How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Ramesses]

*(Begins to recall the annoying randomized damage from PLD's Spirits Within back in 1.0)*

Honestly, some of the comments and suggestions developed here are very solid points and many sides make a great argument. Tanks have generally evolved much better than what we had in the past-- heck, even Paladin is now arguably the best choice on several battles these days.

However, as someone mentioned above, how much damage do tanks really need to be fully validated?

[Insanecell]

Resolve was way too strong for certain tanks like blood dk and brewmaster monk while on the reverse being inadequate for warriors due to them having a proactive tanking kit. So warriors would hide behind shield block which did not scale at the time get half their hp slapped off my a magic attack and then become gods when resolve kicked in and shield barrier covered half their heath gauge. Meanwhile blood dks kept breath of sindagosa up for half its cd and their runes never depleted so they outhealed healers with death strike which also scaled off of attack power at the time. God I loved bdk lol

[Liam_Harper]

As an absolute BASELINE, tanks NEED to do MORE damage than healers. Healers are the quintessential make or break role... you suck at it, everyone dies, you don't do enough damage? It's noticeable.

There's a huge difference between an optimized healer and a non optimized one. Their damage shoots through the roof as they peel back all of the bandaid panic heals and replace those GCDs with damage gcds.

Healers have a clear pathway for damage progression: less healing, more damaging.

Tanks have no such thing, really. The combos and rotations are braindead easy, and honestly, almost all of these fights can be solo tanked without the introduction of a "forced gimmick" that is forced for no other reason than to force two tanks to be brought. Seriously. Looking at the busters in this tier, how many of them are designed not thru damage, but thru sheer gimmicks to require two tanks?

If I do 9k or 11k dmg it doesn't matter. I don't have a big impact. The skill floor is so low for tanks, the skill ceiling is so low, for tanks. But there's a HUGE difference between an 11k Greyville monk and a 18 to 19k OJ monk. A good dps player is noticeable.

Exactly, that's why I heal over tanking right now, even though healer design is far from perfect. As you optimize your healer gameplay, your damage shoots up. You can be both top on healing and twice the damage of your co-heal if you know what you're doing. It's rewarding and feels like you bring something to the group. An optimized tank doesn't really bring that much more than an average one. The fact that tankbusters barely happen 2-3 times on some encounters and are the only threatening thing is silly.

God I loved bdk lol

I hear ya. Sure it was bonkers, but those moments when your whole team is down, it's just you and the endgame raid boss at 8% with your raid cheering you on, 5 stacks of tank debuff too many, and you need to put every last bit of that toolkit into use, health bar bouncing like a yo-yo ...and you actually pull it off. You lived for those moments. Best times as a tank.

[Aurelius2625]

As an absolute BASELINE, tanks NEED to do MORE damage than healers. Healers are the quintessential make or break role... you suck at it, everyone dies, you don't do enough damage? It's noticeable.

There's a huge difference between an optimized healer and a non optimized one. Their damage shoots through the roof as they peel back all of the bandaid panic heals and replace those GCDs with damage gcds.

Healers have a clear pathway for damage progression: less healing, more damaging.

Tanks have no such thing, really. The combos and rotations are braindead easy, and honestly, almost all of these fights can be solo tanked without the introduction of a "forced gimmick" that is forced for no other reason than to force two tanks to be brought. Seriously. Looking at the busters in this tier, how many of them are designed not thru damage, but thru sheer gimmicks to require two tanks?

If I do 9k or 11k dmg it doesn't matter. I don't have a big impact. The skill floor is so low for tanks, the skill ceiling is so low, for tanks. But there's a HUGE difference between an 11k Greyville monk and a 18 to 19k OJ monk. A good dps player is noticeable.

[Satarn]

There's a huge difference between an optimized healer and a non optimized one. Their damage shoots through the roof as they peel back all of the bandaid panic heals and replace those GCDs with damage gcds.

Healers have a clear pathway for damage progression: less healing, more damaging.

Tanks have no such thing, really.

We used to though - the stance system - but many people failed to see it for the possibilities it brought and wanted it gone.

No, I am not talking about the supposed "stance dancing", as that was barely ever a thing of course. What old stance system did however, was that if you knew how to properly use your mitigation cooldowns - which before 5.0 were both more numerous and varied - you could drop the tank stance without being a hindrance to healers and were rewarded for it with more damage.
Sadly vast majority of tanks would sit in damage stance despite lacking sense to even use Rampart more than once in a fight, but the consequence then was also less rDPS - as you'd waste healer gcds by forcing them to babysit you.

Stances were not 1:1 like the healer gcd trade-offs, but they were similar and had potential to be better, if mitigation - and perhaps enmity as well - were made even more demanding. Instead SE completely killed the mechanic, pruned and homogenized mitigation, killed off enmity and then forced us to keep passive stance mitigation - along with its low damage - on permanently, via a stupid trait.

[Awful]

As an absolute BASELINE, tanks NEED to do MORE damage than healers. Healers are the quintessential make or break role... you suck at it, everyone dies, you don't do enough damage? It's noticeable.

There's a huge difference between an optimized healer and a non optimized one. Their damage shoots through the roof as they peel back all of the bandaid panic heals and replace those GCDs with damage gcds.

Healers have a clear pathway for damage progression: less healing, more damaging.

Tanks have no such thing, really. The combos and rotations are braindead easy, and honestly, almost all of these fights can be solo tanked without the introduction of a "forced gimmick" that is forced for no other reason than to force two tanks to be brought. Seriously. Looking at the busters in this tier, how many of them are designed not thru damage, but thru sheer gimmicks to require two tanks?

If I do 9k or 11k dmg it doesn't matter. I don't have a big impact. The skill floor is so low for tanks, the skill ceiling is so low, for tanks. But there's a HUGE difference between an 11k Greyville monk and a 18 to 19k OJ monk. A good dps player is noticeable.

Can't agree more with this post honestly, the skill floor for tanks is indeed low and I wish there was more to do but I can't and nor can we bring just 1 tank because of the gimmicks, I remember back in T9 you could have just 1 tank for that fight and it was great honestly. I hope they move away from the design of what tanks and healers are now and change it in 6.0 the gameplay of these roles need to change I find, I can do well at 9.5-10.5k dps but it means nothing if the DPS I'm with when we hit enrage are at like 12k DPS, but when you see a good DPS do like 18k DPS it makes the world of difference.

Hell I'd even be in favor of 10 man raids that are accessible with 3-4 bosses in them with 2 tanks 2 heals and 5 DPS to give us something different, makes me think a lot of Karazhan back in TBC WoW where it was such a well designed 10 man dungeon and everyone was doing something and rewarded everyone for tanking, healing, dps, different era and different game but immensely enjoyable.

[Aurelius2625]

Grats on the Shiva Clear btw .

Did a run of Ramuh and Garuda/Ifrit on my ruby weapon WAR and was able to be at purple, that shows you how easy it is to do well on a tank. I have so little to improve, once I get fully geared in these fights.

[Shurrikhan]

As an absolute BASELINE, tanks NEED to do MORE damage than healers.

While I'd agree that tanks ought to deal more damage, assuming compensation elsewhere, this feels shockingly off to me. Why should a role which has no compromise between its direct and indirect outputs (Damage and Healing/Resurrections Spared) have higher direct output than a role in which the two are mutually exclusive in any given GCD? Where able to use solely oGCDs, healing is free to Healers, apart from any clipping necessary, but no matter how intensive the damage intake gets Tanks' mitigation is always and entirely free of cost to their damage output. So why should the one role that gets its entire unique functionality for free output more than the one that does not?

I'd agree that in an typical Savage fight, enough healing should be required that a Healer's total damage dealt ought to be less than that of a tank, but that is an issue of fight design more so than job design. Until Tanks are no longer bloated by so much free mitigation (with the majority of the healing spared thereby caused being outright passive), they should have less raw damage throughput than a healer in anything approaching a dummy/SSS-fight situation.

[Kalise]

So why should the one role that gets its entire unique functionality for free output more than the one that does not?

Probably for these very reasons.

Healer DPS and GCD healing compete for usage (In an ideal world where healing isn't 99% free because leloGCD's). Thus, if Healers do more DPS, then there puts more focus on Healers actively avoiding their primary role to DPS more.

Meanwhile, with Tanks not having any resource competition between their Tanking and DPS skills, having higher DPS doesn't necessarily detract away from them performing their primary role.

This is an oversimplification, but from a design standpoint, you don't want the role that has competing resources to have more efficiency with their off-role causing conflict within gameplay.

There are however, other things that can be considered in regards to this too, such as the minutia of such a scenario where if healers do more DPS than Tanks, then Tanks sacrificing DPS for more mitigation in order to allow for more room for the Healer to DPS can be a thing (As opposed to the Tenacity issue, we currently have, where the DPS loss from melding Ten over Crit/DH isn't mitigated by the DPS gain from healers pushing out more DPS GCD's (Partially due to the fact that it outright doesn't even mitigate a GCD spent on healing)). Though, such a scenario would need to actually have any sort of interaction with mitigation beyond maybe melding Ten/Det over Crit/DH and then still just mashing max DPS combos during fights anyway.

[Shurrikhan]

...from a design standpoint, you don't want the role that has competing resources to have more efficiency with their off-role...

...What? It should be quite clear that I'm not saying healers should be more DPS-efficient than DPS to the point that they'd never heal (though I'm not sure there's much of any point at which never healing would EVER be efficient), so I can only assume this is continuing the comparison between the 'off-role' (damage dealing) of tanks and healers. So, let's consider.

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?

Again...

I'd agree that in an typical Savage fight, enough healing should be required that a Healer's total damage dealt ought to be less than that of a tank.

Indeed, virtually any healing output, by nature of it being mutually exclusive with damage-dealing, ought to put them (nearly) on level. But the throughput of 100% DPS uptime on a Tank, at zero cost to their 'main' role, absolutely should NOT be higher than that of a healer, whose 'main' role is mutually exclusive with that output. Again, my response was to the idea of their output rate, not their totals.