Fending Accessories Strength Gain

[whiskeybravo]

Nah, Aana's suggestion was really spot on. Brd/Mch used to have lower weapon damage (I'm guessing at some point they changed this because now they are all the same) and it wasn't ever an issue because it was just their baseline. We know that 1 WD is equivalent to a certain amount of str, so they should still be to balance DPS to be roughly the same while giving tanks a meaningful upgrade path on the right side accessories. Just adjust where the damage comes from slightly, it doesn't have to be weaker or stronger - just a shift.

(personally doesn't affect me as I'm not dropping the gil for crafted accessories, and since my co-tank already took that dive I'll get the raid drops anyways lol)

[ArianeEwah]

[...]
Their previous posts about why they changed us away from vit damage scaling or the str/vit hybrid did describe the "we want defense and offense to scale separately". The post you quoted was exclusively to stop people from wearing lv 60 slaying accessories. Not the overarching problem.

This quote is just a sign that SE doesn't even bother with changing tank accessories.

It's stated here and other threads that fending accessories weren't and still are not desirable. For years now, tanks equip STR accessories to clear duties and savage content. It doesn't matter whether the tank is skilled enough to make proper use of it by using CDs and pushing those deeps. STR accessories were meta and people tend to imitate.

SE's solution in 4.0 was to lock tanks out of STR accessories. It was not about all jobs equiping their appropriate gear, but tanks only. But because SE is lazy and didn't change pre-4.x gear, tanks kept their STR accessories.
In the quoted post they actually admit that "When level syncing, only tanks will have STR stacked up, but we will overlook this for content up through 3.x." and thus, did a half finished job. They don't even care, literally.

Now imagine this: SE could probably change old accessories that tanks wouldn't be able to equid old STR gear. They wouldn't even bother to add STR to 4.x accessories, they don't want tanks to scale with their accessories. This "+0.66 STR/10 iLvl" is just a farce, so it would appear to tanks that they could actually get an upgrade. But in reality they don't.

On a side note: They even prohibited overmelding primary stat-materia, later during HW. So, instead of STR-pentamelded fending gear, there was VIT-melded STR accessories for tanks. They couldn't prevent tanks from using them.

I will repeat myself: This accessory problem exists for years now, and there was no real attempt to solve it. Just bandaids as STR/VIT hybrid, now 'fixed' STR amount on fending gear.

There are multiple propositions out there. Lowering STR amount on the left side, lower potencies, lower attack power scaling per STR point, VIT only scale, etc etc.

I am convinced that SE doesn't want to change fending accessory, and I highly doubt they will do anything big before 5.0.

[Kirei]

I remember when they changed Tanks Damage stat to VIT halfway through HW. I heard they were worried about the HP scaling and us having too much HP in SB. I personally thought it made since for our damage stat to be VIT, it made it a lot easier to deal with.

[whiskeybravo]

Q4: For tank accessories, I believe it’s much more useful to meld Direct Hit onto the new crafted accessories than using accessories obtained from the new tokens and Savage raid. Are there any plans to adjust the stats on the accessories in the future?

A4: I believe the issue here is that the first groups of players trying to complete the raids quickly are in favor of pushing their DPS. Once they obtain Savage accessories, we don’t think they will need that much DPS. We met players at the event today that suggested to make it so you can’t meld Direct Hit on them. While I understand the comments on this will be spit, we’re carefully discussing this right now.

I thought at first maybe you were confused SE, but the second sentence here illustrates you know exactly what's going on. You're basically flat out admitting that Savage accessories reduce tank DPS, "we don't think they will need that much DPS".

What?

- tank buys crafted accessories to increase personal DPS and help team clear before enrage
- tank wins Savage accessories for clearing
- tank equips Savage accessories because extra DPS from crafted accessories is no longer required

Please explain this logic

As for locking tanks out of Direct Hit, it doesn't matter, we will just meld Crit. Or Det. Or God forbid Skill Speed or Tenacity. Whichever gives the most the DPS.

Wait, let me repeat that just in case you missed it. Whichever gives the most the DPS.

(Just as an aside, I broke down and bought a crafted accessory. Just one because they went down to 800k. My co-tank bought me the wrist because I was still wearing crafted 320 wrist in v7s lol. Now to overmeld ; ; ; ; )

[Kreyd]

-snip-

And that's basically the whole problem in this. SE knows that we will gain as much dps as possbile, so they design boss encounters for that dps. But because the boss encounters are designed for high dps, we are in need to gain said dps, no matter what price.

If SE locks out tanks from dps gaining, without adjusting boss hp/enrage timers for lower dps, encounters will become harder. If they adjust boss hp/enrage timer for lower dps, but don't lock tanks out, we will still gain high dps to make content easier.

That's a vicious circle!

[Capn_Goggles]

It's something that I can overlook, but it's just silly that our accessories are just as costly to upgrade in terms of time, effort, gil, and so on, when upgrading them has such an absurdly minuscule value to us. It's not only that this is still a problem after so long, it's that they've spent this long "trying" to fix the problem by completely dancing around the issue at large for whatever ungodly reason they might have. Most people want to deal as much damage as possible in their respective job, so they're going to go with the most optimal way of dealing more damage, because defense is a binary pass/fail mechanic that doesn't actually engage the player in any way.

I understand removing the damage scaling from VIT for sanity's sake when it comes to balancing, but we're basically subsisting off of table scraps for a role that is already heavily underused in this game.

[Coatl]

The worst part is they actually managed this perfectly in creator. Tank damage was changed to scaled with vit so raid accessories were BiS, and vitality potions were very potent. Unfortunately there were definitely too many complaints about tanks dealing damage numbers too close to actual DPS, and it was seen as a balance issue. They wanted to go a different approach to tanking in stormblood and this is what we got. I don't see why they couldn't have just nerfed the overall dps of all the tanks and left the superior vitality scaling intact.

As is it right now tank raid accessories are like the worst thing, it might as well have been a one-chest.

[Aana]

So it begins. 3rd clear and we got our 1st tank accessory of the season. Tank ring. Both me and my co-tank have pentameld Accs. To quote our orange leader:

SAD.

Off to my retainer it goes. Thanks SE. Youre a real pal. I can only pray this isn't like my Final coil season. We got I believe, 16 tank rings alone (before unlocks. This was once a week clears).

[Capn_Goggles]

Unfortunately there were definitely too many complaints about tanks dealing damage numbers too close to actual DPS, and it was seen as a balance issue. They wanted to go a different approach to tanking in stormblood and this is what we got. I don't see why they couldn't have just nerfed the overall dps of all the tanks and left the superior vitality scaling intact.

I'm probably in the minority in this, but I have no problem with tank DPS matching mid-tier DPS character, all other factors equal. If they balanced fights around tanks having to pull their weight in DPS checks (not to Gordias levels for god's sake though), then it shouldn't be an issue beyond the handful of people who think tanks being able to do damage is the worst thing ever (and interestingly, probably don't ever touch savage or extreme content).



It's not like tanks aren't already expected to DPS as hard as possible, they just have a lower maximum number to shoot for. And yes, I understand why they did it, but damage scaling with Vitality was a good idea and I still would like that back.

[whiskeybravo]

I'm probably in the minority in this, but I have no problem with tank DPS matching mid-tier DPS character, all other factors equal. If they balanced fights around tanks having to pull their weight in DPS checks (not to Gordias levels for god's sake though), then it shouldn't be an issue beyond the handful of people who think tanks being able to do damage is the worst thing ever (and interestingly, probably don't ever touch savage or extreme content).

I'd consider myself in that minority as well. Obvious problem being the 7 or 8-tank comps (why bring a dps that can die to everything?). But it seems like it would be fairly easy to simply code the DF for not accepting those kind of parties by default (make it a checkbox option like unsynced & reduce or eliminate rewards for "special comps"), problem solved. That way people can still do crazy comps if they want, just no reward for doing it in relevant content.