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

[Cynric]

snip

You are 100% correct on my original question. It just doesn't feel like it's that much of a difference to say "Dark Knight should have higher defense" like the original poster I replied to wanted.

I guess I should have worded it better more so along the lines of, "How is it enough of a difference to warrant a buff on DRK in terms of Phys mitigation." My fault.

I think the important thing as far as mitigation goes is. The amount where a Dark is weak Physical wise compared to Paladin isn't anything to write home about. I think we both agree on this.

I don't think we've really disagreed with each other much over the discussion, though I do wonder how the effectiveness of Dark Dance would weigh in over the course of a fight if we actually used more parry, since it can be paired with a major cooldown every time a tank buster is incoming(for now..) and can always be paired with a minor CD when it's up if necessary, and every other dark dance you get awareness.

I still feel like reprisal would edge out halone in actual practice though but only on the hits that matter (tank busters), But that itself depends on the Strength stat versus the amount of incoming damage without halone. So that's not set in stone.

Fun conversation to have though. I think what I have gathered from this discussion though is I doubt dark knight's physical defense definitely wouldn't affect them making tank busters stronger. Though I don't think it's necessary to make them very much stronger either.

[Alahra]

I think what I have gathered from this discussion though is I doubt dark knight's physical defense definitely wouldn't affect them making tank busters stronger. Though I don't think it's necessary to make them very much stronger either.

A decent number of tank busters are magical, anyway, so the difference isn't so great that it would impact their decisions regarding future busters. That's by design anyway, since all the tanks need to be viable both as MT and OT.

As for whether or not they need to be stronger, if they intend for tanks to wear Fending accessories (and the loot system currently suggests that they do intend this), they probably do need to be stronger.

[Cynric]

snip

Unfortunately due to the design of the tanks .. There's really only one OT, I don't think we really need to touch much on Warrior though, the problems involving the current tank balance when you look at all three tanks and look at the design the game wants, it's pretty obvious there's a few issues with the way things are right now.

I honestly can't tell whether they want us to wear vit or strength anymore. The DPS checks are too heavy for full fending to make a similar contribution to full slaying. Hopefully whatever they change isn't for the worse. I really wish they weren't so vague about it in the first place.

[Alahra]

I honestly can't tell whether they want us to wear vit or strength anymore. The DPS checks are too heavy for full fending to make a similar contribution to full slaying.

Oh, in terms of the encounter balance, yes, they greatly encouraged Slaying/Pentamelds, especially for progression, but I don't think that was really intent. If I had to guess, they assumed, in their internal testing, full Fending, and intended for Savage to be cleared at much higher item levels. If they really intended for tanks to wear Slaying accessories, they would have given them Need privileges on them, and given that we were at an expansion breakpoint, this would have been the perfect time for them to do so.

I'm relatively sure the current metagame is an unintended one, brought about by the combination of harsh DPS checks and not-harsh-enough tank busters.

[Cynric]

snip

Yeah I can understand that mindset however, if they were assuming full fending while testing wouldn't the tank busters have been harder hitting? Maybe they didn't account for shielding, something. It's almost as if their projected health for us was much lower despite testing. Because I mean as it stands if you do for one reason or another go full fending /vit, you have far more health then you could ever need. We've had mechanics force us into fending gear (at least at first) before 3.0 what suddenly changed during 3.0?

I guess all in all we can just say things haven't been designed the best thus far.

[Alahra]

Yeah I can understand that mindset however, if they were assuming full fending while testing wouldn't the tank busters have been harder hitting? Maybe they didn't account for shielding, something.

If I had to guess, they in part tuned the tank busters around AST's healing capabilities, which were weaker prior to the buffs. But they also probably underestimated how hard the top groups can and do push (they admitted they underestimated the playerbase with FCOB, there's no reason they couldn't do so again).

I don't know, though. Honestly, the whole raid design in 3.0 has been a mess, and it's clear they were trying to do things differently and still have a lot of kinks to work out.

[Shurrikhan]

I'm really hoping they make this a small step towards more gearing options and/or stat complexity, not fewer/lesser (e.g. scaling tank AP solely off Vit, removing all tank use for slaying gear). I like the meta where it's at, aside from how PLD is so far behind in MT and especially AOE dps (the latter I wish they could make up for in a different way, perhaps, than just actual spammable damaging AoEs, etc).

More fending accessory viability (especially in regards to enmity, parry/block value, and self-healing--all the non-dps components slaying accessories aid) would be great, but if anything I'd rather non-tanks see a bit more reason to wear Fending gear outside of cutting edge content 'cheese strats' than for tanks to have zero use for Slaying accessories.

[Freyyy]

I think that there is a big big chance that we might see tank Attack Power scale with VIT. Fending accessories would be desirable again and that'd be cool. I don't see them do some weird shit like scaling with both STR and VIT with a 40/60% rate or whatever. It's FFXIV guys. Look at the number of different stats, it's laughable compared to other MMOs. There's 0 complexity in this game. Everything is straight forward and I think it will stay like that.

[Cynric]

I think that there is a big big chance that we might see tank Attack Power scale with VIT. Fending accessories would be desirable again and that'd be cool. I don't see them do some weird shit like scaling with both STR and VIT with a 40/60% rate or whatever. It's FFXIV guys. Look at the number of different stats, it's laughable compared to other MMOs. There's 0 complexity in this game. Everything is straight forward and I think it will stay like that.

That's also another good point that I agree with. This game is extremely simplified and they've made their intentions to keep it as simple as possible very well known. This is part of why I find it hard to believe they would do some kind of Str /Vit split. Might as well just make the main stat vitality over doing something like that.