How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Bravely_Default]

Kind of an issue that DPS are pushing over 18.5k in many instances while tanks are sitting at around 10.5k (numbers bumped down to account for top percent.) It feels pretty bad when a DPS could LITERALLY have weakness the entire fight and still push out well over the damage of any tank maintaining 100% uptime. if for some reason even 65% of the DPS damage is TOO MUCH for a tank/healer, than give us a "rally cry" role skill that lasts for like 3 seconds and procs a damage buff for the entire team if you take a huge hit in that time.... than you would be indirectly buffing our damage big time while making us still TEAM reliant. However, given the fact that white mage heals are still as strong as they are while being able to put out more dps than any of the other healers with just 2 skills, SE is not going to change ANYTHING until the next expansion.

Sad truth is as long as they can keep making cash off of emotes and mounts from the mogstation and players stay subbed, nothing else matters.... I have to even wonder when the last time somebody from their team even looked at any of the class forums to realize the gripes being put out? considering gunbreaker sounds still havn't been reverted, probably NEVER lol. Just a huge echo chamber in here.

[MerlinCross]

Kind of an issue that DPS are pushing over 18.5k in many instances while tanks are sitting at around 10.5k (numbers bumped down to account for top percent.) It feels pretty bad when a DPS could LITERALLY have weakness the entire fight and still push out well over the damage of any tank maintaining 100% uptime. if for some reason even 65% of the DPS damage is TOO MUCH for a tank/healer, than give us a "rally cry" role skill that lasts for like 3 seconds and procs a damage buff for the entire team if you take a huge hit in that time.... than you would be indirectly buffing our damage big time while making us still TEAM reliant. However, given the fact that white mage heals are still as strong as they are while being able to put out more dps than any of the other healers with just 2 skills, SE is not going to change ANYTHING until the next expansion.

Sad truth is as long as they can keep making cash off of emotes and mounts from the mogstation and players stay subbed, nothing else matters.... I have to even wonder when the last time somebody from their team even looked at any of the class forums to realize the gripes being put out? considering gunbreaker sounds still havn't been reverted, probably NEVER lol. Just a huge echo chamber in here.

How much damage do tanks need then?

I mean I'm in agreement something needs to be done with tanks but personally I think just ramping up the damage is the wrong way to go about that. Give Tanks other duties, other abilities, other things to worry about besides pushing damage and let the damage dealers worry about keeping up time. Let the tanks worry about giving DPS the chance to DO that.

"But Merlin, you've said you want more Damage, what is your deal?"

Why yes I know someone might point out the hypocrisy. I simply see two possible paths; one where they put the breaks on the push for damage and one where they don't. And most the talk I've seen about this game across the community seems to frame it as "more damage" is the only possible end goal, regardless of what I think or want. I personally think it's a mistake to ask for more damage on the TANK role but hey if people want to run this into the ground, be my guest.

All I ask is hopefully something is decided and it gets done. Either for the improvement of the game, or to see this crash and burn faster.

[Insanecell]

You could give tanks and healers 100 things to do within their role and still see dps prioritized just under doing what you need to do to prevent a wipe. Whether your mmo has a trinity class system in it or not does not matter.

Its just that in mmos without the trinity like gw2, players will find ways to "tank" damage the boss does or find a way to sustain through it while keeping up in the nuclear arms race.

[Kalise]

How much damage do tanks need then?

I simply see two possible paths; one where they put the breaks on the push for damage and one where they don't. And most the talk I've seen about this game across the community seems to frame it as "more damage" is the only possible end goal, regardless of what I think or want. I personally think it's a mistake to ask for more damage on the TANK role but hey if people want to run this into the ground, be my guest.

Well, the fact remains, at the end of the day, Tanks will need to do meaningful damage.

Even if there are other Tank duties to consider, Tanks will need to be pushing out meaningful damage.

Why? Scalability.

Typical "Tank" duties are often binary. Usually something like "You either survive it or you don't". If you survive the damage, that's all you need, since you can be healed back up. (This is somewhat marred by tanks having invulnerability CD's allowing them to actually bypass literally any need to hit any sort of minimal gear requirements to survive a particular attack...)

Yet, the driving force for doing content and acquiring gear is to improve your stats. Hence, if "Tank Duties" are tuned around being survivable at minimum item level, which they literally need to be, then what purpose does gearing up serve? None. You simply will end up surviving the same skills but at a slightly higher HP total. That doesn't make the fight progress any better. Not unless it affects something like being able to drop use of a Tank LB and instead use a DPS LB.

Damage is typically the only facet of gearing that scales infinitely. Every point of DPS reduces the kill time of the boss by a fraction. Thus, damage needs to scale with gear at a rate which feels useful, so that gearing up feels useful.

Part of this also includes relative damage to DPS, since if DPS outscale the Tank significantly, then the Tanks increase of damage, no matter how large, will feel insignificant. I.e. If a Tank doing 10k DPS managed to increase his damage by 50% going up to 15k DPS, but at the same time DPS doing 20k DPS managed to increase their damage by 100% going up to 40k DPS, then the 5k increase from the Tank pales compared to the damage that the DPS are now doing.

This last point is of some notable concern for this expansion given that Tanks have a reduced scaling backwritten into their damage formulae, which will cause them to scale significantly slower than all other jobs. There could reach a point closer to the end of the expansion where tanks gear becomes irrelevant due to how minor impact it has on beating enrage timers.

[Kabooa]

Part of this also includes relative damage to DPS, since if DPS outscale the Tank significantly, then the Tanks increase of damage, no matter how large, will feel insignificant. I.e. If a Tank doing 10k DPS managed to increase his damage by 50% going up to 15k DPS, but at the same time DPS doing 20k DPS managed to increase their damage by 100% going up to 40k DPS, then the 5k increase from the Tank pales compared to the damage that the DPS are now doing.

Ramuh and Voidwalker are comparable uptime fights (Both having around 99.6+% uptime).

We are not yet week 8 so it is possible that not everyone is BIS, and given that these discussions tend to use metrics that favor gearing out the RDPS kings, it's possible that the Tanks or Healers in questions are not yet BIS while the DPS most likely are.

While we usually want to avoid using Max, in this regard it shows us the current plateau each job has hit. This will be useful.

We'll use Black Mage since Black Mage has received no potency adjustments to relevant abilities (No AoE, Foul's change irrelevant)

The Max of Black Mage in Voidwalker is: 17,402
The Max of Black Mage in Ramuh is: 20,403
Growth: 17.2%

The Max of Warrior in VW: 9380
The Max of Warrior in RM: 11,067
Growth: 17.9%
Compared to Black Mage VW: .54
Compared to Black Mage RM: .54

The Max of Paladin in VW: 9,758
The Max of Paladin in RM: 11,443
Growth: 17.2%
Compared to Black Mage VW: .56
Compared to Black Mage RM: .56

The Max of Gunbreaker in VW: 9,664
The Max of Gunbreaker in RM: 11,419
Growth: 18.1%
Compared to Black Mage VW: .55
Compared to Black Mage RM: .56

The Max of Dark Knight in VW: 9,377
The Max of Dark Knight in RM: 11,003
Growth: 17.3%
Compared to Black Mage VW: .54
Compared to Black Mage RM: .54


Given that Main Attribute increases and Sub-Stat increases will be the same, with variations most likely occurring on which stats show up where and what breakpoints can be hit in the BIS, this ratio should remain in dummy fights, shifting as Uptime differences occur depending on how encounters play out.

[Nedkel]

You could give tanks and healers 100 things to do within their role and still see dps prioritized just under doing what you need to do to prevent a wipe. Whether your mmo has a trinity class system in it or not does not matter.

Its just that in mmos without the trinity like gw2, players will find ways to "tank" damage the boss does or find a way to sustain through it while keeping up in the nuclear arms race.

This.
No matter what you try to design, dps is the main balance factor and its important for tanks and healers to do reasonable dps in comparison to dps role.
First you need to balance open pve and then instanced pve so all jobs could have important impact on the game.
Everyone could argue with me on this how they want it does not matter, in ALL mmorpgs i played the low dps tanks always were played the least because playing a useless meat shield IS NOT appealing at all from gameplay point of view.

[MerlinCross]

Well, the fact remains, at the end of the day, Tanks will need to do meaningful damage.

Even if there are other Tank duties to consider, Tanks will need to be pushing out meaningful damage.

Why? Scalability.

Typical "Tank" duties are often binary. Usually something like "You either survive it or you don't". If you survive the damage, that's all you need, since you can be healed back up. (This is somewhat marred by tanks having invulnerability CD's allowing them to actually bypass literally any need to hit any sort of minimal gear requirements to survive a particular attack...)

Yet, the driving force for doing content and acquiring gear is to improve your stats. Hence, if "Tank Duties" are tuned around being survivable at minimum item level, which they literally need to be, then what purpose does gearing up serve? None. You simply will end up surviving the same skills but at a slightly higher HP total. That doesn't make the fight progress any better. Not unless it affects something like being able to drop use of a Tank LB and instead use a DPS LB.

Damage is typically the only facet of gearing that scales infinitely. Every point of DPS reduces the kill time of the boss by a fraction. Thus, damage needs to scale with gear at a rate which feels useful, so that gearing up feels useful.

Part of this also includes relative damage to DPS, since if DPS outscale the Tank significantly, then the Tanks increase of damage, no matter how large, will feel insignificant. I.e. If a Tank doing 10k DPS managed to increase his damage by 50% going up to 15k DPS, but at the same time DPS doing 20k DPS managed to increase their damage by 100% going up to 40k DPS, then the 5k increase from the Tank pales compared to the damage that the DPS are now doing.

This last point is of some notable concern for this expansion given that Tanks have a reduced scaling backwritten into their damage formulae, which will cause them to scale significantly slower than all other jobs. There could reach a point closer to the end of the expansion where tanks gear becomes irrelevant due to how minor impact it has on beating enrage timers.

Just to be clear, how much is meaningful damage? How much damage do you people want before you are satisfied?

Yes I understand the fact that right now, tank duty is either "You did it or you wiped". A design idea I very much bloody hate. But demanding each expansion for "More damage" leads us into the problem we bloody have.

FF14 isn't a Trinity. It's 3 DPS, with 2 of them having secondary duties. And I'd very much like for some people to stop hiding behind that and embrace it. Devs included.

You could give tanks and healers 100 things to do within their role and still see dps prioritized just under doing what you need to do to prevent a wipe. Whether your mmo has a trinity class system in it or not does not matter.

Its just that in mmos without the trinity like gw2, players will find ways to "tank" damage the boss does or find a way to sustain through it while keeping up in the nuclear arms race.

I refer to you, the POWER Meta, where back in the day, everyone threw all their points into raw Power and basically turned the entire game into rocket tag to the point that if you didn't build properly, you couldn't go anywhere.

Thanks. I hate it.

This.
No matter what you try to design, dps is the main balance factor and its important for tanks and healers to do reasonable dps in comparison to dps role.
First you need to balance open pve and then instanced pve so all jobs could have important impact on the game.
Everyone could argue with me on this how they want it does not matter, in ALL mmorpgs i played the low dps tanks always were played the least because playing a useless meat shield IS NOT appealing at all from gameplay point of view.

"Reasonable DPS" is... what pray tell? 50%? 65? Let's just ramp it up to 80-95 and be done with it shall we?

And while you say being a useless meat shield is not appealing, I personally don't want to be told I picked the wrong ROLE in a game that tells me there are roles but really the only role is DPS. Just what color do you want to play. And while you also bring up important impact, yeah no. That's not happening.

Not in this community that still bloody makes tier lists. People are still complaining about which healer is best, RedMage is bloody useless, and do we even need to bring up the discussions around how much damage MNK does but no one seems to enjoy PLAYING the broken class? Pepperidge Farm bloody well remembers.

The only important impact the community allows or accepts is anything related to damage. On DPS this makes sense. On Tanks and Healers, I question why but I've come to see I'm just the actual crazy person here.

So let's just give everyone what they want. Real. Important. Impactful. Effects on gameplay. Which is to say, shift the game into hyper damage focus gameplay, and drive this into the dirt faster.

I'll be long gone, either to another MMO or going through my backlog. But hey, if everyone wants nothing but damage, the scaling is only going to go up. And when that's the only mechanic lever you have to balance around, might as well crank that sucker all the way.

People want more damage on Tanks. Fine. But don't complain when your kit next expansion looks as boring as Healers. After all, it's all you said you wanted.

[Insanecell]

That last parts not necessarily true Nedkel. There are players that enjoy playing unkillable juggernauts. However being a unkillable juggernaut comes at a price or at least should, WoW messed this up in Warlords of Draenor. The issue is that it turns into a discussion of meta and preference of playing style, then chaos breaks out from there.

[Shurrikhan]

"Reasonable DPS" is... what pray tell? 50%? 65? Let's just ramp it up to 80-95 and be done with it shall we?

For me, ideally...

Enough to feel that your contribution made a make-or-break impact towards a tight DPS check and is held to nearly the same expectations (in % performance even if not necessarily [or presently likely] meaningful effort required) as DPS. DPS, especially frontline damage-dealers, likewise, should have enough sturdiness to feel that they can have an impact in tanking tasks, should the game ever allow for such. (Think of the many WoW mechanics where melee or mobile-ranged DPS must cycle in to tank things.) Healers, in turn, need to have enough damage that the Healer damage saved (via healing GCDs and/or shared-resource abilities spared) by a tank and healer performing well nearly equates, across a 2nd healer and tank each, to the additional damage of taking 6 DPS instead when accounting for the play then forced upon the remaining single tank and healer each.

Generally, compared to the present situation, this would mean tanks a higher maximal direct contribution (damage) and a lower passive indirect contribution (mitigation) floor and likely less base eHP, while mobs' and bosses' burst damage and Healers' HPS should be decreased to compensate.

Between those restrictions, there should be at least be faint case for possibly replacing a role in either direction, swapping out any tank, DPS, or healer in a 8-man content depending on the needs of the party. If there is never any such case, the fight's design is arguably too rigid and the combat economy imbalanced in the context of that fight's design. That is to say that if, prior to the highest levels of play, no way in which a 3rd tank or healer would be useful but face other and almost equally significant either, the fight does too little to engage with forms of indirect contribution or has imbalanced any one form of contribution (Damage, Mitigation, or Healing). Most fights at present imbalance themselves towards damage-dealing, offering tanks too few tools by which to make use of their indirect contribution without overly relying on rigid mechanics (vulnerability-swaps, tankbusters even the minorest of which a melee DPS cannot survive, etc.) or its passive components (bloated passive Defense atop massive eHP and a 20% baseline mitigation trait). Some HW fights, alternatively, could be said to have imbalanced in other directions, at least in the context of the power of WAR and SCH, and later AST.

To give a ballpark number, a tank should spend 60-70% of the effort of a DPS to deal its damage optimally, and should output around 80-85% of that DPS's damage when purely dedicated to offense, but would typically generate the greatest rDPS while doing around 70% of a DPS's dps. In total, a tank should require perhaps a faint bit more effort in total than your average DPS (e.g. one who does not participate in tanking or healing tasks) to play optimally on the whole, and the equal to a more hybrid DPS with a more versatile toolkit that sees full use; in a perfect party's perfect play, the highest jobs which require the highest effort/awareness/mastery/etc get the highest rDPS, though not by enough for a poor player to shoot for nor enough to oblige even a merely "quite good" player to swap to. The sturdiest melee DPS (let's say MNK with RoE or a DRG otherwise) should have around 70% of the eHP of a tank. (Yes, that includes its mitigation.) Fight design should have enough damage output that the defense difference between, say, a SAM and a BLM is actually, in terms of rDPS in the context of the full party and the opportunities by which that rDPS is rewarded, slightly more than make up for a BLM having more damage than a SAM. (This is, again, just a matter of keeping the different 'currencies' of output--Damage, Mitigation, and Healing--in balance.)

All this would of course require massive changes to fight design and Tank (and likely Healer and DPS) toolkits, however, so consider it merely a pipedream.

[Kalise]

Just to be clear, how much is meaningful damage? How much damage do you people want before you are satisfied?

It's hard to say.

Enough damage that it feels like performance has an impact on beating enrage timers or otherwise making the boss die faster. With enough scaling so that increasing gear within a tier feels like an improvement.

Ironically, the more "Tank Duties" that exist that pull away from focus on DPS, the more raw damage Tanks will require, so that when they've performed their duties well and get some time to drop some damage, that damage will feel like a meaningful contribution.

Yes I understand the fact that right now, tank duty is either "You did it or you wiped". A design idea I very much bloody hate.

If you can think of a tank duty that doesn't result in a binary option, you're welcome to share it.

Personally, I once suggested a mechanic similar to XIII's Stagger system so Tanks could focus on creating burst windows against bosses which can scale infinitely with how fast they can create them and thus how many opportunities they can provide in a fight. Though, the downside is that it literally cannot function in XIV because this game is so heavily focused around everyone popping their 60/90/120s CD DPS cooldowns on 60/90/120 second intervals meaning that any burst window that doesn't line up with 60/90/120 second intervals is bad. (Also, they call this "Co-ordination" when people just press their CD's when they light up as opposed to other games where people actually co-ordinate because CD usage is determined via which boss phase to skip by bursting them down as well as a powerful once per fight Bloodlust/Heroism/Time Warp CD)

But demanding each expansion for "More damage" leads us into the problem we bloody have.

You mean the problem where the Dev's keep trying to find ways to artificially handicap Tank damage for... Reasons?

And while you say being a useless meat shield is not appealing, I personally don't want to be told I picked the wrong ROLE in a game that tells me there are roles but really the only role is DPS. Just what color do you want to play. And while you also bring up important impact, yeah no. That's not happening.

Being a useless meat shield is not appealing.

Trust me, I've played games where Tank damage was insignificant. Do you know what I did to optimize my gameplay? I pressed taunt then tabbed out to look at funny memes and only tabbed back in when boss was doing a tankbuster so I pressed a CD then went back to look at memes for the next minute.

Why? Because whether I was looking at funny memes or pressing attack buttons didn't affect the encounter at all, but one was infinitely more enjoyable (Hint: It was the memes)

One could argue that if mitigation was a more active part of combat theen being a useless meat shield would be more interesting and I wouldn't be able to tab out and look at funny memes. However, due to how binary tank duties are, you only need to actively mitigate enough to stay alive, which often isn't necessarily 100% engaging, especially once you gear up beyond minimum item levels (In addition to healers gearing up beyond minimum item levels, since that's the secondary factor in this, tanks required mitigation gets hit twice by gear increases because both your own mitigation and healer throughput increases)

Thus, once you hit the downtime between mitigating damage, which exponentially increases as your party gears up, you need something to do. Something that is engaging and feels worth your time to do. Thus, given limited options of things that are possible to do and feel worth your time, it comes down to damage, the ever present and infinitly scaling metric.

People want more damage on Tanks. Fine. But don't complain when your kit next expansion looks as boring as Healers. After all, it's all you said you wanted.

That's not the case.

Heck, I'm an active advocator of Tanks getting more Tank duties to perform, especially the removal of the horrible design which is passive defence that makes up 99% of your mitigation in favour of more engaging active defense skills (Which can be themed to each class, such as you can find in WoW. I.e. Warriors use Shield Block to guarantee blocked damage, Paladins use Shield of the Righteousness to increase their armour (Used to increase block chance), Death Knights use Death Strike to heal and create an absorb shield, Monks use Purifying Brew alongside passive delayed damage, Demon Hunters have Fel Spikes granting armour and parry and Druids have Ironfur increasing armour (Used to be Dodge which made little sense on the class that passively gains more max HP than other tanks))

It's just, being able to pack a punch alongside having tank duties is desired. Since, I've played enough games where the constant whining of DPS mains caused Tank damage to be neutered to the point where it just didn't feel good to play a Tank since all you really did was sit there like a target dummy and spam enmity/taunts.

Not to mention, the whole idea of "Why's the boss just attacking the one person who is not a threat?" being mitigated by you know, Tanks actually being a threat in their own right. Bosses should focus me because I'm kicking their ass.

In an ideal world, Tank damage and Tank duties would be intertwined. Meaning, a Tank performing a Tank duty of mitigating damage, is rewarded with damage. This damage, allows them to access another skill for mitigating damage to use against the next attack, thus gaining more damage.

With, again ideally, these damage increases being proportionate to how much you mitigate so that the better you mitigate damage the better your damage output and the better your damage output the better your mitigation options. (You know, as opposed to the old WoW Vengeance, which had reverse scaling because the attack power increase was based on damage taken after mitigation, meaning you ended up actively sabotaging your own mitigation to get more attack power...)