How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Kalise]

Let's say as a healer I have access to my off-role 80% of the time. You, as a tank, have access to your off-role 100% of the time. Assuming we had equal output, you'd do 25% more off-role throughput than I would.

Now, atop that, you want my off-role's uptime to be LESS effective than yours? Not only does my off-role cost me my main role, but you want it to be weaker than your off-role, which costs you nothing?

How does that remotely sound intuitive, balanced, or otherwise sensible to you?

The sense comes from when players find dumb ways to exploit things.

Say you're a healer who has more throughput than the tank, but you spend 20% of your time healing so your average DPS is about equal.

What happens when you spend 15% of your time healing? 10%?

At what point does it become more worthwhile to let the Tank die and have someone insta-res them with weakness because you pumping out more damage yourself is more effective than their 100% uptime and you stopping to cast GCD heals (Most notably would be the case of a DRK using LD when there isn't a WHM with Benediction available, why bother spam healing them when you can just nuke the boss and Swiftcast Raise)?

At what point does the meta become having PLD spam Clemency to heal themselves/the MT because their DPS is not worth as much as a Healer forgoing healing?

At what point is it more valuable for Tanks to run about soaking orbs meant for rDPS/Healers because it allows the Healers to sit still nuking for more overall DPS?

That's the issue of having inequalities in the off-role when it conflicts with a main role. You start to dumpster the role that has a less effective off role by ignoring your main role.

When the off-role doesn't conflict with the main role, then there's complete freedom to have the off-role be as effective as you want, because it can never cause people to sacrifice their main role and thus make others do it for them, in order to better facilitate their own, superior, off-role capabilities.

This is where on the face of it, it sounds balanced to have the role with lower uptime on DPS to thus have higher DPS capacity to average out the same as a role with higher uptime on DPS. But such a scenario can cause players to look to exploit mechanics in order to simply focus on increasing the higher damage role's uptime at the cost of the lower damage role.

But it also means effectively nothing.

Oh wow, now tanks do [more than they currently do despite them doing exactly the same thing as before]. Exciting!

It means that instead of waging the same battle we've been doing for 6+ years at trying to not get gimped stats/gear, we can instead get normalized stats that the devs don't need to keep trying to mess with.

Leading to the opportunity to focus on other topics, such as having a more engaging tank role or at the very least, a somewhat interesting DPS rotation.

To say nothing about how prog raiders, world first racers and speed killers would all find it notably interesting to have not only more base damage on tanks, but also better scaling so that tank gear has a slightly larger impact on overall DPS (It'd also be a slight boon to BRD too since buffing both the tanks via songs will net them a marginally higher rDPS total)

[Arkhon-Infaustus]

Leading to the opportunity to focus on other topics, such as having a more engaging tank role or at the very least, a somewhat interesting DPS rotation.

Exactly. I miss 2.0 and 3.0 because being a tank meant something: you had to manage aggro, use a lot of skills to reduce damages and help your healer(s), manage MP (for DRK) etc... I played warrior on 2.0 and dark knight on 3.0 and it was really fun back then, they had a real identity and who cares if I wasn't dealing a lot of damages, it's a "bonus", that's not my role, or else I play DPS.

Now what, I'm only a HP bag, using one skill to fix aggro, one cooldown from time to time, and the shield (as DRK) blackest night which is the only interesting feature.
But hey, I have a new DPS rotation (as DRK again), a one target skill and an aoe skill, wouhou. And I can use them when I have MP to spend, which means not often, yay !

SE should focus on what each role means, and not try to put DPS everywhere. Tanking is for taking hits, reducing damages, managing aggro and features depending on your job's gameplay. Healing is for, well... healing, and if I want to hit hard, I play DPS, that's all. Now I just don't want to play tank anymore.

[Shurrikhan]

At what point does it become more worthwhile to let the Tank die and have someone insta-res them with weakness because you pumping out more damage yourself is more effective than their 100% uptime and you stopping to cast GCD heals (Most notably would be the case of a DRK using LD when there isn't a WHM with Benediction available, why bother spam healing them when you can just nuke the boss and Swiftcast Raise)?

Not too far away, I'd imagine, which is why I've been suggesting higher maximum tank damage output if they too can see meaningful output conflict -- not to mention threads on how tanks will always scale more poorly than other roles so long as much of their kit is tied up in percentile mitigation, which scales only with content -- and have criticized how little healing there is to be done in the majority of this game's fights. This isn't just a matter of tuning. It's a fundamental issue.

No unconflicted output should be stronger than one that is given entirely for free. As you've said, merely throwing out a buff to the almost-entirely conflicted output isn't going to be able to balance its output against another that is entirely free by just assuming a certain amount of necessary conflict. The fights across this game vary too wildly in their damage intake. Moreover, at present healers, in a sense, benefit doubly from gear in that they both afford for themselves more time to damage atop higher damage dealt, while apart from granular damage increases all the opportunities afforded by a tank's gear (i.e. towards their 'main role' or 'indirect') output only seem to benefit only the healer, even if it is ultimately the tank's rDPS.

The problem with balancing Blue DPS is that they're always set for a 100% 'time spent focusing mitigation', because they've removed their ability to actually influence direct (damage) vs. indirect (mitigation) outputs. There's still some skill-gap in both regards, but even when noting that half or more of that skill-gap shows only on other players' performance (in a way we somehow forget despite noting it at length on any DNC's or RDM's parse), it pales compared to that of healers because it gives the player nothing to adapt to or around. The fundamental problem with balancing Tanks is that they are both never truly Tanks (gameplay-wise), nor ever not entirely tanks (in terms of % mitigation output and its relevant costs to other outputs). They vary in tankiness only as a DPS varies in DPS-ness during CDs, despite healers following an obviously far different and far more sensible design paradigm, even if the majority of the game's fights are a lackluster mess in terms of healing required.

[Kabooa]

It means that instead of waging the same battle we've been doing for 6+ years at trying to not get gimped stats/gear, we can instead get normalized stats that the devs don't need to keep trying to mess with.

Leading to the opportunity to focus on other topics, such as having a more engaging tank role or at the very least, a somewhat interesting DPS rotation.

To say nothing about how prog raiders, world first racers and speed killers would all find it notably interesting to have not only more base damage on tanks, but also better scaling so that tank gear has a slightly larger impact on overall DPS (It'd also be a slight boon to BRD too since buffing both the tanks via songs will net them a marginally higher rDPS total)

If your priority is focused on higher numbers before you can have more engaging gameplay, then the developers aren't the problem.

The strawman in this post is strong and its just plain out wrong.

It means pretty much everything since everything about combat in this game is based around doing damage, having a tank being able to do more dps than bad dps means tank could do the job even if his teammates are watching netflix, is this a bad thing to ask? By going the route of your argument we could ask a question, why tanks do any dps at all if it means effectively nothing?
See how stupid argument this is?.

It means nothing.

If you're at 10k, 15k, 12k, or 6k, without changing anything else, you still bring two tanks, you still have the same ratio of 'bad to good' tank, and the only thing you changed was where you place on the pretty rainbow bar.

Wherever you land, boss Health changes to adjust for it.

Tanks could get a 50% increase in their damage, and Shiva would go from 72.4 million HP to 79.4.

[FirstnameLastname]

The sad state right now is that no matter how good the tank is, if the DPS players are bad the enrage checks will fail. Feels bad to be that irrelevant.

[Aurelius2625]

You can tell the devs were pissed about Tanks figuring out how to minmax being in dmg stance since they forced tank stance on us. All they needed to do, honestly, was keep everything how it was, except give everyone the WAR "Stance on ogcd" treatment. Keep the dmg penalty, keep the enmity boost, and give tanks like a 2 or 3x enmity multiplier on all attacks out of tankstance...then give the "roided up" tank stance enmity boost to tank stance with like a 5x multiplier, requiring the tank to do good damage to remain 1st in aggro from the other tank.

Remember in SB how a great tank could threaten a weaksauce tank in tank stance for aggro? Showed you who was doing far more damage and was a far better player. It was a little reward for playing well, being able to maintain threat outside of tankstance because you were doing so much damage.

That's also why they lowered tank damage: A great tank could keep the dps off of their backs once they had a good lead in threat because they did like 75 percent of a dps' dps so they could keep up.

So what did they do? Forced tank stance on us with the damage penalty instead of letting the PLAYERS DETERMINE HOW THEY WILL PLAY AND OPTIMIZE. The devs forced THEIR views and ways of playing the game on us, the playerbase. They have such little trust for the playerbase to get good. It's savage. If you suck at tanking and doing damage as tank, then it should be a challenge for you to get better because the good tanks are taking threat from you and the dps are catching up to you.

Wasn't their whole schtick about, "We want to take away the need to focus on aggro so tanks can focus on doing dps" during the SHB reveal LLs? We all got mega jebaited.

Yes, now we focus on damage, watered down damage that OVERTUNED healers can surpass. That's what we got. Hell, just giving tanks a 2x enmity boost to all attacks and forcing voke shirks to be coordinated would be great. Two tanks would have to *le gasp* WORK TOGETHER AND MANAGE A TANK ONLY RESOURCES THAT THEY CAN CONTROL!

My static could NOT understand why I was so pissed about tanks and threat changes... "It's better, I used to get threat and die", YEAH that's the good part! Great tanks make a difference because you are never threatened with taking aggro because they both got the situation in control! Everyone had to work together to do their part to reduce their threat, or have the off tank voke and shirk and swap with the other tank to maintain threat and share cooldowns. Now it's so easy.

[Lyth]

Because if tank damage falls below healer damage, then you start running your tanks out of melee range of the self-tanking boss to pick up hula-hoops while your healers stay in place to spam single GCD damage spell 'rotations'. Presumably one of the main reasons why people pick up tanks in the first place is to go toe-to-toe against the big bad. If you can't even supply that part of the experience, you're better off creating a game with just dps and healers.

[Jirah]

Play a dps if you want to obsess over numbers, I will never understand how it will affect the enjoyment of your gameplay whether or not your parser show a higher or lower number, because it is all relative, the only thing that matters is how much different jobs inside a role deal damage, since content will always be balanced around the expected damage, if they increased the level of tank dps, the boss hp would just be higher. Why does it matter how much different roles do dps? Just play a job that you like and try to your best inside it's expected damage, that is what the game expects of you. And btw white mage should not deal more damage than tanks, something is wrong in that group if they do, either the other healer is solo healing, whm is hugely better geared or the tanks are bad.

I’m with her, MMO is a petty enjoyment of numbers and hallow highs with said numbers. Racing to get Eden choir gear ...for what to do the true engame of being AFK in Limsa until 5.3?

[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)