How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Quor]

Final Coil
It's actually completely historically accurate. Interestingly, back in Final Coil, some very good players on my server kept a spreadsheet of their, er, performance metrics. Most of the names on it are oddly familiar. There was a significant amount of overlap between WAR and BRD in Final Coil, mainly in the 425-475 range.

Surprisingly, toggling Defiance was actually part of optimising dps in ARR, especially during your opener. The reason for this was because of Unchained. You used Unchained to remove the damage penalty, allowing you to take advantage of the stance's crit boost and giving you temporary access to IB.

Yes, I'm aware of that technique. Open with Infuriate into Unchained, which would spend your Wrath stacks, setting your crit rate at 0% until you used five of Maim, Skull Sunder, Butcher's Block, Storm's Path or Storm's Eye, in whatever amount. Meaning you effectively had 10% crit and no damage loss for all of 3 seconds. Given you had actual threat issues back then (even with a NIN cooking the books for you) you were opening with BB combo (4% crit at ~7.3s into the fight) then Storm's Eye (8% crit at ~14.5s into the fight) and then you'd get your final stack of Wrath around the 17th or 18th second and then Unchained would wear off and you'd drop Defiance because the 25% (or 35% earlier on) damage reduction was just too much.

You'd toggle it back off as Unchained was finishing. The arrival of Deliverance in HW changed this because Defiance had a parry bonus instead (not to mention the arrival of FC/Deci), but in ARR it gave you crit.

But the single biggest reason was because of STR accessories. Damage was tuned around the idea that tanks were going to be using VIT accessories. What SE didn't predict was that some tanks would be using melee dps accessories. During the WF clear of T9 by BG, Sirius Taco had about 6k HP with defiance off, barely more than the melee dps. Why? STR accs, complete with an i90 Vortex Ring of Slaying.

Granted, there were still people at the time arguing that tanks should stack parry. The general playerbase at the time was so used to misinformed tanks that if you showed up in STR/crafted and tanked well, minds were blown. Good times.

Yeah, it was a period of learning and experimentation.

The value of tanking
I'm not really sure where the Aurum Vale reference comes from - it's not raid content, for starters, and is an oddball even as far as dungeons are concerned (but I think that's also a function of it being a 1.x dungeon). It actually plays much more like PotD/HoH in that careful pulls are relatively important. Is it an interesting bit of tanking content? Yes. Does it impact whether players presently consider good tanking or healing to be high value tasks? Not really.

I've seen more groups blow up in Aurum Vale, and more people just outright leave for that matter, than any other content in this game. I've had mentor roulette's against stuff old EX primals, old BCoB stuff, Shinryu EX, savage Alexander and more where people stick it out and get it done (or at least give it a number of really solid tries). Easily 1 out of every 3 AV's I get into someone either just up and leaves, or I queue in to replace someone that just up and left as soon as they saw it was AV. Most of the time this is a result of people not knowing how to deal with that first room. A tank who knows how to deal with that first room makes the run a breeze, but if you have an AV run with a tank who doesn't know how to deal with that room, then you're in for a bad time. Hence, most people will take the 30 minute penalty over suffering through another series of first-room wipes with an ignorant or bad tank. In other words, if you get AV with a bad tank, you very quickly learn how different that experience is compared to AV with a good tank, which highlights the value that a good tank can bring.

In current content, you definitely see the difference between a better dps and a weaker dps. You make the dps checks allowing you to clear. You clear faster. Even if you put gear on a weaker dps, you get more value out of them, irrespective of how mediocre their play is.

It's not as clear cut for tanks and healers. Most tank and healer 'checks' are mechanics checks. You're expected to figure them out quickly and get back to smoothing things out to meet the raidwide dps check. And in fairness, they're usually fairly simple. It's never a case of "if my tank had better gear, surviving this tankbuster would be cleaner." It's always "if our dps had better gear, we would make this raidwide check."

Most tank/healer checks are also all-or-nothing checks. Some dps checks of a similar nature exist, but if a dps places an aoe wrong, or stands too close/far or something, it probably won't wipe the raid. It might even be recoverable to the point that the clear happens without an issue. But if a tank fails a tank check, or a healer fails a healer check, that's generally it. It's a simple thing, but if a tank doesn't mitigate Vice and Virtue and ends up going down, then a helluva lot more stress is applied to the raid compared to a dps who places their VaV puddle in a bad spot. Yes, those tanks mechanics are "easy" comparatively speaking, but that doesn't change the value tanks who successfully do those mechanics bring to a fight. The fact is that dps have a much larger margin of error for screwing up mechanics, while tanks and healers have a comparatively much narrow window in which to fuck up. .2% HP normally won't make much of a difference, but if 2-3 people are at 69.9% HP instead of 70.1% when Eden's Gravity hits, then they die. Meanwhile, a dps can suffer weakness 1-2 times per fight on top of the odd damage down debuff and still be able to put forth the damage needed to take out Voidwalker. Comparatively, that dps is losing far more than .2% of their overall damage, but that's fine because the tolerances that exist in terms of dps wiggle room are much higher.

Put another way, successful raid tanks and healers have to perform at 99%+ at all times, while successful dps generally only need to perform at 95%+. This generates a sense of complacency; people just expect healers and tanks to perform at that level all the time, while ignoring the key fact that performing at that level is directly responsible for even having a discussion about the importance of dps. Everyone simply assumes the tanks and healers are nailing all their mechanics flawlessly, and then pretending that those mechanics don't matter compared to dps, and thus shouldn't even be considered as any kind of meaningful contribution.

Granted, the former will never, ever be the case as long as we have invulns.

This is only because fights are 100% scripted and once a fight is learned you can plan out invulns to trivialize certain portions of an encounter. I would love to see the butthurt on the forums if SE ever brought back an end-game fight that wasn't 100% scripted. I'm talking a no planning possible kind of situation, not the "random" choice of "will Titania do outside or inside this time!?" with the only constants being that certain things have a small internal cooldown. One thing I loved about Ifrit EX was how maybe he'll stack supparation on you once and won't use it again until after the stack wears off, or maybe he'll stack 5 in under 15s and you need the OT with 3 stacks of supp to take him off you because you now have less max HP than the healers. More of that please.

But even on a more basic level, it doesn't really matter if you're a good 'tank'. i mean yeah, you need to remember the four tankbuster timestamps so that you press the button to survive. But because boss movement is mostly scripted, you rarely run into a situation where your tank positions things badly (you'd almost have to try deliberately). There's never a sense of "when this player tanks for us, I do more dps because they have the best positioning setups that I've seen."

And we should work to change that, not to homogenize the game further by turning tanks and healers into "dps but...."

How do you provide more value to your team as a tank? The content has to be designed to allow for it, first. it doesn't matter if it's about pushing more dps or setting up the fight so that your teammates do more dps. Someone interested in self-improvement is always going to be interested in finding more ways to provide value to their team. If the role doesn't allow for it, they're going to either swap roles or find a game that allows them to do so.

Given that every tank has at least one oGCD that can be used in a short-term situation to provide value as a mitigation tool for someone, it's obvious that there is more that can be done. Many tanks don't use HoS/Intervention/NF/TBN in that way, which is a tragedy really, because they're leaving contribution and complexity on the table in favor of laziness. No tank busters come so quickly that Rampart and the 30% reduction skills aren't enough to deal with them, yet I so rarely see and hear of tanks throwing out their assistance skills onto the rest of the party. Using the assistance skills each tank is provided brings a lot of untapped optimization potential, yet so few tanks do it. Even fewer still take the time to advocate for an increase in actual tank-related stuff to do, instead taking the easy/lazy way out of saying "boost our damage."

FF14 doesn't need to go down the path of WoW. I would rather SE take the time to re-tool their entire approach to raiding than reduce this game to the same state that WoW has been reduced to. They've shown they still have the capability to be original and innovative, but unless people make a stink about it (or if the stink is simply about "muh damage") then they have no reason to believe people would want more than damage. So many people in this very thread are complaining about the lack of tank-style stuff for a tank to do in a fight, yet few - if any - of them try to advocate for an increase in tank stuff to do. It's just a resigned "well I guess we're beefy dps now" and everyone washes their hands of it and complains that imaginary numbers on a stupid graph are all that matters.

I don't want that, and I know I'm not alone in that sentiment. I want tanks to tank and do tank things, not be a dps in heavy armor that the monster just happens to like looking at. So, instead of giving up and giving in to the "moar dps" approach, I will continue to advocate for increased tank-focused responsibilities that will serve to differentiate tanks from dps instead of blurring the lines between the two.