How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Ivellior]

And yet tanks have always dealt damage and threat/enmity/hit-me-instead-points have with few skills' exceptions always been based on damage dealt on any tank in any game.

Following this logic we could say that since enmity is no longer based on the damage dealt anymore (it's a toggle now) there is no reason to do high damage anymore.
In games with trinity enmity was produced from damage as well as skills that only give enmity. For example in WOW classic Warriors got most of their enmity from taunt that did no damage. And in all games with trinity tanks always dealt a lot less damage than dps.

[Kalise]

First of all, doing damage is against the core and class identity for tanks.

Then someone should tell SE.

Since, currently designed Tanks have little to them other than DPS and occasionally press a defensive CD for Tankbusters.

- Enmity is no longer a thing.

- Tank LB's continue to be nigh worthless.

- Tanks don't have to focus on active mitigation because all their skills are mongo smash with a smidge of self sustain tacked onto the 123 combo (Sans PLD whom instead passively blocks damage)

- The "Tank" stat continues to be worthless because it offers less damage than literally every other stat and damage is all that matters from gear.

Literally, XIV's Tanks get the "Blue DPS" meme title for a reason. That reason is they're essentially just less interesting DPS jobs, whom occasionally use defensive CD's. The entire focus of playing a Tank is still just "Maximize muh DEEPS!". Gear for max damage, play around popping offensive CD's in burst windows and maintain high uptime on slapping the boss.

If they want Tanks to actually be Tanks, then they need to give Tanks something Tank related to do in combat (With a meaningful reward, not just "Oh, my healer spent 1 less GCD on a heal so could fire off another Broil!"). As opposed to keeping them as DPS jobs that get continual damage nerfs and impedements.

Either that, or if they continue to make Tanking and Healing requirements so minimal, just go the whole hog and delete the Tank and Healer roles and just give everyone Rampart, Assize, Swiftcast and Raise and tune every job as a DPS who can pop a CD when the boss does a thing.

[Ivellior]

Then someone should tell SE.

Since, currently designed Tanks have little to them other than DPS and occasionally press a defensive CD for Tankbusters.

- Enmity is no longer a thing.

- Tank LB's continue to be nigh worthless.

- Tanks don't have to focus on active mitigation because all their skills are mongo smash with a smidge of self sustain tacked onto the 123 combo (Sans PLD whom instead passively blocks damage)

- The "Tank" stat continues to be worthless because it offers less damage than literally every other stat and damage is all that matters from gear.

Literally, XIV's Tanks get the "Blue DPS" meme title for a reason. That reason is they're essentially just less interesting DPS jobs, whom occasionally use defensive CD's. The entire focus of playing a Tank is still just "Maximize muh DEEPS!". Gear for max damage, play around popping offensive CD's in burst windows and maintain high uptime on slapping the boss.

If they want Tanks to actually be Tanks, then they need to give Tanks something Tank related to do in combat (With a meaningful reward, not just "Oh, my healer spent 1 less GCD on a heal so could fire off another Broil!"). As opposed to keeping them as DPS jobs that get continual damage nerfs and impedements.

Either that, or if they continue to make Tanking and Healing requirements so minimal, just go the whole hog and delete the Tank and Healer roles and just give everyone Rampart, Assize, Swiftcast and Raise and tune every job as a DPS who can pop a CD when the boss does a thing.

That I agree with. They should make tanks feel more tanks again. But asking for more damage is just making the existing problem worse, it doesn't solve any of the underlying core issues with tanks.

[Shurrikhan]

Following this logic we could say that since enmity is no longer based on the damage dealt anymore (it's a toggle now) there is no reason to do high damage anymore.
In games with trinity enmity was produced from damage as well as skills that only give enmity. For example in WOW classic Warriors got most of their enmity from taunt that did no damage. And in all games with trinity tanks always dealt a lot less damage than dps.

It's a toggle between exactly one's damage and 10x one's damage. Both are based on damage.

Making enmity a non-mechanic, moreover, does not make damage meaningless.

Also, Taunt has always had too long a cooldown and far too little threat generation to be the main source of a Warrior's threat. It's effectively Provoke, but without the massive bonus that was added in ShB.
Sunder Armor, WoW Warrior's old high-flat-threat spammable skill, on the other hand, still generated rDPS through more than just misdirecting enemies -- by steadily removing enemy physical mitigation. Note, though, that it too would eventually be replaced by Heroic Strike as a Rage spender once a sufficient threat margin was in place, and was ultimately replaced entirely by a fairly high damage variant, Devastate, not long later.

[ReiMakoto]

First of all, doing damage is against the core and class identity for tanks. You are playing a dps to do damage, a healer to heal and a tank to tank. That is the reason people play tanks and it should be the primary reason to play a tank. If E5S and E6S are able to be solotanks then that is just fine as well. I see no problem with that. People that want to do damage can just roll dps. Finally if SE wants both tanks to perform their intended role (ie tank) they can just add more adds, 2 bosses in the encounter, or force tank swapping with debuffs like they did in the past.

Besides, if we follow what you say and increase tank damage (without decreasing dps damage) and then increase the dps checks (to offset), that will just make savage raids harder and we will end up with Alexander all over again where it almost killed raiding because people couldn't clear A3S. To make it work properly, the devs to do a ton of extra work to properly adjust the dps checks. And all that would be just in order to get tanks do more damage and feel like dps, which they shouldn't be in the first place. It's a different type in the trinity. As for people that want to have more fun because they want to see bigger number they can just play a dps class.

In Final Fantasy Tanks have always dealt damage as far back as th earliest games. In FF4 Cecil was the Tank, and he had the best strength and hit like a truck, FF3, Knights could also hit hard while having high defence, same with Vikings. FF6 had counter based tank in Cyan again dealing big damage, as well as machinist also being tanky and dealing big hits. FF7 Barret has the second highest strength in the game, as well as the highest defence and health, again he hit hard and worked amazing with the cover materia, again making him a tank. FF8 Squall was the highest vit and health party memeber by default, and is refered to as a knight, making him the tank, and he is also the highest damaging character in the game. Steiner in FF9 could pull out really high damage despite being the tank. I could go into the spinoffs too but I feel like I'm making my point. You have an idea of how tanks should be in a trinity system that is not based on series history, nor the games history itself.

Making the tank role harder is not a bad thing if that is how they would make tanks dps bigger, but if they just flat increased tanks dps and changed enrages to match, nothing should change, its just the proportions that are different, unless the tank was bad at their rotation in the first place and being carried by dps, in which case why are the tanks allowed to put in less effort?

[ReiMakoto]

That I agree with. They should make tanks feel more tanks again. But asking for more damage is just making the existing problem worse, it doesn't solve any of the underlying core issues with tanks.

Make tanks feel more like tanks again, qualify this. Tanks in this game have always been about maximising damage outside of like early ARR.

[Shurrikhan]

Make tanks feel more like tanks again, qualify this. Tanks in this game have always been about maximising damage outside of like early ARR.

Even early ARR expected tanks to be able to put out their full damage. Not that there was much of any way to fail that back then. And yet they still dealt a higher percentage of a DPS's dps, iirc.

[Ivellior]

Comparing an mmo with a single player game isn't really appropriate, you should compare tank in FFXIV with tanks in FFXI. The whole system is based on the trinity that was established for MMO and has been pretty much standardized since the age of everquest.
If you want the game to be a trinity game it should follow those standards. And in those standards tanks don't do damage. DPS do.
If you want to have a hybrid system, that is fine too. But this isn't a hybrid system, it's supposed to be a trinity one.

As for what makes a tank, is the core tenets of the class: Mitigation and enmity. What a tanks need to do is take the least damage possible and keep the boss/adds on itself. That is the very definition of an mmo tank.

Tanks shouldn't have the same cookie-cutter defensive kit (an 20% cooldown, a 30% cooldown, a short cooldown, an invlu cooldown etc). Tanks defensive kit now is a just a copy/paste with a few changes on top of it. Tanks should also have a slew of abilities concerning gaining and maintaining enmity. There used a be a dps combo and skills which specifically increased enmity, now there are none, it's just a toggle.

Maximizing damage become a thing in HW because the dps checks were too tight. Before that tanks actually melded parry and vit. What happened in HW is that SE made savage raids dps so tight that it made it impossible to clear unless you maximized damage everywhere (including tanks). And you still couldn't clear if you anyone died once. After that it became about "maximizing damage".
During HW it was also the age when tanks had the most distinctive defensive play-style. What killed that defensive play-style was, again, raids. In the raids there was only magical damage, so PLD became the defacto "detrimental" tank since it had neither good damage, nor the defensive kit to deal with magical damage.
All these side effects from raiding trickled down to the general perception resulting in an increased difficulty for the normal playerbase, causing a general perception that tanking was hard and, as a result a decrease in tanks.
It was expected for people to tank in dps stance => people couldn't keep enmity / tanking was more complex/hard => less tanks.
It was expected for people to play DRK or WAR => people had to play the most complex tanks => people found taking difficuly => less tanks.
This resulted in tanks being seen as hard and complicated which caused the subsequent dumbing down in the next two expansions.

SE wants tanks to be more of a traditional mmo tank (rather than a dps), but at the same time they want to keep a sizable population of tanks, which resulted in curbing tank damage throughout the expansions and making tanks simpler.
It's obvious that SE doesn't want tanks to do damage from all the steps they have taken during the years to curb tank damage (like locking accessories, removing main stat materia melds, and the tank stance changes), so asking for more damage isn't really going to wield any results. Even if you find a way to do more damage it will just get nerfed in the next expansion.
The underlying issue with the tanks isn't the damage output. It's the fact that they are too homogenized.

[Xtrasweettea]

Comparing an mmo with a single player game isn't really appropriate, you should compare tank in FFXIV with tanks in FFXI. The whole system is based on the trinity that was.

Comparing FF14 to a single player game is more appropriate than trying to compare FF14 to FF11.

FF11 has many elements that single player games and FF14 doesn't have. One of them is being able to change any piece of gear at any time, even during combat. This could easily change a "tank" into a DPS within one macro.

FF11 WARs were tanks that could out damage DPS. Heck from level 1-30 and then from level 75+, they were the premier tanks for all non-boss encounters.

FF11 PLDs would be the closest thing to a tank you want: low damage, lots of support abilities, etc. PLDs mainly kept enmity by healing themselves, casting Flash, using abilities, etc. They were also the least played tank in the game and only were really used for big boss fights and end-game events.

If you want to compare FF14 to an MMO, FF14 to WOW would be more appropriate.

[Mithia]

Well, you need a fair share of homogenization. The philosophy design where either tank provides something different to the party is, in the long run, pointless as long as it's just a race against time to deplete the health of the boss.

If we look back at HW, PLD was absolutely shunned from endgame raiding due to a lack of DPS potential altho it provided more party mitigation.


At this point, tanks are homogenized while still maintaining their class identity. And that to be fair is a big success as there is no wrong tank to take for the content. In HW it was common to see statics run 2x Warriors.

Anyway, tanks are in a good place right now, especially in later savage fights and ultimates tanks are expected to use their abilities to help the group survive damage for certain abilities while at the same time dealing considerable damage. Also, tank busters do hurt, try to take a Shiva TB with only one CD and see yourself deleted.