How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[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.