Quote Originally Posted by Lyth View Post
If you've been playing this game for long enough, you hopefully have some insight into how this is going to turn out without having to wait for 8.0's launch. It's the same dev team. They know how to make a good product, but everyone has their blind spots.
The principal class designer got exchanged, am I right to assume that the rest of your post is then naturally moot since the premise is false?
(and no, we got no information about any other designed of classes, they might have been swapped out, or not)

Quote Originally Posted by Lyth View Post
They've once again started with the assumption that if they implement a design direction for tanking, then players will automatically follow their prescribed approach. History shows us that this isn't the case. Your first question should be: Why should we bring an MT and an OT?
This is a problem that all games face, and all MMORPGs specifically, too. This is not an FFXIV-specific issue, and we can readily see from other games how this plays out or more specifically for this worry, doesn't play out. And it's not like there's just one way to mitigate this, the devs are free to pick. From forced group compositions (honestly this'd solve like 90%+ of FFXIV's class design issues in one fell swoop and with how utterly trivial swapping classes with their shared gear and all is in this game there's little reason not to do it, but it feels.. icky?) over target mechanics (you need an MT and an OT as some attacks specifically search characters of these sub-roles!) to complementary mechanics.

Also, you forgot the easiest way of handling this: Not.

What happens if they don't handle it? Then we pick whoever deals the highest damage as the tank of choice, yes? So... like now. And importantly, we do ignoring sub-roles. Like now. So everyone's worries about being "forced into a role" would be inherently moot. Like, well, now. Or rather, such roles already exist made up by players, NOW. At best they're adopting and steering them, at worst they're changing nothing and we continue as we do right now.