So, you want to Strength Tank? The Full Comparison and Info!

Hey guys. I've seen(and participated in) a few debates recently about the merits, intelligence, and/or efficiency of the alternative Tanking method of trading Vitality(VIT) for Strength(STR). One thing I've noticed in these debates is some misunderstandings and the absence of certain concepts. Thus, I'd like to put this big ol' topic together to really get all of the info I believe to be relevant in one place.

I intend to make this as objective an analysis as possible regarding all of the benefits, drawbacks, and concerns surrounding both styles of Tanking. It's been more than proven that all of the content in the game is fully possible no matter what the Tank is stacking. Thus, compiling everything here should be able to help any and all aspiring Tanks choose the style that they'd most like to adopt.

With all of this in mind, let's start.

Stats

As Tanks, the following stats mean something to us:

Strength: Governs how much damage we do. Makes attacks deal more damage, and increases Threat generation. Additionally, every "tier" of 50-51 Strength increases the amount of damage a Block of Parry mitigates by 1%.
Weapon Damage: Each point of Weapon Damage on a weapon is roughly equivalent to 8.72 points of Strength. Weapons are the most important pieces of equipment for doing damage and keeping threat.
Vitality: Governs our maximum HP. Our primary source of Mitigation. Each point above our base Vitality contributes approximately 14.5 HP.
Parry: Governs the rate at which Physical Attacks are parried. Current theorycraft believes that each point of Parry adds 0.075% to our Parry Rate. The base Parry rate has been observed to be 10%.
The Secondary Damage Stats: Critical Hit Rate, Determination, and Skill Speed contribute to increases in damage at lesser rates than Strength. Effects are generally small.
Dexterity: Governs Block and Parry rates for all classes. Currently thought to give smaller returns than Parry.

Some further analysis:

Strength/Weapon Damage: A no brainer. No matter your style of tanking, you want as much of these two stats as your style allows.
Vitality: Again, a no brainer. More HP equals more survival.

Parry: Here's the biggest source of debate on all "Tanking" stats. I'll just give some basic advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages
-You take less damage when it happens. Nobody complains about the act itself.
-Helps smooth out damage during big dungeon pulls.
-Helps keep the hits between the bigger attacks of a boss relatively smooth.
-Has a chance of saving your bacon if things get hairy.
-High chance of mitigating enemies who throw out many hard hits in rapid succession(T9's Bahamut's Claw, Shiva EX, etc.) as opposed to smaller attacks and then one big tank-buster move.
-On a PLD, synergizes very well with Kite and Tower Shields. They can obtain a passive mitigation rate of over 50% by stacking Parry, which isn't too shabby at all.

Disadvantages
-RNG fosters unreliability. One can never plan to Block or Parry an attack.
-Magic attacks cannot be parried.
-Requires significant investment into the stat to get numbers that even start to matter.
-A Paladin's Shield dilutes Parry Rates(especially with Bucklers), making each point worth less for them.

So... sometimes Parry helps. Sometimes it doesn't. It, like all of the other Secondary Stats, doesn't have a large effect on anything. If you want it, go for it. Otherwise, you aren't crippling your ability to Tank or deal damage.

The Two Styles of Tanking

There are two major styles of Tanking that players are tending to adopt. The first is a pure Mitigation Tank. The Mitigation Tank attempts to maximize their Vitality and often stack Parry too. The second is the Strength Tank. The Strength Tank sacrifices some measure of Vitality and converts it into Strength instead, increasing their damage output. Their main concern is finding the right amount of Vitality to sacrifice without getting themselves killed.

I'm going to give an overview of each style now.

Mitigation Tank

Not much time needs to be spent here; this style of Tanking is easy to adopt and easy to perform.

Arguably, this is the way that SE intends for Tanks to Tank. Evidence pointing to this is the Fending gear. It's the only gear Tanks can roll Need on, and the accessories all feature Vitality as their main stat. Another sign that SE never wanted Tanks to focus on damage is the fact that their enmity increasing Tanking stances directly reduce their outgoing damage by a significant amount. Consider yourselves lucky that SE allows Tanks to pursue Tanking in other manners. If this were a Blizzard game, it would be patched out with a vengeance!

Adopting this style is easy: just wear Fending gear in every slot. Your Secondary Stats don't matter; you'll have enough HP to survive anything that heads your way.

Advantages
-Maximizing HP maximizes survivability.
-Maximizing HP maximizes the mitigation provided by nearly all abilities which provide extra mitigation.
-Can weather mistakes of themselves or healers without dying as often.
-Lessens the burden of healers in general.
-Allows healers more room to DPS, if they wish.

Disadvantages
-Maximizing HP minimizes potential damage.
-Can encounter problems with threat in hectic situations or against significantly more geared DPS.
-Xenosys Vex might call you a Parry Princess :)

Strength Tank

The primary meat of this guide. If you're considering adopting the STR Tank paradigm, hopefully this section will tell you all you need to know about what it means for you and your party.

The one thing I must make abundantly clear is that if you have just hit Level 50 and are still learning to Tank, go Mitigation. The Strength Tank is for experts only; people who know their job like the back of their hand and have a skilled enough party to properly back them up. Strength tanks must have an intimate knowledge of all of the tools of Mitigation available to them and how to maximize their use around surviving with a lower HP pool. That being said, having that skill and that party can definitely allow a Tank to put out enough extra damage to actually change the course of a fight.

So, here's the big question: just how much damage can stacking STR add to a Tank? As both a i115 PLD and WAR, adding 65 STR to myself increased my DPS by 30-35 while in my Tanking Stances and 60+ outside of it. Adding 90 STR to myself bumped these numbers approximately as much as would be expected, 45ish and 90ish. If you have an OT who will Tank few enough enemies in the course of a fight to not need much mitigation at all, they can add up to 120 or more STR to themselves. The numbers will speak for themselves. The long story short is that if both of the Static Tanks in a 8 man group decided to switch from Mitigation to Strength, they can increase their Party DPS by 100 or more with the act... if they survive.

Eliminating Vitality does more than just reduce Maximum HP. It also reduces the effectiveness of a great many mitigation skills. Here are some skills that provide an amount of effective HP(that is, the amount of raw, unmitigated damage necessary to kill you at a given moment) as a function of a percentage of a Tank's maximum HP: Stoneskin, Rampart, Sentinel, Vengeance, Inner Beast. Lustrate will also be less effective on you. Abilities such as Adloquium, Foresight, and healing spells other than Lustrate are unaffected by the Tank's current maximum HP. Thus, not only is your HP lower, many methods of mitigation are less effective for you. Keep this in mind when choosing your desired maximum HP.

The long story short is that reducing your maximum HP makes fights more difficult. In many cases, it'll make a fight go from trivially easy to slightly less trivially easy. It's technically "harder", but an easy fight is still easy. This is why the whole debate is centering around Endgame Tanking, where the reduction to HP can and will kill you if you screw it up. Endgame raids are also the only situations where an increase in damage from the Tanks can actually help push a phase or beat an enrage, eg. do something other than end the fight a few seconds faster.

So, how can a Tank add Strength to their build? There are three primary ways to do this.

1. Switch out Fending Accessories for Strength Accessories. It's fine to do this in trivially easy content, but I wouldn't recommend it in higher tier situations. Adding Strength in this manner causes you to lose more Vitality than the Strength you gained. At i110, it's 18 Strength for 21 Vitality. At i130, it's 23 Strength for 27 Vitality.
2. Reallocate bonus attributes from Vitality into Strength. This is a good way to test the waters, so to speak. You can trade 30 Strength for 30 Vitality, a 1:1 ratio. It's very cheap to perform and easy to reverse.
3. Meld crafted accessories to possess both Strength and Vitality. This is by and far the best and most efficient method to add Strength to a tank. At the current tier of crafted accessories, one can have 15 Vitality and 13 Strength on each one. At i110, this traded 30 Vitality for 65 Strength. An over 2:1 ratio! At i130, we're now trading 60 Vitality for 65 Strength. Not quite as significant, but still not a negative ratio. If i110 crafted accessories allow for it, it would be possible to trade 30 Vitality for 90 Strength, allowing for a massive increase in damage for a loss of only ~450 HP. This would also be kind of ridiculously broken, so it is my personal prediction that i110 accessories will come to us nerfed in some way so as to prevent having 18 Strength and 21 Vitality on each one.

If you want to bring Strength into Endgame Raiding, the accessories are the way to do it. If you want to focus your secondary stats into damage, you can get a slight boost by using Ruby accessories. If you want to stack Parry for a mix of mitigation and Strength, meld Topaz. The prices of Strength or Vitality materia, respectively, may also influence a decision if you're strapped for gil.

Now, I will go over some reason to and not to pursue Strength Tanking.

Reasons to Pursue

1. You're 20-50 DPS away from winning a DPS race. This has been extremely relevant in the Final Coil, where stacking Strength on the Tanks(or, conversely, stacking Accuracy on the Scholar) has allowed parties to get past DPS Gear checks far earlier than the developers anticipated.
2. You're doing easy/on-farm content and want to end the fight a bit faster. Caution must be exercised to not make the fight too difficult, however. A dead Tank is a bad farm.
3. You just feel like doing more damage in the trivial content you do regularly. More power to you.

Reasons not to Pursue

1. You want to produce more threat. Threat should never be an issue against similarly geared DPS for even a Mitigation Tank. One should be able to keep threat against even a DPS with a weapon 20 iLvls higher than yours. If you feel that you need more Strength to keep threat, you probably aren't skilled enough with your job to Strength Tank.
2. You think that ending a fight more quickly is a significant source of mitigation. The only attack you should attempt to mitigate by stacking Strength is a boss' Hard Enrage. Otherwise, it's impossible to know for sure what you would have been hit by next if the boss were to live for 5 more seconds. Attempting to use this as mitigation is as unreliable as Parry.

To start closing down this section, I'd like to also present what I consider to be some rules of thumb for Strength Tanking.

1. If your healers want you to have more HP, get some Vitality back. They know better than you how easy or hard it is to heal you in a given fight. Failure to listen to them will get you killed.
2. Never, and I repeat, never reduce your Left Side iLvl to favor secondary stats. Left Side gear is your source of free Strength, Vitality, and Defense. You're already sacrificing HP to be stronger; it's in your best interests to keep the best Left Side possible at all times to compensate.
3. If you're doing big dungeon pulls, it's probably best to temporarily switch to Mitigation. Or, in more general terms, know your limits and adjust your ratio of Strength and Vitality depending on where you are.
4. Never focus on damage more than you focus on mitigation. No matter what, you're a Tank first. Falling into this situation makes the following argument very true: "If you want to DPS so bad, be a DPS class!"

Finally, the tl;dr Advantages/Disadvantages section! I seem to do this a lot.

Advantages
-More DPS!
-In certain situations, can save a raid by pushing a phase at an opportune time. Otherwise, fights just end faster in general.
-You will likely hit the next tier of 50-51 Strength, increasing the power of Blocks and Parries by 1%.
-Skills that impart HP recovery as a function of damage dealt increase in effectiveness. This is a reason that stacking Strength has become quite popular among Warriors.
-It still should have never been a problem, but Threat should truly never even begin to become a problem now.

Disadvantages
-You have less health and mitigation
-Healers have to pay more attention to you, so they have fewer opportunities to do DPS.
-One mistake from you or the healer(s) at mitigating a Tank Buster can one shot you. Basically, both skill and fight knowledge are necessary to proceed.

So, I think that's all the relevant information. Possibly. But, here's a small bonus section.

Healer DPS

Those paying attention to the first clearers of the Final Coil might have noticed the presence of very active Scholars in the groups. Scholars dealing 200-250 DPS all while helping to heal. I can't know for sure, but just judging by the HP numbers of their Tanks it did not appear that they were stacking Strength. It could be concluded, then, that the Strength Tank and the DPS Healer might be mutually exclusive... at low gear levels at least. However, it should be noted that healers can provide a lot of DPS. Often, it will be more DPS than 2 Tanks will provide when both stack Strength. If you have a healer capable of pulling these kinds of numbers, it might actually lower group DPS to stack Strength on the Tanks! Just some food for thought. Experiment with your group to find the combo that leads to the most DPS :)

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The one thing I must make abundantly clear is that if you have just hit Level 50 and are still learning to Tank, go Mitigation.

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Maybe for end game content? Otherwise I highly disagree. STR should be a stat you are entirely focused on even if you are learning. If anything having a heavy reliance on STR will just teach you to be better and smarter with your cooldowns and overall make you a better player. A Sword is forged through fire. I can agree that while progressing content you should give up STR in favor for VIT (Until you know how much VIT you need to survive), but that is progressing challenging content - Which for our example would be FCoB.

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1. You want to produce more threat. Threat should never be an issue against similarly geared DPS for even a Mitigation Tank. One should be able to keep threat against even a DPS with a weapon 20 iLvls higher than yours. If you feel that you need more Strength to keep threat, you probably aren't skilled enough with your job to Strength Tank.

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Snap threat is extremely important and having more strength will help you out. You will find yourself often paired with really good DPS and if you aren't putting out enough damage you will potentially lose threat. I have done T8's on my ninja where I have lost aggro to a PLD who did everything right but was VIT based. STR is huge for aggro management and just makes things a whole lot easier. This IS a good reason to stack strength.

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Healer DPS

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Tanks focusing on STR almost never reduce a healers DPS. You completely overvalue Vitality as a stat.

Also Parry isn't a bad thing, the Parry stat just scales incredibly bad.

You're mixing up effective hp and mitigation. You state that more hp is more mitigation, but that just isn't true. Mitigation is your ability to reduce incoming damage. Straight HP only increases your effective hp (how much damage you can take before you die without a cure). If you have 5000 hp and an attack does 4000 damage, adding hp doesn't mitigate (reduce) that damage. You still take 4k. Sentinel, parry, etc mitigate by reducing it.

Also, you list out every mitigation ability and say that hp makes them more effective. Also not true due to the confusion about effective hp and mitigation. The only way hp enhances mitigation is through abilities that use hp like stoneskin and thrill of battle

Ironically a str build offers more mitigation than a vit build because your parry/shield blocks will reduce additional damage(with exceptions of stone skin and thrill of battle).

All hp does is increase effective hp and that only really has 2 effects: meeting minimum thresholds to survive specific powerful attacks, and giving your healers more TIME to heal you. (And bonus stronger stoneskin and thrill of battle).

While you mention it regarding str and war, the str buffing hp gain is kinda glossed over. namely that their healing abilities become more effective like inner beast, bloodbath, particularly when paired with offensive buffs, and special note for buffed overpower on large groups.

I like the sentiment, but the mix ups on terminology make a lot of the op kinda misleading to the uninformed.

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Originally Posted by Lavieh

Maybe for end game content? Otherwise I highly disagree. STR should be a stat you are entirely focused on even if you are learning. If anything having a heavy reliance on STR will just teach you to be better and smarter with your cooldowns and overall make you a better player. A Sword is forged through fire. I can agree that while progressing content you should give up STR in favor for VIT (Until you know how much VIT you need to survive), but that is progressing challenging content - Which for our example would be FCoB.

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Oh, good. Opinions! Better get the hose out early so this doesn't become a giant flame war. So, you take a Tank that sucks at their job and replace an amount of their Vitality with Strength. One thing that is clear is that they're now going to suck more. From here, two things can happen. The first is your theory: they die a lot but they persevere, keep trying, and become better Tanks for it. The second is that they die a lot, get frustrated with the game, and then stop Tanking. We don't like the second option, so maybe it may be better to pursue other methods of fostering skill for some people. There are certainly ways to foster gaining skill as a Tank while still stacking VIT. If you want to optimize your threat rotations, try taking Flare happy Black Mages into dungeons and do pulls with as few uses of Flash/Overpower as possible. If you want to optimize cooldown rotations, do speedruns with suboptimal AOE DPS. Being in the endgame raids period will force Tanks to get good no matter what they're stacking. Sure, purposely going in with barely enough HP will force a tank to get good, but someone who genuinely wants to become more skilled will still find ways to do it themselves. Starting with full VIT allows the ability to continuously shave it off bit by bit to keep testing themselves.

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Snap threat is extremely important and having more strength will help you out. You will find yourself often paired with really good DPS and if you aren't putting out enough damage you will potentially lose threat. I have done T8's on my ninja where I have lost aggro to a PLD who did everything right but was VIT based. STR is huge for aggro management and just makes things a whole lot easier. This IS a good reason to stack strength.

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You claim that Snap Aggro is important enough to stack Strength for... and then you use one of the very few fights in the game where a solo tank can't pre-prepare the third hit of the enmity combo for the add as the example? Strength or not, no Tank will keep aggro on a monster with just Shield Lob or Tomahawk Throw if the DPS go completely ham immediately. If your first attack on an add that you know your Tank can never "optimally" grab is an Astral Fire III Flare or an auto-crit Raiton, you deserve to get your party cleaved. Threat isn't just the Tank's job. At least, not until at least 3 GCDs have passed in these specific kinds of situations :)

And... it's stuff like this that make me wonder why Ninjas have no aggro reducing skills.

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Tanks focusing on STR almost never reduce a healers DPS. You completely overvalue Vitality as a stat.

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Again, you need a really skilled healer for the Tank to stack Strength and not lose DPS from it. Like, the top 1% skilled. Even if I'm wrong about the skill required, this is not a blanket statement that can be applied to all healers.

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Also Parry isn't a bad thing, the Parry stat just scales incredibly bad.

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When did I say that Parry was bad? If anything, I was trying to present a neutral stance on it.

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Originally Posted by Izsha

You're mixing up effective hp and mitigation. You state that more hp is more mitigation, but that just isn't true. Mitigation is your ability to reduce incoming damage. Straight HP only increases your effective hp (how much damage you can take before you die without a cure). If you have 5000 hp and an attack does 4000 damage, adding hp doesn't mitigate (reduce) that damage. You still take 4k. Sentinel, parry, etc mitigate by reducing it.

Also, you list out every mitigation ability and say that hp makes them more effective. Also not true due to the confusion about effective hp and mitigation. The only way hp enhances mitigation is through abilities that use hp like stoneskin and thrill of battle

Ironically a str build offers more mitigation than a vit build because your parry/shield blocks will reduce additional damage(with exceptions of stone skin and thrill of battle).

All hp does is increase effective hp and that only really has 2 effects: meeting minimum thresholds to survive specific powerful attacks, and giving your healers more TIME to heal you. (And bonus stronger stoneskin and thrill of battle).

While you mention it regarding str and war, the str buffing hp gain is kinda glossed over. namely that their healing abilities become more effective like inner beast, bloodbath, particularly when paired with offensive buffs, and special note for buffed overpower on large groups.

I like the sentiment, but the mix ups on terminology make a lot of the op kinda misleading to the uninformed.

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To "mitigate" something is to reduce the severity of it. The severity of an attack can be measured in two ways: the value of the red number and how well off you are after being hit. If you have 1000 HP and you take a 900 damage attack, that attack was very severe because you're now almost dead. If you have 10000 HP and you take that 900 damage attack, the attack wasn't very severe at all. The mere fact that you had high HP mitigated it. Therefore, HP is mitigation because having lots of HP makes every attack less severe.

Perhaps I should have explained that more carefully, but mitigation can be separated out into "Active" Mitigation and "Passive" Mitigation. Active Mitigation is the taking of actual actions to reduce damage, such as using cooldowns or dodging that AOE. Passive Mitigation is stuff that mitigates damage by simply existing, such as Defense, Parry, Strength Tiers, and Maximum HP.

I usually stay full vit because. 1) i haven't had trouble keepin aggro on anything since brayfox. 2) more hp happier party. I go str only when i feel my ego n want to see bigger numbers.

I tried posting a big post with more detail in this anecdotal occurrence, but the character limit really threw it off. So I'll summarize.

T11: I removed Defiance for ~20 second periods, about 3 times I think in Phase 1, maybe 4. I mostly used SE- BB, but a couple times or so I replaced BB with SP. I kept up Fracture and used IB as I could. Add phase was normal I suppose. Last phase I was conservative and tried keeping up SP full time, and kept Defiance on. I finished fight at 253 dps.

Friend of mine, Defiance on full time, never used BB on Kaliya he said. He finished in 260s.

We both have i115 weapons, and similar left side (all IW both, except he has one DW). My right side was all Vit except an Ironworks Ring of Slaying. His right side was all Ruby.

Basically the point of the above post was that I found it surprising the small Strength difference (15-high 40s possible) did more than my Phase 1 rotation changes, changes for purpose of seeking more dps.

i disagree about the part of using dps as a means of avoiding extra big hits/tank killers moves is rng. i mean, if i use all fending, and our dps is good, but not quite there, and we are close to skipping a flatten or in t12 almost skipping a bennu, then you can use extra dps to "mitigate". you would have to test it first, but if you are able to skip certain attacks because you now do more dps as a tank, and can do it consistently, then it isnt really rng. you knwo through testing that with your extra dps, you can avoid that hit every time. you just saved healer mana and a cooldown respectively.

i did like the fact that you pointed out that to go as more of a str build, you need to know your class and the fights inside and out. and you really need to know just how much hp you can get away with. but yeah, this is a pretty good explanation for tanks who are kind of on the fence. i personally use parry/vit when learning, then switch little by little to dps accessories/rubys and see how much i can get away with. when i see that im never getting one shot, and never going below like 4-500 hp, then thats kind of my cut off point. give them a cushion of 400 hp or so.

but yea, overflow hp is pretty useless, and parry is pretty crap bc of how it scales and the fact that it wont usually help you on tank killer moves. it could potentially help on the auto attack right after or before, but those should be taken into account anyways. and yea, it could help if your healers make a mistake or a dps messes up and dies and the healers are distracted, but really, they shouldnt mess up lol. i mean, if im a tank and i mess up and dont pop my cooldown at the right time, i die, and its usually a wipe. if a dps dies, during learning or progression, then that probably means you will no longer meet enrage. again a wipe. so parry isnt really something id stack just to help my team when things go wrong. id rather do more dps so we can push phases, and so if a dps does die, we can still recover and meet enrage.

its really personal preference, and should be communicated with your healer and static before you decide. they have a say in it too. i also think that the sch dps is based on the skill of the sch themselves. they need to know when the big hits come too. this way, they can dps, dump out a lustrate or 2 when needed, but switch out of clerics during the big hit to toss an adlo up and maybe a physick. depends on how they use their fairy as well, and whether or not the whm can handle it or not. a lot more goes into than just the tanks build. the main tank on world firsts probably dont go super strength because they are trying to clear, and because they are undergeared as hell, so they cant really sacrifice vitality at that point bc they dont have much high ilvl gear to compensate.

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Originally Posted by Kimura410

i disagree about the part of using dps as a means of avoiding extra big hits/tank killers moves is rng. i mean, if i use all fending, and our dps is good, but not quite there, and we are close to skipping a flatten or in t12 almost skipping a bennu, then you can use extra dps to "mitigate". you would have to test it first, but if you are able to skip certain attacks because you now do more dps as a tank, and can do it consistently, then it isnt really rng. you knwo through testing that with your extra dps, you can avoid that hit every time. you just saved healer mana and a cooldown respectively.

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I can concede this point, but the phase push has to be really exact to be certain that you did precisely avoid the Tank Killer. If, for example, you were pushing juuuust before Flatten number 2 for a while and then the party got more DPS and started pushing 5 seconds earlier, you aren't really preventing yourself from being hit by that Flatten anymore. You're preventing yourself from being hit by the autoattack just before it. That's why I was saying it was uncertain, because just a few seconds changes the perspective.

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but yea, overflow hp is pretty useless, and parry is pretty crap bc of how it scales and the fact that it wont usually help you on tank killer moves.

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If more Tank Killers were like Bahamut's Claw, though... we might see a reason for it!

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Originally Posted by Abbul_Stonecleaver

Basically the point of the above post was that I found it surprising the small Strength difference (15-high 40s possible) did more than my Phase 1 rotation changes, changes for purpose of seeking more dps.

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Yep. Strength has had a larger effect than I anticipated as well. If i110 accessories let us cap both STR and VIT, Tanks everywhere are going to be ripping Bahamut a new one for sure!

Would you mind posting specifics of parses of damage in a set simple rotation on a dummy with varying strength levels? I would love to do the same, but I have a PS4 and must ask PC friends to do it for me.