Tank Accessoires 4.0

[Zojha]

Yeah, it's them not learning anything from the past.

The devs should really start to realize some facts about their own metagame before trying to make changes to the way people play.

With strong healers in the game, effective health is a rather worthless stat to have, as the vast, vast, vaaaaaast majority of your effective health in a fight will not come from your vitality, but from the healers heals. Your health pool is completely dwarfed by the health your healer is going to restore. So you only need as much effective health in your pool as you need to not be one-shot, so that healers can actually abuse their power. And that goes for mitigation and nominal health both, though heals do, at least, scale with mitigation, so it's somewhat less worthless compared to nominal health, as it has far higher returns. But even then, the usefulness is capped by incoming damage.

We're back to square one on the STR meta, now with outdated accessories - get as much VIT as necessary for tank buster + AA, fill the rest with STR accs. It's literally the same thing for the same reasons. They haven't learned squat. It's frustrating to watch.

[Miles_Maelstrom]

Yeah, it's them not learning anything from the past.

The devs should really start to realize some facts about their own metagame before trying to make changes to the way people play.

. . .

We're back to square one on the STR meta, now with outdated accessories - get as much VIT as necessary for tank buster + AA, fill the rest with STR accs. It's literally the same thing for the same reasons. They haven't learned squat. It's frustrating to watch.

Agreed, they back peddled on a solved problem, and now the problem is back. Shocker.

[konpachizaraki]

Yeah, it's them not learning anything from the past.
The devs should really start to realize some facts about their own metagame before trying to make changes to the way people play.
We're back to square one on the STR meta, now with outdated accessories - get as much VIT as necessary for tank buster + AA, fill the rest with STR accs. It's literally the same thing for the same reasons. They haven't learned squat. It's frustrating to watch.

it's SE we're talking about here, they fucked up a lot of things in these past decades, so them fucking up another one isn't really surprising

[Shabaaz]

I just used my limited knowledge of Japanese to see what the JP players were saying about this VIT/STR Predicament and they are even more vocal about it then we are. They want the old formula back or want STR on our right side gear. A few are doing what a lot of NA players are doing and wearing 270 slaying, some are just melding STR, and ALOT seem to be just abandoning tank until something is done.

I get the sneaking suspicion that around omega, all acc level 50 and up will be role locked, instead of a real fix.

[Gunnie]

We're back to square one on the STR meta, now with outdated accessories - get as much VIT as necessary for tank buster + AA, fill the rest with STR accs.

The issue with this is that the top end raiding team this might work. For Average Joe you need more wiggleroom to make it work. What I gues will happen, is they will put a cap on all HW str jewely as well. Using ARR stuff is useless for the sole reason the benefit is very minimal. Forcing you into a vit build. Yes you will loose out on DPS, but it's what SE wants.

ps.
I would hate to see STR tanks in random groups as well when I was a healer. It puts alot more pressure on the healer which otherwise would not be there.

[eagledorf]

I get the sneaking suspicion that around omega, all acc level 50 and up will be role locked, instead of a real fix.

That would be a very bad move for SE because tanks and healers are already in very short supply. They should just add STR to the right side and be done with it. Now that accessories are role locked, there's no risk of DPS double-dipping on primary stat to cheese gear checks so there's no disadvantage anymore. Just let tanks deal 75% of a DPS, we kind of need to do reasonable DPS prevent MSQ from being agonizingly slow anyway.

[Reynhart]

When properly executed, stance dancing can be an effective way to add in a little spike DPS here and there without hampering the experience of the rest of your party. It's just that maybe not everybody behaves all that well.

What I don't understand is that SE is pretty vocal about forcing the tank stance more and more, but they put pretty much no complexity in tanks apart from that.
Why didn't they just made the skill rotation more demanding like they did with DPS ?

In the end, I don't think tank players specifically like to stance dance, they just like having room to improve compared to the average player, but the only meaningful way to improve, currently, is by stance dancing.

IMO, tank stance was made so that solo content is not a pain to do, by allowing natural decent DPS on tanks jobs while still putting a penalty in group content for the sake of balance.

Just let tanks deal 75% of a DPS, we kind of need to do reasonable DPS prevent MSQ from being agonizingly slow anyway.

There's another way to do both. Put a greater disparity between "tank stance" and "out of tank stance" numbers. I'm pretty sure if group content was designed around tank stance reducing 50% of damage dealt and received, there would be no "tanking out of tank stance", and tank's DPS in solo could be fairly high.

I don't claim that this would be good, just that it seems to be what SE try to enforce.

[Shabaaz]

That would be a very bad move for SE because tanks and healers are already in very short supply. They should just add STR to the right side and be done with it. Now that accessories are role locked, there's no risk of DPS double-dipping on primary stat to cheese gear checks so there's no disadvantage anymore. Just let tanks deal 75% of a DPS, we kind of need to do reasonable DPS prevent MSQ from being agonizingly slow anyway.

Agreed, This is the worst possible fix. The perferred fix would be add some STR to the right side and call it done. Would some tanks still choose to run 270 slaying on the right side, if they dont lock it? probably yes, but it wouldn't be as punishing to run the new acc in that case.

I get why they changed the damage calc back to STR, due to the weakness change, but they lacked the foresight to realize that min max type players (and the raiding population in general) want to play in the most effcient way possible, which means stacking defensive stats up to the threshold then going all out damage.Which means wearing old acc. I cant imagine thats going to stay that way for too long, which is why i think a role lock on all acc above 50 (or maybe just on HW acc) is coming. They obviously want tanks to be doing less damage and sitting in tank stance more.

Or maybe they wont change anything, leave acc as is and not lock out the old ones. Then we will be back to the good ole 3.0 days of 50 page threads about VIT vs STR tanks and how VIT tanks are "big shitters" and STR tanks are "Tryhards"

[aleph_null]

In the end, I don't think tank players specifically like to stance dance, they just like having room to improve compared to the average player, but the only meaningful way to improve, currently, is by stance dancing.

This is pretty much the reason why I like tanking in this game. The rotations on tanks aren't as complex as dps, but being able to maximize your dps and minimizing the dmg you take or heals you need (thus maximizing healers' dps) is pretty fulfilling.

Unlike stacking dps buffs, stacking mitigation has diminishing returns. Mitigating 10% from a 10k dmg is reducing it by 1k. Mitigating further 10% from that is reducing it by 900. At some point you'll always have "enough" mitigation that stacking more above that threshold yields little to no extra healer dps. And guess what? When you don't need all the mitigations you can have, you'll start by removing the ones that carry a "cost," e.g. tank stances from your list. That's always the one thing you first look at. On the other hand, the devs can't design contents around requiring optimal mitigation usage, since that'll just create a similar situation to gordias savage, which required near perfect dps rotation to clear, and people will probably end up complaining about the raids being too hard tanking/healing wise, instead of dps check wise.

Another thing is that we're playing a game centered around vertical progression, so you'll always naturally grow more powerful as you gear up and you'll inevitably have more leeway with mitigation/healing/dps. Even healers optimize around using instant heals and passive heals like pets/regens as much as they can, while reducing usage of cure/adlo/benefic as they and the tanks gear up. Personally I see tank stances as extra cushions you use to compensate for lack of skills (yours or your group's) or gear (low ilv prog).

Penalizing stance switches will only push tanks further away from using tank stances while compensating on other places: forcing your group's dps to have diversion and lucid dreaming, bringing a ninja, not bringing jobs lacking aggro control, having healers cater to tanks by doing more heals because that'll probably cost less dps than the tanks switching stances back and forth.

Call me a dps meta sheep, blue icon dps or whatever, but until they make damage mitigation actually require a lot of optimization even with tank stances on (which they won't since that'll make raids too hard for most raiders just like gordias savage), I'll continue to optimize on my group dps.

[Faeon]

I don't know maybe i am just overthinking it. But it sounds like a tank should be a dps with tank utilities? so you would have healer, pure dps, dps with defense abilties