Tanks, please use strength gear.. :(

[JackFross]

I was against tanks wearing STR accessories because if the demand for healers to wear INT gear, I felt the game would become sour.

This is not the same thing, at all, fyi.

Cleric Stance swaps your INT and MND stats while boosting attack spell potency by 10% and decreasing healing spell potency by 20%; every healer has access to this skill. Stacking INT as a healer is strictly bad. You get literally no benefit from it outside of... dpsing out of Cleric Stance or healing while in Cleric Stance. But we call either of those "Playing the class wrong" and don't use that as a metric by which to measure players.

Also, it really depends what content you're running. Keep in mind that if your health is too low to survive the biggest hit in the encounter with proper mitigation, you SHOULD put more Vitality on. You just wanna ride it as close as possible (accounting for RNG; don't survive it by 100 hp, survive it by 1000) and turn the rest of the VIT into STR. Assuming you want to maximize the class you're playing, of course. If you're looking for safe clears and don't trust your healers, by all means be a fluffy lovable tank who shrugs off unmitigated Flattens.

[rawker]

To better recreate this dilemma on healers, think of it this way:
Piety vs Mind
Piety gives you more MP which translates to more heals and natural MP regen, right? If the game is properly developed, healers will also have to face the same dilemma of having more heals but each heal does less or more potent heals but you can't heal that often as you'll be OOM in no time.

That is the current dilemma Tank classes face. We are trying to maximize our current toolkit while marginally compromising our main role in the party.

[Awful]

Vit should be changed, there's no reason to go vit accessories it's a shame the old stats of 1.20 weren't brought in. They were very different to what you could allocate your stats to for example:Vitality Damage taken Enhancement Magic Potency Maximum HP Damage dealt by marauder arm. Meaning that they were planning to have Vit reduce dmg taken and increase dmg in some way (at least for marauders), they should go back to that formula and put in the dmg reduction and + dmg with pld/drk/war arms.
Edit: Old 1. patches http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...tch-1.20-Notes

[Sida]

To me it seems this is getting to be pretty much the same argument as "should healers damage or not". And the rule is about the same, for healers it's about downtime, for tanks it's about excess hit points. No healer appreciates the " paper tank", that is those who have less hp than, in some cases, the casters of the group. But when they have well enough hp to do their job properly it's not wrong to add in STR to smooth things out. As much as healer should not be dps'ing when the party needs heals but otherwise is usually welcome to make some boom.

[TheLastRaven]

I honestly hate the fact that tanks a class based on taking damage and helping keep the party alive is having to crank out dps. It seems its always for one of two reasons. I like being a tank if i wanted to dps I would play one of my dps classes

1. Everyone has to be doing tons of damage because if a dungeon takes 1 extra minute someone is gonna lose their s**t.

2. Progression/End Game Raiders have said you need to have all the extra damage for doing the end game raids and that translates to everyone doing the same thing even in low dungeons.

[Selvokaz]

I was under the impression most tanks should stack all their points into Str since most Tank gear is so high in granting Vit bonuses, not to mention the additional str means they build Enmity more quickly, also makes their solo play more bearable. Don't all tank jobs grant high vit as well, my Dark Knight has all her points in Str but Vit is still the highest stat even naked, (naked 172 vs 190 at lv 43)

[karateorangutang]

I honestly hate the fact that tanks a class based on taking damage and helping keep the party alive is having to crank out dps. It seems its always for one of two reasons. I like being a tank if i wanted to dps I would play one of my dps classes

1. Every has to be doing tons of damage because if a dungeon takes 1 extra minute someone is gonna lose their s**t.

2. Progression/End Game Raiders have said you need to have all the extra damage for doing the end game raids and that translates to everyone doing the same thing even in low dungeons.

It's been repeatedly stated that in lower content and 4 mans you can faceroll it in any gear. If people are refusing to read that then that isn't the fault of people that are saying the STR gear is superior. Additionally, almost all advocates of STR gear are using a mix anyway, so this is just simple misinterpretation of the message. Noone is losing their shit for the extra minute, but if you can shave a minute off a run and not suffer any negatives then why wouldn't you?

The people that are not making good use of a certain setup are generally misinformed and can be taught. If we aren't teach them the limits of the gear and how they should be using it then we are doing them and ourselves a disservice. If you have a STR tank in your party do you watch their buffs on the pulls? Are they cycling cooldowns on trash mobs? They should be. If they aren't politely inform them. Alot of stuff can be fixed with just a gentle nudge.

[JackFross]

Everyone on this page seems to either be parroting or ignoring this post I made.

To reiterate: It's not about tanks pumping out more damage. It's not about telling people how to play. It's about discussing ways to maximize your role in the party composition. If you can do your job (survival and threat generation) just fine with less VIT, then dropping that VIT to increase your offensive output is a way to improve beyond where you are currently.

Please note, though. If one of the following is true:
1. You don't know the fight well enough yet to manage cooldowns optimally to keep yourself alive
2. You haven't mastered the dps rotation for your class, so running STR accessories gives you marginal gains for your suboptimal rotation
3. You hate how everyone always cries BUT DO MORE DAMAGE and you much prefer seeing those really really sexy health scores and shrugging off massive hits

You should probably not be running Strength gear. I ran a Sohm Al yesterday on white mage with a full strength DRK who was doing the same damage as a full VIT DRK could do. In that situation, you're forcing me to DPS less and causing an overall drop in DPS to the raid because you simply cannot use the bonus STR to its fullest.

Using STR gear isn't about "DO MORE DAMAGE" it's about optimizing the class. If you haven't done the base legwork to reach that optimization, taking this last step is not advisable.


(Though, important to note: You can still do so. It's fine. If you have more fun seeing bigger damage numbers, even if you're NOT optimizing damage output, and you aren't dying due to unskilled healers / inefficient cooldown usage, by all means GO FOR IT! Have fun, first and foremost! It's a video game, after all. C: )

[Sapphidia]

Everyone on this page seems to either be parroting or ignoring this post I made.

I'll actually respond directly here, because you make some good points, but I feel there's one key element that you've missed when comparing the tank dps thing to the other classes improving their overall performance.

I should probably make a new post on the topic of "Power Fantasy" and why half the playerbase is torn, but the basic concept is simple : Healers improve their DPS via optimising gaps in their need to heal, but still wear the same gear. They arent nerfing their healing output because it's due to how they play, and gearing up increases healing + dps together. If they suddenly need to pump out a tonne of healing, they just turn Cleric off and take full advantage of their gear. DPS players only gain more and more DPS with gear upgrades, but also gain increased survivability as a matter of course as they get free vitality on every left side upgrade. Maximising the class for these two roles is more about playing better, finding opportunities to do other things, and have a "one gearset fits all" system.

With tanks it's different. Now, I'm not going to argue against the merits of Str vs Vit, it's been done to death. Yes, Strength is better in most cases. Yes, Vitality is pointless beyond certain levels. But one thing is present that goes beyond just the stats and figures:

Vitality makes you "feel" tankier. You see big numbers on the health. You see your health bar going down slower.

Now this doesnt really mean much, but "power fantasy" is a key element to enjoying the game. Players who gravitate towards DPS roles generally love seeing big numbers on their hits, they love seeing huge crits pop up, they love seeing a DPS meter with their name at the top showing they've done huge amounts of damage, and they love how getting an upgrade increases all of these.

Now, tanks can also gain just as much enjoyment from this dps fantasy, but the power fantasy of a lot of tank players (particularly those gravitating towards the less aggressive styles, or the PLD class in general) is to be as tough as nails. They care about maximising their class, they care about doing lots of DPS, but they get MORE fun out of feeling like an immovable wall.

This is the problem a lot of players face - regardless of the actual facts, they have to make a SACRIFICE of Vitality in order to stack strength. It's not like healers. They don't just wear one universal set of gear and then maximise their dps by just playing better, knowing the rotations and stance dancing more effectively. They have to make an active choice before a fight starts that they are going to purposefully reduce their effective hitpoints, make themselves able to take less damage without healer intervention, in order to do more damage.

This is a tradeoff, not just a matter of being better. Yes, the best tanks will go strength and understand the lack of impact vit stacking has, but the psychological effect is there. If there's a wipe and the tank explodes, be it due to bad play or more likely something like lag, or the healer gets distracted, or someone accidentally pulls an extra pack... if that happens, some tanks just can't stand the idea that the pre-battle choice they made to nerf their health might have contributed to their death.

It's simply a power fantasy thing, and for players who DON'T have the power fantasy of wanting to feel like an immovable wall I can understand it's difficult to grasp. The game is telling them that they have to give up the feeling they play their class for and optimise towards a different feeling.

The best players will do it anyway, but they don't have to be -happy- about that.

A counter : imagine if Healer DPS scaled entirely off Intelligence and Cleric Stance didnt exist. Healers would be pressured to wear entirely INT gear on the right side, have 35 points in Int, and the community would be saying "just get as much Mind as you need to heal an encounter, then put the rest in your DPS". They'd feel like they were nerfing their potential healing output in order to optimise a secondary role. The best players would do it and it would be fine, but there'd always be that devout core of healers that gain most pleasure out of seeing huge healing numbers that would really resent it.

[JackFross]

Yeah! I definitely agree with all of what you said. That post you actually quoted from goes into those exact concerns without using the same words. You said it much better than I did, though.