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

[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.

[Donjo]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.