Make tenacity great

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Originally Posted by Lyth

No, I'm saying that's what it should do. If your ilvl goes up, your percentage lifesteal (or self-sustain/shielding alternative) should go up independent of the damage that you do, with diminishing returns, of course. I also think that you need some degree of transparency with all this (i.e. when you select a piece of gear for comparison, you should be able to see what those stat boosts are translating into in terms of damage per second, self-healing percentage, damage reduction, and so on).

I mean, you can hand out self-sustain and mitigation options like Bloodbath and such to dps jobs, but at the end of the day, tanks need to be the ones who see proportionately higher gains to those abilities with gear. Much like you get to see higher dps gains with gear than tanks do.

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So from 430 to 530, what should %based abilities such as The Blackest Night and Nascent Flash begin and end at?

How much should the potency healing skills scale by?

What should your start and ending passive Mitigation% be?

Sure. Give me the damage formula that the development team uses as well as their simulation toolkit, and I'll just pop in a few rough values into my calculator.

But what is the relevance of these questions?

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Sure. Give me the damage formula that the development team uses as well as their simulation toolkit, and I'll just pop in a few rough values into my calculator.

But what is the relevance of these questions?

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You don't need a calculator or a simulator to answer these questions.

The relevance is they deal directly with how much damage enemies need to do and how much healers are expected to heal.

I'll give you some sample numbers to illustrate this.

Tanks at 430 had about 110,000 HP. At 530, they sit around 190,000 (Rounded for ease).

TBN currently shields for 25% of maximum health. 27,500 to 47,500. The amount it protects already scales up with gear.

If we add separate scaling, at half the rate that HP increases (So instead of 25%, it shields for 35%), it instead shields for 66,500.

Likewise, Abyssal Drain is a drain effect. It deals 200 damage and heals 100% of that amount. It scales with damage.

If the lifedrain also increases, then it deals 200 damage and drains for 270 using the same "1/2 of HP increase" (72% increase of HP, 36% increase of healing related stuff).

Soul Eater heals for 300 damage, increased to 400 with this scaling.

All healing on tanks is approximately 72% more effective compared to the other roles.

This is without factoring in additional cooldowns for mitigation.

They will make Tenacity great like they did with Parry and Accuracy. By removing it altogether.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

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It's irrelevant because players never see 'true damage' prior to filters of stats and gear. The numbers and scaling can be whatever you want them to be.

Gear progression can be inconsequential or impactful. What does matter is when a player picks up that piece of gear and has a sense that they're actually hitting harder and that their actions are having more of an effect. That's a subjective experience that you can't math out, yet has a much bigger impact on player engagement than whether or not NF provides 12.3% more healing than Bloodbath. When dps gear upgrades consistently feel like they have impact, and tank and healer gear upgrades consistently do not, then your tank and healer numbers decline. Again, this is why listening to your playerbase's feedback is important, especially the roles that you are having difficulty retaining.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Gear progression can be inconsequential or impactful. What does matter is when a player picks up that piece of gear and has a sense that they're actually hitting harder and that their actions are having more of an effect. That's a subjective experience that you can't math out.

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Not only are we able to math it out, dedicated individuals do math it out. To claim one role has impactful progression but another doesn't is false. Jobs have different starting points, but nearly all scale at the same rate - because they are all subject to the same basic formula.

If we included new tiers at this level bracket with no other job changes, those same individuals could tell you where exactly each job should be after its all said and done, and for the laymen like you and I, that range will be between 15-20%.

Potentially higher based on where substats end up, but every single job that can end at those break points will see the same range of increase.

You can calculate whether or not any given player will feel satisfied that their gear upgrades have impact??

This is a surprisingly deep hole that you are digging. The entire point of this thread is that tanks are coming back and are telling you that the present system of stat progression and gear progression on tanks still feels inadequate, especially compared to dps jobs. "Er, according to my calculations, all of you actually really enjoy stacking stats like parry and tenacity. Let me punch these, er, figures, back into my graphing calculator and recheck." No. We really don't.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

You can calculate whether or not any given player will feel satisfied that their gear upgrades have impact??

This is a surprisingly deep hole that you are digging. The entire point of this thread is that tanks are coming back and are telling you that the present system of stat progression and gear progression on tanks still feels inadequate, especially compared to dps jobs. "Er, according to my calculations, all of you actually really enjoy stacking stats like parry and tenacity. Let me punch these, er, figures, back into my graphing calculator and recheck." No. We really don't.

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If 15-20% is impactful for DPS, then 15-20% is impactful for Tanks.

But frankly, if you're not willing to answer some simple questions, there's no point cluttering this thread further.

The least you can do with your final jab is complete my bingo card.

Except it isn't because tank damage calculation itself is a joke. +15-20% of nothing is still nothing and unfortunately damage is the only thing that has any impact, in terms of defense you can easily survive any bossfight in minimum ilvl gear.

Sure, mathematically we're getting the same % increase but this isn't about calculated increases but about how it feels to upgrade your gear and the feeling is absolutely lackluster.


I'd actually argue that even for dps the substats are rather lackluster, the only thing that makes it feel more impactful on dps than on tanks (or healers for that matter) is the fact that they're working with bigger numbers to begin with.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

Except it isn't because tank damage calculation itself is a joke. +15-20% of nothing is still nothing and unfortunately damage is the only thing that has any impact, in terms of defense you can easily survive any bossfight in minimum ilvl gear.

Sure, mathematically we're getting the same % increase but this isn't about calculated increases but about how it feels to upgrade your gear and the feeling is absolutely lackluster.

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It is not nothing. Hyperbole helps no one.

Part of the reason I was asking what they wanted from scaling abilities is because currently the toolkit is not only sufficient, but overly so. Adding scaling here while changing nothing else would only make this worse.

Stop and think about how much less you'd actually have to consider if your healing and active short mitigation scaled even higher with your gear. There is a reason that when Critical changed to scaling Crit.Damage that the initial value was lowered.

Tanks suffer not from power deficiency but extreme passive bloat - You will find I'm mostly opposed to increasing that passive bloat, in any form it takes, and that's not limited to tanks.

I'm all for stat shifting. Throw on Stance of the Irregular and don't die. "Embarass" the DPS. You'll find no argument here about being able to turn into a Glass Cannon, but you'll get every opposition if your idea of "Fun" is just "I have more stats than the rest of the party combined."

I mean that's the whole reason why tenacity is such a lackluster stat to begin with, the damage scales worse than even determination (if only slightly) and the passive mitigation is absolutely unnecessary because we have way too much mitigation already.

I'm also not sure where this idea of our mitigation cooldowns scaling with gear came from, it's a fixed % value and should remain so because anything else would just make it overkill with the current encounter design.


In regards to making tenacity our main stat instead of strength it would essentially have to be nothing more than a cosmetic change to keep the balance.

Let's say tenacity becomes our main stat which gives both an increase in damage and mitigation, then they would probably just lower the mitigation we gain from armor so we end up at the same passive damage reduction we would've ended up with our current stats.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

I mean that's the whole reason why tenacity is such a lackluster stat to begin with, the damage scales worse than even determination (if only slightly) and the passive mitigation is absolutely unnecessary because we have way too much mitigation already.

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At this stage, it seems less likely that the general population will accept reworking tenacity over just removing it (and piety) and just making DH universal.

Attributes at large are not interesting enough to warrant the trouble, and all this does is theoretically increase non-Warrior DPS. Combine it with an appropriate increase of Warrior potency and removal of Auto-DHit such as another poster in here mentioned.

Healers might need some MP economy tuning, but that'll close this chapter on Accessory threads.

I honestly wouldn't mind that change, it might actually make the choice between augmented tome and savage gear more interesting because currently if you have two pieces of gear for the same slot, one with crit/det and one with crit/ten, there isn't really even a choice to make.


Of course it is the easy way out because it means SE doesn't have to redesign tenacity to be an interesting substat but I honestly can't see anything game changing like "increase xyz job mechanic proc chance" or "decreases cooldown of X by Y seconds" happening anyway.

There wouldn't be any problem with getting rid of Tenacity/Piety and making DH universal. The entire point of stats are to make new pieces of gear feel like an actual upgrade.

Materia in general serve no purpose and should be removed. The only materia with any degree of relevance towards build customization are Skill Speed and Spell Speed, and even then only for high-performance play and only for specific classes. And they could just simply set a given class's GCD to a specific point and redesign the rotation as needed if it would be a serious problem for them to be set to one specific GCD speed.

The *idea* behind materia (as with item reforging and fiddling with affixes in WoW, Diablo 3, and virtually any other RPG with such a system) is that the player chooses what they want. But that kind of design is mutually exclusive with a balanced high-end raiding/battle system. Players will simply math out which affixes or stats are best and will then proceed to all use the exact same gemming scheme - or they will be inferior.

More than that, though, the proof of how meaningless materia generally are is easy to see by comparing materia loadouts. A tank with Tenacity in every single possible slot is not meaningfully weaker than a tank with recommended BiS gemming - they will still do more than enough DPS to carry their own weight and then some with proper play, so the only difference is if you actually give a damn about fighting for top spots on the FFLogs leaderboards. The same is true for healers with Piety, etc. Even not having the ideal GCD speed for your class doesn't suddenly make them unable to achieve adequate levels of DPS.

Materia basically only matter insofar as you have *something* your class can make use of in every socket, and even then that only matters if you are raiding savages or ultimates - even extremes don't really require you to use materia in order to produce enough DPS to clear, though it might be a little tough if you're doing the brand new even-patch extreme without crafted gear or anything better than last tier's best gear.

Honestly, XIV needs to shift to a horizontal progression system. Their design philosophy is moving more and more towards "as accessible as possible" (which I think is a *good* thing), and that kind of design philosophy tends to be pretty much mutually exclusive with vertical progression systems, as those systems naturally and inevitably gate off content behind grind or performance walls. I guess we're already close enough, though.

Materia, much like teleportation fees, is there to help permanently remove gil out of the in-game economy. Players don't like it, but it's an essential function to keep gil values from endlessly inflating.

Stats and customization are only meaningless if they're designed that way. You're able to math out a universally optimal choice because the present stat design is incredibly safe. Nearly every stat does the same thing (increases damage), except that some do it better than others. The haste stats (skill speed/spell speed) are really the only ones that break this rule, which is why they're unsurprisingly the most fun to mess around with. I would love to max out haste.

You'll actually find a fair amount of variation in games with talent tree systems, Warcraft included. This isn't purely due to lack of knowledge. Sometimes the best build is fight specific. Sometimes the best build is a function of player skill and how much error you can allow yourself as a player. Black Ox Brew may be the mathematically best pick if you are able to use it on cooldown, but the Light Brewing passive is a safer/more forgiving pick if your cooldown usage isn't spot on. You can have a lot of nuance in these systems, but you'll need a little more than four game designers assigned to 19 jobs.

The problem with Tenacity is that it's really just an inferior damage stat with some other random stuff tacked on (+5 to Lalafell detection rate). If you want it to be a 'tank-exclusive stat', then it needs to be at least equivalently desirable as Direct Hit.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Materia, much like teleportation fees, is there to help permanently remove gil out of the in-game economy. Players don't like it, but it's an essential function to keep gil values from endlessly inflating.

Stats and customization are only meaningless if they're designed that way. You're able to math out a universally optimal choice because the present stat design is incredibly safe. Nearly every stat does the same thing (increases damage), except that some do it better than others. The haste stats (skill speed/spell speed) are really the only ones that break this rule, which is why they're unsurprisingly the most fun to mess around with. I would love to max out haste.

You'll actually find a fair amount of variation in games with talent tree systems, Warcraft included. This isn't purely due to lack of knowledge. Sometimes the best build is fight specific. Sometimes the best build is a function of player skill and how much error you can allow yourself as a player. Black Ox Brew may be the mathematically best pick if you are able to use it on cooldown, but the Light Brewing passive is a safer/more forgiving pick if your cooldown usage isn't spot on. You can have a lot of nuance in these systems, but you'll need a little more than four game designers assigned to 19 jobs.

The problem with Tenacity is that it's really just an inferior damage stat with some other random stuff tacked on (+5 to Lalafell detection rate). If you want it to be a 'tank-exclusive stat', then it needs to be at least equivalently desirable as Direct Hit.

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Those are all good points, that ultimately just loop back to the core design principle of "ultra safe."

It's not a coincidence that every tier has fights that are basically partial or even near-complete rehashes of previous Alexander or Omegascape fights. E11S ain't got a unique bone in its entire body. It's faster and easier to just copy-paste mechanics you've used time and time again, just like it's faster and easier to homogenize the absolute crap out of things so that you don't have to worry about people whining about gameplay balance. Between Gordias and Brute Justice being ball-bustingly difficult and people screaming bloody murder about certain classes being overpowered/underpowered, it's like the entire dev team has PTSD from Heavensward.

I would love to see materia made so it's less possible to just spreadsheet out the best possible combination, but that would require a way to save and swap between sets of materia. It would also require materia to be more than "do more damage, differently," but I'm not convinced the game engine can even handle the things they'd need to start doing in order to make defensive materia or "utility" materia a viable design possibility. Not being able to design for reactive gameplay due to the game's garbage servers seems like it limits the team more and more every year. Too bad they'd never be able to convince SE to spring for better server architecture.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

Neither needs to be. Part of Tenacity's problem is that a 5% mitigation increase does not covert to 5% less healing actions needed and Piety suffers from high cost healing and damage spells not being a significant enough MP drain that increased MP regen does not increase damage by transitioning to higher cost heals.

In theory, a high tenacity build would increase party dps by allowing healers to cast more offensive spells so the party gear composition question would become how much Tenacity do we need to maximize healer dps. The problem with this is that the Healer offensive/healing casts per minute ratio is heavily skewed towards the offensive side.

With Piety, the theory is that with more Piety you would go from casting "Cure 1, Cure 1, Cure 1, Glare, Cure 1, Cure 1, Cure 1, Glare" when you have ~400 MP regen per tick to "Cure 2, Cure 2, Glare, Glare, Cure 2, Cure 2, Glare, Glare" when you have ~700 MP regen per tick. Due to how healing requirements are tuned and how little the MP drain is in fights we pretty much start at the later and Piety becomes more a question of how many Rezs do I need before I go OoM.

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What I mean is that if they made tenacity any stronger it would become the stat of choice, you wouldn’t be fixing anything, just changing the thing we meld. Substats in this game are too simplistic and at the end of the day you’re going to pick the stat that gives the biggest damage boost no matter how it accomplishes that.

Tenacity as it stands works as a progression stat, it’s niche but it’s an identity. If they made it so tenacity was the only meld worth taking then what’s the point of having options for stats in the first place? You can either take the safety net of tenacity/piety or go for the optimal damage boost of direct hit, there’s a choice there (even if it’s a mistake/oversight).

To me what they need to do is remove certain substats entirely and rework their purpose. Skill/spell speed should be combined into just speed or haste because while speed has a place in the game as people can alter their rotation with a certain amount of speed the split between skill and spell is arbitrary at this point since jobs either don’t use both stats and the jobs that do are just being unnecessarily gimped on a part of their rotation by the split. Determination should just be removed entirely since at this point it’s just the same as primary stats but weaker.

Then we would be left with speed to alter your rotation, crit for just extra damage and then they could rework the remaining stats into something useful outside of damage (tenacity purely reduce damage taken, change direct hit to something like evasion, a stat that’s gone completely under-utilised in ffxiv and keep piety as mp regen rate).

Tenacity isn't even really a progression stat. Its benefits are too weak to be meaningful. Blind prog week 1 wipes are generally not understanding or correctly solving mechanics, and in Eden's Promise are typically due to non-tank players being dead since raid damage is much higher than in previous tiers. The benefits of a full Tenacity meld are too minuscule to really have a meaningful impact; you might as well use a typical BiS meld so you get that bit more of extra DPS so you can meet those actually quite challenging week 1 DPS checks on floors 3 and 4.

I think if they removed the DPS component entirely and doubled or even tripled its defensive benefits, Tenacity would be valuable and useful as a proper progression stat. You could achieve meaningful damage reduction and healing increase by stacking enough of it, which would take a little bit of pressure off healers during week 1/2 prog. But as it is right now, it's trying to do everything and it does everything poorly.