Boss Autoattack Damage and FFXIV's Tanking Meta

[Hierro]

I feel OP's being too conservative with his CDs. If you're MTing as WAR for OS3, you should feel alright using holmgang whenever you can, and awarness+another cooldown. Heck, you've even got the choice to switch to defiance for those critical hit tank busters to supplement with inner beast. Given those tank busters occur 7 times in a fight, there's nothing wrong switching to defiance just for those situations to inner beast, especially in between zerk windows.

That said, you can totally use CDs outside of tank busters when there's a lot of outgoing damage when MTing in deliverance.

[ScotchyScotch]

For O3S in particular, if you Awareness+Raw Intuition the first Critical Hit, then you have 20% reduction on incoming physical damage through the first Spellblade Holy. If you're really having issues you can also stack Vengeance with it. Because Awareness+RI is so OP for Crit Hit this leaves Rampart and Vengeance up for other damage mitigation throughout the fight.

Likewise, Raw Intuition can also be used to mitigate the vast majority of the Tail Swipes in O1S.

In O2S you've got rampart up for every double frontal cleave, which is really the only heavy damage that the meatball puts out. Either you are using your mitigation kit properly and your healers are bad, or you need to reconsider your pattern of cooldown usage.

[aleph_null]

As a pld off tank in o1s I do cover + rampart for the two wyrm tails before first twinbolt, after first blaze, and after breath wing. Except for the last one, rampart will last until the twinbolts following them, and I'll make sure to have 100 gauge by these times to sheltron + intervention the other tank (who will only take twinbolt and the upcoming auto attacks). So far it worked really well and my healers only needed to do 3 asp benefics (once on me and twice on the main tank). The rest of the damage are covered by ess dignities and embraces (and aoe heals).

I wouldn't count wyrm tails as auto attacks since they are scripted and afaik can't crit, so they're sort of mini busters or cleaves (except they're single target attacks unlike say a9s frontal cleaves). There have been encounters in the past that have hard hitting skills without telegraph or cast bar, and generally these fights could be a pain to optimize since instead of using cds when you see some cast bars you need to literally count gcds or seconds after certain mechanics, or look at ACT's encounter timer.

I haven't done enough meticulous plannings for o2s-o3s so I can't say how much the auto attack crits and random mechanics in o3s affect healing. Tank cd usage should stay the same regardless of crits, so your healers can predict the incoming damage and react accordingly). I think conditional usage of lustrates (use lustrate here or there if tank drops too low, or use energy drain otherwise) should be enough, or if it isn't then the ast should do a gcd single target heal.

[Canadane]

I see your concerns but while you may he getting hit for 22k damage at random, you have significantly more HP than that. Nothing about the tank meta has changed.

[Skye_]

Most tanks don't use CDs in DPS stance to mitigate autos better. They see a vid or learn DPS stance is what you do, but not whats behind it. Their CDs just sit while they pew pew pew. Healers either get behind and the tank dies or wastes CDs healing instead of DPSing. Most of the base tries to emulate top groups, but don't play like top jobs.

Honestly, I'd like to see someone crunch the numbers. Which is better net party DPS effect? 20% increase of Tank in DPS stance with a healer blowing CDs to heal him. Or a tank in tank stance allowing the healers to DPS more. I say, healers, because it affects both healers

My hypothesis is the net party dps would go up in raid if tanks stayed in tank stance allowing both healers to DPS more.

[Clicked]

Honestly, I'd like to see someone crunch the numbers. Which is better net party DPS effect? 20% increase of Tank in DPS stance with a healer blowing CDs to heal him. Or a tank in tank stance allowing the healers to DPS more. I say, healers, because it affects both healers

My hypothesis is the net party dps would go up in raid if tanks stayed in tank stance allowing both healers to DPS more.

This is what I've wondered as well. I assumed the community has concluded that it's better for the tank to be in DPS stance, but tank stance does a decent amount of mitigation/healing that I assumed would help free up the healers to do some damage. Unlike healers, tanks don't STOP doing damage to fulfill their role, they just do less damage. Healers have to stop and heal.

[Canadane]

Honestly, I'd like to see someone crunch the numbers. Which is better net party DPS effect? 20% increase of Tank in DPS stance with a healer blowing CDs to heal him. Or a tank in tank stance allowing the healers to DPS more. I say, healers, because it affects both healers

My hypothesis is the net party dps would go up in raid if tanks stayed in tank stance allowing both healers to DPS more.

Generally speaking it's the tanks because the healers would be (should be...) DPSing either way, and to replace one single attack with a cure every now and then isn't going to cost them 20% of their DPS. It may be a surprise but you don't need to cure 20% more just because a tank is outside their tank stance!

[Clicked]

Generally speaking it's the tanks because the healers would be (should be...) DPSing either way, and to replace one single attack with a cure every now and then isn't going to cost them 20% of their DPS. It may be a surprise but you don't need to cure 20% more just because a tank is outside their tank stance!

You lose more than 20%. For my warrior, the healer loses 20% throughput on heals and I lose ~5% parry on average (which is like 1% mitigation lol), and I cannot use IB which has like a 50% uptime optimally (avg 10% damage reduction there). Plus IB heals you a bit on top of that.

In return I get quite a decent chunk more damage though. So I can see why dropping tank stance is definitely necessary for DPS checks, but other than that I'm not convinced it's a huge difference (and it's not as safe).

[Driavna]

Most tanks don't use CDs in DPS stance to mitigate autos better. They see a vid or learn DPS stance is what you do, but not whats behind it. Their CDs just sit while they pew pew pew. Healers either get behind and the tank dies or wastes CDs healing instead of DPSing. Most of the base tries to emulate top groups, but don't play like top jobs.

Honestly, I'd like to see someone crunch the numbers. Which is better net party DPS effect? 20% increase of Tank in DPS stance with a healer blowing CDs to heal him. Or a tank in tank stance allowing the healers to DPS more. I say, healers, because it affects both healers

My hypothesis is the net party dps would go up in raid if tanks stayed in tank stance allowing both healers to DPS more.

I don't know about DPS numbers but Japan has a higher clearing rates, one of the reasons is because they use more safe tactics (like the tank always in tank stance). Like you say, and this happens in a lot of multiplayer games, the meta does not matter at average game play.

[Hierro]

My hypothesis is the net party dps would go up in raid if tanks stayed in tank stance allowing both healers to DPS more.

You can now check combined tank damage or combined healer damage on fflogs. The number one spot for combined healer damage on neo-exdeath is held by a pair of healers who dealt with a tank who sat in tank stance the whole time. However, when you look at the combined damage of both healers and tanks, it falls short of the number 1 combined tank damage placeholders, which is 9.6k and 11.1k respectively.

However, when you look at the number 2 and 3 spots for combined healer damage in neo-exdeath, you will find that they dealt with tanks who never touch tank stance. Those healers may not have attained number 1 spot, but it's not much a difference, while exceeding combined raid dps. that said, you can verify combined dps is at its peak when BOTH healers and tanks are dpsing their little hearts out, outside of tank stance.