How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Aurelius2625]

As an absolute BASELINE, tanks NEED to do MORE damage than healers. Healers are the quintessential make or break role... you suck at it, everyone dies, you don't do enough damage? It's noticeable.

There's a huge difference between an optimized healer and a non optimized one. Their damage shoots through the roof as they peel back all of the bandaid panic heals and replace those GCDs with damage gcds.

Healers have a clear pathway for damage progression: less healing, more damaging.

Tanks have no such thing, really. The combos and rotations are braindead easy, and honestly, almost all of these fights can be solo tanked without the introduction of a "forced gimmick" that is forced for no other reason than to force two tanks to be brought. Seriously. Looking at the busters in this tier, how many of them are designed not thru damage, but thru sheer gimmicks to require two tanks?

If I do 9k or 11k dmg it doesn't matter. I don't have a big impact. The skill floor is so low for tanks, the skill ceiling is so low, for tanks. But there's a HUGE difference between an 11k Greyville monk and a 18 to 19k OJ monk. A good dps player is noticeable.

[Satarn]

There's a huge difference between an optimized healer and a non optimized one. Their damage shoots through the roof as they peel back all of the bandaid panic heals and replace those GCDs with damage gcds.

Healers have a clear pathway for damage progression: less healing, more damaging.

Tanks have no such thing, really.

We used to though - the stance system - but many people failed to see it for the possibilities it brought and wanted it gone.

No, I am not talking about the supposed "stance dancing", as that was barely ever a thing of course. What old stance system did however, was that if you knew how to properly use your mitigation cooldowns - which before 5.0 were both more numerous and varied - you could drop the tank stance without being a hindrance to healers and were rewarded for it with more damage.
Sadly vast majority of tanks would sit in damage stance despite lacking sense to even use Rampart more than once in a fight, but the consequence then was also less rDPS - as you'd waste healer gcds by forcing them to babysit you.

Stances were not 1:1 like the healer gcd trade-offs, but they were similar and had potential to be better, if mitigation - and perhaps enmity as well - were made even more demanding. Instead SE completely killed the mechanic, pruned and homogenized mitigation, killed off enmity and then forced us to keep passive stance mitigation - along with its low damage - on permanently, via a stupid trait.

[Awful]

As an absolute BASELINE, tanks NEED to do MORE damage than healers. Healers are the quintessential make or break role... you suck at it, everyone dies, you don't do enough damage? It's noticeable.

There's a huge difference between an optimized healer and a non optimized one. Their damage shoots through the roof as they peel back all of the bandaid panic heals and replace those GCDs with damage gcds.

Healers have a clear pathway for damage progression: less healing, more damaging.

Tanks have no such thing, really. The combos and rotations are braindead easy, and honestly, almost all of these fights can be solo tanked without the introduction of a "forced gimmick" that is forced for no other reason than to force two tanks to be brought. Seriously. Looking at the busters in this tier, how many of them are designed not thru damage, but thru sheer gimmicks to require two tanks?

If I do 9k or 11k dmg it doesn't matter. I don't have a big impact. The skill floor is so low for tanks, the skill ceiling is so low, for tanks. But there's a HUGE difference between an 11k Greyville monk and a 18 to 19k OJ monk. A good dps player is noticeable.

Can't agree more with this post honestly, the skill floor for tanks is indeed low and I wish there was more to do but I can't and nor can we bring just 1 tank because of the gimmicks, I remember back in T9 you could have just 1 tank for that fight and it was great honestly. I hope they move away from the design of what tanks and healers are now and change it in 6.0 the gameplay of these roles need to change I find, I can do well at 9.5-10.5k dps but it means nothing if the DPS I'm with when we hit enrage are at like 12k DPS, but when you see a good DPS do like 18k DPS it makes the world of difference.

Hell I'd even be in favor of 10 man raids that are accessible with 3-4 bosses in them with 2 tanks 2 heals and 5 DPS to give us something different, makes me think a lot of Karazhan back in TBC WoW where it was such a well designed 10 man dungeon and everyone was doing something and rewarded everyone for tanking, healing, dps, different era and different game but immensely enjoyable.

[Aurelius2625]

Grats on the Shiva Clear btw .

Did a run of Ramuh and Garuda/Ifrit on my ruby weapon WAR and was able to be at purple, that shows you how easy it is to do well on a tank. I have so little to improve, once I get fully geared in these fights.

[Shurrikhan]

As an absolute BASELINE, tanks NEED to do MORE damage than healers.

While I'd agree that tanks ought to deal more damage, assuming compensation elsewhere, this feels shockingly off to me. Why should a role which has no compromise between its direct and indirect outputs (Damage and Healing/Resurrections Spared) have higher direct output than a role in which the two are mutually exclusive in any given GCD? Where able to use solely oGCDs, healing is free to Healers, apart from any clipping necessary, but no matter how intensive the damage intake gets Tanks' mitigation is always and entirely free of cost to their damage output. So why should the one role that gets its entire unique functionality for free output more than the one that does not?

I'd agree that in an typical Savage fight, enough healing should be required that a Healer's total damage dealt ought to be less than that of a tank, but that is an issue of fight design more so than job design. Until Tanks are no longer bloated by so much free mitigation (with the majority of the healing spared thereby caused being outright passive), they should have less raw damage throughput than a healer in anything approaching a dummy/SSS-fight situation.

[Kalise]

So why should the one role that gets its entire unique functionality for free output more than the one that does not?

Probably for these very reasons.

Healer DPS and GCD healing compete for usage (In an ideal world where healing isn't 99% free because leloGCD's). Thus, if Healers do more DPS, then there puts more focus on Healers actively avoiding their primary role to DPS more.

Meanwhile, with Tanks not having any resource competition between their Tanking and DPS skills, having higher DPS doesn't necessarily detract away from them performing their primary role.

This is an oversimplification, but from a design standpoint, you don't want the role that has competing resources to have more efficiency with their off-role causing conflict within gameplay.

There are however, other things that can be considered in regards to this too, such as the minutia of such a scenario where if healers do more DPS than Tanks, then Tanks sacrificing DPS for more mitigation in order to allow for more room for the Healer to DPS can be a thing (As opposed to the Tenacity issue, we currently have, where the DPS loss from melding Ten over Crit/DH isn't mitigated by the DPS gain from healers pushing out more DPS GCD's (Partially due to the fact that it outright doesn't even mitigate a GCD spent on healing)). Though, such a scenario would need to actually have any sort of interaction with mitigation beyond maybe melding Ten/Det over Crit/DH and then still just mashing max DPS combos during fights anyway.

[Shurrikhan]

...from a design standpoint, you don't want the role that has competing resources to have more efficiency with their off-role...

...What? It should be quite clear that I'm not saying healers should be more DPS-efficient than DPS to the point that they'd never heal (though I'm not sure there's much of any point at which never healing would EVER be efficient), so I can only assume this is continuing the comparison between the 'off-role' (damage dealing) of tanks and healers. So, let's consider.

Let's say as a healer I have access to my off-role 80% of the time. You, as a tank, have access to your off-role 100% of the time. Assuming we had equal output, you'd do 25% more off-role throughput than I would.

Now, atop that, you want my off-role's uptime to be LESS effective than yours? Not only does my off-role cost me my main role, but you want it to be weaker than your off-role, which costs you nothing?

How does that remotely sound intuitive, balanced, or otherwise sensible to you?

Again...

I'd agree that in an typical Savage fight, enough healing should be required that a Healer's total damage dealt ought to be less than that of a tank.

Indeed, virtually any healing output, by nature of it being mutually exclusive with damage-dealing, ought to put them (nearly) on level. But the throughput of 100% DPS uptime on a Tank, at zero cost to their 'main' role, absolutely should NOT be higher than that of a healer, whose 'main' role is mutually exclusive with that output. Again, my response was to the idea of their output rate, not their totals.

[Kalise]

Let's say as a healer I have access to my off-role 80% of the time. You, as a tank, have access to your off-role 100% of the time. Assuming we had equal output, you'd do 25% more off-role throughput than I would.

Now, atop that, you want my off-role's uptime to be LESS effective than yours? Not only does my off-role cost me my main role, but you want it to be weaker than your off-role, which costs you nothing?

How does that remotely sound intuitive, balanced, or otherwise sensible to you?

The sense comes from when players find dumb ways to exploit things.

Say you're a healer who has more throughput than the tank, but you spend 20% of your time healing so your average DPS is about equal.

What happens when you spend 15% of your time healing? 10%?

At what point does it become more worthwhile to let the Tank die and have someone insta-res them with weakness because you pumping out more damage yourself is more effective than their 100% uptime and you stopping to cast GCD heals (Most notably would be the case of a DRK using LD when there isn't a WHM with Benediction available, why bother spam healing them when you can just nuke the boss and Swiftcast Raise)?

At what point does the meta become having PLD spam Clemency to heal themselves/the MT because their DPS is not worth as much as a Healer forgoing healing?

At what point is it more valuable for Tanks to run about soaking orbs meant for rDPS/Healers because it allows the Healers to sit still nuking for more overall DPS?

That's the issue of having inequalities in the off-role when it conflicts with a main role. You start to dumpster the role that has a less effective off role by ignoring your main role.

When the off-role doesn't conflict with the main role, then there's complete freedom to have the off-role be as effective as you want, because it can never cause people to sacrifice their main role and thus make others do it for them, in order to better facilitate their own, superior, off-role capabilities.

This is where on the face of it, it sounds balanced to have the role with lower uptime on DPS to thus have higher DPS capacity to average out the same as a role with higher uptime on DPS. But such a scenario can cause players to look to exploit mechanics in order to simply focus on increasing the higher damage role's uptime at the cost of the lower damage role.

But it also means effectively nothing.

Oh wow, now tanks do [more than they currently do despite them doing exactly the same thing as before]. Exciting!

It means that instead of waging the same battle we've been doing for 6+ years at trying to not get gimped stats/gear, we can instead get normalized stats that the devs don't need to keep trying to mess with.

Leading to the opportunity to focus on other topics, such as having a more engaging tank role or at the very least, a somewhat interesting DPS rotation.

To say nothing about how prog raiders, world first racers and speed killers would all find it notably interesting to have not only more base damage on tanks, but also better scaling so that tank gear has a slightly larger impact on overall DPS (It'd also be a slight boon to BRD too since buffing both the tanks via songs will net them a marginally higher rDPS total)

[Arkhon-Infaustus]

Leading to the opportunity to focus on other topics, such as having a more engaging tank role or at the very least, a somewhat interesting DPS rotation.

Exactly. I miss 2.0 and 3.0 because being a tank meant something: you had to manage aggro, use a lot of skills to reduce damages and help your healer(s), manage MP (for DRK) etc... I played warrior on 2.0 and dark knight on 3.0 and it was really fun back then, they had a real identity and who cares if I wasn't dealing a lot of damages, it's a "bonus", that's not my role, or else I play DPS.

Now what, I'm only a HP bag, using one skill to fix aggro, one cooldown from time to time, and the shield (as DRK) blackest night which is the only interesting feature.
But hey, I have a new DPS rotation (as DRK again), a one target skill and an aoe skill, wouhou. And I can use them when I have MP to spend, which means not often, yay !

SE should focus on what each role means, and not try to put DPS everywhere. Tanking is for taking hits, reducing damages, managing aggro and features depending on your job's gameplay. Healing is for, well... healing, and if I want to hit hard, I play DPS, that's all. Now I just don't want to play tank anymore.

[Shurrikhan]

At what point does it become more worthwhile to let the Tank die and have someone insta-res them with weakness because you pumping out more damage yourself is more effective than their 100% uptime and you stopping to cast GCD heals (Most notably would be the case of a DRK using LD when there isn't a WHM with Benediction available, why bother spam healing them when you can just nuke the boss and Swiftcast Raise)?

Not too far away, I'd imagine, which is why I've been suggesting higher maximum tank damage output if they too can see meaningful output conflict -- not to mention threads on how tanks will always scale more poorly than other roles so long as much of their kit is tied up in percentile mitigation, which scales only with content -- and have criticized how little healing there is to be done in the majority of this game's fights. This isn't just a matter of tuning. It's a fundamental issue.

No unconflicted output should be stronger than one that is given entirely for free. As you've said, merely throwing out a buff to the almost-entirely conflicted output isn't going to be able to balance its output against another that is entirely free by just assuming a certain amount of necessary conflict. The fights across this game vary too wildly in their damage intake. Moreover, at present healers, in a sense, benefit doubly from gear in that they both afford for themselves more time to damage atop higher damage dealt, while apart from granular damage increases all the opportunities afforded by a tank's gear (i.e. towards their 'main role' or 'indirect') output only seem to benefit only the healer, even if it is ultimately the tank's rDPS.

The problem with balancing Blue DPS is that they're always set for a 100% 'time spent focusing mitigation', because they've removed their ability to actually influence direct (damage) vs. indirect (mitigation) outputs. There's still some skill-gap in both regards, but even when noting that half or more of that skill-gap shows only on other players' performance (in a way we somehow forget despite noting it at length on any DNC's or RDM's parse), it pales compared to that of healers because it gives the player nothing to adapt to or around. The fundamental problem with balancing Tanks is that they are both never truly Tanks (gameplay-wise), nor ever not entirely tanks (in terms of % mitigation output and its relevant costs to other outputs). They vary in tankiness only as a DPS varies in DPS-ness during CDs, despite healers following an obviously far different and far more sensible design paradigm, even if the majority of the game's fights are a lackluster mess in terms of healing required.