How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[BarretOblivion]

"That healers have caught up".

There it is again.

That notion that healers aren't allowed to deal comparable damage.

Again... WHOOOOSH. See the point it is flying by your head again.
Healers didn't move after SB and some would argue only WHM actually got buffed from SB. They can do thier jobs easier to heal groups now... that is all that changed with the healers. Thier scaling for damage didn't get touched at all. Again TANK FELL DOWN TO HEALERS! Should the argument made that helaers should be looked at coming up? Sure, healers can have that conversation, but the point is... TANKS FELL DOWN.

So SE decides to bring tanks down... when we already have an issue with a lack of tanks...

The point is that Healers didn't move from where they were (except WHM) but all the tanks got yanked DOWN.

[Kabooa]

The point is that Healers didn't move from where they were (except WHM) but all the tanks got yanked DOWN.

The healers actually scaled monstrously moving up into this expansion. Most of the jobs got around a 60-80% increase once final potencys settled down and gear was acquired.

And then the healers are sitting around a 90-120% increase.

[J-Reyno]

No one is saying "Healers shouldn't do damage."

Quite a few are saying "Healers shouldn't do as much as tanks."

They shouldn't do as much damage, and as has already been mentioned this doesn't mean healers need to be nerfed. It can be addressed by bringing tanks up. This will be repeated again if necessary.

Going by my logic, if you wish to go through this entire thread, my conclusion was "Tanks do not need 1000 (11%) to be on par with where they were in Stormblood". The OP's statement was based on comparing graphs with two different measurements - The padded stacked logs of Stormblood to the "Damage Goes to Who Brings It" logs of Shadowbringers.

Imagine that - A comparative measurement wouldn't favor tanks, who are nearly as selfish as Black Mages when it comes to DPS buffs. Their "Damage contribution" is less, but not nearly as wide as being claimed here.

We're talking somewhere in the range of 150-200 DPS to each tank.

You can compare the personal dps logs of Stormblood to the dps logs of current Shadowbringers just fine. What's more, current logs do not ONLY show rDPS. We CAN see personal DPS as well, with the only thing removed being single target padding. And no matter which comparison you use, it's more than clear that the other roles received a larger increase in damage than tanks.

You shouldn't butcher the word conclusion when very little when into your thought process in the first place. You compare tanks to the selfishness of BLM and then ignore the massive increase in damage BLM received in Stormblood compared to tanks. Why? Are you saying that tanks were somehow MORE padded in Storbmlood than BLM? How did you determine this to be sound reasoning? Or is it simply that the comparison magically stops working when it would no longer favor your argument?

But it's fine. As ever, I'm here to help. We'll go by your supposed logic and say that BLM and tank are both selfish and should have received a similar increase in personal dps for ShB. BLM's personal DPS during 4.5 Alphascape landed at 8427, and for Eden's Gate we're looking at 15417.

This means that BLM damage increased by around 6990 dps. That is an 82% increase in damage output.

Now. PLD's personal DPS for 4.5 Alpha hits 5286. Current 5.1 PLD dps is 8923.

PLD's damage increased by around 3637 dps. That is a 68% increase in damage.

Let's go ahead and chuck WHM in there, too. WHM's 4.5 Alphascape damage hit 3968. 5.1 patch WHM is sitting pretty at 8722.

WHM's damage increased by 4754 dps. This is a whopping 119% increase in damage.

Please be aware that while Shadowbringers aDPS does remove single-target padding, tanks were not the benefit of mass padding on average in Stormblood. It's something that happens for select parses and is why the numbers selected do not represent MAX stats, but the average scores at higher levels of play.

So no, tanks are certainly not sitting a meager 150-200 dps behind their relative contribution in Stormblood. In fact, if we give PLD the same damage increase as BLM of 82%, they would reach 9620 dps, which would be an increase of 697 dps from current numbers.

But let's do one better and put PLD at the midpoint between BLM and WHM damage increases. That would be about a 100% increase in DPS then, yeah? Which would place PLD at 10572 dps.

So somewhere within that variance (82-100%) we'd see an increase from of 700 dps up to a full 1.5k dps. Yet here they are mingling with the healers. Tanks were shafted this xpac for no discernible reason, and it shows.

Oh, and just because I'm in the mood for it, allow me to inform you that the variance between rDPS and pDPS for tanks vs dps is not as large as you seem to think it is. 5.1 PLD sits at 8567 rDPS compared to 8923 pDPS. 5.1 BLM shuffles from 15003 rDPS to 15417 pDPS. This is a difference of 356 and 414 dps, respectively. So what we're not going to do is pretend that tanks on average receive more benefit from "tHe PaDdInG" than DPS jobs.

What your argument here boils down to is that tanks were the most padded of all the jobs in Stormblood such as to significantly skew the numbers compared to healers and dps. Which is a joke, and not a good one.

[Quor]

snip

You nakedly and obviously just want more damage for tanks because you don't think tanks have enough damage. I, and others, have explained time and again the multiple flaws with not only this "argument" but also the inherent problems this would cause in the macrocosm of the games' systems.

In terms of job balance, what happened on a third party dps logging site prior to 5.0 does not matter. I won't go over the problem with the comparative metrics again either, as it's already been explained many times. Tank damage is fine. First world clear TEA had tanks comfortably above healers in combined damage. The vast majority of savage clears have tanks comfortably above healers. Balance should not ever be judged based upon the extreme top (or bottom) percentiles. Using a <1% sample size and then applying it to the entire population is the height of statistical and scientific malfeasance. Just stop.

[Rhais]

You nakedly and obviously just want more damage for tanks because you don't think tanks have enough damage. I, and others, have explained time and again the multiple flaws with not only this "argument" but also the inherent problems this would cause in the macrocosm of the games' systems.

You haven't explained anything, you have filled this thread with a bunch of long winded vacuous posts devoid of any sort of solid reasoning for why tanks shouldn't see a damage increase. You and others have failed to put forth any sort of credible argument for why a damage increase would be negative. There is nothing there except your own, and others subjective opinion that tanks are fine now.

[Quor]

You haven't explained anything, you have filled this thread with a bunch of long winded vacuous posts devoid of any sort of solid reasoning for why tanks shouldn't see a damage increase. You and others have failed to put forth any sort of credible argument for why a damage increase would be negative. There is nothing there except your own, and others subjective opinion that tanks are fine now.

Taken from earlier in the thread, page 6 I believe:

I've read through this entire thread, watching Kabooa (and others) explain why their arguments are, in a word, bullshit, yet the same responses just keep coming, all some variation of "gib dmg 2 tank plz." Buzz words like aDPS and rDPS are thrown around, comparisons are made, and counter arguments are ignored, all in the goal of getting bigger numbers for the sake of having bigger numbers.

Look, here are the facts; SE has designed a 2/2/4 baseline group composition for tanks/healers/dps and all fights are designed in such a way that by playing your class correctly at minimum ilvl you should be able to beat the final enrage assuming you successfully did all the mechanics in the fight. Anything beyond that is simply e-peen flexing. All fights in the current end-game were beaten by 2/2/4 comps of various types within the first 24 hours of their release. Asking for more dps on a tank, either via personal means or raid utility means, is asking too much. Tanks have the dps they need in order to beat a fight. Wanting more just means wanting to carry people in your group, and as Samsta notes:

"Your damage doesn't matter, what matters is if you fill your damage square is expecting out of you while doing mechanics, again, if you did more damage, bosses would just have more health, they wouldn't end any faster. I am amazed people don't understand this. The obsession with with big numbers in your parser is close to an obsession really."

Which sums it up nicely.

And again, on page 10, responding specifically to you:

Several were offered, most notably:
1 - apples and oranges comparison of tank damage against healer/dps damage. Comparing damage across roles is a terrible idea and should not in any way govern balance decisions.
2 - the game, as designed right now, is completely clearable. This means the content we have in game has been designed with the current dps/mitigation/healing issues in mind.
3 - arbitrarily boosting the dps of a given job won't make fights go faster. Tying into point 2, content is built around certain expected dps levels. Boosting dps just means the content hp gets boosted accordingly.
4 - tank balance right now is the best it has ever been. Just small tweaks - if any really - are needed, and at most we're looking at small adjustments to potencies or perhaps duration on some things (example: increasing Blood Weapon duration to 11s to make it so hitting the 5th hit is much easier due to the client-server bullshit that happens with BW). Screwing with this balance, even if it's an equal % increase across all the tanks, will throw that balance out the window, since some tanks will gain more from that boost and others will gain less. Furthermore, as gear gets better (i.e. crit scales better) you're going to see the damage rankings for tanks get shaken up. Throwing a blanket dps % increase into the mix will really screw things up.

Those are the ones I remember, without going back and reading each page of this thread again anyway. Most responses to this have been a variation of "but muh deeps" couched in a bunch of bafflegarble about relative dps numbers, as if that means a damn thing considering how the content is built around it.

And I'm not the only one. No one has offered any kind of refutation to the claim that OP (and those that support him) don't care about overall game balance (aka the macrocosm I spoke of earlier). The conclusion to draw from this is simple; those who support an increase in tank dps do not care about game balance, and literally want the game to be easier by virtue of tanks dealing more damage and thus killing stuff faster. Justification for this massive buff ranges from "it would feel better" (without any substantive changes to the playstyle of a tank) to "healers deal as much/more damage than tanks do" (with the implication that this is wrong).

A few people have spoken - rightly so - about the lack of things for tanks to do at end game. Other people, myself included, have noted that this raid tier is supposed to be easier according to what SE has said. Given the amount of tank-centric mechanics that exist in TEA (the utmost importance of positioning and proper rationing of CD's for example) I think it's safe to say that SE both has plenty of tricks up their sleeve as well as plenty of room to grow the difficulty for the 2nd and 3rd Eden raids. But, having said that, there is still an argument to be made for certain aspects of tank gameplay not being as engaging as they could be.

Most people in this thread don't care about that though. They just want to see a larger bar for themselves on FFlogs.

Or as Kabooa put it succinctly on page 5:

Funny how changing a display metric suddenly made a job less fun.

[J-Reyno]

A few people have spoken - rightly so - about the lack of things for tanks to do at end game. Other people, myself included, have noted that this raid tier is supposed to be easier according to what SE has said. Given the amount of tank-centric mechanics that exist in TEA (the utmost importance of positioning and proper rationing of CD's for example) I think it's safe to say that SE both has plenty of tricks up their sleeve as well as plenty of room to grow the difficulty for the 2nd and 3rd Eden raids. But, having said that, there is still an argument to be made for certain aspects of tank gameplay not being as engaging as they could be.

Most people in this thread don't care about that though. They just want to see a larger bar for themselves on FFlogs.

Positioning and rotating CDs has been a thing for a while now. As has been said many times, the gameplay of tanks is mostly just doing damage and, on occasion, doing a "tank thing".

That's without mentioning content outside of ultimate and savage. There is plenty of content in the game where a tank can literally play like a DPS and it simply won't matter. The healer is strong enough to do half of the tank's job for them. Will it be optimal? No. Is it as necessary for a tank to press cooldowns as a healer to heal in the vast majority of content? Not even close. What WILL tanks be doing no matter what? Damage.

And we're not entertaining any nonsense about altering the structure of the entire game with 1k more tank damage. That can be adjusted FAR easier than reworking tanks, healers and all of the game's content to make constant, active tank skills a core element of the job. And I'd hope no one has the silly idea that we could change the core elements of tank gameplay to make them decidedly less damage oriented without also changing healers and all encounters to make these non-damage tank elements necessary.

And since you go on and on about how no one is arguing your points I'll hit some of the ones you reposted directly.

1 - apples and oranges comparison of tank damage against healer/dps damage. Comparing damage across roles is a terrible idea and should not in any way govern balance decisions.

To this I'll link you another comment of mine, read HERE

The cool thing about this comment is that it links to yet another (by necessity, some of you really hate reading even though this is a forum) where I describe more of why the comparison might matter to players. Please note that this is going to be a matter of opinion and is something you can disagree with, though I'm sure you'll feel the need to punctuate with some manner of self-importance and an insult toward anyone who feels differently. What you won't do is tell anyone else that this is something that can't matter to them, because you don't have that authority.

2 - the game, as designed right now, is completely clearable. This means the content we have in game has been designed with the current dps/mitigation/healing issues in mind.

We all know that it's clearable. This is irrelevant to the discussion being had for reasons outlined in the post I linked above.

3 - arbitrarily boosting the dps of a given job won't make fights go faster. Tying into point 2, content is built around certain expected dps levels. Boosting dps just means the content hp gets boosted accordingly.

Also irrelevant. It's about how the job feels, not clearing the content faster.

4 - tank balance right now is the best it has ever been. Just small tweaks - if any really - are needed, and at most we're looking at small adjustments to potencies or perhaps duration on some things (example: increasing Blood Weapon duration to 11s to make it so hitting the 5th hit is much easier due to the client-server bullshit that happens with BW). Screwing with this balance, even if it's an equal % increase across all the tanks, will throw that balance out the window, since some tanks will gain more from that boost and others will gain less. Furthermore, as gear gets better (i.e. crit scales better) you're going to see the damage rankings for tanks get shaken up. Throwing a blanket dps % increase into the mix will really screw things up.

Balance between the four tanks is not the subject of discussion. You also seem to have forgotten that individual changes to tanks can be made to ensure they remain on par. Whether a tank buff comes in the form of a blanket dps increase or individually selected improvements specific to each job, further adjustments can always be made if necessary.

Sorry, but we're not going to pretend that a 1k bump in dps for tanks would destroy the game's balance beyond repair. You're going to have to find another angle here.

[Shurrikhan]

The conclusion to draw from this is simple; those who support an increase in tank dps do not care about game balance, and literally want the game to be easier by virtue of tanks dealing more damage and thus killing stuff faster. Justification for this massive buff ranges from "it would feel better" (without any substantive changes to the playstyle of a tank) to "healers deal as much/more damage than tanks do" (with the implication that this is wrong).

While I do generally side with your position here, there have been more arguments than are merely both vague and subjective or rely on unargued proven warrants. There a couple, even, I think most could agree with:

• At no point should the skill-to-reward progression of any given role be so limited relative to others that one would seemingly need to switch roles to contribute as much as they could to their party.

  Many have complained that this currently seems the case with tanks, especially relative to DPS. Others insist that the passive benefit offered by tanking provides such a high output floor that one has no business complaining about its low ceiling, but this seems a tangential defense at best. Other more directly claim that they just don't feel that the ceiling is particularly limiting despite the difference between medial and peak performance providing less to the party than would the same in DPS, since it's roughly the same % difference -- i.e. a 10% difference between median and maximum parses for both the average DPS and average tank each. It thus remains at an impasse, until we can answer whether it is sufficient merely that improvement in one's percentile allows them to outperform others of their same role (since tanks are going to be obliged by mechanics, and thus "someone's gotta do it, anyways") or if increased skill should be rewarded with equally valuable contributions to their party regardless of the "currency" of their contributions. The discussion will likely also touch on tanks' output floor, as that is far higher than it's ever previously been.

• Equally valuable contributions to the party should come from roughly equal requirements of skillful play.

  This is of course a variation on "effort/complexity should be duly rewarded" which is itself controversial and is likely a minority opinion by a slight margin if ever applied as broadly as to general balance or long-term metrics like rDPS. Still, many have argued as an extension of such that the skillful play required for healers to minimize their healing is still not enough to bring them up to the average skill requirements given how barebones their offensive gameplay itself has become -- effectively, that healers are getting too much output potential for too little effort or complexity. There has not yet been any thorough counter-argument save those already applied to the more general warrant. Others have pressed that the efforts spent in allowing for healer offensive uptime is valuable, but none have gone so far as to argue (except perhaps implicitly) that it is therefore sufficient.

[Rhais]

And again, on page 10, responding specifically to you.

I read what you posted and responded when you originally posted it. It no more conclusively establishes your point now then it did back on page 10. As I said previously, no persuasive arguments have been made to back your position.

You have earlier in this thread propped up your opinion as the only right view with specious arguments founded in irrelevant topics, erroneous statements, and baseless assumptions. While doing that you have purposefully misconstrued what people with an opposing opinion have said in order to denigrate their position.

Now I will say that in the last few posts you seem to be a lot less abrasive and condescending toward opposing viewpoints, and say a few things that even if I don't outright agree are at least worth consideration. You should have taken that approach from the outset, it would have been far more conducive to discussing the merits or lack thereof of the various arguments here.
Ultimately however this isn't an argument to win, provided it doesn't upend balance between the roles, how big a percentage of party dps tanks should be given and how much importance that plays in someones enjoyment of the role is purely a subjective opinion with no right or wrong answer.

[Kabooa]

What your argument here boils down to is that tanks were the most padded of all the jobs in Stormblood such as to significantly skew the numbers compared to healers and dps. Which is a joke, and not a good one.

Mind providing the parameters you're using for these comparisons? 4.5 is pretty broad, and Paladin's capability was -way higher- than you're listing it.

You haven't explained anything, you have filled this thread with a bunch of long winded vacuous posts devoid of any sort of solid reasoning for why tanks shouldn't see a damage increase. You and others have failed to put forth any sort of credible argument for why a damage increase would be negative. There is nothing there except your own, and others subjective opinion that tanks are fine now.

Just as there's nothing other than the subjective opinion that tanks aren't fine now.

See, that's the rub isn't it? It comes down to opinion, and as usual, masking it as something else entirely.

"Damage Contribution", the idea that tanks aren't providing the damage they were before to the raid. It's a valid concern.

But from the angle of "Damage Contribution", tanks have dropped around 10% at a glance (From 20 to 18%). However, using high speedkills for that comparison is in highly optimized groups, where the healers are blasting out damage that surely skews that. For example: Any speed clear of Voidwalker.

But "Damage Contribution", as has been touted, is misleading. Tank's "Damage contribution" itself hasn't changed to the degree it's been claimed - Because Tanks now contribute differently to the party bonus. Straight up 1% added to the party, where as before they only added Vitality. So realistically they dropped from 20% to 19%.

The removal of Slashing was mostly a neutral change - Raising paladins and Dark Knights to around the warrior's level in the subsequent retuning, but even then, the slashing bonus wouldn't go to Warrior in any group with Ninja or Samurai - Because in all relevant cases, the DPS with Slashing paired with the Paladin/Dark Knight where it mattered, so the gain went to them. Basically the Warrior is no higher on 'damage contribution' than it is listed at, but Paladin and Dark Knight often plummet.

The presence of strong party buffs also largely skews the idea of damage contribution when it comes to using DPS graphs. A Full Time astro buddy in Stormblood can make anyone look good.

We also want to use 100% uptime (or as close to it as we can get) fights when making comparisons, as no job is favored due to timing windows, like Warriors on Ravana during Heavensward. With that in mind.

https://www.fflogs.com/reports/x6ajk...pe=damage-done

https://www.fflogs.com/reports/LR7qM...pe=damage-done

Take a bit to examine this. I'd like to hear your thoughts.