Quote Originally Posted by Donjo View Post
There is, in fact, a severe imbalance existing within the game. SE royally screwed up, mostly with encounter design admittedly but with stats in one major area: most jobs have their main stat and their damage stat being exactly the same. Therefore, maximum potential is achieved mostly by maximizing this one stat. Tanks, however, are the odd duck. Their main stat is Vitality but their damage stat is Strength. This alone, though, wouldn't cause the huge problems we're currently experiencing with what is known as the "aggressive tank". All of the following things make it the case that for Tanks and Tanks alone, one cannot unambiguously reach a maximum potential while maxing their main stat.

1. The main stat and damage stat are different.
2. Crafted Accessories allow primary stats(STR, DEX, etc.) to be melded to them in enormous amounts(in relation to their benefit to the character in comparison to the secondaries), which allows Tanks to benefit most from them.
3. Encounters at the endgame are simply not doing enough damage to Tanks, thus allowing them to trade a disproportionate amount of their main stat for Strength. This is further compounded by the fact that many of them are, at these levels of hp, tanking the bosses outside of their tank stance for 90% of the battle. But, that particular diddle is caused by...
4. Single Hit Tank Busters are such an awful way to make an encounter "difficult". They directly propagate the logic of "if I can survive this one hit every time, I have enough HP". SE has already shown they can move past this kind of mechanic by providing examples of both multi-hit tank busters(Bahamut's Claw, Sword Dance, etc.) and encounters without busters but high constant damage(Shiva EX). The single hit buster should be eliminated entirely. Additionally, every single buster in the game should be physical damage. This would make encounters more dynamic and somewhat less formulaic in addition to making parry and block procs more useful.

SE didn't anticipate just how powerful crafted gear was going to become. When people can craft together things on day one of the existence of a raid and meld them to be explicitly better than the stuff the new raid gives, there's a problem with the intended speed of gear progression. Tanks wielding accessories with both STR and VIT on them are the most profited by all of this, which is why I directly targeted them so much in my suggested changes.

-Accessories are class locked: Tanks can't wear Slaying accessories anymore
-Main Stat materia is nerfed + no guaranteed slot on accessories: You're right; people will still try to do this anyway. But, they'll literally cry trying and be able to do nothing but max that other main stat, if there is enough room in the first place for it.
-Vitality determines Tank Damage: Now Tanks are in the same boat as everyone else; maxing the main stat = maximum potential in both mitigation and damage.
-Unmitigated attacks instakill: Stops tanking outside of tank stances. Buuut, this one is probably overkill considering the change above, unless bosses start doing enough damage to really need the extra mitigation.

Now, switching damage from Strength to Vitality for Tanks would solve the problem alone. Now they have to use the gear assigned to them like everyone else. It, however, is the "easy" solution. The alternate solution is "if Tanks can have two primary stats that are so important to them, why can't everyone else?", but that opens the can of worms known as "balance". I'd love to try and suss out possibilities for this as it could make gearing very interesting.
Oh, you were SERIOUS about those accessories changes and weren't just proposing CRAZY things that SE might do to piss off their players.

Those changes to accessories are AWFUL

GOD

F)*#$@#$

AWFUL

(i'm sorry if that's a little harsh, but seriously, I cannot emphasize how much I do not like these changes)

All it does is serve to take an already terrible overmelding system (that's only benefit is that it's less terrible than the 1.0 overmelding system, but it still sucks) and make it worse by removing guaranteed slots. They've already nerfed the crafted accessories by taking a secondary stat off them, if anything they should add in a 2nd guaranteed slot to the accessories now that they've been nerfed. For better or worse, these accessories are now designed and balanced around being max melded, so it only makes sense to ease the very frustrating and unfun aspect of getting there. Making the accessories more random and frustrating to meld is absolutely no way to fix the problem at all.

Seriously, the whole stat system and how it relates to materia is screwy. Elemental materia are completely pointless. Main stat materia are ONLY good on accessories (and really, only STR/VIT have much if any purpose, DEX/MND/INT are borderline useless too), and you pretty much want to kill that off.