How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Reynhart]

You said optimization is hated and should be kept out, but it was already a thing in the 50s with low hp tanks. Again a thing in the 60s with strength accessory tanks where people only had the bare bones health needed to eat tank busters. Even the start of the 70s we had players still taking strength accessories.

Like I said a few pages ago, optimization is not related to raw numbers. You're much more "optimized as a player" if you're a 99th percentile at 8k DPS than a 30th percentile at 10k. ShB brought its bag of adjustements and the new potencies have set tanks and DPS farther away from each other, but you're still expected to do your best.

[Lyth]

...

AV is not a relevant metric for anything. It's five-year-old content. The biggest reason why it causes anyone problems is because you sync to 49 instead of 50. But it's also incredibly easy to tank if you use a bit of common sense. You certainly aren't going to find raid groups trialling tanks on AV to find out if they're any good.

Not every tank mechanic is an all-or-nothing check. Positioning and movement-based ones are not. Everyone knows that you have to get from A to B. The difference is that really good tanks will backstep the boss in a way that causes neither themselves nor melee dps to lose any uptime.

If you want to see a fight with interesting tank mechanics, look at A7S. After every jump, the boss repositions themselves on the active tank. So you can set him up next to the jail locks to give your melee more uptime. You have to slowly kite the boss away from the cat while dodging balls. You could just run away, but you've just lost the group a ton of positionals. You could have the best dps players in the world, but it's meaningless if the fight isn't set up in a way that lets them optimise. THAT's where tanks are supposed to come in.

The problem is that the designers who create these fights create them from a dps perspective. So they look flashy and elaborate, but every bit of the "choreography" is scripted. Either the boss moves and rotates themselves into an optimal position, or the boss is massive and sits off the edge of the platform, moving to wherever they need to. Tanks are just melee dps with a simpler rotation that press a defensive button at four scripted points in a fight.

FFXIV is the raiding equivalent of a rail shooter. There's the illusion of movement, but it's all fake.

The issue of tank dps was just masking the underlying issue. You can push the difference all you want, but all it does is expose the fact that the game designers don't know how to design fights from a tank's perspective.

[Quor]

You said optimization is hated and should be kept out, but it was already a thing in the 50s with low hp tanks.

No I did not. I said that optimization as the be-all-end-all is a terrible thing. Optimization within a job is fine, and can be fun. "Optimization" using incomplete third party information with the reasoning of "it feels bad" is fucking terrible and should be nipped in the bud, especially when the "optimization" in question is something as lazy as "just give us another 1k dps."

[Bravely_Default]

And where did I ever mention 3rd party information? You realize you can get a generalized damage output for a single class down to relatively close accuracy using a dummy right? Go punch a level 80 dummy with an assortment of dps, then go punch it with a tank and do the math for time it takes to kill with your best rotation. You will find it takes tanks about twice as long. Yes party buffs and other tools come into play. A majority of them benefit the team, while some of the buffs (dragoon eyes) a tank will never see. All the third party information does is simplify things for lazy people, but the ability to calculate has ALWAYS been there for number crunchers.

[Bravely_Default]

Hell if the dummy is not good enough for you, go get the hp value of whatever mob of your choice and test it yourself.

[Reynhart]

Hell if the dummy is not good enough for you, go get the hp value of whatever mob of your choice and test it yourself.

Value that was definitely not obtained by 3rd party information because players sure love to make ridiculously long addition of each of their damage by themselves

But since we're on dummies, you have one designed for your role that says if you do enough damage for a tank, which again, is the only thing that matters in the end.

[Bravely_Default]

Oh? But some of us do have time for addition, not really a valid counter point considering the 100s of hours players in the past have put into theory crafting to figure out stat weights. And yes, tanks do have dummies. And they have very very little health. Because our contribution is expected to be very low. I dont agree with this.

[Quor]

And where did I ever mention 3rd party information?

This entire thread was spawned based on someone feeling that the pretty bar graphs created on a third party site by a third party program weren't "right" and how SE needed to step in and correct it. Any conversation had in this thread that ignores the very reason for the threads existence is merely someone being disingenuous.

[Izsha]

Dismissing the point of view and characterizing it as nothing but 'pretty bat graphs' is disingenuous. Se changed the balance between job roles. Thats not just stupid bar graphs. If you wale up tomorrow and healers deal triple the damage of dps, even if monster hp scaled to co.pensate, that would he far more than just bars on a graph. It changes the dynamics of the game. It changes solo play. It shifts the meta. It changes how healers should gear and what the optimal strats are for high end content regarding uptime and who to cater too. It has in game consequences when you change the ratio of damage participation between classes. Dismissing cross role shifts in power is not just existential bs about peoples egos. It is a tangible change to the impact different roles have in combat that affects many aspects of the player experience. Hand waving all that away is the disingenuous action.

Is it to big of a change? Is it a positive change? Negative? Those are worth discussing. Hand waving legitimate concerns wholesale because you want to lump it in with elitism on the other hand is oversimplifying the issue and mischaracterizing the problem.

[Ultimatecalibur]

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. It's still floating around. 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. 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.

On the flip side, during 2.X a tank could be tough enough that tank swapping wasn't needed in many high end fights due to all the "soft" tank swap mechanics. If a tank had enough Vit, rotated your cooldowns right and your healers were good enough to heal through all the damage a tank could survive with a stupid amount of vuln/hp down stacks. This was another reason OTs could go all out on Strength.