How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[J-Reyno]

If Tank stance was -sane-, something like 1.7x or 2.0x, I'd have agreed wholeheartedly with you. It would then require a tank that is -just as good- as your DPS, and then damage concerns might be valid. It would require far more threat management with your off tank.

I agree that the hand-holding of tank stance is pretty ridiculous. That said, who did it punish to take away what little agency tanks had when it comes to managing enmity and give less damage in return? Because in my opinion it only punishes those tanks who DO perform just as well or better than the dps. SE decided no one likes tanking so felt it would be good to make it super accessible and remove some of what little non-damage engagement the role had in the process.

SE: "Ohhh hey we're going to have to change up tank stance so that you never really have to worry about enmity anymore"

Player: "Ah okay, well I guess I did just use tank stance to establish enmity and turn it off as soon as possible, so it's not a uh... bad thing I guess? Any actual tank-oriented engagement we're getting in return?"

SE: "Nah."

Player: "I see. Well, the enmity is one thing, but what about the defense?"

SE: "It's passive! "

Player: "Oh uh-okay... well I guess I can at least I can focus on doing good damage and feel rewarded for that"

SE: "Yeahhhhh we're also going to have to take some of your damage too"

Player: "...allllright. So what ARE we getting?"

SE: "Here's a couple more damage attacks you can use to feel better!"

Player: "....I'm getting more damage attacks to deal comparatively less damage?"

SE: "What was that? Btw healers are getting more actual heals, and they get to match or even exceed your damage at the same time!"

Player: "..."

SE: "Please look forward to it!"

The only tank that even gets a defensive ability past level 70 is WAR with Nascent Flash. Well, I guess we could count DRK's Dark Missionary if we really want, which is hardly as useful or necessary as healer role's heals. The role is simply not designed in the same way as healers. It's a watered down dps that just tries its best to deal damage only to be matched in damage by a role that has far more to do which doesn't include dealing damage.

So if nothing else it seems many agree that something needs to change, and it boils down to two ideas. The first is that current gameplay is fine but the damage needs to be higher. The second is that the current damage is fine but the gameplay needs to be adjusted to give tanks less damage skills and more non-damage role abilities.

I'm obviously in the first camp and think that it is the best solution, and that even if SE were to decide to change tanks it's still the best solution until that happens. Because there's no way a complete redesign of the role along with and adjustment to all of the game's content is happening anytime soon.

[Shurrikhan]

So if nothing else it seems many agree that something needs to change, and it boils down to two ideas. The first is that current gameplay is fine but the damage needs to be higher. The second is that the current damage is fine but the gameplay needs to be adjusted to give tanks less damage skills and more non-damage role abilities.

If I may posit a third position: The number of damage skills is fine, but there needs to be more non-damage skills against which they can be balanced in their opportunity costs, with the non-damage skills still being viable at the highest levels of play (such as by making their mitigation scale with tank gear or cost less when mitigating the attacks relatively weakened by simple a party's gear progression), such that tank complexity increases, with greater depth in most outputs and greater breadth across all types of outputs.

An extreme of said position: Passive mitigation should likely be reduced in favor of frequent (or even consistently available) means of active mitigation. If needed, tank combos can be reworked to conserve button count, trading a pretense of complexity for actual complexity.

[Kabooa]

An extreme of said position: Passive mitigation should likely be reduced in favor of frequent (or even consistently available) means of active mitigation. If needed, tank combos can be reworked to conserve button count, trading a pretense of complexity for actual complexity.

Like a more meaningful toggle. Always bothered me Tank Stance was a +20/-20 (before modifications) but the DPS toggle was often +X/-0.

having those toggles enable and disable options would be a plus, to me at least. 2 Button Wonders aside, protection warriors from TBC era Warcraft will always hold a special place in my heart via immunity Blocking and Revenge spam.

[Reynhart]

I get you, but we weren't discussing optimizing enmity.

We were discussing primary focus. And since tanks have two focus, to keep monster on them and to survive, I simply made sure that enmity was a not non-issue to focus on the surviving part, which, again is almost completely unrelated to how much DPS you do.

[J-Reyno]

We were discussing primary focus. And since tanks have two focus, to keep monster on them and to survive, I simply made sure that enmity was a not non-issue to focus on the surviving part, which, again is almost completely unrelated to how much DPS you do.

We all know that mitigation is another aspect of tanking, but that's not the point being made here. The point of the discussion was that tanks focus on dealing damage as a primary objective of their role. Dealing damage is exactly how they maintain enmity, and so damage is an essential element of tanking. It must be done, and is in fact most of tank gameplay.

[Reynhart]

Dealing damage is exactly how they maintain enmity, and so damage is an essential element of tanking.

Oh, so you really were taking about keeping enmity as a "primary focus" o_O
So, again, keeping enmity is only very loosely based on how much damage you actually do. By that, I mean that you could be absolutely horrendous at dealing damage that you would still be top enmity, simply be being in your tank stance. So, that whole "I'm min-maxing my rotation and it should reward me more than healer pushing one button" is completely irrelevant there.

So, I'll say it again, optimizing your damage has nothing to do with any primary focus of a tank, be it keeping the enemy on you or surviving attacks. And they pretty much don't interfere with each other, as opposed to healer who need to "sacrifice" some GCD to deal damage, and could potentially not heal enough if they're too greedy. That's why it make more sense to me that a healer who take that kind of risk should achieve higher numbers than us, since we don't sacrifice anything to push our damage. Funnily enough, if you look at the graphs that were posted on this very thread, tanks in SB were far above healers when it comes to DPS, and they had to sacrifice something for that, namely, their tank stance.

[Quor]

I suppose from the perspective of somebody that grasps things quicker it seems more of a dps problem. I didnt think groups had too many problems with tanks too often but I'll keep that in mind. I think if they start making more nidex styled fights or lengthen fights like E2S I would not have too much of an issue. I have always liked the mentality of having a chance no matter what, but most fights you can tell by about partway in whether you have a chance or not which is just sad.

We've all been there man. Not to toot our collective horns, but I honestly believe as a tank (and healer as well) a person just becomes used to having more on their plate in a moment-to-moment situation. So it gets frustrating to see people who literally only have one job fail to do that job, and you naturally want to be able to affect the outcome of a fight more than you already are.

[Bravely_Default]

Even flash was nice to have since it, you know, blinded things. This mitigated damage and contributed to being a tank. Honestly I think they should bring flash back as an OGCD with a 30S CD that makes it reduce enemy damage dealt by 5% due to being blinded. Hell make it an AOE too for dungeons.

[Lastelli]

I honestly don't understand why tanks should do more dps than healers. Healer optimization in a savage/ultimate setting is way harder than tank optimization, the latter simply requiring you to keep doing your extremely basic rotation while popping defensive cds when needed. In fact, looking at lower percentiles, healers rdps contribution is always lower than tanks'. It's only at 95-99% percentiles that healers do around the same rdps as tanks, but that requires healers to perfectly exploit their ogcd skills...and this is something that requires quite a bit of effort and planning. Also, it's something that requires perfect play from the whole party in order to minimize gcd heals and bis gear (with low gear, healers are forced to spend more gcds for healing spells because of lower defense).

Anyway, it's all relative, as other people said. Even if they were to buff tanks' dps, they'd just tune future encounters accordingly, so at the end of the day who cares? Just try to maximize your role and don't worry about other roles. Actually, given how the current situation gives more accountability to dps and significantly reduces the chances of bad dps being carried by good tanks and healers, I think it's a good thing. This will be a wake-up call for all the bad dps out there.

[Bravely_Default]

I will admit one thing though about tanks right now. Due to the fact they have the largest potencies in the game, they have the biggest damage variances of all the classes right now from crits. For instance, one particular E2 run with paladin this dude ran like 70% the dps damage because every single confiteor he used was a direct hit critical hit

if all damage statistics for tanks become a matter of who got more critical finishes it's going to suck pretty bad because that's not a reliable source for determining the very top of what a tank can do consistently, but rather rng being kind