Keep overpower cone shaped!

[Shurrikhan]

To me it seems SE is still under the mistaken assumption that "tanxiety" (and its cousin "healxiety", for that matter) is something caused by the (perceived) complexity of the jobs. One would think they'd have figured out by now (MMOs and the "holy trinity" have been around for a while now...) that this is a purely psychological barrier to the role, not to the individual jobs, due to the perceived "additional responsibility" of the role and no amount of changes, barring outright removing the role, will "fix" tanxiety.

The vast majority of the people that are "tanxious" will still be tanxious if tanking consisted of a single button that said "Unga bunga!", while on the other end of the spectrum there would also be less tanks since they're sucking every little bit of enjoyment out of tanking dungeons with both the direction of dungeon design (those last few dungeons didn't exactly have exciting trash pulls...), and job design (I mean, every tank is the same as far as AoE goes...).

Then again, we're just guessing, since they never bothered actually explaining why they butchered WAR AoE, which makes things even more frustrating.

While, I'd agree that those particular changes didn't much affect "tanxiety" (using a conal was just a matter of aiming at the center mob, fcs, since the base of the cone is still plenty wide and need only clip any pixel of the enemies' oversized rings), I don't believe that "tanxiety" is something wholly static / uninfluenceable.

Heck, just take being a tank in WoW's +10s when the affixes lead to very precise pulls in order to perform careful skips through the shadow realm or by spawning the avatar of Pride. Having that extra matter to keep track of --changing pulling from a pretty basic "skip most things that can be skipped and grab some of the easiest packs extra to make up for it" to rather finnicky and memorization-dependent patterns-- was a huge blow to tank confidence.

Now, that was kind of a perfect storm. Shit actually hurts there, so the tank takes precedent on deciding how much to pull as not to be instagibbed. There's a timer, so there's little time to discuss things anyways. But the crucial piece is that there became a new responsibility that fell only on the tank. There, tanks legitimately had greatly disproportionate responsibility, and so adding a new, unintuitive and difficult practice straw atop that did break many a camel's back tank's spirit.

Now, how do you move tanks away from feeling like they have a significant unique responsibility when they don't? I suspect that's by increasing the outwardly visible responsibility of whichever role would otherwise seem to have the least.

In practice, when running with a Sylphie, that may seem to be the healer, but more often I'd suspect that's the DPS. Given the DPS some cross-role utility (such as by more often interrupting special attacks to mitigate for the tank or save themselves uptime, more ways to rapidly group up enemies or peel summon adds [which would need inclusion] or intercept tracking skillshots for the healer, etc.) for which they'd be responsible to the same degree that tanks and healers are responsible for optimizing their damage.

Once all roles have something beyond just dealing damage, then it's harder to pretend to oneself that, just by being the first typically into the fray, one has taken on unique and arduous responsibilities worth balking at (instead of merely optimizing as one can).