Tanks - The Most Useless Raiding Role

[ijuakos_xqwzts]

Tanks in raids are, for the most part, completely useless. I'll break it down:

Healers: a healer's job is to heal folks. If your group is good to go, you you have visibility into the other groups and can heal those folks, too. Due to generally constant damage being applied by the enemies, you're almost always doing something. If you die, people usually get you up ASAP because the easiest path to wiping is all dead healers.

DPS: hitting crap is your job. You are always doing your job. You're not expected to heal or take hits but it's great if you have the ability to do so. To be honest, if I'm healing a raid - unless tankbusters are involved - I tend to revive the DPS before the tank if both are down.

Tanks: your job is to take damage that otherwise would have went to the raid. Here lies the problem.

Other than the trash pulls, most raid fights consist of one creature that does all of the damage. One creature. Three tanks. That means you have two tanks doing subpar damage pressing the 3 buttons from their main rotation and the occasional damage cooldown. All those damage mitigation buttons and other tanking skills go unused. The only time you feel "important" is when the critter throws out "tankbuster" attacks. Big whoop.

I suspect this is why I see so many tanks provoking off each other or tanks who think they have to tank the entire instance. It's outright boring to go into a raid instance as a tank and all you get to do is be a lackluster DPS.

What can be done to fix it? Well, this will require SquareEnix to do something more substantive than "oh, we'll throw in a tankbuster" in their raids. Tankbuster attacks are the laziest way to add an artificial need for an otherwise unneeded tank. Another thing they've tried is adding trash adds to the fight, but those phases are maybe 5% of the entire fight. It seems like they'll either need to completely rethink how they design raids, put some kind of lottery system into bosses, or they will have to do something like remove tanks provoking and require tanks shirking; none of these sound appealing in the long run. Alternatively, it tanks could just rotate through the bosses. But this would require the entire tanking community to change this mindset that they have to tank everything - something I'm equally sure will never happen.

[Tizzy_Tormentor]

Funny, because people have beaten certain Ultimate's with no healers, but you can't do that without tanks. Healers barely heal as it is in stuff outside of savage/ultimate (and sometimes even then).

The off-tanks main job is to step in and save the day in case the main tank dies, because not having a boss run around killing dps/healer because of a main tank error is worth the slight decrease in overall raid dps.

[UkcsAlias]

Funny, because people have beaten certain Ultimate's with no healers, but you can't do that without tanks. Healers barely heal as it is in stuff outside of savage/ultimate (and sometimes even then).

Thats because tank busters unlike healing checks are a lot more common in fights. The moment you get a raid wide doom that has to be esunad or strongly healed, healers become mandatory. The only reason its not there is because unlike the tank, healers often dont have a fallback for failure (a dead tank can be revived). The lack of proper healing checks in ultimates is just a massive failure on the fight design.

Also, this complaint was about alliance raids, and outside of the 3 enemy battles, multiple tanks is generaly useless. And it doesnt even need to be 3 enemies either, if there are 2 enemies that must be pulled apart, 2 tanks is mandatory again.

And its realy about this fight design where the complaints are, since a single big enemy, while being capable of forcing healers into healing, they are generaly not capable of forcing tanks into tanking tasks. A mechanic involving tank swapping would be completely fine for alliance raids. Since unlike savage, the other mechanics are still generaly weak.

[Bad_Luck]

Tanks in raids are, for the most part, completely useless. I'll break it down:

Tanks: your job is to take damage that otherwise would have went to the raid. Here lies the problem.

You're missing a very crucial detail.

[Absurdity]

The moment you get a raid wide doom that has to be esunad or strongly healed, healers become mandatory.

Magic Numbers cheese would like to have a word with you, lol.

[Jade_Tyrant]

One creature. Three tanks.

Just want to point out that until I got to this part, I had no clue you were specifically talking about in Alliance raids. Clears up the earlier comment about healers having "visibility into other groups" as well (though I'd say it's still pretty easy for healers to get bored and feel useless in Alliance Raids with how easy it can be to keep a half-decent group alive.)

It's a pretty important detail that makes the post confusing otherwise, though I will add that a fair number of non-high end Normal Raids and Trials have this issue as well, where the off-tank simply has nothing to do besides damage rotation and the rare add phase.

Mechanics that force tanks to rotate, like how tankbusters (more frequently seen in high-end) can give vulns that force a tankswap, are a potential solution to the problem you're seeing. Though every boss doing that would likely not be very interesting after seeing it for the N-th time.

[Post]

Take a look at some of the more experimental alliance raid environments to make tanks have more of a role.

Labyrinth of the Ancients through Dun Scaithe went from offering multiple bosses and adds to manage to bosses that could easily kill a tank to give a reason to have others ready on deck. Now they aim busters at you if you're part of the blue role, Enmity be damned.

Bozja's Castrum and Dalraida and the savage 48 man had similar opportunities because they're off the beaten path of 'expected' content.

Basically, their intentional difficulty they're aiming to design for has lowered, and they're okay with that.

With roles outside of DPS, this doesn't mean a relative decrease in difficulty but a drastic one after some arbitrary point is hit, like 'now we don't have to plan who tanks what at all' or 'no tank swaps'.

This is done to streamline the experience because friction like maybe wiping if one player doesn't want to do anything but pull non-stop and another refuses to use their stance or the group needing to talk about more than 'show him your hole' would be too involved.

I like tanking Euphrosyne a little bit though cuz you can do some minor stuff like put Nymeia really close to Athyk without giving them their shared buff, allowing the few jobs that can still cleave do so.

[Oizen]

Funny, because people have beaten certain Ultimate's with no healers, but you can't do that without tanks. Healers barely heal as it is in stuff outside of savage/ultimate (and sometimes even then).

The off-tanks main job is to step in and save the day in case the main tank dies, because not having a boss run around killing dps/healer because of a main tank error is worth the slight decrease in overall raid dps.

Those no healer parties are also being done off the backs of PLD and WAR, with the p12s clear doubling on both, while the TOP clear had 2 PLDs and one WAR.