What is the point of playing a tank?

[AnPo]

Tanks are...kinda boring now.

Skill used to be a factor some time ago...now it's just eh. You can teach a toddler to do it. Which I guess is what most of the playerbase needed to be able to play tanks.

But what was hard in tanking before ShB, TP management aka dont spam aoe till end or stance dancing aka all hate this. Skill as factor - nice joke

[DreameR7g]

Skill in holding enmity alone has never been a thing in XIV ever since 2.0. It became even -more- trivial with the addition of Shirk in 4.0.

Heck, it was proven with certain skill combinations that tank stances could be bypassed altogether! An example would be 4.0 DRK where all you had to do was 1-2->Dark Arts -> Power Slash and you established enmity for most if not all the fight. This was done without Grit on by the way. What is the point in stance dancing when you switch a total of 1 time in a fight? There is none. It makes the tank stance button a dead one (Hello, button bloat!). It also makes people believe there is skill in such a thing when there really wasn't. The only skill part about it was the burden of knowledge knowing such a thing was possible.

[Enjuden]

In fairness, they mentioned being level 49, when you can't equip gear that's greater than, like, i49. But otherwise, yeah. Soon as you hit 50 and upgrade to Ironworks, everything (in ARR) starts melting. You'd probably run into a similar problem as you approach 60, but even then, geared up, not nearly as bad.

Aye. Didn't catch the level 49 bit, but ARR fates admittedly were not meant to be solo'd unless overleveled. This is mostly fixed in Heavensward, then entirely in Stormblood/Shadowbringers.