How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Shurrikhan]

I don't think anyone feels like dps jobs don't have room to excel, and by the numbers Gunbreaker has as much room to excel as Samurai and other dps jobs, if not more than some. Why do we say otherwise?

It simply depends on whether the concern should be proportion relative to one's role alone, or to raw ("effective") increased contribution to one's party.

Between any two Savage clears, there's little to no difference in indirect contribution (i.e. healer GCDs saved via mitigation) between two players on the same tank; with few exceptions there is generally a larger difference due simply to passively granted eHP (from gearing) allowing for more efficient healing (via delay) than between any two acceptable CD schedules, and it's not much either. That leaves the extent of added contribution mostly under the damage dealt metrics. But for two roles to be equally rewarding or mastery, they can't just have equal % gain relative to themselves, but also to each other. Otherwise, if you have a player who can perform at the same high percentile in either role or a given job in either, the one with the lower ceiling would technically be holding the party back if there's a lower-performing player when assigning their better player to that role relative to another, lower-performing player (again, on both roles or jobs therein). That circumstance would be so rare that all this is theoretical, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be a concern.

For my own part, that just means there should be more tank control over their mitigation -- whether that be by sharing uptime cost with maximal damage or simply having finer means of control and, in either case, more effort necessary to optimize its potential, with a higher ceiling and lower floor so that tank contribution over percentiles scales more equally to DPS contribution over contribution rather than just in equal proportion. There should be an economy to it all, imo, whereby an equal increase in player skill in any given role is never going to be worth more in one role than another.

At most, the only exceptions would be to the extent that (1) the given encounter requires and rewards that increase in skill more in one role than another, such as in a fight with advanced tank-dependent techniques for uptime, or (2) the given job in one role as compared to another's better suits that improvement in terms of its skill curve. But these are both negligible concerns and we cannot afford to reshape job balance on a fight-by-fight basis, nor should we sacrifice originality in job design just to keep their skill curves equal.

[Kabooa]

Maybe tanks just have a lower skill floor so we'll see much smaller increases at lower the percentiles?

This would be my assumption, but admittedly nothing more than that.

That said, while I don't think it's necessary just yet at this point, I do think we can rein back the total DPS of the DPS role a tad and increase Tank and healers.

20/20/60 as it were

[J-Reyno]

That leaves the extent of added contribution mostly under the damage dealt metrics. But for two roles to be equally rewarding or mastery, they can't just have equal % gain relative to themselves, but also to each other. Otherwise, if you have a player who can perform at the same high percentile in either role or a given job in either, the one with the lower ceiling would technically be holding the party back if there's a lower-performing player when assigning their better player to that role relative to another, lower-performing player (again, on both roles or jobs therein).

Assuming you're talking about the damage ceiling when performing at a high level (since as you said damage is ultimately what matters) then I don't disagree with this at all. It actually highlights my exact issue with tanks as they are. The numbers show that higher level players are having as difficult a time optimizing Gunbreaker as they are Samurai, and lower performing players might actually perform relatively better with Samurai. Even so, in a scenario like what you describe a lower performing player in this case would still want to play Gunbreaker, because while tank is just as difficult to optimize it doesn't gain as much for the work. A high performing Samurai, on the other hand, gains a lot more damage. Which is ever important.

High performing healers see a ton of valuable contribution as well.

There should be an economy to it all, imo, whereby an equal increase in player skill in any given role is never going to be worth more in one role than another.

While I think we have different ideas of how we'd like tanks to perform, I want to quote this statement because it highlights the issue with tanks extremely well. It's funny that when I first made this topic it was just kind of off the cuff chatting about my thoughts after playing several of the jobs. After so much discussion I find that the feeling I described echoes in your statement here, and rings very true:

It makes me just want to play heal/dps instead where it feels like I'm appropriately rewarded for my efforts.

At this point what I hope is that SE will at least acknowledge the state of tanks at some point.

[Nedkel]

In the first example, the tanks were probably out of defensive stance for 95% of that fight. At the time, Defensive stance dropped your dps by 20% IIRC. Shadowbringers basically applied the tank stance penalties to all tanks across the board for the perception of not losing dps by equipping tank stance.

So again, take the first example of tank dps (10%) and drop 20% off of that for a result of 8% dps contribution add in the extra high potency dps attacks both tanks and healers got in Shadowbringers and you'll see that tanks are in the exact same spot they should be relative to the healers.

So the conclusion that tanks did in fact lost dps that was a part of the offensive stance in sb.
So we could say we all got forced into tank stance since 5.0, seems fair enough.
However it will cause problems in the future, mark my word when dps uptime on tanks will be less of a value than that of healers then a lot of funny things are going to happen. Rightnow tenacity should be the most valuable secondary stat due to healers uptime having bigger impact on raid dpa than a tank, savin one or two gcd on healer will likely be better than 1-1.5% on tank that contributes 8.5% rdps to the total number.

[Reynhart]

There should be an economy to it all, imo, whereby an equal increase in player skill in any given role is never going to be worth more in one role than another.

The problem is how you "scale" this worth. Let's say the gap between an average DPS and a top DPS is from 10k to 15k (made up numbers), you can't really have tanks ranging from 5k to 10k, because it would make the skill ceiling too high. However, having tanks ranging from 5k to 7,5k would mean that, for both roles, you'd have a 50% increase from average to top.

[BarretOblivion]

Right now the only tanks I can argue there is a feeling of "skill" to damage is between maybe DRK (dunno don't play it but its punishing when you screw up) and GNB with it mostly being gunbreaker requiring to regurgitate thier opener every 60 secs with bloodfest being the biggest skill check of knowing timings to use it for resource management.
PLD is not just straightforward but its easy to keep uptime when needing to move and WAR... just don't get me started on WAR -_- plz... they killed it.

And to the point of percentages changes for tanks between (skill tiers), don't use eden or at least use E1/E2s. Titan (uplift and the entire first phase when he picks tanks for mechanics to drop uptime is so brutal as there are some runs I can sit at 9k as a GNB for transition and then tank to 7k with no deaths during transition just because of mechanics.) and Leviathan both have RNG mechanics that destroy tank damage (stormy for leviathan can hurt a tank that's targetted as well as tsunami 2 for the tank that has the 'bomb').
So... I would look at tank differences between tiers with a grain of salt because there is a significant 'luck' factor with those two fights in particular.

[ReiMakoto]

Right now the only tanks I can argue there is a feeling of "skill" to damage is between maybe DRK (dunno don't play it but its punishing when you screw up) and GNB with it mostly being gunbreaker requiring to regurgitate thier opener every 60 secs with bloodfest being the biggest skill check of knowing timings to use it for resource management.
PLD is not just straightforward but its easy to keep uptime when needing to move and WAR... just don't get me started on WAR -_- plz... they killed it.

And to the point of percentages changes for tanks between (skill tiers), don't use eden or at least use E1/E2s. Titan (uplift and the entire first phase when he picks tanks for mechanics to drop uptime is so brutal as there are some runs I can sit at 9k as a GNB for transition and then tank to 7k with no deaths during transition just because of mechanics.) and Leviathan both have RNG mechanics that destroy tank damage (stormy for leviathan can hurt a tank that's targetted as well as tsunami 2 for the tank that has the 'bomb').
So... I would look at tank differences between tiers with a grain of salt because there is a significant 'luck' factor with those two fights in particular.

There isn't a luck factor if you organise your team properly, you can get 100% uptime on stormy if your team stays close to the dive where you stay further away then sprint/ cd to safety, pretty sure theres an uptime strat for the bomb too. For Titan you can choose a tank to get near 100% uptime for uplifts. Uplift 1 if the dps stand at the front of their platform tanks can drop their blue in a spot where it doesnt hit anyone but they can still hit the boss, the second blue mark is like a 2 gcd loss max if you time it right. Second uplift you can pick a tank to go with the melees an have front back groups so the melees and that tank always get 100% uptime (as well as padding off of the gaol with demon slice/slaughter and fated).

[Shurrikhan]

The problem is how you "scale" this worth. Let's say the gap between an average DPS and a top DPS is from 10k to 15k (made up numbers), you can't really have tanks ranging from 5k to 10k, because it would make the skill ceiling too high. However, having tanks ranging from 5k to 7,5k would mean that, for both roles, you'd have a 50% increase from average to top.

At risk of being especially redundant, imo, the % variation within one's own role is not what matters; the flat contribution value, when including both indirect (healing GCDs saved) and direct output (damage), is. Otherwise roles benefit equally from any equal increase in player skills.

If you need a more in-depth explanation, see any of the former posts, including the one you've quoted, such as just a few sentences before the chosen line.

But for two roles to be equally rewarding of mastery, they can't just have equal % gain relative to themselves, but also to each other.

[Reynhart]

At risk of being especially redundant, imo, the % variation within one's own role is not what matters

But, like I said, since the "base" DPS value is not the same for every role, you'll have a great difference in floor/ceiling. Also, whatever the ratio between DPS and tanks is considered "fair" (Around 60% seemed to be enough back in Alphascape), giving the same room for improvement will inevitably break it.

[J-Reyno]

There's no real reason tanks shouldn't have a higher reward for better performance. We've already seen that tanks are not having an effortless time maximizing damage. If that were the case we'd be seeing tanks reach their maximum dps with greater ease than dps jobs, but the percentiles show that tanks are very on par with dps jobs in terms of skill to damage gain. The only difference is that the tank role receives proportionately less damage gain for the effort.

So give tanks more to do besides dealing damage, some say. Kind of like healers have to heal? Okay, sure, but let's take a look at healers. Going by current numbers Astrologian sees a damage increase from 3.7k to 8.8k from 10th to 99th percentile. So not only do healers heal, but they also receive the same damage-for-effort reward that dps jobs have. Moreso, in the case of AST, because I'm not seeing a single dps job with a damage increase of 5k from lowest to highest performance.

Just to oblige I did check E2s specifically, and Gunbreaker's numbers barely change. Damage gain from 75th to 99th is 6.6%. 50th to 99th is 12% and 10th to 99th is 31%. Samurai sees damage gains of 6.8%, 12.6% and 34% respectively.

Paladin, the "easy" tank, sees a damage increase of 35% from 10th to 99th in E2s.

Dps and healer jobs both see much greater damage rewards. Tank is the odd one out here.