Why not just make everyone a DPS?

[Sapphidia]

Oh I definitely agree with ZDamned about the ilevel requirements. The issue is more that, at least in my mind, if a TANK is barely at the ilevel requirement for a super hard raid encounter, then surely they should be concerned about minmaxing to optimise their survivability above all else. If a tank can waltz into an encounter wearing strength accessories, spend half the time tanking it in Sword Oath/Deliverance, and have no more difficulty than when geared out to the hilt then something is weird about balance.

It just feels like the incentive in 3.0 raids is much more highly swung in favor of squeezing out every last teeny tiny bit of DPS from healers and tanks, rather than having healers and tanks prioritise being able to actually stay alive and have no real test on that front. I may be wrong but i certainly don't recall MTs on T13 initial clears wearing full slaying sets and spending half the time tanking Bahamut in sword oath (not that I was part of the first clears of course!)

I think the issue is mostly due to the fact that A1S and A3S have much more -hard- enrages than just harsh dps checks. It's literally X DPS in this timescale or you wipe, whereas earlier content tended to be more about low dps meaning the next cycle of mechanics might be harder to deal with, so you'd get overwhelmed but the leeway was just about there.

[Phoenicia]

Snip.

Tanks wore crafted melded accessories in FCoB. DPS also wore hybrids (crafted with melds) so they have enough HP to survive the insane damage. SCH was in cleric stance for DPS for the whole first phase as well. The main tank couldn't afford to drop tanking stance on Bahamut though. But the OT dropped it after picking up the ghosts in phase 2.

I think the problem with Alexander Savage is that it is turned higher than FCoB was in terms of DPS requirement but not the raid-wide damage. Which is why tanks spend most of their time in DPS mode. Even the busters are kinda weird, like in A1S, the buster literally does twice the tank's HP but it is spread so far apart that the tank just throws all its CDs at it and survive with over 50% HP left. When you look at Revelation/Flatten which did 1k~2k more than max HP and was on a minute timer so you had to spare some CDs leaving you with barely enough HP to survive it.

[Sapphidia]

I think the problem with Alexander Savage is that it is turned higher than FCoB was in terms of DPS requirement but not the raid-wide damage. Which is why tanks spend most of their time in DPS mode. Even the busters are kinda weird, like in A1S, the buster literally does twice the tank's HP but it is spread so far apart that the tank just throws all its CDs at it and survive with over 50% HP left.

This, this exactly. The tuning is just -slightly- off right now. It's too easy to tank the damage whilst basically undergeared for the encounter, which means there's absolutely no incentive to improve your overall "tankability", if such a concept exists.

Obviously on ANY encounter when you start to overgear it then tanks will start using more dpsy gear, experimenting with single tanking or just DPS stance a lot more, that's how things go - once an encounter is beaten, you do everything you can to beat it -faster-. The problem is that there isnt really any need on the current Alex content to beat it -safer-. When that Hyper Plasma shot comes in on A1S you're going to pop the same cooldowns in i210 gear as you did in i180 and whilst you'll have more HP left it wont have made the encounter any easier really.

I'm mostly just surprised that so much of a focus is on the dps output from day 1 in crappy gear from a tank perspective. You're right about the spacing of the tankbusters. Heck, even on something as trivial as Titan Hardmode when it first came out and people were trying it in low level gear you wanted as much tank stats and health as possible because of the sheer frequency of the mountain busters comboed with the aoe stomps. The tank was always at risk of dying at any point and you really noticed the tank stats of the MT throughout the encounter. In Alex 1 you only notice the tank's toughness in the 1 second after the Hyper compressed plasma when you have a quick peer at how much health they had left before they're back to full again and probably swapping to sword oath.

The TLDR here? Tanks arent being tested in their ability to take damage in 3.0 content, so we're relegated to being tested purely in our ability to DPS as long as we can pop a cooldown every 90 seconds.

[Yorumi]

This, this exactly. The tuning is just -slightly- off right now. It's too easy to tank the damage whilst basically undergeared for the encounter, which means there's absolutely no incentive to improve your overall "tankability", if such a concept exists.

I think this highlights another problem with the game's design, there are essentially no tank stats in the game, period. Parry is a joke and vit is just more hp but not more mitigation. Really the design problem in the game is that only dps stats exist and nothing else. Although healers have mnd, given the way cleric stance works it might as well just be a dps stat. Dps stats increase heals so a healer gearing for heals is gearing for dps, tank stats do little to nothing so might as well gear dps.

[SpookyGhost]

Oh I definitely agree with ZDamned about the ilevel requirements. The issue is more that, at least in my mind, if a TANK is barely at the ilevel requirement for a super hard raid encounter, then surely they should be concerned about minmaxing to optimise their survivability above all else. If a tank can waltz into an encounter wearing strength accessories, spend half the time tanking it in Sword Oath/Deliverance, and have no more difficulty than when geared out to the hilt then something is weird about balance.

It just feels like the incentive in 3.0 raids is much more highly swung in favor of squeezing out every last teeny tiny bit of DPS from healers and tanks, rather than having healers and tanks prioritise being able to actually stay alive and have no real test on that front. I may be wrong but i certainly don't recall MTs on T13 initial clears wearing full slaying sets and spending half the time tanking Bahamut in sword oath (not that I was part of the first clears of course!)

I think the issue is mostly due to the fact that A1S and A3S have much more -hard- enrages than just harsh dps checks. It's literally X DPS in this timescale or you wipe, whereas earlier content tended to be more about low dps meaning the next cycle of mechanics might be harder to deal with, so you'd get overwhelmed but the leeway was just about there.

I agree, but I think something needs to be clarified:

To tank in Deliverance you need to compensate with CDs. Basically, you want to essentially be in Defiance but without having to... actually be in Defiance. As an example, in A1S 1st and 3rd phase I start with Thrill + Conv + Foresight + Awareness, then when that's done rolling I pop Vengeance, then I'm popping Second Wind for the cleave and Holmganging the tank buster, then rolling Raw Intuition a bit later to mitigate autos until the final cleave.

PLD is a case where you can get away more with SwO tanking sans CDs due to the shield, but compensating with CDs applies to all 3 in a general sense.

So the problem is less "you can tank for a long time out of your tank stance" and more "you can essentially be in your tank stance while in Deliverance, and not need any extra mitigation". This is due to the fact that auto attacks, in this game, are nothing but fluff damage. Fairy heals, Regen/Med2, and the occasional Cure will keep you relatively topped for all that time.

The easiest way to prevent this is make autos hit hard enough to require a tank stance (already the case unless you want to severely burden your healers, though with more gear it will start to become irrelevant again) and have frequent enough tank busters to not allow for you to just pop CDs out of tank stance gg ez. Bahamut's Flatten was actually on the perfect timer for this, so it'd be cool if they could balance more fights like that for tanks. Maybe it's because we're basing all this on the first round of Alex that we're assuming everything will be as smooth sailing in the later stages, but it's still a reasonable worry to have right now.

A3S is also pretty much the perfect playground for stance swapping, no actual tank busters, just a stacking debuff which needs to be swapped for anyway. I know in A4S you can tank the legs in Deliverance, but I'm curious about the boss himself.