Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

[Lyth]

However, only the initial damage from applying Fracture is affected by SE, the actual DoT ticks aren't.

I was under the impression that DoTs snapshotted any buffs and debuffs up at the time of application (i.e. Trick, Hypercharge, etc.) Is the DoT tick not recognised as slashing damage or something?

This is really all SE's fault. In ARR there was a huge tank shortage so they started giving bonuses and mounts to encourage players to play the tank class. Naturally those players came from the dps class. This (IMO, I don't have proof) lead the devs to create tanks that look and feel like a dps. War already had the framework that was built on into HW. Drk was a job that appealed to dps, and was made a tank. Sam and Rdm are two of the most wanted new jobs and it wouldn't surprise me if one or both was made a tank. They are still going to appeal to dps classes and are going to be designed for a dps to step into. Instead of making the tank class more enjoyable to play we instead get dps playing a tank class with a dps mentality.

Hm. I don't know if this was really the case. Although there was an initial surge of interest in DRK at the time of its release (just like with NIN), a lot of people wandered off into other jobs after hitting 60. If you look at the Eorzea Census from a year ago (post-HW), tanks still were relatively rare compared to dps. The numbers fit with the queue times; the ratio of tanks to total players is probably lower than 1:4 (instant queues for 4-mans) and higher than 1:8 (longer queues for 24-mans after they changed from 2/2/4 to 1/2/5). DRK is the least played tank (which makes sense, because it's gated behind HW), and PLD is the most played (which is unchanged before and after HW).

The bigger impact of DRK was probably in luring players away from other tank jobs. You suddenly had long time WAR players coming into the job, bringing their combat prowess with them. This is probably why the MT dps levels started to climb, and player expectations with it. The techniques became mainstream.

I'm okay with tanks having abilities that let them deal some damage. Rage of Halone's debuff lasts 20 seconds, and combined with Shield Oath's enmity bonuses you can afford to rotate Halone, Goring Blade and Royal Authority. As I said in an earlier post, you can rotate all three to the point Halone's debuff only drops for 1 or 2 seconds between applications (assuming you want to prioritize Royal Authority over RoH). You're still generating aggro while in Shield Oath; more than if you were trying to tank a mob in Sword Oath and while taking less damage, to boot.

And all I said was that damage to a tank is a means to an end, not that it's irrelevant.

Here. These are the parts in particular that I'm referring to:

To me, judging tanks by how much damage they deal is the wrong way to approach raid comps and player dynamics. It's like judging a construction worker by how much they know about the business accounts of the company they work for. It's unreasonable and irrelevant to the duties of that person.

From this post, I inferred that you felt that 'how much damage [a tank] deals ... [is] irrelevant to [their] duties', although what you're saying now seems to contradict this. I may have misunderstood, or you may have had a change of heart in the interim; not that it matters either way. If you can agree that dealing damage is one of the responsibilities of a tank, then this discussion becomes significantly more straightforward.

Now for the next part:

That being said, damage to a tank is a means of holding aggro, and as such a tank should use the skills in their arsenal when possible.

If doing damage is just a means to hold aggro, then why are you talking about rotating in RA and GB? RoH is your highest aggro generation combo by far. The other two combos sacrifice enmity for more damage.

You also talk about dropping the Strength Down debuff from RoH to fit in an extra application of RA, and explain that there may be times where you want to prioritise RA over RoH. You're sacrificing mitigation to do more damage.

I'm trying to get a sense of your priority system in all this. You downplay the role of tank dps, but it seems like there are clearly situations where you feel it appropriate to trade off enmity and mitigation to do more damage. So when is it appropriate? I presume this would be when you have more than satisfied the enmity and mitigation requirements of the encounter. Which gets back to what I was saying earlier: tanking is about knowing when to trade-off offense for defense and vice versa.

You could certainly try to design a fight with tight mitigation checks, requiring 100% Shield Oath uptime. It's not going to stay that way, though. Initially, only the teams with the best tanks would clear. Then more gear gets released, and the playerbase gets more practice. The check gets softer, and more teams start to clear. Those best players who cleared at a lower gear level no longer need the extra mitigation, and their Shield Oath uptime starts to drop, while their dps goes up.

Actually, this is a bit of an oversimplification. When you work on the later phases of a fight, your Shield Oath uptime in the earlier phases is going to start to drop off fairly quickly. Only the part that you're presently working on may actually ever require 100% ShO uptime, even in a very difficult fight.

Either way, tank dps comes mainly from how effectively you use your mitigation tool kit to stay out of Shield Oath and on how good your positioning/melee uptime is. Your rotation is a distant third; dps jobs are really the ones who spend the most time worrying about optimising complex rotations. Ours are fairly trivial. The tanks most capable of clearing a tight mitigation check are also the ones who do the highest dps.