So, instead of people fighting about STR, why are they fighting about VIT?

[SpookyGhost]

Just want to hop on in and clarify some things.

Firstly, the change wasn't "to address WAR being preferred over PLD/DRK" - this literally makes no sense as nerfing baseline attribute points effectiveness still leaves the relative discrepancy in damage intact. However as a side effect to the change the difference in damage doesn't matter as much since all tanks contribute less overall, similar to how being in tank stance nerfs our damage less than it did before due to us dealing less overall damage. Anyway, the real reason that they changed attributes around is to force all tanks into Fending accessories, something that a large amount of tanks weren't using and were considered near worthless compared to crafted and Slaying accessories. The devs intended for us to use these accessories they threw in literally every single patch and not do something completely non-intuitive for a tank (sacrifice health for damage), so they put us in a situation where there's no real point in using Slaying (the DPS you gain from better secondaries isn't even worth it since you lose so much health).

It is a "nerf" to our overall damage, however we weren't meant to be dealing that much to begin with. It's like if you played a DPS and did 3000 DPS compared to the average DPS doing 1000, then they put you back down to where everyone else is and you complained "No! They nerfed our damage! ". Tanks were really, genuinely overpowered since SCoB and nobody wants to accept it. They just want to go back to being crazy OP and facerolling everything at half the health you're intended to be at for the encounter.

Also there's this huge fallacy that STR tanking was "harder", when in reality the only point where it was actually more difficult was SCoB and T13 MT due to how much damage things did relative to our health. This didn't even make it more difficult, it just meant that messing up could cost you your life, which is significantly too much effort to be putting in as a tank. Also, in 3.0 it was literally the easiest thing in the world because everything hit like pillows - you got all the advantages of doing over-the-top damage while also having a giant HP buffer that nearly never got used.

There is a problem with the discrepancy between WAR + DRK/WAR + PLD and DRK + PLD, however it has nothing to do with the change that was made to attribute points because that literally did nothing as all 3 tanks were affected equally.

Also one last thing:

The nerf also didn't improve tank survivability for anyone except perhaps WARs. PLD and DRK don't get a significant increase in HP for stacking VIT, and the only reason WARs do is because of Defiance.

This makes no sense. WAR doesn't gain more eHP than PLD/DRK from turning on their tank stance, its equal. In fact, PLD/DRK recieve more effective healing from abilities than WAR does. We also lost effective potency on our self healing, meaning Equilibrium and Second Wind both got nerfed since they contribute less overall and definitely less relative to our increased health.