Would tanks be okay if SE swapped the damage between tank and healers?

[Carighan]

Why would more vocal players be any less able to point out a likely solution path than less vocal players? And why would the playerbase not necessarily handing the devs the solution on a silver platter mean that it's a bad idea to listen to them?

Ah yeah sorry, I should have worded that better.

Thing is, this has been a concept since Blizzard talked candidly about it back in the early WoW days (and since then some other devs did, Awesomenauts for example), players by and large are quite good at telling you that something is annoying them, and to a degree what.
However, experience has shown (and this matches with my experience in business software, where similar issues exist if on a different level) that even in the context of explicitly being asked for feedback players are very bad at telling you why something is annoying to them, and what they would like instead.

The same actually goes for the flipside, albeit it's of course more rare as happy players don't leave feedback as often as unhappy ones: Players can tell you that they're happy and to a degree what makes them happy, but not really why that thing makes them happy and what should not change lest it'd no longer be awesome.

So basically, from player feedback, take the "if" and to a degree the "what" (at least as a general pointer) but not the "why" or the proposed fixes.

And that's not a negative in itself. Of course the onus should not be on the players to provide this, they're not developers. But it becomes a problem in the modern social media age as players of certain groups tend to form a sort-of cult around some bigger personalities, and in the process of which these personalities get paid for providing more and more and more detailed and more detailed thoughts, which also means they'll provide ideas and hence a large group of players takes these ideas as if they're their own.

And then as developers, you get peer-pressure to react to these influencer thoughts one way or the other. Which is a bit weird, as they're just one person, just with a bunch of people who likes hearing that voice blabber incessantly.

And like a project manager in business software, it becomes surprisingly difficult to ignore these "larger" voices sometimes, but listening to them can be utterly destructive, as in the end they're no better than any other random voice. And sometimes less so, because they focus on a thing that's less related to gameplay and more selling the appearance of gameplay, after all, that's how they make their money.

Sorry, got way too wordy. Point is, I don't mean devs should ignore player feedback, but they need to be careful to not read too much into it either. That's how we end up with homogenized jobs after all, players crying for balanced raid performance constantly.

[Somnolence]

So long as the fight ends by reducing the enemy's HP to 0, all contribution --no matter how indirect-- is ultimately via more quickly reducing the enemy's HP to 0 (even if through a bit more uptime via Expedient, a healer GCD saved, or whatever else). The primary way tank sustain contributes to rDPS outside of not needing to be rezzed is just... more healer offensive GCDs. But you can only push that sustain so far before it becomes redundant, failing to provide any difference to clear time or chance of success.

Why, then, would having excess sustain be in the tank's interest? And similarly, why would it be in the tank's interest to have higher maximum damage than healers, thereby reducing the relative value of proper use of sustain (rewarded through increased healer DPS)?

Excess sustain/utility is useful during prog, as it allows recovery in case healer dies/busy with rezzing and stabilizing somebody else/when having misplaced mits etc.

Sure when fight is optimized it might be so superfluous in that it does not save healers any GCDs, but it is still there just in case.

Good example of that is WAR Equilibrium.

[Shurrikhan]

Excess sustain/utility is useful during prog, as it allows recovery in case healer dies/busy with rezzing and stabilizing somebody else/when having misplaced mits etc.

Sure when fight is optimized it might be so superfluous in that it does not save healers any GCDs, but it is still there just in case.

Good example of that is WAR Equilibrium.

I'm not disagreeing that some excess sustain potential is good, but neither was it my point.

All excess tank sustain rewards, ultimately, healer DPS. The more free sustain tanks have, the less likely they are to see any difference in reward as it actually matters (i.e., provides any benefit to the chance or speed of beating the given encounter). And, the lower healer maximum or per-GCD damage is, the less reward good use of sustain (be it flat or scaled, healing or mitigation) gives. One would think there would be far less outcry from tank "mains", then, to keep healers inferior, seeing as tanks now have zero swing available to them by which to usefully spend excess sustain (e.g., on Fell Cleave's over Inner Beast, on TP instead of HP, etc.).

Though, as an aside, there is also a large difference between having a massive heal like Equilibrium be both typically excess to requirement (for Warrior having already met the sustain of other tanks even without it) while being at no cost to damage and a tool like Clemency, which can spend rDPS through the tank on recovery or on rDPS through the healer (even if that is worthwhile only if/when the healer offensive GCD is disproportionately impactful (as used to be the reason for a stronger-spam-attack WHM handling heals while the weaker-spam-attack SCH redots, etc.) or one can benefit from Clemency's bonus (50% of healing to others duplicated to self).

[CaptainLagbeard]

Excess sustain/utility is useful during prog, as it allows recovery in case healer dies/busy with rezzing and stabilizing somebody else/when having misplaced mits etc.

Sure when fight is optimized it might be so superfluous in that it does not save healers any GCDs, but it is still there just in case.

Good example of that is WAR Equilibrium.

I personally don't mind the tank sustains... But because of them and the general design of fights, I think they should give Healers another way to contribute than just healing. But they don't want to do that.

[Supersnow845]

Excess sustain/utility is useful during prog, as it allows recovery in case healer dies/busy with rezzing and stabilizing somebody else/when having misplaced mits etc.

Sure when fight is optimized it might be so superfluous in that it does not save healers any GCDs, but it is still there just in case.

Good example of that is WAR Equilibrium.

That just goes back to the point of the post though. If tanks are able to act as emergency stabilisers for other party members if the healer either makes a mistake themself or makes a bad decision trying to correct another’s mistake (such as hard rezzing while the party needs healing) and this emergency stabilisation doesn’t hurt the tanks damage in any way then why do tanks just do 30% more damage by default when its healers who’s damage actually suffers from triage while the tanks can both triage and lose no damage in the process

If you can cover for the healer when needed and have it cost no DPS while the healer is doing other things that do cost them DPS why in a perfect environment when neither side is losing damage do tanks still do more damage especially when healers also have caster uptime concerns

[CaptainLagbeard]

Looking at just base potencies of attacks...

The main 3 hit Weaponskill combos of all the tanks

WAR, 220 - 340 - 480, averages to 346.6 and they get their 10% extra damage buff from doing their combo.
DRK, 300 - 380 - 480, averages to 386,6.
GNB, 300 - 380 - 460, 380 average.

PLD is a bit of a special case due to Atonement and Divine Might...

But for those 3, them just doing using their GCDs would be equivalent of healers spamming Glare, Broil, Malefic or Dosis... But due to their higher potency, they'd still out DPS the healers and that's not even accounting for all their other attacks. For healers, these other attacks barely exist aside from the DoT. And the DoTs aren't quite going to pull the DPS of Upheaval and Inner Release, or whatever else the other tanks have.

[GoatOfWar]

Looking at just base potencies of attacks...

The main 3 hit Weaponskill combos of all the tanks

WAR, 220 - 340 - 480, averages to 346.6 and they get their 10% extra damage buff from doing their combo.
DRK, 300 - 380 - 480, averages to 386,6.
GNB, 300 - 380 - 460, 380 average.

PLD is a bit of a special case due to Atonement and Divine Might...

But for those 3, them just doing using their GCDs would be equivalent of healers spamming Glare, Broil, Malefic or Dosis... But due to their higher potency, they'd still out DPS the healers and that's not even accounting for all their other attacks. For healers, these other attacks barely exist aside from the DoT. And the DoTs aren't quite going to pull the DPS of Upheaval and Inner Release, or whatever else the other tanks have.

That's not how that works.
300 potency for healers translates to more damage than 300 potency on tanks because of job traits.
The tanks do have a wider array of abilities though. They have removed a bunch of healer dps buttons over the years that kinda left behind that void.
Warrior, PLD and Gunbreaker have some really strong GCD's. And Dark knight has some really strong OGCD's. But what *really* separates the tanks from the healers is that the tank's dps profile synergises better with the burst. You could frontload half of Sage's dps and it would be on par with the tanks. Because it would be able to fit all of that damage into the burst.

[Shurrikhan]

I mean, you'd want to do pp2m counts anyways for any thorough comparison, but my point was that not all potency are equal.

300 tank potency >>> 300 melee potency >> 300 ranger potency > 300 caster/healer potency.

Tanks suffer a hidden output nerf inside their attack power formulas (and consequently to their damage at a given item level), as they have since Vit was first given Attack Power contribution (to stop tanks from equipping Slaying rings, before they just made ring types role-exclusive... wasting that effort and giving no excuse for this lingering nonsense), iirc.

300 healer/caster potency hits 30% harder than 300 melee potency because the Maim and Mend traits increase their damage by 30% before all else.

300 ranger potency hits 20% harder than 300 melee potency because the Job Action Bonus traits increase their damage by 20% before all else.

That being in the game is just unnecessary confounding BS compared to simply adjusting the raw potencies for each, I'll agree, but it's something we need to keep in mind in considering outputs against each other (e.g., in a shared "effective potency" measurement).

[Wolf_Necros]

Pretty sure some healers can do more damage depending on the gear they have on but just in case please correct me if I'm wrong

[Supersnow845]

Pretty sure some healers can do more damage depending on the gear they have on but just in case please correct me if I'm wrong

Doing more damage by nature of having more gear is a pretty pointless comparison especially if you consider in statics healers are last in gear priority