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

[Cynric]

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No reason to have that attitude just because people enjoy different things about tanking. I enjoy having high tank DPS to carry the bad ones and make the difference between a clear and seeing an enrage. I also noted that for me it's different. I pay PvP. My reasons for playing a tank and yours are different.

Since I am a PvPer a lack of tank dps when Dark Knight doesn't have the level of CC warrior or paladin do, playing Dark Knight would kind of be pointless if I can't even do decent damage. While yes I strength tank in pve and I enjoy doing it. I tanked in 2.0 with vitality and while it was boring to tank on paladin in lots of fights. That's more because of the lack of other things to do while tanking than doing good DPS. However at least for now I can contribute decent damage to help beat an enrage or make a run quicker.

But as far as the meta or your mindset hate or whatever. Don't lump me in with your hate. I'm a PvPer, I could care less whether you enjoy sitting in front of a boss while healers and DPS carry you or whether you enjoy pushing numbers. I just like being able to survive and kill in PvP and do the same in pve. If they nerf that i'll just go back to DPS.

snip.

So let me get this straight. It's okay for us to sit in front of the boss and do bare minimum DPS, turtle in tank stance and pop a CD every now and then for a buster. While the healers not only heal us, and do mechanics, but also stance dance for cleric stance to push out a ton of DPS, while the DPS does mechanics as well.

It's not okay for healers to just heal but it's okay for tanks to just tank? That seems kind of like a double standard.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Since I am a PvPer a lack of tank dps when Dark Knight doesn't have the level of CC warrior or paladin do, playing Dark Knight would kind of be pointless if I can't even do decent damage. While yes I strength tank in pve and I enjoy doing it. I tanked in 2.0 with vitality and while it was boring to tank on paladin in lots of fights. That's more because of the lack of other things to do while tanking than doing good DPS. However at least for now I can contribute decent damage to help beat an enrage or make a run quicker.

I play a Rank 50 Tank (Paladin) in PvP as well (Which you might be able to guess by the Helm of the Behemoth King my portrait shows at times), and I am fully aware that currently we are slightly tougher (~1500 hp in Sealed Rock) positional free melee DpS with fewer damage boosting cool downs while wearing Strength accessories and very tough, mediocre DpS while wearing Vit Accessories.

I doubt that they plan to completely destroy tank DpS. There may be a roughly 10% decrease in DpS for a Tank wearing Str Accessories, but this would come with a roughly 10% increase in Tank DpS while in Vit Accessories. This would lead to a choice of 5% DpS versus 27% hp (~3k at Sealed Rock's i150 levelsync)

So let me get this straight. It's okay for us to sit in front of the boss and do bare minimum DPS, turtle in tank stance and pop a CD every now and then for a buster. While the healers not only heal us, and do mechanics, but also stance dance for cleric stance to push out a ton of DPS, while the DPS does mechanics as well.

It's not okay for healers to just heal but it's okay for tanks to just tank? That seems kind of like a double standard.

The thing is that a Tank in Str gear and and a Tank in Vit gear do not do anything really different. Both use the same rotations to max DpS, both can do the same stance dancing, etc. The difference in numbers just happens to be influenced by 5 right side equipment pieces.

[Cynric]

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My problem isn't that we wouldn't do the same thing as before. Just that the contribution wouldn't be the same.As it stands right now if my DPS are sub-par I can make up for it. The only problem would be if they were to decrease tank DPS by 50% like some people suggest. At that point optimization wouldn't really help as much in terms of raid DPS and it would fall on the healers stronger DPS at that point and the DPS to meet the required DPS.

Yeah we do the same stuff but we contribute less over all for the same work. I don't really like the idea of contributing less for the same work.

As far as pvp goes. If it's like 10% that's not too big a deal as long as the burst is still decent. If it's a big change like 50% then there'd be no point in having the extra bulk for such little damage with an already lack of CC. Paladin functioned fine before having more DPS since they can stun lock. They weren't really getting the most kills but they could at least support and lead into kills. Warrior can hold someone down with holmgang with or without high damage. Dark Knight however gets a small duration heavy and most likely one opportunity to stun with low blow, neither are really mind blowing CC skills. So by that information if tank DPS does get nerfed down to 50% of what it is , there's really no reason for me to run in as Dark Knight just for the extra health.

[ManaKing]

So let me get this straight. It's okay for us to sit in front of the boss and do bare minimum DPS, turtle in tank stance and pop a CD every now and then for a buster. While the healers not only heal us, and do mechanics, but also stance dance for cleric stance to push out a ton of DPS, while the DPS does mechanics as well.

It's not okay for healers to just heal but it's okay for tanks to just tank? That seems kind of like a double standard.

Your Healer gears for max heals and max DPS, that's what cleric stance does, you just have to toggle it when appropriate to play your job to the fullest.

You only gear for maximum DPS and effectively take away their ability to DPS because they can't justify jumping into cleric stance because you'll fall over too fast and make them look incompetent for playing their job to the max.

Your statistical DPS boosts aren't worth their complete exclusion from the DPS portion of their character. The Double Standard is you not letting them play their job the way they want by making an assumption on your gear. If you go for Double Melds you can stance dance and so can they. Double melds are the best you can do to allow yourself and your healers to max your performances without excluding one of you from actually playing the game.

If your healer straight up says, "nope I don't DPS, I only heal" then sure you can start making those assumptions. But I play with healers who actually DPS and enjoy it. They put out solid numbers and help with enrages.

From my point of view, you're just an EPEEN bully. Your play experience is no different than if you were in full VIT. You'd still stance dance if you wanted to increase DPS and the only difference that STR gear makes is how large the numbers are and how long a healer can go before they need to heal you.

SE's statement that tanks need to not be the only job that gets singled out for luxury gearing to help raids progress is indicative of fairness for all, not just for EPEEN tanks.

If you don't like my hyperbole then you really shouldn't have thrown it all over your statements. It gives me the idea that you're ok with a discussion that is just black and white.

[Nektulos-Tuor]

Your Healer gears for max heals and max DPS, that's what cleric stance does, you just have to toggle it when appropriate to play your job to the fullest.

You only gear for maximum DPS and effectively take away their ability to DPS because they can't justify jumping into cleric stance because you'll fall over too fast and make them look incompetent for playing their job to the max.

Your statistical DPS boosts aren't worth their complete exclusion from the DPS portion of their character. The Double Standard is you not letting them play their job the way they want by making an assumption on your gear. If you go for Double Melds you can stance dance and so can they. Double melds are the best you can do to allow yourself and your healers to max your performances without excluding one of you from actually playing the game.

If your healer straight up says, "nope I don't DPS, I only heal" then sure you can start making those assumptions. But I play with healers who actually DPS and enjoy it. They put out solid numbers and help with enrages.

From my point of view, you're just an EPEEN bully. Your play experience is no different than if you were in full VIT. You'd still stance dance if you wanted to increase DPS and the only difference that STR gear makes is how large the numbers are and how long a healer can go before they need to heal you.

SE's statement that tanks need to not be the only job that gets singled out for luxury gearing to help raids progress is indicative of fairness for all, not just for EPEEN tanks.

If you don't like my hyperbole then you really shouldn't have thrown it all over your statements. It gives me the idea that you're ok with a discussion that is just black and white.

I'd much rather the tank go full dps then the healer. It is much safer to have a healer paying attention to health bars then trying to think about DPS.

Why? Because its much easier to tank and dps then heal and dps. Every time you toggle your cleric stance your no longer looking at health bars as much because your now doing a DPS rotation, this means that if the tank is introuble you would not know.

It is always better for the healer to be mostly a full healer and use his dps stuff only when the monster isn't attacking or he just doesn't need to heal.

Bla bla bla, i'm tired now you get the point.

[Freyyy]

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Except that a full STR tank will not completely disable the healer's ability to DPS. It will just lower it at most and not for much compared to what the tank gains. It's also better to optimize tank DPS rather than healer DPS if you really had to choose for very simple reasons :

- Tanks have 100% damage uptime
- Healer accuracy sucks ass in a fashion that you can even miss in Fractal Continuum (happens to me when I run ex roulettes as SCH). And yeah crafted accessories can make up for a part of that, but you still can't reach the accuracy cap and will keep missing anyway. This sole reason makes healer DPS a little bit unreliable
- Healers need to actually completely stop their primary duty in order to start DPSing, where tanks can just do both at the same time.
- The healing needed in raid fights is mostly from raid wide damage or mechanic damage on other players than the tank. A tank being tankier only reduces the amount of healing needed on himself. Tank damage is ridiculously low in this set of raid, a tank having less VIT or tanking in DPS stance doesn't really increase the amount of overall healing needed, thus not hindering healer DPS at all.
- Tanks are damage dealing jobs. They have DPS rotations and damage-boosting abilities. They have much more DPS than healers and their damage output is actually reliable. The DPS gain from a tank > the DPS gain from a healer.

Stop speaking like a tank DPSing prevents the healer from DPSing too, that's a completely false assumption and an excuse for poorly skilled healers to not DPS or to hate on DPSing tanks on forums.

With that said, I raid with healers who both love DPSing too. For Savage raiding, we tanks are gearing for both HP and DPS for only one reason : we need a "safety" threshold in order to survive big attacks. Everything else we put on STR. It has nothing to do with "balancing healer and tank DPS" or whatever. It's "making so that the tank survives everything, then optimize his DPS. Healers go DPS when healing isn't needed". More VIT than necessary on a tank will never decrease the amount of overall healing needed in a fight and a tank stance-dancing will have his tank stance up for damage that matters, the 20% more damage he will take from not having its tank stance the rest of the time is negligible and he should be using CDs to compensate.
I also occasionally play SCH, tho not in Savage for instance. But everytime I run experts or stuff like that, I love going full ham on DPS and I always deal almost the same amount of damage regardless of how the tank is geared or stance-dances unless he is terribad and doesn't use any CD, which is then poor gameplay and is actually the same whether the tank is full VIT or full STR.

Tank DPS doesn't hinder healer DPS in any way if done correctly.

Now let's get back to the original thread's point.

[Sapphidia]

- The healing needed in raid fights is mostly from raid wide damage or mechanic damage on other players than the tank.

This is kind of the most important quote in the entire tank meta discussion, in my opinion.

There IS a benefit from tanks gearing to be tankier, to have huge hitpoint pools and high parry and stay in tank stance - but this benefit in current raid content is absolutely negligible. Tank healing is not difficult. In most cases it can be done by a regen and a fairy. Whilst people will argue that the dps-tank meta existed in 2.0, noone can possibly say with a straight face that it was as drastic as it was now.

Bahumut Prime, Nael and Twintania all hit incredibly hard, and consistantly, with heavy tankbusters coming at a rate where you barely had enough cooldowns. Spike damage was high. Raid AOE dps was still high but seemed to come in more separated bursts. Your tank dying to a tankbuster/auto combo was a real issue in a lot of these fights when done at the expected gear level or below. There were enrages and dps checks to hit, but they werent the primary reason for failing the fights. Tanks had a choice - maximise their own survivability and make the fight easier in that way, or try and maximise dps to help push phases at an expense of a riskier fight.

The current tank meta does not really have that choice. There is virtually no difference in the effective outcome of a fight between a tank that goes in in 190 gear and one that goes in in 210 gear, outside of higher dps that makes the enrages less taxing (and shortens the fights). The actual mechanics and tank survivability is such a minor impact that there's no tangible benefit to a tank being tankier.

THIS is the entire crux of why tanking feels weird to a lot of tanks. There's just no reason to be tankier. It makes such little difference due to how the fights are structured. You'll see more impact from your DPS PLAYERS getting a chunk more vitality naturally on their upgraded gear than your main tank getting higher health.

[AlexiIvaniskavich]

Tank DPS doesn't hinder healer DPS in any way if done correctly.

2nd most important quote.

I guess one of my concerns with a conversion to VIT based would be the HP bloat that would come along, and to a lesser degree, the continued arguement of STR v Vit in tank forums. Though they can be VERY entertaining, they often times breed misinformation and drawn out discussions on less optimal ways to tank (end game raid specifically).

I would be interested if SE went the route of having tank accessories do tank like things -buffs/debuffs etc. Though this would be less "flashy" than options more skewed to putting out moar deeps, Accessories that mix and match various buffs (dmg down, magic down and so on) would allow us to keep our right side gear flexibility.

[Alahra]

I guess one of my concerns with a conversion to VIT based would be the HP bloat that would come along

I don't think the developers really share your concern, to be honest. Since they seem to intend for tanks to wear Fending accessories in the first place, they seem to want HP totals that high. Moving to a meta where Fending is the norm wouldn't really increase HP beyond what they were expecting to begin with. The encounter design just isn't jiving with the itemization expectations at present.

Granted, I do think stat bloat is an issue in general (not just for VIT, though it's the stat where it's most readily visible). But it's not something exclusive to the STR/VIT issue for tanks really.

[AlexiIvaniskavich]

I don't think the developers really share your concern....

There is about a 5000 HP difference (ish, math - coffee = no math) between full VIT accessories and full STR. Assuming both tanks go full VIT, how long would it be until healers figure out how to solo heal everything and we have a SCOB group make up again, but with 2 tanks and one healer? (Which SE doesn't want, hence FCOB and Alex having specific mechanics for both tanks). This just drags us down the path of ever inflating damage numbers to counteract the ridiculously high tank health.

I do expect there to be some bloat in numbers, I just prefer a seperation in the stats that determine my damage output and my health.

One issue I see with that is, either the effects would be so minimal as to not really matter - or they start to encroach on balance. Like, we know drk is better with magic mitigation, but now you can have war or even double war stacking magic down thus eliminating the need for drk (and possibly pld). So you don't want to get in that situation, you still want each job to have it's niche.

I agree with all of this, should have added to the "less flashy" statement, "likely to become more broken than the current setup". In no way do I think adding buffs to VIT accessories would be a perfect system. Just throwing out a different option, beyond my previous statement of SE putting in a "tank stat" to replace STR.