How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Quor]

The issue isn't tank damage. It's the relative damage that tanks do in comparison to dps.

So, tank damage.

In ARR, there was a fair amount of overlap between some of the better WARs and some of the weaker BRDs on account of STR accessories, even amongst skilled players.

This is bullshit. WAR had no dps stance in ARR, and their highest damage combo was BB, which also was their threat combo, while their highest damage move (Inner Beast) was locked behind the damage reduction of Defiance. There's a reason why BRD stacking was the preferred option until 2.2 or so; you had solid, mobile damage with great utility all wrapped up in one package. The best PLD's and WAR's in ARR wouldn't come close to even an average dps at the time. They simply lacked the tools to do so.

In Stormblood, you would see a bit of overlap, but only if you compared the extremes of skill. Right now, it's difficult to do less damage than a tank as dps unless you're actively trying to play badly. This is a reasonable change to an extent, because you don't want groups substituting in tanks for dps to make mechanics easier.

Agreed.

But the problem is that dps is the only thing that has an impact.

Disagree. As much as people like to pretend that dps is the end-all be-all of progression in this game, nothing could be further from the truth. Dps is what a tank or healer does after their primary function has been fulfilled. A raid without healing is a raid that won't make it 30 seconds into a fight, and a raid without tanks who know what they are doing will spend the entire run wiping. Hence, there is an assumption taken when having this discussion. Namely, that the tanks and healers are pulling off tank and heal stuff flawlessly 100% of the time, and then completely ignoring the absolutely necessary contributions to the group that tanks and healers bring by virtue of tanking and healing.

And it becomes harder to see good tanking or good healing as things that carry value.

I urge you to run Aurum Vale with a tank or a healer who has never done it before. That'll give anyone an appreciation of the value a good tank or healer brings.

The vast majority of boss fights are on rails and they position themselves for you, so you aren't really going to notice movement decisions that your tank makes. You'll die if you don't mitigate a tankbuster, but there's never a question of not having the gear to meet a mitigation or healing check. DPS have always been a higher priority for gear, but at least previously you could justify throwing a few early gear pieces to your tanks or healers geared up relatively quickly if they were shouldering a bigger chunk of the dps burden (and if tank gear happened to drop anyways, well, great for them).

With the inability to meld main stat (specifically vit) onto accessories now, there is significantly more value to gearing out healers specifically with non-weapon gear. Before hand, you could throw some extra vit onto your accessories and get a nice chunk of life. It was a popular thing to do in progression situations, to give healers a buffer when healing the non-tanks until enough clears had been accrued that everyone was running a higher average ilvl. Now, with vit baked into accessories and no way to increase it aside from increasing your ilvl, it's not so clear cut as just "gear the dps first" anymore.

Between the new gear system and the relative dps gap between the roles, it's pretty hard to justify getting any gear to your tanks and healers before all your dps are geared up, irrespective of skill.

See above. Dead healers don't keep anyone alive.

You don't need to incentivize people to play dps. Yes, they make up the majority of your subs.

If a person has to be "incentivized" to play something, then they really don't want to be playing that. The incentive is in the class. I play SAM and DNC because I enjoy SAM and DNC. I don't play MNK, despite MNK being objectively better. It's fun, sure, but it's not my cup of tea. On the other hand, I greatly enjoy all four tanks, and it's a matter of personal pride that I get all of them to level cap and become equally proficient with each one. My incentive as a tank is to be a great tank. To make it so that the dps I'm with are so confident of where the boss is facing that they don't even have to look at it to hit their positionals, and for the healers to know that I've always got something up my sleeve to deal with incoming damage. That's the incentive I have as a tank, and I daresay any true tank player will have a similar set of incentives for why they play tank. If a player is playing tank and thinking to themselves "man, my lack of damage is killing my enjoyment of this job" then they need to accept the truth that they aren't a tank and they need to start playing dps. You don't tank for the damage; you tank for the tanking.

But if players switch roles, queue times go up and subs drop.

Given Yoshi P's well-known stance of people dropping their subs and coming back again for big content patches, I fail to see how this is a problem. If a player wants queue times to be shorter then they can run a healer or a tank no problem. After all, 4-mans are astonishingly simple to complete. If a lack of damage is ruining your experience as a tank in 4-mans then you're doing it wrong and there's no hope for you. My DRK puts out stupid numbers in W2W pulls. If I do it right I'm only ever beaten by a BLM or a DNC. Turns out a 300 potency oGCD aoe spammable nuke does wonders when it has a dozen targets to hit. Nothing quite like puking out 3600 oGCD potency every 3s.

The biggest reasons why someone picks healer or tank are to have an impact on their team and provide value to their teammates. You achieve this by making these roles more challenging in order to give them value, rather than the reverse. The devs need to take a long hard look at how they design fights from a tanking and healing perspective, and make these roles feel like they can contribute something useful again.

This is exactly what I (and others) have been advocating for. Make more tanky stuff for tanks to do. Adding complexity via increasing damage somehow just makes tanks more like dps. I'd love to see more "mitigation" checks or positioning checks for a tank to do in fights. I do not want to be a "beefy dps." And I certainly don't want balance decisions to be made on the basis of a person's bad feeling about some bar graphs.