is it because of the responsibility of being a tank intimidating most players? Is it because some of the people that try out tanking get scared away because of harrasment from other players?
Paladin since 2.0. i'm still here.
at the end of august 2013 i saw people bitching about the server issues on neogaf and picked this up. first job i picked was paladin because of the sword and shield, now this was my first mmo so i had no idea what i was doing.
fast forward to tam-tara and every dungeon and trial after i notice people were going "this tank sucks!" "this tank is garbage", i had no idea what a tank was so i ignored it until the ifrit battle where guy was being condescending with "Altered, you are tank...so tank." and other shit. every time the main story had me go through a dungeon i would always get anxiety...most people would flock to dps job at this point but i never bothered. it never crossed my mind at the time where i would always get attacked for being a bad tank in AK.
It took me a month to beat the main 2.0 story and everyone was stuck on titan. in DF i kept getting groups that would shit on me for skipping darklight gear. i was going for myth so i never bothered. pretty sure i only had hopelite tabard. also i spent all my philosophy on items. i gave up trying to df because of people who can't dodge, (probably should pay attention to the battle instead of my gear) so i paid for my run. i never died btw. now i notice that i wouldn't lose aggro often (because of WD, most people had ifrit or garuda weapons)but i was still bad. didn't start to improve until they added philo in WP. In November i started pugging coil but yeah. i gave up and switched to monk.
now hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. i didn't hang up the sword and shield i still used pld for fc and when i was trying to cap myth on a sunday evening back when weekly reset was on monday. but i only used monk for coil and extreme fights and dungeon running. eventually i started leveling up other jobs. Monk and PLD are still my main and second.
when i spent a week running dungeons for zodiac i was very proud of myself that instead of getting the kaiser knuckles i just upgraded my curtana to zenith and beyond. got my excalibur after a month and dyed it along the shield metallic blue.
point is 2.0 was a very toxic era for this game. right now if you are new you'll most likely be helped out by people in llr. but back then it was rough. i mean honestly if people stopped being assholes to new player this wouldn't be a problem. i haven't been victim of or witness tank harassment in dungeons recently but 2.0 definitely left a scar on me.
right now im ok. stopped playing when they announced the june expansion release date but im looking forward to Dark Knight. probably should renew my subscription for one more month on Tuesday.