How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[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.