Yeah, I'm not sure what the fix is other than redoing most boss mechanics. I tanked and healed on WoW through Wrath and everything was about mitigation and effective healing throughput. It might be the slower skill cooldown nature in this game, but that never feels like the case here. I find the idea that healers are expected to constantly DPS a bit off-putting. Even worse is a system where classes designed to, you know, tank, are expected to maximize the time they spend in DPS stances. It's such a foreign concept to me. Not "bad" necessarily, just not what I've come to expect from other trinity concepts.
Having also just come (back) from playing some WoW, that was also a DPS-centric meta? It just didn't matter because tanking and healing involved more actual time dedicated to them that getting to DPS was a luxury. XIV is very spiky so you have a lot of time with fuck all to do.
Personally, I'd shuffle more skills behind the tank stance so you're tied to it when actively tanking. To compensate, more reactive things when actively tanking to make up for the flat damage loss. Meanwhile, OT stance has more responsibility in our relevant tank debuffs as well as the base higher damage. Then we can start worrying about more maintenance damage on the tanks and less just big busters.
When people say paladins are worthless, they don't mean that. They mean that paladins do less damage than their counterparts and provide little to no advantage. It's literally about a tank doing suboptimal damage.
This isn't quite true? They do less damage but they're also objectively the worst tank when it comes to the fights as they're designed: Their cooldowns all sync the worst with the fights. In the super fast kills with no padding, PLD will actually do pretty okay vs DRK when it comes to damage output. They're just going to be worse at actually taking damage AND worse at helping raid wide damage (unless you have a MNK but then you're also lowering rDPS anyway or going triple melee) as well as worse utility provided in things like ranged AoE pulling, AoE damage, mobility, etc.
Honestly the biggest thing I'm a little disappointed with is being asked to come as (Noct)AST to help out with a friend's Alex weekly or their VA or whatever else instead of my main, which is Scholar, because of multiple balances and other things AST brings to the table. Honestly, I play AST worse than SCH and WHM put together but since I pull multiple balances to balance out with my Diurnal AST cohealer, I guess it stops mattering at a point.
I'm all for min/maxing stuff but I really do draw the line at purposefully AST/AST for card stacking (same for MCH/MCH Hypercharge, BRD/BRD Foe, etc.) as it feels really ... artificial and game-y at that point? I say as hoping for good card RNG runs and so on but yeah. The doubling-tripling up on damage buffs to game things is a pretty shitty part of the game currently.
I dunno, I went to bed with Noi feeling disappointed and woke up still feeling disappointed. Partially because Samurai looks slow, and partially because I feel like the team isn't too good at balancing so their idea of leaving Tanks/Healers as-is and fixing it for the expansion with the new skill system or other stuff in the works puts me a little on-edge.
I was really hoping for SAM as a tank if only as being able to go "Okay, they have a plan for WAR having OT on lock!" At this point, I'm left just going I hope they're completely overhauling existing systems instead of just bandaid fixes like VIT over STR as our primary stat.