What if Tanks were designed like Healers?

[Post]

Let me stop you there.

Until enmity was basically non existent (ie how it is today) Tank damage was equivalent to threat so it made sense that tanks were required to do decent damage to maintain a threat level against the DPS (Despite the DPS having multiple threat reducers at the time). Good DPS still snuck up on tanks.

That doesn't exist in any way, shape, or form anymore. Tanks can literally do one button to take threat off of a DPS.

As I've said multiple times before: If tanks were designed like healers they'd riot. Rightfully so. Which is why the current state of healer design is unacceptable to veterans.

It's worth noting that both healers and tanks lost a lot of their unique identities at the same time: Entering Shadowbringers from Stormblood. That's when all healer dps rotations became streamlined (one nuke, one DoT and one AoE before fringe cases like Assize or Misery), and that's when tanks lost the entire enmity portion of their kits.

It's also when they decided to further homogenize tank mitigation for the sake of ease of balance: All tanks got a 'co-tank targetable' version of their short cooldown, all tanks got a 2 min and 30% version of their strong cooldown, all tanks got reprisal and arm's length chosen for them (and arms length was made into a Slow for additional dungeon mitigation).

What tanks got in exchange was more consciously designed dps rotations, separated from their role responsibilities. All tanks got an aoe resource generating combo. No longer would a WAR or DRK be asked to spend their gauge on survival, they were made strictly for dps. No longer did a tank have to forgo a knockback resisting action for personal or party mitigation. By contrast, Healers gained nothing, only lost.

It's not really the discussion of this thread in general, but I think the loss of enmity as a system from the game removed a layer of depth that the game was founded on and kinda sorely needs. As it is right now, the tank dps rotations are more interesting than healers, but they're still not interesting enough for 95% of the game's battle content. It doesn't help that the battle design team itself goes out of its way to remove more of the role's responsibilities. Bosses position themselves, put giant flashing visuals with castbars to hint at tankbusters, and adds almost never show up while the boss is still around, but I think that stuff is kinda in the realm of arguing bosses should do more damage to match the strength of modern healer toolkits as well.

They need to create new problems to solve, not take away problems that we already were solving.

The job design team and battle design team often tackle the same problem from both ends, and over-correct for it.

Simple example that springs to mind: When EW launched, they addressed some long standing issues with ground targeted abilities, notably that you can modify them not to ever exceed their max distance while targeting them, and you can execute them by using the action key they're assigned to twice (instead of using the action and then clicking).

Now that they solved this, they simultaneously removed the ground targeted function of DRK's Salted Earth; it simply casts centered on the DRK now. There's basically only 5 ground targeted actions in PvE today (Shukuchi, Caster Limit Break, Asylum, Sacred Soil, and Earthly Star) and three of those they made friggin' gargantuan so you don't even need to aim them anywhere remotely properly. It's harder to MISS with them in most arenas.

Why did they change something that the other team solved? Are they not talking to each other? Do they not approach problems from the perspective of "fixing a problem" and not "removing any situation that might be a problem entirely?"

Why couldn't they just give you two versions of Salted Earth, one that's ground targeted if you liked it, and one that isn't if you preferred being less adaptable? Why couldn't they keep a version of a dungeon that the bosses function the way they used to for 4 player parties and one with modified boss AI for the Duty Support version where the AI players couldn't hack a boss fight for whatever reason, and load you into the appropriate version of the dungeon based on your group?

I miss enmity sometimes purely because I used to be able to help myself (and others as a NIN) stay alive as a non-tank just because I knew how to manage it. Now, when a tank dies in a 24 man, the other two tanks don't even have their stances on and the boss auto attacks the next 2-3 dps until someone says something in chat for them to wake up, and there's no player agency in the game itself for this, because the system was stripped down and removed. And as ty_taurus says, it was replaced with nothing.