How do we feel about tank damage right now?

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

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.

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Like a more meaningful toggle. Always bothered me Tank Stance was a +20/-20 (before modifications) but the DPS toggle was often +X/-0.

having those toggles enable and disable options would be a plus, to me at least. 2 Button Wonders aside, protection warriors from TBC era Warcraft will always hold a special place in my heart via immunity Blocking and Revenge spam.

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Originally Posted by J-Reyno

You suggested that damage is not a primary objective of tanks and we've established that it is.

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Ok, let's admit that it is because of the relation between damage and enmity. So let me ask you that question : Why would you need more enmity ?

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Originally Posted by J-Reyno

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.

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The main thing that I see is that you tunnel vision into damage numbers and use that to claim that tanks have "very low impact", which is extremely biased and completely disregard the part where tanks, well, tank.

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Originally Posted by J-Reyno

enmity and mitigation largely being non-factors

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But again, that is the real issue. The fact that actual tanking is not engaging, not our damage numbers.

A thing I noticed looking back at the graphs back in page 4 is the "score" of tanks. They are around 50 points in Eden where they were closer to 70 in Omega. It's funny when you realize that tanks used to lose roughly 20% of their damage when using tank stance. Basically, now that they removed the hassle of stance dancing and trading survival for damage, we don't get rewarded with the increased damage.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Passive mitigation should likely be reduced in favor of frequent (or even consistently available) means of active mitigation.

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I still think mitigation GCD would make tanking far more engaging :)

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

A thing I noticed looking back at the graphs back in page 4 is the "score" of tanks. They are around 50 points in Eden where they were closer to 70 in Omega. It's funny when considering that tanks used to lose roughly 20% of their damage when using tank stance. Basically, now that they removed the hassle of stance dancing and trading survival for damage, we don't get rewarded with the increased damage.

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Omega is PDPS. PDPS is heavily inflated by padding. It's the entirety of the reason that upon Dancer's introduction that the site in question changed its metric. And while that metric isn't perfect, it's more equitable.

So our first fault is trying to compare the raw aggregate data of a -PDPS- based dataset to the raw aggregate data of an -RDPS- based dataset.

Even if we moved back to Stormblood, using this new metric Tanks heavily drop because the only "RDPS" metric brought was by Warrior, and it shares that with two DPS jobs.

What we have is a combination of several factors.

A) A Change of measuring metric.
B) Retuning healer's damage (Where most of the jobs range between 60-70% increases, healers range from 80-90%)
C) The change of assumption in tuning Tanks (RE: There is no longer a penalty - AKA one tank is no longer at 80% while the other sits at 100%, as far as SE's tuning is concerned)

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The main thing that I see is that you tunnel vision into damage numbers and use that to claim that tanks have "very low impact", which is extremely biased and completely disregard the part where tanks, well, tank.

A thing I noticed looking back at the graphs back in page 4 is the "score" of tanks. They are around 50 points in Eden where they were closer to 70 in Omega. It's funny when you realize that tanks used to lose roughly 20% of their damage when using tank stance. Basically, now that they removed the hassle of stance dancing and trading survival for damage, we don't get rewarded with the increased damage.

I still think mitigation GCD would make tanking far more engaging :)

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Okay so... what pray tell does that make an OT then? Because according to your logic a OT is supposed not exist. I can't tank the same boss like leviathan every fight, what am I supposed to do? Oh I voke and help my MT with a TB before he takes it back? Greaaaat. The act of tanking is also doing damage. Not just in FFXIV, but in every MMO tanks have to also deal damage to do their tanking so it is one of our primary concerns. Its last on the list when progging but when clearing it certainly is up there in priority.
A GCD cooldown is probably going to be the dumbest thing they could add. Remember Inner Beast? Yeah, few used that in SB and that was a GCD cooldown. You know what tanks will just do? Have the OT use their OT skills for once or just tank swap.

On your point on tank stance... nobody used tank stance, well at least in end game. You establish hate and then swap to DPS stance the rest of the way unless you needed the extra mitigation (which you almost never needed). If they didn't remove it what would have happened? Well the OT would just take a tankbuster that the MT can't take while in DPS stance. The removal of the stances was to make the tanks more "new player friendly" plus it helped remove the aspect DPS/Heals watching their own hate.

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Originally Posted by BarretOblivion

Okay so... what pray tell does that make an OT then? Because according to your logic a OT is supposed not exist.

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The OT would do exactly the same thing as they do now, tank. The fact that he doesn't manage the whole fight is completely irrelevant. And it's even more important now that every tank has several mitigation tools usable even as an OT.

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Originally Posted by BarretOblivion

A GCD cooldown is probably going to be the dumbest thing they could add. Remember Inner Beast? Yeah, few used that in SB and that was a GCD cooldown.

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Only because the oGCD mitigation was more than enough to tank everything, and also because the opportunity loss of Inner Beast went way above a single GCD.

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Originally Posted by BarretOblivion

On your point on tank stance... nobody used tank stance, well at least in end game.

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You're right, in endgame, after you gather enough knowledge of the fight to optimize your mitigation skill, your enmity rotation and optional tank swapping even if the fight didn't require that. And you were rewarded for those efforts by an increased amount of damage. Now, all of that effort is gone, so the reward is also gone.

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Originally Posted by BarretOblivion

The removal of the stances was to make the tanks more "new player friendly" plus it helped remove the aspect DPS/Heals watching their own hate.

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New players were far away from the whole "stance optimization in Savage content", so no, it wasn't made for new players, but to close that very fiery debate, exactly like the update on accessories. And yes, it removed the aspect of watching hate. So, explain why tanks should be more rewarded now that they have less things to manage ? And that's without counting how the rotations themselves have been mostly streamlined, requiring, once again, less effort than in past expansions (At least for WAR and DRK).

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

Ok, let's admit that it is because of the relation between damage and enmity.

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Gonna stop you here. I'm glad we can agree that damage is necessary for enmity, but it is also a primary function of the role simply because it is intended by the devs who designed the role that tanks deal damage, just as much as it is intended for dps to deal damage. Tanks need to deal damage because content is designed around tanks dealing damage and utilizing the rotation they are given. It's not a debatable subject.

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Originally Posted by J-Reyno

I'm glad we can agree that damage is necessary for enmity, but it is also a primary function of the role simply because it is intended by the devs who designed the role that tanks deal damage, just as much as it is intended for dps to deal damage.

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You're right, the devs designed the tank role so that it would do damage...its current damage. So, end of debate, "working as intended" ?

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

You're right, the devs designed the tank role so that it would do damage...its current damage. So, end of debate, "working as intended" ?

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The discussion was whether dealing damage is a primary element of tank gameplay. You argued that it isn't, which would be like my arguing that tanks didn't receive a lower damage increase than the other roles even though we all know that is true. I haven't made any such argument, however, and we've established that yours was wrong.

If you want to argue that damage SHOULDN'T be a focus of the role, that's a different story Similarly, I might argue that tanks should deal more damage, but whether or not it's necessary for the role to deal damage isn't up for discussion.

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Originally Posted by J-Reyno

The discussion was whether dealing damage is a primary element of tank gameplay.

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No, again, the discussion on this thread is that you feel tanks don't do enough damage compared to other roles. You just use enmity as a reason why you should do more damage because it would help you fulfill your primary focus, which is false because you don't need this additionnal enmity to tank.

So again, you want more damage for damage sake.

And if you use devs as a justification for how tanks are expected to do damage, it's obvious I will use devs to justify that tanks are expected to do the damage they currently do, since in both cases, that's how devs designed tanks.

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Originally Posted by BarretOblivion

A GCD cooldown is probably going to be the dumbest thing they could add. Remember Inner Beast? Yeah, few used that in SB and that was a GCD cooldown. You know what tanks will just do? Have the OT use their OT skills for once or just tank swap.

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Should we remove GCD healing as well, I wonder? I mean, oGCD healing has made it mostly superfluous as is, so... why not?

While we're at it, why don't we throw in some channeled oGCDs (broken on any other action) for DPS that deal more than their GCD outputs? Their contribution isn't actually capped, so gotta find some other way to make GCDs unnecessary for their role as well.

:: GCDs are only a waste insofar as low damage tuning and overpowered oGCDs make them a waste.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

I will use devs to justify that tanks are expected to do the damage they currently do, since in both cases, that's how devs designed tanks.

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And you're free to do that. I'm not arguing that tanks are not expected to deal their current damage. I'm arguing that I feel they should deal more. You argued that tanks are not expected to focus on damage, but they are.

There is a difference between arguing HOW things work and arguing how you FEEL things should work.

You argued the former, I've been arguing the latter.

I'd hope you could understand this before the discussion became tiresome, but... here we are.

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Originally Posted by J-Reyno

You argued that tanks are not expected to focus on damage, but they are.

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No, I argued that there's no justification for them to do more, since it wouldn't change anything on how they do their tanking. And that your focus as a player should simply to get as close a possible to the ceiling of your role and not compare it to what other roles do.

And also that to make tanks more engaging, it would be much more interesting to focus on actual tanking mechanics, by either making enmity something you had to actually manage or mitigation more involving.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

No, I argued that there's no justification for them to do more, since it wouldn't change anything on how they do their tanking.

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You argued that there's no reason for tanks to optimize damage. You even suggested that spamming shield lob would be an effective replacement for optimizing damage to accomplish the tank's objectives, even though one of those objectives is effectively dealing damage around which content is balanced.

Your quotes below:

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

I'm not sure about the enmity modifier for Shield Lob/Tomahawk and such, but you could probably gain more "enmity" by spamming it than by doing a correct GCD rotation. But enmity not being an issue, I think it's more important to focus on the other primary objective of tanks, which is surviving, and it just so happens that surviving is almost completely unrelated to doing damage.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

But, like I said, optimizing enmity is not technically the same as optimizing damage. And, frankly, this line was only to point out that enmity is barely something tanks have to focus on :p

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You even called this "optimizing enmity" as a way to emphasize that there's no need to actually utilize the damage rotation. You were wrong that optimizing enmity would include spamming shield lob (this is not optimal by any stretch of the imagination) and you were wrong that tanks are not intended to focus on dealing damage as part of the role.

And just to make sure you understand that you did indeed dismiss damage as a primary focus of the role, let me offer a couple more quotes from yourself:

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

We were discussing primary focus. And since tanks have two focus, to keep monster on them and to survive, I simply made sure that enmity was a not non-issue to focus on the surviving part, which, again is almost completely unrelated to how much DPS you do.

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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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So let me say it again. Optimizing your damage IS a primary and intended focus of playing tank according to the very devs who design the roles and the content.

Now you can argue separately that tanks should not have more damage, and again, you're free to do that. It doesn't change that you were, are and will continue to be wrong about the above.

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Originally Posted by J-Reyno

You argued that there's no reason for tanks to optimize damage.

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No, I didn't. In fact, I specifically said :

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

The thing is that "optimizing DPS" has nothing to do with the actual damage numbers but rather how close you are to your full damage output. You're a better tank by doing 7k out of a 8k ceiling than by doing 8k out of a 12k ceiling.

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when I joined this thread, and

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

One more time "as best as you can" shouldn't be compared to "as best as DPS can" but "as best as other tanks can". That's why I said that raw numbers don't matter much as ceiling within your role.

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as a specific answer to you.

You're the one that started mixing enmity as a justification that tanks should do damage closer to DPS, which, again, wouldn't increase anything in your abiity to survive or keep enmity off your party members.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

when I joined this thread.

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The only thing I'm commenting on is what you say in response to me. We're not going to spin this into a separate discussion to distract from earlier comments.

Now if you decide to insist again that "optimizing your damage has nothing to do with any primary focus of a tank" I might have more to say.

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Originally Posted by BarretOblivion

On your point on tank stance... nobody used tank stance, well at least in end game. You establish hate and then swap to DPS stance the rest of the way unless you needed the extra mitigation (which you almost never needed). If they didn't remove it what would have happened? Well the OT would just take a tankbuster that the MT can't take while in DPS stance. The removal of the stances was to make the tanks more "new player friendly" plus it helped remove the aspect DPS/Heals watching their own hate.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

New players were far away from the whole "stance optimization in Savage content", so no, it wasn't made for new players, but to close that very fiery debate, exactly like the update on accessories. And yes, it removed the aspect of watching hate. So, explain why tanks should be more rewarded now that they have less things to manage ? And that's without counting how the rotations themselves have been mostly streamlined, requiring, once again, less effort than in past expansions (At least for WAR and DRK).

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The HW/SB DpS stance tanking situation was partially caused by unintended uses of skills for massive increases in enmity generated. Enmity management when playing as intended (i.e. in Tank stance with Vit accessories doing a proper rotation) was pretty much a non-concern as it is now. The situation developed after Warrior players discovered that they could generate a massive lead in enmity by combining overhealing with Equilibrium (if I remember right it was a free 1500 enmity at max hp) and their Unchaned opener and that tanks could maintain this lead for long enough to clear content with their Strength accessory enhanced DpS rotations. When the devs tried to correct for this during SB they ended up introducing the Circle Shirk combos which allowed for multiplication of both tanks current enmity without the use of tank stance.

High end Tank players discovered that they could do more work to increase their damage massively. The ShB tank stance changes were done to return the tanks to their intended difficult level.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

The ShB tank stance changes were done to return the tanks to their intended difficult level.

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So, they also returned them to their intended DPS level, now that the additionnal work has been removed.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

So, they also returned them to their intended DPS level, now that the additionnal work has been removed.

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For the most part. MT and AoE relative intended DpS has been increased, but OT Tank relative single target DpS has been reduced from what people got used to over the previous 4 years.

HW and SB were a mess of overperforming tanks after Gordias Savage's overtuning led groups to search for easy ways to make up for underperforming dps. Tanks ended up being the role that had the easiest to increased damage numbers while only slightly increasing healer workload.

To me the charm in tanking was in other places always anyway.
I'm console peasant so I cannot even """cheat""" to see my numbers. Oopsie.

I honestly don't understand why tanks should do more dps than healers. Healer optimization in a savage/ultimate setting is way harder than tank optimization, the latter simply requiring you to keep doing your extremely basic rotation while popping defensive cds when needed. In fact, looking at lower percentiles, healers rdps contribution is always lower than tanks'. It's only at 95-99% percentiles that healers do around the same rdps as tanks, but that requires healers to perfectly exploit their ogcd skills...and this is something that requires quite a bit of effort and planning. Also, it's something that requires perfect play from the whole party in order to minimize gcd heals and bis gear (with low gear, healers are forced to spend more gcds for healing spells because of lower defense).

Anyway, it's all relative, as other people said. Even if they were to buff tanks' dps, they'd just tune future encounters accordingly, so at the end of the day who cares? Just try to maximize your role and don't worry about other roles. Actually, given how the current situation gives more accountability to dps and significantly reduces the chances of bad dps being carried by good tanks and healers, I think it's a good thing. This will be a wake-up call for all the bad dps out there.

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Originally Posted by J-Reyno

And you're free to do that. I'm not arguing that tanks are not expected to deal their current damage. I'm arguing that I feel they should deal more. You argued that tanks are not expected to focus on damage, but they are.

There is a difference between arguing HOW things work and arguing how you FEEL things should work.

You argued the former, I've been arguing the latter.

I'd hope you could understand this before the discussion became tiresome, but... here we are.

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Any many would argue how you "feel" is meaningless when it comes to balance.

Take some time and do some tests, gather data, present it that way. Just saying "I feel this" doesn't get much support.

For example, you can get to lvl 80 and equip same ilvl gearsets on tanks and DPS and do some 500 potency attacks (or whatever) and compare the damage. Then you can make a judgement on Tank scaling and comment on that.

I will admit one thing though about tanks right now. Due to the fact they have the largest potencies in the game, they have the biggest damage variances of all the classes right now from crits. For instance, one particular E2 run with paladin this dude ran like 70% the dps damage because every single confiteor he used was a direct hit critical hit

if all damage statistics for tanks become a matter of who got more critical finishes it's going to suck pretty bad because that's not a reliable source for determining the very top of what a tank can do consistently, but rather rng being kind

How do I feel?

I feel like the fact that we focus on tank damage and not mitigation is a problem.

I feel like stacking damage stats shouldn't be the optimal route for a job designed to take hits.

I feel like the stat solely designed for tanks shouldn't be considered trash.

I feel like I should be doing everything I can to reduce the damage I take, not the damage I do.

I am irked to no end by this.

It's not about the stats.

This is a game. Every role has to have some measure of skill. They also need to have a means of differentiating between players at different skill levels.

The problem is that in order to make tanking more 'accessible', the devs have neutered the skill checks involved with the role. It doesn't matter if it's suddenly better to equip your +2 ring of tankiness over your +2 ring of damage dealing. You can look that up in a guide. How do you tell if someone is a good tank or not?

The reason why damage enters the discussion is because it's the only differentiating skill check that tanks have at the moment, between auto-positioning bosses and invulns on every tankbuster. The solution is not to remove the last remaining skill check. You need to identify more ways for tanks to contribute.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

It's not about the stats.

This is a game. Every role has to have some measure of skill. They also need to have a means of differentiating between players at different skill levels.

The problem is that in order to make tanking more 'accessible', the devs have neutered the skill checks involved with the role. It doesn't matter if it's suddenly better to equip your +2 ring of tankiness over your +2 ring of damage dealing. You can look that up in a guide. How do you tell if someone is a good tank or not?

The reason why damage enters the discussion is because it's the only differentiating skill check that tanks have at the moment, between auto-positioning bosses and invulns on every tankbuster. The solution is not to remove the last remaining skill check. You need to identify more ways for tanks to contribute.

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That's what many people here are saying; don't dig a deeper dps hole as a means of increasing skill check in tanks. Add in more tank stuff that tanks can do to make tanks tank-like. Make tanks tank again. Don't make us beefy almost-dps.

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Originally Posted by Quor

That's what many people here are saying; don't dig a deeper dps hole as a means of increasing skill check in tanks. Add in more tank stuff that tanks can do to make tanks tank-like. Make tanks tank again. Don't make us beefy almost-dps.

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Honestly, why not both? The actual tanking aspects of XIV tanking are almost inexistent, so it can obviously increase its depth a great deal before becoming oppressive. But, the dps aspects, too, are pretty scant. As long as I can feel like an actual tank, I don't much care where the depth necessary to feel fleshed out as a job comes from beyond that point. Quantity > relative allotment, if you will.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Honestly, why not both? The actual tanking aspects of XIV tanking are almost inexistent, so it can obviously increase its depth a great deal before becoming oppressive. But, the dps aspects, too, are pretty scant. As long as I can feel like an actual tank, I don't much care where the depth necessary to feel fleshed out as a job comes from beyond that point. Quantity > relative allotment, if you will.

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Yeah, but that really doesn't have anything to do with increasing damage.

It's already been stated here that the end goal is more damage. The method it gets it doesn't matter, but if the method itself changes while the damage goal doesn't, then they don't want it.

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Originally Posted by Quor

That's what many people here are saying; don't dig a deeper dps hole as a means of increasing skill check in tanks. Add in more tank stuff that tanks can do to make tanks tank-like. Make tanks tank again. Don't make us beefy almost-dps.

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Yeah, we tried that, and tank population kinda was at its lowest during that time. When they had elements on letting tanks with high skill levels dealing close to the lowest DPS numbers tanks started being played more. There is a limit to how much you can throw at tanks to do "tank things" when its almost completely even across all roles when it comes to mechanics. Tanks needing to do 'tank things' to help the group are kinda boring in all honesty, i take this tether that would kill another, I stack with MT, I share a TB, etc. There is a certain point where unless they do a massive rework to tanks, (which they just kinda did) we are kinda going to be "blue DPS". Sure, positioning requirements would be nice and maybe not force tank swaps and instead make them spaced out enough to where you kinda need to tank swap. However, is it so much to ask really for rotations that aren't mind numbing to play? Seriously besides PLD/GNB the other two tanks are mind numbing to play rotation wise. I fell asleep the other day playing WAR again, its just so... boring. Right now, the role to play for new players are tanks, it pains me to admit this but it seems like SE want newer players to be tanks and it just rubs me the wrong way.

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Originally Posted by BarretOblivion

Yeah, we tried that, and tank population kinda was at its lowest during that time. When they had elements on letting tanks with high skill levels dealing close to the lowest DPS numbers tanks started being played more. There is a limit to how much you can throw at tanks to do "tank things" when its almost completely even across all roles when it comes to mechanics. Tanks needing to do 'tank things' to help the group are kinda boring in all honesty, i take this tether that would kill another, I stack with MT, I share a TB, etc.

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Not one of those examples are uniquely tank mechanics or responsibilities. The exact same mechanic is done by all other roles, only in different fights and with different stack-anchors.

That's... kind of the point. Tanking right now is almost devoid of... tanking. At most, we hit a damage-intake CD between our damage-output CDs, or divert the aim of a boss. That's literally it for our uniqueness (and technically not even the mitigation is unique, given the physical ranged role). There's nothing to build towards for mitigation. The use of any given skill allows for no impact on or integration with our survival beyond "Did you press it in time last time and, given that, did you press it in time this time?"

But, that doesn't have to be the case. It just takes more than a bean's worth of imagination and not pandering to a lowest denominator.

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Originally Posted by Quor

That's what many people here are saying; don't dig a deeper dps hole as a means of increasing skill check in tanks. Add in more tank stuff that tanks can do to make tanks tank-like. Make tanks tank again. Don't make us beefy almost-dps.

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They wont put on tanks shoulders more responsibility because any mistake done by a tank already cost a lot to everyone in the party (eden 1, double tank buster could wipe entire party).
Its better if they give us more dps responsiblity instead, because it wont not hurt entire party as much if a tank does 6000 or 7000 dps.
If they would give us skills to manage that we have to use in order to do our job properly by making our job harder to do like for example we may be required to use our extra sustain skills there are only 2 outcomes.
First one we are successful and nothing bad happens, and the second one is we fail and we die and wipe the party.
Forget about it, it wont happen, they wont make tanking more engaging because it would mean they have to make it harder, and making it harder will just take people away from the role, because it will be stressful. There are tanks that do not use CD's at all, imagine what would happen if they will have to manage some second hand mechanics to keep themselves alive.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Not one of those examples are uniquely tank mechanics or responsibilities. The exact same mechanic is done by all other roles, only in different fights and with different stack-anchors.

That's... kind of the point. Tanking right now is almost devoid of... tanking. At most, we hit a damage-intake CD between our damage-output CDs, or divert the aim of a boss. That's literally it for our uniqueness (and technically not even the mitigation is unique, given the physical ranged role). There's nothing to build towards for mitigation. The use of any given skill allows for no impact on or integration with our survival beyond "Did you press it in time last time and, given that, did you press it in time this time?"

But, that doesn't have to be the case. It just takes more than a bean's worth of imagination and not pandering to a lowest denominator.

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Unfortunately they probably want tanking to be more new player friendly, it reeks of this idea from them with all the changes to tanks. Now look, I appreciate the hate change, it made this wierd dycotimy where DPS/Healers had to actually cooldown/watch their own personal hate and tanks basically shirk'd to keep ahead while also making Ninja more MANDATORY of a pick in most cases for shadewalker. I honestly hated the forced 'meta' to always have a Ninja in the group during SB, but it was necessary because a Tank had a gimped opener if they didn't because they had to throw in an aggro combo to establish hate leading to borked openers. Unfortunately the affect on tanking has resulted in the loss of stance dancing which is a high skill technique when progging and even doing ultimate content. That got chucked out the window (it also nerfed WAR as it was one of their strengths being the best tank to stance dance).

So, if SE wants us Tanks to be able to be new player friendly to get more players to try tanking, fine by me. However, they need to have more engaging OT mechanics at the very least in the last 2 encounters of these tiers, I shouldn't be basically twiddling my thumbs waiting for the forced tank swap for me to do what my role is, and make these rotations at least somewhere closer to DPS. I mean jesus, DRK/WAR are starved for offensive skills. Bring back our old skills if you have to, bring back Scourge, give WAR some OGCDs to make us more involved with our Beast Guage, give Paladin some sort of way to dump our oath guage (cause you only use shelltron with it and intervention, which means just use our guage on Tankbusters) and give GNB another resource to play with. I mean all GNB does is build up two charges and that's it. Thier job guage feels unfinished.

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Originally Posted by BarretOblivion

Unfortunately they probably want tanking to be more new player friendly, it reeks of this idea from them with all the changes to tanks.

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Which really bugs me...A "new player" doesn't start at level 80 in Eden Savage, so why tanking at this level should still be "new player friendly" ? Even if you start at level 60 with the Gunbreaker (Which, IMO, is still a wrong move), you should have these 20 last levels to learn how to deal with advanced tank skills and/or mechanics.

And if you bribe your way with a potion, then it's on you to make up for what you missed.

Tank stance was never a skill check. It just separated out tanks into players who were 'in the know' from people who weren't. The latter category progressively shrunk over the course of ARR to Stormblood as the issues around tank stance and tank gearing became basic knowledge in raiding. The term "stance dancing" is a complete misnomer.

Enmity is a proxy for actually doing damage. Do you know what's less exciting than just doing damage? Just doing fictional damage. No, the enmity and stance changes were incredibly good changes for the role.

But by cutting out the fluff, we've also exposed the underlying problems.

Positioning is my biggest gripe at the moment. This has never really been FFXIV's strongest suit. But by Stormblood the fight designers had became so enamoured with their own fight choreography that they just took player agency out of it with auto-positioning bosses. This might be my rose-tinted glasses, but this is one area of fight design that Warcraft devs seem to (at least historically) have understood better.

Raiding is filled with all-or-nothing checks. During progression, a single mechanics error from a single party member is (theoretically) supposed to trigger a wipe. If dps players can cause a wipe by not moving their icons to the correct places at the correct times, surely we can trust our tanks with genuinely threatening mitigation checks? It seems like most of the relevant damage in any given fight is on the raid, rather than on the tank.

It's like your tank isn't even there.

I think the concept of "carry potential" is an important factor in drawing skilled players to a role. If the work that you do doesn't carry an impact, then why invest effort to get good at it? With tanks, you have a role that is paradoxically intimidating to newer players (in dungeon content), yet leaves more experienced players with less opportunity to impact their team (in raid content).

And yet we seem surprised at tank numbers.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

Yeah, but that really doesn't have anything to do with increasing damage.

It's already been stated here that the end goal is more damage. The method it gets it doesn't matter, but if the method itself changes while the damage goal doesn't, then they don't want it.

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This, exactly. While it's true a few have mentioned wanting increased complexity/engagement in tanking that doesn't necessarily mean a change to how we deal damage, the main thrust of this thread is that a some people believe tanks should do more damage because they don't think tanks are doing enough damage right now, and to hell with game balance (both between the three roles and among the tanks).
Now, this isn't to say a damage increase for tanks isn't warranted, but if one were to happen it would certainly be small. Something on the order of 1-2% of total, not the 12-15% that has been suggested elsewhere in the thread.

Now, while an argument could certainly be made that tanks could use more "stuff to do" outside of the normal rotations, I think the better way to go about it is not just adding a bunch of dps, (either in the form of potency boosts or additional combos) but also considering how to encourage and reward tank-like behavior. Something new and different, like maybe TBN could apply a stacking buff to the DRK each time it's broken, and upon the 4th time it's broken (so functionally about a low 60's CD) the DRK gets some kind of noticeable dps boost, either via a powerful oGCD move, or a new combo being unlocked, or what have you. The DRK is actively encouraged to use TBN to protect not only himself but his allies, with a commensurate payoff at the end that keeps in line with the feel of the job. Much preferred to just tacking on "1k dps" and calling it quits. Add a hedge in there such that if TBN isn't broken, progress is still made towards the goal by an equal % to the amount of damage TBN absorbed. This way no TBN is "wasted" so to speak; you'll always get something out of it, and it should be powerful enough that a DRK would actively look forward to using it as much as possible. It wouldn't refresh Darkside, so Flood/Edge still have their place, and now it's more of a game to balance the MP usage such that you don't drop Darkside inadvertently while you try to maximize TBN usage.

Obviously just an idea, and I'm sure there are problems and holes in it, but it's leaps and bounds more interesting than "1k dps" or "another combo." There's loads of potential among the tanks for tank-like stuff that could result in a noticeable (but minor) increase in damage. Something that will make people "feel" like they're contributing more (because they are) but also making it so said contribution isn't focused around dealing damage. Yes, damage becomes a reward, but it's a reward that comes from playing in a tank-like manner. You get rewarded for reducing damage. I see so few tanks use their "helper" abilities despite the great power they have that it's honestly quite sad. They're literally throwing free complexity out the window, and it's not like there isn't an upside to it either. A well-timed helper buff can save a vuln'd or low-life dps, and even if no one is actively at risk, damage mitigated is damage that doesn't have to be healed, giving healers more leeway to do other things (mostly nuke I'd imagine). Ok, so that stuff isn't immediately noticeable, I get it. Then let's make it noticeable. Let's lean on *that* to add complexity, and in the process sure, beef up tank damage a bit when it's done correctly.

But please, please....don't just sit here and advocate for a blanket damage increase like that's going to solve anything. Suggest ideas for better tank complexity that focused on tank-like behavior, even if those ideas are ridiculous at least they're better and more interesting than a potency boost.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

It's like your tank isn't even there.

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To be fair, apart from pushing phase transition, most of the fights unfold like the whole party isn't even there. It would be more interesting to have less scripted sequence, and a somehow logical use of skills.
For example, in E2S, you mostly know in advance what kind of Doomvoid move it will do, even if your positionning will make it useless way before the cast.

In my opinion, it would be much more interesting to have more "feedback" from the boss (i.e, the DPS are really hurt so I'll do that big AoE to kill them instead of doing a tankbuster on a target with full health) or a little bit of random so that you'd have to react on the fly (i.e attacks have their own cooldown and the boss will pick one among those that are ready).

The discussion around tank damage is just about letting tanks feel relevant. It's the only meaningful way of differentiating between tanks of different skill levels in game at the moment. If you continue to de-emphasise that, we have nothing.

Why scupper your only stopgap solution? You need more reasons to make good tanking valuable, not fewer. Absolutely fix the other issues, but don't continue to sabotage the one part that's keeping everything afloat.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

It's the only meaningful way of differentiating between tanks of different skill levels in game at the moment.

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Not to sound like a broken record, but "differentiating tanks of different skill levels" is, again, completely unrelated to how much damage tanks do compared to DPS and healers.
Basically : 99th percentile = good, 5th percentile = bad.

The relative damage determines the impact of your performance. The wider the gap, the less value that 99% percentile performance carries to your team as a whole. Your team is better off moving a less competent player into the tank slot and having you switch to dps.

The people who seek out support roles (tanking and healing) do so to bring value to their team. If you devalue these roles, they become superficially more 'accessible', but you also end up driving away the very sort of personality type who seeks them out in the first place.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Your team is better off moving a less competent player into the tank slot and having you switch to dps.

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Unless :

• You're not as skilled as a DPS compared to the DPS job of the less competent tank
• Your DPS is not geared properly because you use the weekly rewards to equip the job you like
• The less competent tank might have tanking problems putting your party at risk
• You're less accustomed to the mechanics for a DPS and thus have a greater chance of failing them
• You don't want to raid as a DPS
• The less competent tank doesn't want to raid as a tank

So, basically, you need an 8 planet alignment for asking a competent tank to switch...and all of those would have been the same in previous expansions.

FFXIV's job system is designed around you being able to swap jobs and roles at a whim. I understand that some people identify as career 'tanks' and 'healers'; these players won't change up what they do regardless of how the game is designed (unless they find a different game that gives their role more interesting gameplay). Roleplaying considerations aside, dps is the role which has the greatest carry potential at the moment. If you can't trust your tank to press the invuln button at four pre-ordained timestamps in a 10 minute fight, they're not going to cut it as dps either.

Personally, I think a well designed MMO should aim for the reverse: tanking and healing should be your most reliable teammates, because that's what your typical type A tryhard wants to be: in-front of the boss, coordinating the team, or controlling the flow of the fight. Not watching the fight unfold on auto-pilot or pressing the occasional oGCD heal with a paperweight sitting on the Stone keybind. I feel like the past two expansions have progressively taken steps in the wrong direction.

Most people naturally migrate towards dps, and most people also want to fly under the radar. Let them have that, and let it be nice and low impact (but look flashy and important).