To everyone who says tanks shouldn't be able to meld Direct Hit

[MoroMurasaki]

Because it allows me, a healer, and any other supportive roles to spend less time spam healing. Also, Tenacity DOES boost damage output. It's better team comp.

It also makes soloing anything as a tank a good deal easier.

The problem we're seeing now is Tenacity still isn't meeting to magical parse numbers spit out by tank players that really should just be DPS, but it's getting closer with each gear upgrade.

If you have a tank and a healer of comparable skill level in a single-target enviroment the tank is going to out-DPS the healer every time. I say this as a healer main with some DH melds myself.

It just boils down to the time spent dealing damage - virtually everything a tank does cauaes damage to an enemy where as there are almost no healing abilities that cause damage. That's not even getting into auto attacks.

Because tanks can hit significantly higher dps numbers it makes sense for them to lose the negligible survivability boost offered by tenacity in favor of perhaps making their healer cast an extra heal or two over the course of a fight because there is nothing I can put up as a WHM that holds a candle to a Fell Cleave.

The best team composition is the one that kills the enemies the fastest not the one that specifically allows healers the most time to dps. As healers it is up to us to find our dps windows by learning a fight, it isn't on our group to gimp their dps in order to let us hurl another stone.

[Tridus]

If you have a tank and a healer of comparable skill level in a single-target enviroment the tank is going to out-DPS the healer every time. I say this as a healer main with some DH melds myself.

It just boils down to the time spent dealing damage - virtually everything a tank does causes damage to an enemy where as there are almost no healing abilities that cause damage. That's not even getting into auto attacks

It's true. My PLD can out-DPS healers single target, and it's actually melded for tenacity because I took it through Sigmascape while relatively undergeared and wanted the extra toughness for my first time tanking it. It doesn't need that now that I'm more confident and geared in there, so I could swap that out and it wouldn't hinder anyone.

And that's assuming it actually requires an extra cast. In some cases the extra damage requires an extra cast. In other cases it may result in less overheal, like if the heal crits and would take you to full. Or Eos will do the extra cast for me, when I'm on SCH. If you're blessed with a PLD offtank who can fire off Intervention on big hits, that dwarfs what Tenacity will give you, too.

I mean, conceptually I like tenacity. But the way the game stands right now, most of the time you don't need that extra defense. Just like a lot of the time you don't need Shield Oath to do your job. So long as that's true, people are going to meld for what gives you a guaranteed benefit: killing the boss faster. Enrage aside, killing the boss faster means fewer chances for someone to make a mistake on mechanics, and that boosts group success. That boost works all the time, even in normal DF random groups where stuff can go wrong regularly.

IMO, one way to address this is to nerf the hell out of enmity boosted abilities outside of tank stance (making it harder to do the "tank" part of tanking), and let tenacity boost enmity generation from damage. Given what a big hit to DPS tank stance is, a meld that lets you stay out of it and get the enmity you need would hold some appeal. Probably not the best way, but just tossing an idea out that fits the point: a stat that does something we don't need more of is less appealing than a stat that does something where more is always better. (Piety has the same problem, but no one seems to mind healers ignoring it to meld epic quantities of crit.)

[Ametrine]

Snip.

The flaw with that is it would make lower level dungeon emnity issues worse unless they gave tanks their stances at the lowest possible levels. Should we make materia a requirement, or a bonus?


My confusion now comes down to the recent changes of the game (4.0 to now) making materia and healer/tank/DPS synergy push more towards outlasting and higher survivability, verses speedrunning. Less damage, more sustain. That said, taking DH away from tanks would sooner make many turn to Crit before Tenacity.

And if they cut Crit away, we may as well start considering dropping materia as a system all together or reworking it from the ground up.

Also, you get a comm though for being the first person to see me say how much easier healing a Tenacity focussed tank is over a DH one, and not respond by passively telling me I'm a bad for being dependant on a tank being defensive. Tenacity tanks being less work is something to note, yet it isn't.

Also, in regards to DPS maximization on Heal/Tank jobs taking *priority* (key word here) over the core Healing and Tanking role, not suplementary to it, I think that's the point a player needs to consider DPS. We're all trying to maximize what we enjoy, so if big damage outputs are what you enjoy doing, then why not play a job built for getting the most out of that?

Personally, I'm starting to realize why some players wish we had support jobs. I think I've become one of them.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Also, in regards to DPS maximization on Heal/Tank jobs taking *priority* (key word here) over the core Healing and Tanking role, not suplementary to it, I think that's the point a player needs to consider DPS. We're all trying to maximize what we enjoy, so if big damage outputs are what you enjoy doing, then why not play a job built for getting the most out of that?

And what if they enjoy the duality of both mitigation and damage? You are yet again ignoring the fact defensive play simply isn't necessary nor even encouraged by gameplay mechanics. The one secondary jobs tanks have—building enmity—has become so hilariously trivialized, tanks can get away with a single aggro combo or none at all. To substantiate your argument, you must prove defensive tanking directly benefits the raid over offensive tanking. As that hasn't been the case since aggressive tanking became popular, well, you're going to have an uphill battle.

Personally, I'm starting to realize why some players wish we had support jobs. I think I've become one of them.

Pure Support jobs would suffer an even worse fate. Assuming they contribute negligible damage relative to their DPS counterparts, their support either needs to tremendous to the point they're mandatory or no one will touch them. Case in point: 3.4 Balance. Astro practically destroyed White Mage all because of how overpowered that one card became. At least once you moved up the raid totem pole.

[Tridus]

The flaw with that is it would make lower level dungeon emnity issues worse unless they gave tanks their stances at the lowest possible levels. Should we make materia a requirement, or a bonus?

At low level, enmity bonuses we have now are so powerful that it's nearly impossible to rip anything off once you've hit Flash a couple of times. I don't have any wish to make life harder at level 16, but holding mobs at that level is virtually no effort and there's room to manipulate things without breaking it down there. (And if necessary, tank stance earlier wouldn't exactly break anything.)

And if they cut Crit away, we may as well start considering dropping materia as a system all together or reworking it from the ground up.

Yep. I mean, the only choices right now are "tenacity or DPS stats" effectively. Unless they plan to cut all the DPS stats, people will just keep going to them until they run out or tenacity is stronger. And if you cut them out, why do we have this system at all?

Also, you get a comm though for being the first person to see me say how much easier healing a Tenacity focussed tank is over a DH one, and not respond by passively telling me I'm a bad for being dependant on a tank being defensive. Tenacity tanks being less work is something to note, yet it isn't.

Also, in regards to DPS maximization on Heal/Tank jobs taking *priority* (key word here) over the core Healing and Tanking role, not suplementary to it, I think that's the point a player needs to consider DPS. We're all trying to maximize what we enjoy, so if big damage outputs are what you enjoy doing, then why not play a job built for getting the most out of that?

I'm a healer main, so I can come from there more easily. Piety does nothing for me. I have all the MP I need on WHM and SCH (and I don't like AST). It may be the healer stat, but having more of it doesn't change anything. So I don't. I put VIT on a couple of items for that extra survivability, and after that it's all other stuff. That other stuff boosts both healing and DPS, so we have it kind of easy.

But once I can do enough healing to keep everybody up through the damage, what does more healing get me? Not a lot. You need to do X healing, and any extra is overheal. X varies from group to group and tank to tank, but it rarely goes over a certain point. Of course, I don't have a ton of healing boosting cooldowns, so more healing is often better.

Tanks tend to only be under threat in certain attacks and have boatloads of ways to mitigate it through abilities. They need enough toughness to survive. After that, more DPS helps avoid enrages so it's value goes up quite a lot to get a kill in case someone else dies or something happens (or just to do it faster and avoid mechanics). More toughness past what you need on jobs that already have so much is not going to stack up for a lot of groups.

That said, I certainly don't mind a tough as nails tank in DF. Tenacity there isn't optimal for speed, but anytime I'm healing one of those folks I know we're going to have a smooth run because there's no way they're suddenly going to spike down faster than I can recover.

Personally, I'm starting to realize why some players wish we had support jobs. I think I've become one of them.

Yep. I mean, healers are usually effectively support but I spend half my time flinging rocks. I know Moro likes that playstyle quite a lot, but I've always found it weird (coming from WoW) and if they shifted it to make healing harder where I need to do more of that and less DPS, I'd be okay with that. That's not the game we have right now, though.

The entire game is built to be extremely DPS focused. When that's the game they give us, it's hard to fault people for taking that and running with it.

[Ametrine]

Snip.

You're talking in CURRENT content, I'm talking in CURRENT AND FUTURE content if said changes going ito affect and SE designs around it.

I'm fully aware the game rewards DPS focus on literally everything. I'm fully aware defensive and supportive play isn't as it's too unnuanced and easy. And if you could just read what I'm apparently really bad at explaining, I do not like this facet of FFXIV's current job design and feel that there is evidence SE doesn't either, and that my personal, anecdotal experience towards defensive play is positive.

Taking a DPS focussed tool away from tanks to further force them into a defensive only position when the game doesn't make tank players even work on defense is another point towards SE making to push towards making tanks be more like a tank.

Furthermore, if they like both aspects of mitigation and damaging, which is why I noted damage being priority being a key word with stars around it, then absolutely they'd be happier as a tank then a damage only focussed DPS. It's just a curiosity that many tank players prefer maximizing damage output while doing as little (to zero) mitigation. That's when I ask, "Why aren't you playing a DPS? If you don't enjoy the tank gameplay, then why are you tanking?"

That's not hard to understand, is it? If the answer is that tanking is boring otherwise, then why aren't we asking why that's not seen as a problem instead of tanks getting the damage outputs nerfed again?

[Eeshen]

Yet, what amazes me is my WAR buddy has stacked his HQ crafted right and left set with a much Tenacity as the game would allow without losses has some of the best personal survivability of any tank I've ever seen. His personal healing skills are far more potent along with it bolsterimg his defenses and damage output.

So, it's very much the perfect stat booster for tank roles. He main tanks everything he can.

But only if you want to actually play like a tank and not a DPS with good defense like meta enforces.

I wish I could play this way.....I play to tank, but I’m just a somewhat tanky DPS

[Warkupo]

I very much vastly prefer it if my Tank can also do a respectable amount of damage. Dropping tenacity means I move towards skill speed or crit. Dropping those means I would drop the game as I don't enjoy being a fortress that just stands around and gets hit as a gameplay element.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

That's not hard to understand, is it?

Spare me the condescension.

I read your posts plenty and simply disagreed. Welcome to a discussion forum. Your opinions do not get to be presented without rebuttal. I responded on your follow-up subjective stance Tenacity provides a benefit that doesn't apply universally hence why it's ignored. Claiming now you dislike that facet of the game and wish it were to change is an entirely different argument than what you presented. Your words, not mine.

Now on that topic, I have long thought healing potencies and outgoing damage are too high and low, respectively, which allows for such a DPS focused mindset. Alas, I doubt SE does anything different given their mandate to make the game easier.

[Ametrine]

I'm happy to discuss, and I'm not really sure why every conversation we have gets heated, wow. I just repeatedly felt like you were missing the point entirely that I was trying to make, that I was not wording it in a way that made it clear, not trying to be a condescending ass, which I was. I was getting frustrated, and I apologize for that.

I'm also hitting that point where I feel like practicing what I preach and swapping to a fun DPS like SMN or RDM. Having sub support is just so much less, I guess, toxic, than healing is anymore, as it's less about upkeep unless I play AST. But, again, I heal mostly with my FC mates, who are far more defensive than average, so landing with offense oriented PUGs feels less like a challenge, more like I'm stuck playing baby sitter.

Anyway.