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

[therpgfanatic]

It's 0,45 i think.

And you get a lot more of main stats now.

I don't think I am wrong, but let us suppose you are right, and it's 0.45 instead of 0.44

Does that really change the result of the changes? No, it does not, so it seems silly to argue about it.

@240 it's 782 Str + 1100 Vit = 1882 which is 846,9 AP from gear.

With slaying and Str = 1 AP it would be 1012. That's around 16,5%.

You are going to need to be more specific on what you are talking about, as no one knows what items you are referring to here.

But this gap will close with time.

The gap will never close because the way AP is calculated intentionally makes it impossible for the max amount of AP when 1 STR = 1 AP. When you have a ratio of .44 / .44 and cost of points on items remain the same (meaning you can't add larger amounts of VIT or STR to them beyond what was possible before for items remains the same, there can never be a situation where the gap closes at each item level.

It will always be that you need 3 more points of VIT to get a full point of AP. It's a weird formula that if anything, makes it harder to balance tank DPS than before.

VIT is getting higher faster than STR. On ilvl 200 body it's 93 STR / 97 VIT, which is now 8% lower AP then before.
@240ilvl it's 131 STR / 142 VIT and only 6% lower then it would be before.

VIT/STR-gap grews by 1 every 10 ilvl, so the AP will tend towards the old values (latest, when they fix parry in 3.4/40.).

We have no idea how they will address parry so don't bet on that.

Also, that is an extra 4 points of VIT you pointed out. The tank is still only getting 1 point of AP because the system is not going to award fractions of AP. it rounds to whole numbers, and it rounds down. 1.76 AP means 1 AP.

That is why you don't see fractions in the damage you deal to enemies.

Thus the old way of stacking STR with the old STR = 1 AP formula will always have resulted in a higher AP. The divided weights between VIT and STR are too low to create a situation where the gap can be closed.

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.

Think about the way the tanks work. PLD and DRK are largely built around mitigation cooldowns, whereas WAR is built around having a higher HP pool to soak damage. Therefore yes, stacking VIT does have a more noticable impact on WAR survivability than for DRK and PLD, because these two tanks are about reducing the amount of damage with cooldowns and WARs are about soaking it up.

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).

This is another thing. If the devs wanted tanks to use fending over slaying, they should have realized they designed the end-game accessories incorrectly. To make a change that impacted tanks at all levels (especially low level ones) to address a design flaw with the accessories which were statted wrong was a mistake.

All they had to do was reverse STR and VIT values on fencing accessories so STR was equal to Slaying accessories. DPS would never have used them anyway due to parry being worthless over skill speed. It was not as big of a deal as they made it out to be.

Also, it seems odd that the designers want to eliminate build choice from the classes and make them super cookie cutter. Why do they even give us the option to spend stat points at level up? If they want us to only slot VIT they shouldn't be giving us a choice. This is probably the only MMO I've seen where you can spend stat points at level up, but there is only one logical choice because anywhere else is wasted. Normally when you spend points, it's because there is some build where INT or DEX is useful to a tank (example: Ragnarok Online where you can indeed build a mage tank, or an agi focused tank).

Looking at aspects of the game design like that, the designers seem like they are making band-aid fixes to deeper game mechanic issues they haven't dealt with.