Four Ways to Die - why the Tank Meta feels "off".

[Anova]

Hmm, I'm wondering if SE should improve healer DPS and healing on tanks so that beefy tanks can contribute to the party by putting less pressure on healers. Overall team dps will then rise as a result and make beefy tanks viable as a support build.

And did not know about the 20k hp tier for tanks.

[Sida]

Hmm, I'm wondering if SE should improve healer DPS and healing on tanks so that beefy tanks can contribute to the party by putting less pressure on healers. Overall team dps will then rise as a result and make beefy tanks viable as a support build.

And did not know about the 20k hp tier for tanks.

Please no, that is backwards. I mean, the part of healer dps. It's like saying "we don't feel being dps should be part of the tank job, so let's make it bigger part of another job it doesn't really belong to."

What I'd rather see is that fights would actually start dealing damage enough that a) tanks need to be tanky and b) healers still need to concentrate on healing. I recall in some other game where even the trash mobs, if giving few hits to dps meant dead dps. Here about any dps can shrug of at least one mob because they just don't hit for all that much. And giant pulls are possible for the same reason. The mobs just don't hit all that hard.

[Yaichiro]

I think the best solution to improve the situation is to allow VIT increase physical/magic defence instead of improving HP. For a game that has healers it is pointless to improve HP beyond the threshold that you need to avoid a single hit death whereas defence mitigates all incoming damage and thus incoming damage can be made hard to allow a proper use for wall tanks.

[Anova]

Please no, that is backwards. I mean, the part of healer dps. It's like saying "we don't feel being dps should be part of the tank job, so let's make it bigger part of another job it doesn't really belong to."

What I'd rather see is that fights would actually start dealing damage enough that a) tanks need to be tanky and b) healers still need to concentrate on healing. I recall in some other game where even the trash mobs, if giving few hits to dps meant dead dps. Here about any dps can shrug of at least one mob because they just don't hit for all that much. And giant pulls are possible for the same reason. The mobs just don't hit all that hard.

I think it's just because there's a huge jump in gear. I don't know if you remember running Neverreap or Fractal in i160 gear, but healers and tanks really had to be careful changing between dps and tank/heal stances. Now, everybody is geared about 30 to 40 levels above it and are just blazing past it, so I can't say this was how the dungeon was intended to be run. Also, if we make the raid hits that big, there's no way the tanks are going to survive them in the earliest gear stages without using holmgang, hallowed ground, or living dead. And you know the CDs on those won't allow consecutive tank busters that would wear the healer down.

Anyway, the dps healer idea was just a quick suggestion based on the presumption that defense and VIT is like accuracy. Once you reach a certain value, any more becomes useless (or greatly diminished returns) for that dungeon. However, it's true that healers don't need to worry about letting tanks die and can have longer dps bursts with higher hp tanks. I just suggested that if a tank stacks VIT for reduced damage and hp, a healer could be able to use that extra buffer to deal out the difference in damage equal to the difference between a full VIT and STR build. It's not going to be a big difference, but one that simply makes VIT feasible in a party situation (perhaps more so in specific cases where aoe or matk is better). Healers do not do that much as much damage as a tank currently and have a lot of mp problems when they dps. We would need to make heals more effective on VIT tanks too (possibly making VIT a stat that increases healing power when receiving) to help make VIT tanks offset the extra mp costs of healer dps.

The other options are that tanks passively reflect damage based on VIT, or healers lose some of their mitigation abilities so tanks need more VIT. Neither solution is perfect though as one turns VIT in to a damage stat and the other removes a great deal of complexity and nuance to the healer class. Increasing overall damage or decreasing tank pdef/mdef is a possibility, but one that's easy to overcome with overgearing (which is the current problem).

Also for the idea of VIT increasing defense, there were previous systems that used VIT as flat damage reductions and PDEF/MDEF as percent damage reduction. Obviously, the calculations are different in FFXIV, but that might be one suggestion to promote the use of VIT. It still runs in to the problem of a soft cap for survivability though and the high demand to meet dps checks.

[Ibi]

Also for the idea of VIT increasing defense, there were previous systems that used VIT as flat damage reductions and PDEF/MDEF as percent damage reduction. Obviously, the calculations are different in FFXIV, but that might be one suggestion to promote the use of VIT. It still runs in to the problem of a soft cap for survivability though and the high demand to meet dps checks.

They could also replace the VIT on Fending accessories with Blunt/Piercing/Slashing Resistance (since the stats exist in game, and are almost completely ignored at present). As you say, you still run into a soft cap, but at least Fending accessories become theoretically desirable that way.