New Job: Pugilist Tank

[PlayerEx]

Simply add a new job to pugilist available at level thirty that fulfills the tank role. Tank would be focused around evasion for survival more than defence or HPs. This adds a tank role to every current monk.

[Maku]

And you are going to get your position bonuses how?

[Kitru]

And you are going to get your position bonuses how?

Just remove the positional requirements and fold them into the normal attacks (or change the positional requirement to "front" so that you can only get the benefit while being in front of the target, which means tanking).

PGL is actually fertile ground for a tank job. You can coopt Greased Lightning to provide +eva instead of +dam while in the tank stance, which acts as both the damage reduction and the increased survivability; for enmity mods on the attacks, you can simply have raptor and coeurl forms increase enmity by x3 and x5, respectively, while those forms are active (another option would be to simply add high enmity mods to certain raptor and coeurl form requirement attacks if you don't want to have the problem PLD has with only being able to use high enmity combos); there's already a pretty decent native CD suite (Second Wind, Mantra, Featherfoot) that just needs a bit more (Conv from GLA, Foresight from MRD; just leaves 2 more from job), and there's Fists of Earth as well. You'd simply need to add a tank stance (30% +hp to provide slightly more eHP thanks to reliance upon RNG mitigation and 80% increase to def and mdef to make PGL armor equivalent to WAR/PLD armor; you could have it tweak Fists of Earth to have these attributes instead), a couple CDs, and probably some type of controllable effect similar to IB that increases max HP for those times when you need to deal with big spikes.

[Messenger]

THen give him a kunai + a utsusemi skill and you have...

[Anienai]

THen give him a kunai + a utsusemi skill and you have...

No reason to bring a PLD tank.

[Alwryn]

With the current design philosophy of ARR, a evasion based tank would break the game. Let's use the ever present twintania and extreme modes for examples. Firstly, we need to come to a understanding about evasion tank survivability. That is, for any semblance of balance, it's primary mitigation comes through evasion; meaning that it can't really take a hard hit. A obvious, but needed statement.

Now, for extreme modes, or turn 2 of coil. I cite stacking debuffs. The ability to completely mitigate these raid mechanics through dodging, would completely void PLD and WAR in these encounter. In the case of twintania, the ability to evade Death Sentence would once again, break the encounter to the evasion tanks favor.

Well, how do you fix such an obvious overpowered job? Well, for that to happen and not break the mechanics, would mean that DS or incinerate, or MB, or whatever would have to ALWAYS hit. meaning the evasion tanks primary means of mitigation is now void. Remember how evasion tanks can't really take strong hits, like death sentence? It would be underpowered in this case, if not completely unviable. This is only taking into account certain factors as well, for example, what about aoe damage? Now, I'm not saying a evasion tank isn't possible, but would require something really complex, such as tiered levels of evasion, you can't simply evade an attack but you can evade most of an attack. Which would be similar to a PLD, only with a better shield and fewer cooldowns. Of course, that's just a simple muse on my behalf and the actual viability of such a system is suspect.

Point is, I extremely doubt an evasion tank is ever going to happen, and if it does, it'll be nothing like what most people will expect or want.

[Kitru]

With the current design philosophy of ARR, a evasion based tank would break the game. Let's use the ever present twintania and extreme modes for examples. Firstly, we need to come to a understanding about evasion tank survivability. That is, for any semblance of balance, it's primary mitigation comes through evasion; meaning that it can't really take a hard hit. A obvious, but needed statement.

You're remarkably uninformed about tank design. There are 2 aspects of a tank that have to be balanced: eHP (the amount of premitigation damage that a tank can take in a single blow discounting any and all RNG effects) and mean mitigation (the effective increase in healing received based upon your mitigation effects as derived from reduction in damage taken over time). Certain mitigation mechanisms will bolster one while ignoring the other (+hp increases eHP but does nothing for mean mitigation; evasion and +healing increase mean mitigation while doing nothing for eHP) while others bolster both (damage reduction reduces damage over time and, because it's always there, increases eHP as well).

If you're not completely ignorant of the dichotomy of tank mechanisms, it's actually easy to design an evasion tank. Hell, I actually outlined exactly what you'd need to do in my previous post: you give it +hp (to provide equivalent eHP) to make up for the fact that the evasion does nothing for it. You get the similar eHP as the other tanks (slightly higher to make up for the spikier damage profile) as well as similar mean mitigation, which means that it's balanced against the other tanks, no problem whatsoever.

If you want to talk about truly borked tank designs that require all kinds of complex math and design to balance them out, try looking into blink tanking, like NIN in FFXI; blink effects create *all* kinds of problems because they're controlled 100% mitigation mechanisms (which means that they're either monumentally abusable if they can apply to anything and incredibly weak if big attacks go right through them) that are charge based (which means that their performance is *highly* dependent upon the number of incoming attacks per second, which causes wild vacillations in performance based upon the number of attackers and their attack speed).

The only time tanks get borked is when the designer is ignorant of the actual mechanics and balance constructs involved (like conflating eHP with mean mitigation or assuming that there is only a single metric with which to measure tank survivability). If you actually know what you're doing, it's pretty simple as long as you understand the mechanics you're electing to deal with.

[Alwryn]

You think you know more then you do, I'll forgive your terrible attitude though. I also choose to omit any references to eHP, they're meaningless to most people and unrelated to my key argument of evasion tanks breaking mechanics. I will comment on this though.

you give it +hp (to provide equivalent eHP) to make up for the fact that the evasion does nothing for it.

An evasion tank that doesn't benefit from evasion?

You're just throwing out ideas that you'd think would work, not caring about how they would actually work in practice or their balance. You also still haven't commented on how an evasion tank will affect current mechanics like debuff stacking.

Edit: For a new tank to be balanced with the other tanks, their total eHP and mitigation potential have to be similar. That is not only on paper, but in practice. Remember 2.0 WAR was somewhat balanced on paper, but due to how it worked in practice it was inferior to PLD. Evasion as a mechanic would skyrocket a tanks ability to mitigate damage, therefore for any semblance of balance on paper, evasion tanks would need to be less beefy then other tanks.

Please try to think things out before you post and insult, it cheapens the community.

[Kitru]

An evasion tank that doesn't benefit from evasion?

No, I was saying that Evasion does nothing for eHP, not the tank itself. Evasion is a mean mitigation mechanism, not an eHP mechanism. As such, you give the class +hp to allow it to survive the burst effects that you think render them non-viable coinflip tanks. This is exactly what the devs did with WARs through Defiance: +healing is there for mean mitigation and +hp is there for eHP.

You're just throwing out ideas that you'd think would work, not caring about how they would actually work in practice or their balance. You also still haven't commented on how an evasion tank will affect current mechanics like debuff stacking.

No, I'm pointing out the exact ways that an evasion tank can be implemented because that's how they're implemented in a balanced manner. The whole question of debuff stacking is a nonissue because the very mechanics that apply the mechanic relevant debuff stacks are those that you cannot avoid with evasion. Evasion does not nor should it apply to all attacks which you seem to think that it should. It's the exact reason why you provide it with eHP so that it can survive the burst attacks that it cannot avoid with the evasion working to simply reduce healing requirements over time.

Edit: For a new tank to be balanced with the other tanks, their total eHP and mitigation potential have to be similar. That is not only on paper, but in practice. Remember 2.0 WAR was somewhat balanced on paper, but due to how it worked in practice it was inferior to PLD. Evasion as a mechanic would skyrocket a tanks ability to mitigate damage, therefore for any semblance of balance on paper, evasion tanks would need to be less beefy then other tanks.

First off, I was the one that told you about the separation of eHP and mean mitigation as balance concerns for tanks. Don't try and copycat to make it seem like you know what you're talking about.

Secondly, WAR was not balanced with PLD on paper. It was a well known fact that PLD was explicitly better at mitigation which is why WAR was not brought. Defiance was explicitly worse than Shield Oath, the WAR CD suite was a joke compared to PLD's, and Inner Beast was basically worthless in 8m content. Anyone that honestly thought that WAR and PLD were balanced for survivability in 2.0 was deluding themselves.

Third, Evasion does not skyrocket mitigation capability. A 25% chance to avoid damage provides the exact same mean mitigation benefits as a 33% increase to healing received or 25% reduction in damage taken. The only time that Evasion breaks the game is when you have someone who doesn't know the math assigning numbers. Your whole "omg debuffs" argument is completely irrelevant anyways because you're operating under a flawed understanding of the attack system of the game anyways.

Please try to think things out before you post and insult, it cheapens the community.

I do think things out which you apparently do not (nor do you have much in the way of reading comprehension). You operate under flawed assumptions with a equally flawed understanding of the concepts while parroting things that I've already said in order to make it look like you aren't. Try doing some math and research before you tell someone who *has* done the math and research (and actually gotten changes implemented in other games exclusively through providing devs with math) that they're wrong. It cheapens the community when someone like you starts spouting inaccuracies as if they were anything resembling the truth.

If you think I'm being rude, I'm not. I simply cannot abide idiocy and don't feel like making people that don't know what they're talking about feel like they were doing anything but.

[Alwryn]

snip

We could go back and forth all day but I have neither the interest or energy to argue with you.


I suppose we will have to agree to disagree.