How is late game tanking and breakdown of each?

[Hawklaser]

I'm kinda considering swapping mains as Drg got a bit too much skill bloat over time(A 10 chain single target gcd combo is getting to be a bit much when combined with its oGCDs), and Sch is kinda going through an identity crisis currently.

I doubt I'll pick up a different healer currently, and only a couple of DPS seem interesting. So that leaves me looking at the tanks.

I have dabbled with tanks in the past across different mmos, and have enjoyed some of them.

So I am a bit curious about how things are late game currently for the tanking situation, and kind of a breakdown of the differences in the tanks. As I know from the limited experience I had with gladiator and war, paladin was seeming simpler and more newbie friendly, while warrior was a lil more involved. Dark's first impression was that it was unlikely to mesh with me.

Also any odd quirks of later ffxiv tanking should know about in advance?

[Nedkel]

If you are counting to use less skills than necessary, then it will not be your best choice to play a tank.

Rotating deffensive cooldowns is a core of all tanks skills, necessary to make run as easy and fast as possible, without it you are going to fail misreably. You will have to know which skill does what and use support abilities in order to help healers not failing the duty away.
You still have to do your DPS rotations properly, you use most of your offensive kit in duties anyway, those could take up to 16 - 17 buttons alone.
On top of it you have some necessary role actions to use as well like arms lenght, rampart, low blow/interject (for stunning large aoes on mobs), because you will find yourself having to use everything you have in order to keep yourself alive.

DPS is an easy cake in comparison.

[Hawklaser]

If you are counting to use less skills than necessary, then it will not be your best choice to play a tank.

Rotating deffensive cooldowns is a core of all tanks skills, necessary to make run as easy and fast as possible, without it you are going to fail misreably. You will have to know which skill does what and use support abilities in order to help healers not failing the duty away.
You still have to do your DPS rotations properly, you use most of your offensive kit in duties anyway, those could take up to 16 - 17 buttons alone.
On top of it you have some necessary role actions to use as well like arms lenght, rampart, low blow/interject (for stunning large aoes on mobs), because you will find yourself having to use everything you have in order to keep yourself alive.

DPS is an easy cake in comparison.

I use the better part of 3 full hotbars on both Drg and Sch. The part about Drg skill bloat I was not liking is they slowly kept creeping up in combo length. 2.0 single target was 6 long. Heavensward 8 long, Stormblood 10 long. I haven't really checked if it grew again in shadowbringer plus this is in addition to their growing number of jumps and other low cd oGCDs to mix in as well, at least 5 I can think of that should be on cd nearly 100% of the time. So 16-17 buttons based around a shorter and more muscle memory friendly rotation wouldn't be too bad.

As to using everything to keep someone alive, have that fun already when get to heal under geared tanks that don't use cooldowns, so that is nothing new as well.

[Bobzitto]

WAR - You wanna have the highest skill cap and put in twice as much effort to get to where other tanks are. Great for AoE pulls where you'll feel like an axe-wielding demigod. Single target is kinda 'eeh'.
PLD - Most straightforward, simple rotation. Your healer dies, you dgaf. You're your own healer.
GNB - New kid on the block. Is less about dealing with damage spikes and more about making sure they don't happen. Great OT, and the ST rotation feels super nice with Gnashing Fang and Continuation.
DRK - Has some niche CDs that frankly could be axed for something more useful. You'll find them by the buckets since they're the poster boy for ShB. Feels more thoughtful to play than other tanks due to having to balance defense and offense w/ your mana.

[Maneesha]

I'll give a very simplified review, since i don't have all tanks maxed and wont include any optimizations.

War - became very easy and less complex, imo, in comparison to hw. no slashing de-buff anymore, no dmg reduction de-buff, no dot to pay attention to, just 1,2,3 combo (3 is a different finished, either eye or path). things to pay attention to are not over-capping on gauge and to not use infuriate and inner release at the same time. you have your inner release burst(5x fell cleave) and outside of that you spam the 1-3 combo with occasional upheaval, inner chaos or fell cleave. has a very good personal and good party cd's.

Drk - plays similar to warrior because of inner release and delirium similarity. thou contrary to warrior it feels like you have a few more ogcd skills to press (thou 1 of those is going to be used the most,edge of darkness). similar to warrior outside your burst window you will be spamming 1-3 a lot because there is only 1 combo. you need to manage your mana which is used for dps skills and for tbn (defensive skill). the magic defense skills are a bit odd and polarizing, some feel they are fine as they are, others dislike them and would rather see them changed. still he isn't lacking in personal or party cd's.

Gnb - imo it shares similarities with paladin, but not a lot. mostly the way it plays the invuln skill and the dmg buff. it has far more skills to press then warrior and drk at the moment (a certain combo could be made into a macro to simplify things if one wishes to) similar to paladin. the novelty gives it a extra edge in the fun department, but even without it, its a very well rounded and fun to play. personal and party cd's are on par with all the other tanks, so he isn't lacking there either. also his style is more sustain and not pure burst like drk/warrior. he still has a burst rotation for burst windows, but you are not restricted by a 90sec cd.

Pld - used to be the least complex of all the tanks, at least in hw. while he is very straight forward, i think he got a bit more complex over the expansions. they changed him a lot with sb and it was not only needed, but also the changes were amazing. he is really well rounded and similar to gnb focuses more on sustain instead of pure burst. has the most party utility skills (party cd's) but he gives me the impression in dungeons that he lacks 1 personal defensive cd. other then that he is really great and fun to play.

Overall i think all the tanks have their interesting aspects, they are close in dps and while i am sure you will be able to clear content with all of them, i cant predict the "meta". All of them have good party support and their defensive cool-down's got streamlined, so none of them is really lacking. You might feel like a "blue-icon" dps thou, since you could say there is no enmity anymore as long as you press on this "def-stance" button and because other then the occasional defensive cd activation, you will spam your dps combos.

I hope this was somewhat helpful and i wish you best of luck and fun with whichever of the tanks you might choose to play.

[TheForce]

WAR - You wanna have the highest skill cap and put in twice as much effort to get to where other tanks are. Great for AoE pulls where you'll feel like an axe-wielding demigod. Single target is kinda 'eeh'.
PLD - Most straightforward, simple rotation. Your healer dies, you dgaf. You're your own healer.
GNB - New kid on the block. Is less about dealing with damage spikes and more about making sure they don't happen. Great OT, and the ST rotation feels super nice with Gnashing Fang and Continuation.
DRK - Has some niche CDs that frankly could be axed for something more useful. You'll find them by the buckets since they're the poster boy for ShB. Feels more thoughtful to play than other tanks due to having to balance defense and offense w/ your mana.

I gotta disagree about DRK being the most thoughtful to play. If we were talking about its HW or even its SB iteratiom, I would've agreed with you in a heartbeat. But now, there's a total of 3 whole skills that cost magic...with two of those skills being essentially the same move, just one being aoe, and one being single target. DRK really isn't the magic management Tank anymore, I'll give that title to PLD. We just have a greater amount of options for how to use magic, as well as more creative ways to use it and reasons to manage it (Requiescat is an example that comes to mind) which leads to more (and more fun, imo) magic management.

I have both DRK and PLD at 80, and honestly DRK is much easier than PLD. There's simply just less options, less freedom, and less complexity. Cannot speak on WAR or GNB yet though.

[Hawklaser]

Overall i think all the tanks have their interesting aspects, they are close in dps and while i am sure you will be able to clear content with all of them, i cant predict the "meta". All of them have good party support and their defensive cool-down's got streamlined, so none of them is really lacking. You might feel like a "blue-icon" dps thou, since you could say there is no enmity anymore as long as you press on this "def-stance" button and because other then the occasional defensive cd activation, you will spam your dps combos.

I hope this was somewhat helpful and i wish you best of luck and fun with whichever of the tanks you might choose to play.

Thank you, it did help. I would be more interested in some more detailed stuff from those that could share as well. I just never really mained a tank before in the prior MMOs because I didn't want to be stuck doing everything on them as that tended to happen to those who did well with in demand classes, and I try and perform well if at all possible.

On the blue DPS icon, at least when initially dabbled with war(lv34ish) pre-shadowbringers already felt that way in tank stance. But then again did have light tanking experience from FFXI, Rift and WoW prior to this as like to feel out a number of classes to know how they work especially if pvp could be involved.

[Nihility]

WAR is extremely simple with one huge annoyance and two great skills that clash so you need to be careful on them.
the annoyance is storm's eye. It takes 3 gcd to get it up and you need to maintain it but aside from the buff it's trash compared to storm's path and with your bigger skills weaved in once in a while the buff from this is almost always going to delay your cooldowns, be forced to refresh way too early, or be forced to let it fall off for 1-2 gcd. It rarely lines up properly outside of the opener where it lines up near perfect.
the clash is infuriate and inner release. Never ever use these skills together or your costing yourself like 20-30k+ damage easily

DRK is like WAR but it has a bunch of skills with annoying downsides and it's version of storm's eye is pretty awesome
dark mind is absolutely useless against physical attacks
living dead is bar none the worst invuln skill. The way tank hp went way up compared to healing output it is more of a healer resource black hole than ever before
abyssal drain and salted earth are straight up remnants that they just left in place and are barely worth using. Just super weak skills you just use because it's better than not using. Even Carve and spit is kind of some weird wedged in thing as it is now(it is actually good though) Much rather see these skills effects just be rolled back into bloodspiller/quietus and the new shadows skills
and the blackest night is the only defensive cooldown that shares offensive resources across all tanks. Personally i think this one is not a problem though as it's cooldown is negligible
so the resource is the more limiting factor in it's case

PLD is easy to use and you get to use a lot of different skills all the time because it's basic skill rotation is super long but also simple to grasp and it's burst is also different skills than it
normally uses. It's only real downside is very long cooldown on it's invuln skill

GNB is very very busy. It's very strong but definitely keeps you going nonstop so be prepared to be pushing buttons very fast, very often

As of right now PLD and GNB are pretty much the very solid tanks that don't need any tweaks and are just a preference of playstyle
WAR and DRK share a playstyle
WAR is a bit undertuned on the damage side which seems unbelievable but outside their bursts they kind of suck
DRK is on par but has a bunch of negative quirks to their skills that need to be ironed out. S-E just needs to get the idea that dark night is some sort of undead anti-mage out of their heads. It was never that and isn't even that in FFXIV's lore and it's weird that they call it the magic tank when in reality it's just the least physical tank since every other tank is omni-damage reduction

[Abomination713]

Pld - used to be the least complex of all the tanks, at least in hw. while he is very straight forward, i think he got a bit more complex over the expansions. they changed him a lot with sb and it was not only needed, but also the changes were amazing. he is really well rounded and similar to gnb focuses more on sustain instead of pure burst. has the most party utility skills (party cd's) but he gives me the impression in dungeons that he lacks 1 personal defensive cd. other then that he is really great and fun to play.

While it is true that PLD have 1 less defensive CD compared to the other tanks (ironic since SE stole Rampart and gave it to everyone and PLD are suppose to be the def tank) we make up for it by having Sheltron which lets up block all damage for 6 seconds and you can do this every 16ish seconds which is great! However, in lower dungeons before the Sheltron upgrade, we do get screwed in the def department cause SE took away 4-5 def abilities this expansion. We should have at least kept Convalescene (Increases own HP recovery via healing magic by 20% for 20 seconds) considering that it's been with us since like level 6.