Are Tanks Obsolete Outside of Operations?

Are you sure? I'm almost positive that you can. You can definitely do mods and enhancements.

This.

End-game pieces are bound to slot, and motor, sensor, core, etc. are not head, chest, etc. slots. So you're stuck with either crafting the armorings, using crappy armorings that aren't bound to slot, or buying and crafting the czerka droid parts.

My experience in Kuat is that the best team is three DPS and a Heal. The FP runs super fast and nobody dies.

A tank does not help in Kuat - by design the fights do not need a tank, and a lot of the tank's utility is negated by the other players not letting the tank tank, because they do not need to. A healer, on the other hand, does not need people's cooperation much.

End game armoring mods are locked to the slot, such that an armoring mod pulled from a chest piece can only be placed into another chest piece (and not a droid 'parts' 'core' etc piece).

Same issue with the companions that use different weapons than players of the same stat, where the barrels or hilts are locked to both the hand (MH / OH) AND the weapon type.

IMO they could fix this by dropping the armoring slot lock (either all or even just non-set bonus pieces) or somehow mapping player slots to droid slots (e.g. chest = core 1 slot on droid).

For weapons, the weapon type locks should be dropped as locking to MH / OH is all that is needed to keep players from buying a Commendation off-hand and using the barrel / hilt in their main-hand.

Tanking as a role, no. I think having a frontline / control center in coop PvE content is a role in no danger in coop RPGs. It's not mandatory for design, but it allows the devs to do some cool things with encounter design.

I think MMOs may be flirting with the obsolescence of hardcore Tank commitment, though — extreme separate gear sets, specwork, etc.

Look at WoW — it's been gradually doing this for years, and in next expansion it's fully committing: Tanks, DPS, and Healers all use the same stats. Tanks gets defensive benefit from DPS stats. Tank damage is tuned down a bit & balanced around the assumption of being in full DPS gear.

The only reason the Tank role needs to be obsoleted in the first place is that it makes coop content a tedious PITA for the other 2-3 Roles, because no one wants to Tank. But no one wants to Tank for a few simple reasons:

• Treatment. You're expected to fix all problems, but the rest of the group has no qualms about flippantly creating more for you.
• Gear. You're expected to gimp the bloody hell out of your soloing potential and off-spec ability to load up on stats that mean nothing if you aren't being actively violated in sensitive locations.
• Organizational responsibility. You can't tunnel or people hate you (justifiably), you need to be OCD aware of everything, everywhere, at all times, and have a spatial plan for how to round up and hold everything in sight while also following mechanics, defending yourself properly, etc.
• Bland rotations. Tanks tend to have less interesting or more tedious rotations because they're simplified down to accomodate everything else a Tank has to do.

Probably some other issues, but those stick out to me. The thing is, they're all "fixable".

• Normalize gear. This disappoints Tanks that love feeling as dedicated and Tanky as possible, but they are unfortunately a tiny minority. If players didn't feel pressured into a separate set of ultra-specialized junk gear to do the role, more people would be willing.
• Spice up Tanking — make the rotations punchier and flashier, more in line with DPS rotations, and simplify other areas to compensate for having more complexity/interest in the primary and AoE cycle.

Beyond that the other points will fix themselves:

• Treatment is just how it is. Players are mean and impatient. Tanks get the brunt of this because Tanks have the most pressure on them, ie, a Tank making even small errors stands out much more than a Heal or DPS.
• Responsibility — many, many DPS players are excellent at taking charge and leading groups through stuff. They do it all the time when the Tank is incompetent or just shy / uncertain. Meaning, if these DPS players could "legit" Tank in their DPS gear, they probably would. They already do.

I guess the TL;DR is that I think the future of Tanking is really to just be the DPS player that's willing to trade a small amount of their damage output for increased defenses.

ie, it needs to be something simple — a Stance & Spec swap — and not something ultra-heavy like tediously building entire extra gear sets. Because just asking people to Tank and take on the extra positioning/organizational responsibility is already enough of a "Hmm... not sure..." kind of decision.

When you make it so disappointing in so many other ways, most people just say "Nope, F* this" and deal with the queue times / run Tacticals.

And then you'll get 8 man raid teams consisting of 7 "tanks" and one healer, or 8 tanks each having a little self-heal ability -- why not if the tanks only have a little less DPS than a DPS does? At the least, you'd probably replace all the melee DPS with tanks, and maybe replace a healer with a ranged DPS since your healing load just went down so much.

I am not sure that the resulting 7Tank-1Heal or 4Tank-1Heal-3rDPS 8m ops groups would be as much fun as the current 2Tank-2Heal-4DPS norm.

No, you don't. WoW still follows a very comfortable 2 Tanks + X DPS structure despite the stat changes, because (get ready for this):

• Tanks have different abilities
• Tanks have different utility
• Tanks still require a spec commitment
• Tanking properly still requires experience / practice
• Tanking is still a job that requires positioning and awareness and not everyone wants to do it
• There is no sane reason to drop your raid's DPS by like 30%+ just to make your DPS players slightly more durable when they're not even being attacked, since their Tank stance won't save them when the raid wipes to Enrage timers
• Tank specs do not do the same DPS as DPS specs even if the Tank is geared for DPS
• ...
• ...
• ...

(this goes on a while, grab a cocoa)

I must just be really lucky in who I get matched with in group-finder or something, because I've literally never been *****ed at for my tanking. Unless it's a fight with pretty complex mechanics that aren't really telegraphed, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to lead pugs through things even of you've never seen it before.

I don't really understand how the gear is problematic, nor how my soloing potential is gimped. I can solo practically anything I want with a healing companion and tear through normal stuff with a DPS companion. The gear is what it is... it looks cool, and the stats are appropriate for tanking. I don't really see how that's an issue.

If DPS rotations are much more complex than the top-level Vanguard rotation, I don't want them! I've got so many damn abilities I'm running out of fingers and staring at the bar trying to keep track of a fistful of different procs is not my idea of fun.

The reason you feel that way is because you're an ideal candidate for Tanking.

The problem is most players aren't, so they don't do it, because they don't want to deal with things like trading out damage mods for boring Defense mods. etc etc

Less players interested in doing it makes Tanking special, but not fun for everyone else, who requires a minority of players in order to do the content.

Game developers see this Supply-v-Demand issue and respond in one of a few ways:

• Make tanking more appealing
• Heavily bribe tanks into doing things
• Remove tanking

Unfortunately Option #3 is going to keep winning as long as Tanking is not appealing to more players. It's slightly twisted, but if you want to preserve the existence of your favorite role moving forward, you have to be ready to make significant changes to how it functions so that more people like doing it.

Again, just asking people to:

• Lead
• Organize
• Position

Already filters out a huge chunk of players. Filtering even more out with all the other requirements is just sledgehammering an already minority role into an ultra-specialization that cripples queue times.