Tanking feels unimportant

[Seku]

Not really. Higher DpS often shortens fights leading to few mechanics that need to be done. Take Zurvan Ex for example. You had 3 rough Tiers of DpS: "insufficient to clear," "sufficient to clear" and "more than enough to skip Soar."



The fights are less on rails and more tightly choreographed with very short hard enrages. Fights are more determined by "can the party output enough dps to kill the boss before enrage" than "can the tanks and healers keep the party alive long enough for the dps to kill the boss."

Post-3.1, getting to enrage is more a question of properly handling mechanics rather than a test of the tanks' and healers' ability to deal with the damage the fight puts out. This is likely part of what makes the tanks feel unimportant.



The lack of randomness in high end boss attack patterns is the result of an attempt to make skill the primary determiner in completion of a fight rather than hoping that the RNG gives your group an easy pattern. They do not want World First Savage/Ultimate completion to be determined by which group was luck enough to get the easy pattern.


Lowering the amount of DpS need to complete a fight wouldn't make tanks more important even with added randomness. It would just make DpS even more important. It would actually require a very different fight design to make Tanks feel more important.

By that logic mitigation isn't binary either. you have "Not enough mitigation, you die", "Enough mitigation, a healer can heal the tank up", "The tank has mitigated enough damage, no GCD or OGCd required HoT's will handle it" or the"Tank takes 0 damage from any method, no GCD or OGCD required from the healer." The only issue is that no one cares in a majority of cases about option number 3 or 4.

The fights are on rails. No boss has a different sequence in which they use their moves. It's the same rotation every....single...time. and how just about every group goes about approaching a fight. The only "change" is if you force a phase change by knocking it into another phase of the fight. But again, that rotation of the new phase will be the same and repeat every single time.

Your fourth point, may I have evidence please? I'm unaware of this statement being made by any official about randomness being excluded due to not wanting luck to be a factor in determining World First.

Lowering the damage as in, incoming damage to the boss. Not faster kills. Anything to slow the death of the boss down while increasing damage output on the party would force more of a defensive stance. The fact that we can get away with "deal enough damage to skip mechanics" is a major reason as to why DPS is valued, which you have agreed to

Fights are more determined by "can the party output enough dps to kill the boss before enrage" than "can the tanks and healers keep the party alive long enough for the dps to kill the boss."

If there is a hard cap on damage and a set length of the fight that people have to get through it forces players to actually do mechanics and soak / heal the damage, then DPS wouldn't be as important and would be a step in a different direction. This can be done a number of ways out side of lowering the damage dealt to the boss as well. But I do agree that the fight design would need to be vastly different than what 14 is currently offering.

Randomness of the monsters attack pattern while DPS is limited to a set amount (damage is already limited to be fair, but SE let's us do a lot while content is relevant) would put more focus on healer's and tanks. Reason being is that a fight can go very side ways out of the blue. This would make keeping a certain amount of MP pretty crucial for healer's and force them not to contribute as much to DPS and could force tank swapping in the case that one tank's cool down's run out. This would also make it harder for groups to optimize a fight as each encounter would be different.

You can also add in mechanics such as "If party or tank takes to much damage, X mechanic happens" and apply it through out the fight. Or "Monster uses Tank buster, check tank for Cool down, No cool down = bad things happen. Cool down = normal things happen."