LOLSE, We're not wearing 270 STR to hold hate, c'mon now...

[Evaddaragon]

And so does the shield from Divine Veil! Hahaha

[Vallamaria]

Just sad for me that people would rather have a dps tank than ask SE to redesign tanks to be more fun while being more in line with traditional mmo tanks

Well it's the rather logical and sensible thing to ask for honestly. Because at this point with the expansion already out SE can only realistically do things like adjusting potency on skills, adding STR to Tank accessories, making Tank damage scale off VIT instead, or reverting the Tank damage calculate to STR+VIT like it was towards the end of HW. Or to put it all more simply. I'm saying they're realistically only going to change the numbers on things.

Since what you're describing with asking SE "to redesign tanks to be more fun" would simply require too huge of an overhaul. Since they would have to largely scrap what we have currently and rework it from the ground up. Which they're obviously not going to be doing anytime before 5.0. Since the only time we see absolutely massive overhauls of how Jobs play is with the release of a new expansion. Which is of course because of the huge amount of development time it takes to rework things so heavily in regards to how a Job plays.

[Thunda_Cat_SMASH]

Once agian, many people are kinda missing the point, so ill quote myself

WHM, WAR, PLD, AND DRK all have shields that scale off of Vit. Can we have something a tad more relevant to the discussion?

[mcspamm]

First off, let me get this out of the way - "OMG WAR main, disregard anything I say that doesn't agree with your personal viewpoint on the matter lolkthxbai!!1one".

*Ahem* Now, back to being rational adults who can articulate their gripes about this matter in a calm and professional manner.

My Problem with STR accessories on Tanks

As a tank main since I started raiding in 2.5, my problem with the current tank accessory setup is centred on the fact that FFXIV is a purely vertical scaling game with regards to equipment upgrades.

By and large, barring large differences in materia melds, normal quality crafted gear, or Diadem's RNG weapons and substat distributions, getting a higher item level piece of equipment is an upgrade. It makes our job stronger. We get more main stat, which affects our damage dealt and healing. On armour and weapons, we get more vitality, which increases our max HP so you can survive more damage before needing heals. Upgrading our weapon also increases weapon damage, which boosts your damage and healing done even more. We also get higher amounts of secondary stats as gear iLvl goes up. Finally, and mostly just relevant for tanks, higher iLvl armour increases our defence and magical defence, reducing the amount of damage received from attacks (the only mitigation stats other than Tenacity, which is still dubious in its scaling even at ~5% per 1000).

Given the vertical progression model, this makes it feel good to receive an upgrade. However small an increase, it makes us feel stronger and more powerful each time.

All of this boils down to gradually upgrading gear in this fashion, and wanting to feeling rewarded every time we receive a higher iLevel piece of equipment that we can wear.

My issue with this is that since 4.0, with the reversion to pure STR AP scaling for tanks, none of the new role-locked tank accessories feel like an upgrade, and therefore, for the most part, I don't want to wear any of the new Stormblood tank accessories.

As I was leveling Warrior and Dark Knight, after earning tomestones of verity to buy i310 gear, after killing and farming Lakshmi EX, I kept seeing healers and DPS players getting shiny new accessory upgrades, whereas every time I saw a new role-locked tank accessory drop, I felt like the game had offered me a piece of coal instead.

Tanks are the only role confronting this issue in Stormblood, as higher item level role-locked accessories are an upgrade for every DPS and healer job.

As a tank main, this feels awful.

I'll list some suggestions on how to fix this issue in a subsequent post.

[Mertrodome]

I'll preface this by saying I've not played since ARR and am not yet 70, so take with a grain of salt.

I personally feel like the issue lies more with gear/stat variety.

In WoW there is at least your set armour, alternate offset pieces, assorted trinkets with varying effects and so on. Sure, there was still a defined BIS list, but the puzzle was around balancing the stats on the pieces you did have to ensure things like meeting caps, pushing hit off the combat table, active effects, etc.

FFXIV's secondary stats don't really matter in that way. The transition from more EHP to more DPS is literally the only interesting thing to do with gear and even then it's super basic by comparison. There's no "puzzle" beyond that - no theorycrafting to be done.

So to anyone accusing folk of being up in arms about "muh deeps" or whatever, I think it's more that they're up in arms about the only interesting gear choice they had at all being taken away.

[bweisnicht]

WHM, WAR, PLD, AND DRK all have shields that scale off of Vit. Can we have something a tad more relevant to the discussion?

While his statement was a bit hyperbolic, the point still stands and is extremely relevant. These skills that "scale" off vit are not required to survive any content and the "scaling effect" is nearly meaningless. When compared to the benefit of doing hundreds of more DPS in STR gear, well, there is no comparison.

WHM - Benediction: Limited to no benefit from it "scaling", used when tank is dangerously low HP. Doesn't matter how much total HP they have. A tank with high HP might be able to take an extra auto attack from relevant bosses before its use is necessary effectively saving you a cure II or equivalent.

WAR - Thrill of Battle, Upheaval: Offers no mitigation benefit, again at best saving you a Cure or equivalent due to the increased healing from ToB. Damage bonus to upheaval is negligible compared to the overall benefit from wearing STR gear.

PLD - Divine Veil: Additional benefit of ~2000 damage mitigated full STR vs full VIT. Meaningless with all current content.

DRK - Blackest Night: About the only skill I could see with an argument for useful VIT scaling, increases direct mitigation.

[whiskeybravo]

More and more I'm feeling like you guys are right, SE just doesn't want people to play tanks.

They didn't mention anything about adjusting costs for stance swapping. Outside of the gearing issue this is the main complaint (for war, at least).

It doesn't sound like there is going to be any real "fix" to the gearing issue either, likely they are just going to job lock the old accessories too.

Also, since they are having to scramble to "fix" this by patch 4.05, it leads me to believe they had no plans whatsoever to even go back and make adjustments, nor were they even monitoring the tank situation to begin with. Like, if the player base hadn't spoke up they wouldn't even be addressing these issues.

So, we'll have HP inflation - but it won't be the kind that upsets balancing so that's OK.

[mcspamm]

Incoming WALL OF TEXT!!

Possible Solutions

The dev team has expressed that they have no interest in returning to tank attack power scaling off VIT.

They want to be able to scale tank HP and tank AP independently. That's fine. We can treat this as a design constraint for any possible fixes.

Furthermore, the dev team doesn't seem to be thrilled with the tank damage meta, and appears to want to cut back on it.

With that in mind, here are a few ideas I have on how to remedy the problem, which can be used in conjunction with one another.

Also, most of these are not novel ideas - they've been mentioned already. I just want to consolidate and flesh them out a bit more.

1. Add some STR to role-locked tank accessories
Now that accessories moving forward are role-locked, they can be tweaked independently of other jobs and roles.

In order for the 4.0 accessories to surpass the 270 STR accessories, they would need to have at least 53 STR added to them (53 base STR + 25 STR from materia VI = 78 STR, the same amount gained from the 270 STR pieces).

So long as level 70 tank accessories have at least 53 STR on them in addition to VIT, they'll strictly be an upgrade for tanks, which is one way to solve the problem.

Furthermore, because these are role-locked, you can change the progression of STR increments on higher level tank accessories differently than for healers and DPS while still making them upgrades.

Right now, DPS and healer accessories give roughly +6.5 main stat every ten item levels.

For tank accessories, you could have weaker STR scaling while still providing more STR on each higher level piece, such as by giving roughly +2.5 additional Strength every ten item levels on tank accessories.

In table form:


While this change would retain an element of the tank DPS meta, should they desire, they can taper off STR gains relative to other jobs to lower the impact of it.

This change on its own does have a downside though. As DPS and healers continue to scale better from their accessories, enmity will eventually become a problem again and enmity modifiers will have to be gradually increased over time to compensate.

2. Make VIT organically boost enmity
Another possibility is making VIT increase our enmity modifiers, so that higher VIT = higher enmity.

I'm not going to crunch any numbers here, but my first take would be something like making every 200 VIT add an additional +0.1x enmity modifier to all enmity-increasing abilities (perhaps with different scaling for AOE abilities).

Also, I'm not sure if making this additional enmity boost additive or multiplicative would be more helpful without trivializing threat management, but some sort of system like this (once the numbers are tweaked and optimized) would allow for tank enmity to organically scale with levels, and could remove the need for the devs to increase enmity modifiers over time as DPS and healer enmity continue to climb.

3. Lock tanks out of ALL STR accessories while providing a different incentive to upgrade them
This is the most controversial solution I have, but I personally think it's the closest in line to what the dev team is considering as their fix in 4.05, so I might as well share these in hopes of dulling the loss come 4.05.

First, prevent tanks from using STR accessories, maybe starting at level 50 or even level 30 (it's largely negligible before then, and allows new tanks to use STR accessories while leveling until VIT ones also become available).

This change alone would just anger a lot of tank players, since we would be losing attack power from the 270 STR pieces without gaining anything in return.

So to take the sting off this change, the devs could add a different incentive to upgrading your accessories aside from the extra max HP.

Here are a few ideas on how to do this.

a) Make every role-locked tank accessory give you a certain amount of Tenacity, in addition to the secondary stats
Basically, treat Tenacity like an extra "main stat" on tank accessories and put it on every piece in addition to VIT.

For example, the i310 tank accessories could be changed to have 113 VIT, 111 Tenacity PLUS whatever secondary stats they had already.

This would be awkward to implement without removing Tenacity as a substat on accessories, which might be tricky. However, in conjunction with my next suggestion, you could swap Tenacity for Direct Hit on tank accessories, and then also add Tenacity to each piece as you would VIT.

Also, with the current scaling on Tenacity, this would still be rather weak on its own IMO, especially with the loss of STR from locking out the 270 accessories.

b) Allow tank accessories (and only accessories) to have Direct Hit as a secondary stat on the pieces themselves
It's definitely worse than STR, but Direct Hit is currently one of - if not the strongest - tank secondary stat available right now, and yet tanks can only get it via melding, which you only want to do on left-side pieces and weapons because STR melds take precedence on VIT accessories.

IF (BIIIIG if) the dev team plans on preventing tanks from getting STR from their accessories outside of melds, making Direct Hit more available to tanks would be a good thing.

c) Give tank accessories defence and magical defence stats equivalent to our belt slot
Another angle would be to incentivize upgrading our accessories to boost our mitigation with higher defences.

From a lore perspective, I'm not sure how this would work. Magical accessories of protection that only resonate and/or activate with tank job stones...?

While this likely wouldn't make up for being locked out of STR scaling on right-side pieces, increasing tanks' mitigation on accessories would - potentially - allow for slightly more damage stance uptime and/or slightly fewer healer GCDs, compared to current VIT accessories.

~~~

Anyway, that's my two dollars and change on the matter.

In a perfect world, my ideal fix for this issue would be implementing suggestions one and two above: add slower scaling STR to tank accessories, and also make VIT boost enmity.

Realistically though, I'm just hoping that IF they lock tanks out of STR accessories entirely that they give tanks something decent in return.

All I can hope now is that the dev team takes this into consideration before patch 4.05 goes live in two weeks.

[Jonnycbad]

This change on its own does have a downside though. As DPS and healers continue to scale better from their accessories, enmity will eventually become a problem again and enmity modifiers will have to be gradually increased over time to compensate.

No. It. Wont.

DPS and Healers need to manage their own enmity too, and tanks can circle jerk eachother for +56% TOTAL DIRECT enmity every 2 minutes with Shirk. So, no more of this ARR/HW mentality of "Use 1 Rage of Halone in Shjield Oath at the start of the fight then EZ mode tank the rest in Sword Oath, using DPS combos while wearing STR accessories" bullcrap. That's not tanking. That's DPSing with mild tank elements.

Diversion: Reduces enmity generation.
Shirk: Diverts 25% of enmity to target party member.
Tactician: Gradually restores own TPP and the TP of all nearby party members. Reduces enmity generation.
Refresh: Gradually restores own MP and the MP of all nearby party members. Reduces enmity generation.
Shadewalker: Grants target party member the effect of Silhouette, diverting to target 80% of all enmity generated by caster.
Smoke Screen: Creates a wall of smoke, reducing enmity generation of a single party member.
Elusive Jump: Executes a jump to a location 15 yalms behind you, while removing any Heavy or Bind effects.Additional Effect: Reduces enmity by half


LEARN TO USE THEM.

[Delorean]

Nah they mean they can't balance tank power and hp levels easily. Instead of going 100 vit 100 str, they can go 50 vit 200 str and keep the damage and health reasonable at different levels.

If they put str on the accessories it'd honestly make a better argument.

how does that make any sense

like, do they not want you to have all the hp you can get as a tank? that doesn't make any sense. tank damage was not even that high in hw... if tanks were outdpsing dps its because classes like bard were awfully designed for leveling contents or players just sucked. maybe both.

either way, dont care. if you're having trouble holding threat and need str gear from last expansion to do so its because you're not a good tank xD maybe something changes at 70 but i have had no problems keeping threat at all. if you are paying attention and/or communicating it should not be difficult to eliminate whatever issue players are having.