How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Samsta]

There's barely any positionning in a tank's role in this game right now. Bosses just reposition themselves with every mechanic when they're not outright just a giant static hitbox that takes half the arena (Leviathan, Titan Maximum for example, which are half the current raid tier). Aggro has become a complete non-issue and mitigation is just invuln most busters and press CDs on the rest. Protecting party members is just press one button on a 90sec recast when big damage is coming. Nothing feels engaging nor impactful. Everything is scripted and very easy to do. The only thing remaining is damage.

So now this is about what feels impactful and less about what actually is impactful? You don't think not dying is impactful? The mental gymnastics you guys are willing to make to justify your damage obsession is insane. Positioning is very relevant in 1 and half of the fights and mitigation both party and personal means not dying, how is that not impactful but suddenly bigger number on a parser that is going to be adjusted to bosse's health is?

[BarretOblivion]

So now this is about what feels impactful and less about what actually is impactful? You don't think not dying is impactful? The mental gymnastics you guys are willing to make to justify your damage obsession is insane. Positioning is very relevant in 1 and half of the fights and mitigation both party and personal means not dying, how is that not impactful but suddenly bigger number on a parser that is going to be adjusted to bosse's health is?

...
Have you tanked 1? 1 is keeping the boss in the center of the map where he repositions to almost every other mechanic. Important nothing, the only fight where positioning is important is 2 where you need to make sure you have room to dodge heads and not go off the map. Titan has 1 mechanic in phase 1 where positioning is somewhat important, entirety of phase 2 there is no positioning, and phase 3 is keep Titan in the middle which is brain dead easy as he doesn't move except for 1 time when the split tank busters come up.

[Freyyy]

So now this is about what feels impactful and less about what actually is impactful?

It has always been mostly about feeling impactful. Of course, as long as things such as tank busters and forced tank swaps exist, we will be forced to have 1 or 2 tanks in order to clear the content because we're the only jobs with the tools needed to deal with these. But, just like magic TBs are just there to make Dark Mind look good/useful, TBs, mechanics that force tank swaps and such are just there to make having 2 tanks necessary. Delete these and the role becomes completely useless. The only thing that a tank does more than a melee DPS is press defensive CDs at very scripted times in each encounter and voking once/twice in some fights. None of this feels impactful, and they only are because the devs purposely designed these to force tanks into raid groups. On the other hand, our jobs are much easier to play with a lot less complexity and our contribution to damage (the only thing that matters for the group once the minimum mitigation/healing thresholds are met) is very low compared to what it used to be before.

[Kabooa]

Delete these and the role becomes completely useless..

How much damage do you lose for a DPS taking 55k autos from Titan and healers being forced to baby sit that?

How much damage do DPS lose when the Boss is ping ponging around between those holding aggro?

How much damage do any of the casters / healers lose when those Autos interrupt their spells?

How much -death- happens when the Tank role mitigations aren't present during the traditional end-boss raid busters?

How many of the -other jobs- would be able to survive a raid buster -and auto attacks happening immediately after-?

Just removing tankbusters doesn't make the role worthless. The amount of damage they mitigate just from auto attacks alone would wipe out a raid without tanks in this "No tank buster" fantasy land.

Not to mention if we had no tankbusters, the auto attacks would likely be ramped up, or supplemented with a few instant-attacks of comparable strength.

[Shurrikhan]

How much damage do you lose for a DPS taking 55k autos from Titan and healers being forced to baby sit that?

(Forgive the 4-day late reply, but this still seems an important point to discuss.)

As always, that would depend on the healer dps lost relative to the dps gained by replacing a tank with another dps. If, say, a DPS is doing 14.5k, a tank 8.5k, and a pure-dps healer 8k, the healer would have to be healing 3/4ths more of the time due to that swap for it to be worth taking a tank. For each of the questions, you could run simulations and point out "tanks are still a net gain". That might not be true of a second tank, but given how much of tank mitigation is passive it would pretty much always be true of the first, even in that above scenario whereby tankbusters are removed (+/- auto-attacks being ramped up to compensate, but still being unable to outright one-shot a DPS). The question is how much of a lead should tanks have. How niche should a single-tanking setup be? Or a solo-healer setup? How much inertia or hegemony, so to speak, should be given to the "traditional" 4/2/2 comp. When DPS still had some utility of note beyond mere rDPS, the best balance was probably a point where a non-traditional point should only be competitive with deliberate planning or when vastly overgeared. But now -- when apart from Mantra and a usually-still-worthless Ranged raid mitigation buff? I'm not sure.

[Kabooa]

(Forgive the 4-day late reply, but this still seems an important point to discuss.).

Questions that could be their own discussion thread, for certain, but not here, unfortunately.

Frankly, if I'm being honest, I don't think buffing tanks is the end of the world, I just know it won't end there. We'll hit 5.2 and 5.3 and we'll see this thread again, because the core problem is that tanks, even as fun as they can be at times, are still just extremely shallow.

A potency boost should be seen as patronizing, not as the solution, because that would just be a "Quiet down and enjoy your 800 more damage per hit".

[lillucario]

Questions that could be their own discussion thread, for certain, but not here, unfortunately.

Frankly, if I'm being honest, I don't think buffing tanks is the end of the world, I just know it won't end there. We'll hit 5.2 and 5.3 and we'll see this thread again, because the core problem is that tanks, even as fun as they can be at times, are still just extremely shallow.

A potency boost should be seen as patronizing, not as the solution, because that would just be a "Quiet down and enjoy your 800 more damage per hit".

I will agree with that. I'm personally skeptical we'll actually get changes next expansion but that's far in the future so we'll see then. I honestly wouldn't give a damn about tank damage being arguably lower than before if tanks actually became more like tanks because of it.

[Shurrikhan]

I will agree with that. I'm personally skeptical we'll actually get changes next expansion but that's far in the future so we'll see then. I honestly wouldn't give a damn about tank damage being arguably lower than before if tanks actually became more like tanks because of it.

This, exactly. I just don't like getting it while also having fewer tank-related outputs available to us that are actually under our control.

Likewise, though, I can entirely see what Kobooa means in terms of setting a risky precedent, given how often the devs can almost be accused of malicious compliance. I don't think every risky issue can be avoided, though. There is, inevitably, going to be a time where we can't take a poorly done version or even a second version and just accept the excuse that "It's too late now."

[Samsta]

It has always been mostly about feeling impactful. Of course, as long as things such as tank busters and forced tank swaps exist, we will be forced to have 1 or 2 tanks in order to clear the content because we're the only jobs with the tools needed to deal with these. But, just like magic TBs are just there to make Dark Mind look good/useful, TBs, mechanics that force tank swaps and such are just there to make having 2 tanks necessary. Delete these and the role becomes completely useless. The only thing that a tank does more than a melee DPS is press defensive CDs at very scripted times in each encounter and voking once/twice in some fights. None of this feels impactful, and they only are because the devs purposely designed these to force tanks into raid groups. On the other hand, our jobs are much easier to play with a lot less complexity and our contribution to damage (the only thing that matters for the group once the minimum mitigation/healing thresholds are met) is very low compared to what it used to be before.

What a weird thing to say. This a game, everything is there to make you do something. Enrage is there to make you do enough dps, damage is there to make you heal. What you are saying is "if they delete everything tanks are supposed to do tanks don't have anything to do anymore" well yeah, if they delete boss hp and make the bosses just follow a set rotation and then they just die after dps are useless. You speak like every other thing is there is is like a force of nature that exists without any intention from the devs. Yeah tankbusters are there to make tanks do something, just like raidwide damage is there to make healers do something. What even is the point of this? Are healers forced into raid groups because damage exists?