Would tanks be okay if SE swapped the damage between tank and healers?

[Somnolence]

So long as the fight ends by reducing the enemy's HP to 0, all contribution --no matter how indirect-- is ultimately via more quickly reducing the enemy's HP to 0 (even if through a bit more uptime via Expedient, a healer GCD saved, or whatever else). The primary way tank sustain contributes to rDPS outside of not needing to be rezzed is just... more healer offensive GCDs. But you can only push that sustain so far before it becomes redundant, failing to provide any difference to clear time or chance of success.

Why, then, would having excess sustain be in the tank's interest? And similarly, why would it be in the tank's interest to have higher maximum damage than healers, thereby reducing the relative value of proper use of sustain (rewarded through increased healer DPS)?

Excess sustain/utility is useful during prog, as it allows recovery in case healer dies/busy with rezzing and stabilizing somebody else/when having misplaced mits etc.

Sure when fight is optimized it might be so superfluous in that it does not save healers any GCDs, but it is still there just in case.

Good example of that is WAR Equilibrium.

[Shurrikhan]

Excess sustain/utility is useful during prog, as it allows recovery in case healer dies/busy with rezzing and stabilizing somebody else/when having misplaced mits etc.

Sure when fight is optimized it might be so superfluous in that it does not save healers any GCDs, but it is still there just in case.

Good example of that is WAR Equilibrium.

I'm not disagreeing that some excess sustain potential is good, but neither was it my point.

All excess tank sustain rewards, ultimately, healer DPS. The more free sustain tanks have, the less likely they are to see any difference in reward as it actually matters (i.e., provides any benefit to the chance or speed of beating the given encounter). And, the lower healer maximum or per-GCD damage is, the less reward good use of sustain (be it flat or scaled, healing or mitigation) gives. One would think there would be far less outcry from tank "mains", then, to keep healers inferior, seeing as tanks now have zero swing available to them by which to usefully spend excess sustain (e.g., on Fell Cleave's over Inner Beast, on TP instead of HP, etc.).

Though, as an aside, there is also a large difference between having a massive heal like Equilibrium be both typically excess to requirement (for Warrior having already met the sustain of other tanks even without it) while being at no cost to damage and a tool like Clemency, which can spend rDPS through the tank on recovery or on rDPS through the healer (even if that is worthwhile only if/when the healer offensive GCD is disproportionately impactful (as used to be the reason for a stronger-spam-attack WHM handling heals while the weaker-spam-attack SCH redots, etc.) or one can benefit from Clemency's bonus (50% of healing to others duplicated to self).

[CaptainLagbeard]

Excess sustain/utility is useful during prog, as it allows recovery in case healer dies/busy with rezzing and stabilizing somebody else/when having misplaced mits etc.

Sure when fight is optimized it might be so superfluous in that it does not save healers any GCDs, but it is still there just in case.

Good example of that is WAR Equilibrium.

I personally don't mind the tank sustains... But because of them and the general design of fights, I think they should give Healers another way to contribute than just healing. But they don't want to do that.

[Supersnow845]

Excess sustain/utility is useful during prog, as it allows recovery in case healer dies/busy with rezzing and stabilizing somebody else/when having misplaced mits etc.

Sure when fight is optimized it might be so superfluous in that it does not save healers any GCDs, but it is still there just in case.

Good example of that is WAR Equilibrium.

That just goes back to the point of the post though. If tanks are able to act as emergency stabilisers for other party members if the healer either makes a mistake themself or makes a bad decision trying to correct another’s mistake (such as hard rezzing while the party needs healing) and this emergency stabilisation doesn’t hurt the tanks damage in any way then why do tanks just do 30% more damage by default when its healers who’s damage actually suffers from triage while the tanks can both triage and lose no damage in the process

If you can cover for the healer when needed and have it cost no DPS while the healer is doing other things that do cost them DPS why in a perfect environment when neither side is losing damage do tanks still do more damage especially when healers also have caster uptime concerns

[Wolf_Necros]

Pretty sure some healers can do more damage depending on the gear they have on but just in case please correct me if I'm wrong

[Supersnow845]

Pretty sure some healers can do more damage depending on the gear they have on but just in case please correct me if I'm wrong

Doing more damage by nature of having more gear is a pretty pointless comparison especially if you consider in statics healers are last in gear priority

[Aravell]

Pretty sure some healers can do more damage depending on the gear they have on but just in case please correct me if I'm wrong

Gear shouldn't even factor into discussion of inter-job balance.

An i730 MCH can easily outdamage an i710 SAM, that doesn't make the damage gap between them any smaller.

Same case that a WHM with an i735 weapon outdamaging a WAR with an i710 weapon doesn't mean anything because the WAR will handily outdamage that WHM every single time when they both hit the maximum item level.

[CaptainLagbeard]

Pretty sure some healers can do more damage depending on the gear they have on but just in case please correct me if I'm wrong

If the tank is horribly undergeared compared to the healer sure... But that's like noting that people in Savage gear do more damage than people with the ilvl 700 tomestone gear.

[Katish]

Gear shouldn't even factor into discussion of inter-job balance.

An i730 MCH can easily outdamage an i710 SAM, that doesn't make the damage gap between them any smaller.

Same case that a WHM with an i735 weapon outdamaging a WAR with an i710 weapon doesn't mean anything because the WAR will handily outdamage that WHM every single time when they both hit the maximum item level.

I actually think even then, a tank with an ilvl with 710 will still out damage a healer with an ilvl of 735 due to diminishing returns in stats which I think speaks even more wonders. It's the multipliers on the skills and the lot of them that make up the difference. Tanks do: healing, damage, and tanking, they supersede the trinity...which is horrible design imo. All sustain from nonsustains should be removed and tank sustain nerfed (or removed depending on what it is)...if Square gave nonsustains sustain because it lessens pressure on newer healers, that wasn't a good solution; a good solution would be either teaching the new healers to get better and/or making the kit actually synergize better with itself (that doesn't mean add healing bloat though, in fact the opposite is better in reducing it. This would make people that are new to the role understand what button is meant for what and why; the way we have it now, the heal buttons are overloaded...resulting in newer players asking "What do I press?" [When a lot of those buttons just do the same thing in terms of healing]...or even worse them being overwhelmed by the amount of buttons and therefore not pressing anything or timing anything correctly.).

[Carighan]

a good solution would be either teaching the new healers to get better and/or making the kit actually synergize better with itself (that doesn't mean add healing bloat though, in fact the opposite is better in reducing it. This would make people that are new to the role understand what button is meant for what and why; the way we have it now, the heal buttons are overloaded...resulting in newer players asking "What do I press?" [When a lot of those buttons just do the same thing in terms of healing]...or even worse them being overwhelmed by the amount of buttons and therefore not pressing anything or timing anything correctly.).

Yeah that's a good point. The modern high-level heal kit is a slew of buttons nobody ought to need. It's okay to have some extra healing buttons, but if they're not interesting for mechanical reasons, or if they're just duplications of already existing ideas, then they really ought to exist only to cover a few bases like GCD single, oGCD group emergency, that kind of stuff. Rather make the existing abilities stronger and more usable to make healers fly with a reduced set of say, 4 core heals 1-2 emergency heals and 2-3 flavour heals.

Then add a bit more damage flavor to each of the jobs, ideally with a low focus on GCDs (as those ought to be kept open for healing, in particular for newer healers), then massively increase the amount of damage to be healed, but maybe reduce the immediacy of it. That is, you need to heal 3x-4x the amount of damage, but you got 2x++ the amount of time, too. Take your time, just make sure you do heal everything, the next round of damage is coming.