Where the Meta/Paradigm Problem Applies

[Exodus_Kenpachi]

Snip lots of stuff I agree with... Surprisingly...

I think one of the biggest issues that casual tanks face is that 1. Never anywhere in the game is a tank pushed towards Strength gear. 2. Getting Strength gear as a tank (perticularly Savage Strength gear) is almost impossible without a static.


So they will be wearing the best gear that has dropped for them which will always be fending gear.

The community needs to chill out on DF tanks that don\\'t raid. Shit... If I kicked every halfassed DF DPS I get saddled with I would never complete my ESO grind for the week.

Honestly I believe that Fending gear SHOULD have strength on it. This would balance out melds, help out new tanks, and would fit well with tanks who like to feel tanky and tanks who like huge numbers flying across the parse.

[Rhaja]

Or we could have stances work like cleric's stance but with VIT and STR. Only issue I could see with this is WARs who switch out, get a massive drop in HP, and suddenly drop XD.

[winsock]

Lower all tank dps, give dmg on parry to compensate such that the additional dps from parry is typically better than STR.

[Tyrial]

Lower all tank dps, give dmg on parry to compensate such that the additional dps from parry is typically better than STR.

This would require a complete overhaul of how Parry works. As it stands you can't even reach a reasonable increase in parry rate with all of the current available parry gear.

[Gorlioliolio]

Didn't read any of the responses, but my opinion is that SE needs to go back to the fight design style of original coil for tanks.

When we were clearing t5, we had average i80 gear, as a PLD I don't think I even broke 6k without food. Twintania death sentences could hit up to 5.5k without mitigation, so death sentence+auto attack with no CDs usually meant death. Death sentence also had a fairly quick cast time compared to something like hypercompressed plasma where I feel like I have a few seconds to pop all my stuff and if you were mid rage of halone good luck getting a CD off before the cast finished. On top of all this it was 30-35 seconds apart meaning you had to stagger CDs and still ended up having ones you had to rely on virus/eye/adlo/SS to mitigate because you didn't have enough CDs for the whole fight.

Twintania also had a priority casting system, where if you pushed the percent slightly faster the entire cast sequence would be switched around, sure some things happened exactly alike every time, but if people pulled slightly more or less dps you could sit in conflag for every death sentence, or you could get it right when the whm has to heal up from fireballs.

This constant excessive damage to the tank kept healers healing (you essentially had to spam the living crap out of the tank during healing debuff or he was gonna die) the tanks in tank stance, and the game being played like a trinity game.

If SE wants tanks to feel like tanks and not dps in heavy armor they need to go back to this style of fight design. One thing I have never seen is twintanias enrage because that was never the fear.

[Yosho]

Or we could have stances work like cleric's stance but with VIT and STR. Only issue I could see with this is WARs who switch out, get a massive drop in HP, and suddenly drop XD.

I really like this idea, its a good start.

[rawker]

Again, cleric stance is swapping INT nd MND. These stats, if you try to analyze more, just swaps healing potency to damage dealing. If we want to translate it on tanks, it's much more logical that it swaps STR and DEX.... If only SE made DEX stacking tanks relevant.

[Lyth]

Most people aren't watching what you're doing in casual content. People start to scrutinize your play when things go wrong. You might get suggestions about strength gear if you're losing aggro consistently, but I'd be very surprised if someone from DF insisted that you stance dance to do more dps.

This "meta" isn't really a new or even a controversial issue in raiding. The reason it's being made into a big deal now is because you're seeing people clear content with non-PLD MTs, and the assumption is that it's entirely a dps vs. mitigation issue, rather than personal preference on the part of the tank.

[Syzygian]

The reason it's being made into a big deal now is because you're seeing people clear content with non-PLD MTs, and the assumption is that it's entirely a dps vs. mitigation issue, rather than personal preference on the part of the tank.

Which is funny because the groups that are bringing a PLD + other tank are shooting themselves in the foot on these DPS checks by making the PLD MT. There's not a composition of tanks in the game right now in which it is DPS efficient for the PLD to MT. Its OT damage is not too far behind the other tanks while its MT damage is lightyears below both.

[eagledorf]

Right now at level 60 there's nothing you want to wear Fending for except for maybe trash pulls if you're really not geared.

Why? Well to begin with you simply don't get hit very hard or...very much at all in dungeon boss fights or EX Primals. They've designed these fights with long mechanics that don't do damage (like...running around wondering where the birdy's shadow went, running around to hit wind sprites, running in circles around the boss, running around and carrying totems) and no threatening damage on the tank even in minimal gear. Sometimes they've given them soft enrage on top of that (like the stacks on the first boss of Fractal) that mean you actually take more damage if you stack vitality. During these breaks Regen/Selene continue to heal you so there are these short bursts where your HP is going down, then it goes up rapidly for a fairly long period of time.

Even raid content. If you want to wipe on A4 Savage and start again and missed the cleave, it takes forever to wipe because the autos are so weak they won't kill one DPS for a long time even with no heals.

It's not the players' fault or any kind of nasty trickle-down from elitists, it's the devs' fault for designing content that doesn't require a tank.

1-60 is a different matter. Several bosses hit pretty hard and your healer will be cursing you if you don't have a certain amount of HP.