Strength Tanks

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Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

It still kinda is. But it makes me wonder how the devs tested alex savage originally. Did their tanks wear 190 alex nm fending accessories? 150 crafted accessories melded with str? A mix of vit and str alex 190 accessories? Did they have the whm/ast solo heal with a sch dps'ing? Just makes me curious.

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I remember a while back, when they were previewing 3.1, there was a DRK with some ~21k health in a dev screenshot and everyone was like "Oh my god, devs use Fending? Git gud." I still think the devs intended on tanks using fending primarily, only using slaying to bridge the dps gap if the need arose. I don't think they anticipated people completely phasing out Fending and treating vit like a plague.

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Originally Posted by Ironos

I remember a while back, when they were previewing 3.1, there was a DRK with some ~21k health in a dev screenshot and everyone was like "Oh my god, devs use Fending? Git gud." I still think the devs intended on tanks using fending primarily, only using slaying to bridge the dps gap if the need arose. I don't think they anticipated people completely phasing out Fending and treating vit like a plague.

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Ah. So the real reason tanks wear str and healers dps is to carry the dps. If SE could do it in fending then we could to, right? :P

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Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

Ah. So the real reason tanks wear str and healers dps is to carry the dps. If SE could do it in fending then we could to, right? :P

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Ahaha, I'm making no so such claims. I think that's what SE thinks it's like, and they also thought the current tier of Savage was overtuned a bit, supporting that thought. We also don't really know what SE's intended ilvl for Savage was, because I've seen some people saying anything over ilvl ~195 is overgearing it. I don't really know, because I haven't bothered to do anything past A1S.

Tanking Alex for precision items and war panther runs yesterday, I met another DRK in full vit. She asked when the swap happens. I said in full fending, shouldn't need a swap. She says okay and turns Grit off after having pulled most of the trash. We get to Living Liquid and it turns out she wants me to MT after having asked when to swap. ...what's the point of being OT if you're in full fending? -_- I was ready to dps but she said she was more comfortable dpsing as OT.

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Originally Posted by bounddreamer

Tanking Alex for precision items and war panther runs yesterday, I met another DRK in full vit. She asked when the swap happens. I said in full fending, shouldn't need a swap. She says okay and turns Grit off after having pulled most of the trash. We get to Living Liquid and it turns out she wants me to MT after having asked when to swap. ...what's the point of being OT if you're in full fending? -_- I was ready to dps but she said she was more comfortable dpsing as OT.

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People still swap? I thought this died in normal mode at around i195 left side..... regardless of right side life choices

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Originally Posted by AlexiIvaniskavich

People still swap? I thought this died in normal mode at around i195 left side..... regardless of right side life choices

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Some people will try to...and when you're a PLD and they're a WAR trying to steal threat, there's not much you can do. So I let them have it and went SwO to finish the fight.

Haha, I was still swapping in my runs.. It's been like 5 months since I went in normal, wtf do you expect xD

It was like going back to do t1 and everyone wanted to sac pull, wait, what's a sac pull? We never sac pulled before DF echo and nerfs lol

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Originally Posted by OogaShaka

Please stop, there is no sane reason why a tank should slot points into strength instead of vitality. You having less or the same hp as a dps is not an effective tank build because a dead tank does zero dps.

If you say that you hold hate better then you must never flash or taunt , seriously if you do your threat generation rotation properly you will hold hate and once again when you die due to your low hp your threat generation goes to zero.

It is not a healers responsibility to spend an insane amount of time and mana keeping you alive when you choose not to talent properly, it's like healing a dps that thinks he is a tank.

In conclusion is you want to play a dps class then roll one otherwise learn to play as the role you selected which means you are there to take damage not cause massive damage to mobs and die in the process.

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Sounds like a butt hurt bad healer...

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Originally Posted by FunkyBunch

Sounds like a butt hurt bad healer...

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Nah, OP was just a scrubby troll, no meaningful response from him since the start of the thread

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Originally Posted by Ironos

I remember a while back, when they were previewing 3.1, there was a DRK with some ~21k health in a dev screenshot and everyone was like "Oh my god, devs use Fending? Git gud." I still think the devs intended on tanks using fending primarily, only using slaying to bridge the dps gap if the need arose. I don't think they anticipated people completely phasing out Fending and treating vit like a plague.

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I find most devs that test out their game think like devs when they should think like a player. This is why a large majority of imbalances exist when a game or patch launches.

Look if you wanna walk around Turtled up fine but dont be mad if others choose not to

Every time I see this thread pop up I cannot help but be reminded of My Strenth.

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Originally Posted by Ragnorak

Look if you wanna walk around Turtled up fine but dont be mad if others choose not to

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If you want to be all "look at my l33t parses" (damn, that hurt my eyes to even type that), switch to the DPS job of your choice and let a real tank do the job he/she's meant to do.

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Originally Posted by Hayward

If you want to be all "look at my l33t parses" (damn, that hurt my eyes to even type that), switch to the DPS job of your choice and let a real tank do the job he/she's meant to do.

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A real tank isn't so single minded that he thinks that his only job is to survive damage. If you're hitting the boss to hold aggro, whether you like it or not, you are a part of the +group DPS gang. Healing is a bit more removed, you have to go out of your way as a healer to contribute to group DPS, but as a tank you have to hit the boss. While it might not be your main priority (staying alive), it does contribute to your second priority (holding aggro), and it's by default your third priority (contributing DPS without compromising either of the others). As a real tank, you maximize all 3, not ignore one because you only feel like doing the first 2.

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Originally Posted by SpookyGhost

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I mentioned nothing at all about not doing damage. My issue is with tanks wanting to do damage at the expense of their actual function (the mooks running through dungeons using Sword Oath/Defiance or without Grit on, for example) rather than as a part of their actual function. I genuinely hope this whole VIT/STR issue is cleared up in 3.2 along with this whole "damage first" mentality that has gone too far and really puts the whole tank & healer roles into question.

It seems to me that this whole argument isn't really about which is "better", because if a tank in full VIT or STR can hold hate off of their intended target(s) without placing undue stress on the healer, it's pointless. Both sides have shown that they can do their job, so they both obviously work. The issue should be about which is faster, because if DF runs have shown me anything it's that people are impatient as hell and they want to be done with stuff quickly. VIT potentially helps if you have a tank that's doing mass pulls and overestimating their capabilities, but it's moot if your healer isn't up to the task or if the tank bites off more than they can chew. (Which I see a lot)

So rather than argue it as "All that VIT is useless because it does nothing for you", try it from the perspective of "The extra STR helps because it gets you through things faster if you're not pulling half the zone like a moron."

And this is the great part... I can do my job as a tank and i can put out a lil extra dps AT THE SAME TIME IN STR GEAR (omg no wai) amazing aint it i know i know.. Id like to give a shout out to my healers yall da shizz nizz , My DPS yall make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside when shits dying fast... And last but not least MY BRO TANK ya always lookin out for ya boy we all make a good team ������������

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Originally Posted by Hayward

I genuinely hope this whole VIT/STR issue is cleared up in 3.2 along with this whole "damage first" mentality that has gone too far and really puts the whole tank & healer roles into question.

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There isn't a single change SE can implement that will alter people's desire to optimize the way they play. Whatever changes come down the line, the good players will adapt and figure out the absolute best way to play the job, and the "real tanks" will keep clinging to their notion of tanking, probably from previous games, and hoping that the devs will change the game to bend to their desires.

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Originally Posted by Hayward

I genuinely hope this whole VIT/STR issue is cleared up in 3.2 along with this whole "damage first" mentality that has gone too far and really puts the whole tank & healer roles into question.

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I can't wait for SE's fix to be "VIT affects tank DPS/AP instead of STR", so I can bottle up those tears like Poland Spring. You can't get rid of tanks trying to maximize damage without gutting the functionality entirely, which makes tanks boring to play and requires every single ability to have an enmity modifier adjustment made to it to make up the difference in damage output.

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Originally Posted by Hayward

I mentioned nothing at all about not doing damage.

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You replied to a post that said:

"If you want to turtle up and play super defensively, then that's fine, but if you do this don't be upset when other players choose not to play the way you do."

with:

"If you want to maximize DPS, switch to a DPS job, and let the real tanks play this specific turtley way."

Now... maybe you were being absurdist, or were trying to take things to a logical extreme, or maybe you misinterpreted the post - but from my PoV, that's the exchange that was had. Based on that exchange, I felt like you were wrong, in that a real tank isn't so single minded (focuses solely on DPS or focuses solely on mitigation), they take all 3 factors into account to maximize the potential that your group will kill the boss. This doesn't necessarily mean always being in DPS stance, full Slaying, etc - it varies from situation to situation, but the point is that you're doing as much DPS with what you have available.

If your gripe is, instead, with people who prioritize DPS over their ability to stay alive, then that's fair enough and I agree - there have been a surplus of STR tanks who don't understand the risks/rewards of it lately and that's lead to a mass misunderstanding of the STR meta that's been evolving since early 2.0. If the devs choose to make VIT the STR/DEX/MND/INT equivalent then that still won't actually solve the issue, however it will give the healers slightly more room for error which is probably the best result we can hope for.

since 2.0 Tank can push dps with more str, less vita.
seriously i never get a problem with it you can push dps in dps stance when you can and compensate it, and you can swap tank stance when it's needed.
the important is like spookyghost said : tank should not be single minded.
a tank can be super tanky and aslo push dps and you need to not think only about maximise dps. but also to survive and not be a hell to heal. it's obvious for a tank.
i think vita tank/ str pushing dps tank, should not judge themself also.
you play how you want to play. if you think you need your str so go for it, if you think you need all vit, go for it.
I am glad SE will certainly do something about the Tank stat because it seem many guys like to make VIT/STR warflamme, and only think to defend is way to play vit or str.
So maybe all the tank should be at the same school and have the same main stat.
That and also, nice less time to farm both vita and str accesories for every tank.
When players say you would to do it only to savage raid, you forget something, players want to speedruns content, it's a grinding game, players just wanna be fast and would even take risk to be faster. with this fact you see str tank everywhere for any content.

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Originally Posted by fm_fenrir

You can't get rid of tanks trying to maximize damage without gutting the functionality entirely[...]

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Sunder Armor used to be a thing. Pretty sure you could even include it in a combo system without changing the classes from the ground up. Heck, you could give every ability a weapon/stat-dependent enmity modifier and then purely supportive effects with no damage whatsoever. Let some inflated enmity numbers flash up on the screen so people don't "get bored" and you're set.

But then you step outside the dungeon and lack the dedicated damagedealers to kill anything. And "that" is why we have a hard time getting rid of the damage paradigm of tanks. Frankly, tanks/healers have as much business doing damage as damagedealers have healing/tanking: None. That's the trinity design. And that's totally fine, until the trinity is broken in solo play.

That's where the mess starts. You now give tanks/healers the tools to end a fight ASAP and of course they'll try to use it in a group setting as much as possible as well. Which can't be resolved without essentially designing two different classes for each type of content. Hence, do as little tanking/healing as possible while doing as much DPS as possible.


TL;DR: Trinity design is stupid.

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Originally Posted by Zojha

TL;DR: Trinity design is stupid.

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I generally agree with this. Lord of the Rings Online did something interesting though with its tanking class, the Guardian (though I havent played it in years so not sure if this is still the case).

Guardians were able to equip 1h/shield or 2h weapons. They had a bunch of skills that did damage after they parried an attack, and a bunch of skills that did lots of -threat- after they blocked an attack. Obviously you could only block with a shield equipped, so if you were using a two handed weapon you naturally lost access to the vast majority of your threat moves (you had like... one move you could use without needing a block that was for getting initial threat, but not keeping it).

The idea was quite elegant - in a dungeon environment you equip a sword and shield and as you block attacks you use your reactive block moves to generate AOE threat (most did virtually no damage). In a solo environment you equipped a big two handed sword and used reactive Parry moves to do lots of solo damage. However, you couldn't effectively be a DPS class in a group because your big damage moves required you to be being hit for parries, and you couldnt hold threat well without the shield.

It worked fairly well I think. Point is: it's possible to have a situation where a class has two "modes", one for solo and one for group tanking. Doing lots of damage in a solo environment is not necessarily going to mean you always do huge damage when tanking too.

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Originally Posted by fm_fenrir

Dead mobs also do zero DPS, which lowers HPS requirements.

Also, having more HP doesn't stop you from being mushed by mechanics, it only buys you a tiny bit of buffer in trash pulls--you should be using CDs anyway, or you're going to be in for a Bad Time as a tank.

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/endthread

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Originally Posted by Enesuia

Also I pull with Voke then shield lob or Scorns

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You are really missing the point here. When it's all said and done, you are getting the same amount of hate + 1, as any other tank who just uses Tomahawk alone. You are getting no statistical advantage at all, save for that one extra point. However, even this fact isn't the point.

The point is you are wasting an ability that takes 40 seconds to return, and by doing so risking a moment in which that ability would have been useful -such as dps derping and attacking the wrong enemy with their strongest attack. In situations like this, where it will take you half - or in worse cases - a full combo to get the hate back, you could have instead used provoke.

I know this post isn't gonna change your initiate-by-provoke ways, but at least I feel better by trying.

The main cause for misunderstanding in the damage vs. mitigation discussion is that many players think that the two represent different play-styles. They don't. Your damage output as a tank has much less to do with your rotation than it would with a dps class. It has much more to do with how you understand the patterns of incoming damage and matching the correct amount of eHP and mitigation to that damage through gear, stance, and cooldown usage. If you underestimate the amount of incoming damage you die. If you overestimate it, your dps plummets.

There are elements of tanking that are not easily quantifiable, such as positioning and its impact on raid dps. But with all things being equal in terms of MT/OT roles, job choice, and ilvl, a tank who puts out more dps than another generally does so through a better understanding of mitigation and tanking as a whole. (You cannot put out dps while dead, so survival is intrinsically built into your ability to put out damage.)

The same principles apply to healing as well. The better you understand the healing timings of a fight, the more windows that you will see between points of incoming damage where you can safely put up dots and dps. This is not a trade-off. You just have a better understanding of when is safe and when is not.

I guess all this comes down to is playstyle, I don't have to do massive DPS to think that tanking is fun and right now I'm also not doing any high level raids, but I don't quite get how healing could be more interesting without the possibility of also doing DPS (you could say I shouldn't heal then, but I like healing+DPS). That's why I obviously like Tanks that don't take unpredictably huge chunks of damage suddenly better, and I assume that is easier with more Vit.
As a tank I also don't have a problem if the healer lets my HP fall as low as they feel comfotable with without letting me die, benefit of more HP. That being said I am packing more strength on myself since that seems to be the trend.
All this also depends on the situation the tank is in and his skill. In Duty Finder playing save is always better, what works with people you know might not work with people in Duty Finder and suddenly the srtength tank in Deliververance is dead faster than he can click Holmgang because the healer just woke up and wasn't prepared to spam Cure II on him while the Dragoon/Blackmage stands in AoEs and the Bard exidentally pulled three more mobs with his auto-attack.
Is healing and tanking in other games a lot different? My brother asked me to level a WoW character for him once and I was surprised to only find healing spells on his hotbar at that time... he also seemed to think it was weird when I mentioned stacking more Str as a tank.

lol your funny XD the only thing having a higher hp does is lower tank dps and give the healer an excuse to be bad

i think with all the good intention or not with this tread, tank do how they want to do.
we can convince str tank to wear vit, and vit tank wear strenght all the day.
everybody need to be full vita ? no
everybody need to be full str ? no
it's your choice.
Why let other choice for you after all.
I can understand someone asking to switch my str because i die. it's certainly why i never encounter this case in casual content.
the same happen when you don't reach the dps check ,on a savage, you are vit so you need to wear str.
Just Tell just one reason to a tank not dying in savage raid in str, think he will die in a casual and a lot easier content wearing the same thing.
Just accept the fact some tank know what they do, and others mess and this is where you encounter issue with tank wearing str accesories. if someone wear str accesories, undergeared it's a other story.
i never get any problem, not a single healer show he me was not happy, or even asked me to wear something else.
i don't say to vit tank to switch str, do as you wish, if you don't wanna switch str you have your reason, i never call a tank wearing vit to be bad, because it's not requiered to wear str accesories. and any str tank don't have to say every tank should wear str instead of vita.

It does I started the game as a str tank funny how it was the right thing to do.

my goal as tank is to hold aggro , and use my CD's properly making the healers life easier ^^ and before someone says anything i have no problems to hold aggro with vit gear :P

funny how it was the right thing to do :P

if you would wear str your aggro and dps and selfheal would be buff of at least 25 %, so wear vita don't mean you can't hold aggro at all, if you don't need to buff your aggro to hold, you can hold with vit, i never get a problem to hold in vit too, when you loose aggro on something it's not hard to get it back...
it's a choice you spend vita or str, as long you can do your job, it don't matter.
the funny right thing to do is the thing you are confortable with.

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Originally Posted by VaddixKrieg

lol your funny XD the only thing having a higher hp does is lower tank dps and give the healer an excuse to be bad

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[saves everyone the boredom of reading the entire "Billy Madison" quote]

"I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul"

I'm SURE someone already pointed this out to u about ur 'wrongness', but im going to just restate it, ur wrong. A tank in full vit will lose aggro to a geared dps, Even if it is 1 enemy, if that dps has a better weapon. For example if it is a warrior they will lose aggro before they finish a storms eye combo, and if they open with a b.b. combo they will still lose aggro because the potency wasn't hi enough without the maim and slash debuff. In low level dungeons I see ur point but doesn't work like that lvl 60+. U get 1 pt of aggro per damage done. + aggro multiplier. If a dps is out doing u by enough do to gear then literally the only way to keep aggro is roll strength. This goes for healers and over healing too. I'm sure u know this.

Why is this thread 28 pages long, and why are people still arguing? There's nothing wrong with str tanks. Taking extra str instead of vit does not prevent you from doing anything, you don't lose mitigation, you don't lose the ability to "tank". You can clear the vast majority of content by mashing your face on the Flash key over and over and over throughout the entire fight in full vit if you want to, so it's not like vit tanks are "wrong", and if you don't want to str tank that's fine.

Healers don't have to pay extra attention to str tanks because they're not actually taking more damage. They still take the exact same amount of damage over time as a vit tank, so that's no excuse.

There's only so much you can do as a tank in any given encounter when it comes to mitigation, once you have your CD rotation set and you have enough HP to survive (or more HP if you really want....) the only optimization left is your own damage output.

Why are vit tanks so upset? No one is stopping you from being low damage HP sponges if you want to be. There's also nothing wrong with wanting to speed things up myself by doing more damage. Is it a requirement? Does that void ark boss REALLY have that hard of a DPS check that random DF DPS can't deal with it? No, of course not, but I don't wanna sit there doing no damage with a humongous excess of HP when there's practically nothing in the game that does a significant amount of damage that requires a gargantuan HP number that can't be dealt with a simple cooldown.

I don't care if a tank goes pure vit as long as they hold threat. But that's the problem. Most of the time in my experience they don't.

As a competent DRG, BLM, BRD, MNK, and especially as a Summoner, I've get mauled and give pure vit tanks a hard time solely because of their lack of power (and incidentally me melting things like I don't know what necessary is).

As a healer I don't find there to be any difference in how much healing I need to do. But a tank that doesn't use their CDs is extra work for us all. The most recent worst was a DRK taking tonz of damage and dealing baby slaps for all the nothing he was doing in Dusk vigil.

However it's easy to take for granted how much of the tank's ability to hold agro from the party is only the tank. Many players don't have the best rotations, making it easier to hold agro, and easier to be lucky enough to never run into problems until SUDDENLY someone knows what they are doing, even if its another tank who's pure str surviving all the same things you are while holding agro with no problem. Don't get me wrong, I would love to build defenses, and I mained as a protection warrior in WoW, but here in FF14, power, threat multipliers, and treat in general consequently are the serious issue here.

Just got out of arboretum with a full vit tank. Not only did he sustain about 40% more damage and lower the overall output of the group significantly, he had trouble holding aggro due to having the Str level of a 110 dps at ilvl 190. The run took about only ten minutes longer he insisted on doing large pulls even tho with ilvl 200 dps doing respectable AOE rotations the damage output from his drk AOE was much lower. The 20k hp he had never once got below 12k effectively negating 100% of the hp increase from the vit accessories.

But by all means. Gear as you wish. I'm sticking to Str on mine.

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Originally Posted by MPNZ

OMG, basically Vitality tanking was viable before 3.0, and it's easy to see why when playing the content prior to 3.0. There was little to no stress to maximize DPS and threat is easily maintained as long as the DPS or HLR didn't overly surpass your item level or totally tard-out, the player made sure to mark their targets, and follow the formula that everyone will have to explain at some point. Some of the old content still hits harder and faster than anything in the Heavensward story-mode dungeons, like, the Aurum Vale which still has an effect of making people shudder, and how there is like never a point in the Stone Vigil where you're not healing 80-90% of the time, IMO. And, it's not like it is required outside of the expert raids anyway.

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An amendment and bump because everyone has forgotten why people rolled full vitality pre-3.0 (or, everyone that hated the vitality focus in 2.0 are just smearing it in the faces of vit-tank's): it was also nice to have A vit tnk because there was less and less to worry about once they had mythology gear, so you could do other things besides heal the party's tank. Also, it does feel like keeping agroe has a lot harder for me since 3.0, which may or may not be because almost every party will be so unfocused (lol ninjas) since marking fell out of practice by the majority of players who play tanks. And no, I am not complaining about DOT-ing. DOT-ing is totally fine, and big pulls will obviously have this problem.

And, yes. I haven't been marking things as I should either.

Aggro is not harder now than 2.0, it's just now tank try to dps more, so them want to get a strong aggro directly to focus dpsing.
It's not like Tank was not able to do better dps before, but in 2.0 you was not realy forced to do this exept the hardcore raider who wanna dps higher to finish earlier.
There was already some STR war doing that.
I am sure it's why SE Make the raid in 3.0 forcing the tank to focus dps.
To have seeing that before 3.0, i saw one STR war most of the time not on defiance in T12 for exemple and also STR war on T13.

In 2.0 everyone rolled strength/vit gear.