How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Shurrikhan]

So Hurrdurrikan's posts boil down to "I like standing about taking hits and just taking hits all day, you better start liking that real soon as well lads". Glad we sorted that out buddy, your contribution is appreciated.

You got any of that straw left?

You need only look at any other of my posts here to see that I'd rather tanks were able to output damage nearer to that of dps, if only to make their effort-to-reward ratio more appreciable so that tanks don't feel like stepping stones to the optimization available to DPS.

That doesn't change the fact, however, that tanks are already incredibly strong; while healer oGCDs are the sum total of their contribution that does not eat into their damage output, tanks provide more effective sustain on themselves (via mitigation more than 50% damage on average) than healers can provide them without paying a single point of damage for the opportunity.

By all means, let's see tank damage increased a little bit, but that should then come with cost to the percentage of damage we are able to nullify over the course of a fight.

[Reynhart]

By all means, let's see tank damage increased a little bit, but that should then come with cost to the percentage of damage we are able to nullify over the course of a fight.

That was called "the tank stance"

[Shurrikhan]

That was called "the tank stance"

Yeah, I'd rather we have the choice between mitigation (healing spared) and damage, just as healers do, and for more of our mitigation (again, effectively the same as healing) be skill-based, rather than the majority of it being passive.

Nearly half of all damage mitigation is passive, making even a 30% CD effectively only some 16-17% additional mitigation, even if still a true 30% increase to eHP. That... doesn't feel great, given that while it certainly improves survivability, it doesn't actually increase throughput.

I could see why the devs might prefer that, but I'd just prefer... largely the opposite, more manipulation of efficiencies (and thereby throughput) than just whether one survives or not.

[Reynhart]

Yeah, I'd rather we have the choice between mitigation (healing spared) and damage, just as healers do, and for more of our mitigation (again, effectively the same as healing) be skill-based, rather than the majority of it being passive.

When the tank stance debate was a focus point, I thought that the effect of the tank stance should be much more powerful. Something like 50% mitigation/+100% Max HP_healing received, but with "naked" damage received higher. This way, you would indeed "stance dance" instead of simply dropping your stance for the whole fights, or, you'd basically remove almost all DPS opportunities for your healers.

And for tanks that would do an optimal stance dance, relative damage output should be higher than it is now, because it would require good knowledge and decision making. And it would allow "turtle tanks" and "healers who're afraid of DPSing" to be paired with "healers who DPS as much as possible" and "agressive tanks" respectively, if the amount of damage one role loses is the same as what the other role gains.

Or, the other solution is to have GCD-triggering mitigation skills, so that tanks would have the same dilemma as healers. For example, since PLD has historically been "the fighter that heals", I'd find it appropriate that the majority of its survivability comes from Clemency instead of oGCD mitigation...which is basically how it worked in FFXI, now that I think of it. Or, instead of the tank mastery, PLD would have Seltron as a GCD (still blocking all attacks for 6s), meaning that to achieve permanent damage reduction, you'd have to sacrifice half your GCDs.

[RadicalPesto]

Healers doing as much damage as tanks further pushes this game's terrible design where the opportunity cost of a single GCD heal is so enormous as to make healers want to avoid them at all costs. This has only gotten worse over expansions as GCD heals maintain their effective 0 damage potency but a healer's main nuke becomes replaced by increasingly powerful ones, with the only attempt at addressing this being White Mage's lily system.

If the healer community wasn't already upset at much of how this expansion has treated them, I would suggest substantially nerfing healer DPS output, but this would not on itself suffice to address the fact that healers simply don't have enough healing to do in raids due to every single raid being designed around spike damage and boss auto-attacks being effectively trivial to heal.

Given that addressing the bad design of healers requires substantial changes to encounter design, at this point it might simply be a better idea to boost tanks by 10% or so, or raid strategies will likely begin developing where tanks losing uptime is considered a non-issue, given the embarrassing state of tank DPS at the moment, and the fact that tanks scale so poorly with strength that by the next raid we might encounter tanks being seriously out-DPSed by every healer.

[Reynhart]

If the healer community wasn't already upset at much of how this expansion has treated them, I would suggest substantially nerfing healer DPS output

I'm personnaly on the side to reduce the healer's healing output, so that, like the dev claimed, they'd have to spend more time actually healing. Or, if they don't want to "nerf" anything because people will rage, just make sure that the next bosses deals significantly more damage.

[Liam_Harper]

I'm personnaly on the side to reduce the healer's healing output, so that, like the dev claimed, they'd have to spend more time actually healing. Or, if they don't want to "nerf" anything because people will rage, just make sure that the next bosses deals significantly more damage.

I like the idea of harder hitting bosses, then also giving tanks even better tools to deal with that significant damage increase. I'd rather have damage that feels real and a powerful toolkit that's rewarding to use well, than have bosses that hit like wet noodles and little baby heals that you just spam over and over to accumulate half a health bars worth.

[Shurrikhan]

I like the idea of harder hitting bosses, then also giving tanks even better tools to deal with that significant damage increase. I'd rather have damage that feels real and a powerful toolkit that's rewarding to use well, than have bosses that hit like wet noodles and little baby heals that you just spam over and over to accumulate half a health bars worth.

Tbf, we don't even need harder hitting bosses so much as just less ridiculous (46%+ at level 80, assuming loss to multiplicative stacking for every step; much higher otherwise) passive mitigation so that survival is more firmly in the players' hands instead of the mitigation toolkit outside of Savage TBs amounting to additional effective healing alone.

Heck, we don't even need to increase the risk of death to make proper mitigation necessary if only someone at 1% HP (eviserated, spine broken, an arm missing, face torn off, and both femurs fractured) didn't fight exactly as well as someone in perfect health... The difference from mitigation then would only be effective healing and occasionally increased survival, but also effective damage and future mitigation.

[Sawamura]

Let´s ask SE give back
tank enmity management vs dps and healer and enmity combo rotation and dps combo rotation!

for healer give them back Cleric stance.

Then tank and healer choose between party life or dps!

[Lyth]

Forcing more active mitigation through more challenging damage patterns is interesting. Forcing more passive mitigation where you press a button to stay turtled up is not. You don't want to go back to the old stance system. You might think you do, but you don't.

Also, the "tank stance debate" was two people arguing for the sake of arguing on why we can't 'maximise our mitigation' or why we can't redesign this game into a new game in which we 'maximise our mitigation'. There was never any real debate on how this game gets played in practice.