Concern State of Tank Stats - Alex:Father Dejavu and Tenacity

As more people are reaching lvl 70 and we are starting to get a sense of available gear and stat weights, a fairly annoying trend is rearing its ugly head... Strength Tanks.

Due to SE reverting the tank damage calculation from 1 AP = 0.45 * (Str + Vit) back to purely STR scaling, tanks have started switching into 270 STR accessories for dungeons and high end content.
Of course this comes with the usual arguments of "Tank damage is significant, so unless you maximize your damage via gear, you are handicapping your group", as well as "If they have enough HP to survive the tank buster, who cares?"
Now this may be true right now, though we have no idea what raid content will bring, and whether tanks will need the extra HP to survive tank busters, like in Alex:Son.

The overall sense from the tank community was that people largely approved of the STR + VIT calculation, so why revert it and revive the STR-tanks mess and all it entails?
Some proposed that this is due to the new death penalty reducing all stats but VIT, such that tanks would be less affected by the penalty.
Is it that difficult to quasi-reduce tank's AP by having the damage calculation be affected by the death penalty, but not the HP calculation?

Secondly, I would like to address (as some others have) the perceived weakness of Tenacity.
From reddit data analysis reports (avoiding the p-word), Tenacity is providing almost no increase in incoming heals, and about 1-2% higher outgoing damage and incoming damage reduction per 1000 tenacity.
Um, 1000 points of a substat is a LOT for a 2% improvement. This low scaling is making Tenacity about as desirable as parry... and we all remember how much people loved parry.
This further goes to explain why the general recommendation for left side melds is Direct Hit followed by Critical Hit, as the remaining options of Skill Speed and Tenacity provide drastically lower returns.

So to conclude I've the following question to ask of SE:

Would you consider reverting the tank AP calculation to the pre-4.0 formula, or making it so Tenacity's effect scales with Vitality in such a way as to encourage Vit accessories (and not STR ones 40-50 ilvls lower)?

If anything the new weakness needs to apply a flat 15-30% damage down whilst keeping hp levels the same, which could revive the good ole vit-str calculations. Either that or throw str onto tank accessories... this one is more unlikely as if the devs wanted something like that, we would of seen it throughout the beginning of stormblood. Tenacity being useless and being on nearly every piece of gear we get at level 70 doesn't help... substat needs to be buffed significantly so it can at least rival either direct hit or maybe even crit on our melds..

TL;DR: Give us back 3.2-3.56 damage calculations please and thank you.

I'm pretty pissed about Tenacity, tbh. I had high hopes that SE, after reworking parry, had made a true tank secondary stat that had some value. Nope.

I wished I saw the thread about how garbage it was before melded it.

Reverting to VIT scaling would be optimal, buffing tenacity to scale with VIT would also be great. But, I have a pretty solid fear that their "solution" will actually be: "Whoops, we actually forgot to role lock the old accessories, too.... Fixed!"

It'd guess the easiest thing to do would be to add strength to tank accessories. If you added 1/2 the typical main stat allotment as strength I think plenty of people would be pretty happy to pick up i310 tank accessories. It'd be roughly equivalent to the str/vit blend before in attack power.

Or they could make tenacity do something significant. But no secondary has ever been close to a main-stat in power.

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Originally Posted by BlueYukiao

Reverting to VIT scaling would be optimal, buffing tenacity to scale with VIT would also be great. But, I have a pretty solid fear that their "solution" will actually be: "Whoops, we actually forgot to role lock the old accessories, too.... Fixed!"

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Then tanks will use Penta meld crafted items. Probably will take less than 5 melds to cap str, but you get the idea. They will all use crafted right side.

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Originally Posted by Vincentv

Then tanks will use Penta meld crafted items. Probably will take less than 5 melds to cap str, but you get the idea. They will all use crafted right side.

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Except you can't overmeld a main stat, so we'd still only get the one STR slot.

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Originally Posted by Kenji1134

The overall sense from the tank community was that people largely approved of the STR + VIT calculation, so why revert it and revive the STR-tanks mess and all it entails?

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This is the only logic I can come through with: What is the meaning of stats if you are going to make them behave differently on every job? If you want tanks to do more damage, just give their gear the stats needed to reach the amount of damage you desire them to inflict. However, the fact that they changed healers to work of MND tells me that would not be the case (or two completely separate teams balanced healers vs tanks.)

Another likely case is they never wanted tanks to do that much damage, and the VIT+STR scaling was only a temporary fix until someone decided that they would, indeed, lock accessories behind role groups. I say: fine, but not going all the way and doing this to all back-gear is contradictory, if so.

Personally, I think the solution should be to make all Tank Gear have decent STR values AND lock all level 50-60 accessories behind roles.

As for Tenacity, I got to say if their goal was to simplify things, adding even more stats that (supposedly) just mean "more damage" was not the best approach. What is it now? Str, Det, Ten, Crit and Direct Hit? Did I miss one?

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Originally Posted by Ogulbuk

Another likely case is they never wanted tanks to do that much damage, and the VIT+STR scaling was only a temporary fix until someone decided that they would, indeed, lock accessories behind role groups. I say: fine, but not going all the way and doing this to all back-gear is contradictory, if so.

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It's not a "likely" case. It is "the" case. Your reasoning is exactly what the devs had in mind, but apparently, everyone seems to have forgotten it.


The more I read the forums since a week and the more I feel like I'm about the only who remembers that:

1- The STR+VIT formula was actually an overall damage nerf to using pure STR accessories, but a buff to people who were using VIT accessories.

2- It "was" stated that this was a temporary fix and that it would one day (read: 4.0) be reverted to STR only with role-locked accessories, but the reasoning why it would be made like that was because, when the "fix" was introduced, they were so advanced in the concept of the gear that would be released during 3.x that, for a development point of view, it made more sense to devote the revert to STR formula during 4.0 with the rest of the revamping of the battle system.

Maybe I'm just hallucinating because when I see people talking as if SE hadn't "learned from its mistakes", I'm like: "But I've know it would get to this for awhile!".

Also, when I see people extrapolating so much on the STR meta regarding the incoming Savage Raid, I feel like it's needed to remind everyone that is coming out in another TWO weeks and that maybe, just maybe, it's a little early.


Therefore, as crazy as it sounds, I don't know why people are thinking that they will either revert to STR/VIT or role-lock the i270 accessories. I've been under the assumption that for the past year, this was their design, all along, and that come Omega Savage people will realize that even that 20-30% DPS increase will not suffice to survive the incoming damage, and in the end, if you don't survive the tankbusters, well, you do zero damage and you wipe. Then again, the Savage Raid isn't out yet, so...

"But we are having more difficulty to keep hate while in DPS stance", some say? First, remain longer in tank stance, second, ask your DPS, Healers and Off-tanks to use all the wonderful skills such as Diversion, Lucid Dreaming and Shirk they have at their disposition. Since when has hate management been "only" the responsibility of the main tanks and not a team effort?

Tanks don't do any damage now anyway in 4.0 so who cares if they don't lose damage on death with VIT scaling, and likewise why bother using STR accessories when you do so little damage that the increase you get is negligible anyway?

So make tank damage scale with VIT again and force tanks to use VIT accessories like they said they were going to.

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Originally Posted by Kenji1134

Tenacity is providing almost no increase in incoming heals, and about 1-2% higher outgoing damage and incoming damage reduction per 1000 tenacity.
Um, 1000 points of a substat is a LOT for a 2% improvement. This low scaling is making Tenacity about as desirable as parry... and we all remember how much people loved parry.
This further goes to explain why the general recommendation for left side melds is Direct Hit followed by Critical Hit, as the remaining options of Skill Speed and Tenacity provide drastically lower returns.

So to conclude I've the following question to ask of SE:

Would you consider reverting the tank AP calculation to the pre-4.0 formula, or making it so Tenacity's effect scales with Vitality in such a way as to encourage Vit accessories (and not STR ones 40-50 ilvls lower)?

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I actually posted a request that they have tenacity scale off vitality and posted something similar to what you said on the tank role forums

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Originally Posted by Evaddaragon

I've been under the assumption that for the past year, this was their design, all along, and that come Omega Savage people will realize that even that 20-30% DPS increase will not suffice to survive the incoming damage

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This is a pretty huge assumption considering just how many tools we have to mitigate things right now

Feint/Addle
Apocatastasis/Palisade
Sacred Soil
Astro Shield
Adlo
Divine Benison
Intervention
Passage of Arms
The Blackest Knight
Reprisal
Eye for an Eye
The Bole

And this is just stuff that other people can do to the MT or the boss. If they really need to stack up mitigation they can go WAR(mt)/PLD(ot) and abuse intervention, warrior CDs, and Cover+paladin CDs. If there's a super dangerous and hard to compensate for cleave you can just slot in VIT pieces as needed.

They basically have to role lock pre-Stormblood gear. There's no other solution if they don't want to change SB accessories to have strength or change how tank damage works.

1) 1000 points of Tenacity is about a 5% dmg reduction.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...city_datadump/

2) Taking just left-side in consideration, melding 520 points of Dhit translates to a 14% proct rate, aka about a flat 3.3% DPS increase. Meanwhile 520 points in Det = at least 140 attack power (at least in patch 3.5?) which is a 5-6% DPS gain for tank (PLD that I know of anyway).

3) 270 accessories ain't gonna fly in Omega Savage. I think 1 at the very most, but by then it will have relatively diminished DPS value too once ilvls are 340 and accessory secondary stats start getting much bigger.

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Originally Posted by Brannigan

They basically have to role lock pre-Stormblood gear. There's no other solution if they don't want to change SB accessories to have strength or change how tank damage works.

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Whille it's true that indeed other party members have many tools to help tanks mitigate damage, the majority of these, we alread had and/or are rebranded into role actions. Only a select few (Passage of Arms, Intervention, The Blackest Knight, for example) are actually new, so I'm not actually of the opinion that on its own, it will make the difference. But you are right, it's speculation on my part, which I did imply anyway.


I'm still not expecting SE to role-lock anything pre-Stormblood because it seems to me it is as intended.

Also, instead of actually role-locking the accessories, they could do away with the possibility of changing equipment once you enter an instance. Tough luck if you get a dungeon drop while leveling, though.

Melding tenacity is pointless. And what is worse, they say it's not broken