Make tenacity great

[Cabalabob]

Tenacity and piety are progression stats and there’s no way to change that without fundamentally changing what they do or what substats do overall. They’re stats that give you a little buffer when you don’t quite know the fight yet but once you do and you’ve optimised your healing and mitigation they’re no longer needed in favour of damage.

The fact is the majority of players aren’t going to go to that level of optimisation outside of world first parties because fights are easy enough to learn once all the guides are out that you don’t need to.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Tenacity and piety are progression stats and there’s no way to change that without fundamentally changing what they do or what substats do overall. They’re stats that give you a little buffer when you don’t quite know the fight yet but once you do and you’ve optimised your healing and mitigation they’re no longer needed in favour of damage.

Neither needs to be. Part of Tenacity's problem is that a 5% mitigation increase does not covert to 5% less healing actions needed and Piety suffers from high cost healing and damage spells not being a significant enough MP drain that increased MP regen does not increase damage by transitioning to higher cost heals.

In theory, a high tenacity build would increase party dps by allowing healers to cast more offensive spells so the party gear composition question would become how much Tenacity do we need to maximize healer dps. The problem with this is that the Healer offensive/healing casts per minute ratio is heavily skewed towards the offensive side.

With Piety, the theory is that with more Piety you would go from casting "Cure 1, Cure 1, Cure 1, Glare, Cure 1, Cure 1, Cure 1, Glare" when you have ~400 MP regen per tick to "Cure 2, Cure 2, Glare, Glare, Cure 2, Cure 2, Glare, Glare" when you have ~700 MP regen per tick. Due to how healing requirements are tuned and how little the MP drain is in fights we pretty much start at the later and Piety becomes more a question of how many Rezs do I need before I go OoM.

[Absurdity]

In theory, a high tenacity build would increase party dps by allowing healers to cast more offensive spells so the party gear composition question would become how much Tenacity do we need to maximize healer dps. The problem with this is that the Healer offensive/healing casts per minute ratio is heavily skewed towards the offensive side.

That's not the only question you would need to ask in a theoretical tenacity build though. You would also need to know if maximizing healer dps outweights the dps lost from tanks going full ten.
But yes, it is entirely theoretical because in reality you're most likely not saving your healer any GCDs by going full ten.

[Ultimatecalibur]

That's not the only question you would need to ask in a theoretical tenacity build though. You would also need to know if maximizing healer dps outweights the dps lost from tanks going full ten.

The dps loss from going full ten is actually pretty low. Outside of Direct Hit shenanigans, the dps difference between a Tenacity heavy build and a Crit heavy build is about 2%.

But yes, it is entirely theoretical because in reality you're most likely not saving your healer any GCDs by going full ten.

True with the current extremely low gcd heal requirements. At a 3:21 healingffensive healer base gcd use per minute ratio a 5% reduction in healing required only 1 gcd is going to be freed up rough every 7 minutes. With a more sane 12:12 ratio base, a 5% reduction in healing required frees up roughly 1 of the healing gcds for offensive use every 2 minutes and the amount freed up by tenacity only gets better as the healingffensive gcd ratio favors healing.

[Lyth]

It's strange that DPS jobs don't also have 'progression stats'. They just become progressively more effective with better gear.

I'm all for in-game trade-offs that require you to make decisions on the fly. But 'progression-only' stats just seem to be one more way of punishing the very roles the devs are desperate to see better represented.

[Liam_Harper]

I don't see why Ten and Piety can't be the stat to stack, rather than Crit.

One of the issues I see with Enix's tank/heal design is they seem to be of the mindset that simplifying tanks/heals and trying to put as little burden on them as possible is the way to go. The result is a role that hits like a wet noodle, is dull to play and that doesn't feel like it has much impact on the fight. If instead, tanks/heals hit quite hard, had an engaging toolkit and were easy to pick-up but had depth and the tools to pull off some impressive saves in the hands of a great player, that would be far more enticing to pick up. I'd much rather pick up a potential juggernaut than a blue noodle dps that doesn't need effort.

Ten and Piety are part of this mindset. They don't have any real impact. They don't have good damage. They don't want you to need to stack them. They're just lukewarm, bland and simple like the rest of the role.

[Kabooa]

I don't see why Ten and Piety can't be the stat to stack, rather than Crit.

Would you care to elaborate on what you'd want them to do?

[Lyth]

What tenacity does is fine. It's the scaling that needs to change. Piety should cover a similar range of functions (i.e. attack potency, healing potency, and MP regeneration rate).

Now if you want people playing these roles to pick these stats, there are a couple of things that you can do.

1) Make these into Primary Attributes, and just standardize the stats across all roles. In other words:
Tanks: Tenacity (Attack, Defense, HP restoration/Lifesteal)
Healers: Piety/Mind (Attack, Healing, MP regeneration)
Melee: Strength (Attack)
Ranged: Dexterity (Attack)
Magic: Intelligence (Attack)

Secondary Stats (Everyone): Crit, DH, Determination, Haste

Why do this? Well two reasons. Primary Attributes scale with ilevel, so better gear scales up all of your essential tank functions. Second, it decouples tank attribute progression from melee dps, so you don't have to worry about tanks having to gain Strength more slowly than Melee DPS to keep us from outperforming and embarrassing them, Heavensward style.

2) Make all Secondary Properties have diminishing returns. What do I mean by this? The opposite of how Crit gains value. Ideally, you want it to be such that you gain less of a dps boost per additional point of any individual stat. This encourages you to diversify your stats, rather than dumping everything that you can into Crit, followed by the next most effective stat only when you have no more room left for Crit. So even if we go back to that idea of Tenacity and Piety providing the 'best' damage boost for tanks and healers respectively out of your secondary stats, the gain drops off as you invest in it, suddenly making say Crit and Det better. Now you start investing in those but the relative gain falls off, meaning that you gain more from stacking Tenacity.

And note that none of this actually impacts the relative dps that tanks and healers do compared to other roles, so long as you can control the relative weighting of each Primary Attribute. Your Secondary Properties are a drop in the ocean by comparison.

Smart players are not going to want to invest into a 'defensive only stat'. We've seen this, it was called Parry. They are also not going to want to invest in a defensive stat that provides inferior offensive gains to its counterparts. They certainly will invest in a defensive stat that provides better offensive gains to its counterparts, even if that only occurs at set stat intervals. The main thing that everyone wants out of a stat system is to gain progressively stronger offense with better gear. We don't want dummy stats like Parry and Accuracy that occupy equipment slots without providing an offensive benefit. We also don't want inferior offensive options like Tenacity is now, even if it comes with a swiss army knife of helpful secondary functions that you can live without. Nobody likes feeling shortchanged on their gear upgrade.

[Kabooa]

Now if you want people playing these roles to pick these stats, there are a couple of things that you can do.

1) Make these into Primary Attributes, and just standardize the stats across all roles. In other words:
Tanks: Tenacity (Attack, Defense, HP restoration/Lifesteal)
Healers: Piety/Mind (Attack, Healing, MP regeneration)
Melee: Strength (Attack)
Ranged: Dexterity (Attack)
Magic: Intelligence (Attack)

You are not picking your primary stats, so other than changing the name of Strength and Mind I'm not seeing how this accomplishes anything.

Strength already deals with attacks, defense already scales with iLvl.

For tanks, all potency based actions interact with attack power, it already scales up your ability to heal with actions, and already scales up your ability to drain health (Health gain from dealing damage).

Tanks no longer gain strength more slowly, they just operate on a different damage formula, one of the suggestions that tanks specifically asked for in Stormblood's Accessory megathread. This just effectively changed the two leading coefficients in the formula (IE: Instead of 1.0 x Str, it's .66 x 1.5 Str).

Secondary Stats (Everyone): Crit, DH, Determination, Haste

2) Make all Secondary Properties have diminishing returns.

I don't really have any issue with this. It's just a more refined version of what we have now.

Likewise, just tacking on MP generation to Mind seems pointless. You will not start out an expansion at a disadvantage just so you can not have that problem midway through (Or wherever the normalization is set to occur).

It seems like we can sum up this entire request with just: Remove Tenacity, Remove Piety, make Direct Hit Universal, let Direct Hit apply to non-damage numbers.

[Lyth]

No, I'm saying that's what it should do. If your ilvl goes up, your percentage lifesteal (or self-sustain/shielding alternative) should go up independent of the damage that you do, with diminishing returns, of course. I also think that you need some degree of transparency with all this (i.e. when you select a piece of gear for comparison, you should be able to see what those stat boosts are translating into in terms of damage per second, self-healing percentage, damage reduction, and so on).

I mean, you can hand out self-sustain and mitigation options like Bloodbath and such to dps jobs, but at the end of the day, tanks need to be the ones who see proportionately higher gains to those abilities with gear. Much like you get to see higher dps gains with gear than tanks do.