Make tenacity great

[Absurdity]

I mean that's the whole reason why tenacity is such a lackluster stat to begin with, the damage scales worse than even determination (if only slightly) and the passive mitigation is absolutely unnecessary because we have way too much mitigation already.

I'm also not sure where this idea of our mitigation cooldowns scaling with gear came from, it's a fixed % value and should remain so because anything else would just make it overkill with the current encounter design.


In regards to making tenacity our main stat instead of strength it would essentially have to be nothing more than a cosmetic change to keep the balance.

Let's say tenacity becomes our main stat which gives both an increase in damage and mitigation, then they would probably just lower the mitigation we gain from armor so we end up at the same passive damage reduction we would've ended up with our current stats.

[Kabooa]

I mean that's the whole reason why tenacity is such a lackluster stat to begin with, the damage scales worse than even determination (if only slightly) and the passive mitigation is absolutely unnecessary because we have way too much mitigation already.

At this stage, it seems less likely that the general population will accept reworking tenacity over just removing it (and piety) and just making DH universal.

Attributes at large are not interesting enough to warrant the trouble, and all this does is theoretically increase non-Warrior DPS. Combine it with an appropriate increase of Warrior potency and removal of Auto-DHit such as another poster in here mentioned.

Healers might need some MP economy tuning, but that'll close this chapter on Accessory threads.

[Absurdity]

I honestly wouldn't mind that change, it might actually make the choice between augmented tome and savage gear more interesting because currently if you have two pieces of gear for the same slot, one with crit/det and one with crit/ten, there isn't really even a choice to make.


Of course it is the easy way out because it means SE doesn't have to redesign tenacity to be an interesting substat but I honestly can't see anything game changing like "increase xyz job mechanic proc chance" or "decreases cooldown of X by Y seconds" happening anyway.

[Lyth]

There wouldn't be any problem with getting rid of Tenacity/Piety and making DH universal. The entire point of stats are to make new pieces of gear feel like an actual upgrade.

[Gserpent]

Materia in general serve no purpose and should be removed. The only materia with any degree of relevance towards build customization are Skill Speed and Spell Speed, and even then only for high-performance play and only for specific classes. And they could just simply set a given class's GCD to a specific point and redesign the rotation as needed if it would be a serious problem for them to be set to one specific GCD speed.

The *idea* behind materia (as with item reforging and fiddling with affixes in WoW, Diablo 3, and virtually any other RPG with such a system) is that the player chooses what they want. But that kind of design is mutually exclusive with a balanced high-end raiding/battle system. Players will simply math out which affixes or stats are best and will then proceed to all use the exact same gemming scheme - or they will be inferior.

More than that, though, the proof of how meaningless materia generally are is easy to see by comparing materia loadouts. A tank with Tenacity in every single possible slot is not meaningfully weaker than a tank with recommended BiS gemming - they will still do more than enough DPS to carry their own weight and then some with proper play, so the only difference is if you actually give a damn about fighting for top spots on the FFLogs leaderboards. The same is true for healers with Piety, etc. Even not having the ideal GCD speed for your class doesn't suddenly make them unable to achieve adequate levels of DPS.

Materia basically only matter insofar as you have *something* your class can make use of in every socket, and even then that only matters if you are raiding savages or ultimates - even extremes don't really require you to use materia in order to produce enough DPS to clear, though it might be a little tough if you're doing the brand new even-patch extreme without crafted gear or anything better than last tier's best gear.

Honestly, XIV needs to shift to a horizontal progression system. Their design philosophy is moving more and more towards "as accessible as possible" (which I think is a *good* thing), and that kind of design philosophy tends to be pretty much mutually exclusive with vertical progression systems, as those systems naturally and inevitably gate off content behind grind or performance walls. I guess we're already close enough, though.

[Lyth]

Materia, much like teleportation fees, is there to help permanently remove gil out of the in-game economy. Players don't like it, but it's an essential function to keep gil values from endlessly inflating.

Stats and customization are only meaningless if they're designed that way. You're able to math out a universally optimal choice because the present stat design is incredibly safe. Nearly every stat does the same thing (increases damage), except that some do it better than others. The haste stats (skill speed/spell speed) are really the only ones that break this rule, which is why they're unsurprisingly the most fun to mess around with. I would love to max out haste.

You'll actually find a fair amount of variation in games with talent tree systems, Warcraft included. This isn't purely due to lack of knowledge. Sometimes the best build is fight specific. Sometimes the best build is a function of player skill and how much error you can allow yourself as a player. Black Ox Brew may be the mathematically best pick if you are able to use it on cooldown, but the Light Brewing passive is a safer/more forgiving pick if your cooldown usage isn't spot on. You can have a lot of nuance in these systems, but you'll need a little more than four game designers assigned to 19 jobs.

The problem with Tenacity is that it's really just an inferior damage stat with some other random stuff tacked on (+5 to Lalafell detection rate). If you want it to be a 'tank-exclusive stat', then it needs to be at least equivalently desirable as Direct Hit.

[Gserpent]

Materia, much like teleportation fees, is there to help permanently remove gil out of the in-game economy. Players don't like it, but it's an essential function to keep gil values from endlessly inflating.

Stats and customization are only meaningless if they're designed that way. You're able to math out a universally optimal choice because the present stat design is incredibly safe. Nearly every stat does the same thing (increases damage), except that some do it better than others. The haste stats (skill speed/spell speed) are really the only ones that break this rule, which is why they're unsurprisingly the most fun to mess around with. I would love to max out haste.

You'll actually find a fair amount of variation in games with talent tree systems, Warcraft included. This isn't purely due to lack of knowledge. Sometimes the best build is fight specific. Sometimes the best build is a function of player skill and how much error you can allow yourself as a player. Black Ox Brew may be the mathematically best pick if you are able to use it on cooldown, but the Light Brewing passive is a safer/more forgiving pick if your cooldown usage isn't spot on. You can have a lot of nuance in these systems, but you'll need a little more than four game designers assigned to 19 jobs.

The problem with Tenacity is that it's really just an inferior damage stat with some other random stuff tacked on (+5 to Lalafell detection rate). If you want it to be a 'tank-exclusive stat', then it needs to be at least equivalently desirable as Direct Hit.

Those are all good points, that ultimately just loop back to the core design principle of "ultra safe."

It's not a coincidence that every tier has fights that are basically partial or even near-complete rehashes of previous Alexander or Omegascape fights. E11S ain't got a unique bone in its entire body. It's faster and easier to just copy-paste mechanics you've used time and time again, just like it's faster and easier to homogenize the absolute crap out of things so that you don't have to worry about people whining about gameplay balance. Between Gordias and Brute Justice being ball-bustingly difficult and people screaming bloody murder about certain classes being overpowered/underpowered, it's like the entire dev team has PTSD from Heavensward.

I would love to see materia made so it's less possible to just spreadsheet out the best possible combination, but that would require a way to save and swap between sets of materia. It would also require materia to be more than "do more damage, differently," but I'm not convinced the game engine can even handle the things they'd need to start doing in order to make defensive materia or "utility" materia a viable design possibility. Not being able to design for reactive gameplay due to the game's garbage servers seems like it limits the team more and more every year. Too bad they'd never be able to convince SE to spring for better server architecture.

[Cabalabob]

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.

What I mean is that if they made tenacity any stronger it would become the stat of choice, you wouldn’t be fixing anything, just changing the thing we meld. Substats in this game are too simplistic and at the end of the day you’re going to pick the stat that gives the biggest damage boost no matter how it accomplishes that.

Tenacity as it stands works as a progression stat, it’s niche but it’s an identity. If they made it so tenacity was the only meld worth taking then what’s the point of having options for stats in the first place? You can either take the safety net of tenacity/piety or go for the optimal damage boost of direct hit, there’s a choice there (even if it’s a mistake/oversight).

To me what they need to do is remove certain substats entirely and rework their purpose. Skill/spell speed should be combined into just speed or haste because while speed has a place in the game as people can alter their rotation with a certain amount of speed the split between skill and spell is arbitrary at this point since jobs either don’t use both stats and the jobs that do are just being unnecessarily gimped on a part of their rotation by the split. Determination should just be removed entirely since at this point it’s just the same as primary stats but weaker.

Then we would be left with speed to alter your rotation, crit for just extra damage and then they could rework the remaining stats into something useful outside of damage (tenacity purely reduce damage taken, change direct hit to something like evasion, a stat that’s gone completely under-utilised in ffxiv and keep piety as mp regen rate).

[Gserpent]

Tenacity isn't even really a progression stat. Its benefits are too weak to be meaningful. Blind prog week 1 wipes are generally not understanding or correctly solving mechanics, and in Eden's Promise are typically due to non-tank players being dead since raid damage is much higher than in previous tiers. The benefits of a full Tenacity meld are too minuscule to really have a meaningful impact; you might as well use a typical BiS meld so you get that bit more of extra DPS so you can meet those actually quite challenging week 1 DPS checks on floors 3 and 4.

I think if they removed the DPS component entirely and doubled or even tripled its defensive benefits, Tenacity would be valuable and useful as a proper progression stat. You could achieve meaningful damage reduction and healing increase by stacking enough of it, which would take a little bit of pressure off healers during week 1/2 prog. But as it is right now, it's trying to do everything and it does everything poorly.