balance.. where art thou?

Not sure what rock you've by hiding under, Overlord Pika, but this isn't news, nor is it some new trend of imbalance. Due to leech effects, ripostes and ae aggro, sks have pretty much always been better at swarming largeish amounts of weaker end mobs versus the other two tanks, ever since...level 70 (epic & first ae hate spell)? It's actually one of the only niches the class has, albeit a random/dumb one.

Increased tank dps and the general stupidity of stances have just made the problem a bit more glaring than before, imo.

Did any other tanks go out there and bring top tier cleric and sham players + various good dps as a war or paly and attempt this? Also does the group heal recourse from paly blessing generate hate? If anyone knows for certain appreciate the input.

Nor did I say it was news. I'm just highlighting to the person who said there was balance that there isn't. There hasn't been for the better part of a decade, nor will it ever come. It's just a natural ability of the class due to the mechanics of their abilities and as long as you're somewhat competent at the game, any SK will be able to do it better than paladins or warriors of equivalent gear/aas/skill. As a person's skill rises, the more mobs they can do at once, but literally every SK can do this at varying degrees. It's quite amusing reading how people are acting as if this takes Ph.D level skill to do.

However, the issue will become even more glaring with a 7k rune procing weapon. Dear lord, imagine if Disruption remained AE? SKs would bring a single merc and decimate anything.

Short answer...they can't. It might be possible to achieve that by using all abilities at once under special circumstances, but it would last all of a few seconds. Sustained dps is not remotely close to what the OP claims.

It's probably misleading of me to say 'sustained'. 3 and a half minute fights.

So, Brutal + Mighty + Heroic Blade covers 2.5 of those 3.5 minutes, with 15, 20, and 20 minute cooldowns respectively Not to mention the 10 & 15 minute cooldown adps being taken advantage of. Full coverage on Funeral Dirge, etc.

You're definitely describing a long-ish burn, but it's not sustained dps unless it's the recycle time on discs.

The perspective error is easily forgiven since what you're describing is totally how RoI does the actual content, but yeah the verbiage has to be watched out for. Very much not how 99% (or whatever) of EQers experience EQ.

So 210s ? Thats not exactly sustained. I could see 350k on a warrior in a dps group. Reason being warriors benefit from ADPS greatly and should have a pretty high passive crit rate.

However given the length of most EOK raids i would not call 210s sustained dps.

I recently came face-to-face with the disparity between tanks and other classes first hand. I normally box an SK/Druid/Wizzy, with healer and caster mercs. The SK is in a mix of group (EoK and TBM) and raid (TBM/TDS) gear and is ranked in the 70's on magelo. I completed all the progression without any problems.

Then, to try something different, I tried to switch out my SK for my group geared monk (TBM and EoK) and tried using a tank merc and 2 healers. I couldn't survive the second 2-mob ambush in the Lcea partisan tasks. Wiped twice. No way I'd be able to finish progression with that group make up in a reasonable amount of time.

My SK can solo that ambush without any healer. And after the first few seconds, I can just about walk away.

But this shouldn't be about nerfing anybody! Bring up the other classes - please believe me, you do NOT want kills to be any slower for ANYBODY!

And as a side note, for anybody wondering about the impact of the OP's gear or group makeup: I tried this out with my less-geared SK, with my merc healers and boxed druid and wizzy. Only pulled 11-14 mobs, but never broke a sweat. I think any group-geared tank can probably do similar with a real healer. So group up, people!

I also want to point out that we're not really any more powerful than we've been for the past couple of expansions. One big difference is that this expansion has dark blue mobs - I can only remember a handful in all of TBM, and they were usually intended to be tanked 8 at a time (TseTse flies).

NameAlreadyInUse - you hit the nail on the head.
The stances made all the tanks really good - which means all the mobs need to get that much tougher.
Which makes everything else even weaker against mobs.
Tanks need to stop getting better because the tanking disparity between then and mercs/pets/anyone else is getting way to big (anyone else meaning those NOT in raid gear)

3 1/2 minutes is an eternity tbh

Burst was sub 60 seconds for 10 years of this game at least. Slowly burst classes have gained secondary, tertiary tools or just gotten their stuff extended that they now want you to believe that anything under 10 minutes is burst and the rest is sustained. That is nuts. If you are on a mob for more than 2 minutes it is sustained. No matter how much burst classes want to frame it otherwise so they can keep all their burst tools and just cry for more and more sustained so they dominate all situations like wizards did for the past few years and like how zerkers can't be touched on basically anything in Eok.

Play was very different for those 10 years, no one disputes that, but the spirit is the same. Sustained damage is how much damage you deal without using stuff up. If there's stuff used up, you're burning to some degree or other.

Play is more active now than it was way back when, though. Various burns are available more than 1/hour, and they're quite different by class. Competent players use the tools available when they can, making the appropriate duration over which to evaluate sustained damage the cooldown period of whichever burns are being used. That's the point at which a character is back to its baseline, full potential.

We don't speak of the Kick button being infinity dps in the second it lands; it's more like 2k sustained dps (or whatever) with its expected damage divided by the time it takes to become available again. In the same fashion, we don't evaluate the 240,000 damage from warrior BP click as "sustained dps" on a duration shorter than its 10 minute reuse timer, and we don't evaluate an overall character's sustained dps on a duration shorter than that character's de facto overall cooldown timer, that of their burn discs.

There is no burst or sustained. Only sustained exist. No event is 2 minutes so it doesn't matter what a class does in that time frame it matters what they did the entire event which is what the devs care about.

SKs didn't just become this massive wrecking ball with EoK. I said it awhile back and got banned. It's all about the skill of the person behind the keyboard. I said it then and I'll say it now that people who say it's not true or argue that I can't post parses just flat don't have the level of skill that others do. Lack of skill does not mean it's a balanced class because you can't do something.

It's late and I don't understand your words. But since the OP posted a video, you can see exactly what he does. And I'm not taking anything away from the OP by saying that, from watching the video, you can tell that this does not require a high level of skill. Pop your epic. Pop a disc, if you feel like it. And then spam your AE tap/taunts and everything else you have.

If somebody copies what the OP does in his video and doesn't have the same results, I say the problem is most likely to be unsatisfactory gear/AA/stats, not skill. Bravo to EoK - where group gear makes this level of play available to ANY tank (not just raiders).

I do wish that non-tank classes could molo/solo a mob or two with confidence. I don't think it's fun to play other classes unless I have a guaranteed group of people. But I don't think there's anything inappropriate about tanks being able to stand up to lots of mobs. That's what makes grouping worthwhile.

So, the parse listed is from a warrior most likely with max DPS AA of EoK or close, who was in a melee DPS group most likely with perfect ADPS support, and that was a burn parse.
A burn parse that a SK would reach np too, providing the same ADPS support (caster or melee DPS group not sure what benefits most SK, maybe caster DPS group).
A burn parse that any melee DPS worthing their salt and getting the same support would beat np.
Also, a "normal" raid doesn't have warriors in melee DPS group and melee DPS in tank groups.
All in all, this 350 k "sustained" parse is therefore irrelevant regarding class balance.

And when brutal and mighty were down, he was most likely under Offensive Disc, as being in a DPS group he was not tanking.

The problem is you're not attributing timing and knowledge of how every disci works. See as an SK to become a legit good swarmer of modern mobs you need to to become very good at timing everything right and making sure you get MC to proc because epic drops fairly fast and then when you really need to pop defensives and stuff when you're spiking hard. There's a reason you don't see many raid sk's doing what Drogba does and it's because he knows his class and limits very well and times everything just right. Alot of sk's like to spam DD taps when swarming and what they don't realize is less swings is less heals with MC or epic running and you risk dying every cast.