How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Shurrikhan]

If that's the case, I think it should either be :

• Too weak for tanks to completely neglect managing their enmity (Pretty much the same impact that Second Wind has on keeping DPS alive)
• Tied with a cost so that you wouldn't want to use it on CD. A thing like a Subtle Blow that greatly reduce the enmity you generate for a few seconds but reduce your DPS.

I agree that if enmity is to be at all a concern for tanks, there should never be a situation (except by specific fight mechanics) that they are entirely freed from that duty, or that even that more than roughly half of it should be performed by others.

However, I do think that others' contributions, if given at all, should not be so negligible as, say, Second Wind's contribution to survival, nor should it come as a maintenance skill. Rather, it should add a skillgap component that additionally affects how one performs their normal tasks, rather than replacing or interrupting it.

To be more concrete, it should not be

• Insignificant (let's say, less than some 20% of contribution towards optimized enmity management);
• Wholly situational (used specifically and at too significant a cost to warrant in the vast majority of situations, as that would just feel bloated); nor
• Optimal, yet irritating (forcing jobs to interrupt their rotations or integrate into them seemingly unrelated and incohesive skills).

If that's the case, it should still have a DPS cost. Either by having a damage penalty, or by having GCD mitigation skill. The choice should still be "how much GCD I can spend on not doing as much damage as possible" ? With best tanks finding the minimum amount of them. And of course, tuning the game so that, unless greatly overgearing, that minimal amount would still be a significant number. About 1/4th or 1/3rd of your GCD, which, in my opinion, should also be what healers have to spend on healing if damage recevied was tuned correctly.

Of course. And yes, GCDs would be included in such (and obviously contributing more over time to damage-mitigation variance than shared-recast time or gauge skill oGCDs, if those are even used on the given job). The difference is that one builds its margin during periods of reduced danger (prepping for mitigation events) and the other around periods of reduced damage potential (prepping for raid buffs). I find the first to be more iconic for tanks, and thus focused on that over simply "make sure to have enough enmity to max out the next trick attack". Strictly speaking, the latter would still apply, but adding the other focus should help, however much, to make tanks feel less like mere "Blue DPS".

I don't think it should. You should never be able to replace an average DPS with a good tank and achieve better DPS.

Let's not break the notion of the quote from the requirements that immediately followed it, shall we?

At present tanks have an incredibly small performance range relative to other roles. This is due primarily to both having as great of offensive uptime as any other melee, unlike healers, and fewer optimizations to be made (or, less effort required in making those optimizations) than most DPS. Decreasing the gap in complexity by increasing the effort required for optimal tank play would greatly diminish the chances of a tank replacing a dps simply due to being easier to perform with as is currently the case.

But, let's consider as well -- what you're describing has already been a historical norm until Stormblood. A 90th percentile tank could often outperform a 50th percentile DPS in ARR and HW. Was that so horrible? If tanks then had possessed the passive mitigation they carry now, I'd argue so, but, they didn't. So where does the problem really lie, in a good player being able to outperform a poorer player even outside the obviously optimal role, or simply when one role carries too many simultaneous advantages? The latter, I'd have to say.

A good DPS should obviously outperform a good Tank by a large margin (already the case); a fair DPS should likewise outperform a fair tank by a large margin (not so much the case, as the relative gap is greatly diminished). The issue to me is that there is little reward, and in many ways little to reward, in optimal tank play relative to DPS, and that if tanks were allowed more proportionate reward (i.e. damage range) they would be overpowered so long as they keep so much passive indirect contribution.

[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.

[RadicalPesto]

People are sure writing a lot of words to fail to grasp the point that as soon as healers start consistently outdpsing tanks (which will happen due to tanks having atrocious main stat scaling), strategies will adapt towards sacrificing tank uptime wherever it brings the party some kind of benefit instead of healer uptime. Healers can actually do something (heal, shield, place regens) when forced into downtime strategies, whereas tanks can for the most part do absolutely nothing. Healers outdpsing tanks has been deliberately avoided in this game's balance for most of its existence for a good reason, and part of why tanks should outdps healers is that tanks have very little gameplay besides being a slower melee DPS with defensive cooldowns.

The only argument I've received to contradict the fact that the current state of healers as borderline hybrid DPS classes that aim to spam all their GCD's on damage was some shallow attempt at shutting down the discussion with "only healers should talk about this", like its some manner of political issue that should only be discussed by a select community of true healers, and not a widely-recognized flaw in how this game is designed, one that even career healers acknowledge has resulted in healers only being fun when their DPS rotations are, because the healing side of healing is overpowered, unrewarding, and has a massive DPS opportunity cost in a game focused mostly on DPS. Healers having the high DPS they have now actively makes the role unfriendly to new players, discourages any usage of healing GCD's, results in healers being the most counter-intuitively designed role in the game, and as such represents one of the most confused healing class designs out of any MMO I've played.

[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.

[Shurrikhan]

People are sure writing a lot of words to fail to grasp the point that as soon as healers start consistently outdpsing tanks (which will happen due to tanks having atrocious main stat scaling), strategies will adapt towards sacrificing tank uptime wherever it brings the party some kind of benefit instead of healer uptime.

No, they'll sacrifice tank uptime when it brings the party some rDPS advantage on the whole.

Tanks have rotations. Healers do not. Tanks can easily be screwed over macrorotationally if having lost downtime at the wrong moment or in the wrong duration relative to their modular parts of rotation. Healers will not be. It would significantly more than healers merely edging out tanks GCD for GCD for the party to be less negatively affected by a tank sacrificing uptime than a healer.

That's not to say I think healers should be doing more damage than tanks when each has perfect uptime; I don't, but no party is going to sacrifice party dps through desync just to allow for a few more Glares.

The only argument I've received to contradict the fact that the current state of healers as borderline hybrid DPS classes that aim to spam all their GCD's on damage was some shallow attempt at shutting down the discussion with "only healers should talk about this", like its some manner of political issue that should only be discussed by a select community of true healers, and not a widely-recognized flaw in how this game is designed, one that even career healers acknowledge has resulted in healers only being fun when their DPS rotations are, because the healing side of healing is overpowered, unrewarding, and has a massive DPS opportunity cost in a game focused mostly on DPS. Healers having the high DPS they have now actively makes the role unfriendly to new players, discourages any usage of healing GCD's, results in healers being the most counter-intuitively designed role in the game, and as such represents one of the most confused healing class designs out of any MMO I've played.

No such argument is necessary. They are, for all intents and purposes, Green DPS, or "DPS, but with barebone damage kits so they can take care of auxiliary function off the global cooldown while they spam 1 and, twice per minute, 2". That doesn't change whether the damage permitted them ought be acceptable, though. It's merely a thus-far irrelevant factoid.

I'll agree that it indicates a game-wide issue, but it's less likely an issue of healers having too much damage available to them per GCD of uptime than simply having too few uptime costs necessary. That's an issue of fight design. Merely reducing the opportunity cost of healing does not remove that opportunity cost; it solely encourages your party to slap you less frequently or painfully when overhealing. It does not make that overhealing any degree of optimal. XIV healing is muddled, and just as many a tank here has complained they would like to have more tanking to do on their blue thingamajob, healers have been requesting the same since ARR. It just so happens that healing requirements are now perhaps the lightest they've ever been, despite all promises to the contrary. Our problem is not a new one; it's just more painfully obvious now.

[Kabooa]

The only argument I've received to contradict the fact that the current state of healers as borderline hybrid DPS classes that aim to spam all their GCD's on damage was some shallow attempt at shutting down the discussion with "only healers should talk about this", like its some manner of political issue that should only be discussed by a select community of true healers, and not a widely-recognized flaw in how this game is designed, one that even career healers acknowledge has resulted in healers only being fun when their DPS rotations are, because the healing side of healing is overpowered, unrewarding, and has a massive DPS opportunity cost in a game focused mostly on DPS. Healers having the high DPS they have now actively makes the role unfriendly to new players, discourages any usage of healing GCD's, results in healers being the most counter-intuitively designed role in the game, and as such represents one of the most confused healing class designs out of any MMO I've played.

Yes.

Healer GCDs being too damage weighted is a -healer issue-. it affects -healers-. It affects -their play-.

It has no bearing on whether or not tanks need more damage. Do you know why?

Because if we reduced healer GCD damage proportionately, the problem -still remains for them-. It doesn't matter that the 'weight' is now less damage oriented for their GCD usage - They're still not going to GCD heal if there is nothing their OGCDs cannot heal, just like right now they aren't going to let someone die just to get off another Glare (Or rather - they shouldn't.)

Everyone is a healer, or a potential healer. This isn't the thread to be talking about the design concept of healers and how their GCD weighting is detrimental to their play, because this is a thread about whether or not tanks need a damage boost. (They don't need one)

Healer gameplay has no bearing on tank numbers. You can shift the GCD damage weight down, increase their OGCD damage capability so there is no difference in the long run, and it has literally no effect on Healer playstyle nor their standings with regards to everyone else.

[*]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.

[/LIST]

There is nothing inherently wrong about healers dealing comparable damage to tanks. The fact that by and large healers still do less is largely ignored. Heaven forbid that those at the top get to flex a little.

And really, the trend breaker is only White Mage. Astrologian in Stormblood easily passed up Tanks on raid damage, and Scholar wasn't that far behind, the difference is that the hard data analyzer didn't show that as a default.

Edit: I'll make an amend that most of my posts in this thread were made prior to the 5.1 job adjustments. If in further job adjustments Summoner becomes a new baseline, then Tanks can stand to receive an increase alongside Healers.

[Reynhart]

However, I do think that others' contributions, if given at all, should not be so negligible as, say, Second Wind's contribution to survival, nor should it come as a maintenance skill. Rather, it should add a skillgap component that additionally affects how one performs their normal tasks, rather than replacing or interrupting it.

Then, like I said, an easy solution is to put a damage penalty on enmity dump skills. It wouldn't make the job clunky by changing your rotation but you definitely wouldn't want to use it more than you had to.

But, let's consider as well -- what you're describing has already been a historical norm until Stormblood. A 90th percentile tank could often outperform a 50th percentile DPS in ARR and HW. Was that so horrible?

Horrible, no. But, in a game revolving around enrage timers, it bugs me that you can clear current top tier content with a party of 8-tanks.

So where does the problem really lie, in a good player being able to outperform a poorer player even outside the obviously optimal role, or simply when one role carries too many simultaneous advantages? The latter, I'd have to say.

Even with less passive mitigation, tanks are way sturdier than DPS ever will be. And with the dedicated OT skills, offer great utility without having to sacrifice anything. So giving them DPS level of damage output will be too many perks on one job.

The issue to me is that there is little reward, and in many ways little to reward, in optimal tank play relative to DPS, and that if tanks were allowed more proportionate reward (i.e. damage range) they would be overpowered so long as they keep so much passive indirect contribution.

In the end, the "optimal tank play" is mostly the focus of the main tank. He's the one who have to build a decent enmity, and keep an eye on its HP for tankbuster phase. For the OT, it would be harder to mechanically reduce their DPS.

[BarretOblivion]

Except that's simply not the case? A Healer with about half the offensive uptime of a tank does about, shockingly, half the damage of a tank. AST is the only one who flexes significantly beyond percentage damage as percentage uptime.

A typical speedrun, the only case in which WHM or SCH outperform a tank, have zero GCDs spent on healing outside of deployed-reci-Adlo or lily skills (and then only to the last multiple of three necessary to feed Misery casts for their 900 potency of damage). That's some 97.87% of the Tanks' uptime. That brings the disparity within 3% despite the fact that tanks already provide greater free output (i.e. without uptime- or other opportunity costs) than do healers.

Then you need to watch my static because right now our WHM/SCH are both nearly pushing the DPS numbers of our DRK with me only a few hundred above him and this is considered "purple"

[Nedkel]

I am just waiting for double paladin healers meta, where tanks dps is so pathetic that it actually is better to have tanks healing with requietcast buffed clemecy.
If healers dps potential js higher than tanks then i dont see reason why not. xD