How to get people to tank!

[darzok]

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.

I hope tanking is not going to be dumbed down that is just bad for the game as a whole. I think quite a few tanks would stop tanking or just leave the game if it was to be dumbed down.

I think we just need to get people to be more willing to learn how to tank how i do not know maybe special training missions that give good rewards and teach people how to tank?

[Venjenz]

As I am leveling my tank, I keep visiting this tread. Starting to think most of my criticism is coming from my own expectations and inner voice than it is from others. I have probably missed out on some player comms in the last couple weeks, but I probably do 10-15 DF roulettes per week, and I might get a party tell in the immediate encounter if I am screwing something up, like when I tunnel on the last boss of Halatali and forget to go help with the wisps. That is literally the last time anyone said anything remotely negative, and even that was just "uhm, you gotta leave the boss and help with the wisps." Beyond that, most folks don't ever say much, even after an overpull, wipe, whatever. Turns out that I am my own worst critic, and the stress I have when tanking new or harder content is all put there by me.

I am starting to think it is like Makeda says - being the limelight position is just stressful and not for everybody.

[Rinari]

As I am leveling my tank, I keep visiting this tread. Starting to think most of my criticism is coming from my own expectations and inner voice than it is from others.

I am starting to think it is like Makeda says - being the limelight position is just stressful and not for everybody.

Definitely true! I was lucky that I learned the basics of tanking back in WoW playing a tank alt while other tanks from my guild coached me on their alts. It made the learning curve very gentle and I didn't have to stress out over mistakes. I was able to hit the ground running here and still haven't had a bad experience yet. I'll probably never shake a bit of tank anxiety I feel with random groups, but it does keep me sharp.

[Venjenz]

Definitely true! I was lucky that I learned the basics of tanking back in WoW playing a tank alt while other tanks from my guild coached me on their alts. It made the learning curve very gentle and I didn't have to stress out over mistakes. I was able to hit the ground running here and still haven't had a bad experience yet. I'll probably never shake a bit of tank anxiety I feel with random groups, but it does keep me sharp.

I think what keeps me sharp is that I hardly ever tank with my friends because I am trying to catch them in level, so I am almost exclusively a DF random group tank. When I tank with my friends and we are actually communicating and all that? It is sooooo much easier. =)

[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%...

[Zojha]

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

And that reason is bogus because it implies that every game without a trinity can not present a skillful challenge. This statement completely precludes all single-player games (including the Dark Souls series) from having any sort of skillful challenge as well as most competitive games ever, whether real or electronic. Fighting games, MOBAs, shooters, dungeon crawlers...

If you're asking me, that's complete nonsense. It's proven to be nonsense further when you realize that in order to create challenge in games with a trinity, you have to ignore the trinity - We call that mechanics. Avoidable AoEs thrown at the ground, attacks that require you to do certain things in order to avoid their effects. Stack, Spread, Hide behind a pillar, press a button, tethers of all kinds, turn away, stack with a set amount of players, stay on high ground, stay on low ground, interact with objects etc etc... they are numerous. All of those completely ignore the trinity. In order to make fights remotely exciting, you have to ignore, remove and otherwise circumvent the trinity already.

And yet you stand here, saying that fights cannot be made a skillful challenge with out it? When all of the skillful challenges in the game rely on massively circumventing it?

The only "mechanics" of the trinity are: You take damage and there's nothing you can do about it - Autoattacks, Tank busters, Damage Up Stacks, Prey, Raid Wide AoEs. And the non-trivial ones rely on the same principle of dodge: You have to time the mitigation buff/heal right or someone dies. The principle you just claimed was so easy that people left a game over it.

My apologies, but perhaps YOU should be the one considering why things are as they are, because what you are saying makes no sense.
I'll also note that those 22% refer to the official census numbers, which in past censi has always been the number of jobs of that role at 31 or higher. Whether they play it or not is a completely different matter. This means it includes people who picked up DRK, got one level and then never touched the job again. It shouldn't be taken as a reliable number.

And the connection between enjoying tanking and liking the limelight is and stays shaky at best - tumblr is full of people trying to get into it, yet only few of them main or even play tank. I'll continue to cast doubts on that.

[Moomba33]

My main issue with tanking is I don't like the feeling of leading.
Your mistakes being really noticeable adds to the stress but that's true of healing as well and I love healing as much as DPSing.

The other issue is I'm not comfortable with making big pulls at all. I pretty much don't tank anything at level cap unless it's for friends because I know I can't keep up the pace expected by the community.

[ADVSS]

The other issue is I'm not comfortable with making big pulls at all. I pretty much don't tank anything at level cap unless it's for friends because I know I can't keep up the pace expected by the community.

it took me a really long time to even consider speed tanking, well untill i started to level dps in 2.0 the only downside of the new cross role system will be having people level other classes to get an understanding of how they operate. Now, when I do tank, its usually speed mass pulling, you can thank evellinh smn and blm for that. Ubless i get 2 melee, then they get the chain pulling cause no way in hell am i standing in the moshput for 5 minutes blowing all my cooldowns and the healers oomp and theyre still not dead

[Rinari]

The other issue is I'm not comfortable with making big pulls at all.

The only complaints I've had about my tanking are due to normal pulling. I really haven't figured it out yet. I usually pull a single pack for the first pull to judge DPS, and if they are really fast, I'll do double pulls from there on out. My ability to judge the DPS is still lackluster though, so I often don't have a good grasp of what a random group is capable of. Sometimes they complain about the first pull being too small (like I should know what they can do already?), or sometimes I judge them to be mediocre but they want bigger pulls. I'm probably too conservative in my estimates, as I've never pulled larger than the group could handle to the point of wiping. The complaints are rare and most groups will quietly go along with whatever I do anyway, so it's not a big deal really. I do wish I could be better at the 'when' for big pulling, but I think that just comes from experience that I don't have yet.

[winsock]

The limelight doesn't matter to me at all. It's the back seat driving that frustrates me.

When I was newer, it was especially irritating having vets complaining about my pace or pulling for me when I felt like I was struggling at the pace I was going. Then if I didn't pull off them, they cry about me not doing my job.

Now that I am a vet, it's the newer people that complain. Ex: "Dude.. did you really think pulling that many would work?" (Main Scenario). It's not as bad, just because you have the experience to know exactly what the issue was and that the other player is ignorant of the meta, but at the same time, I don't really need to deal with this as a healer or DPS.

TLDR: you had the option to queue as tank and decided not to knowing you could not change your mind mid-duty. You decided you did not want to be the driver. Don't try to drive from the back seat