How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[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.

[Quor]

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".

Yes. Why focus on the damage side though? Why not focus on the tank side? That's the crux of the argument here, as the existence of this thread is predicated on the belief that tank damage is low while also lamenting the simplicity of tank-centric gameplay. If tank-centric gameplay is simple, then (as I mentioned multiple times before in this thread) energy would be better spent advocating for an increase in tank-focused solutions instead of boosting dps.

From your linked post:

We all understand how the damage distribution works, what we are discussing is whether that damage distribution between the roles is appropriate and how it leaves one role feeling less impactful than others. I've also addressed this exact question multiple times, including the actual OP, and most recently here:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post5188337

It essentially boils down to asking why, if tanks are going to have the damage of a support, do they not have a full bar of powerful personal and party mitigation tools that are necessary and needed to complete content. If I'm going to do the damage of a support role, then I need more than a watered down dps rotation for my moment-to-moment gameplay. Where are my skills that I use consistently and frequently to tank like the healer's heals? Because pressing a mitigation skill every 60-90 seconds ain't it.

The answer to most of this is "balance." As others have noted here and elsewhere, if tank mitigation is too high then content becomes trivial. The reason why 60-120s CD's are typical not just for tank cooldowns but for general party utility cooldowns across all jobs is because too low of a cooldown on some of these things would be too powerful. It would be a re-hash of the old 2.0 and 3.0 Storm's Path debuff, where you wanted it up 100% of the time since it was a global reduction to incoming damage from a boss. Translated to modern terms, if something like Dark Missionary or Shake it Off or Divine Veil had a lower CD than their current, you would drastically reduce the amount of healing throughout a fight. At even just 60s, Dark missionary would have a 25% uptime, which effectively means healers would have ~2.5% less healing to do on raid wide damage (almost all of which is magical, bar a few rare exceptions). Bring a GNB for Heart of Light and you're looking at 50% uptime on 10% magic DR, which saves another ~2.5% healing. I suppose we could shorten durations on these skills to account for the decreased CD, but then you're just pressing a button more often for smaller effect. Shallow complexity I believed Shurrikhan called it. Worst case scenario it just becomes another part of a tanks rotation instead of a decision that carries weight due to the inherent lockout you get from a cooldown.

It's always good to mitigate damage, but some damage is better to mitigate than others. There might be a big huge raid-wide coming soon, but if it's not going to be followed up by anything scary then better to hold off and save the CD for a part of the fight that will be rougher. If you make a utility cooldown available too often then you remove any decision making that comes with the use of said cooldown, further lowering the complexity of the job (and I think Shurri would agree that this is a deeper form of complexity than simply keeping another plate spinning).

If managing my damage rotation is going to be 99% of my gameplay, then I'm going to need to do more damage than a healer role who gets all these powerful heals and then has a one-button rotation for damage.

But it's not 99% of tank gameplay. It's not even 90%. It might be 75-80% in a fight that's on farm, and probably less than 50% for a fight that's in prog. Mechanics will always come first, with dps being a concern after the execution is down pat. To get to the point that a fight is on farm, the tanks and healers need to be performing their primary jobs (tanking and healing) at near-perfect levels. That's not nothing, and it needs to be considered as a part of each roles' overall impact on an encounter. This is why the dps-to-tank log comparison is flawed; of course dps will have more damage because that is literally 90-99%+ of what they do (the rest being the utility they bring, varying between each job). The non-damage contribution that tanks and healers bring to a fight is not measured in FFlogs, and that's a tragedy because all dps is 100% reliant on proper tanking and healing execution.

This may or may not be something that matters to you, but this is not about whether the role CAN contribute, it's about HOW it contributes. This is something that will be a matter of opinion, but hopefully we can at least reach that understanding and stop going in circles about how the damage distribution between roles works.

My opinion - and mind you, this is backed up by much of what people have said in this thread - is that the actual tanking and healing contributions are trivialized as meaningless in the context of increased dps, with the overarching belief being that the only thing that matters in a fight (and thus the only thing determines the relative value of a job) is the damage said job does. Tanks and healers contribute 100% to the success of a fight. If the tanks and healers in a group just said "fuck it, we're doing damage!" and focused exclusively on their damage skills, no raid would make it past the first 30s of a fight.

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.

Whew, where to start here. First off, I'd say as far as non-endgame raid content goes, of course it will be easy and most jobs will be "reduced" to dps. This is at least partially why wall-to-wall pulling is done. Not only is it faster, but it's also more fun, since the challenge of managing your damage alongside your tanking/healing is more interesting than the comparatively boring single-group pulls would be. Having said that, much of this feeling comes from outgearing stuff. I remember my first time in Sastasha back during 2.0 beta, carefully pulling each pack, trying not to bottom out on TP from Overpower spam by swapping between targets to HS>SS each one in turn so I maintained aggro over the healer. *THAT* was fun. It wasn't a wall-to-wall pull (that came later, and was still fun) but it was good times nonetheless. Nowadays, with the increased potencies that's more or less a non-issue. But I still run into occasional newbie groups in mentor roulette where I gotta take it slow so as not to overwhelm the healer. Point being, part of this is a perception thing. Many veteran players are used to a certain cadence in the game, and this naturally puts an emphasis on more damage and faster clearing when it comes to non-savage/EX level stuff. But just because the emphasis is on dps in those situations doesn't mean the value of a properly played tank or healer is decreased. You still need that tank there to hold aggro and rotate CD's on a big pull, and that healer still needs to make sure said tank doesn't go down or else you'll have 8-10 very angry monsters running roughshod over the rest of the group.

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.

Yes, 1k more damage blanket across all the tanks would be a huge altering of the game's structure. It would be a more than 10% increase in average tank damage without any commensurate increase in difficulty, which is an insane buff. Given that SE is still - at this point in time - in the foundational building stages of the next xpac, the time to advocate for better tank-centric tools and mechanics is now.

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.

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.

I addressed some of what you said already up above, but specifically in regards to this:

As far as the damage ratio between roles, to me it's about the "power" or as some have described it the "impact" of the role. Yes tanking is necessary because you can take the hits, but like I described previously the act of taking hits mostly boils down to pressing an occasional mitigation skill and relying on passive damage reduction. Outside of that tanks perform their dps rotation and work to pump out as much dps as possible. The actual act of tanking/mitigating is not like healing in this game. Healers have very powerful healing and can bring the entire party from 1hp to full in a matter of seconds. This is the kind of thing that makes a role feel strong, in my opinion, and they do this while dealing nearly the same damage as tanks (and in the case of WHM can do more) with what effectively amounts to one-button rotations.

You kinda dismiss tanking with the "yes it's necessary but" line there, which is what I was talking about earlier with the implied understanding that tanks and healers just naturally perform tanking and healing so flawlessly that the only "true" thing that matters is damage. This is a false premise, as anyone who's had a bad tank or healer in a 4-man (or any content for that matter) can attest to.

As to the point of impact, that's very much an opinion I think. I find my time as a tank feels very impactful, regardless of the damage I do. Naturally I try to put out as much as I can within the range of the role, but I don't much care about where I chart on the damage graphs compared to how well I do the actual tanking stuff. Keeping boss movement down to a minimum so as to enable greater ease of uptime for the melee dps. Pre-positioning the boss for upcoming mechanics to reduce movement time and prep needed to deal with what's coming next. That feels impactful to me. Your mileage may vary - and that's fine - but I stand by my earlier comment when I said that if you're playing a tank and your primary concern is damage, then tank probably isn't for you. I would much prefer all the energy in this thread be directed towards advocacy of greater tank-centric tools and mechanics instead of this focus on damage.

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

It's not irrelevant. If content is being cleared regularly by a wide variety of jobs then that's a good objective indicator that job balance is pretty good. If there were major issues with content being cleared by specific jobs (and only specific jobs) then an argument could be made to help those jobs in some way. Doubly so if said jobs were parsing markedly lower than other jobs in their role. That isn't the case here, as tank dps balance is the tightest it's ever been. Maybe WAR and DRK could use a few minor changes (mostly QoL stuff) but that would be it and they would be decidedly minor. We're talking small potency increases, or duration boosts of 1-2 seconds on key abilities.

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

A job can feel great and deal very low damage. A job can also be boring and do amazing damage, such as what many WHM's say about the current WHM dps "rotation" of spamming a single nuke. The reason why I talk about damage and clearing content in this regard is that the suggestion to add 1k dps to all tanks does nothing to change how tanks play. It wasn't paired with anything that increases tank combo complexity (higher complexity naturally should bring a higher reward), but rather it was simply suggested as a way to "fix" the "problem" of perceived low tank damage. I have yet to see anyone else but myself offer an idea in this thread (I am aware of - and thankful - for the thread started by Kabooa) to boost tank damage while also boosting complexity. The meaning behind this is clear; those advocating for an increase in tank damage without commensurate increase in tank complexity simply want more damage for the sake of having more damage. They want this damage because they somehow believe this changes tanks in such a way that makes them more fun or impactful, when the reality is that nothing concrete has changed. Boosting potencies isn't how you increase complexity, and lowering a cooldown or increasing a duration simply means another 3-6 button presses per fight. If an additional 3-6 button presses is the cutoff for "impactful" and "fun" then that's an awfully low bar I think.

Or maybe they just want to deal more damage with no extra effort on their part at all. Given the distinct lack of suggestions, both in this thread and elsewhere, I'm inclined to believe people just want to see a bigger bar graph on FFlogs.

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.

Any change to a job is automatically a balance discussion, not just for that job or role but for the game as an entire ecosystem. And again, given that tanks are well-represented in all aspects of the game right now, on top of being very tightly balance in terms of damage, it's hard to justify a change as broad and sweeping as adding ~12% more damage to four separate jobs.

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.

1k is not a "bump." Assuming an 8k baseline at 80, that's a ~12.5% increase in damage. Nobody on any forum would consider a 12.5% increase in damage to be anything but a massive buff.

[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.

[Quor]

While I do generally side with your position here, there have 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:[LIST]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.

I can agree to this. I understand the design decision behind a simple tank rotation; the main game of a tank is not the combos we use but the macro meta of the fight itself. However, combos are a part of this, and pressing globals is the cornerstone of this game. I don't necessarily think we need a dps-level of complexity, but I can understand wanting more. GNB and PLD both flow pretty well but have a lot of rigidity to them. WAR and DRK have periods of high action where you feel busy but the low intensity periods wear on you. How exactly to address this I don't know. Part of the issue comes from the (relatively) simpler encounters present at end game right now. After seeing that TEA has in store for players, I'm hopeful for more challenging macro-level stuff for tanks to do in upcoming content, but it's always a good idea to talk about how baseline rotational stuff can be improved.

[*]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.

I can understand the perspective regarding healers, and again I'm hopeful - having seen the sheer amount of GCD healing needed to beat TEA - that future fights will emphasize more of the "healer" side of a healers kit instead of the dps. As someone who casually plays a healer (WHM and AST) I find AST to be more functionally busy but WHM to feel more powerful overall. I enjoy the longer-term macro planning you get with AST, and I wouldn't mind shades of that being imported to WHM, as well as a bit more depth to healer rotation.

But that's a discussion for elsewhere.

As far as it pertains to tanks, again I think it's important to gauge the contribution not just by GCD and ability complexity, but by the macro-level fight-centric stuff expected of a tank. I'm confident SE has more in store for us later on in the xpac, but I'm not against the idea of higher complexity in tank combos. Naturally I would want this to lead to higher reward (most probably damage, but it would be nice if some kind of mitigation and/or other utility factored in as well). I've been going through the thread Kabooa made, but I have nothing substantive to add as of yet. I'm a bit too focused in on the current state of the game, so all of my suggestions are - to use your words - adding another spinning plate to maintain.

[Shurrikhan]

As far as it pertains to tanks, again I think it's important to gauge the contribution not just by GCD and ability complexity, but by the macro-level fight-centric stuff expected of a tank. I'm confident SE has more in store for us later on in the xpac, but I'm not against the idea of higher complexity in tank combos. Naturally I would want this to lead to higher reward (most probably damage, but it would be nice if some kind of mitigation and/or other utility factored in as well).

First, fair on all points. I want to touch further on just this last bit, though.

I guess the concern that follows is whether it's appropriate to balance a job around the greatest efforts required for a given competing function (healing, tanking, etc.) when the majority of content is so vastly different. Perhaps in time content will make something closer to TEA than nearly-zero-GCDs-of-healing the norm, but that's likely to take years and would, simply put, rely on divisive increases in difficulty to healer's more immediately impactful duty (keeping people alive).

I've been going through the thread Kabooa made, but I have nothing substantive to add as of yet. I'm a bit too focused in on the current state of the game, so all of my suggestions are - to use your words - adding another spinning plate to maintain.

Makes sense. I had intended to have my own ideas listed there some couple weeks ago, but sadly they ended up requiring a modicum of AI (beyond merely 'use unvaried rotation on lead enmity target until %HP or timing trigger') that just doesn't exist in this game at present, which will probably tack on yet a further week or two's delay. I do feel bad for having been so critical of yours but having nothing of my own up there yet, let alone that it will likely appear only a pipedream once listed.

[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.