to the tank been bad and must be abused and shamed for it.

Its not going to change as you can not force people to be nice and it has high odds to backfire or have people just find away around it.

[Gaj85]

I tried to Tank, I got my DRK to 60. The issue was that since I was a new tank I was still learning the ways. Too many times I had people being very rude to me and even got kicked a few times. So that was a HUGE turn off. The only time I could practice was if I was in a group of my friends (which living in Korea it is hard to match their times in the States).

[Misutoraru]

i did little bit tanking during 2.0, and did not do it again till recently
but I feel it is kinda discouraging
it is not that often, but when i doing dung run everyday, i eventually ran into one or two of them
they expect the tank to know everything, and always want big pull no matter how our equipment level, if anything go wrong, tank is always being blame
this is the pressure blocking me to main a tank, even i found some tank class interesting, i would still prefer to main a Healer or DPS to get experience of the dung before i try tanking one

[winsock]

Never happen people in game seem to expect a tank will do every thing right first time every time and any error is down to the tank been bad and must be abused and shamed for it.

Its not going to change as you can not force people to be nice and it has high odds to backfire or have people just find away around it.

Sad, but true. I appreciate the irony of course. DPS that complain about queue times, only to coax the tank that allowed their queue to pop into quitting.

My worry is that without community support, tanking will be dumbed down like it has been in other games... It's been at a point where people would rather wait in a 20 min queue than instantly play a class they have an interest in, or people excited about DRK when it was released that took an eternity leveling in order to avoid group content.