Hell, they don't even need to die; just have them leave like Lyse did, let a new group join.
The only reason I want to see them dead is that they keep pretending to be dead and making overtures in the narrative to them dying. Thancred, for example, was ripe to just retire after ShB. I only want his ass dead because he fake-died in ARR, fake-died in ShB itself, fake-died in EW, and in general doesn't seem to have much to do.
You notice how during the Garlemald segment, they try to play around with the different Scions bringing their skills to the fore and actually contributing to things, whereas in every other segment of the game the Scions just kindof sit around in the background doing literally nothing? They have to be there because of trusts, but their individual perks and skills and abilities don't matter. You could swap them out. Not only have they been flanderized, they've been leveled.
GNB is the wrong job for continuation because it interferes with what your primary role should be, tanking.
I mean, there is not a single tank job in the game that has an actual mechanic involving damage mitigation and reduction as a meaningful choice. The class playing closer to a DPS class makes the class more enjoyable, yeah, because otherwise tanks do nothing and have no choices to make. They are already glutted with so many mitigation and self-heal tools that they genuinely have no use for, the way the game is currently designed, there is nothing for them except to have more engaging rotations.
If you tried to give them more
engaging ways to mitigate damage or brought back threat mattering, yeah, that could offer more compelling loops but it also means about 90% of DF tanks can no longer play the role at a basic level of competence. I just don't see them going to that. As it stands, I think The Darkest Night is the only slightly-engaging mitigation ability in the game because it rewards you for expending the shield, IE pressing it at a correct point in time. And it's only slightly engaging because, once you've played with the class for maybe an hour, you already know when to press TBN to get the shield to pop 100% of the time. It grants you the ability to stand in an AoE and not give up damage, but if you moved out of the AoE, you'd just use the mana on damage anyways.
t also plays terribly for anyone with suboptimal connection if you are in your burst and also need to use mitigation. It's also a really boring way to try and give you something to do. It's literally the exact same skill, a generic damage oGCD, that you're already pressing.
So in the busiest period for a GNB, the opener, they have
3 double-weaves, and one of those double-weaves can be split out almost without consequence into an extra single-weave. There's also the single-weave option there that sacrifices a little top-end to keep things fresh. And most encounters don't throw out tankbusters that need to actually be mitigated until after the first burst phase, though that's obviously variable.
DRK has
7 double-weaves, plus abilities you need to press pre-pull where if you fuck the timing up, you will drift the next time the burst phase comes around. There isn't a way to make that class split out into single-weaves without giving up a huge amount of damage potential and royally fucking over the class's potetial. For reference, paladin has 2 and warrior has 1.
fight like positioning, mitigation, and crowd control.
But there are so many other things that got completely lost to time like crowd control, resource management, positioning, etc.
Which is why in not just FF14 but all modern MMOs, the only way to make a tank compelling is to make it play like a DPS class. I don't think we disagree - they aren't RPGs anymore. But I don't think you can have meaningful notions of crowd control, resource management, positioning and so-on if the game plays on-rails with a simplified meta.
Back in The Burning Crusade, several classes outright didn't get brought into Heroic Dungeon PUGs because they had no crowd control, and were thus liabilities. These classes could pump damage pretty well, but the complete lack of crowd control made a balancing nightmare. So in Wrath, Blizzard made crowd control completely irrelevant. There was one pull in the entire expansion, in Ulduar, that needed CC. Everything else was AoE everything tank-and-spank. In Cataclysm, Blizzard wanted to create harder five-man content for intermediate players, and so made dungeons again require crowd control.
The playerbase shat the bed and complained harder than anyone has ever seen before, and so within a few months every last dungeon was made laughably easy to the point where you could ignore all of the mechanics and aoe-tank-and-spank it. And the playerbase
loved it. Threat was made irrelevant, the tank classes began to play more and more like DPS classes, and mitigation became far less active and far more "just push this button after everything is grouped up." At the same time, WoW tanks didn't have as extreme of self-sustain as the FF14 ones do, so healers there at least spent most of their time, well, healing.
