we got a fourth tank

[NosamKin]

No. God no. Please SE never add a job to this game that has a summoned minion do the tanking. .

Umm - we've had this for quite a while. SMN has Titan-Egi which is tank minion. It's most excellent when i'm soloing content. Also works ok if we're undersized in a party.

[Neela]

Umm - we've had this for quite a while. SMN has Titan-Egi which is tank minion. It's most excellent when i'm soloing content. Also works ok if we're undersized in a party.

i also would like see a beastmaster with tanking pets - I would really enjoy it, but I guess Nosa we are some of the less who like pets at all ^^

[Bright-Flower]

Umm - we've had this for quite a while. SMN has Titan-Egi which is tank minion. It's most excellent when i'm soloing content. Also works ok if we're undersized in a party.

Yeah, it works fine for soloing as a smn or when there's not a proper tank around, but I would not want to deal with them in current dungeons and raids.

Even if they say set up the defensive cooldowns and taunts to work seamlessly and do something like a health sharing mechanic, having a pet positioning bosses would be a pain.

[Makeda]

No. God no. Please SE never add a job to this game that has a summoned minion do the tanking. I would not want to deal with a tank who has to tell a summon where to go and how to position things etc even if the player was directly controlling the summon's cooldowns for tankbusters etc.

As for 'needing' it, no we don't need a new tank but we didn't 'need' a third casting dps either, the game doesn't 'need' jobs of any specific role at this point.

Wildstar had this with the Engineer and it's tank bot. The Engineer used a rifle - so it was technically a ranged tank, and the tank bot was used to keep a target at range - though it didn't tend to live long and you had to keep spawning them. Many engineers just used builds without that pet (In Wildstar, like many current MMOs, you could only have a small number of skills on your action bar, and knew about 3 times as many - so everyone had a different skill build).

Conceptually though, and even in practice, it worked very well. You'd be spamming a new bot about as often as a tank here hits something like Rampart. If I remember right you had some control over it, but could also let it just do it's own thing. It was very handy for massive numbers of adds, as you could use it to split the adds the same way a Monk in WoW can use their statue - throw all the adds to the side, then peel them off in numbers small enough to survive. It made it one of the best tanks to use in some of Wildstar's dungeons that had trash packs frustratingly close together with pats moving between them... the engineers could rescue a situation the other tanks would wipe on by throwing the bot out onto some spell-casting adds that would otherwise take out the healer.

If we had a ranged tank here, or a pet-tank, it would instantly become meta for any content that had a risk of adds spawning in poorly controlled locations.

[Kalise]

If we had a ranged tank here, or a pet-tank, it would instantly become meta for any content that had a risk of adds spawning in poorly controlled locations.

Ranged Tanks and Pet Tanks...

Well, I remember back in the day in WoW when Warlocks could tank things with their Voidwalker. But it became a strat to cheese a particular boss fight because of pets AoE damage reduction that made it better than an "Actual" tank so then the pet got nerfed to uselessness...

There was also a time in WoW when Warlocks had a Glyph that gave them a Tank stance that boosted their threat and defenses and changes a few of their skills to be instant casts. That was actually pretty fun, since you ended up playing a Tank but with DPS rotations (So you know... Actually fun). But then it was removed because of course having fun in a Blizzard game is not allowed, gotta remove any source of entertainment lest anyone start enjoying themselves instead of paying $30 for a store mount!

Other notable tanks I recall off hand...

Engineers in Anarchy Online where kind of Pet Tanks. Well, not really an actual tank but kind of because their schtick was to get a bunch of buffs from high level players to allow them to build a pet that would be many times higher level than them and use that to carry them/their team through content. Ahh, the joys of AFK farming because of hiding in the corner of a mission map while your level ??? pet (Because you could only see levels up to 50 levels higher than you) was set to Hunt mode and ran around murdering everything was a thing xD

They later nerfed Hunt mode though so this wouldn't work (Yet at the same time, Keepers could AFK farm Shadowlands content because they would just stand around in the middle of a pack of enemies with auto-attack when attacked activated while their healing aura sustained them...)

Also in Anarchy Online was the Soldier class, which was a ranged tank. Using Assault Rifles (Or Machine Pistols/SMG's if you were min/maxing) to fill their enemies full of lead (Or plasma) while for defence they had reflection shields that mitigated (And reflected) damage. With of course, their main defensive CD being the OP OP Total Mirror Shield which would be a massive 75%-82% damage reduction (With 1 minute 20s duration and 2m CD...)

Of course, AO had some peculiar things with Hate management. Like, if you sat down in combat you'd generate a bunch of Hate (Because standard OoC healing items technically only had the requirement for you to sit down to use them, so hate generation when you sat down made things hit you to stop you from healing) so you could effectively "Taunt" as a Tank by sitting down if you didn't have your actual taunt skills available or if they were out of range xD

Though, I get the concern about a pet tank in FFXIV, due to it being more traditional in regards to needing to face bosses away from the group to mitigate cleaves and such. Meanwhile, pets have very limited control compared to other games, as well as them having delays on using actions because they'll queue them up for when they finished their current action. So it won't be as easy to for example, quickly reposition a pet while throwing out an AoE and using an oGCD taunt to pick up adds. Generally, pet tanks work by pets just being imbalanced to cover up for their weakness of lack of control.

Unless there ends up being something like your character still does most of the stuff just with the caveat that your enmity goes to your pet. So that basically all your pet needs to do is be in the correct position and get slapped a bunch. But I dare say that wouldn't really be fulfilling the fantasy of a "Pet using Tank" (Either that or they go the aforementioned Glyphed Warlock or WotLK era Unholy Death Knight tank where they have a pet but it's just there to DPS stuff while the PC is the actual tank still...)

[HyperiusUltima]

GUN probably will have burst similar to PLD’s Requiescat window perhaps, but I think that we’ll at least have a gauge of what to expect of them whenever they release or bring out a play test version to the public.

What I expect is for it to be decent on MP and a tad more aggressive than PLD, but not as aggressive as DRK/WAR in terms of playstyle.

[Renato]

My thing is I hope SE actually makes Tanks feel like tanks and not just another DPS with simplified rotation. What makes it worse is that the community pushes the notion that DPS melds are more important than the actual stats intended for tanking as well. (Determination and Tenacity) I don't agree with it but I understand why that thread was created asking for the tank stances to be removed...everyone's basically a DPS class anyway. Kill things quick, run dungeons faster.

And I'm not saying tanks shouldn't DPS. I like big numbers as well. It just seems like it's made to be a priority in this game sometimes.

[ReiMakoto]

My thing is I hope SE actually makes Tanks feel like tanks and not just another DPS with simplified rotation. What makes it worse is that the community pushes the notion that DPS melds are more important than the actual stats intended for tanking as well. (Determination and Tenacity) I don't agree with it but I understand why that thread was created asking for the tank stances to be removed...everyone's basically a DPS class anyway. Kill things quick, run dungeons faster.

And I'm not saying tanks shouldn't DPS. I like big numbers as well. It just seems like it's made to be a priority in this game sometimes.

Thats because Determination and Tenacity don't make a noticable difference whereas crit and the like do. Also the best mitigation is killing a fight quicker, and its not like you're taking an unreasonable amount of damage anyway that you would need what tenacity and to a lesser extent det is providing.

[Kalise]

My thing is I hope SE actually makes Tanks feel like tanks and not just another DPS with simplified rotation. What makes it worse is that the community pushes the notion that DPS melds are more important than the actual stats intended for tanking as well. (Determination and Tenacity) I don't agree with it but I understand why that thread was created asking for the tank stances to be removed...everyone's basically a DPS class anyway. Kill things quick, run dungeons faster.

And I'm not saying tanks shouldn't DPS. I like big numbers as well. It just seems like it's made to be a priority in this game sometimes.

Yeah, but it's not a particularly easy fix.

DPS scales infinitely, once you can survive everything that the game will throw at you (I.e. Tankbusters, the only appreciable amount of damage thrown the Tanks way) the only thing left to do is stack damage. Since it doesn't matter if you survive the tankbuster at 1% life or at 51% life, either way, you're not dead and you're getting healed back up immediately after. Meanwhile, there is a notable difference between killing a boss in 10 minutes and killing a boss in 9 minutes.

Meaning that the options are something like: Tune damage to tanks so that stacking mitigation is always warranted (But the downside is it makes lower geared Tanks really difficult to play if not outright impossible due to incoming damage) or provide an alternate means of enhancing a parties overall DPS in a way that relies on stacking non-DPS focused stats and utilizing defensive abilities such as Tank stances and/or enmity combos (But the downside is you might just get the same thing happening, building mitigation stats up until a breakpoint, then stack DPS. Or invalidating the use of DPS stances)

Though, at the very least while they're working on fixing this, it'd be nice to just get some more interesting rotations. Less "1 > Enmity 2 > Enmity 3 + 1 > DPS 2 > DPS 3" and more actual diversity and you know... Engagement... With Tank rotations. Even if you keep the Enmity combo just the simple 123 chain so idiots can still play tank and get enmity, at least if we have to spam DPS combos for eternity make them somewhat interesting and actually different between the tanks in more ways than "Oh, PLD gets a DoT and WAR has a dmg buff to maintain"

[Phoenicia]

First of all, I don't get the whole "we don't feel like tanks" argument.. We already take less than half the damage none tanks do out of our tank stance. We also have almost twice their health and we survive shit no non-tank can dream of.

Snip.

No matter how much they increase tank buster damage, it is not going to change the way we gear. I mean currently tank busters do twice our health in damage (and if they still don't feel like a tank now I don't know what will) . Or they are so frequent that they exhaust our CDs.

If "feeling like a tank" is to put on a turtle shell on your back, walk slow and carry a shield then you're playing the wrong game. Even in medieval armor offense was taken into account when armor was made.

I am very pro-best mitigation is high offense. I think most people that don't "feel like a tank because no tank stats" don't even do savage. In o10s, there is this small dragon add that is immune to damage while nails are alive. This dragon cleaves for a fk tonne of damage and Very frequently. It WILL exhaust your defensive very quickly. Unless you and your team kills the nails within a minute, you will sit in tank stance and probably die. Not to mention it is a DPS check where the boss will wipe the raid if dragon dies late.

But if I hypothetically want tank stats to be a real thing, the way to force tanks to want to build defensively is change this predictable pattern of damage (where it is chip vs TB) to be unpredictable where randomly the boss will do a highly damaging attack.

A better way even, is what WOW is doing, offensive stats provide mitigation. Strength/Agility provides parry chance and block value for people that use shields. Critical adds parry chance with diminishing returns, haste reduces the CDs of their active mitigation (in FFXIV PLD would have more sheltrons because faster autos) and so on. But then again, Wow decided to reduce boss damage and nerf tanks' mitigation so damage is not as scary for non-tanks. A weird change imo.

As for rotations, tanks' rotations in many MMOs are getting streamlined to make them more accessible since it is the least played role due to tankxiety (the main reason many people don't do or quit tanks). In WOW tanks are the only classes that have their single target and AoE rotations being the same. In here we have 1 button AoE rotations and no serious "keep 2 DoTs, a debuff and a buff up" rotations for tanks. Less complex rotations also allows less capable players to still focus on mechanics and mitigation since a tank's mistake is much more impactful than a DPS's.