What Does Protect Actually Do?

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

If I remember right, it's around 8% effective mitigation?

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At ilv400 it ranges from exactly 8% for tanks and less than 3% for healers/casters

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Originally Posted by AleXwern

At ilv400 it ranges from exactly 8% for tanks and less than 3% for healers/casters

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Wow, good riddance, Protect.

I would still like to see some form of Protect and Shell in the game. Maybe a Ogcd ability the last for 15s?

It's an 8% damage reduction for tanks and people are glad it's gone? I don't get it. That's feels like a heavy nerf; why is this a good thing? When you're in a group of 8 that quickly translates to quite a bit of mitigation across the party too...

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Originally Posted by Truen

It's an 8% damage reduction for tanks and people are glad it's gone? I don't get it. That's feels like a heavy nerf; why is this a good thing? When you're in a group of 8 that quickly translates to quite a bit of mitigation across the party too...

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That’s only presuming that they don’t reduce overall mob damage or increase base defense of every class. There’s other ways to make up for protect being gone.

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Originally Posted by Truen

It's an 8% damage reduction for tanks and people are glad it's gone? I don't get it. That's feels like a heavy nerf; why is this a good thing? When you're in a group of 8 that quickly translates to quite a bit of mitigation across the party too...

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I mean, when you put it like this, it makes it sound like it was removed to force healers to heal more.

The numbers weren't the issue. It's that it was a pointless skill because it had a 30 minute duration and was present on every single healer. Meaning it had a guaranteed 100% uptime in every single encounter in the game. There was no skill or strategy to using it, you just press it as soon as the instance starts, or the second you return from a wipe and forget about it again.

It's telling when people are wanting it nerfed from 30 minutes to something like 15 seconds purely to make it somewhat interesting. As it was it added nothing to the game except another button to fit on your bar.

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Originally Posted by Brynhild

So I sputtered in horror when I learned that Protect is going away, then I realized I have no idea what it does even though I dutifully cast it at the beginning of every duty. Tooltip says "Increases the physical and magic defense of target and all party members nearby target". Ok, cool. By how much, and how?

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In terms of effectiveness, it effectively took up a spot on your hotbars. That's not a joke.

You know it increases physical and magical defense, but don't really know by how much. There has been some numbers tossed into this thread: 8% and 15%, and even much lower numbers for non-tanks. We also know that either way, 8% to 15% increase to def/mdef does not translate to the same amount of damage reduction respectively, which would be a much greater percentile of defense added. The tank having the highest defensive stat benefits the most from this.

Because it has a 30 minute duration, even if negligible you would think any increase to defense can't be bad. In truth it isn't bad at all. What makes it bad is it's a mandatory static buff with little benefit as it is a buff that doesn't really fall off, nor grant any kind of survivability against hard hitting mechanics. As such, it adds an unnecessary step to combat. A player KO costs the healer 3 GCDs, or 2 GCDs and an oGCD depending on availability/preference: Rezz, Cure, and reapply protect. Just shaving one of those off will really help the flow of combat for healers, and those who love to run ahead of Protect currently are most certainly not going to miss it either.

If they wanted to keep it, they could have just have made it instant and I think most would have been fine with that. WHM in particular currently has the least bloat of the three healers, so they could have given it back to them. I'm glad they are taking this concept of Protect away, but not particularly happy it's gone completely.

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Originally Posted by Truen

It's an 8% damage reduction for tanks and people are glad it's gone? I don't get it. That's feels like a heavy nerf; why is this a good thing? When you're in a group of 8 that quickly translates to quite a bit of mitigation across the party too...

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Yeah, there are like a lot of duty finder parties with players that are totally reliant on protect's dmg mitigation. Like, returning players, new players, lazy players, dragoon, black mages, players that are rusty with jobs, players that don't remember what to do, tnk DC nightmares, players without job crystals that are trying experimental set-ups...

TBH, the devs might actually be tired of the content's skill level and might be trying to increase player skill so that they can make more interesting content and increase the depth of PVP. The devs do play FF14 regularly

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Originally Posted by Brynhild

What Does Protect Actually Do?

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Keeps the tank and dps from hitting sprint when the instance starts.