How do we feel about tank damage right now?

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Originally Posted by J-Reyno

Dealing damage is exactly how they maintain enmity, and so damage is an essential element of tanking.

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Oh, so you really were taking about keeping enmity as a "primary focus" o_O
So, again, keeping enmity is only very loosely based on how much damage you actually do. By that, I mean that you could be absolutely horrendous at dealing damage that you would still be top enmity, simply be being in your tank stance. So, that whole "I'm min-maxing my rotation and it should reward me more than healer pushing one button" is completely irrelevant there.

So, I'll say it again, optimizing your damage has nothing to do with any primary focus of a tank, be it keeping the enemy on you or surviving attacks. And they pretty much don't interfere with each other, as opposed to healer who need to "sacrifice" some GCD to deal damage, and could potentially not heal enough if they're too greedy. That's why it make more sense to me that a healer who take that kind of risk should achieve higher numbers than us, since we don't sacrifice anything to push our damage. Funnily enough, if you look at the graphs that were posted on this very thread, tanks in SB were far above healers when it comes to DPS, and they had to sacrifice something for that, namely, their tank stance.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

Oh, so you really were taking about keeping enmity as a "primary focus" o_O

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Uh, yes. Tell me how well it works out if you use your mitigation skills without dealing any damage to the boss.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

So, I'll say it again, optimizing your damage has nothing to do with any primary focus of a tank, be it keeping the enemy on you or surviving attacks.

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You're subtly shifting your wording here. My statement was that dealing damage is a primary focus of tanking. Your response is basically "but you don't have to optimize tho you just gotta hit stuff". I mean, sure, you technically don't have to optimize properly on dps role either, but the role is intended to do so. Tank is as much intended to perform its rotation properly, which is why tank damage is taken into consideration when it comes to encounter design. Tanks are expected to contribute an appropriate amount of damage at all times.

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Originally Posted by J-Reyno

Uh, yes. Tell me how well it works out if you use your mitigation skills without dealing any damage to the boss.

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Again, you were the one speaking of being "rewarded for your effort". Do you expect to be taken seriously if you claim that keeping enmity requires any effort ?

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Originally Posted by J-Reyno

My statement was that dealing damage is a primary focus of tanking.

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No, your statement, in the sense of this very thread you created, was that you didn't felt rewarded as a tank by your DPS number. The thing is that whatever primary tank focus you use as a metric, which are enmity and survival, that DPS number is all you need to perform optimally and without any risk.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

Again, you were the one speaking of being "rewarded for your effort". Do you expect to be taken seriously if you claim that keeping enmity requires any effort ?

No, your statement, in the sense of this very thread you created, was that you didn't felt rewarded as a tank by your DPS number. The thing is that whatever primary tank focus you use as a metric, which are enmity and survival, that DPS number is all you need to perform optimally and without any risk.

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My statement was that tank accomplishes its primary objective by dealing damage. I'll quote it for you.

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Originally Posted by J-Reyno

Yes, and the tank accomplishes its primary objective by dealing damage.

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You decided to interject with semantics that "enmity" shouldn't be considered a primary focus because you don't have to optimize damage to keep enmity. It doesn't matter. You DO have to deal damage to tank. You WILL spend most of your time dealing damage. Tank ARE designed to deal damage and ARE intended to optimize their damage by the devs' own admission, and doing damage DOES require effort.

I don't care if you want to call it enmity or not, nothing you have said or can say will change that damage is absolutely a primary and necessary function of the role.

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Originally Posted by J-Reyno

Tank ARE designed to deal damage and ARE intended to optimize their damage by the devs' own admission, and doing damage DOES require effort.

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Again, optimizing your damage as a tank is unrelated to how much damage you do compared to DPS or healers, but to your fellow tanks. You can coat it with whatever noble goal of doing your job you want, but in the end, what bugs you is that you deal low damage compared to DPS. Increasing that number without any additionnal effort (Which is what potency increase would be, since I don't remember you asking for a more complex rotation) would change absolutely nothing on how well you tank, or how optimized your rotation would be.

I can't really guess what tank you played since this character seems to be your alt, but since you mentionned being more rewarded in SB, it should also be noted that optimizing DPS in ShB is much much easier than it was in SB, so it makes totally sense that the reward would be lower. Healers, on the other hand, have the exact same gamble to make than in past expansions.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

Again, optimizing your damage as a tank is unrelated to how much damage you do compared to DPS or healers, but to your fellow tanks.

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You suggested that damage is not a primary objective of tanks and we've established that it is. You even argued that "optimizing enmity" would be spamming shield lob repeatedly, which is wrong. I've already said my piece about the impact of roles within a given damage distribution and why it matters multiple times within the thread, so unless you intend to object further that damage is not a primary function of tanks we can dead this particular discussion.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

Increasing that number without any additionnal effort (Which is what potency increase would be, since I don't remember you asking for a more complex rotation) would change absolutely nothing on how well you tank, or how optimized your rotation would be.

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I'm looking for more impact from what I spend my time doing, which is damage. And since you can't remember, let me remind you with my post below:

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Originally Posted by J-Reyno

I'm not sure I get what you're suggesting, but if I understand then there are ultimately two options if you allow more room for tanks to "excel" in damage.

1) Tanks who "excel" are able to do more damage than now, solving the issue of tanks being very low impact compared to the other roles. This would be good

2) Tanks can "excel" in their role but the damage ceiling remains the same, and bad tanks do even less damage. So tanks doing their job properly end up working harder for the same contribution.

The second scenario is unacceptable. The first is good, but this is essentially a roundabout way of saying that tanks need more damage, and I'm not really concerning myself with the how right now. Whether they change the rotation, adjust the formula for tank damage so that we get more out of the current rotation, or just straight up increase potencies, doesn't really matter. If tanks get more damage out of it, then that's fine.

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As you can see, I'd be perfectly fine with an upward adjustment in the rotation that allowed tanks to have more damage with more effort. Keep in mind that doing so would not make actual "tanking" particularly more effective what with enmity and mitigation largely being non-factors, but it would make the role more impactful and engaging.

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Originally Posted by J-Reyno

Uh, yes. Tell me how well it works out if you use your mitigation skills without dealing any damage to the boss.
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This was already done in SB, a paladin did nothing but spam flash and kept aggro just fine.

You could also spam 1 or first aoe move and probably keep aggro against most players

Even flash was nice to have since it, you know, blinded things. This mitigated damage and contributed to being a tank. Honestly I think they should bring flash back as an OGCD with a 30S CD that makes it reduce enemy damage dealt by 5% due to being blinded. Hell make it an AOE too for dungeons.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

This was already done in SB, a paladin did nothing but spam flash and kept aggro just fine.

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Only bad tanks spammed flash, you used it only once per group.

Shb is a total lie for everyone who played a tank in SB.
They streamlined our gameplay, especially murdered DRK and WAR in dungeons, those two are shadow of their former self.
They took that little enmity management away from us
They took away a lot of our role CD's that were useful
We supposed to be more DPS focused in this expansion, but no one was expecting to do less damage than healers and a lot less dmg in comparison do dps.

No wonder why tanks are still in demand if they play like crap, like poor man version of dps, and 4 jobs neither a good balance between them is helping, healers are more numerous despite having 2 playable jobs and 1 underwhelming one, i guess why.
I should have played shb on other roles.

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Originally Posted by J-Reyno

So if nothing else it seems many agree that something needs to change, and it boils down to two ideas. The first is that current gameplay is fine but the damage needs to be higher. The second is that the current damage is fine but the gameplay needs to be adjusted to give tanks less damage skills and more non-damage role abilities.

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If I may posit a third position: The number of damage skills is fine, but there needs to be more non-damage skills against which they can be balanced in their opportunity costs, with the non-damage skills still being viable at the highest levels of play (such as by making their mitigation scale with tank gear or cost less when mitigating the attacks relatively weakened by simple a party's gear progression), such that tank complexity increases, with greater depth in most outputs and greater breadth across all types of outputs.

An extreme of said position: Passive mitigation should likely be reduced in favor of frequent (or even consistently available) means of active mitigation. If needed, tank combos can be reworked to conserve button count, trading a pretense of complexity for actual complexity.