How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Quor]

You completely skip the arguements of tanks which are "We all got nerfed from what we were scaled at beforehand." How would you like your job to get their scaling nerfed next expansion? How about your entire role and force other to have to work harder for something that is completely out of your control.

How would I like it? Well, considering I have 2/4 tanks at 80, and raid regularly on them both, I'd have to say I don't mind it all. Also considering I've raided high-end stuff since 2.0 (mostly on WAR, even back when it was shit and kept out of parties due to almost-nil mitigation prior to the IB and Veng reworks) I don't mind it one whit. Absolute damage has gone up. WAY up. Relative damage might be different, but each xpac is essentially it's own new game. Just because WAR "felt" like it was doing much more damage in 3.0 or 4.0 doesn't mean that it isn't doing damage now. Objectively, WAR does more absolute damage than it did. All the tanks do more absolute damage than they did. Objectively, all the tanks do enough damage so that any combination of two different tanks (accounting for LB generation via a lack of dupe classes) can successfully clear content. Without looking at damage numbers no one would know that tanks are dealing "less relative damage" than last xpac. And since content is clearable, it doesn't matter that the slices of the pie are slightly different in size. All that matters is that the pie gets eaten.

Yeah content is "clearable" but keep in mind this is the first tier and its been stated that this raid tier they nerfed boss HP values by 15% unlike other first raid tiers where they nerf it by 10%. Gee I wonder why??? "thinking"

Without further context on the relative %'s of HP in various raid tiers, we simply don't know what that 15% means. Maybe they cut it by 15% because they realized belatedly that they had added too much HP relative to the damage they were expecting. Maybe the last raid tiers in SB they were more able to form an accurate estimation so a 10% cut was all that was needed. Maybe they just wanted this first raid tier to be an easier tier due to the increased popularity of FF14 via the ShB xpac and this would be a good "entry drug" to get new end-game players hooked on the raiding scene. Until (if) further information on this comment comes out, it's simply a useless number with almost no applicable context.

Maybe its because ranged DPS were doing too little damage and the pressure got further pushed on DPS to do even higher than they normally did in SB to clear content because one whole role got cut down for something they do. Healers were supposed to be doing less damage according to every info they gave out so healers would focus on healing but guess what? Now they need to even more than ever DPS. The tanks are balanced in their own bubble... kinda, but overall they are behind, just like Physical Ranged are. So yeah, lets just keep cutting down Tank DPS... won't have any effect on the number of tanks in PF, naaaaah.

I don't even know what you're referring to with whatever you're trying to say in the first two sentences, but as for the last sentence, if you're q'ing up as a tank because you're concerned about your dps, then the problem isn't with the tank role, it's with you. Tanks put out as much damage right now as they need to. I'll give you the same answer I gave to Awha above; asking for more dps simply because "it feels bad" is selfish and destructive to the game as a whole. Speaking of Awha:

I have always played tanks for their level of engagement. I wish threat management was a thing, I was wish fights required more tank swaps, I wish positioning had a greater level of importance, I wish they would throw more stuff at tanks to do outside of ultimate.

See, now this I can get behind. "Engagement" isn't the same as "damage" although damage can be a form of engagement. For a tank, engagement would be best accomplished via tank-like actions. Damage mitigation, threat management etc. A good (and probably the only) example of this is DRK's TBN. When I'm on my DRK, I'm constantly looking for people I can TBN. It's not a dps loss as long as the shield breaks, and if the shield does break then it's a pretty great overall dps gain, since a properly used TBN saves healer GCD's, which in turn allows those healers to use the extra GCD's elsewhere (usually damage). DRK is basically the only tank to have that kind of "overwatch"-style of play. GNB, WAR and PLD all want to save their short-timer CD's for dealing with tank busters, and the rest of their CD's tend to be "big" uses, like Heart of Light or Shake it Off or Divine Veil during Quietus in E2S. A reasonable criticism to level against SE in this xpac thus far is a lack of short-term engagement for GNB, WAR and PLD on a level that's roughly equivalent to what TBN brings DRK. You can also talk about how brain dead aggro management is compared to what it used to be, but that's another can of worms altogether.

It is not about the damage per-se more so what the percentage and potential damage mean in terms of engagement. It is not like we do low damage by any means, sure percentage wise it is lower then before but it is not horrible and I do agree tank balance is in a great spot but the engagement is lacking, and while I do not see SE making content outside of ultimate that much more demanding on tanks or healers they could at the very least make the roles feel better to play, and bigger numbers while silly to some for others like myself it is gratifying to see, and starving for that optimization that might to beat a pure dps player even if they are playing poorly is also engaging.

Again, I can sympathize with this. I miss Fracture. I miss (old old) Delirium and Scourge. I'm at once both pleased and confused that GNB has two dots to manage while both WAR and DRK lost theirs. I can understand wanting a more complex dps rotation for anything (tank, healer or dps) in the name of being more engaging or fun, but at the same time, it's important to note that complexity necessarily comes with a price. Namely, the more complex a thing is, the more people expect to "get" out of it, simply on the basis that the more complex thing requires more effort or work to pull off, therefore it should have a commensurate reward. Which just makes sense; if person A works harder than person B, you would expect person A to gain a larger reward commensurate with the extra effort they have put in.

The reason why this is a problem is because of balance. NIN is an excellent example of this, since it's arguably the highest APM job in game, yet until the recent buffs happened, was putting out very low dps. Many NIN's rightfully complained that they had to put in so much more work for a contribution that was significantly less than a person would expect for all that work. Clunkiness of the class notwithstanding, it sucks to work hard at something and not be rewarded for it. Most NIN's would probably be happy with being the lowest personal dps of all the jobs if it meant that their raid-wide contribution was in the top 3. But complexity is very hard to balance in the larger scheme of things, and adding further complexity to a dps rotation for any job means you need to reward said complexity with something appropriate.

In this case, since we're talking about dps, the proper reward is bigger numbers. And since we're talking a more complex dps rotation, we're talking bigger personal numbers. Sure, you could go ahead and add some kind of "debuff" mechanic for tanks, similar to Trick Attack or something, but you would then have to add it to all tanks or else you create a clear bias for the tanks with the debuff. And if you do that then you get what, an extra button to push? An extra combo to do? Each tank becomes a bit more like GNB? Homogenization of the tanks creeps ever forward yet again.

Point here being that I understand the desire for more engagement, but I don't think that dps is the way to go about satisfying said desire. Leaning into the things tanks do is the better option; give us something akin to TBN in some form or another. Put Cover on a shorter CD, take it off the gauge, and give PLD's some kind of tangible benefit to Covering a raid member aside from niche uses like Cover+HG. This is just one idea, but you get the gist. Something that plays to the tank role of mitigating incoming damage that has the same short-term tactical thinking involved in using TBN. Something that engages a tank beyond the usual, with a commensurate reward such that the raid is better off for the tank having gone the extra mile.