DPS Stance vs Tank Stance Including Healer DPS

[RLofOBFL]

917 is not just low balled buy extremely low balled. FC is 170 more potency than IB(1/3 weaker) and considering its where most of WAR dps comes from, they'd lose several hundred more, though they'd gain a very small bit from Upheavels buff. And it's actually 25% not 20% penalty due to the 5% damage up on Deliverance. So it's not even, not even close xD.

[JohnnyDevo]

917 is not just low balled buy extremely low balled. FC is 170 more potency than IB(1/3 weaker) and considering its where most of WAR dps comes from, they'd lose several hundred more, though they'd gain a very small bit from Upheavels buff. And it's actually 25% not 20% penalty due to the 5% damage up on Deliverance. So it's not even, not even close xD.

Shows how much I know about tanks!

EDIT: now that I think about it, even the healing difference is inaccurate in the case of the warrior, because its version of the defensive buff only buffs healing spells, not abilities.

[Liam_Harper]

I've found it interesting, it's one of the things you get rather fragmented information on while learning to tank.

Does DRK's lack of self-heal factor into anything? For example, you're 61-69, you don't have TBN and Souleater doesn't heal anything outside of Grit, ...I'd have imagined this puts more on the healer than a flat 20% loss of tank mitigation. I admit I don't know how other tanks function compared to this, do others lose more than a flat 20% mitigation too?

[whiskeybravo]

At the end of the day, top healer parses are with tanks in DPS stance - not in Tank stance. Could it be pushed higher with tanks playing more defensively? Maybe a little bit, but you're taking over 1000 dps away from the tank and you likely aren't going to push 1000 more dps out of a healer.

Additionally, at least one healer has to be healing for the group to survive the encounter. If you are trying to let one healer dps while the other heals, why not just take an actual DPS? (outside of logs pride, I suppose) In most cases I've looked at (admittedly limited), either both healers are minimizing heals/optimizing dps, or one healer is flat out getting carried by the other for the parse.

Does DRK's lack of self-heal factor into anything? For example, you're 61-69, you don't have TBN and Souleater doesn't heal anything outside of Grit, ...I'd have imagined this puts more on the healer than a flat 20% loss of tank mitigation. I admit I don't know how other tanks function compared to this, do others lose more than a flat 20% mitigation too?

Not really. 61-69 is leveling content, and while I do agree that DRK is weaker than WAR/PLD until 70, it's not the basis for balancing the tanks. Jobs do a fraction of their lv70 potential while leveling so it shouldn't really be that big of a deal. And really, dungeons are different than raids. You don't have X amount of minutes to kill the dungeon before the boss explodes and wipes everyone. Use your tank stance on big pulls to survive and swap to dps stance for bosses to kill if faster. At least in DF. You can play around with whatever you like in a pre-made party but don't expect DF to put up with or perform the same as your static would.

[Izsha]

Some of this has been covered, but the fundamental problem is that tank damage taken is not a direct connection with how much a healer heals (25% less heals needed via tank stance doesn't mean a healer does 25% less healing) so its not a 1 to 1 that X% less damage is X% more healer damage. In addition, tanks deal more damage than healers so hurting a tanks damage directly is more harmful than indirectly hurting healer dps by a not 1 to 1 ration between healing and damage.

Reasons mitigation isn't a 1 to 1 savings on healing requirements.
1. Healers overcure. Every healer, every time. Some of that 25% higher tank healing requirement will be eaten by what you were naturally overhealing anyway.
2. The damage may be low enough you wouldnt need to hard cast cure spells and make no difference. Things you would already be doing might cover the damage regardless of stance. You will still use regens/fairy/medica2 tics/aoe heals on the party that hit the tank regardless of their stance. In low damage times that is often enough healing even in offense stance so tank stance doesn't help here.
3. The tank isn't the only person you cure. So your tank turtles and needs 25% less heals. Well you still need to heal that raid aoe. And your prey target. And that guy needs a raise. How much of your healing is even on the tank? Not all of it, that's for sure. So 25% saving on tanks doesn't mean 25% less healing.

Lets say half your cures are on the tank (made up number). Now that 25% savings is really only 12.5% savings. How much DPS can you get with that? (don't forget points 1,2, 3cut this down further). Is that DPS more than 33% of a tanks damage. Nope. Tanks do more damage than you, so 33% of their damage is far more than the fraction of healing you will save based on the above points. Even if 75% of your cures are on a tank, that's still only a 19% reduction in healing (cut down by 1-3).

Tank loss:
I don't know the other tanks as well off the top of my head as my war main, but deliverance to defiance war looses:
* Baseline Deliverance: 105 damage (deliverance has a 5% damage boost).
* Defiance: 105 to 80 (loose 5% from deliverance and 20% for defiance from 105 to 80.)
* FCs become IBs: 80 to 69.6 (FC makes up 40-45% war damage and every 500pot FC becomes a 300 pot IB so 60% loss on 42.5% of your damage, so -17% total loss. 17% of 80 drops damage to 69.6)
* A smidge more from lower crit rate (deliverance boosts crit rate based on how much gauge you have. Lets just ignore this for simplicity, but that means were lowballing how much war looses here)

Total damage lost 105 to 69.6 is 33.7% damage lost by moving to defiance. For some perspective, highest war damage on Chadernook (basically a training dummy) is 5500 dps. War would loose 1854 dps. The highest healer dps (sch) in chadernook is 4200 and did functionally zero healing. They cast ONE single target heal the whole fight. Seriously. 1 excog (single target ogcd) and 1 indom(aoe OGCD). That's it. That's all the healing he did. 100% damage, 2 OGCD heals. It doesn't get more ham than that.

This means that the healing saved (remembering points 1, 2, 3) would need to free up the sch to make up 1854 dps. Since the max a sch can do in that fight is 4200, that means they must be doing 2300 DPS while the war is doing 5500 in deliverance. Then the war turns on defiance, drops 1854 dps, and the scholar skyrockets by 83% to 4200 JUST because the war took 25% less cures. That is completely unreasonable.

Now there are some hybrid things like, dropping defiance to use inner release that can increase damage quite a bit, but not bug healing that much. Unchained etc. These are broad stroke numbers. But even if you really low ball this and assume unrealistic perfect situations (zero overhealing and only tank heals. No party heals). Make some really low ball assumptions on the tank damage (lets say, unchained and dropping defiance just long enough to IR FC spam) cuts the1854 dps in, lets say, half is still a 900 dps loss. Does a 25% reduction in healing make a 4200 sch out of a 3300 scholar? That is still a 27% increase in healer damage for a 25% reduction in healing requirements just to BREAK EVEN.

But its not a perfect world. You will heal people besides the tank. Regens/Raid heals/fairy can cover the bulk of tank healing. Whats left is mostly covered by OGCDs which have minimal impact on healer DPS. You will overheal regardless wasting a lot of the savings you 'could' have had. Reducing tank healing requirements doesn't somehow free up a million GCDs that you didn't have before. It frees up a 'few' GCDs in an entire fight when damage is higher than passive and OGCD heals, but has no impact on raid healing. It just doesn't put much of a dent into what you have to do regardless of the tank. But the impact on tank DPS is substantial and unavoidable. Just not worth the trade off.

It just dosent work out in healer dps favor when they can already DPS most of the time no matter what stance a tank is in. I'm at best a purple war on logs, while my whm is often an orange one. After progression I only enter defiance when unchained is up (or shit hits the fan). My static healer is not gonna gain 1000 DPS because I put on defiance more as he's already often 90+% dps, but I will loose many hundreds if I did. I often screw up, mess up my CDs and other things, but even with my defensive blunders outside of tank stance, my healers can respond, spot cure my screw-ups and still maintain high DPS. Putting on tank stance just doesn't help that much.

[AppleJinx]

tank stance pretty much does not change the number of heals going out from the healers and missing 5-20% damage from each tank is a much bigger detriment in terms of raid dps.

[Shurrikhan]

The trade-off almost always favors dps stance, especially with higher gear and better CD rotation, as the modifier generally outweighs the lost healer GCDs, in most cases trimming overheal rather than costing another GCD.

[Naryoril]

Thanks to those who actually took the time for giving founded answers backed with thoughts and numbers, in particular Izsha and JohnnyDevo. That's the stuff i was looking for and couldn't find.

No thanks to the "lol, tank DPS rox, healer sux" people without giving any real reasoning, answers like that don't explain anything and don't help anyone.

[aqskerorokero]

It depends on the situation from my pov, if the healer has trouble to keep me alive even in shield oath, why should i switch then, if there are 3 ppl in the party with vulnerability debuff and big aoe incoming, i just shell up. A lot of time my healer space out and for a good chunk of seconds does not heal me, i even cast a clemency just to be safe. And what if you party does not know how to control aggro generation, RQ or you do your part and shell up! Play around the party, don't expect nothing.

[Reynhart]

For me, the eHP effect on tank stance should be more powerful (-50% damage, or +100% HP/healing received), so that the healing requirement between the two would be vastly different. But, on top of that, I think tanks should take far more base damage that now (By having the Def/MDef on gear reduced), since I think healers have too much room to DPS even when the tank uses DPS stance.

The end result would be that trading Tank's DPS for healer's DPS should be fair and simply a matter of preference, since some healers do not like to DPS while others do, I some tanks like to play safe with their tank stance while others like to be more aggressive.