How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Shurrikhan]

Last time I checked FFlogs to see DRK's DPS on E1S, it varied from 6k to 9k depending on percentile. That's 50% more, do we really need a larger scale to differentiate tank skill ?

To be fair, that has a whole lot more to do with tanks who don't believe they need to optimize their dps and can be carried despite that because the rDPS advantage of optimization (or disadvantage of poor play) is so small, than it has to do with tanks already being difficult. Simply put, a DPS dealing only two-thirds of what they could... doesn't get to stay for very long unless the other dps are wholly willing to eat up that added burden, which, make no mistake, is quite a bit larger than the burden inflicted by poor tank play.

Rathalos EX, where the optimal pug strategy was 3 tanks and a healer.

If you could tank/healer Titan EX, the fight might take 18 minutes, but you're also far less likely to wipe at any point, meaning at the very worst case you lost 6 minutes, but saved, oh, who knows.

10 minutes to 8 hours, give or take.

I'd actually be totally fine with that if the added risk of taking DPS wasn't due to RNG, poor telegraphs, or the like. Just as I'd like to see scenarios by which taking a single tank could be viable, I'd like to see the occasional excess-tanks composition as a cheese strat so long as it comes at cost and does not therefore become dominant. Using tanks to absorb unmitigateable risk sucks, because it just comes down to statistical risk management. Using them to make manageable an fight that would otherwise be too difficult at a party's current skill level (where below the balance point), though? I've got no issues with that. It just makes me wish further that tanks could have broader impact (like, more skills being interceptable, etc.), so that there was more interaction involved in those varying comps.

That's why, in my opinion, they should have separated tanks between OT and MT. Basically, every tank would have the mitigation skills from role actions, but "MT" tanks would have more personal mitigation skills and "OT", more transferable/raidwide mitigation skill. So, this way, even without a tank swap, the OT could have specific responsibilities.
After all, DPS are already separated into three sub-categories, why not tanks ? Or even healers...

You don't need to bar all designs from ever using a single-tank setup, or else bar half of all tanks from said single-tank setups, just to make OT mechanics. We've already seen plenty of them in more interesting fashion than we see now. You can have more than just "Both tanks always take damage simultaneously" or "Ha, your first tank is effectively no longer tank for the next minute! Better hope you've got another!" as a means of encouraging the use of an OT.

[Kabooa]

I'd actually be totally fine with that if the added risk of taking DPS wasn't due to RNG, poor telegraphs, or the like. Just as I'd like to see scenarios by which taking a single tank could be viable, I'd like to see the occasional excess-tanks composition as a cheese strat so long as it comes at cost and does not therefore become dominant. Using tanks to absorb unmitigateable risk sucks, because it just comes down to statistical risk management. Using them to make manageable an fight that would otherwise be too difficult at a party's current skill level (where below the balance point), though? I've got no issues with that. It just makes me wish further that tanks could have broader impact (like, more skills being interceptable, etc.), so that there was more interaction involved in those varying comps.

I could do threads upon threads just discussing ideas and design schemata.

Keeping it within this scope though, there's two primary scenarios where I'd go along with saying more damage is fine.

A) The Toggles come back with greater stat shifts. Every 1% damage increase it grants should be met with a 2-3% damage taken increase. A damage penalty for the 'tank' stance wouldn't be necessary here since the 'DPS stance' brings an appropriate drop in durability.

While I would prefer 'stances' exclude and enable actions, it's a good enough compromise when moving into your offensive mode is a significant and dangerous option. Tanks currently have something like a base EHP ratio of 250% more than everyone else. Gaining 15% damage and reducing to 125-150% of that is a suitable drop.

B) Retributive skill design. The tank getting hit by the boss deals more damage through enabling powerful counter attack options.

The two are not exclusive with each other, but from a tank fantasy, getting hit and slinging it back in turn with a bit more gusto is more appealing than adding more potency to basic actions.

[Shurrikhan]

I could do threads upon threads just discussing ideas and design schemata.

I look forward to your next one. My last was shat upon for having too many tanking mechanics (and, of course, requiring too many general changes, as my threads are wont to do). Would be nice to see something aiming for the comprehensive, but still more moderate/pragmatic. (I apologize if I'm off base in thinking that'd be your approach.)

A) The Toggles come back with greater stat shifts. Every 1% damage increase it grants should be met with a 2-3% damage taken increase. A damage penalty for the 'tank' stance wouldn't be necessary here since the 'DPS stance' brings an appropriate drop in durability.

I apologize if we've already talked about this before, but... this seems like really roundabout solution. I get that if tanks have or would have too much simultaneous output (enemy damage decreases + own damage dealt + indirect aid to party damage dealt beyond enemy damage decrease) for any single one of those outputs to feel impactful in its own right. But, why not just have their base mitigation be more reasonable, instead of starting them off with super-armor only to then have them apparently go out of their way to take more damage so that they only then return to normal "tank armor"? Realistically, one can make an active effort at the cost of dealing damage to protect oneself, but how would it make sense to have that much mitigation passively or for passive mitigation to be removed by performing otherwise normal actions?

Heck, you could have tank stance literally convert Attack Power into Guard (Block/Parry) strength, obviously with a revised parry system, and that'd make more sense. Heck, it could easily synergize into counter-attacks, too.

That said, I'm not sure why we'd necessarily need toggles, or even skill-swapping toggles, to diversify or give greater potential to outputs. We could just as well broaden GCD choices and their diversity of outputs alongside other job-unique effects and interplay. I'd sooner take minute imbalances than force a one-size-fits-all solution, and yes, I honestly think that diversity --if applied well-- only truly forces minute imbalances, rather than throwing balance out the window as some here would have us believe.

[Kabooa]

That said, I'm not sure why you need toggles, or even skill-swapping toggles, for either one, rather than broadening GCD choices and their diversity of output alongside other job-unique effects and interplay. I'd sooner take minute imbalances than force a one-size-fits-all solution, and yes, I honestly think that diversity --if applied well-- only truly forces minute imbalances, rather than throwing balance out the window as some here would have us believe.

Again - scope of the thread. But if we do expand it a bit, moving beyond just a couple simple compromises, I wouldn't have all tanks be a broad modular GCD system. In my mind, that seems most thematically appropriate to Dark Knight given the weapon of choice. A job focused around short term buff-granting GCD skills, building up momentum ("Blood") and capping off a modular combo with a Blood weaponskill.

In this scenario, the Tank role would be significantly squishier when maximizing their damage output. The Dark Knight gains their higher durability through GCD selection in modular combos, creating a natural risk/reward system. Can you afford to tax your healer more, or do you turtle? Will you have everything in place before the buster comes in, or would you blow an important cooldown? (This variant would likely only have Living Dead, Abyssal Drain, and Blackest Night on the Defensive on-demand ability side of things.)

[Shurrikhan]

In this scenario, the Tank role would be significantly squishier when maximizing their damage output. The Dark Knight gains their higher durability through GCD selection in modular combos, creating a natural risk/reward system. Can you afford to tax your healer more, or do you turtle? Will you have everything in place before the buster comes in, or would you blow an important cooldown? (This variant would likely only have Living Dead, Abyssal Drain, and Blackest Night on the Defensive on-demand ability side of things.)

Right, I'm just saying that it makes more sense to just put one and one together to get two than have double value each but have one conflict with the other. Either process gives the same result, so why not just give tanks less ridiculous eHP when they're not actually doing any tankish things instead of making them passively nigh-invincible but effectively suicidal when attacking? It's just... far more intuitive.

Again - scope of the thread. But if we do expand it a bit, moving beyond just a couple simple compromises, I wouldn't have all tanks be a broad modular GCD system. In my mind, that seems most thematically appropriate to Dark Knight given the weapon of choice. A job focused around short term buff-granting GCD skills, building up momentum ("Blood") and capping off a modular combo with a Blood weaponskill.

Yeah, the concept seems fitting and lucrative. I'm sold. See you on a thread of sufficient scope, then.

Edit: Saw your new thread. Cool ideas so far! Will reply once I have some stuff of my own.

[Lyth]

Indubitably, yet I must indicate that your incurable affectation to conceive all your posts under the assuaging auspices of a thesaurus has hitherto proved a most sphinxlike endeavour.

Jokes aside, I agree with the earlier point on swapping. Generally, tanking tends to be an all-or-nothing task. In most cases, fights feel like they were designed for one tank, with a second tank shoehorned in with a stack/debuff mechanic. It also doesn't help that you can bypass some of these 'forced' swaps with an invuln.

It's a shame that council fights aren't more common. I'm sure that we'll see one in the next ultimate; Brute Justice had one of the best examples of these. Omega-M/F was a good example as well. But this partially goes back to the "design fights for tanks" issue that I discussed earlier.

I also feel that the redundancy is another move to make tanking feel more "comfortable".

Another option is to place more importance on using on-demand cooldowns to mitigate damage. If you have to donate cooldowns to your co-tank when they're actively tanking, it keeps you engaged with tanking even when you're not 'actively' tanking.

It's a longstanding issue that this game's fight design has always faced, but if you make tank damage less important to the overall raid, the downtime when you're not actively tanking becomes that much more obvious.

[Kabooa]

It's a longstanding issue that this game's fight design has always faced, but if you make tank damage less important to the overall raid, the downtime when you're not actively tanking becomes that much more obvious.

See, while I can sympathize, as healers currently face a similar issue, I disagree mainly because the reasoning behind the initial request was flawed.

As disparaging as "pretty bar graph" statements have been, I didn't toss them out without care. Upon reading the topic, I went to some logs and starting doing some homework, using the best comparable ones I could (Voidwalker and Fomega, because theoretical 100% uptime) and began doing math.

Now, my math is obviously not perfect and not indisputable, but I did more, I checked it, and while I could not make exact measurements in converting PDPS logs to RDPS ones, the common thread is only the Warrior could realistically maintain its PDPS score, because slashing. Dark knight and Paladin tank heavily.

The real difference I settled on was closer to a 2% deficit. Tanks need about 100-200 DPS more to reclaim their relative standing, while ignoring their bloated passive stat increase, however, even with that in mind other factors lead to them being less TDPS to the raid. The primary reason being Healers, particularly White Mage, gained a significant amount of damage.

The above makes the following assumption. The removal of the tank stance penalty means SE likely trimmed off the top of Tanks - Whether or not the players used tank stance would not stop SE from tuning a fight with the assumption that between the two tanks, Tank Stance would have an uptime of 50%.

The above also includes the fact that tanks contribute to the party stat bonus where before they only gave vitality. That feeds back into the passive stat bloat.

[Reynhart]

To be fair, that has a whole lot more to do with tanks who don't believe they need to optimize their dps and can be carried despite that because the rDPS advantage of optimization (or disadvantage of poor play) is so small, than it has to do with tanks already being difficult.

I think it's a bit of a generalization considering we're already talking about the small part of the tank playerbase that 1) cleared E1S, and 2) actually get parsed during their run...which means that the skill floor for lvl80 DRK is probably lower than that.

You don't need to bar all designs from ever using a single-tank setup, or else bar half of all tanks from said single-tank setups, just to make OT mechanics.

In my opinion, the worst thing for an MMO is to reuse the same mechanics over and over and over. So, sure, you can still have some fights that could be single tanked, or that reuse the current shallow mechanics, as long as others include interesting mechanics that doesn't make the OT feel like a lesser/backup tank. Technically, we already have DPS mechanics that are more fit for either ranged or melee, despite being manageable by any type of DPS.