Tank Balance

[Drakkaelus]

Tanks should get like a massive nerf to their DPS and a massive boost to their enmity gains.

This would get rid of 90% of the false tanks who only tank so they can DPS. Only the true metalheads will remain when the scrubs who bandwagoned tank realize they have to actually tank.

Making fending an almost necessity to be equipped. The fact that tanks can get away with wearing slaying accessories shows poor game design that's obviously heavily favoring a more casual player. If you disagree, then you know nothing about game design. That's a simple 100% fact.

So once I've established aggro, I can get up and walk away from the keyboard? Yeah, let's make the entire game as, "exciting" as PLD AoE. Sounds like a blast.

I guess you never do anything but spam your enmity combo/flash, right? No offensive cooldowns or combos at all? Somehow I doubt that.

The idea that tanking has to be as dry as possible is what chases so many people away from it in the first place.

[RecklessLion]

Man the logic in this thread shows me how close minded and lack of creativity. Most of all the game is geared to keep casual players around. Square succeeded in that FFXIV is one the highest played mmorpgs. With that being said they did things to make tanking roles actually fun. What yall trying to do is nerf all tanks to one style of game play which alone defeats the creativity of FFXIV. They want you to bounce around to different classes so you won't hit a comfort zone. It gets old and boring but the bounces of classes keeps casual player interested. And the concept benefits pro players at the same time. Nothing is really wrong with PLD the content doesn't agree with its play style and that's that. If you want balance square should balance out the content where both tanking and damage matters in different scenarios. All tanks should balance out are yall crazy? It takes 30 mins for a dps to Q up now forcing it to play boring you think the wait is long.

[Phoenicia]

I have to post this here since it's funny:



"Colin Farrel is right, PLD is shit."

[Reynhart]

So, what's the problem with Tanks? It's that Vitality, their main stat, is treated the same way for them as it is for everyone else: once you can survive the fight, stop worrying about it. It is the only main stat that becomes less useful at certain thresholds.

Very interesting point.
It could be interesting to find an another effect that VIT could offer to counter this.

I think the problem is twofold :
- Vitality only gives HP
- Healing spells are too strong

Why is "more HP" a problem ? Because, unless you're at max HP, you actually don't care what your max HP is. If you have only 1000 HP left, one 1000 hit will kill you, wether you have 2000 or 25000 max HP
As for healing spells, the problem is that healers don't care about auto-attacks. They can keep you alive from auto-attacks for...well, forever, in fact. If their wasn't any tankbusters, tanks would be invincible.

So, what can be changed :
1) Vitality should add a constant mitigation. That way, if you have 1000 HP left, a 1000 hit (before mitigation) will not have the same effect depending on your vitality.
2) Healing spell's potencies should adjusted so that auto-attacks are a real thing, not a minor annoyance. That way, adding vitality would still be useful since its much more difficult to mitigate auto-attacks in the long run.

After that, it can be interesting to decide if Vitality would only be physical mitigation, and Mind for magical mitigation (And Dark Mind could be a swap between the two like Cleric Stance).
Or vitality could enhance heals received, to the same effect, having a constant effect on your mitigation/recovery.

As a sidenote, Piety is the same...enough MP to manage the fight, then the rest is useless...but nobody actually focuses on Piety, so, who cares

[Phoenicia]

Snip.

Personally I liked the way stats worked in FFXI. The whole system of "Main stat is the glass and secondary stat is the water" was interesting for me. i.e. STR raised the cap for your damage, but attack power was what decided how much damage you did. Each point of STR gave 2 power IIRC.

So you had corresponding stats:

STR = Power.
DEX = Accuracy/Crit.
VIT = Def
AGI = Evasion/Block/Parry
INT = Magic
MND = Magic
CHR = .... Yeah

Then you had abilities benefiting from different stats. Most of the great ax weaponskills for example had 1:1 damage scaling from both STR and VIT. (The weaponskill uses STR+ VIT equally as added WD). and some sword weaponskills used STR and MND. Daggers used DEX exclusively IIRC. BRD abilities used CHR as a modifier and Black Magic (since multiple classes used it) had INT.. etc.

Auto attacks were STR, THF abilities used DEX and AGI... etc.

Anyways, not to derail, I think a quick "fix" to tanks gearing would be to encourage tanks to gear for VIT by giving VIT additional benefits. VIT should have added defense and/or have a % of VIT act as pseudo-STR for tanks only.

[Reynhart]

Personally I liked the way stats worked in FFXI.

In FFXI, VIT was a physical mitigation on top of adding Defense. (And MND, a magical mitigation)

Since Defense is a passive constant mitigation in FFXIV, VIT adding defense would have the same effect, yes.

But I really think the focus should move a little towards mitigating auto-attacks, since they basically "don't matter" for now.

[Phoenicia]

In FFXI, VIT was a physical mitigation on top of adding Defense. (And MND, a magical mitigation)

Since Defense is a passive constant mitigation in FFXIV, VIT adding defense would have the same effect, yes.

But I really think the focus should move a little towards mitigating auto-attacks, since they basically "don't matter" for now.

Yeah, but if both our mitigation AND damage scaled from our main stat, like how healing and damage scales for healers, then tanks would be more inclined to equip VIT gear. Even if the added benefit is smaller than pure STR accessories.

I think also part of the problem is at the start in 2.xx, SE had tanks getting "at least something" from too many stats. We had STR for damage and block/parry values. We had DEX affecting rates. But they were at dismally low rates that they didn't matter. And lack of gear variety made it even worse. SE made a good "choice" by removing that dependency form those stats.

[Reynhart]

Yeah, but if both our mitigation AND damage scaled from our main stat, like how healing and damage scales for healers, then tanks would be more inclined to equip VIT gear. Even if the added benefit is smaller than pure STR accessories.

But, the problem is that every gear gives Vitality. Healers don't have high MND and high INT, that's why they have Cleric Stance (Besides, damage and healing do not scale from the same stat).
On our left side, we have the exact same "attack" and VIT bonus than any physical job. To work like healers, our STR bonus should be removed and we should have a skill to swap VIT and STR.

If we separate HP and Vitality, the VIT bonus could be removed from any non-tank gear, since their HP pool would still increase with their level. This way, VIT would really become a "tank" stat.

Another thing to consider is that attack and healing spells use three base stats : Weapon "damage", Attack/Healing potency and skill potency.
Maybe we can work with something similar for mitigation.

[rawker]

Swapping str and vit.... U serious?

[Reynhart]

Swapping str and vit.... U serious?

Well, if you're the OT and VIT doesn't change your HP pool anymore...yeah, I'd be serious about it.


Another crazy idea...YES, I'm bored at work

What if tanks mitigates by accumulating a "Barrier" ?

Nowadays, mitigation is, mostly, a passive thing. Pop you CD, wait for the blast...even WAR has it a little.
BUT, like DPS constantly attacking to build greater DPS and healers constantly healing to build greater HPS, tanks could constantly use skills to build greater BPS (Barrier Per Second).

The barrier would work like Stoneskin or Addlo, meaning that, as long as you have that barrier, you won't take any damage. This way, tanks could have skills with potencies, even combo, that would give them higher and higher barrier numbers. Rampart, Sentinel, Vengeance...all those skills would work like Flight of Fight or Internal Release by increasing your numbers for a short period of time, adding more chance for them to crit, etc...

With a system like that, tanks would have a rotation to master to accumulate the highest BPS, and harder content could throw higher and higher damage against your barrier meaning you'd really have to master your skills to reduce/prevent your HP from dropping as long as you can.