richo262 wrote: »

josiahva wrote: »

The fact is that there is NOTHING that can be done to incentivize a thankless job. It takes a certain personality to tank...that's all there is to it. People who have that personality are less common than those who DPS and even those who heal. Most people are after the instant gratification of DPS rather than the slow control of the battlefield a tank exerts. People without patience and unable to react dynamically to changing battlefield situations are not able to tank effectively. Its a personality thing...most gamers in general are after self-glory and have no interest in playing support roles to elevate team members instead. There is no incentive you can offer to make people play against their personality type. I myself enjoy tanking...even(maybe especially) tanking pug groups in vet DLC dungeons...but most people don't have the patience to do so.

I don't buy the feng shui arguments. Many players have Tanks, DPS, Healers in their collection. They do not have to suffer from schizophrenia and switch to their 'tank personality' to play this game as a tank. I do however understand some may derive more enjoyment from different play styles.

Of course anyone "can" play any role. I often swap to DPS gear and skills when fighting say Drodda or the like and can do a passable job as a DPS...but I don't excel at the role...and I am pretty bad at healing...I over-heal way too much. I can indeed play any role and can even swap between all 3 roles on one of my toons easily enough....but people play what they like to play, and that is more often than not DPS...its not going to change. The game glorifies DPS and marginalizes tanks and healers. Why? Because most people play DPS. Take a look at FPS games....the only role in those games is DPS...as in most games...which is why most gamers gravitate toward the role of DPS...because most games have no other roles...and those with personalities geared more toward support roles...simply dont play video games because in their experience the video games they played didn't resonate with them so they do other things instead. I promise you that most people who tank in MMORPGs always gravitated toward the RPG/strategy genre over the action genre long before they ever played a MMO. As an example: Let say someone liked the game Goldeneye and goes to play ESO....that person is likely to chose the DPS role, on the other hand, if that person like the game Tactics Ogre...that person is going to gravitate toward the tank role where battlefield positioning is everything.

I think the main reason there are few tanks is that there is very little gear for tanks in dungeons. For the last 10 days or so I have been playing Summerset and haven't ran a dungeon at all. So I returned to Dungeons this week, and invested the gold i made questing summerset and selling alinor stuff into a Werewolf Hide+Dragonguard+Potenates armor set. It's a nice set for PUG dungeons since it gives you Ultima for resources or protection if needed, and many warhorns provide a buff for DPS.

I find it really boring running a dungeon if there's noting in there for me. Running for fun just isn't my cup of tea. So I asked myself after running dungeons today why I bother running dungeons? I don't need pledge keys anymore, not even for my adventure/dps set.

I ran a few times for the Mask, and it was fun, lots of good teams with High CP players. But at the end of the day, a item that you can sell for 200k isn't worth running that dungeon over and over. There's better ways to make 200k.

If they had added a good piece of BOP gear in dungeons, with the droprate of the Mask then my motivation would have increased.

It's just the extremly lazy game design in ESO, tanks who are a Dungeon class basicly don't really have any gear there. Ebon you can get in 1 run if you collect the pieces from the other guys.

Here is how you speed up the que.

DDs that stand in stupid, or run ahead and pull more then they can handle stop being a$$ hats to tanks and healers blaming us for your stupidity.

We don't queue cause, one we normally have friends to run with, but also because we don't want to put up with the head ache up being told how much we suck when we have done more than our job keeping you alive.

It's one of the things I hate about healing most in this game. I can't control who gets hit with what heals to a point. in games like WoW if you were a jerk to anybody in the group you some how strangely died every fight we didn't need you.

FlyingSwan wrote: »

richo262 wrote: »

Yes, and most DPS players also know the fight.

Is Tanking some sort of exclusive club or something? Fine, have one of the armories have a special VIP lounge then.

Yes, but DPS know it from a DPS perspective. I think the point the other poster was making is that just donning tank gear does not mean that person will know the fight from a tank perspective, it's entirely different, and therefore, they are still likely to fail in that role.

DPS often know nothing. They are just DD by default. Really, they are fulfilling no role whatsoever.

DaveMoeDee wrote: »

Mintaka5 wrote: »

I like how FFXIV approaches the problem of low tank/healer populations in dungeon queues: they incentivize it by rewarding better loot and more gold at the completion of the dungeon. DPS are simply granted the default rewards. This would sweeten the deal and make queue times fly. I would hate to see role-spoofers exploit this though.

This would just make fake tanking worse.

Except you have to be able to finish it to get the better reward. You could also come up with a system that determines how much damage you did, or took whatever. Then have baseline for tanks, DD, and healers. If you don't hit them you get the base rewards.

I don't really like the idea/system either but there would be ways to fight it.

This is the usual "lets force players into specific builds, sets and roles" tactic when trying to come up with solutions to the abusing of the group finder. Problem with forcing things down peoples throat is they get choked. I dont wan't to get choked.

The problem is a lack of real tanks. No "solution" addresses this. From the perspective of a tank I'll try and help though.

In order to solve the problem the game needs to make playing a tank in all content fun. All content. It's the only role that can't go off and do other things without major changes.

DPS, no problem doing other content usually with no change.

Healer, swap a couple skills and maybe a set and off you go.

As a tank our gear, skills, and CP do nothing to help us kill enemies faster.

No amount of changes to the group tool will help with the fact that the role is not fun outside of dungeons/trials for most people.

It's also possible I'm looking at it wrong and that has nothing to do with why so few of us play tanks.

SakuraRush wrote: »

The problem is a lack of real tanks. No "solution" addresses this. From the perspective of a tank I'll try and help though.

In order to solve the problem the game needs to make playing a tank in all content fun. All content. It's the only role that can't go off and do other things without major changes.

DPS, no problem doing other content usually with no change.

Healer, swap a couple skills and maybe a set and off you go.

As a tank our gear, skills, and CP do nothing to help us kill enemies faster.

No amount of changes to the group tool will help with the fact that the role is not fun outside of dungeons/trials for most people.

It's also possible I'm looking at it wrong and that has nothing to do with why so few of us play tanks.

They could take the step and implement a feature to have dual cp builds that you can freely switch between while in a dungeon? Perhaps with a set 5 min cooldown...?

Jayman1000 wrote: »

SakuraRush wrote: »

The problem is a lack of real tanks. No "solution" addresses this. From the perspective of a tank I'll try and help though.

In order to solve the problem the game needs to make playing a tank in all content fun. All content. It's the only role that can't go off and do other things without major changes.

DPS, no problem doing other content usually with no change.

Healer, swap a couple skills and maybe a set and off you go.

As a tank our gear, skills, and CP do nothing to help us kill enemies faster.

No amount of changes to the group tool will help with the fact that the role is not fun outside of dungeons/trials for most people.

It's also possible I'm looking at it wrong and that has nothing to do with why so few of us play tanks.

They could take the step and implement a feature to have dual cp builds that you can freely switch between while in a dungeon? Perhaps with a set 5 min cooldown...?

They could but I don't think they have the ability to implement something like that without somehow breaking nine unrelated things.

At the very least allowing us to save CP load outs but leaving the cost would alleviate some of the tedium. Many of us could work with that while just dealing with the skill morphs we had.

Change nothing else really. We'd still have to go to a shrine and pay the gold to swap attributes and we'd still pay the gold to swap CP. But reallocation of the points is a big downer.

Realistically if they did something like that it would be broken in some way behind the scenes that made it so all CP set ups were applied at the same time and it would be the Twice Born exploit all over again.