Tanking in FF14 question

[Maeka]

Although this is likely correct, notice how they didn't do the same with DPS, who also have that issue of what DPS was viable and which ones weren't. They didn't homongonize DPS, they realized if they did that the game would be on fire. Because Tanks/Healers are a smaller portion of the playerbase (still at least 30-40%) they believed they could get away with what they did this expansion and thought it would not hurt the game.

DPS are easier to balance.

There's only like 2 metrics you need to balance DPS: Output and Utilities.

Notice how all the DPS have similar utilities (movement abilities, second wind, etc)? Well, as long as the DPS are doing DPS within 5-10% of each other, they're balanced. And if they're not balanced, an easy fix is to just add or subtract a little potency, like what they did with DNCs when their damage was well behind everybody else's.

Tanks and Heals, however, you need to balance how much damage they can take and how much healing they can do, along with their DPS. So SE's decision was to just simply make them very similar and then make their DPS similar and their survivability about the same and boom. Balance.

The reason why we had so much difficulty in the past, is they tried to balance it by giving WHM lots of heals and PLDs the ability to soak lots of incoming damage. This didn't work because players simply didn't care about that; all they cared was about DPS output, which led to the "WHM and PLD suck" shtick we heard for two expansions straight. So SE knew that having a throughput healer and an immovable wall meant nothing if their DPS was less. But they couldn't simply buff the DPS of PLD and WHM because they also had the damage soaking and raw healing power and they'd then be OP. So how do you fix this? Well, quite simple. Make everybody the same. That's the only way to shut players up and get them to stop discriminating.

It's a lot easier to play around with the DPS because the only numbers you really care about, are the DPS output for them really. As long as nothing egregious is going on like you have a DPS with zero movement abilities or something.