How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[J-Reyno]

I will use devs to justify that tanks are expected to do the damage they currently do, since in both cases, that's how devs designed tanks.

And you're free to do that. I'm not arguing that tanks are not expected to deal their current damage. I'm arguing that I feel they should deal more. You argued that tanks are not expected to focus on damage, but they are.

There is a difference between arguing HOW things work and arguing how you FEEL things should work.

You argued the former, I've been arguing the latter.

I'd hope you could understand this before the discussion became tiresome, but... here we are.

[Reynhart]

You argued that tanks are not expected to focus on damage, but they are.

No, I argued that there's no justification for them to do more, since it wouldn't change anything on how they do their tanking. And that your focus as a player should simply to get as close a possible to the ceiling of your role and not compare it to what other roles do.

And also that to make tanks more engaging, it would be much more interesting to focus on actual tanking mechanics, by either making enmity something you had to actually manage or mitigation more involving.

[J-Reyno]

No, I argued that there's no justification for them to do more, since it wouldn't change anything on how they do their tanking.

You argued that there's no reason for tanks to optimize damage. You even suggested that spamming shield lob would be an effective replacement for optimizing damage to accomplish the tank's objectives, even though one of those objectives is effectively dealing damage around which content is balanced.

Your quotes below:

I'm not sure about the enmity modifier for Shield Lob/Tomahawk and such, but you could probably gain more "enmity" by spamming it than by doing a correct GCD rotation. But enmity not being an issue, I think it's more important to focus on the other primary objective of tanks, which is surviving, and it just so happens that surviving is almost completely unrelated to doing damage.

But, like I said, optimizing enmity is not technically the same as optimizing damage. And, frankly, this line was only to point out that enmity is barely something tanks have to focus on

You even called this "optimizing enmity" as a way to emphasize that there's no need to actually utilize the damage rotation. You were wrong that optimizing enmity would include spamming shield lob (this is not optimal by any stretch of the imagination) and you were wrong that tanks are not intended to focus on dealing damage as part of the role.

And just to make sure you understand that you did indeed dismiss damage as a primary focus of the role, let me offer a couple more quotes from yourself:

We were discussing primary focus. And since tanks have two focus, to keep monster on them and to survive, I simply made sure that enmity was a not non-issue to focus on the surviving part, which, again is almost completely unrelated to how much DPS you do.

So, I'll say it again, optimizing your damage has nothing to do with any primary focus of a tank, be it keeping the enemy on you or surviving attacks.

So let me say it again. Optimizing your damage IS a primary and intended focus of playing tank according to the very devs who design the roles and the content.

Now you can argue separately that tanks should not have more damage, and again, you're free to do that. It doesn't change that you were, are and will continue to be wrong about the above.

[Reynhart]

You argued that there's no reason for tanks to optimize damage.

No, I didn't. In fact, I specifically said :

The thing is that "optimizing DPS" has nothing to do with the actual damage numbers but rather how close you are to your full damage output. You're a better tank by doing 7k out of a 8k ceiling than by doing 8k out of a 12k ceiling.

when I joined this thread, and

One more time "as best as you can" shouldn't be compared to "as best as DPS can" but "as best as other tanks can". That's why I said that raw numbers don't matter much as ceiling within your role.

as a specific answer to you.

You're the one that started mixing enmity as a justification that tanks should do damage closer to DPS, which, again, wouldn't increase anything in your abiity to survive or keep enmity off your party members.

[J-Reyno]

when I joined this thread.

The only thing I'm commenting on is what you say in response to me. We're not going to spin this into a separate discussion to distract from earlier comments.

Now if you decide to insist again that "optimizing your damage has nothing to do with any primary focus of a tank" I might have more to say.

[Ultimatecalibur]

On your point on tank stance... nobody used tank stance, well at least in end game. You establish hate and then swap to DPS stance the rest of the way unless you needed the extra mitigation (which you almost never needed). If they didn't remove it what would have happened? Well the OT would just take a tankbuster that the MT can't take while in DPS stance. The removal of the stances was to make the tanks more "new player friendly" plus it helped remove the aspect DPS/Heals watching their own hate.

New players were far away from the whole "stance optimization in Savage content", so no, it wasn't made for new players, but to close that very fiery debate, exactly like the update on accessories. And yes, it removed the aspect of watching hate. So, explain why tanks should be more rewarded now that they have less things to manage ? And that's without counting how the rotations themselves have been mostly streamlined, requiring, once again, less effort than in past expansions (At least for WAR and DRK).

The HW/SB DpS stance tanking situation was partially caused by unintended uses of skills for massive increases in enmity generated. Enmity management when playing as intended (i.e. in Tank stance with Vit accessories doing a proper rotation) was pretty much a non-concern as it is now. The situation developed after Warrior players discovered that they could generate a massive lead in enmity by combining overhealing with Equilibrium (if I remember right it was a free 1500 enmity at max hp) and their Unchaned opener and that tanks could maintain this lead for long enough to clear content with their Strength accessory enhanced DpS rotations. When the devs tried to correct for this during SB they ended up introducing the Circle Shirk combos which allowed for multiplication of both tanks current enmity without the use of tank stance.

High end Tank players discovered that they could do more work to increase their damage massively. The ShB tank stance changes were done to return the tanks to their intended difficult level.

[Reynhart]

The ShB tank stance changes were done to return the tanks to their intended difficult level.

So, they also returned them to their intended DPS level, now that the additionnal work has been removed.

[Ultimatecalibur]

So, they also returned them to their intended DPS level, now that the additionnal work has been removed.

For the most part. MT and AoE relative intended DpS has been increased, but OT Tank relative single target DpS has been reduced from what people got used to over the previous 4 years.

HW and SB were a mess of overperforming tanks after Gordias Savage's overtuning led groups to search for easy ways to make up for underperforming dps. Tanks ended up being the role that had the easiest to increased damage numbers while only slightly increasing healer workload.

[Burmecia]

To me the charm in tanking was in other places always anyway.
I'm console peasant so I cannot even """cheat""" to see my numbers. Oopsie.

[Lastelli]

I honestly don't understand why tanks should do more dps than healers. Healer optimization in a savage/ultimate setting is way harder than tank optimization, the latter simply requiring you to keep doing your extremely basic rotation while popping defensive cds when needed. In fact, looking at lower percentiles, healers rdps contribution is always lower than tanks'. It's only at 95-99% percentiles that healers do around the same rdps as tanks, but that requires healers to perfectly exploit their ogcd skills...and this is something that requires quite a bit of effort and planning. Also, it's something that requires perfect play from the whole party in order to minimize gcd heals and bis gear (with low gear, healers are forced to spend more gcds for healing spells because of lower defense).

Anyway, it's all relative, as other people said. Even if they were to buff tanks' dps, they'd just tune future encounters accordingly, so at the end of the day who cares? Just try to maximize your role and don't worry about other roles. Actually, given how the current situation gives more accountability to dps and significantly reduces the chances of bad dps being carried by good tanks and healers, I think it's a good thing. This will be a wake-up call for all the bad dps out there.