After 1 (arguably 2) expansions what is square trying to achieve with WAR (and PLD)?

[rawker]

That's the main concern. It's simple yet strong. Think of the sweating gamer guy meme picture. That's how some of the tanks play. And then there's the gamer singing Payphone meme playing as WAR. Then for some reason, the WAR is doing more damage than the other tanks for less the effort. Unfair, isn't it?

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I've been reading this thread with great interest. I'm one of those "filthy casuals", a former disillusioned RDM main who turned DRG and will sometimes heal for fun. I'll level all my jobs but never touch any of the tanks anymore once they are at max level. The reason for that? I don't trust healers in duty finder. I have met many more cure 1 White Mages than I should and Esuna doesn't even seem to be on some healers' hotbars. So I just did not tank.

However, that changed recently when I was tired of waiting in queue and didn't feel like healing either. So I queued as a tank, WAR of course (based on how the jobs played while leveling, the other tanks except maybe PLD just aren't for me), and I had really fun. I'll keep doing it! It's easy, it's fun and that's all I want from it. And I think I'm surely not the only one, so perhaps that might be a reason for WAR being as strong as it is - to give super casual players a reason to at least give tanking a try? I don't know, but that is my theory. I'll leave the discussion about jobs in high end content to people who actually know what they are talking about.

Perhaps. Yours is a theory that doesn't go untouched seldomly. Here's something that's pretty similar but might be applicable to casual DF runs as well that was written in one of healer's subforum thread:

Tinfoil hat time:
JP has a way higher savage clear rate than both EU and NA, especially their pug raiding.
Now could this be because the JP playerbase in general is more skilled? Maybe, no idea.

But their way of raiding is absolutely like a conveyor belt, or like fastfood. Players are basically interchangeable, you queue for savage in duty finder, zone in, get a macro posted, pick your spot (the really are only 2 for healers) and never deviate from whatever the incredibly safe macro strat tells you, you kill the boss and move on.
And it seems to work quite well for them, so they probably want to keep it that way, make the individual players in your party matter as little as possible.
So it is in their best interest to keep individual responsibilities as low as possible, because if the healer is suddenly required to contribute, or even able to do, more than spam their completely overtuned healing kit it potentially throws a wrench into their perfectly functional conveyor belt.

This would also explain why tank responsibilities/difficulty have been reduced to basically nothing and why they're perfectly happy with their ridiculous self sustain, less chances for tank players to mess up, more convenient boss kills, the conveyor belt keeps running smoothly.

[Amvin]

That's the main concern. It's simple yet strong. Think of the sweating gamer guy meme picture. That's how some of the tanks play. And then there's the gamer singing Payphone meme playing as WAR. Then for some reason, the WAR is doing more damage than the other tanks for less the effort. Unfair, isn't it?

Of course it sounds unfair. And I suppose it is, especially in higher end content! I personally, for the content I do, couldn't care less about damage. So long as I hold aggro and survive the W2W pulls even with a bad healer, it's all good. It doesn't matter to me if I do 10% more or 10% less damage really.

[Amvin]

Perhaps. Yours is a theory that doesn't go untouched seldomly. Here's something that's pretty similar but might be applicable to casual DF runs as well that was written in one of healer's subforum thread:

That is actually fascinating. I've never thought about how different the approach to the game is in JP vs. US/EU! But it makes sense in a way. Sounds very efficient too!

[rawker]

Of course it sounds unfair. And I suppose it is, especially in higher end content! I personally, for the content I do, couldn't care less about damage. So long as I hold aggro and survive the W2W pulls even with a bad healer, it's all good. It doesn't matter to me if I do 10% more or 10% less damage really.

If a job is simple, powerful utility, high sustain, and high damage, people will flock to it, correct? Look at EW SMN. People switched to it because it's insultingly simple in its rotation. Is it well-designed? Of course, not.

[Supersnow845]

Question, and I’m not saying this rudely I’m just genuinely trying to understand

What’s the point of playing an MMO if your goal is to play a class where you can functionally ignore the other people in your party

Like WAR does everything for you and I can kinda see how that’s fun, but what’s the allure of doing that specifically in an MMO

You can go turn Clive into a walking tactical nuke and functionally achieve the same thing

[VentVanitas]

the "fine I'll do it myself" mentality has always been a big part of the tank fantasy in games, for better or worse. one of the biggest appeals to tanks across the genre after all is being an invincible killing machine. we can see this reflected in tanks in other games like the Heavy from TF2 or Roadhog from Overwatch.

even in those games however, there's always been pretty clear and distinct by-design weaknesses with tank characters/classes to specifically make them rely on team coordination just as much as anyone else in their team. something that WAR has effectively erased by having no real weaknesses which is compounded by several other XIV specific issues like the dev team not really caring about anything under Savage when it comes to challenge/balance and the erosion of party coordinated mechanics.

[Gullis]

im so sick of getting warriors in groups now whenever I play healer, i'd rather leave. If square wants tanks to be solo classes, they need to give healers other things to do.
pressing 2 button for a whole dungeon isn't fun, and never will be.

[Lyth]

...

Even in the FPS PvP games that you described, the primary function of those tanks is to control positioning by denying space to the enemies by suppression fire or hooks. That in turn gives the rest of your team more room to set up angles on their opponents.

Tanks in FFXIV have very little impact on positioning, because most fights are scripted to reposition the boss automatically. The only things of value that they have left are mitigation and the ability to deal damage. The former has been inflated to excessive amounts, and the latter has atrophied. It's actually a much worse deal than those other games have, but players are being shortsighted because it lets them feel special in casual content.

[Arkdra]

If a job is simple, powerful utility, high sustain, and high damage, people will flock to it, correct? Look at EW SMN. People switched to it because it's insultingly simple in its rotation. Is it well-designed? Of course, not.

No, and also no, though let me preface what I am about to say with this; I agree with your basic position that tanks have too much self-healing and I think the blending of role lines is generically bad, and specifically bad with regards to corundum, bloodwhetting, and clemency.

For all of EW, warrior has been simple, had powerful utility, and high sustain. It was only missing damage up until fairly recently. But taking a look at fflogs (admittedly imperfect, open to better sources if you've got any) Dark Knight's way ahead of warrior in savages. Warrior does have the lead in ultimates, but dark knight isn't that much further behind on Omega (drk 607 to war 738) and is basically at parity for thordan. So it seems to me that the most edge chasing group of people care a lot but the rest of the playerbase at large, hard to say.

People care about a lot of nebulous things when it comes to what they play. There's an amount of players who don't care about power at all. Just wholly subjective things like game feel, available job specific glams, my co-tank is already a warrior, etc. This isn't an excuse to just leave imbalances sitting around, lord knows I am tired of warriors getting constantly buffed all the time. But it's not quite as simple as more power = more players.

As for summoner, people do not flock to poorly designed jobs, unless you are taking a high level meta approach to what you mean by design and are talking overall health of the game and not just if a job is fun and coherent and such. Like HW ninja was wildly poorly designed for example, but only because they gave it all of the utility and it was bonkers imbalanced, even if that's the best iteration of nin to date imo just from a gameplay perspective. While I wouldn't use popularity as the sole determining factor in if a job is well-designed or not, I would say that it's enough to keep the job out of the bad category. Since it's so popular it is clearly filling a niche that is worth catering to. The tightest and most thoughtful design is ultimately meaningless if it does not attract players.