How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[ForteNightshade]

Players who are obsessed with damage will leave the tank role, which is fine because they never belonged in it in the first place. It's like all the SCH's who left SCH at the beginning of ShB because they couldn't "dps" like they used too. Those SCH's weren't SCH's, they were dps who wanted fast queue times. If a player is playing tank for the damage, and is going to leave because of a perceived lack of damage, then they aren't a tank and need to be honest with themselves and start playing a dps.

As I (and others) have stated, an argument could be made (and should be made imo) that more complexity can be added to tanks via tank-style stuff such as mitigation or threat management. But fundamentally, tanks are tanks, and tanking is what comes first. If a person is turned off by the damage a tank or healer does instead of being turned on by the tankiness or heal capability of those jobs, then that's not a problem with the job, that's a problem with the player.

That argument falls a bit flat when tanks have all but become buffier DPS. Gunbreaker practically epitomizes this as does Warrior. This tier is especially bad for how little mitigation you actually need outside Titan, which is why tanks notice how low their damage contribution is compared to what it was. And let's be honest here. I suspect the only reason this change occurred is SE didn't like the idea bad players who died would be out-damaged by tanks and feel bad about it.

Personally, I'm not bothered by it enough to complain one way or another. I do think tanks should be above healers if only because a healer's DPS "rotation" is two buttons—one of which they press every 30 seconds. Tanks actually have a rotation. So it's a bit unfair GNB has to jump through hoops to deal comparable damage to a WHM spamming Glare and occasionally Dia.

Respectfully disagree because in the tank community it largely doesn't come down to how we should spend out time, but bigger numbers. It's almost never, what can I do to make my healers life easier but generally, "They'll pick up the slack, I'm going for more damage!"

Blame encounter design for that. The playerbase merely takes advantage of the tools provided. Presently, there is no reason to over mitigate things at the expensive of your damage regardless of the role you play. For instance, Levi does so little damage, tanks can straight up waste CDs eating the first Temporary Current because it doesn't matter. Likewise, doing things like stacking flares isn't just for tank DPS but the entire party since damage trumps everything in this game. Allowing your tanks to get 3-5 more GCDs while you only trade an Energy Drain for a Soil is a much better exchange.