New Job: Pugilist Tank

[Kitru]

Why would anyone put their hands completely into RNG when they can take steps to mitigate damage through their own actions. Unreliable mitigation is inferior to reliable mitigation in practice, even if on paper they should be equal.

Which is why there is +hp.RNG based mitigation mechanisms are not a replacement for static mitigation mechanisms for spike damage situations. As I have said time and time again, Evasion doesn't isn't a factor when you considering the massive spike hits. It's explicitly because of the worst case stuff that you're discussing that any Evasion tank would need the ~25% +hp *because that gives them the exact same eHP as a WAR or PLD*.

But another huge problem is once again, is debuff attacks and death sentence. What if you can't evade them? Imagine a PLD facing down DS without shield oath. Because if 20% evasion is replacing 20% dmg reduction or 25% hp/healing and you can't evade a death sentence; you're basically a PLD without oath, or a WAR without defiance.

What you continually seem to be incapable of comprehending is that 20% evasion is *not* replacing 20% DR or 25% +hp/+healing. 25% +hp and 20% evasion are replacing them. Evasion is a mean mitigation stat. It does not affect a tank's eHP specifically because it can, and will, fail. You do not rely upon Evasion to keep you alive through something like a Death Sentence. You rely upon the 25% +hp that you would be getting *alongside* the evasion.

I have said this *over and over*. How do both of you keep missing this and act like Evasion would be the sole benefice given to this theoretical tank?

Listen, I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times. Total mitigation over a fight doesn't matter.

That's an ignorant viewpoint because, if you only care about eHP (which is what you keep bringing up), you're leaving out mean mitigation, which would be like giving WAR 25% +hp but no +healing: yes, they would be able to survive the same hits as a PLD, given the same starting hp, but it would take 25% more healing to keep them at that place.

You *have* to account for both eHP and mean mitigation when coming up with a tanking. On top of this, you have to realize that not all mechanics affect both, which I have said multiple times. Any tank getting a substantial amount of evasion is going to *have* to get something to bolster their eHP specfically because evasion doesn't do *anything* for eHP; it's a pure mean mitigation stat, and, honestly, it's not like the math is even remotely hard.

[Alistaire]

You keep saying bad points over and over as well, which get shot down with very specific reasons why it either would have to not work or be utterly broken. If your evasion tank evades more, it'll be broken. If it doesn't, it wouldn't be an evasion tank. Not quite sure how to put it more simply here.

[Kitru]

If you only think in terms of a tank yes. But you need to take into consideration the healer. the HP plus of WAR and the DR on PLD are great but the require a good deal of healing even just from auto attacks because in things like t5 and ex primals the healers must keep the tanks at 100% at all times or risk an instant death from a series of instant moves. Because we have to keep them at 100% there is a lot of over healing involved. However, with an evasion tank sure when they do get hit they get hit harder but this will actually allow the healers to over heal much much less because the evasion tanks are actually using up all the HPs we are giving to them in the spell instead of only say half like the WAR or PLD do. We will have to cast less because of the evasion because an evasion is a 100% mitigation where the current tanks only have partial mitigation (looking at a single attack here). This opens up healers to DPS or take care of the other party members much more easily.

I seriously have to wonder how much overhealing you're dumping into a tank to keep them alive during EX primals. I've healed all of the EX primals and I've *never* had a tank die to lack of healing nor have I ever ended up spending a majority of my time overhealing. If you're overhealing like that, you're doing it wrong.

As to the aspect of tanking that you are dancing around, it's called "spikiness" (or, more properly, the incoming damage profile). It refers to the pace in which damage is received and healing is required. Evasion tanks, because their form of "bonus" mitigation, have incredibly spiky incoming damage profiles. In fact, any reliance upon RNG based mitigation ends up increasing your spikiness, though higher chance/lower potency mitigation mechanisms have lower spikiness than lower chance/higher potency RNG mechanisms. It's exactly what PLDs have to consider when deciding between the Allagan Shield and the Onion Shield: the Onion Shield reduces you spikiness substantially, which is a significant benefit even if it provides less explicit mean mitigation over an extended period of time.

The problem with what you're saying here is that you're acting as if spikiness is a *benefit* because it decreases overhealing and/or allows for gaps between healing required. Yes, it does, but you neglected to realize that, when a tank with a spiky incoming damage profile needs healing, they need it *very quickly*. You have to pay a *helluva lot more attention* to a tank with a spiky incoming damage profile and, because of the rapid drops in hp that are possible, if you're busy throwing damage on enemies or heals on other targets, you're not going to be able to get back to the tank as quickly as you could/should be. It's the exact scenario that occurs when you have a WAR that gets hit with a Plummet>DS>Plummet: if you're doing *anything* but healing the tank when that happens, the tank is basically dead.

This is assuming that the evasion tank doesn't get defensive CDs like Foresight and stuff that up Defence because they are evasive and shouldn't be getting hit right? So they would get things like Featherfoot to up the evasion even further and potentially evade auto attacks in a consecutive row and thus help the healers even more.

Any tank that focused *entirely* upon RNG based mechanisms would be shooting itself in the foot. The key to effective tanking is diversity. Evasion tanks should not be thought of as tanks that rely entirely or even in a *majority* upon dodging attacks to survive. I've dealt with games tried to make it work but it never did (City of Heroes/Villains Super Reflexes). An "evasion" tank is best thought of as a tank that relies upon evasion more heavily than the other tanks but not to the exclusion of everything else. PLD is considered to be a damage reduction tank, but it doesn't have *only* damage reduction: it still has the baseline dodge (which is bolstered somewhat by Flash's Blind), and actually brings in an extra level of RNG with shield blocking.

A well design tank is diversified in the mechanics it draws upon. Since evasion are already creates a woefully spiky tank, the best set up is for one is to have their CDs to focus upon smoothing out their spikiness: DR, Defense increases, etc. It has less of an impact upon mean mitigation than you might think because evasion is already an all-or-nothing mechanic: if you dodge an attack, it wouldn't matter if you had 1000 def or 0 def. The only time the CD would actually benefit you would be if an attack actually punched through your evasion.

[Kitru]

There's some irony here in that he's exactly right and you're way out in left field on this.

The irony is that you think it's ironic when it's nothing of the kind. The only way that their "points" make any kind of sense is if you misread everything I've been saying just like they have.

[Alistaire]

At this point you're just not listening. To anyone. Think what you want to think. Dream of an evasion tank that doesn't need to evade to tank, and isn't broken by either not needing to evade or evading while not evading. Enjoy it. Just stop posting about it.

[Kitru]

You keep saying bad points over and over as well, which get shot down with very specific reasons why it either would have to not work or be utterly broken. If your evasion tank evades more, it'll be broken. If it doesn't, it wouldn't be an evasion tank. Not quite sure how to put it more simply here.

No, I keep making salient points that get misinterpreted by people that think they know what I'm talking about but don't actually because they didn't actually read what I had written well enough to understand it which makes people like you that read even *less* of a given post (and, at best, just skim it) *think* that a point has been made because you're not actually cognizant of the details. For every single one of the "reasons" posited by other people, I have explicitly shown why that reason is either not valid or already accounted for in everything I've been saying the entire time.

[Maku]

Though I don't agree with what you just said let me respond as if I did.

If the healer has to pay more attention then before then um, why would you use that style of tank then?

[Alistaire]

No, I keep making salient points that get misinterpreted by people that think they know what I'm talking about but don't actually because they didn't actually read what I had written well enough to understand it which makes people like you that read even *less* of a given post (and, at best, just skim it) *think* that a point has been made because you're not actually cognizant of the details. For every single one of the "reasons" posited by other people, I have explicitly shown why that reason is either not valid or already accounted for in everything I've been saying the entire time.

Well, you certainly love your walls of text. And thinking you're right no matter what anyone else thinks.

[Wadoka]

<drops in and looks around>

<gets really depressed>

SHISHI HOKODANNNN!!!!!

There you go. Emo Tank.

[Alistaire]

That would be the DRK threads, where some are saying it should be a tank.