Tanking in FF14 question

[ReiMakoto]

That just just plain terrible design then, if 2 tanks could do that and the other one couldn't.

It needed fixed.

Dropping your protective stance, and dumping most of your threat generation shouldn't make you *more* tanky and able to do more DPS at the same time. That's just stupid.

Its called risk reward, and was designed like that to raise the skill ceiling. It was harder to play aggressive but there was a massive reward for doing so, which I would argue is good design. Through smart play you could be just as tanky as someone sitting in crutch stance while doing more damage, but if you didnt play better you got bopped. That is inherently good design as it rewards mastery of the system, whilst having a crutch there for people who need it due to being undergeared or lesser skilled.

The flaw with the system was simply that threat was so easy to manage and damage was so low that it was the obvious choice spending 99% of your time in damage stance was the correct way to play, and even SE introducing aggro resets and other mechanics didnt offset how people played the classes, so it became a vestigial system. I would have hoped in cutting it that tanks would get more in depth dps rotations to compensate but well here we are, basically in the same state we were before but now without the illusion of choice.