Quote Originally Posted by Sapphidia View Post
Oh I definitely agree with ZDamned about the ilevel requirements. The issue is more that, at least in my mind, if a TANK is barely at the ilevel requirement for a super hard raid encounter, then surely they should be concerned about minmaxing to optimise their survivability above all else. If a tank can waltz into an encounter wearing strength accessories, spend half the time tanking it in Sword Oath/Deliverance, and have no more difficulty than when geared out to the hilt then something is weird about balance.

It just feels like the incentive in 3.0 raids is much more highly swung in favor of squeezing out every last teeny tiny bit of DPS from healers and tanks, rather than having healers and tanks prioritise being able to actually stay alive and have no real test on that front. I may be wrong but i certainly don't recall MTs on T13 initial clears wearing full slaying sets and spending half the time tanking Bahamut in sword oath (not that I was part of the first clears of course!)

I think the issue is mostly due to the fact that A1S and A3S have much more -hard- enrages than just harsh dps checks. It's literally X DPS in this timescale or you wipe, whereas earlier content tended to be more about low dps meaning the next cycle of mechanics might be harder to deal with, so you'd get overwhelmed but the leeway was just about there.
I agree, but I think something needs to be clarified:

To tank in Deliverance you need to compensate with CDs. Basically, you want to essentially be in Defiance but without having to... actually be in Defiance. As an example, in A1S 1st and 3rd phase I start with Thrill + Conv + Foresight + Awareness, then when that's done rolling I pop Vengeance, then I'm popping Second Wind for the cleave and Holmganging the tank buster, then rolling Raw Intuition a bit later to mitigate autos until the final cleave.

PLD is a case where you can get away more with SwO tanking sans CDs due to the shield, but compensating with CDs applies to all 3 in a general sense.

So the problem is less "you can tank for a long time out of your tank stance" and more "you can essentially be in your tank stance while in Deliverance, and not need any extra mitigation". This is due to the fact that auto attacks, in this game, are nothing but fluff damage. Fairy heals, Regen/Med2, and the occasional Cure will keep you relatively topped for all that time.

The easiest way to prevent this is make autos hit hard enough to require a tank stance (already the case unless you want to severely burden your healers, though with more gear it will start to become irrelevant again) and have frequent enough tank busters to not allow for you to just pop CDs out of tank stance gg ez. Bahamut's Flatten was actually on the perfect timer for this, so it'd be cool if they could balance more fights like that for tanks. Maybe it's because we're basing all this on the first round of Alex that we're assuming everything will be as smooth sailing in the later stages, but it's still a reasonable worry to have right now.

A3S is also pretty much the perfect playground for stance swapping, no actual tank busters, just a stacking debuff which needs to be swapped for anyway. I know in A4S you can tank the legs in Deliverance, but I'm curious about the boss himself.