What they mean by "change the damage calculations of tanks"?

[Syzygian]

Regardless of what they do they aren't going to let us have our cake and eat it too i.e. if vit becomes the damaging stat, wearing a full set of fending 210 won't give us the vit and dps of 210 fending and 210 slaying tank in a single set, but will probably be closer to pentamelds in terms of efficiency. So for instance my carve will crit for 3.5k instead of 4k. I think we'll live.

[Alahra]

I really hope it's not just make VIT also do damage. Stats are linear enough already. There is hardly any sort of customization in the game. You can't express yourself in your playstyle. I love how tank is right now and wish they'd do the same for other jobs, where you have more than one stat that really means something.

While it would be nice if other classes had that sort of customization, the difficulty would be in actually modifying the existing classes so that they could support it. With the stats as they are, no DPS class is going to reasonably want multiple stats unless they moved to an itemization model in which the VIT present on left-side gear wasn't enough for HP checks in content. They'd need some sort of secondary effect for each main stat to encourage these kinds of things (something more like FFXI's system, probably), and they'd also need to modify existing gear such that it would generally need three primary stats (say, STR and DEX for melee, plus the already present VIT).

And even if they did all that, since the other primary stat would undoubtedly just be a damage boost and they'd need to be somewhat balanced with one another, it probably wouldn't ever matter for DPS which stat they focused on. The main reason tanks currently function in the way they do is because offense and defense are both important to them, which generally isn't the case for other classes (though if Cleric Stance didn't exist, Healers might have a similar dichotomy).

[karateorangutang]

I just hope it doesnt turn into some stance dependent nightmare. If stat weights change dependent on stances... oh god...

I'll be rolling on scholar again.

[Syzygian]

I really hope it's not just make VIT also do damage. Stats are linear enough already. There is hardly any sort of customization in the game. You can't express yourself in your playstyle. I love how tank is right now and wish they'd do the same for other jobs, where you have more than one stat that really means something.

Please don't be naive. You can't express yourself now either. Its str or you're bad. Even melds at this point are dubious. You can hit 17k+ hp (enough to survive A3/4S) in party with 2 melds/3 slaying and some hq tank food.

The way the game is designed now there will never be more than two primary stats for any job where one of said stats is not unequivocally better than the other.

[Cynric]

Well let's look at what doing each assumption would do.
1) Split damage between vit and str. If they make it so str has a higher impact on damage then nothing would change, we'd still roll with enough vit for the fight and use the rest str. If they make vit have the higher impact than they might as well just make vit = attack power. Because we'd roll with all vit. No reason to take the less impacting stat.

2)Make enmity gain higher the more vit you have. This would still not change anything as once you generate enough enmity in a fight you don't need to generate much more, It might help a vit stacking paladin but we'd probably still push str for dps.

3) Heavily reduce tank DPS, Well considering they said they felt warrior was in a good place I kind of doubt they're going to do a global reduction of DPS on tanks. This would also cause trouble for tanks leveling and make the more DPS oriented tank kits kind of pointless.

The only reasonable thing I see for them to do is make vit = AP, doing a STR/VIT split is pointless, changing enmity doesn't exactly have anything to do with damage calculations specifically either. If they were going to change enmity to scale with vit I think they would have specifically said enmity calculation anyway not damage. Even if that is what they meant there wouldn't be very much point to that either.

Even if they do scale Attack power with vitality we wouldn't double dip into the strength stat on current gear because we wouldn't use it. Stats don't work like that currently. Strength isn't a flat melee damage increase, It's just the stat most of the melee jobs read to get their attack power stat from. Then the game reads that attack power stat for the weapon skills that use it. Ninja is a melee and dexterity increases their attack power which still applies to their physical damaging skills(and self heals that scale with AP)

[Lan_Mantear]

My guess/hope, VIT will be the main source of attack power.

That better not be the case... 'cause I didn't even bother to get VIT ESOs Accessories.

[Alahra]

The only reasonable thing I see for them to do is make vit = AP, doing a STR/VIT split is pointless

In a vacuum it might be pointless, but the game doesn't exist in a vacuum and tank gear historically has STR on it on the left side, since *all* left side gear has one primary main stat and a secondary main stat (for most classes, the secondary stat is VIT, but the pattern is reversed for tank). In terms of coinciding with existing gear, they're more likely to do a split so they don't have to recalibrate the way stat budgets work for left-side tank gear.

[Syzygian]

Enmity arguments are extremely poor imo as a good tank can keep hate regardless of vit or str spec assuming their left side gear isn't terribad. When i see people using enmity as a main talking point for these tank stat/damage discussions i can't help but wonder what they are doing when they play the job.

[Cynric]

In a vacuum it might be pointless, but the game doesn't exist in a vacuum and tank gear historically has STR on it on the left side, since *all* left side gear has one primary main stat and a secondary main stat (for most classes, the secondary stat is VIT, but the pattern is reversed for tank). In terms of coinciding with existing gear, they're more likely to do a split so they don't have to recalibrate the way stat budgets work for left-side tank gear.

Gear shared between Monk and Ninja had Dex and STR on it. Ninja didn't magically get stronger from the strength stat existing on that gear.

It's not really hard to say if Tanks don't need Str on gear then it doesn't have to be there. You're thinking too inside the box. Nothing is set in stone with game development. Especially itemization.

[Kenji1134]

As far as the 2 stat concern on left side pieces, they could make parry (and block) scale with STR again to make STR a useful tanking stat, without having to redo any of the existing left side items for tanks.