Homogenization and Simplicity in Tank Roles

[Anahlise_Auhn_Giinslai]

At that point, the community with find out the best 28 abilities you should use, and anyone not using those would be forced out of endgame. Then you have the issue of, You didn't bring any AoE, but you now need it for this raid fight, you are screwed. Infact, you would end up with different sets based on what you are going to be playing, a dungeon set, a trail/normal raid set, a savage+ set etc. It would just be a pain to switch between them.

You can say, well, restrict what they can have. Ensure they have some form of AoE, make sure they have at least X amount of mitigation etc. At some point you have to think, we are basically funneling them into this specific direction anyway, might as well just give them everything they need and balance that.

Blue Mage works because it is designed to be flexible between Tank/Healer/DPS, even then though, there are specific spells that you will find the vast majority of BLU uses. Even ignoring that, alot of BLU spells are just copy and paste of each other, just with a different element.

And only picking 24/28 you could have, you just nerfed yourself for no reason.

The way they do it now is the best way to do it to maintain balance and also to keep the ease of balancing.

That is why I did refer to it as a mockery of In-Class Diversity and just a Illusion of choice... There would be various problems with it, some of which you even did not mention, due to FFXIV's combat design is so bad and weird, to the point that the "jobs" need to have their design made to function with how bad combat design is, then to the point of restriction and limitation...
That is why I only did claim that it may dispel the myth of Button Bloat, since "Button Bloat" is in one part: "too many actions to use all actions, so get rid of the less use-full actions". That even gets into one of the problems that you did not mention, if we add the need to balance to the mix... Every action that the players deem "inferior, so ignore it", would have to receive improvement, to be on par with the actions given favour, to the point that, as like with Blue Mage, some actions are just copy and paste, with little real difference.

Back on thread topic... I think that in order to eliminate some of the homogenization of Tanks, and further to all "jobs", the Dev Team will have to complete redesign and improve FFXIV's awful trash combat systems... some parts of Homogenization have the cause as this issue, some of it does not, but it would be the place to start. My obsession with In-Class diversity only functions as a end-point, not a place to start...

Two other causes of Homogenization in Tanks... One would be Role Actions, and I have even seen, and agree with, the people that want some of these removed, and to replace certain role actions with.. although not unique actions in their function, at least unique actions in their animation; to give a nice illusion of to be even just a little less homogenization.

The other is a problem that affects more than just the Tanks...
similar to the severe design flaws of the combat systems, we also have the severe design flaw of "only DPS matters and DPS is more important than aught else." For less homogenization, especially for Tanks and Healers, this design flaw needs to be dealt with... Tanks need to be made to worry about defensive combat design more. give Tanks a reason to be Blue DPS less, and a bit less homogenization through that, by to have four different means of defensive reactions, that the Tanks need to use more than just as a reaction to simple combat patterns that get blown off with simple defensive reactions.

Also, to be honest, my earlier post was actually just a impulse post, because the button bloat thing annoys me a lot... >.>;