How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[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.

[Lyth]

If fight designers expect us to be "part-time tanks" in raid content (i.e. taking turns 'actively tanking' until one of four tankbusters per fight initiates a swap), then what are we doing the rest of the time? We're not positioning. We're probably not mitigating. I wonder what we're doing. Hmm. "I've finished my shift for the evening, going to clock out, good luck with tanking the rest of the fight!"

Healing is and always will involve a degree of shared responsibility. You can divide it up however you like. I'm not really sure if there's an equivalent for a 'provoke war' between two healers. You're never really in completion for the privilege of healing. As an aside, I'm going to be terribly amused when this new 24p instance comes out in 5.1. These have been historically terrible at designing content for multiple tanks, and with the very poorly thought out changes to provoke in 5.0 (i.e. gain aggro + gain a massive amount enmity on top, on the order of 200k), hilarity will surely ensue. I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The changes to the damage penalty of tank stance isn't really a justification for the adjustments to relative damage output. If you were using tank stance in previous tiers, or if even if you were "stance dancing" (i.e. using tank stance for some of the time to compensate for a poorly thought out mitigation rotation), you were probably on the bottom half of the bell curve. By Stormblood, the vast majority of tanks were in the know that tank stance stays off in raid content if you want good performance from a damage output standpoint. No favours were done in removing it. We just unmasked the truth of the matter.

[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.

[MerlinCross]

If fight designers expect us to be "part-time tanks" in raid content (i.e. taking turns 'actively tanking' until one of four tankbusters per fight initiates a swap), then what are we doing the rest of the time? We're not positioning. We're probably not mitigating. I wonder what we're doing. Hmm. "I've finished my shift for the evening, going to clock out, good luck with tanking the rest of the fight!"

Depends on the fight. There's a couple older fights that zapped the MT and anyone who was close or required tanks to split damage with each other or party members. Personally I'd rather have more things that take into account "Hey we have 2 meaty targets" than more damage.

Because if Damage is all we really care about; ax the second tank, bring a 5th DPS, ax the double tank mechanics we currently have and give more focus on keeping the only Tank alive(Oh look maybe healers have something to do and the DPS loss can be made up by the new DPS).

Also I'll take being on the bottom of the bell curve if it meant I felt like I was doing something more than just being Blue DPS. You top raiders(riiiiiiiiight) all complained about the stance and they went "Fine, they hate it so much, removed" and we got nothing to replace it with. "Damage output standpoint" yeah as for more tanking output rather than crying about FFLogs all the time.

I don't even know what tanks want to do anymore besides out DPS MNK and BLM these days it seems. Yes, damage is the only thing that matters after a certain point so why not ask for SOMETHING ELSE? Oh wait no you'll master it and go right back to needing more damage.

So yeah, Kill off the OT position already, let those that want more damage bring the 5th DPS they always actually wanted to do since Heavensward. Besides, how many upper half of the bell curve raiders actually try to salvage it if the MT goes down? Just speeds everything up. Do it Square.

[Risvertasashi]

Because if Damage is all we really care about; ax the second tank, bring a 5th DPS, ax the double tank mechanics we currently have and give more focus on keeping the only Tank alive(Oh look maybe healers have something to do and the DPS loss can be made up by the new DPS).

-snip-

So yeah, Kill off the OT position already, let those that want more damage bring the 5th DPS they always actually wanted to do since Heavensward.

You're forgetting one crucial thing. They not only want the extreme DPS, they want to have tank queues while doing it.

[Nedkel]

Depends on the fight. There's a couple older fights that zapped the MT and anyone who was close or required tanks to split damage with each other or party members. Personally I'd rather have more things that take into account "Hey we have 2 meaty targets" than more damage.

Because if Damage is all we really care about; ax the second tank, bring a 5th DPS, ax the double tank mechanics we currently have and give more focus on keeping the only Tank alive(Oh look maybe healers have something to do and the DPS loss can be made up by the new DPS).

Also I'll take being on the bottom of the bell curve if it meant I felt like I was doing something more than just being Blue DPS. You top raiders(riiiiiiiiight) all complained about the stance and they went "Fine, they hate it so much, removed" and we got nothing to replace it with. "Damage output standpoint" yeah as for more tanking output rather than crying about FFLogs all the time.

I don't even know what tanks want to do anymore besides out DPS MNK and BLM these days it seems. Yes, damage is the only thing that matters after a certain point so why not ask for SOMETHING ELSE? Oh wait no you'll master it and go right back to needing more damage.

So yeah, Kill off the OT position already, let those that want more damage bring the 5th DPS they always actually wanted to do since Heavensward. Besides, how many upper half of the bell curve raiders actually try to salvage it if the MT goes down? Just speeds everything up. Do it Square.

We already have single tanks in alliance raids, whats your point?
And who say tanks want to outdps DPS jobs?

And YES damage is what we all care about, we literally are buying three times more expensive materia to buy 2-3% damage advantage, and barely anyone is investing in tenacity.

The difference in DPS contribution for tanks in both expansion is big enough to notice it, basically tanks are doing 15-18% less than they used to. The difference is even bigger if we shew off tanks who used tank stance instead of offensive stance. Warrior in 4.5 was doing massive damage in offensive stance in dungeons to the point where dps were not needed much, its all now gone.

[Risvertasashi]

And who say tanks want to outdps DPS jobs?

-snip-

The difference in DPS contribution for tanks in both expansion is big enough to notice it, basically tanks are doing 15-18% less than they used to. The difference is even bigger if we shew off tanks who used tank stance instead of offensive stance. Warrior in 4.5 was doing massive damage in offensive stance in dungeons to the point where dps were not needed much, its all now gone.

To answer your first question: Apparently, you are saying that.

Have you actually looked at AOE potencies?

Healers and tanks are very close what DPS can do. Some of the potencies are even exactly the same; the difference being that DPS jobs may get some oGCDs or special procs that can put them a little above what tanks and healers can do.

If you want to talk dungeons in particular - In the 90th percentile, tanks are doing very well right now.