So, after the patch, how goes it with Paladin?

[Brian_]

Tank damage is important because...
A. You push through phases faster in some fights.
B. Is the best type of mitigation due to things being dead.
C. Is the main method of keeping hate.

In conclusion, in any encounter where killing something is the main objective maxing out DPS always matters, no matter what it's on.

That's not the actual conclusion because you are stopping one step short of the real reason why any of what you said matters.

If a fight is shorter, the tank and the entire raid will take less damage. Why does this matter? With less damage taken, you lower the risk of something going wrong.

It's the same reasoning with pushing phases. Faster phasing usually means that you have a lower chance of messing something up and wiping (though there have been some examples of where phasing faster is bad).

The conclusion is more DPS in the current meta leads to more consistent raid performance. That is the actual point. It's about margins of success / failure.

I've said this in the past but just look at A3S. If someone accidentally hits the wrong had for too long during Equal Concentration, enough raid DPS means you can still recover. If one of your DPS accidentally gets damage down Digi for some reason, enough raid DPS means you can cover for his DPS loss. If someone dies from tether AoE or your DPS get linked with ferrofluid and lose a lot of up-time, you can still clear add phase with enough DPS. If you constantly miss your slows from ACC RNG or mistime a stun, you can still kill the add before they reach the edge with enough DPS. If your DPS messes up a ferrofluid pairing, you can still recover from the DPS loss of atrophy. If for some reason your LB build is slow in the fight, if you have enough DPS, you can still kill Liquid Limb in time to free your healer and kill the boss before hard-enrage.

In comparison, being tankier doesn't really help your raid as much.

This is the direct result of raid design making mechanics based on DPS benchmarks.

That's not to say eHP and tankiness can't be more valuable than DPS in the proper context. It's just that we don't live in that meta. If for some reason, sacrificing eHP led to tanks randomly dying 50% of the time to a mechanic and the added raid stability of DPS didn't outweigh that, then obviously you would not favor DPS.

[Seku]

Snip.

I'm not going into detail over every single fight and the context of it. Maxing out your DPS, after you've hit the threshold to live through every mechanic and the consistent out going damage, is a priority when it pertains to killing something (which is a majority of the content). I didn't know I really had to spell out the fact you needed to get to that threshold first and assume people would have enough common sense to figure that out on their own. Guess I was wrong. As for the rest of your argument I put in the A B C, mainly B which covers everything you said, just not the "why". Which if a person doesn't know why they exist they can go do the research themselves. Not like there are entire forums of it.

[Khalithar]

So after tanking a lot of the new stuff over the last few days, in regards to the changes I'll definitely say they aren't bad at all. Swipe is very small dps gain while MTing, one I'm glad to have, if only because I like the animation, I think the little upwards jump stab thing is nifty. I'd still like another oGCD attack to hit when not MTing though. I also notice my TP lasting longer in some of the longer fights to so that's a plus, overall I think we could use one more oGCD attack or extend the DoT on Circle to last until it goes off CD.

[Brian_]

It has to do with people parroting the idea of DPS mattering without understanding why it matters or why it's more valuable than eHP or how that threshold is determined for each group.

The real statement is that tank damage matters because it contributes more to raid stability than "extra" eHP does.

[Nadirah]

I've yet to see any MMORPG where tank DPS doesn't matter at all in high end content. Even if it's not as much as it currently is in FFXIV, tank DPS has always been a thing to take care of in MMOs end game content.

My problem is that it's the *sole* thing this community grades tanks on.

They could be squishy as hell and require 100% healer attention yet do 1500 dps blindfolded and facerolling, and everyone would bitch "why can't we bring two?"

It's disgusting.

There's more to tanks than their damage.

[Freyyy]

The current meta forces us into this mindset. It's not the community. And your statement is wrong, only bad players trying-hard-to-be-good are thinking only about tank DPS. Good tanks think about HP thresholds and optimal CD usage (which is for............ MITIGATION !) for each fight before thinking about optimizing his DPS. The problem with PLD is that it lacks everything. It lacks a LOT in the DPS department, but also in the mitigation department where they're supposed to be the king when in fact WAR is the current king of mitigation. It also lacks in the raid utility department except for ONE SINGLE FIGHT in the game which is the brand new Thordan EX. But his lack of DPS is currently the most important problem because of the meta we live in.

[Brannigan]

My problem is that it's the *sole* thing this community grades tanks on.

This isn't really true because we're not dealing with hypothetical tanks. Dark Knight has more than enough mitigation to survive anything the game throws at it without extra healer attention and warrior's mitigation easily rivals paladin and in some cases exceeds it. The reality is that because their mitigation is pretty equal, damage is how you distinguish which one is better than the others. Of course here I'm talking about classes and not individuals - an individual can easily require more healer attention because they're tunnel visioning or wasting cooldowns on abandon stacks.

[Shurrikhan]

First of all, no it's not. Swapping is a loss of at least 500 potency (in and out, average RA potency with slashing debuff). In those 3 GCD, you get .2*250*3+55*(3 or 4)+30 or 40 so you get about 350-400 potency.

Second of all, that's actually all the more reason Halone should be at least 300 potency. They should be encouraging us to use it for the STR debuff if we're OT or when we're MTing and have already established aggro. Making it so low discourages its use except for hate when absolutely necessary.

But the only time when someone would swap (well, half-swap) at 2 steps into a combo for dps reasons is in dropping Shield Oath before GB/RA for their full potency (followed by popping Sword Oath, before having lost more than one AA bonus)... Though it makes no sense to drop Sword Oath early, moving from Shield Oath to Sword Oath isn't necessarily done all at once. Normally you'd need 3 GCDs in Sword to make up for a swap if both oGCDs are up and doing so won't delay GB, 4 otherwise, but it's not because you're dropping a combo. You drop combos only in case of emergencies, which aren't really the situations we make broad rules upon...

As for Rage of Halone, consider the weight of its mitigation vs. your own damage. 10% vs. a Thordan his is a very large difference, much more than 20-40 of your potency, especially in Shield Oath. The problem is mostly that there are no flat-value suppressors/enfeebles in this game to attempt to equalize those ranges in value. Also, keep in mind that the enmity mod for both SB and RoH are both .5x less than equivalent abilities (SS/SS and PS/BB) in the other two jobs. We can always mess with those, or even Shield Oath's enmity multiplier, in order to make to give it a more reasonable value relative to other options (RA) or tanks (relative to DRK or WAR's average enmity during high-potency combos with their minimum mitigation). By the time you place RoH within 40 potency of RA, however, the real choice becomes simple -- Shield Oath MT PLD will use RA no more than once every third combo, period, Sword Oath MT PLDs will drop RA for ROH outright, and OTs PLDs will be sure to include RoH exactly every third. At 270/280, their still a choice to be made in most situations, especially with if SB enmity were increased by .5 to 1x (100-200 ePot) and RoH modifers left the same or reduced by .125-.25 (still an increase of up to 30 ePoT).

[eagledorf]

Right now, nobody uses Halone. Take a look at fflogs and see what fraction of the DPS is in Halone even for MTs. They use NIN and STR accessories to get around the hate issues so they can avoid Haloning. The total number of Halone used is <10 for all of them and as low as 1 for some of them.

Halone is just too much of a potency loss for what it provides. It's 80 potency lost for a debuff that only provides mitigation for the tank. Considering WAR will avoid SP while OTing even though the potency difference is only 40, it's totally logical for RoH to be buffed to at least 300. If they don't improve the debuff to provide mitigation for all types of damage, I honestly think the potency difference should even less (why should a less powerful debuff have the same or higher potency cost?)

As for what you're saying about potency lost, you lose about that much potency assuming you never cancel a combo. Even if you don't cancel your combo, turning on an Oath is a lost GCD so it's a loss of potency. If you actually cancel your combo 1 step in, you lose 594 potency with the slashing debuff.

[Ashkendor]

Halone is just too much of a potency loss for what it provides. It's 80 potency lost for a debuff that only provides mitigation for the tank.

How is it only mitigation for the tank? If an attack on another party member is physical damage it should also reduce that, no?