No. If they did have damage, then maybe 10% at the absolute maximum, but nowhere near 25%.
Your job as a tank is to hold the enemy's attention, move them to the correct position, maintain debuffs, call out mechanics, interrupt attacks and provide buffs to your team.
Necrotech_Master wrote: »for general overland, its already possible to get a tanky character that does 16k dps (almost 50% of an avg expected dps toons dps)
this is on a non optimized build or anything, all i did was throw herald of the tome on and use the arc beams as primary source of dmg lol
for optimized end game content though this just wouldnt work because tanks absolutely need 100% of their build dedicated to staying alive
More damage, more power creep…
That said, looking at the pure class passives thus far, I suspect that it might be possible to drop some defense to get more weapon/spell damage and do a bit more damage. Or just proccing the damage pure class passives. Like the trade-off is you either subclass and get more debuffs or pure class and do some damage. We’ll find out later on though, probably not until it hits live. I might mess with it but I don’t have confidence that I’ll try doing any dungeon HMs on the PTS.
More damage, more power creep…
That said, looking at the pure class passives thus far, I suspect that it might be possible to drop some defense to get more weapon/spell damage and do a bit more damage. Or just proccing the damage pure class passives. Like the trade-off is you either subclass and get more debuffs or pure class and do some damage. We’ll find out later on though, probably not until it hits live. I might mess with it but I don’t have confidence that I’ll try doing any dungeon HMs on the PTS.
We are away to get the most power creep we have ever had, and I don’t want to sacrifice utility for damage, I just want a battle spirit type buff on tanks to give them more passive damage, maybe more people will play tank if they can so something, I might actually queue for random dungeons on tank if I knew it wasn’t gonna take 45 minutes
Necrotech_Master wrote: »why would you play a full tank in a random queue when you dont know who your teaming with? especially if your going in on a normal
if your just doing random normals, you definitely dont need a full tank for that, just heavy armor and thats about it
in stuff like vets and HMs, you absolutely should not be focused on DPSing because then your going to miss a block and die and potentially cause a wipe
so i still dont see why tanks need a dmg buff when you can easily build a tank for random normals that does 25k dps (and yes i tested that on my main who is a tank with just the herald of tome line for added dps and on the king boar jester quest i was doing 22-25k dps)
More damage, more power creep…
That said, looking at the pure class passives thus far, I suspect that it might be possible to drop some defense to get more weapon/spell damage and do a bit more damage. Or just proccing the damage pure class passives. Like the trade-off is you either subclass and get more debuffs or pure class and do some damage. We’ll find out later on though, probably not until it hits live. I might mess with it but I don’t have confidence that I’ll try doing any dungeon HMs on the PTS.
We are away to get the most power creep we have ever had, and I don’t want to sacrifice utility for damage, I just want a battle spirit type buff on tanks to give them more passive damage, maybe more people will play tank if they can so something, I might actually queue for random dungeons on tank if I knew it wasn’t gonna take 45 minutes
That doesn’t mean it should be made even worse. We can’t have it all, I think if it does become a trade-off where pure class can do more damage that’d be a good thing because it’s going to be hard to balance pure class against subclass for tanking when the goal is to stack debuffs/buffs.Necrotech_Master wrote: »why would you play a full tank in a random queue when you dont know who your teaming with? especially if your going in on a normal
if your just doing random normals, you definitely dont need a full tank for that, just heavy armor and thats about it
in stuff like vets and HMs, you absolutely should not be focused on DPSing because then your going to miss a block and die and potentially cause a wipe
so i still dont see why tanks need a dmg buff when you can easily build a tank for random normals that does 25k dps (and yes i tested that on my main who is a tank with just the herald of tome line for added dps and on the king boar jester quest i was doing 22-25k dps)
I’d argue you don’t even need heavy armor, I can fake tank on my light armor wearing DPS (albeit, I have frost staves and major resolve) fine if there’s a real healer (aka I need to slot more heals LOL).
You can DPS as a tank, it just depends on the content and your skill level. Medium armor tanking HMs with one bar daggers? That’s a thing but at that point you’re probably full burning the boss and sweating your global cooldowns. You can roll heavies up until maybe Coral Aerie so you could drop some defense, at the cost of added risk. I have beam and jabs on my plar tank to keep me entertained but I don’t do a whole lot of damage and usually that’s fine…
That is to say, though, maybe rethink the build to add more active skills onto it. Like magma fist or vamp drain. Keeps you busy and makes the DPS do more damage.
Yeah that’s what they do in every mmo, but they only do 0 damage in eso, why do they need to be doing 0 damage? I get it for PvP balance but my idea doesn’t affect PvP
Oblivion_Protocol wrote: »Yeah that’s what they do in every mmo, but they only do 0 damage in eso, why do they need to be doing 0 damage? I get it for PvP balance but my idea doesn’t affect PvP
I don’t think you understand how ZOS operates. There is no separate balance between PVP and PVE. Whatever gets buffed in PVE will come to PVP, which is how we get stuff like trial sets, such as Null Arca and Relequin (intended for PVE), becoming meta for PVP builds.
Oh, but don’t worry. Every once in a blue moon, if something overperforms too much in PVP, it gets nerfed across the board (RIP Plaguebreak and Tarnished Nightmare).

There is nothing stopping you running a tank that does damage. You just need to spec a build that can fulfil your role in the team. In easier group content, just run a dps build, with a shield skill and a taunt (and maybe a heal) and you can fulfil a tank role if you know what you're doing.
High health does not make a good tank
If you want to have a build that can both take maximum damage, and deal maximum damage, that would be broken.
Necrotech_Master wrote: »why would you play a full tank in a random queue when you dont know who your teaming with? especially if your going in on a normal
if your just doing random normals, you definitely dont need a full tank for that, just heavy armor and thats about it
in stuff like vets and HMs, you absolutely should not be focused on DPSing because then your going to miss a block and die and potentially cause a wipe
so i still dont see why tanks need a dmg buff when you can easily build a tank for random normals that does 25k dps (and yes i tested that on my main who is a tank with just the herald of tome line for added dps and on the king boar jester quest i was doing 22-25k dps)
Avran_Sylt wrote: »Not that it's a fix for the abilities available, but slot a Master's 2H for Brawling trash packs once you've gained aggro.
Necrotech_Master wrote: »why would you play a full tank in a random queue when you dont know who your teaming with? especially if your going in on a normal
if your just doing random normals, you definitely dont need a full tank for that, just heavy armor and thats about it
in stuff like vets and HMs, you absolutely should not be focused on DPSing because then your going to miss a block and die and potentially cause a wipe
so i still dont see why tanks need a dmg buff when you can easily build a tank for random normals that does 25k dps (and yes i tested that on my main who is a tank with just the herald of tome line for added dps and on the king boar jester quest i was doing 22-25k dps)
I do trifectas I don’t do normal dungeons on tanks, in the hardest content you need all the mitigation and sustain you can get, and you need all the bar space, I’ve tanked on other MMOs and it feels better when the tank doesn’t hit like a noodle
Necrotech_Master wrote: »why would you play a full tank in a random queue when you dont know who your teaming with? especially if your going in on a normal
if your just doing random normals, you definitely dont need a full tank for that, just heavy armor and thats about it
in stuff like vets and HMs, you absolutely should not be focused on DPSing because then your going to miss a block and die and potentially cause a wipe
so i still dont see why tanks need a dmg buff when you can easily build a tank for random normals that does 25k dps (and yes i tested that on my main who is a tank with just the herald of tome line for added dps and on the king boar jester quest i was doing 22-25k dps)
I do trifectas I don’t do normal dungeons on tanks, in the hardest content you need all the mitigation and sustain you can get, and you need all the bar space, I’ve tanked on other MMOs and it feels better when the tank doesn’t hit like a noodle
Wait, so if you’re already doing scorepush then why do you feel like you need more damage? Everything should be burning pretty fast. Have you tried dungeon sweat strats? If not, that might be what you’d find fun? I mean, pre-subclassing there was a video going around of SCP tri with essentially 3.5 dps. Post-subclassing I’d imagine true meta is full tank though (too many debuffs to apply to spec into damage) but with daggers (knife). Not that you’d really have time to do damage with how fast dungeon bosses get burnt to a crisp with sweat strats.
Necrotech_Master wrote: »why would you play a full tank in a random queue when you dont know who your teaming with? especially if your going in on a normal
if your just doing random normals, you definitely dont need a full tank for that, just heavy armor and thats about it
in stuff like vets and HMs, you absolutely should not be focused on DPSing because then your going to miss a block and die and potentially cause a wipe
so i still dont see why tanks need a dmg buff when you can easily build a tank for random normals that does 25k dps (and yes i tested that on my main who is a tank with just the herald of tome line for added dps and on the king boar jester quest i was doing 22-25k dps)
I do trifectas I don’t do normal dungeons on tanks, in the hardest content you need all the mitigation and sustain you can get, and you need all the bar space, I’ve tanked on other MMOs and it feels better when the tank doesn’t hit like a noodle
Wait, so if you’re already doing scorepush then why do you feel like you need more damage? Everything should be burning pretty fast. Have you tried dungeon sweat strats? If not, that might be what you’d find fun? I mean, pre-subclassing there was a video going around of SCP tri with essentially 3.5 dps. Post-subclassing I’d imagine true meta is full tank though (too many debuffs to apply to spec into damage) but with daggers (knife). Not that you’d really have time to do damage with how fast dungeon bosses get burnt to a crisp with sweat strats.
Its not that I feel like I need the damage it’s more that I’ve tanked on other MMOs where I could do a bit of damage and it feels better when you aren’t doing 0, if I could do 50k there’s been times where it’s a wipe and the boss is on a million health imagine if the tank could clutch up and finish the boss I think that would be cool, them days are passed me but when I was going through all the hard modes there was a lot of them situations, they are type of moments that will get people addicted to tanking, but it’s not possible with 5k dps, I just want to see my number higher because it feels better
So uhm....what's the complaint here?
For non Veteran content you barely need actual tanks because enemies will melt, so you can run "off tank" just to taunt so your DPS players can smash their heads against the keyboard in peace (no offense).
For veteran/HM content you want a well organized/constructed party where your buffs/debuffs/actual tanking matters way more than the damage you do.
So technically while still not anywhere near a real DPS damage wise in higher level trials a lot of the time one of the tanks and healers partial or fully parse during some fights
As you improve as a player and play with others of a higher skill level you can parse as a support here and there
Necrotech_Master wrote: »for general overland, its already possible to get a tanky character that does 16k dps (almost 50% of an avg expected dps toons dps)
this is on a non optimized build or anything, all i did was throw herald of the tome on and use the arc beams as primary source of dmg lol
for optimized end game content though this just wouldnt work because tanks absolutely need 100% of their build dedicated to staying alive
I’m just talking about buffing their damage skills they already use, they do about 5k dps in raids on meta builds
Necrotech_Master wrote: »why would you play a full tank in a random queue when you dont know who your teaming with? especially if your going in on a normal
if your just doing random normals, you definitely dont need a full tank for that, just heavy armor and thats about it
in stuff like vets and HMs, you absolutely should not be focused on DPSing because then your going to miss a block and die and potentially cause a wipe
so i still dont see why tanks need a dmg buff when you can easily build a tank for random normals that does 25k dps (and yes i tested that on my main who is a tank with just the herald of tome line for added dps and on the king boar jester quest i was doing 22-25k dps)
I do trifectas I don’t do normal dungeons on tanks, in the hardest content you need all the mitigation and sustain you can get, and you need all the bar space, I’ve tanked on other MMOs and it feels better when the tank doesn’t hit like a noodle
Wait, so if you’re already doing scorepush then why do you feel like you need more damage? Everything should be burning pretty fast. Have you tried dungeon sweat strats? If not, that might be what you’d find fun? I mean, pre-subclassing there was a video going around of SCP tri with essentially 3.5 dps. Post-subclassing I’d imagine true meta is full tank though (too many debuffs to apply to spec into damage) but with daggers (knife). Not that you’d really have time to do damage with how fast dungeon bosses get burnt to a crisp with sweat strats.
Its not that I feel like I need the damage it’s more that I’ve tanked on other MMOs where I could do a bit of damage and it feels better when you aren’t doing 0, if I could do 50k there’s been times where it’s a wipe and the boss is on a million health imagine if the tank could clutch up and finish the boss I think that would be cool, them days are passed me but when I was going through all the hard modes there was a lot of them situations, they are type of moments that will get people addicted to tanking, but it’s not possible with 5k dps, I just want to see my number higher because it feels better
It is a complaint I've seen before that tanks don't do enough damage to be interesting but really, ESO doesn't need to be like other MMOs. I have clutched situations like that before. Usually using my atronach on sorc tank but I've done it with plar beam too. Albeit, it wasn't a million health. At that point, I'd be clutch ressing haha.
GloatingSwine wrote: »Necrotech_Master wrote: »for general overland, its already possible to get a tanky character that does 16k dps (almost 50% of an avg expected dps toons dps)
this is on a non optimized build or anything, all i did was throw herald of the tome on and use the arc beams as primary source of dmg lol
for optimized end game content though this just wouldnt work because tanks absolutely need 100% of their build dedicated to staying alive
I’m just talking about buffing their damage skills they already use, they do about 5k dps in raids on meta builds
How does the game know who to buff for this?
Because if it's just on role, then everyone sets their group role to tank to get the buff, and that would become the objectively correct thing to do. (Remember that the game does not in fact enforce group compositions except via the role queue for dungeon finder, and you can just change once you've loaded in)
Also your premise just doesn't hold up.
People who don't play tanks aren't avoiding them because they want to post a high damage number, they're avoiding them because the tank is the highest pressure role in most encounters where if you make a mistake, which can happen remarkably quickly, it's very likely that you cause a wipe and it's very hard in most situations for a single player to be the cause of a wipe (and almost never that a single DPS can cause it).
Some people just aren't going to step into that environment for any amount of damage buffs, because they don't want to be the one who gets blamed and told they suck when the team wipes.