How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Lyth]

Enmity/aggro is just a damage system with a fancy name. The only reason why these systems exist in MMOs is because tanks do less damage than dps. If you wanted to create clever, engaging enmity gameplay, you might as well create clever, engaging damage-dealing gameplay. This may come as a surprise, but tanking as a concept well pre-dates enmity systems.

No, removing the stance system was one of the things that Shadowbringers got right.

How do you make tanking more interesting? There are a few ways.

1) Positioning: Force your tank to re-position the boss while evading mechanics. Cleaves are a good test of movement mechanics as well. I'm not sure why every mob ability in this game gets animation-locked, but this seems to take a lot of the positional awareness out of tanking. I don't have to pay attention to my position if I know that the boss is locked in place for the entirety of a mechanic. It's a different story if I have to dodge with a simultaneously cleaving boss that can wipe the group if turned the wrong way.

I suspect that this is something that the game inherited from 1.x, but it feels like one of the reasons why tanking in this MMO feels inferior.

2) Mitigation: It doesn't really feel like we mitigate any more. Invulns are a big part of the problem. All the relevant tank damage comes in the form of tankbusters. But these are generally spread far enough apart that they get handled with either invulns or a surplus of mitigation cooldowns.

Tank damage is either fluff or tankbusters. I think what made fights like T9 or A3S intimidating at the time was the presence of intermediate damage types, such as cleaves, which didn't have a cast bar. It's not mitigate or die, but it's the sort of thing that can burst you down if you and your healer aren't on your toes. And they have to happen frequently enough to keep the pressure on, both from a healing perspective as well as forcing you to expend precious mitigation reserves.

3) Damage: Where does damage fit into this? There are a couple of places. First, it's a concentration check. Can you do the above while managing your resources/rotation? Second, it fits into positioning. If your tank is forced to reposition the boss, a good tank is going to do it without losing any uptime (for both themselves or the team). A bad tank is going to run across the arena and let the boss run to them, costing both themselves and everyone else uptime in the process. Tank damage indirectly tests this.

That's how I would address the issue.

[BarretOblivion]

2) Mitigation: It doesn't really feel like we mitigate any more. Invulns are a big part of the problem. All the relevant tank damage comes in the form of tankbusters. But these are generally spread far enough apart that they get handled with either invulns or a surplus of mitigation cooldowns.

Tank damage is either fluff or tankbusters. I think what made fights like T9 or A3S intimidating at the time was the presence of intermediate damage types, such as cleaves, which didn't have a cast bar. It's not mitigate or die, but it's the sort of thing that can burst you down if you and your healer aren't on your toes. And they have to happen frequently enough to keep the pressure on, both from a healing perspective as well as forcing you to expend precious mitigation reserves.

3) Damage: Where does damage fit into this? There are a couple of places. First, it's a concentration check. Can you do the above while managing your resources/rotation? Second, it fits into positioning. If your tank is forced to reposition the boss, a good tank is going to do it without losing any uptime (for both themselves or the team). A bad tank is going to run across the arena and let the boss run to them, costing both themselves and everyone else uptime in the process. Tank damage indirectly tests this.

That's how I would address the issue.

All seem fine except the mitigation part. If you add more tankbusters to bosses you have to do them veery carefully. Adding more hard hitting tankbusters like stonecrusher from titan is a bad idea due to voking on a boss at a certain time can be quite frustrating due to server ticks and how sometimes the game delays OGCDs sometimes. However, the problem will just push WAR/DRK to the new tank meta and will just push PLD/GNB out which isn't wise, the objective should be to keep all tanks viable. The cleave seem fine if they just hit a suprising amount of damage and force healers to keep tanks actually healthy instead of letting us drop to 20% HP before healing us, but then healers would complain about having to baby sit the tanks for too long. So again, a smart balance would be needed.

Your part on damage has been true the whole time. Even when tanks have to position bosses good tanks will stop moving him for one GCD before continuing the movment to not lose uptime, but the problem is it doesn't feel that impactful when one GCD usually feels like you are just hitting like a wet noodle or those GCDs feel, automated/basic to just barely satisfy the "im pressing buttons" instead of needing to have a balanced focus on rotations and moving the boss.