Objective Considerations about the new tanks in ShB! Discuss :)

[Nedkel]

I personally believe that the changes were the worst possible for the health of tanking in this game.
I have 2 major issues:
1. Dumbing down tanking
2. Homogenisation
In 1. we can include removing enmity management, removing stance dancing, removing defensive abilities like blind, pacify and generally adding more damage instead of more defense. Tanks right now are pretty much blue dps. Tanks should tank, healers should heal and damage dealers should do damage. It's called the trinity for a reason and it worked for so many games for a reason. At least they are on the right track with the healers. Hopefully they can do the same for tanks in the future.

However the real killer is the 2nd one, Homogenisation. Square enix is trying desperately to make all tanks viable for savage raiding (for any other content tanks were pretty much fine).
While the idea behind their changes (making tanks viable) is correct the way they are trying to achieve it the worst possible.

What they are pretty much doing is making all the tanks the same. All tanks have the same (or almost the same) cooldowns and abilities (20%, 30%, invul, gap closer, aoe, ot support, aoe mitigation etc). Tanks (and all classes as a matter of fact) should have their niche. You should have a magic tank, or physical tank or a shield tank or an aoe tank or whatever. And you should make content that favors the niche of each tank. For example make a boss magic heavy, then make the next boss physical heavy etc.

If every tank can do everything (like the situation we have now) the result will be that the tanks doing the most damage will be the tanks that are being used. Because when everyone is special, then noone is special. And no matter how much they try to make the dps the same, they will not be able to do it. (Unless they give the exact dps abilities to all tanks, thus making the class more of a skin than an actual class).

You can see what I mentioned above in World of Warcraft. They had the philosophy: "Bring the player, not the class". So what they did, is pretty much make everyone special, by giving all classes all abilities that would make them needed/prefered in raid enviroments. And it ended so bad for them, that their lead designer had to come out in a video and say they pretty much screwed up and they will revert it back. Because not only it didn't solve their problem (ie don't bring a specific class) but it also made people hate the classes and the game due to all being samey.

Unfortunately that is where tanks are heading.

Any enmity management was only present in savage raids and even there, the OT tank were giving you enmity by shirking and provoking and it was no philosophy nor a depth gameplay, just a annoying gimmick to help maintain DPS stance on both tanks.
They deleted def cooldowns and nerfed it in some way or another to make room for healers to actually heal more instead of DPSing for majority of time. You cant keep trinity with tanks being able to hold them own, or you will end up with healers being glorified DPS.
Homogenisation was present in stormblood to even higher degree, idk what you were doing for the last 2 years, but tanks were always similar to each other in that patch, at least now they are more different than then.
They had tank stance which were made for the exact same purpose, they had dedicated AOE pull, range pull, some kind of shield, they had enmity combo, they had dps combo, all had gauge to use for skills, 2 of them had dash, 1 strong offensive oGCD to single target, 1 strong def CD, one weaker def CD, one CD that allowed them to be immune to damage, well not to mention 7 shared class actions. Seriously there were no diversity in tanks anyway and you are complaining about thing that did not existed anyway, tanks now are more diverse then they were in anytime in stormblood. And no, DRK and WAR are not the same because of IR and delirium.
Comparing this game to world of warcraft is petty to say the least.
FFXIV is a game designed with mind of making all teams being able to go through the content, so you will be able to finish the content no matter the team composition you will get from PUGs, it always been like that. WoW is completely different pair of boots, because blizzard just forced same changes on their game which was different from the beginning.

I think you are complaining about wrong game lad, or you play WoW too often.

[Ivellior]

Any enmity management was only present in savage raids and even there, the OT tank were giving you enmity by shirking and provoking and it was no philosophy nor a depth gameplay, just a annoying gimmick to help maintain DPS stance on both tanks.

That is part of dumbing down I mentioned before. They could just remove shriek and decrease the enmity modifiers on the combos and magically, you have enmity management again.

They deleted def cooldowns and nerfed it in some way or another to make room for healers to actually heal more instead of DPSing for majority of time. You cant keep trinity with tanks being able to hold them own, or you will end up with healers being glorified DPS.

That is absurd. Do you want to increase healing? Just make the bosses auto attacks do 5x or 10x more damage. Problem solved, now healers actually have to heal and you still have a lot of defensive cooldowns which are now necessary and useful again. Also the trinity also requires tank to actually tank and not just be glorified blue dps like thay are now.

Homogenisation was present in stormblood to even higher degree, idk what you were doing for the last 2 years, but tanks were always similar to each other in that patch, at least now they are more different than then.
They had tank stance which were made for the exact same purpose, they had dedicated AOE pull, range pull, some kind of shield, they had enmity combo, they had dps combo, all had gauge to use for skills, 2 of them had dash, 1 strong offensive oGCD to single target, 1 strong def CD, one weaker def CD, one CD that allowed them to be immune to damage, well not to mention 7 shared class actions. Seriously there were no diversity in tanks anyway and you are complaining about thing that did not existed anyway, tanks now are more diverse then they were in anytime in stormblood. And no, DRK and WAR are not the same because of IR and delirium.

Saying that tanks are more different now is seriously disingenuous. The way tank stances worked was MUCH more different than the way they do now. WAR had a different skillset between the bloody stances...
Gauge/gimmicks were added to all classes. It really only makes sense on WAR and they just added it to the other tanks because they had to add a gauge. And WARs gauge actually has a meaning since you need to do some resource management compared to other classes. Not to mention the classes still have gauges.
Yes tanks had a lot of tools that had similar usage (some were required) and instead of making them more different they just made them even more homogenised.

Comparing this game to world of warcraft is petty to say the least.

No it's not. Both are mmos, both use the trinity and both homogenised their classes. It's also a live example of what happens when you homogenise too much. It's a very appropriate example.

FFXIV is a game designed with mind of making all teams being able to go through the content, so you will be able to finish the content no matter the team composition you will get from PUGs, it always been like that. WoW is completely different pair of boots, because blizzard just forced same changes on their game which was different from the beginning.

I think you are complaining about wrong game lad, or you play WoW too often.

Raiding in WoW and FFXIV is pretty similar. WoW also has LFR so pugging is a thing there as well (WoW probably has better raiding because they have more bosses and difficulty scales better). In FFXIV you can finish most content with PUGS because the content is not punishing/difficult. You can clear normal modes with pugs. But that is not true for difficult content. Try pugging an ultimate.