Let's Talk Stats

Before I begin, I wish to preface this discussion with a disclosure. I understand quite well, that currently, the sole tanking stat (parry) is frowned upon because the game has been designed and balanced in a way that discourages tanks building defensively, but this is a discussion about moving forward, not remaining where we are.
Anyway, as I have just mentioned, tanks as it stands, are pretty much glorified damage dealers who can actually take a hit. A group of friends and I see this as more or less misunderstanding what makes a tank in gaming what they are, tanks. It shouldn't be that we build full offensive, our threat in all forms of combat should be that we're unstoppable juggernauts, slowly carving opponents up with our blades.

Our solution? Stats. As it stands, tanks have one stat that actively increases our durability that we have a choice in: Parry. Parry as a concept is great, parry in practice... not so much. We all know it needs a better formula, one that rewards us for choosing it over critical hit rate, skill speed, or determination. But one stat to rule them all is just as unhealthy, so what I wish to propose is increasing the amount of stat options available for tanks.

There are a myriad of examples of stats that could work, be it something like Lifestealing (a good option for WAR and DRK?), simple Elemental Resistance (think single elemental resistance, but for all six/seven elements), Deflection (Parry for magical attacks, maybe just rolled into Parry), Regeneration (passive HP regen in combat). While most of these would still be good for "fluff" attacks, they do add up over all and would allow healers more room to assist in doing damage. In addition to all of this, it would make tanks feel like they were tanks instead of damage dealers who happened to tank. We really shouldn't be asking ourselves "how are we supposed to maximize our damage" we should be asking ourselves, "how are we supposed to minimize their damage." At least, that's what I think.

Im not interested in the illusion of choice for FFXIV.
Str vs Vit is already enough of a headache here without giving tanks more crap to argue about incessantly.

Well, before you talk individual stats, let's back up and look at a bigger picture.

Philosophy #1: Find minimum defensive stats to live comfortably, then shift additional points into offensive stats.

Philosophy #2: Prioritize defensive stats over offensive. Mostly in prep for very challenging content or some effort to free up healers to DPS.

#1 is my current philosophy, and probably most popular at the moment.
#2 I could respect if SE were to consistently throw challenging content our way. They haven't unfortunately. Alex savage has been a refreshing change for the 1 day I've tried it so far: Warrior MT Faust with near full STR spec & stance dancing made me sweat, and that's awesome. However, Esoterics gear was just released & Alex normal 2 weeks ago (thus I only have half done), so the challenge level is going down fast. And that's after a drought of nothing really challenging since final coil was newly released.

Now consider the effect of your proposed new defensive stats on those philosophies:
#1 you just made it less clear how to find that minimum defensive stats. Doesn't ruin the approach, but I for one would not appreciate the complication.
#2 could benefit. If people actually wanted to use it.

And finally the disclaimer about all "propose change" posts on this forum:
Do you think developers for a Japanese game read English forums? (Not likely)
Do you think developers cruise fan or player forums for their game looking for ideas? (In the unlikely event they do, they had better be very careful implementing what they find. "Be careful what you wish for" is an old cliche - with good reason.)
Do you think these would be easy to implement? Does the positive effect justify the effort/cost and risk of messing something up? (Hint: won't be easy)
...Hope you had fun writing it. The enjoyment of writing/replying is all we'll get out of it.

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Originally Posted by Hundred

Im not interested in the illusion of choice for FFXIV.
Str vs Vit is already enough of a headache here without giving tanks more crap to argue about incessantly.

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Oh sure mate, th' stats in this game are shite on ice, but that don't mean they gotta be. I mean yar, SE ain't gonna change shite either anytime soon, but it's nice ta dream.

I'd love ta see a world where each of th' stats did somethin' good. Givin' people crap ta argue about is great, 'cause that means there's somethin' ta argue over. This shite is homogenous enough.

Ah, I think you're starting to see what is possibly the largest flaw in the design of this game. We have here a game that features the Holy Trinity of Tank, Heal, and DPS... but is absolutely abysmal at enforcing it.

Ordinarily, there are the three roles. First is the DPS who specializes at dealing damage at the expense of a limited ability to take hits and support the party with buffs/heals. Second is the Healer who specializes in supporting the party with buffs and heals at the expense of limited ability to deal damage and take hits. Finally, we have the Tank who specializes in taking hits at the expense of limited ability to deal damage and support the party. Put all three of these together and we get the Holy Trinity because the three most major aspects of a party's ability to fight an enemy are covered. The weaknesses of the individual roles didn't matter; they were all so necessary because of what they specialized in that all of them were always needed, and therefore they were always there.

But that isn't how things are in FFXIV. In FFXIV, the so called DPS deal a mere 20-30% more damage than Tanks and Healers. Bards and Machinists have been called obsolete because Tanks are so close to their DPS. There are fewer than five fights in all of Heavensward that couldn't be easily cleared without bringing a single DPS along. Tanks can eschew a majority of their ability to take hits and still tank an encounter. A healer can spend less than half of an encounter casting healing spells and still easily keep everyone alive. Eliminating Tanks and Healers from encounters is always at the forefront of player's minds because the number of them that the game recommends for parties is almost never necessary. That's the big theme here: there are too many party based situations where one or more roles simply aren't necessary.

So... Tanks. As you have observed, they are currently caught in a fallacy. They're being told that they can only be effective Tanks if they stop thinking like a Tank. Healers are in a similar conundrum. The driving reason behind this, I would guess, is that the community is increasingly valuing DPS above all other factors in determining the effectiveness of a party. This is because of the way FFXIV handles difficulty. The primary difficulty of most fights is the handling of mechanics. The rest of it is the numerical difficulty: the amount of DPS, healing, and mitigation necessary to survive and win. The only truly significant element of numerical difficulty fights in FFXIV tend to get is a DPS check. Hard checks on Healing and Tanking are much rarer and are frequently only valid when a group is undergeared for a piece of content or players are otherwise deliberately doing something to increase the difficulty of a fight.

So we have DPS checks in every meaningful fight, a DPS role that doesn't deal that much more damage than the other roles, and Tanks/Healers who have absurdly easy access to ways of increasing their own damage without removing the ability to perform the minimum of their own assigned roles. Of course DPS is going to be the stick by which everything is measured. Thus, the Holy Trinity is abolished. Instead of Tank, Heal, and DPS... we have a DPS who can take a hit, a DPS who can heal a hit, and a DPS who hits a little harder than the others.

There are two questions left here. First is whether or not this is actually a huge problem, in the sense of some perceived ability to kill the game. The game has been running strong with these design philosophies for well over a year now. If this skewed trinity were to kill the game, it probably would have succeeded by now. Granted, it probably has lost subscribers in people like you who looked at a non-DPS role and realized that it's just a DPS that happens to have a specific utility, but it seems evident enough that the community at large is having fun with the game as it currently is. If you wish to Tank or Heal, it might be truly necessary to leave behind what those roles fully do in other games because it just doesn't apply to FFXIV right now.

The second question is whether or not SE might ever consider changing the game to make the roles more defined and necessary. My best guess is that they probably won't. One thing they have been particularly loathe of doing is making changes that significantly muck with established player strategies or practices. Strength Tanking has been happening for a very long time now and they publicly acknowledged DPSing healers shortly before Heavensward came out. SE knows that this is happening and it thus could stand to be reasoned that they're deliberately enabling it to occur.

This situation is rooted down well enough that a mere increase in the amount and/or effectiveness of defensive stats for Tanks will not do a single thing to change the landscape. All it will do is piss people off because there are now more defensive stats to avoid.

Your heart's in the right place, OP... it just might be in the wrong game.

Great post donjo. Ive had this conversation with others, but for many this is their first mmo with nothing to compare to.

Since you said it clearly i dont have much to add. Just an opinion that as the game goes on and they add more jobs, it will be necessary to increase the unique qualities of each class. And i feel then is when we will get a deeper stat meta introduced and adopt a stricter holy trinity. Atleast in raids.

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Originally Posted by D_C

Oh sure mate, th' stats in this game are shite on ice, but that don't mean they gotta be. I mean yar, SE ain't gonna change shite either anytime soon, but it's nice ta dream.

I'd love ta see a world where each of th' stats did somethin' good. Givin' people crap ta argue about is great, 'cause that means there's somethin' ta argue over. This shite is homogenous enough.

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heh, pirate speech.


I like the idea OP, at least on paper. in practice i have no idea. definitely would at least make me feel closer to a tank, and not a "High hp dps with an immunity"

good read Donjo. I do sincerly hope that they fix this skewed trinity though. it probably won't kill the game if they don't, but it would be nice.

Am I the only one liking the all DPS thing going on with the game? I mean, all of them are capable of dealing damage but has different "priorities". A tank can dps, sure but has to prioritize taking hits and surviving. Healers can dps but should be quick to abandon the thought of using the next offensive spell to help dying party members.

Comparing it to other MMOs I've played in the past, you are forced to do one thing, nothing else. Say you're a tank, you are given very low offensive capabilities that there are no reasons to invest on offensive stats unless you're doing novelty builds that will be a waste of character space. This design makes playing either tanks or supports 100% leeching off dps characters which is stupid, imo

I think the reason why we're seeing role bleeding, and the focus on DPS in this expansion more than previously, is due to the majority of players' affinity to do damage rather than other roles. Finding tanks in ARR launch (and pretty much any other MMO) is always a task, now with HW, the tanks now are a little bit more fun to play knowing they're contributing damage to the group.

It's not uncommon to see tank damage (or healer damage) increase. World of Warcraft (which the developers openly looked at for inspiration, among others) also boosted the dps of tanks to lure players into that role to fill the gaps in class/role disparity.

The Trick is to devise a way to allow players to "have their cake and eat it too". We can't have healers and Tanks being top dps, but they need to be competitive for fights like Bismark EX and the other DPS check fights.

I think instead of creating the "talent spec" style of classes (e.g. dual spec in other MMO'S) they just offer up various stances (Deliverance for wars). Tanks in this game have become, just as it was mentioned before, DPS that can take a hit. And, IMO, there's *nothing* wrong with this


Frankly (and I may be biased here) but I love being a Warrior that can Tank efficiently and also dps competitively.

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Originally Posted by Bustaperizm

Great post donjo. Ive had this conversation with others, but for many this is their first mmo with nothing to compare to.

Since you said it clearly i dont have much to add. Just an opinion that as the game goes on and they add more jobs, it will be necessary to increase the unique qualities of each class. And i feel then is when we will get a deeper stat meta introduced and adopt a stricter holy trinity. Atleast in raids.

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One could only hope...

It's first and foremost an issue with encounter design.

If fights had a lot more general damage -- enough damage to run healers OOM from non stop max-HPS spam, then the ability to minimize damage as a tank would be more important.

As is, the balance works as such -- I could stack more survivability and...? Or, I could stack more DPS stats and end the fight faster. One has a clear result. The other is situational at best.

If you wanted to fix the dynamic you just design encounters to change that relationship. For example -- I could stack more survivability and actually survive through the incoming damage. Or, I could stack more DPS and be 100% guaranteed to wipe the raid every time due to healers going OOM or just randomly dying to incoming damage.

Then, defensive stats actually become relevant.

Next, you would just have to fix the stats themselves -- so make parry not suck, unlink def / mdef and vit / str stat allocation from ilevels, etc.

You might think this flips the scales in the other direction and makes tank DPS irrelevant but that's simply not true. People will still eventually find the threshold where enough survivability is enough even if it's after you've over-geared content. Also, encounters can still be designed to give OTs the responsibility to DPS. So, offensive stats would still matter.

As it stands, no classes have this kind of "choice" outside of tanks. That is a problem. Tanks shouldn't have a choice either.

Suggestion 1: Take slaying away from tanks. Make accessories class specific. Cut the vit on fending in half, replace the lost points with str. This will do two things. End the argument of str vs vit, and allow better tuning of bosses and of classes. It would be a lot easier to bring all tanks within 150 dps of each other.

Suggestion 2: Make parry actually useful and add def and mgc def to fending accessories to encourage tanks to use them, this would still run the risk of tanks doing exactly what they do now. So in turn se would make bosses hit harder and in turn bosses would more easily one shot everyone else.

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Originally Posted by Edewen

As it stands, no classes have this kind of "choice" outside of tanks. That is a problem. Tanks shouldn't have a choice either.

Suggestion 1: Take slaying away from tanks. Make accessories class specific. Cut the vit on fending in half, replace the lost points with str. This will do two things. End the argument of str vs vit, and allow better tuning of bosses and of classes. It would be a lot easier to bring all tanks within 150 dps of each other.

Suggestion 2: Make parry actually useful and add def and mgc def to fending accessories to encourage tanks to use them, this would still run the risk of tanks doing exactly what they do now. So in turn se would make bosses hit harder and in turn bosses would more easily one shot everyone else.

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Pretty much this. The more I play tank, the more I want to just play a DPS. No stressing over what accessories to get, or getting/keeping up to date 2 sets. And if I'm expected to maximize my DPS, I'd much rather just play that role instead of a psuedo-tank.

I wish the stats did more, tbh. As a drk or a nin, i don't want to slap on only one stat and call it a day. I want to see piety or dexterity do something for me too.

A little more in the way of stats strengthening particular moves/abilities i think would be great.
There's no real thing to look foward to in terms of gear. the raid (and maybe the esoteric) will always be the highest, and they can't be customized. The crafted? Always a tier down, and held back by stat limitations.

They made encounters a little more interesting this time around but they still fail to go beyond putting DPS checks in the way. I would like to see more encounters that rely on situational awareness than just pure "beef up the numbers to make them push their buttons harder".

The one thing I truly, truly want is WoW in a FF setting. And I mean that with zero sarcasm whatsoever.

WoW is an extremely polished mmo - but the graphics are 10 years old and I'm a bit tired of the lore.
FF14 is chock full of lore and childhood memories, and absolutely beautiful graphics. But the 2.5 sec GCD kills me. Animation locks kill me, and zero gear choice kills me too. Gear bloat, and massive grind are very reminiscent of Vanilla WoW.

We take a lot of WoW's innovations for granted...but seeing how not a single new MMO managed to emulate more than Vanilla and maybe BC at best...well, its sad. Maybe FF14 will become that in another 5 years.

But that is sort of off topic.

I would very, very much like tanking "skill" to be being able to mitigate the most damage possible, to make those clutch plays and save the raid. I want my survivability to be in my own hands, instead of a glorified meat shield that relies 100% on healers to survive.

I think tank stances are stupid and the idea of tank swaps needs to be better done. I think VIT needs to be solely based on ilvl and more interesting stats should take its place. I think class specific gear is well and good but should be on the token system a la WoW instead of solo buying with esoterics, so we can have more interesting raid drops. I desperately want this game to have some degree of actual randomness and procs - bring in trinkets and set bonuses, please...we've been playing the same class for years and years with no change other than our numbers go up.