Please Reconsider Splitting Main and Off-Tank Roles Based on Job

[Sazuzaki]

The argument is not that they will not be viable at all: it's that there might be additional friction against jobs that will be newly designed as OTs but want to MT instead, or vice-versa.

How much friction there will be, if any, will depend on the details how this will be implemented. It's true that there is not enough info yet to make a final judgement, but there is definitely enough to raise some early concerns or try to have a discussion. "Don't worry it's not going to be that bad" is also speculation.

I understand the wish to reduce homogenization, but the only way to not make a tank "good at everything" is by making it "bad at something" and doing that brings its own balancing issues.

Sure me saying all of the concerns are a bit exaggerated is speculation as well, but at least it's based off of things that reinforce it like OTs doing dungeons, tank swaps, etc. I haven't seen much basis on the other speculation from the other perspectives aside from very specific scenarios.

When you make a tank specialize, it will naturally have a weakness to balance it out. No one is purposefully making the tanks worse at something, they are simply letting it go in a direction that allows it to resonate more with specific playstyles and it will naturally be a bit weaker in other scenarios it doesn't specialize in. This split is so they can make different playstyles for the tanks and allow those playstyles to work. Why give PLD a counter-attack if it's gonna be designated as the OT? If the solution is to not have counter-attacks at all, then what about the players who want that playstyle? Also, I'm not sure why someone would look at the new most likely double shield tank, see it has a counter based playstyle, and say "oh man I can't wait to off-tank with that." The only thing I can get behind is a PLD wanting to play OT, but even then that will still likely work considering it still has extremely strong support tools. If anything, you'll need to be more clever on how you'll trigger your counter-attacks.

Any newly designated OT job will more than likely do fine as MT. If it can't, then dungeons shouldn't exist. Tank swaps shouldn't exist. There's too many things that would go wrong if they really stuck to the idea that the MT MUST keep aggro.

[Mukuku]

Sure me saying all of the concerns are a bit exaggerated is speculation as well, but at least it's based off of things that reinforce it like OTs doing dungeons, tank swaps, etc. I haven't seen much basis on the other speculation from the other perspectives aside from very specific scenarios.

I agree that very likely the goal of the devs is not going to completely relegate tanks into sub-roles, but better make sure they get the feedback that there is concern in the playerbase about that.

When you make a tank specialize, it will naturally have a weakness to balance it out.

Specialization always comes at the expense of balance: X being better in a scenario means that Y is worse in that scenario, which means X and Y are not balanced in that scenario. If that scenario matters and the balance is large enough, it's a problem.

Look at some cases: Pandaemonium vs. WAR's holmgang, or the addition of physical damage reduction to DRK's previously purely magical defensives, etc..

Balance is king. Specialization needs to deal with that and to a player base that will mostly chose balance over specialization any day.

Any newly designated OT job will more than likely do fine as MT. If it can't, then dungeons shouldn't exist. Tank swaps shouldn't exist. There's too many things that would go wrong if they really stuck to the idea that the MT MUST keep aggro.

Or they may be made irrelevant.

Take dungeons: there is massive imbalance between tanks in dungeons in regards of trash packs. A WAR is on a completely different planet compared to a DRK. The only way that flies is by making the dungeon so easy and streamlined that it doesn't really matter - and still you get the occasional complaint.

If dungeons had e.g. harder hitting large trash packs, or the ability to group even larger packs than today, that imbalance would stop being irrelevant and the devs would have to homogenize tank performance in that area to support such new dungeon design. The fact that the imbalance exists in fact strongly limits what they can do with dungeons.

What you would ideally want is equal balance in different flavours: tanks being able to more or less equally deal with e.g. trash packs, main tanking or whatever, but in different ways. It is of course much easier said than done and that's why homogenization happens.

TL;DR: If the devs want different flavours of tanking jobs, but with both being equally apt I see no issue except the difficulty to achieve such a goal. If instead the different flavours are meant to introduce significant enough imbalance, it's IMHO a losing proposition.

[Emitans]

I do not understand how Dark Knight, who's design has encouraged counterattacking since its FFXIV debut, is supposed to be a supportive tank, but Paladin is a counterattacking tank. Despite it's supportive fantasy and it continues to have Passage of Arms (with an AoE heal added to it). This is not the complaint of a salty DRK main. It's actually my second favorite tank. PLD is the job I raided savage on.

[Terhix]

I do not understand how Dark Knight, who's design has encouraged counterattacking since its FFXIV debut, is supposed to be a supportive tank, but Paladin is a counterattacking tank. Despite it's supportive fantasy and it continues to have Passage of Arms (with an AoE heal added to it). This is not the complaint of a salty DRK main. It's actually my second favorite tank. PLD is the job I raided savage on.

DRK has not have any mechanics related to parry for multiple expansions now. TBN doesn't yield you any extra dps(*) nor does it require you to be the MT to use. From pure job fantasy perspective DRK being a designated OT is a perfect opportunity to actually bring the OG FF DRK job fantasy which is spending HP for DPS, something XIV DRK never had except for PvP DRK designed by Mr Prime. PvP TBN and Shadowbringer interaction is 10x more interesting than the effective MP refund we have now.

Regarding dev panel PLD: yes PLD got a heal follow up on wings, but it lost the healing effect on Divine Veil so that's not really a buff, and Divine Veil went from 90s to 120s cooldown, so overall its party support got nerfed. We've only seen half of the horse for now and we won't really know what they mean to do with offtanks until we see an example.

(*) You get a little bit of aDPS gain by banking dark arts for 2min burst, but even that you usually do by putting TBN on a squishy for a raidwide before 2min comes up.

[Rithy255]

I do not understand how Dark Knight, who's design has encouraged counterattacking since its FFXIV debut, is supposed to be a supportive tank, but Paladin is a counterattacking tank. Despite it's supportive fantasy and it continues to have Passage of Arms (with an AoE heal added to it). This is not the complaint of a salty DRK main. It's actually my second favorite tank. PLD is the job I raided savage on.

I mean I agree as a PLD main I love the jobs protector vibe; I think design wise outside of DT's 2 minute meta and PLDS rotation feeling a bit bland to me the job felt perfect, Now it feels like PLD's getting forced to be a selfish tank compared to other tanks which to me just makes no sense for PLD.

I'm really against the idea of forcing tanks into MT or OT roles it just feels stupid, it was bad with the pure/barrier healer split too, frankly It did not make healer more interesting it just made astro bland while making white mage the same and scholar the same while adding another scholar.

When people say we want more job identity that's true, but wanting more job identity isn't forcing jobs into different sub categories, Frankly forcing PLD to be a MT just restricts how I play the game and makes the game worse because I enjoy flexing to MT and OT.

With all the negative feedback on this topic. I think if they dont have a good showing of the other tanks and how MT and OT can work together in content live on stream, then I can see them rolling back this entire thing and just keeping it how it is with all tanks being able to MT or OT.

No we're screaming at walls here frankly, don't expect any changes for a long while. I mean look at healer mains they've been screaming for improvements for ages and haven't got anything.