How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[MerlinCross]

Yeah, and what was the problem with it tell me? And what tank meta has anything to do how we play the game? The game will only let you have 2 tanks if you want the loot, also having a full party of tanks who still deal way less dps than everything else wouldnt even be efficient. Btw you could do encounters and dungeons even without tank right now, is this okay then?

The problem was failed DPS players that wanted nothing but fat Fell Cleaves eating it again and again cause they didn’t learn to tank. And due to that whole Meta we got shifted into what have now. I’m quite convinced the problems we have now steam from Heavensward. They still have no idea how to really deal with TEN it seems.

So why SE consecutively buffed redmage and ninja in the last patches when it shouldnt mean anything? Because it does.

Ninja is trying to be pulled away from Trick Attack, kicking and screaming. That’s a separate issue these days. And good for Red Mage. You Forum mathers going to play it or does it have to surpass the next class first?

Lol brining the numbers up wont change your tank gameplay even a bit, it would just make it more important to be good at it thats all. I fail to rationalize the stance you are taking against having higher numbers instead of being 2x weaker than dps, in the next gear tier the difference is going to be even bigger. Tanks scaling IS SO BAD that they dealing less damage than healers.

Rising the numbers won’t change your gameplay either other than letting you carry people or make up for your own mistakes. And what’s the difference between letting you hit harder and shaving off some boss HP or messing with the enrage timers?

Come next expansion, I question how tank gameplay looks if all they hear is “more damage”. I look forward to every tank getting a 100% Crit buff or passing out “Fight or Flight” across everyone. Picture it, an expansion that boosts your damage and nothing else. Fun for you sure but it’s barely a bandaid for the problem. Which is why I argue against simply bumping the numbers up and the outright demands for it. One of them being the head long rush we seem to be in but few care.

And thanks for bringing up Healers. Correct me if I’m wrong(Middle of the bloody night self quarantine wrecks sleep schedule), but wasn’t the idea to bump up Healer damage but at the same time game healing harder so they wouldn’t be using the damage spells as much? Oh wait that seemed to bloody fail didn’t it.

That’s an issue I have. Simply adding raw damage without changing the battle system runs us into problems like this. Tacking on more damage in my mind can limit the design space and lemme tell ya on the player side, we really don’t have much space left anyway.

You ask me why I’m against bigger numbers, I ask you why you want them. I also ask why you want them besides it would feel better to play a tank.

[Lyth]

A couple of points.

Damage dealt is always an important consideration, irrespective of role. Nobody is saying that tanks should do more damage than primary damage dealers. But we still need to do relevant damage. This is because:
1) Your ability to clear fights is gated behind raid damage output.
2) Every tank in this game functions in melee range, and damage output is a function of melee uptime. If tank melee uptime doesn't matter, we can just go invuln mechanics in the corner while everyone else does relevant damage.
3) The entire appeal of tanking is built around going toe-to-toe with the boss. This, in turn, is built around you being a credible threat. If you're beating on the boss with a foam bat, why are they targeting you? Because they're programmed to do so?

It's obviously not the only consideration, either. From a fight design perspective, tanking in this game is sub-par. The reason is because we've moved away from positioning and movement mechanics in favour of self-positioning bosses. It's the MMO equivalent of a rail shooter. This is a historic problem with Square Enix. When you become overly fixated on the dramatisation and story-telling elements of the fight, it stops being a game and it starts to turn into an extended cutscene. Mash square to power up your Guardian Force.

Let us position the boss. Let us move the boss around. Let us dictate the course of the fight. Your dramatic fight choreography may not play out as planned, but at least it'll be enjoyable to play, not watch. Give tanks back their autonomy. Let players control how the fight unfolds. Not you. The players.

There's another issue here. The developers seem to want to make tanking more accessible. But it's all backwards. In dungeon content, tanks are expected to know where to go, how to pull, and direct the flow of the fights. That's intimidating for very new players, sure. But when you get anywhere near raid content, it's reversed. You have auto-positioning, auto-tanking bosses. You're irrelevant. It should be the opposite: easy to pick-up and get into, but difficult to master.

I feel like the game that the present fight-designers are trying to deliver is very different from what tanks, especially those who have spend time playing western MMOs, are looking for. Which is fine - maybe they've analysed the market and such players aren't important to their bottom line. Regardless, I think that they would be better suited just sticking to healers and dps if there's no room for high level tanking. Just create a quicktime event for one of the dps when you want the big tankbuster moment to happen for dramatic effect.

Tanking needs to be both relevant and accessible. In trying to make tanking accessible, the devs have failed at both. If they care, the above problems are the ones to fix.

[MerlinCross]

1) Your ability to clear fights is gated behind raid damage output.

What percent of damage should we take as our assigned damage output to kill the boss though? Put a different way, each time we get a buff, we make the fight easier. Something I know people are not going to be happy with(Though Elitists like that can go jump in a stack marker). Granted, I hate how tight the enrages are, but how much easier do we have to make it for DPS?

Look I'm fine with the idea of giving us some damage so that the DPS don't have to play to 100% skill. They can get some slack, mess up some times, and still win the fight. Not after dying like 5 times or messing up royally on their rotation. I just question if people are asking for more tank damge to make raids easier(if that's the case how about we just nerf the raids instead) or think they'll have more fun with higher numbers(if so, DPS that way).

2) Every tank in this game functions in melee range, and damage output is a function of melee uptime. If tank melee uptime doesn't matter, we can just go invuln mechanics in the corner while everyone else does relevant damage.

See previous. How much damage should we do to cover for the DPS?

3) The entire appeal of tanking is built around going toe-to-toe with the boss. This, in turn, is built around you being a credible threat. If you're beating on the boss with a foam bat, why are they targeting you? Because they're programmed to do so?

Yes they are programmed to do so because the player based complained about hitting them with the foam bat rotation instead of the damage one, and even then the damage one could carry you. Now unless you're not attacking at all, or maybe swinging 1 attack compared to a DPS's entire rotation, there's no threat of losing threat. Even if you did SAM/BLK damage levels, the moment you understand Tanking is On/Off that 'needing to be a credible threat' idea is down the drain. The only difference would be we suddenly don't even need the Stance at that point, but I don't think people are THAT lazy to need even that removed.

I do agree with the rest of your statements though. I've said it before, taking wasn't terribly in depth or challenging before. And you could actually cheese some fights with Titan Egi before. Now, I feel like I'm playing Titan Egi. And surprisingly, adding more damage isn't going to make it feel more fun but that's all we get to ask for these days. Case in Point, DRK might actually do far more damage than it did in Stormblood, hate how it plays and feels. But hey, Damage with 1 busted Tank skill makes a tank right?

Thanks Square and Community. I hate it.

[Hierro]

I can't be bothered to look through previous pages, but I wanna throw in my own gripe:

Tank damage has been continually tuned down to be less and less of the overall pie chart of outgoing damage. Still, if a DPS player was terrible then you could see GOOD tanks outdamage them. Nowadays you can have a single-digits grey DPS still outperforming even pink tanks by a large margin, despite several deaths. That's just sad, and it makes playing well discouraging seeing how little we affect the outcome of a fight.

Plus, WHM outdamaging tanks? No way, brother, that doesn't sit right with me.

[BarretOblivion]

I can't be bothered to look through previous pages, but I wanna throw in my own gripe:

Plus, WHM outdamaging tanks? No way, brother, that doesn't sit right with me.

Not just that... but WHM isn't the highest damaging potential healers. That falls into AST of all things ( yeah no idea how but AST at the top end out DPS WHMs by a good chunk but that is with raid buffs)

[Lyth]

...

It's all relative. When raid damage wins fights, roles that do more damage are proportionately more important. That's always been the case in this game, which is most groups prioritise damage dealers in loot distribution.

The dps role tends to be the most overcrowded role regardless of which game you play. You really need to give people a reason to pick up tanks and healers. Traditionally, that comes from 'carry potential' and a general sense that you're essential to the clear. That's the underlying reason for this discussion. It's not purely about tank damage. At it's core, it's about tank importance.

There are three problems facing tanks. First, there's been a shocking lack of positioning mechanics in raid content during the past couple of expansions. I suspect this comes down to a programming limitation in which mobs have to stop their movement in order to use abilities (and perhaps that odd spin exploit). As a result, bosses tend to re-position, re-orientate, and lock themselves in place prior to performing each mechanic. But then what's your tank's job? I've said this before, but it feels like the last time that tank movement actually mattered was A7S. It's been a while now since I've last properly played Warcraft (circa 2008), but it feels like forcing your tank to continuously and safely re-position a boss while it fluidly throws out cleaves was the norm.

And even if this movement/animation lock issue is a programming legacy issue that they can't fix and this is a workaround that they're forced to do to prevent an exploit, I think that the fight designers still need to find ways to make tank positioning matter within their constraints. Auto-positioning bosses are just not acceptable fight design.

Second, invulns trivialise most tank mitigation mechanics. Raidwides are the real threat to your team. It feels like you're giving the healers a dps window whenever it's just the tank taking damage. There's nothing vaguely threatening or challenging about it. 'Press button at known fixed timestamp every 5 minutes then swap' doesn't make for particularly engaging gameplay. There needs to be more of an emphasis on actively mitigating damage from damage spikes that can potentially kill you throughout the fight. Unmarked cleaves are good for that. Looking back to fights like A3S, that was presumably the whole point of introducing short recast abilities like Sheltron.

Lastly, in failing to address the first two issues, the only way in which a tank can meaningfully contribute is by doing damage. But as Hierro pointed out, there's been a progressive push by the devs to make tanks offer less and less of the pie, with no real end in sight. I find it especially irritating every time Yoshi-p's vision for what a tank is comes up in interviews. No, I am not here to stand in front of the boss in a fixed spot and cheer you on while you do damage. I am not your sidekick. Please get someone who actually enjoys playing tanks to advise you on what a tank should be. And fix it. Because there isn't a whole lot of incentive for players to want to pick up a tank in raid content at the moment, outside of nostalgia or identifying with the role.

I didn't mention enmity in all this. Enmity only exists because tanks should, by design, do less damage than a comparative dps when both are played at an equal skill level (or else people would do progression using just tanks and healers). But there's nothing that dealing fictional damage offers that dealing real damage does not. The point on rotation difficulty was something that I didn't go into, simply because all jobs have become progressively simpler over time to make them more 'accessible'. Tanks have been affected more by this, but rotations aren't the only way to challenge a player's skill.

[MerlinCross]

The dps role tends to be the most overcrowded role regardless of which game you play. You really need to give people a reason to pick up tanks and healers. Traditionally, that comes from 'carry potential' and a general sense that you're essential to the clear. That's the underlying reason for this discussion. It's not purely about tank damage. At it's core, it's about tank importance.

Yes no. Yes it's about tank Importance, No the only importance the community will accept is damage.

There are three problems facing tanks. First, there's been a shocking lack of positioning mechanics in raid content during the past couple of expansions. I suspect this comes down to a programming limitation in which mobs have to stop their movement in order to use abilities (and perhaps that odd spin exploit). As a result, bosses tend to re-position, re-orientate, and lock themselves in place prior to performing each mechanic. But then what's your tank's job? I've said this before, but it feels like the last time that tank movement actually mattered was A7S. It's been a while now since I've last properly played Warcraft (circa 2008), but it feels like forcing your tank to continuously and safely re-position a boss while it fluidly throws out cleaves was the norm.

And even if this movement/animation lock issue is a programming legacy issue that they can't fix and this is a workaround that they're forced to do to prevent an exploit, I think that the fight designers still need to find ways to make tank positioning matter within their constraints. Auto-positioning bosses are just not acceptable fight design.

"Muh uptime" goes the Melee. I suppose square got tired of hearing that and tanks are a smaller community to listen complain, if we even do.

Second, invulns trivialise most tank mitigation mechanics. Raidwides are the real threat to your team. It feels like you're giving the healers a dps window whenever it's just the tank taking damage. There's nothing vaguely threatening or challenging about it. 'Press button at known fixed timestamp every 5 minutes then swap' doesn't make for particularly engaging gameplay. There needs to be more of an emphasis on actively mitigating damage from damage spikes that can potentially kill you throughout the fight. Unmarked cleaves are good for that. Looking back to fights like A3S, that was presumably the whole point of introducing short recast abilities like Sheltron.

This I agree with. Though at the same time, too much value in those short recast abilities could lead to other problems(COUGH Blackest Night, COUGH)

Lastly, in failing to address the first two issues, the only way in which a tank can meaningfully contribute is by doing damage. But as Hierro pointed out, there's been a progressive push by the devs to make tanks offer less and less of the pie, with no real end in sight. I find it especially irritating every time Yoshi-p's vision for what a tank is comes up in interviews. No, I am not here to stand in front of the boss in a fixed spot and cheer you on while you do damage. I am not your sidekick. Please get someone who actually enjoys playing tanks to advise you on what a tank should be. And fix it. Because there isn't a whole lot of incentive for players to want to pick up a tank in raid content at the moment, outside of nostalgia or identifying with the role.

Which is why I've mentioned I feel like Titan Egi. But simply making me do more damage is going to fix this how? They've kept triming away tank damage but at the same time not replacing it with anything, along with trimming away possible duties for us. DRK could outdamage DRG but I would still find it clunky and annoying to play as, and while that's hyperbole, I don't see how raw damage numbers as being fun unless there's more to the class/role. And right now there really isn't for tanks.

I didn't mention enmity in all this. Enmity only exists because tanks should, by design, do less damage than a comparative dps when both are played at an equal skill level (or else people would do progression using just tanks and healers). But there's nothing that dealing fictional damage offers that dealing real damage does not. The point on rotation difficulty was something that I didn't go into, simply because all jobs have become progressively simpler over time to make them more 'accessible'. Tanks have been affected more by this, but rotations aren't the only way to challenge a player's skill.

Enmity gives you something else to worry about, something else to manage, something that tanks barely have these days and is part of the problem. I had a lot more fun(or more memorable panic moments) where I had to push out a lot of "Fictional Damage" due to usually the BLM going nuts. But I was a bad tank, as this thread has seemingly told me again and again that I didn't need to do that. Aggro wasn't perfect, but by discarding that they've made the design space they have to work with. Also you can't seem to go "Fictional damage doesn't offer anything" and then earlier say "Why are the bosses auto programmed to focus on me, the non threat". The devs did that because people complained enough about Aggro they just took it away from you, so be happy about that.

Also about challenging a player's skill, people don't want the challenge, they just want more damage. This is the easiest time to push DPS on Tanks and what do people ask for? Not more challenge, not for more skillful gameplay, no just more damage because our ratio is low this expansion.

You brought up that the core problem is that being a Tank doesn't feel important. I agree with you, whole hardheartedly. However the only importance this community values is damage, in part due to their own demands in part due to the game design and the dev's way of thinking. I also think the head long rush for "more damage" is more than likely going to shoot us in the foot sooner than later. Or would Tanks find it fun if we got the healer treatment, good effective damage, boring kit. As right now, I find all the Tank kits boring. Adding more damage isn't going to change that.

You said so yourself the only reason to play a Tank is nostalgia or identifying with the role. And I barely have either of those right now so hint, adding more damage won't help me. Might help some people here and I realize the game can't change for just me, but I can't be alone in my line of thinking.

[ReiMakoto]

Saying people just want more damage is an oversimplification, we want more engaging rotations to deal said damage because there certainly isn't much tanking to be doing. However that is a feature for another expac because they wont make sweeping changes like that mid expac, what people want is a reason to feel relevant, and for a lot of people thats a larger slice of the damage pie. Even if bosses health increased around the fact that tanks had more output, I wouldn't care because it would feel like you have more of a presence when you're doing 75% of the damage of a dps not 50%, and it'd allow tanks to see bigger numbers in their rotations which is always fun. Increasing their max damage potential could also make a wider difference between a good tank and a bad tank.

[MerlinCross]

Saying people just want more damage is an oversimplification, we want more engaging rotations to deal said damage because there certainly isn't much tanking to be doing. However that is a feature for another expac because they wont make sweeping changes like that mid expac, what people want is a reason to feel relevant, and for a lot of people thats a larger slice of the damage pie. Even if bosses health increased around the fact that tanks had more output, I wouldn't care because it would feel like you have more of a presence when you're doing 75% of the damage of a dps not 50%, and it'd allow tanks to see bigger numbers in their rotations which is always fun. Increasing their max damage potential could also make a wider difference between a good tank and a bad tank.

Oh yes I know they aren't going to shake up the gameplay of a class mid expansion unless it's REALLY warranted and even then I think that happened maybe once. To MNK, AST, or BRD, and that's a "I think', I'd have to look that up.

But so, let me ask you then ReiKakoto. Would you be fine if as a tank you had more duties? Would you feel relevant if you had to upkeep damage amps for the rest of the team? Would you be happy if tanking had more things to upkeep, juggle, do but kept the damage levels on par with what we have no?

Or would you turn around and ask for more damage because that's the only way to have fun on the Tank Role?

It's not an oversimplification. Tanks as a whole need to feel better to play, but the only acceptable way for that to happen is "more damage" as the community calls for. No interesting mechanics, no new duties, no different rules for us; more damage please. I've seen a few people offer up ideas for rotations, or possible new ideas but hey the path of least resistance is taken; up the damage numbers because a Tank shouldn't be below a Healer. Because that will suddenly make it interesting to play I guess, out pacing the WHM.

This is the danger, and the worry I have. We already saw what they did with Healers and their damage but on the flip side with what they also did to Healers and their Healing, I'm not sure I would trust the team to fix Tanks anyway. Better to pull the plug on that system now. Come next expansion, I dread to see what they do to Tanks next.

[Kabooa]

Saying people just want more damage is an oversimplification.

It's not.

Not everyone in the thread is on that boat, but this thread was created on the notion of more damage and more damage alone - The way it was achieved did not matter.