Tanks that think they are DPS, just stop...

[Lyth]

It's not that people dislike Vitality. From 3.2 until SB, tanks really liked it. The system worked precisely because gear improved both your HP and the effectiveness of your actions.

The problem that tanks have with Vitality under the present system is that the effectiveness of your actions does not scale with better right side gear. Vitality is very important, up until a point, but tanks shouldn't have to trade it off stats that have a bigger impact on performance in order to have more Vitality.

It's the same issue with Parry pre-SB. The act of parrying something is good. Tanks like it when it happens. But Parry showed up on tank gear at the cost of other stats which had a bigger impact on tank performance, like Crit, Det, and Skill Speed. You never saw the same complaints about Block, because Block was a shield property that did not come at the cost of other stats. As a result, stats like Parry, and in some cases, Accuracy, ended up being "dead stats" on gear that didn't contribute to your performance. The end result was that some gear pieces 10-20 ilvls lower were more powerful than their higher ilvl counterparts with more Parry and Accuracy, purely due to secondary stat weights.

The Vitality change revisits all of this, but worse. Your right side Vitality has no stat weight to it. In fact, in spite of being a secondary stat (and a poorly scaling one at that), Tenacity is more useful than Vitality, because it influences both damage and passive damage reduction, the latter of which has a much bigger impact on survival than raw HP. The problem with Tenacity is that it doesn't scale well, probably because you don't want players having large mitigation differences based on how they pick out and meld their gear.

[Thunda_Cat_SMASH]

because you don't want players having large mitigation differences based on how they pick out and meld their gear.

Why not? A tank that melds a tank stat should logically be much more tanky than someone that chooses to use STR, at the expense of taking, for example, 25-30% more damage on average that CD's alone shouldn't be able to accommodate.

[Lyth]

Why not? A tank that melds a tank stat should logically be much more tanky than someone that chooses to use STR, at the expense of taking, for example, 25-30% more damage on average that CD's alone shouldn't be able to accommodate.

Percent damage reduction can easily get out of hand. In this game, the devs have traditionally kept it in check by linking DEF/MDEF to gear tiers, so that the amount of damage that tanks receive is fairly uniform.

You can have a lot of variation in secondary stats. You have to account for tanks in entry level gear with much lower Tenacity, and tanks in higher level gear with potentially much higher tenacity. If it scaled too briskly, you could have a fairly significant difference in the damage taken, which could make encounter design for different skill and gear levels much more challenging. Tenacity could be much more powerful if it was a primary stat, as primary stats are generally gained at fixed amounts with each tier of gear, and you won't have two tanks with different amounts.

Make no mistake, %DR stats in MMOs are very powerful, and devs are usually fairly cautious with them. For all of our interest in doing solid dps, if stacking %DR gave us big enough returns, we'd prioritise it in a heartbeat. This is the sort of thing that can trivialise tanking in encounters.