Tank Accessoires 4.0

Hey everyone,

lately i've seen a couple of Tanks with the 270 Slaying Accessoires. Is this with 4.0 a thing again to wear 4/5 DD Accessoires rather than that for Tanks?

Well not really, its because they are not locked out like they were in HW. Player base always favors more deeps, though I reckon when the raids new acc comes out it will be locked out again

With the damage formula scaling on STR again, if you want to do top DPS, i270 slaying accessories are the best.

The problem compared to 3.0 is that you don't have access to a capped ilvl full STR build, meaning you'll trade a lot of Hit Points for only a fraction of damage. We'll see if it's viable for Omega.

Unfortunately it is a thing again.

The reason for this is the same like back then but now with an even darker future.

Enmity scaling is tied to damage, but tank accessories don't provide damage/ enmity gain with growing ilvl.
This means tank enmity will just grow slowly with Ilvl and with accessories it will stagnate while DPS damage/enmity will grow constantly and will force tanks more or less to stay in tank stance 100% with no gains in gameplay...

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Originally Posted by Legion88

Unfortunately it is a thing again.

The reason for this is the same like back then but now with an even darker future.

Enmity scaling is tied to damage, but tank accessories don't provide damage/ enmity gain with growing ilvl.
This means tank enmity will just grow slowly with Ilvl and with accessories it will stagnate while DPS damage/enmity will grow constantly and will force tanks more or less to stay in tank stance 100% with no gains in gameplay...

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Yes to tank stance, because just like heals they did not like the fact that you stayed in cleric stance the whole dungeon. It is the same with tanks they prefer them to stay in tank stance, unless OT'ing the fight. Will have to see when the raid comes out. I reckon the bosses are going to hit allot harder,since in the dungeons you can already see this effect.

Yes, because Square Enix removed the effect of Vitality on attack power for tanks, which means in order to maximize DPS (and self-healing) tanks will again choose STR accessories over VIT at whatever ilevel they can get them once they have enough HP for the content and their healer.

There's a lot of people guessing that this is because of spaghetti code like how in order to make magic blockable they ended up making blocking work from all directions (I believe magic is not directional by default since Ravana also had the bug where spells were unaffected by his perfect defense). Because food has VIT and weakness no longer lowers VIT the guess is they had to prevent VIT from increasing attack power to keep tanks from being immune to weakness and getting too much benefit from food.

Of course, they could have just put STR on the tank accessories, but they didn't. Please look forward to your next tank having 12k less HP.

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Originally Posted by eagledorf

Because food has VIT and weakness no longer lowers VIT the guess is they had to prevent VIT from increasing attack power to keep tanks from being immune to weakness and getting too much benefit from food.

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Frankly, they could have made an easy fix, which would have also enforced tanking in tank stance, since that's that their wish. Remove VIT accessories completely, and make the increased eHP of tank stance much higher.

Two birds with one stone.

Being forced to tank in tank stance is lame though. It's much more fun when you get to use both stances while tanking.

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Originally Posted by Brannigan

Being forced to tank in tank stance is lame though. It's much more fun when you get to use both stances while tanking.

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Then why have a tank? or why have a tank stance?

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Originally Posted by Faeon

Then why have a tank? or why have a tank stance?

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Well, he did say 'both!' When properly executed, stance dancing can be an effective way to add in a little spike DPS here and there without hampering the experience of the rest of your party. It's just that maybe not everybody behaves all that well.

Yeah, it's them not learning anything from the past.

The devs should really start to realize some facts about their own metagame before trying to make changes to the way people play.

With strong healers in the game, effective health is a rather worthless stat to have, as the vast, vast, vaaaaaast majority of your effective health in a fight will not come from your vitality, but from the healers heals. Your health pool is completely dwarfed by the health your healer is going to restore. So you only need as much effective health in your pool as you need to not be one-shot, so that healers can actually abuse their power. And that goes for mitigation and nominal health both, though heals do, at least, scale with mitigation, so it's somewhat less worthless compared to nominal health, as it has far higher returns. But even then, the usefulness is capped by incoming damage.

We're back to square one on the STR meta, now with outdated accessories - get as much VIT as necessary for tank buster + AA, fill the rest with STR accs. It's literally the same thing for the same reasons. They haven't learned squat. It's frustrating to watch.

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Originally Posted by Zojha

Yeah, it's them not learning anything from the past.

The devs should really start to realize some facts about their own metagame before trying to make changes to the way people play.

. . .

We're back to square one on the STR meta, now with outdated accessories - get as much VIT as necessary for tank buster + AA, fill the rest with STR accs. It's literally the same thing for the same reasons. They haven't learned squat. It's frustrating to watch.

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Agreed, they back peddled on a solved problem, and now the problem is back. Shocker.

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Originally Posted by Zojha

Yeah, it's them not learning anything from the past.
The devs should really start to realize some facts about their own metagame before trying to make changes to the way people play.
We're back to square one on the STR meta, now with outdated accessories - get as much VIT as necessary for tank buster + AA, fill the rest with STR accs. It's literally the same thing for the same reasons. They haven't learned squat. It's frustrating to watch.

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it's SE we're talking about here, they fucked up a lot of things in these past decades, so them fucking up another one isn't really surprising

I just used my limited knowledge of Japanese to see what the JP players were saying about this VIT/STR Predicament and they are even more vocal about it then we are. They want the old formula back or want STR on our right side gear. A few are doing what a lot of NA players are doing and wearing 270 slaying, some are just melding STR, and ALOT seem to be just abandoning tank until something is done.

I get the sneaking suspicion that around omega, all acc level 50 and up will be role locked, instead of a real fix.

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Originally Posted by Zojha

We're back to square one on the STR meta, now with outdated accessories - get as much VIT as necessary for tank buster + AA, fill the rest with STR accs.

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The issue with this is that the top end raiding team this might work. For Average Joe you need more wiggleroom to make it work. What I gues will happen, is they will put a cap on all HW str jewely as well. Using ARR stuff is useless for the sole reason the benefit is very minimal. Forcing you into a vit build. Yes you will loose out on DPS, but it's what SE wants.

ps.
I would hate to see STR tanks in random groups as well when I was a healer. It puts alot more pressure on the healer which otherwise would not be there.

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Originally Posted by Shabaaz

I get the sneaking suspicion that around omega, all acc level 50 and up will be role locked, instead of a real fix.

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That would be a very bad move for SE because tanks and healers are already in very short supply. They should just add STR to the right side and be done with it. Now that accessories are role locked, there's no risk of DPS double-dipping on primary stat to cheese gear checks so there's no disadvantage anymore. Just let tanks deal 75% of a DPS, we kind of need to do reasonable DPS prevent MSQ from being agonizingly slow anyway.

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Originally Posted by Kumori_Kumo

When properly executed, stance dancing can be an effective way to add in a little spike DPS here and there without hampering the experience of the rest of your party. It's just that maybe not everybody behaves all that well.

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What I don't understand is that SE is pretty vocal about forcing the tank stance more and more, but they put pretty much no complexity in tanks apart from that.
Why didn't they just made the skill rotation more demanding like they did with DPS ?

In the end, I don't think tank players specifically like to stance dance, they just like having room to improve compared to the average player, but the only meaningful way to improve, currently, is by stance dancing.

IMO, tank stance was made so that solo content is not a pain to do, by allowing natural decent DPS on tanks jobs while still putting a penalty in group content for the sake of balance.

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Originally Posted by eagledorf

Just let tanks deal 75% of a DPS, we kind of need to do reasonable DPS prevent MSQ from being agonizingly slow anyway.

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There's another way to do both. Put a greater disparity between "tank stance" and "out of tank stance" numbers. I'm pretty sure if group content was designed around tank stance reducing 50% of damage dealt and received, there would be no "tanking out of tank stance", and tank's DPS in solo could be fairly high.

I don't claim that this would be good, just that it seems to be what SE try to enforce.

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Originally Posted by eagledorf

That would be a very bad move for SE because tanks and healers are already in very short supply. They should just add STR to the right side and be done with it. Now that accessories are role locked, there's no risk of DPS double-dipping on primary stat to cheese gear checks so there's no disadvantage anymore. Just let tanks deal 75% of a DPS, we kind of need to do reasonable DPS prevent MSQ from being agonizingly slow anyway.

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Agreed, This is the worst possible fix. The perferred fix would be add some STR to the right side and call it done. Would some tanks still choose to run 270 slaying on the right side, if they dont lock it? probably yes, but it wouldn't be as punishing to run the new acc in that case.

I get why they changed the damage calc back to STR, due to the weakness change, but they lacked the foresight to realize that min max type players (and the raiding population in general) want to play in the most effcient way possible, which means stacking defensive stats up to the threshold then going all out damage.Which means wearing old acc. I cant imagine thats going to stay that way for too long, which is why i think a role lock on all acc above 50 (or maybe just on HW acc) is coming. They obviously want tanks to be doing less damage and sitting in tank stance more.

Or maybe they wont change anything, leave acc as is and not lock out the old ones. Then we will be back to the good ole 3.0 days of 50 page threads about VIT vs STR tanks and how VIT tanks are "big shitters" and STR tanks are "Tryhards"

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

In the end, I don't think tank players specifically like to stance dance, they just like having room to improve compared to the average player, but the only meaningful way to improve, currently, is by stance dancing.

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This is pretty much the reason why I like tanking in this game. The rotations on tanks aren't as complex as dps, but being able to maximize your dps and minimizing the dmg you take or heals you need (thus maximizing healers' dps) is pretty fulfilling.

Unlike stacking dps buffs, stacking mitigation has diminishing returns. Mitigating 10% from a 10k dmg is reducing it by 1k. Mitigating further 10% from that is reducing it by 900. At some point you'll always have "enough" mitigation that stacking more above that threshold yields little to no extra healer dps. And guess what? When you don't need all the mitigations you can have, you'll start by removing the ones that carry a "cost," e.g. tank stances from your list. That's always the one thing you first look at. On the other hand, the devs can't design contents around requiring optimal mitigation usage, since that'll just create a similar situation to gordias savage, which required near perfect dps rotation to clear, and people will probably end up complaining about the raids being too hard tanking/healing wise, instead of dps check wise.

Another thing is that we're playing a game centered around vertical progression, so you'll always naturally grow more powerful as you gear up and you'll inevitably have more leeway with mitigation/healing/dps. Even healers optimize around using instant heals and passive heals like pets/regens as much as they can, while reducing usage of cure/adlo/benefic as they and the tanks gear up. Personally I see tank stances as extra cushions you use to compensate for lack of skills (yours or your group's) or gear (low ilv prog).

Penalizing stance switches will only push tanks further away from using tank stances while compensating on other places: forcing your group's dps to have diversion and lucid dreaming, bringing a ninja, not bringing jobs lacking aggro control, having healers cater to tanks by doing more heals because that'll probably cost less dps than the tanks switching stances back and forth.

Call me a dps meta sheep, blue icon dps or whatever, but until they make damage mitigation actually require a lot of optimization even with tank stances on (which they won't since that'll make raids too hard for most raiders just like gordias savage), I'll continue to optimize on my group dps.

I don't know maybe i am just overthinking it. But it sounds like a tank should be a dps with tank utilities? so you would have healer, pure dps, dps with defense abilties

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Originally Posted by Faeon

I don't know maybe i am just overthinking it. But it sounds like a tank should be a dps with tank utilities? so you would have healer, pure dps, dps with defense abilties

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Yeah because being overly tanky and overhealing people won't help the group at killing the boss. Once you're good enough that you don't have to stay in tank stance or healing non stop you should contribute dps.

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Originally Posted by aleph_null

When you don't need all the mitigations you can have, you'll start by removing the ones that carry a "cost," e.g. tank stances from your list.

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The problem is that, in fights designed around spike damage, the tank stance is basically the weakest mitigation available. That's why you take the liberty of dropping it and why I think, in a world where the designer try to enforce tank stance, that it should be much more powerful...and mobs should it much harder.

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Originally Posted by aleph_null

This is pretty much the reason why I like tanking in this game. The rotations on tanks aren't as complex as dps, but being able to maximize your dps and minimizing the dmg you take or heals you need (thus maximizing healers' dps) is pretty fulfilling.

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So you're saying that even if you had a more complex damage rotation, you'd still find turtle tanking not appealing ?
Or, if your rotation would have to min-max between active mitigation and damage ?

For example, instead of having enmity bonuses (Which could be 100% covered by the stance), some of our WS could put a cumultive shield on us, and you'd try to judge the sweet spot between building more shield and doing more damage.

Well unlike dps, mitigation has a threshold, but if that threshold requires turtle tanking and is challenging enough I think I can be satisfied enough. If a boss hits so hard that I have to perfectly time inner beast or sheltron for every single cleave and tank busters need a few more cds on top of that, then yeah that sounds absolutely interesting to me.

However in that case the difference between good tanks and average tanks would be the difference between clearing and not clearing so to be fair on top of that you'd have to put equally intense healing and dps checks (think gordias savage dps checks + midas savage mechanics/tanking/healing checks), and furthermore to avoid people outgearing the content it'll have to be designed assuming BiS sets on everyone. Now you'll get a really hard fight that actually needs tanks to turtle tank to survive, and also healers/dps to be on top of their game as well. The only way for this to happen is to put it as the super hard boss fight they mentioned during the live letters that we'll get in odd patches (which I'm really looking forward to, since the devs seem content with savage mode being as easy as creator).

If perfect mitigation isn't required to clear then any extra mitigation like stacking shield you mentioned will be weighed against the extra healer dps you're affording your healers, and you'll get back to where we're at.

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Originally Posted by aleph_null

However in that case the difference between good tanks and average tanks would be the difference between clearing and not clearing

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Not automatically. For example, if RoH would apply the cumulative shield I'd mentionned, you'd have PLDs that mainly accumulate shield again and again, to the point of "overshielding", and maybe put aside Royal Authority totally. As a good tank, you'd pinpoint the amount of shield you need. It would work pretty much like judging the perfect amount of enmity combos you need, except than overdoing it could be useful.

You see, I totally support players optimizing their DPS, it just that stance dancing, for me, feels like an unatural and clunky way of doing it.

They just need to add STR to our accessories now.

Like the 2nd secondary, it would not be as high as the "primary" primary. Thus DPS would still have much more atk power plus all their other damage skills.

I can't believe anyone would advocate turtle tanking. Talk about boring. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed tanking in this game because the damage was not so abysmal. Now that they take that away.......