How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Reynhart]

I am just waiting for double paladin healers meta, where tanks dps is so pathetic that it actually is better to have tanks healing with requietcast buffed clemecy.

That would be the best testament on how healers' DPS is far less an issue than the really low healing requirement...which is probably why healers have so much opportunity to do damage.

[Shurrikhan]

I am just waiting for double paladin healers meta, where tanks dps is so pathetic that it actually is better to have tanks healing with requietcast buffed clemecy.
If healers dps potential js higher than tanks then i dont see reason why not. xD

Once overgearing content enough, i.e about the same time TBN becomes too difficult to reliably pop anywhere near as often as its CD, I'd suspect double-Warrior would be the optimal setup... Clemency saves over 2 GCDs of healing (over 3 on cross-heal), but it's so rare to need 2 full GCDs of healing within the same minute -- even on what few Savage fights require GCD healing at all -- that it'd likely overheal in its single use per minute from each tank in cross-healing. Nascent Flash, on the other hand -- no opportunity cost.

Here's hoping next tier will require a decent bit of healing for once...

[Nedkel]

That would be the best testament on how healers' DPS is far less an issue than the really low healing requirement...which is probably why healers have so much opportunity to do damage.

Its a statement that also says how pathetic low and high effort is tanks dps.

You do opener and rotation to the exact milisecond but its not worth as much as healers few buttons spam.

That doesnt mean healers are doing too much damage, but how low tanks dps is and need a good buff. Right now tanks contribution to the dps pool is so pathetic that it does not matter anymore.
One of the world highest ranked raid team has tanks performing at the 85-90% percentile level.

[Reynhart]

That doesnt mean healers are doing too much damage, but how low tanks dps is and need a good buff.

Buffing the damage while keeping the exact same rotation would still make tanks DPS effortless. Those two things are completely unrelated.

Healers high DPS is the result of knowing how much you can heal and how much you can deal damage. Even if the damage is tuned too low right now, that's still something healers have to plan, and it will greatly change their damage output. As a tank, you don't have that kind of reasoning. If you don't use your GCD to do damage, you're just doing nothing.

Which is why some of us are suggesting that enmity and/or mitigation should have an impact of how we use our GCD. And once it does, optimal use of it should reward us with a higher DPS...on top of healer having more heal to do that would naturally reduce their opportunity to do damage.

[Quor]

Positioning and rotating CDs has been a thing for a while now. As has been said many times, the gameplay of tanks is mostly just doing damage and, on occasion, doing a "tank thing".

Yes. Why focus on the damage side though? Why not focus on the tank side? That's the crux of the argument here, as the existence of this thread is predicated on the belief that tank damage is low while also lamenting the simplicity of tank-centric gameplay. If tank-centric gameplay is simple, then (as I mentioned multiple times before in this thread) energy would be better spent advocating for an increase in tank-focused solutions instead of boosting dps.

From your linked post:

We all understand how the damage distribution works, what we are discussing is whether that damage distribution between the roles is appropriate and how it leaves one role feeling less impactful than others. I've also addressed this exact question multiple times, including the actual OP, and most recently here:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post5188337

It essentially boils down to asking why, if tanks are going to have the damage of a support, do they not have a full bar of powerful personal and party mitigation tools that are necessary and needed to complete content. If I'm going to do the damage of a support role, then I need more than a watered down dps rotation for my moment-to-moment gameplay. Where are my skills that I use consistently and frequently to tank like the healer's heals? Because pressing a mitigation skill every 60-90 seconds ain't it.

The answer to most of this is "balance." As others have noted here and elsewhere, if tank mitigation is too high then content becomes trivial. The reason why 60-120s CD's are typical not just for tank cooldowns but for general party utility cooldowns across all jobs is because too low of a cooldown on some of these things would be too powerful. It would be a re-hash of the old 2.0 and 3.0 Storm's Path debuff, where you wanted it up 100% of the time since it was a global reduction to incoming damage from a boss. Translated to modern terms, if something like Dark Missionary or Shake it Off or Divine Veil had a lower CD than their current, you would drastically reduce the amount of healing throughout a fight. At even just 60s, Dark missionary would have a 25% uptime, which effectively means healers would have ~2.5% less healing to do on raid wide damage (almost all of which is magical, bar a few rare exceptions). Bring a GNB for Heart of Light and you're looking at 50% uptime on 10% magic DR, which saves another ~2.5% healing. I suppose we could shorten durations on these skills to account for the decreased CD, but then you're just pressing a button more often for smaller effect. Shallow complexity I believed Shurrikhan called it. Worst case scenario it just becomes another part of a tanks rotation instead of a decision that carries weight due to the inherent lockout you get from a cooldown.

It's always good to mitigate damage, but some damage is better to mitigate than others. There might be a big huge raid-wide coming soon, but if it's not going to be followed up by anything scary then better to hold off and save the CD for a part of the fight that will be rougher. If you make a utility cooldown available too often then you remove any decision making that comes with the use of said cooldown, further lowering the complexity of the job (and I think Shurri would agree that this is a deeper form of complexity than simply keeping another plate spinning).

If managing my damage rotation is going to be 99% of my gameplay, then I'm going to need to do more damage than a healer role who gets all these powerful heals and then has a one-button rotation for damage.

But it's not 99% of tank gameplay. It's not even 90%. It might be 75-80% in a fight that's on farm, and probably less than 50% for a fight that's in prog. Mechanics will always come first, with dps being a concern after the execution is down pat. To get to the point that a fight is on farm, the tanks and healers need to be performing their primary jobs (tanking and healing) at near-perfect levels. That's not nothing, and it needs to be considered as a part of each roles' overall impact on an encounter. This is why the dps-to-tank log comparison is flawed; of course dps will have more damage because that is literally 90-99%+ of what they do (the rest being the utility they bring, varying between each job). The non-damage contribution that tanks and healers bring to a fight is not measured in FFlogs, and that's a tragedy because all dps is 100% reliant on proper tanking and healing execution.

This may or may not be something that matters to you, but this is not about whether the role CAN contribute, it's about HOW it contributes. This is something that will be a matter of opinion, but hopefully we can at least reach that understanding and stop going in circles about how the damage distribution between roles works.

My opinion - and mind you, this is backed up by much of what people have said in this thread - is that the actual tanking and healing contributions are trivialized as meaningless in the context of increased dps, with the overarching belief being that the only thing that matters in a fight (and thus the only thing determines the relative value of a job) is the damage said job does. Tanks and healers contribute 100% to the success of a fight. If the tanks and healers in a group just said "fuck it, we're doing damage!" and focused exclusively on their damage skills, no raid would make it past the first 30s of a fight.

That's without mentioning content outside of ultimate and savage. There is plenty of content in the game where a tank can literally play like a DPS and it simply won't matter. The healer is strong enough to do half of the tank's job for them. Will it be optimal? No. Is it as necessary for a tank to press cooldowns as a healer to heal in the vast majority of content? Not even close. What WILL tanks be doing no matter what? Damage.

Whew, where to start here. First off, I'd say as far as non-endgame raid content goes, of course it will be easy and most jobs will be "reduced" to dps. This is at least partially why wall-to-wall pulling is done. Not only is it faster, but it's also more fun, since the challenge of managing your damage alongside your tanking/healing is more interesting than the comparatively boring single-group pulls would be. Having said that, much of this feeling comes from outgearing stuff. I remember my first time in Sastasha back during 2.0 beta, carefully pulling each pack, trying not to bottom out on TP from Overpower spam by swapping between targets to HS>SS each one in turn so I maintained aggro over the healer. *THAT* was fun. It wasn't a wall-to-wall pull (that came later, and was still fun) but it was good times nonetheless. Nowadays, with the increased potencies that's more or less a non-issue. But I still run into occasional newbie groups in mentor roulette where I gotta take it slow so as not to overwhelm the healer. Point being, part of this is a perception thing. Many veteran players are used to a certain cadence in the game, and this naturally puts an emphasis on more damage and faster clearing when it comes to non-savage/EX level stuff. But just because the emphasis is on dps in those situations doesn't mean the value of a properly played tank or healer is decreased. You still need that tank there to hold aggro and rotate CD's on a big pull, and that healer still needs to make sure said tank doesn't go down or else you'll have 8-10 very angry monsters running roughshod over the rest of the group.

And we're not entertaining any nonsense about altering the structure of the entire game with 1k more tank damage. That can be adjusted FAR easier than reworking tanks, healers and all of the game's content to make constant, active tank skills a core element of the job. And I'd hope no one has the silly idea that we could change the core elements of tank gameplay to make them decidedly less damage oriented without also changing healers and all encounters to make these non-damage tank elements necessary.

Yes, 1k more damage blanket across all the tanks would be a huge altering of the game's structure. It would be a more than 10% increase in average tank damage without any commensurate increase in difficulty, which is an insane buff. Given that SE is still - at this point in time - in the foundational building stages of the next xpac, the time to advocate for better tank-centric tools and mechanics is now.

And since you go on and on about how no one is arguing your points I'll hit some of the ones you reposted directly.

To this I'll link you another comment of mine, read HERE

The cool thing about this comment is that it links to yet another (by necessity, some of you really hate reading even though this is a forum) where I describe more of why the comparison might matter to players. Please note that this is going to be a matter of opinion and is something you can disagree with, though I'm sure you'll feel the need to punctuate with some manner of self-importance and an insult toward anyone who feels differently. What you won't do is tell anyone else that this is something that can't matter to them, because you don't have that authority.

I addressed some of what you said already up above, but specifically in regards to this:

As far as the damage ratio between roles, to me it's about the "power" or as some have described it the "impact" of the role. Yes tanking is necessary because you can take the hits, but like I described previously the act of taking hits mostly boils down to pressing an occasional mitigation skill and relying on passive damage reduction. Outside of that tanks perform their dps rotation and work to pump out as much dps as possible. The actual act of tanking/mitigating is not like healing in this game. Healers have very powerful healing and can bring the entire party from 1hp to full in a matter of seconds. This is the kind of thing that makes a role feel strong, in my opinion, and they do this while dealing nearly the same damage as tanks (and in the case of WHM can do more) with what effectively amounts to one-button rotations.

You kinda dismiss tanking with the "yes it's necessary but" line there, which is what I was talking about earlier with the implied understanding that tanks and healers just naturally perform tanking and healing so flawlessly that the only "true" thing that matters is damage. This is a false premise, as anyone who's had a bad tank or healer in a 4-man (or any content for that matter) can attest to.

As to the point of impact, that's very much an opinion I think. I find my time as a tank feels very impactful, regardless of the damage I do. Naturally I try to put out as much as I can within the range of the role, but I don't much care about where I chart on the damage graphs compared to how well I do the actual tanking stuff. Keeping boss movement down to a minimum so as to enable greater ease of uptime for the melee dps. Pre-positioning the boss for upcoming mechanics to reduce movement time and prep needed to deal with what's coming next. That feels impactful to me. Your mileage may vary - and that's fine - but I stand by my earlier comment when I said that if you're playing a tank and your primary concern is damage, then tank probably isn't for you. I would much prefer all the energy in this thread be directed towards advocacy of greater tank-centric tools and mechanics instead of this focus on damage.

We all know that it's clearable. This is irrelevant to the discussion being had for reasons outlined in the post I linked above.

It's not irrelevant. If content is being cleared regularly by a wide variety of jobs then that's a good objective indicator that job balance is pretty good. If there were major issues with content being cleared by specific jobs (and only specific jobs) then an argument could be made to help those jobs in some way. Doubly so if said jobs were parsing markedly lower than other jobs in their role. That isn't the case here, as tank dps balance is the tightest it's ever been. Maybe WAR and DRK could use a few minor changes (mostly QoL stuff) but that would be it and they would be decidedly minor. We're talking small potency increases, or duration boosts of 1-2 seconds on key abilities.

Also irrelevant. It's about how the job feels, not clearing the content faster.

A job can feel great and deal very low damage. A job can also be boring and do amazing damage, such as what many WHM's say about the current WHM dps "rotation" of spamming a single nuke. The reason why I talk about damage and clearing content in this regard is that the suggestion to add 1k dps to all tanks does nothing to change how tanks play. It wasn't paired with anything that increases tank combo complexity (higher complexity naturally should bring a higher reward), but rather it was simply suggested as a way to "fix" the "problem" of perceived low tank damage. I have yet to see anyone else but myself offer an idea in this thread (I am aware of - and thankful - for the thread started by Kabooa) to boost tank damage while also boosting complexity. The meaning behind this is clear; those advocating for an increase in tank damage without commensurate increase in tank complexity simply want more damage for the sake of having more damage. They want this damage because they somehow believe this changes tanks in such a way that makes them more fun or impactful, when the reality is that nothing concrete has changed. Boosting potencies isn't how you increase complexity, and lowering a cooldown or increasing a duration simply means another 3-6 button presses per fight. If an additional 3-6 button presses is the cutoff for "impactful" and "fun" then that's an awfully low bar I think.

Or maybe they just want to deal more damage with no extra effort on their part at all. Given the distinct lack of suggestions, both in this thread and elsewhere, I'm inclined to believe people just want to see a bigger bar graph on FFlogs.

Balance between the four tanks is not the subject of discussion. You also seem to have forgotten that individual changes to tanks can be made to ensure they remain on par. Whether a tank buff comes in the form of a blanket dps increase or individually selected improvements specific to each job, further adjustments can always be made if necessary.

Any change to a job is automatically a balance discussion, not just for that job or role but for the game as an entire ecosystem. And again, given that tanks are well-represented in all aspects of the game right now, on top of being very tightly balance in terms of damage, it's hard to justify a change as broad and sweeping as adding ~12% more damage to four separate jobs.

Sorry, but we're not going to pretend that a 1k bump in dps for tanks would destroy the game's balance beyond repair. You're going to have to find another angle here.

1k is not a "bump." Assuming an 8k baseline at 80, that's a ~12.5% increase in damage. Nobody on any forum would consider a 12.5% increase in damage to be anything but a massive buff.

[Quor]

While I do generally side with your position here, there have more arguments than are merely both vague and subjective or rely on unargued proven warrants. There a couple, even, I think most could agree with:[LIST]At no point should the skill-to-reward progression of any given role be so limited relative to others that one would seemingly need to switch roles to contribute as much as they could to their party.

Many have complained that this currently seems the case with tanks, especially relative to DPS. Others insist that the passive benefit offered by tanking provides such a high output floor that one has no business complaining about its low ceiling, but this seems a tangential defense at best. Other more directly claim that they just don't feel that the ceiling is particularly limiting despite the difference between medial and peak performance providing less to the party than would the same in DPS, since it's roughly the same % difference -- i.e. a 10% difference between median and maximum parses for both the average DPS and average tank each. It thus remains at an impasse, until we can answer whether it is sufficient merely that improvement in one's percentile allows them to outperform others of their same role (since tanks are going to be obliged by mechanics, and thus "someone's gotta do it, anyways") or if increased skill should be rewarded with equally valuable contributions to their party regardless of the "currency" of their contributions. The discussion will likely also touch on tanks' output floor, as that is far higher than it's ever previously been.

I can agree to this. I understand the design decision behind a simple tank rotation; the main game of a tank is not the combos we use but the macro meta of the fight itself. However, combos are a part of this, and pressing globals is the cornerstone of this game. I don't necessarily think we need a dps-level of complexity, but I can understand wanting more. GNB and PLD both flow pretty well but have a lot of rigidity to them. WAR and DRK have periods of high action where you feel busy but the low intensity periods wear on you. How exactly to address this I don't know. Part of the issue comes from the (relatively) simpler encounters present at end game right now. After seeing that TEA has in store for players, I'm hopeful for more challenging macro-level stuff for tanks to do in upcoming content, but it's always a good idea to talk about how baseline rotational stuff can be improved.

[*]Equally valuable contributions to the party should come from roughly equal requirements of skillful play.

• This is of course a variation on "effort/complexity should be duly rewarded" which is itself controversial and is likely a minority opinion by a slight margin if ever applied as broadly as to general balance or long-term metrics like rDPS. Still, many have argued as an extension of such that the skillful play required for healers to minimize their healing is still not enough to bring them up to the average skill requirements given how barebones their offensive gameplay itself has become -- effectively, that healers are getting too much output potential for too little effort or complexity. There has not yet been any thorough counter-argument save those already applied to the more general warrant. Others have pressed that the efforts spent in allowing for healer offensive uptime is valuable, but none have gone so far as to argue (except perhaps implicitly) that it is therefore sufficient.

I can understand the perspective regarding healers, and again I'm hopeful - having seen the sheer amount of GCD healing needed to beat TEA - that future fights will emphasize more of the "healer" side of a healers kit instead of the dps. As someone who casually plays a healer (WHM and AST) I find AST to be more functionally busy but WHM to feel more powerful overall. I enjoy the longer-term macro planning you get with AST, and I wouldn't mind shades of that being imported to WHM, as well as a bit more depth to healer rotation.

But that's a discussion for elsewhere.

As far as it pertains to tanks, again I think it's important to gauge the contribution not just by GCD and ability complexity, but by the macro-level fight-centric stuff expected of a tank. I'm confident SE has more in store for us later on in the xpac, but I'm not against the idea of higher complexity in tank combos. Naturally I would want this to lead to higher reward (most probably damage, but it would be nice if some kind of mitigation and/or other utility factored in as well). I've been going through the thread Kabooa made, but I have nothing substantive to add as of yet. I'm a bit too focused in on the current state of the game, so all of my suggestions are - to use your words - adding another spinning plate to maintain.

[Kyni]

That would be the best testament on how healers' DPS is far less an issue than the really low healing requirement...which is probably why healers have so much opportunity to do damage.

It's more of a testament that holy spirit under requiescat needs to hit a bit harder. Increasing the Healing requirement i.e. forcing healers to use more gcds on healing would make this specific problem worse. The big reason, why nobody is already doing it, as glare already hits harder than hs under requiescat, is simply that you probably wouldn't even gain a glare out of it, because the whm wouldn't have used a cure or cure 2 anyway, so there is nothing to really gain here. But, if casting cures becomes more commonplace, so that you can guarantee to get a glare out of it, people will start doing it, even through the gain is very small currently.

That being said this isn't really a Tank dps vs Healer dps issue and more an odd side effect of PLD having a full blown heal. That being said i think it still should be watched, because i don't think it's intended this way.

[J-Reyno]

Yes. Why focus on the damage side though? Why not focus on the tank side? That's the crux of the argument here, as the existence of this thread is predicated on the belief that tank damage is low while also lamenting the simplicity of tank-centric gameplay. If tank-centric gameplay is simple, then (as I mentioned multiple times before in this thread) energy would be better spent advocating for an increase in tank-focused solutions instead of boosting dps.

I focus on the damage side because that's how tanks play. They do damage. It's how they're designed and I don't have a problem with that in itself, but my primary concern is the low damage of tanks given that's pretty much all they do. I think there can definitely be a discussion addressing the relative simplicity of the role, but that doesn't change what's going on with them right now. It's more of a tangential discussion that has its place, but doesn't address immediate concerns of current gameplay design. Still, you'll see that I'm not arguing against people who are actually discussing those things in this thread even if it's not my foremost concern, because I think it's still an interesting and worthwhile discussion to have.

I also don't think they're mutually exclusive. If SE wants to increase tank damage by making the job more complex, that's a one-size-fits-all solution if I've ever seen one.

But it's not 99% of tank gameplay. It's not even 90%. It might be 75-80% in a fight that's on farm, and probably less than 50% for a fight that's in prog. Mechanics will always come first, with dps being a concern after the execution is down pat.

Mechanics are the universal gameplay present for all jobs. I'm referring to what happens when tanks press buttons. 99% of the time it's damage. Yes, they do have passive non-damage contribution by virtue of taking hits, but I'm specifically talking about what happens when you actually press buttons. Active gameplay. And yes it's ultimately the goal for all jobs, even healers, to press as many damage buttons as possible, but tanks are undoubtedly doing that more than healers and with more variety as well. Or put differently, healers interrupt their damage dealing with heals more often than tanks interrupt theirs with... non-damage tanking.

Many veteran players are used to a certain cadence in the game, and this naturally puts an emphasis on more damage and faster clearing when it comes to non-savage/EX level stuff. But just because the emphasis is on dps in those situations doesn't mean the value of a properly played tank or healer is decreased. You still need that tank there to hold aggro and rotate CD's on a big pull, and that healer still needs to make sure said tank doesn't go down or else you'll have 8-10 very angry monsters running roughshod over the rest of the group.

The tank absolutely has value. You should still do your job correctly, but your job mostly amounts to "do damage" with the only real special thing being that you're just doing it while being a tank. You can genuinely get away with not using defensive cooldowns AT ALL during an entire dungeon run. You barely even have to worry about positioning, if at all, because your mistakes can be cleaned up by the healer. The healer, who will and must do healing things more often than you do tank things.

Now I'm not saying a bad tank won't make the run worse or that a good tank can't significantly improve the experience of the group. What I am saying is that a tank can get away with no doing "tank stuff" more than a healer can get away with not doing "heal stuff" in your regular, everyday content. For most content, if you've turned on tank stance you've done the absolute bare minimum needed to function as a tank.

Not only do tanks already have less actual defensive tank abilities to begin with, most of what they do have isn't even necessary in most content. They're simply a much more damage-oriented job when it comes to active gameplay. You might ask again, why do I not focus on addressing this instead? For the reasons stated above. I don't have a problem with tanks being more damage-oriented. I do have a problem with active gameplay being 99% dealing damage given the current damage numbers. You can disagree and feel that tank gameplay should simply be shifted AWAY from damage, which is fine, but it's not a "right" opinion. It's a different one.

I have yet to see anyone else but myself offer an idea in this thread (I am aware of - and thankful - for the thread started by Kabooa) to boost tank damage while also boosting complexity. The meaning behind this is clear; those advocating for an increase in tank damage without commensurate increase in tank complexity simply want more damage for the sake of having more damage.

I've already answered this HERE.

And like I've also said before, increasing the complexity of tank damage is fine. Great, even. Leaving tanks as they are for the remainder of the xpac since we all know significant changes would not happen before the next? That sucks. As for wanting more damage "for the sake of having more damage" I'm not repeating myself because I linked my post in my last response, which in your own response you seem to have at least regarded the impact of the roles as a matter of opinion. Hopefully we can keep that energy. You don't get to decide others' motivations and reduce their arguments and opinions to "want more damage for no justifiable reason" just because you disagree with those reasons.

[Kabooa]

It's more of a tangential discussion that has its place, but doesn't address immediate concerns of current gameplay design..

Humor me this last time.

https://www.fflogs.com/reports/x6ajk...pe=damage-done

https://www.fflogs.com/reports/LR7qM...pe=damage-done

Examine these two logs and tell me your conclusion. Once you do yours, I'll do mine.

[J-Reyno]

Humor me this last time.

https://www.fflogs.com/reports/x6ajk...pe=damage-done

https://www.fflogs.com/reports/LR7qM...pe=damage-done

Examine these two logs and tell me your conclusion. Once you do yours, I'll do mine.

Just write what you have to say. I'm guessing it has something to do with AST matching or even superseding tank dps by the end of the tier, with SCH not far behind. AST was OP and everyone knows it.

But that's not everything these logs show, which I'm sure you see. So let's hear it.