Is a tank's defence so high that they will appear to have received a lot less damage than the rest of the group, despite standing in the middle of a mob with a boss at its head? It's kind of been playing on my mind since an 'incident' in a raid, where some DPS 'god' decided to start flaming my (then amateurish) tanking skills, and that he'd received more damage than I had so I must be doing my job wrong. As said above, I was there in the centre of the mob (M1 Batcave raid) of robots the whole time so I was certainly taking some punishment.
It's like flaming healers as rage or fire that our healing out is higher. If you're something like an Ice tank, you should definitely have low damage in, because, you know, you're shielding it :-D Your defense will of course reduce incoming damage but it's not so high that you will usually have less damage in per hit in than everyone else. However, the amount of hits that actually target you are still higher than that what a melee DPS takes in (not counting AoE). But even I had more damage in than a tank in some cases when I was meleeing. Usually, that was an Ice Tank though..
Ice tank, yea. So I mitigate a lot of damage cycling shields. I haven't really done a proper check on the end of raid stats recently - I should re-visit and re-assess.
From a healer POV, if you are talking about the 4man in Metal 1, being an ice tank, in the 1st boss with the AoE and DoTs, yes, you should have less damage in than others because they will receive a good amount of environmental damage that you aren't receiving because of shields. Also Bane has the spinning AoE attack, and venom on floor applies damage. All that damage is suffered by DPSs but mitigated by ice tanks.
As a fellow Tank, I would let the DPS know to use the R1 button or actually move out of the way of damage the best they can instead of justing standing in one spot. Sometimes there are more important things that “pew pew”. Next time just say “You can’t handle my damage in.”
As others have said yes you do mitigate some of the damage. So tick for tick you will take less damage. However as a whole you’re I’ll take more damage since most hits are going to you. Oh course this depends on power and rotation. I have finished alerts as ice tank with less than 100k damage taken. When I’m in alerts as ice I try to see how close I can get to 0 damage taken. Closest I came was I think 50k when my shield broken while I was CCed and took splash damage. And other powers can do similar (not that low) by having a shield heavy loadout. For example, an earth tank using, gem stone shield, HLS, Amazonian deflection, and movement shield, with a pull and brick or jackhammer. You can simply rotate you shields to mitigate a lot of damage. Gem > HLS > gem > AD > SC shield > repeat. So yes it’s not that hard to do, especially in an alerts. Most dps just ignore mechanics, focus on pew pew and cry when they get hit.
A lot of newer content has scripts for enemies to leave the tank or target other players. Then there are things like environmental damage like Lady Blackhawks stomp and that annoying crap in DMe and abnormal add aggro mechanics like in FIe and The DMe embers. With all that, if the right set of factors were at play, it’s not out of the question for a non-tank to end up with more damage in than the tank in a raid even if the tank is doing their job superbly.
I’m a fire tank. I have had a melee dps take more damage than me on a few occasions, and typically, he’s dying a lot more than he should and stressing the healer out. Taking in more damage than the tank as a a dps is not sometime to brag about. If you want melee bosses, that’s fine, but you should have some level of damage avoidance load out or strategy to keep the group running smoothly and not bailing you out.
Some tanks are built to not have received the damage in the first place (Earth and Ice) while other tanks are a combo of healing and negating damage. If you tank the boss/adds and don't go down/beat the instance you did your job and if you're a tank that shields a lot or uses a pet to eat your damage then the dps that was talking out the side of his neck is ignorant and needs to expand his knowledge.
