3.0 Paladin is broken still. Square-Enix please. Clemency, scaling.

[rawker]

So if they intended that PLD go full fending, then why does Clemency scale off STR? Isn't that a bit contradicting?

[SirTaint]

Tanks have the most dynamic gearing in the game. STRvVIT is the only discussion with real merit. Everyone else is stuck in max one stat and then debate about .1% gains with secondaries. Tanks actually have a huge deviation between them. Some tanks do 390dps and others can do 1000+ in the same encounter doing the same thing. Its the last interesting part of FFXIV, lets not kill it on purpose.

[Donjo]

mit·i·ga·tion
/ˌmidəˈɡāSH(ə)n/
noun
noun: mitigation

the action of reducing the severity, seriousness, or painfulness of something.

Oh, good. You've almost figured it out. Activating Rampart(20% damage reduction) reduces the severity of attacks, but it's not the only thing that makes attacks less severe. All of this does too:

Shields(Known as Damage Absorption, as they are functionally just a chuck of invisible HP added on top of your current total.)
Blocks/Parries
Defense
Raw Health

Anything you can apply to yourself that makes an attack less likely to kill you is Mitigation. To put it in another term that people like to use, anything that increases your Effective HP is Mitigation. Damage Reduction is merely part of the equation, not the entire subject.

[Edewen]

I like being able to mix in str gear as needed. But I also see the benefit in forcing us to a single setup, a str/vit hybrid fending for example.

Think about the current tuning, in order to make dps check meaningful, they need to account for a full str warrior going balls to the wall in their calculations. This eliminates all choice anyway. You need to run str, and chances are unless your dpsers can make up the slack, you will need the warriors too. If there was one set that tank could use, not only could the dps checks be better tuned around skill instead of class stacking, the amount of health of the tank would be more predictable allowing tighter tuning of tank busters to require some skill to survive it instead of stacking enough vit to survive it.

Full vit is boring, but if you are going to turn it into an illusion of choice with dps checks like they are doing now, may as well take the choice away entirely and use the predictable numbers to make their tuning even tighter.

[SirTaint]

Oh, good. You've almost figured it out. Activating Rampart(20% damage reduction) reduces the severity of attacks, but it's not the only thing that makes attacks less severe. All of this does too:

Shields(Known as Damage Absorption, as they are functionally just a chuck of invisible HP added on top of your current total.)
Blocks/Parries
Defense
Raw Health

Anything you can apply to yourself that makes an attack less likely to kill you is Mitigation. To put it in another term that people like to use, anything that increases your Effective HP is Mitigation. Damage Reduction is merely part of the equation, not the entire subject.

I understand your stretch of the word. But you contradicted yourself.

Mitigation can been see as reduced damage or reduced % of health. But mitigation is always a reduction.

I am in the reduced damage corner like most people, but of course you could stretch all boundaries of eHP to make your argument make sense.

[Donjo]

I like being able to mix in str gear as needed. But I also see the benefit in forcing us to a single setup, a str/vit hybrid fending for example.

Think about the current tuning, in order to make dps check meaningful, they need to account for a full str warrior going balls to the wall in their calculations. This eliminates all choice anyway. You need to run str, and chances are unless your dpsers can make up the slack, you will need the warriors too. If there was one set that tank could use, not only could the dps checks be better tuned around skill instead of class stacking, the amount of health of the tank would be more predictable allowing tighter tuning of tank busters to require some skill to survive it instead of stacking enough vit to survive it.

Full vit is boring, but if you are going to turn it into an illusion of choice with dps checks like they are doing now, may as well take the choice away entirely and use the predictable numbers to make their tuning even tighter.

But we do have to ask two related questions, though:

1. What is the item level that the developers decided was the "intended" level of gear that players should be clearing this content at?
2. Is it necessary for the Tanks to stack Strength in order to meet checks at that intended level of gear?

If we go by the interview in which it was stated that the devs calculate DPS checks by factoring top-tier DPS at intended item level X and removing 10-15%, then we can surmise that we are definitely undergeared for Savage Alexander by a good deal since it's currently taking top-tier DPS just to barely meet the checks. In that situation, everyone's got to help out in ways that go beyond their stated roles. DPS have to maximize their utility and the Tanks/Healers have to maximize their DPS. More gear will relax what people currently think are hard requirements. Hopefully.

[pandabearcat]

WoW ran into a similar problem regarding vit (stam) stacking tanks.

VIT is not mitigation. It is EHP buffer. Over a long period of time, VIT has zero returns, aka, it does nothing for you. There is only one reason VIT exists, and that is

1. To reduce the overall "spikiness" of damage. Obviously the extreme end of spikiness is OHKO, and that is primarily VIT's function to defeat.

There is a secondary reason, and that is to increase the amount of GCDs healers have to react to your damage. If all damage is predictable however, the value of this also drops severely.

So this is why in the age of dps checks being the be all and end all of challenging content, STR stacking is far more prevalent.

WoW solved this problem with 2 steps

1. You can no longer stack VIT. This is equivalent to removing fending accessories from the game. All items give a baseline amount of VIT based on ilvl. This ensures that (traits/class bonuses aside) that all players have the same hp at the same ilvl, allowing balancing content to be easier.

2. Tanks simply get a bonus HP above what everyone else gets, either stance based or job based. Tanks just have more mitigation from armor/traits/abilities. Possibly "tank plate" can have more vit than similar dps plate, at the cost of lower str.

I am all for this, but then again, there are dunderheads that still like accuracy. I gather that "my kind" aren't liked here. But this is a better solution imo.

[Donjo]

I understand your stretch of the word. But you contradicted yourself.

Mitigation can been see as reduced damage or reduced % of health. But mitigation is always a reduction.

I am in the reduced damage corner like most people, but of course you could stretch all boundaries of eHP to make your argument make sense.

The logical failing of most people in this respect is that they only consider the value of the red number(damage reduction and absorption) and completely ignore the element of reduced % of health, even though reduced damage can be converted down to reduced % health loss and having additional health increases the strength of damage reduction.

[RobBull]

Tanks have the most dynamic gearing in the game. STRvVIT is the only discussion with real merit. Everyone else is stuck in max one stat and then debate about .1% gains with secondaries. Tanks actually have a huge deviation between them. Some tanks do 390dps and others can do 1000+ in the same encounter doing the same thing. Its the last interesting part of FFXIV, lets not kill it on purpose.

Well said. Every other job has a BiS set, but tanks have so much flexibility in gearing options. You have a scholar that puts out a ton of damage? Wear crafted or a mix of slaying/fending to give them more wiggle room. Your healers are more pure healers? Go ham with all slaying. Tanks are in a great spot right now with balance and gear options. MMOs have dumbed down gear sets and eliminated or dumbded down skill trees, so it's actually refreshing to have options.

[Donjo]

Well said. Every other job has a BiS set, but tanks have so much flexibility in gearing options. You have a scholar that puts out a ton of damage? Wear crafted or a mix of slaying/fending to give them more wiggle room. Your healers are more pure healers? Go ham with all slaying. Tanks are in a great spot right now with balance and gear options. MMOs have dumbed down gear sets and eliminated or dumbded down skill trees, so it's actually refreshing to have options.

Yeah, the "easy" option is to cut the tall poppy down to everyone else's level, but SE would make so many people so very happy if they made everyone else's gear more complex instead. I just can't imagine how difficult it would be to overhaul everything so much, though.