How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[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.