Your Theory on the Tank Shortage

From some player experiences, it's rather difficult to play as the Tank, especially when they're dependent on both Healer and Troll to supply them with necessary resources for maximum aggro focus on them. Think of it this way, how good is a Tank when they have no Controller to supply power? In some cases, it just leads to frustration and blame swinging. In terms of balancing among the four roles, it's usually skewed toward the Controller to keep all other roles supplied with power, helping out Tanks with enemy debuffs, and keeping DPS and Healer out of harm's way so they can then focus on the Tank.

More so, how many guides are out there for the Tank role to help new players out so they can properly balance out between Tank and Damage... and with limited inventory slots, it's honestly difficult to maintain two whole sets of armor without being pressured to buy membership to compensate for this constraint. The same applies with resetting powers. Sometimes if you're completely free to play, you're basically stuck with that power's role constraint other than being DPS.

If newer players were to say, have enough slots to fill out two Roles at the same time, then I would see this tank shortage being far less of an issue in the long run.

That's just my speculation. Free to play constraints, Limited power set choices and once you choose a power, you're basically stuck with what you got and deleting that character means starting over from the beginning, to which some people will not want to do that considering their high skill point count from all the years of grinding to collect style sets. Some of the most popular powers for damage are either stuck to Controller or Healer as an alternative role, with Quantum, Light, Gadgets, Electric, Mental, and Nature as some examples.

Tank role as far as I remember are the following for free to plays, being only a choice between Fire or Ice. All other tank roles are locked to premium membership, or using a market reset token.
That being, Atomic, Earth or Rage.

Compared to the rest of the game, there's only 5 power choices to choose from, with 3 locked to being a member or using power respec tokens. Not very good odds if one asks me.

Sure but a buff troller is a carry and speedups up any content up so much in elite raids this really is OP you know why? Because the elite raids are very dps centric and buff troller buffs the DPS.

And yea i hope we can see better designed elite raids random 1 shots arent good.

Agreed on the one shots. Again, this is why ToTD was always a great raid. The only 'one shot' was a reflect or the Punisher...both of which were on the users to NOT trigger. It wasn't something ham fisted thrown at us to add a 'challenge' to a mundane fight. The other mechanics like stomping the shade form out correctly (in the corner) and splitting the group down the middle with the teleports added difficulty without resorting to the one shots(it also encouraged learning and using multiples of roles). The essence mechanic was the icing on the cake and they've removed that due to 'reasons'. Yeah, I'd rather see things that make the run 'harder' without resorting to the one shots every 30 seconds.

I wouldn't say DWFe was that one shot heavy though. Most everything that kills you in there is caused by the other players not knowing the mechanics...not breaking out stuns is the biggest one, but to me that is not a one shot...it's a mechanic...holding R1 every 30 seconds when a skull comes up is not.

NEW VIDEO ALERT... PART 2

This video is a bit better than my first video...

Hopefully my points were made louder this time..

You should share this with the devs, I'd like to see a comment on this form the devs (NOT MEPPS)

To me it feels like to make it challenging for tanks your stats and arts dont help as much as you think they should. A dps/troll/healing art will always do what it says it does. In ISE 1st boss he drops tanks with standard brawling attacks. Shouldn't say, the Manacles stop that from happening?

Another thing is how hard it can be to get tank practice. People just dont want to go into a raid and let you work it out, which is perfectly understandable. The sense of failure is real. The feeling that youre letting the group down is real. It adds up to something that just isnt as enjoyable as the other roles. I got serious about my tank character about a year ago and one year later, this just aint it.

The Manacles has a 60 or 45 second cooldown, are you accounting for that?

Yes but ive seen everything except earth and rage tanks running for their lives there at 1st boss no matter what arts they had.

Yeah you really can’t facetank him, well, not for too long. Staying midrange and countering his lunge by blocking is key.

Thats my point where is the line drawn at? To me it feels like tanks arts and stats are for the adds. The bosses seem to have varying quirks. Like COUE the mob of eyes, cool, that should be hard for a tank to survive. But ISE with just standard weapon attacks dropping tanks? Nah something isnt right.

Oh it’s fine and totally doable, you can avoid the damage (kite, stay out of range). It’s an elite raid, there should be a near constant threat.

Right but where are the lines drawn? Thats my only thing. If i have max arts, 580 sp, 330k health, 150k defense, and 3 punches puts me in danger, something is not right. At the very least something doesnt work the way i think it does if i use the same criteria i use for the other roles.

The failure most have with face tanking the ARC bot is that they don't counter him. Face tanking bosses largely requires you to counter. And he is incredibly easy to counter because all he does is lunge, he never block breaks anyone. Now, thats not to say that a boss even in elite should 1-3 a tank with a single combo. I've seen earth tank's full comboed Gemstone shield (the strongest non iconic/movement shield in the game) struggle to take that hit. ARC bots combos go through that shield like a hot knife through butter.

Could armories be an issue? My main is dual specced DPS/Healer, and in a recent alert ended up switching between DPS and healer a couple of times, because the person who was trying to heal wasn't doing a good job. (Came out first in healing, second in damage out that mission. Woo!) The thing is, she has 2 armories, and can easily switch between the roles.
I bet that most players just have one armory, which is sub optimal. For them, they're probably going to just go DPS, since that works just fine for open world stuff, and solo and duo missions, and often works for alerts and raids. If they switch roles, they're going to have to manually swap out armor, and probably go with their DPS artifacts, augments and skill point setup. That's annoying, and I bet that a lot of people wouldn't be willing to go through the trouble.
So, another free armory for everyone! (Just kidding. Or not.)

Post this in a the bug thread and I’ll up vote it. You’re right we do need a devs perspective on this.

one thing that often gets missed, is the fact that a tank needs to notice where the reason lies, if the group is failing.
it often looks as if the tank was responsible for a wipe, wich can be the issue if the tank isn´t doing his job well enough.
however: when a tank goes down, it might have been the healer who didn´t pay attention for a second.
then again: maybe the troll didnt spend enough power for the heal to sustain.
or the damage might be to low for a successful run.

as a tank, you feel best how each group member performs, because if anyone in your team fails, you fail.
you need to anylise whats going on at all times and notice what can be done to do better and tell it.
comunication is key to that. wich is way more important to tanks than any other role IMO.

I feel...in my humble opinion...Players will play whatever is fun.

Seen a XIV census, were a lot of people supposedly played tanks in the class distribution chart from 2020.

Tanks, more so than anyone else....Rely on others, healers.... and dps to do dmg. Perhaps, potential tanks do not trust relying on others to be efficient; compared to a dps who are not the center of attention.

AV here on the forums said something that I can't disagree with. He will only tank when he knows the DPS are up to snuff. And I ran into that in my previous league. Most people in that league except for a handful of players sucked and needed to be carried through most content. And I was always forced into tanking because very few people wanted to tank or could tank very well in the first place. And the DPS in the runs where I was tanking sucked a** however when I was DPSing and someone else was tanking, we actually got through in a reasonable amount of time. Because in runs where I was DPSing I was regularly doubling people in boss damage and overall damage.

Inner sanctum first boss is a more rare example he i think is the or one of the hardest hitting bosses ive seen or can remember (which is good) but hes counterable and if you arent able to pay to attention to the boss and block at the right time yes he will strike you so hard and put u to sleep And thats also how bosses in elite raids should be ! tanks have been very spoiled over the years by the low difficulty in elite raids while the raid content in dcuos first few years was much harder on the tank i hope the dev team will go back to that design.

You (me,all) as a tank should be struggling to stay alive imo All counterable bosses should be doing very high single target damage to the tank on Elite raids.

I can relate to this alot the tanks at top endgame leagues imo get carried so hard. The dps they have and buff troller is just insane tanking is a chore(not difficult but annoying) with bad even average dps in elite raids i hope the gap can be closed or a different design made that doesnt benefit the endgame groups so much but rather skilled players, its a joke to tank when u play with top endgame groups wheres the skill there for the Tank? Everything dies so quick.

The difficulty needs to be as equal as possible on the Tanks,tanks shouldnt be getting carried or have a easy job the tank should be the one carrying it like content also used to be back then now people just need good dps and buff troller but not good tanks or skilled tanks and its clearly not a longterm challenging design. A elite raid thats difficult on the tank(s) has always been longterm challenging.