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

[Freyyy]

snip

Except that a full STR tank will not completely disable the healer's ability to DPS. It will just lower it at most and not for much compared to what the tank gains. It's also better to optimize tank DPS rather than healer DPS if you really had to choose for very simple reasons :

- Tanks have 100% damage uptime
- Healer accuracy sucks ass in a fashion that you can even miss in Fractal Continuum (happens to me when I run ex roulettes as SCH). And yeah crafted accessories can make up for a part of that, but you still can't reach the accuracy cap and will keep missing anyway. This sole reason makes healer DPS a little bit unreliable
- Healers need to actually completely stop their primary duty in order to start DPSing, where tanks can just do both at the same time.
- The healing needed in raid fights is mostly from raid wide damage or mechanic damage on other players than the tank. A tank being tankier only reduces the amount of healing needed on himself. Tank damage is ridiculously low in this set of raid, a tank having less VIT or tanking in DPS stance doesn't really increase the amount of overall healing needed, thus not hindering healer DPS at all.
- Tanks are damage dealing jobs. They have DPS rotations and damage-boosting abilities. They have much more DPS than healers and their damage output is actually reliable. The DPS gain from a tank > the DPS gain from a healer.

Stop speaking like a tank DPSing prevents the healer from DPSing too, that's a completely false assumption and an excuse for poorly skilled healers to not DPS or to hate on DPSing tanks on forums.

With that said, I raid with healers who both love DPSing too. For Savage raiding, we tanks are gearing for both HP and DPS for only one reason : we need a "safety" threshold in order to survive big attacks. Everything else we put on STR. It has nothing to do with "balancing healer and tank DPS" or whatever. It's "making so that the tank survives everything, then optimize his DPS. Healers go DPS when healing isn't needed". More VIT than necessary on a tank will never decrease the amount of overall healing needed in a fight and a tank stance-dancing will have his tank stance up for damage that matters, the 20% more damage he will take from not having its tank stance the rest of the time is negligible and he should be using CDs to compensate.
I also occasionally play SCH, tho not in Savage for instance. But everytime I run experts or stuff like that, I love going full ham on DPS and I always deal almost the same amount of damage regardless of how the tank is geared or stance-dances unless he is terribad and doesn't use any CD, which is then poor gameplay and is actually the same whether the tank is full VIT or full STR.

Tank DPS doesn't hinder healer DPS in any way if done correctly.

Now let's get back to the original thread's point.

[Sapphidia]

- The healing needed in raid fights is mostly from raid wide damage or mechanic damage on other players than the tank.

This is kind of the most important quote in the entire tank meta discussion, in my opinion.

There IS a benefit from tanks gearing to be tankier, to have huge hitpoint pools and high parry and stay in tank stance - but this benefit in current raid content is absolutely negligible. Tank healing is not difficult. In most cases it can be done by a regen and a fairy. Whilst people will argue that the dps-tank meta existed in 2.0, noone can possibly say with a straight face that it was as drastic as it was now.

Bahumut Prime, Nael and Twintania all hit incredibly hard, and consistantly, with heavy tankbusters coming at a rate where you barely had enough cooldowns. Spike damage was high. Raid AOE dps was still high but seemed to come in more separated bursts. Your tank dying to a tankbuster/auto combo was a real issue in a lot of these fights when done at the expected gear level or below. There were enrages and dps checks to hit, but they werent the primary reason for failing the fights. Tanks had a choice - maximise their own survivability and make the fight easier in that way, or try and maximise dps to help push phases at an expense of a riskier fight.

The current tank meta does not really have that choice. There is virtually no difference in the effective outcome of a fight between a tank that goes in in 190 gear and one that goes in in 210 gear, outside of higher dps that makes the enrages less taxing (and shortens the fights). The actual mechanics and tank survivability is such a minor impact that there's no tangible benefit to a tank being tankier.

THIS is the entire crux of why tanking feels weird to a lot of tanks. There's just no reason to be tankier. It makes such little difference due to how the fights are structured. You'll see more impact from your DPS PLAYERS getting a chunk more vitality naturally on their upgraded gear than your main tank getting higher health.

[AlexiIvaniskavich]

Tank DPS doesn't hinder healer DPS in any way if done correctly.

2nd most important quote.

I guess one of my concerns with a conversion to VIT based would be the HP bloat that would come along, and to a lesser degree, the continued arguement of STR v Vit in tank forums. Though they can be VERY entertaining, they often times breed misinformation and drawn out discussions on less optimal ways to tank (end game raid specifically).

I would be interested if SE went the route of having tank accessories do tank like things -buffs/debuffs etc. Though this would be less "flashy" than options more skewed to putting out moar deeps, Accessories that mix and match various buffs (dmg down, magic down and so on) would allow us to keep our right side gear flexibility.

[Alahra]

I guess one of my concerns with a conversion to VIT based would be the HP bloat that would come along

I don't think the developers really share your concern, to be honest. Since they seem to intend for tanks to wear Fending accessories in the first place, they seem to want HP totals that high. Moving to a meta where Fending is the norm wouldn't really increase HP beyond what they were expecting to begin with. The encounter design just isn't jiving with the itemization expectations at present.

Granted, I do think stat bloat is an issue in general (not just for VIT, though it's the stat where it's most readily visible). But it's not something exclusive to the STR/VIT issue for tanks really.

[AlexiIvaniskavich]

I don't think the developers really share your concern....

There is about a 5000 HP difference (ish, math - coffee = no math) between full VIT accessories and full STR. Assuming both tanks go full VIT, how long would it be until healers figure out how to solo heal everything and we have a SCOB group make up again, but with 2 tanks and one healer? (Which SE doesn't want, hence FCOB and Alex having specific mechanics for both tanks). This just drags us down the path of ever inflating damage numbers to counteract the ridiculously high tank health.

I do expect there to be some bloat in numbers, I just prefer a seperation in the stats that determine my damage output and my health.

One issue I see with that is, either the effects would be so minimal as to not really matter - or they start to encroach on balance. Like, we know drk is better with magic mitigation, but now you can have war or even double war stacking magic down thus eliminating the need for drk (and possibly pld). So you don't want to get in that situation, you still want each job to have it's niche.

I agree with all of this, should have added to the "less flashy" statement, "likely to become more broken than the current setup". In no way do I think adding buffs to VIT accessories would be a perfect system. Just throwing out a different option, beyond my previous statement of SE putting in a "tank stat" to replace STR.

[Alahra]

I do expect there to be some bloat in numbers, I just prefer a seperation in the stats that determine my damage output and my health.

I don't disagree here--my general preferred solution is a split between STR and VIT in some way, with just enough of VIT contributing to damage to make Fending the preferred accessory choice. This will allow the developers to better predict both tank DPS and tank health pools when designing future content, which should (hopefully) result in better encounter design.

I think full VIT for attack power is the wrong way to go for a number of reasons, but it wouldn't really change the HP totals the developers expect, since they have always likely assumed full Fending accessories in the first place, since that's the gear tanks have Need privilege on.

[Rbstr]

Worrying about HP levels if tanks go full vit is silly.
#1 HP doesn't effect HP/s required, HP over what's required to eat maximum damage is a (small) time delay that can help with reaction time at best.
#2 Strength tanks already carry more HP and massively more passive and active mitigation than DPS classes. Yet, DPS classes aren't punted from groups for DPS tanks. DPS classes still do more DPS than tanks. 50k HP tanks or not, Savage Alex's primary problems are DPS checks and enrages. Adding more tank HP to that doesn't change this balance.
#3 This change would go happen at 3.2 which is a new raid tier. They can clearly design the new encounters with whatever tank HP value the changes lead to. All the old stuff will be significantly out-geared just like it has always been. Yet more HP doesn't change anything about that.

I don't disagree here--my general preferred solution is a split between STR and VIT in some way, with just enough of VIT contributing to damage to make Fending the preferred accessory choice. This will allow the developers to better predict both tank DPS and tank health pools when designing future content, which should (hopefully) result in better encounter design.

If vit is better than strength for damage there's no reason to ever carry strength. That basically means it's irrelevant if it's a hybrid between vit and str or vit alone.
If you want strength to mean something still it has to be better than vit for damage. You need a different control, like tank busters that require several vit accessories to survive or some kind of strength cap, in order to push vit accessories then.

[Alahra]

If you want strength to mean something still it has to be better than vit for damage.

STR should "mean" about as much to tanks as VIT means to DPS, honestly, though, if they want tanks to fit into the same gearing paradigm as every other class. That is, my feeling is that they will leave some fraction of tank damage tied to STR so that the STR in place on left side gear still has a purpose, but not so great a purpose that tanks are encouraged to meld STR or to use Slaying accessories.

While a STR/VIT split won't, in practice, end up any different mathematically than a pure VIT ratio, it fits better into the existing gear/class paradigms, as each class has two primary stats that matter to them. The non-main one of them isn't supposed to matter so much that it complicates accessory choice, though.

There are other ways to make STR have some effect for tanks, of course. They could revert the HW-changes to STR's effect on Parry and Block, for instance (and probably scale them up some), and then make VIT their full attack power stat. In some ways that would make them mirror the other classes a bit better: primary stat for offense, with a secondary stat that contributes to survivability in some way. But they only mentioned changing damage calculations when they discussed how they were going to address the issue, so that's where I assume they'll be doing everything until we get more information.

[Dante_V]

There is about a 5000 HP difference (ish, math - coffee = no math) between full VIT accessories and full STR.

You were close, it's about 4k with 190 accessories. I think more importantly is the str difference between full slaying and fending sets, which is about 200 str. Converted stat weights this is the equivalent of 20 weapon damage, or in other terms it's the raw damage difference of a 200 eso weapon versus a 2.0 non upgraded poetics weapon (20 phys atk difference)

Ie going full fending at level 190 is equivalent to an 80 level drop in weapon damage. This is a pretty substantial loss we are talking about especially in fights based so heavily on raid dps. Now granted most tanks are going to mix the two to reach the hp threshold in everything after a1s, but for any other content running full slaying is completely viable with a full 200 left side due to the vit on the armor.

Ultimately the problem occurring here has nothing to do with tanks or their stats at all. It has to do with the design and mechanics in the raid content. They either need to increase the raid damage output to tanks by the bosses or establish mechanics that some how trivialize tank damage output in the fight to lower the weight of their damage stats for that instance and in turn lower the benefit of gearing such a way. Simply recalculating the tank damage calculations or nerfing there stats won't change anything. It will ultimately just make tanking that much less rewarding and more boring than it already is. The one thing that increased tank dps and rotations actually do is make tanking wayyyyy more interesting and allow for the skill ceiling to be raised. Short of revamping the entire game engine to make defense and active role and not a rng calculation, straight defense tanking in this game will always remain a complete snoozefest with almost no skill necessary aside from spamming aggro moves and pushing a cooldown when a bar is about to fill up for an attack.

[AlexiIvaniskavich]

You were close, it's about 4k with 190 accessories.

Yay - math! Keep in mind I wasn't promoting VIT stacking, only pointing out potential flaws if damage was based on solely VIT for tanks, we would be running around with a ton more health (and and maintaining or increasing damage output as there is more vitality available than any other stat - as per Ariyala's website).

There is a significant loss in dps going full fending v. full slaying and current raid setup screams more deeps. SE knows this, they designed it. Pentamelds have been a thing for tanks for quite some time, not just since 3.0, tanks wearing slaying accessories have been around for awhile, not just 3.0. SE decided to give everything a hard enrage, thus putting emphasis on dps. SE decided that if you like to "Netflix and Medica" or "Reddit and Tank", endgame isn't for you.

I'm fine with the meta. I find it more engaging. More importantly, I think SE thinks that this meta is more engaging for more people. Leading to more tanks, to better queue times for everyone, to more gameplay to more subs.

...

I'm pretty sure that I have previously covered the fact that I am not a programmer (but i did program a TI-81 calculator once....). I also stated in that specific post that my example was an oversimplification. There would exist some highly complicated ways to make that transition, as there are very likely some ways that are easier (in comparison). I restated at the end of my post that all of this is still an enormous amount of work. Reiterating whiskeybravo's previous post stating the same thing.

I'm going to have to agree with Donjo's earlier statement, I think you missed the mark.