SE must be drunk.

[Zensho]

Looking forward to parry actually working one day. Some counter attacks would be nice as well.

[Ultimatecalibur]

You make it sound like these players ignore survivability but it's remotely the main issue. Auto attacks from boss hit like wet noodles that healers only have to top up tanks within 3-4 GCDs. This makes it the most efficient play because anything more is a waste and better off tunneled into another metric that matters. Autos are the real reason why metagame is as such. Imagine if 1 auto hits for like 1/4 of your HP, your healers will have to take care of you more.

Uhm... that problem was covered by this line:

Tankbuster centric fight design that focuses more on properly timing cooldowns rather than continuous high tank damage fight design that benefits from improving average mitigation/survivability.

The meta comment was more about how the player base assigns weight to various stats.

The meta was a result of a really poor scaling from parry. If it's effect was significant right from the start.
For the expansion, make the mobs hit harder so that they wreck tanks who don't focus on survivability, and the meta will change right away. Especially if having no parry makes them squisher than they are now.

Its more a carry over from the pre-3.2 meta where wearing Str accessories over Vit accessories was a dps increase in the realm of 30% or more (this was also a Warrior mitigation increase due to their mitigation from damage based self-healing). Along with little understanding of how much mitigation is gained from parry.

A lot of players are also missing just how small the player weighted difference between Parry all the way and BiS is at i270. According to the BiS calculator on Ariyala's, BiS is only a 3.3% to 4.8% gain over a full parry build* for the various tanks.

*Choosing all pieces with Parry and melding Battledance materia into left side pieces that can take them other wise BiS dps melds. Accessories are still melded with Str/Vit materia.

[Sarcatica]

Snip

Just a comment because you are contradicting your previous point. The DPS choice doesn't actually impact your survivability. The current metagame for tanks allow for the best of both worlds. Doing more DPS as a tank doesn't cost survivability, likewise for having huge DPS as a healer doesn't make the fight harder. This is basically the conundrum for most players because they are stuck in this hollow concept of "if i am not in tank stance, healers cant heal me and i will die" or " if i dont keep healing, everyone will die" which is far from the truth. This is basically differetiation from level of competency and skills. The gap is too big.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Just a comment because you are contradicting your previous point. The DPS choice doesn't actually impact your survivability. The current metagame for tanks allow for the best of both worlds. Doing more DPS as a tank doesn't cost survivability, likewise for having huge DPS as a healer doesn't make the fight harder. This is basically the conundrum for most players because they are stuck in this hollow concept of "if i am not in tank stance, healers cant heal me and i will die" or " if i dont keep healing, everyone will die" which is far from the truth. This is basically differetiation from level of competency and skills. The gap is too big.

No. I am not contradicting my previous point. Going for tank DpS BiS does reduce survivability. A tank in DpS BiS will take roughly ~5.5% more damage (reduced survivability) than a tank in a parry build when all attacks can be parried in exchange for a ~4% increase in damage all else being the same.

[Reynhart]

Its more a carry over from the pre-3.2 meta where wearing Str accessories over Vit accessories was a dps increase in the realm of 30% or more

Then, a parry build should offer at least the same difference in damage taken. And the name should be changed to "damage reduce".

[Sarcatica]

Let's put this to another perspective. Allowing yourself to be in DPS stance increases your damage by at least 50%. Cycling CDs is just a necessity to mitigate enough damage taken, so you can take it out of the equation. Having access to DPS stance is yet bolstered by the crit chance which plays the huge role of having huge damage parse. The more crit you stack, the more you get the chance while also having the upgraded scaling for crit damage. Hence why you are underestimating on how much crit as a stat actually matters. They are by no means flat scaling like det does which ofc sucks.


Here is one example on how much crit is able to reliably proc and thus increases your damage by a good margin:
https://www.fflogs.com/reports/ZTQH6...-done&source=1
https://www.fflogs.com/reports/zgGc6...-done&source=4

Let's compare the auto attacks here. 1st log has 9:51 and 2nd log has 7:28, The total damage for both are close but you are comparing 165 casts vs 136 casts. The big difference here is 2nd log features almost 50% total damage from the crit autos. If you solely count from the numbers alone, you are getting extra 500dmg off each single crit auto that amounts to about 24k bloat damage. This is also the fact that I was in DPS stance for the entirety of the fight for that 2nd log that helped me achieve huge damage from autos alone. And this is just for autos, mind you. So in total, I got extra ~24k damage from auto alone just because I had 1150+ crit.

Now, let's talk about parry. Theories often don't line up with how it actually works. ~4% damage is increase is very false. This is already proven in the previous sentence. ~5.5% less damage doesn't make your tanking any better. Why? Because parry is very unreliable, you don't count it to proc to save your life. Like what you mentioned, in a game where you use CDs to soften the hard hitting busters, parry almost always don't work and even if it works, it's gated by so many reasons like "if parry even procs", "redundant", "-20% flat", "the existence of better secondaries". This makes the parry stat a very "hollow" concept. Auto attack damage for the most part is very light feather, 20% off a 5k auto is still requires the same amount heals to top you up anyway, almost always leading to overhealing. Above all, this game doesn't just have physical attacks.

An example, removed Dark Dance for visibility:
https://www.fflogs.com/reports/ZTQH6...buffs=-1000744

Under the parried hit table from the yellow bars, you will see parry-able attacks have that flat -20%dmg. A freaking Regen on you will 100% overheal you for sure from each parried hit. ~5.5% less damage taken is not a convincing metric, healers don't have issue topping you. So what if you take ~5.5% less damage anyway, it heals just the same.

Note: Total damage taken from parry is hardly ever calculated by itself. When a cure1 is enough to top you up every single auto hit, parry becomes so much of a waste to stack. See below.

[Reynhart]

Now, let's talk about parry. Theories often don't line up with how it actually works. ~4% damage is increase is very false. This is already proven in the previous sentence. ~5.5% less damage doesn't make your tanking any better. Why? Because parry is very unreliable, you don't count it to proc to save your life.

I always felt that sentence very biased. Yes, you don't count on it to survive a tankbuster, but during the course of the fight, your HP will drop slower by having a high parry/block rate so, in the long run, you'll need less healing.
Of course, if your healer is trigger happy and wants to keep you at full health all the time...he's probably wasting a lot of MP

You said that Regen is enough to heal a parried hit, so it mean that a chain of parried hits could all be healed by some regen ticks, right ? If those hits were taken unmitigated, each of them woud have take a small part of your HP, and you'd have needed to pop a Cure for that. If parry/block rate would scale better, and parry/block strength would also be affected by Parry, it could decrease the need for healing significantly.

[Sarcatica]

I always felt that sentence very biased. Yes, you don't count on it to survive a tankbuster, but during the course of the fight, your HP will drop slower by having a high parry/block rate so, in the long run, you'll need less healing.
Of course, if your healer is trigger happy and wants to keep you at full health all the time...he's probably wasting a lot of MP

You said that Regen is enough to heal a parried hit, so it mean that a chain of parried hits could all be healed by some regen ticks, right ? If those hits were taken unmitigated, each of them woud have take a small part of your HP, and you'd have needed to pop a Cure for that. If parry/block rate would scale better, and parry/block strength would also be affected by Parry, it could decrease the need for healing significantly.

Okay, let's pull the same log: https://www.fflogs.com/reports/ZTQH6...buffs=-1000159

From the log, Cure 1 heals for 4.5k average and each auto hits for 4.2k. Parried hit each will chunk HP at 3.4k, each time you heal a parried hit is a waste of 1.1k heal, you are just validating with yourself that healers don't have to ever use cure 2 and above to even top you up every single auto. You can't really compare the total damage taken less from parry either, because heals don't work that way. 60k total damage parried might sound so good until you realize that 1 heal is more than enough to even top you up every single auto, parried or not.

This is why I just find it hard to account for its face value, because that's not how it works. It only works if autos hit you for like 20%++ of your HP each time, which parry gets to shine a lot better. If you see some of the old MMOs, their parry was good to mitigate big autos from bosses because the stat itself wasn't gated heavily and ofc because autos hit the tanks hard enough for them to actually start stacking it.

[Reynhart]

60k total damage parried might sound so good until you realize that 1 heal is more than enough to even top you up every single auto, parried or not.

The bosses just have to hit harder and the gap between a mitigated/unmitigated hit more important

If you see some of the old MMOs, their parry was good to mitigate big autos from bosses because the stat itself wasn't gated heavily and ofc because autos hit the tanks hard enough for them to actually start stacking it.

In FFXI, block rate could go higher than 60% and the damage reduction was huge. You can't expect people really focus on parry if you cap the parry strength at 20%...

[Lyth]

Don't underestimate parry. I hear that there's this new max parry build going around which lets you get an extra GCD off during Gobsnick Leghops casts. It increases your survival rate by a whopping 20% over conventional builds. The other 70% of the time, your character dies a painful death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiYqwSsop9o

More seriously, though, the main problem with tank stats at the moment is that secondary stats are weighted relatively higher on tanks than they are on other roles, due to the split between vitality and strength as primary stats (two stats with a weight of 0.45 each as opposed to a single stat with a weight of 1). Constraint stats, such as parry and accuracy on gear, exacerbate this issue. Secondaries should be there to add flavour to choices between gear pieces at the same ilvl and allow for fine tuning, not to dominate decision-making.

I'd much rather see an emphasis on active tanking and proper timing of mitigation cooldowns rather than on stat allocation and passive mitigation. The latter is a test of your ability to use a search engine, rather than of mechanical player skill.