The Ultimate DRK Rework

[bundythenoob]

I agree wholeheartedly and feel that encounter design is what really needs to be leveraged to give tanks more direct engagement for the role and to feel like a "tank".
To me being a tank is about keeping control of the fight and making sure that the boss is doing what you want it to do. The design of essentially a tank and spank while navigating general mechanics that affect the whole party doesn't really convey that feeling.
The general mechanics, the tank busters, the dps checks and the stuff they have done so far are good and they should keep doing that, but they need to start adding in more things specifically for tanks to have to control and manage asides from being able to take a beating.
A few things that come to mind are making boss positioning a more important and dynamic thing in encounters, more aggro drops/resets/multi-enemy boss fights that require swapping targets between tanks and other such things forcing tanks to have to utilize on-the-fly aggro tools like provoke, and more mechanics requiring the tanks to actively protect other party members with their abilities. Stuff like that. Then give the tanks more abilities to deal with those mechanics like a stronger defensive to use on others but on a longer recast.
I feel doing things like that would do a lot to make the tank role feel more unique and sell the fantasy of being a protector.

The argument of tanking being better designed sadly is a lost cause when it comes to this game, mostly due to the developer's intentions of being casual friendly. In terms of savage and ultimate, yes that's where the devs have the room to implement the most tank-like gameplay ideas, and I believe they will continue to do so going forward, but sadly those ideas will not see the light of day when it comes to the dungeons, trials, and even normal raids.

looking at it from the beginning with their ARR combat design, square has designed most of the game to get people to focus solely on their rotations and maximising output, and then adding difficulty with enemy positioning, mob patrol routes, or even having small dungeon gimmicks to keep the players on their toes by the lv 50 content. sadly though, as the years have gone by, they have toned down the difficulty, and so if they tried to add anything that would be fundamentally tank-like, not only would they need to overhaul 90% of the game, but the players themselves would have to actually put in effort to beat even the daily faceroll content that they've become used to.

it's my strong belief that the designs of dungeons and trials were acceptable because tanks and healers had more complicated designs in their job kits to make up for that, but now that the jobs have been simplified, the holes in those cracks are starting to show.

so now the question becomes.. does square make the jobs perform better while keeping content brainded, or do they make content much harder and allow jobs to stay brainded? (i say why not both, but that requires the playerbase to git gud as opposed to facerolling everything)