What they mean by "change the damage calculations of tanks"?

[Alahra]

Probably why I'm cowering under my desk hearing bomb sirens instead of looking for the shining airplane in the sky. But yea I'd be delighted if my intuition proves false.

I wouldn't worry too much. The class designers and content designers for XIV don't overlap much with the FFXI team from back then, and Yoshi's said before they really try to avoid nerfs because they know they don't feel good.

Have you read the tank threads where everyone is up in arms about STR gear and how tanks must wear vit!

None of that has anything to do with playing the class optimally, though, in terms of ability usage and high-skill stance swapping. The right side gear has no impact on the actual execution--only the final numbers of the results. Even if there was no option to wear STR, you'd still be able to push your DPS in the same way--you just wouldn't see the numbers hit the same high point.

[ManaKing]

I think the reason so many of us enjoy pushing DPS and stance swapping and all that is because it takes away fromy the boring meta of "oh let me stand here with my bazillion HP that I can't possibly die with while waiting for the next big hit to pop a cool down for and still not be close to dying cause I have a bazillion HP" some of us actually want to push our play and skill to the max and not be carebears. Sorry most of you ruin the game for everyone, if you want a game to emulate WoW so bad just go play WoW.

I doubt I should respond to a post with an amazing statement like that in it but what the hell.

If you actually have a reasonable level of toughness and cooldown management, then your healers can DPS. Fun fact, Healers can do tons of damage, significantly more than the difference between your tank stance and your balls-out-man-mode-dps-Dps-DPS!!!! lack of tank stance, if you can be a good tank and afford them that luxury. It's also safer, which is a word i like to translate into 'more likely to get my loot and less likely to wipe'.

Also "some of us actually want to push our play and skill to the max and not be carebears." sounds like WoW kid talk for video games is my life and I don't know how to be nice to others.

[Syzygian]

Have you read the tank threads where everyone is up in arms about STR gear and how tanks must wear vit!

GAWD CAN THIS LINE OF THINKING PLEASE DIE SLOWLY AND NEVER EVER EVER COME BACK.

"Oh look that tank's wearing STR gear, s/he obviously can't be anything but an unspeakable BADASS and a great player! Yup, prolly world first, that guy! I wonder if he's related to Xeno!?"

"PSH this dumbass tank is wearing VIT gear, we're all doomed to wipe 'cause s/he clearly has NO idea how to play their job or what any of their abilities do or how to tank! *abandons duty*"

Its this ludicrous, toxic school of thought that a cancerously large chunk of the community has clanging around in their heads that, I'm hoping, SE's adjustments will rid us of once and for all. -inb4 "oh, this guy just wants tanks to do 400 DPS and sit there like scrubs" -feel free to stalk my lodestone and see that I'm never wearing fending gear. I love tanking. I love DPS. I don't love this idiotic, borderline-caste system based on what GEAR you CLICKED onto your CHARACTER SHEET.

Edit for additional impact:
No other job-type in the game has this degree of a "Gear=Skill" mindset. Only in the tanking community, right here.

I doubt I should respond to a post with an amazing statement like that in it but what the hell.

If you actually have a reasonable level of toughness and cooldown management, then your healers can DPS. Fun fact, Healers can do tons of damage, significantly more than the difference between your tank stance and your balls-out-man-mode-dps-Dps-DPS!!!! lack of tank stance, if you can be a good tank and afford them that luxury. It's also safer, which is a word i like to translate into 'more likely to get my loot and less likely to wipe'.

Also "some of us actually want to push our play and skill to the max and not be carebears." sounds like WoW kid talk for video games is my life and I don't know how to be nice to others.

Healers play their jobs within ridiculous shackles because of the current tanking meta. Its considered ACCEPTABLE for a WHM to pull 100DPS or LESS in most raids. -_- And they're just resigned to it. I constantly ask my healers "Do I need to put some melds back on? We're good on DPS..." and they're like "No no... its fine..." ...I'll never even try healing in this game because holy shit. O.O

[DarioSkydragon]

Sorry if it's hard to understand what I say. English is not my primary language xD

I pentamelded my i110 accessories to play FCoB and even then switched to more parts slaying. Still, I could hardly overcome DPS, even those not optimized. Certainly bad DPS was possible to overcome.

I played as mt / ot all coils and FCoB was undoubtedly the easiest among them.

But the fact of the tanks dps are not required in these turns, meant that the vast majority of the tanks simply ignore its potential as DPS.

Now in Alex Savage, tanks and healers need to DPS, which made their lives much more challenging, both in its task of tanking / survive as the task of contributing to the DPS of the raid.

Even my friends tanks / healers who were against these attack classes now like to give DPS, and this led them to improve a lot as players.

I'm sorry for the tanks who just want to be walls, but the tank / healer current meta is much more fun for those who enter it for real.

[Ultimatecalibur]

I expect at most that the damage calculation change will close the damage gap between tanks with a Str build and those with a Vit build without making Tank damage "suck."

The problem currently with Tank gearing is that a Tank with a Strength right side deals 27% more damage than one with a Vit right side. This is a significant gap.

Changing it so that Str increases AP by .6 and Vit increases it by .4 would make the gap a much more sane 4.8% increase in damage output from switching sets.

[Syzygian]

Sorry if it's hard to understand what I say. English is not my primary language xD

I pentamelded my i110 accessories to play FCoB and even then switched to more parts slaying. Still, I could hardly overcome DPS, even those not optimized. Certainly bad DPS was possible to overcome.

I played as mt / ot all coils and FCoB was undoubtedly the easiest among them.


But the fact of the tanks dps are not required in these turns, meant that the vast majority of the tanks simply ignore its potential as DPS.

Now in Alex Savage, tanks and healers need to DPS, which made their lives much more challenging, both in its task of tanking / survive as the task of contributing to the DPS of the raid.

Even my friends tanks / healers who were against these attack classes now like to give DPS, and this led them to improve a lot as players.

I'm sorry for the tanks who just want to be walls, but the tank / healer current meta is much more fun for those who enter it for real.

Ah, I see. The thing is though, the people that were maximizing back in the days of scob and fcob are still maximizing now, and you carry that with you on the back of your skill as a player, and it transcends gear/stats. Even in coil, regardless of if you had to put on more fending gear, you still maximized your raid awareness and GCD usage to pump out as much DPS as you could in the confines of that. The assumption that tanks were just half-assing their play back then is misleading and a little insulting to tanks that were... i dunno... trying? And you did have to try at first unless you were clearing this in full i120-i130 gear. T12 is a great example of this. How easy people say T12 was is extremely telling of how geared they were when they cleared it. The Bennu DPS check was no joke.

The fact that maximizing before (like in bcob) meant mitigation and maximizing now means DPS does not make one inherently more skillful than the other. It just means "Woo! Big numbers on the screen!"

I do not think you have anything to be scared of with what SE appears to be planning. What I'm hoping is that they make it so that there is not a choice between gearsets with one being fundamentally better than the other. Who knows what they'll do. They might lock tanks into fending gear but give tank weapons a crap-ton more weapon damage or something. Your DPS might go down a bit from what it was in full slaying, but still WAY more than the equivalent in full fending, AND you'll have more HP, which means healers will get more of a chance to maximize their DPS as well, and we won't have this stigma in the game attached to our gear. Your skill as a player still matters and always does no matter what gear you are wearing, and lets be real here, most of the stunts us tanks pull in slaying gear ride on the skill of our healers, as much, if not more than our own. Yet we talk about it with such pride which I just do. not. under. stand. Its like check out my insane skills as I click this slaying gear onto my character sheet! Its a fallacy to assume a player cannot maximize their actual in-combat play based on limitations of gear.

[ManaKing]

Yeah but you could also have a SCH that can pull down 900 DPS on their own because their WHM partner can keep me alive through anything by themselves.

[Syzygian]

Yeah but you could also have a SCH that can pull down 900 DPS on their own because their WHM partner can keep me alive through anything by themselves.

Very rare in Alex as rarely are you the only one taking a crapton of damage. MT and OT both have to tank and both eat millions of damage over the course of each fight. If the SCH is really pumping out 900 DPS and never having to heal you, you should ditch that SCH and bring a SMN and see if the WHM is *actually* solo-healing.

[DarioSkydragon]

and lets be real here, most of the stunts us tanks pull in slaying gear ride on the skill of our healers, as much, if not more than our own. Yet we talk about it with such pride which I just do. not. under. stand. Its like.

You're right about that. My equipment is always discussed with the healers of my group before entering a run. I do not say that your opinion is wrong. But it's your opinion. My opinion is that play tank became more challenging and fun with the whole question of stancedancing, mix str / vit equips and etc. Tanks and healers are the only roles that can get some customization in their equipment (str / vit and accuracy) beyond the traditional crit or det and it certainly improved the game for me. It existed before the HW, but my fear is that we may enter into a linearity that never even existed in the game, as melded accessories there since the time of T1.

[Ultimatecalibur]

You're right about that. My equipment is always discussed with the healers of my group before entering a run. I do not say that your opinion is wrong. But it's your opinion. My opinion is that play tank became more challenging and fun with the whole question of stancedancing, mix str / vit equips and etc. Tanks and healers are the only roles that can get some customization in their equipment (str / vit and accuracy) beyond the traditional crit or det and it certainly improved the game for me. It existed before the HW, but my fear is that we may enter into a linearity that never even existed in the game, as melded accessories there since the time of T1.

From the sounds of things, aggressive "stance dancing" tanking is unlikely to be removed and the changes to materia melding and the tank damage formula are intended to close the damage gap between Str Accessories and Vit Accessories while reducing the power of Pentamelds.