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

[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.

[whiskeybravo]

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.

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.

[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.

[Kenji1134]

There's another aspect to the str/vit issue that has poignantly manifested itself for my group in A3S, aggro.

We have our WHM solo healing the first few phases, and when they have to drop aoe healing bombs, they end up passing our PLD MT on aggro when he's in VIT gear.
Well I should say, if he does his usual RoH-Goring-Royal rotation, he will lose hate very quickly due to the massive aoe healing going out.
If he does RoHx2-Goring, its better, but once Medica 2, regens, and Cure 3s start flying, he'll lose aggro again due to having to disconnect for Marks unless the WHM uses SoS to halve their aggro (we dont have a Nin to help w/ aggro control).

So, back when we started in Savage and I only had 190 Slaying acc's, I calculated that going from full vit to full str was a 27% damage increase. I imagine it is now a bit lower, probably 24-25% with 200+ left side gear that adds more str per ilvl than accessories. But still, adding 25% more damage to your tank means they can go that much longer before losing aggro to heals during the aoe damage phases of something like A3S.

So why's this relevant?
Some of the ideas flying around are that if tanks had both high hp and current damage levels, they'd be OP. But currently there are fights where you need the higher base damage to hold aggro due to the amount of healing required. So just from an encounter design perspective, where you need 1 healer to dps and 1 to heal, that 1 healer who's healing the entire raid will put out more hate than a tank can generate while using a more dps oriented rotation.

In that case your options are:
Full str and equally split dps-hate rotation, hopefully thats enough.
Full str and 2/3 hate rotation, so 1 dps combo per 2 hate combos to keep up.
Full vit and all hate combo spam, which again may not be enough, requiring more str and still the hate combo, which in itself is a dps loss.

[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.

[Cynric]

snip

The other replies to you pretty much mirror my opinion. It's not about being a bully. A healers main job is to heal. Ours is to tank. However, there's no doubt (hopefully anyway) that a healer will have to waste a GCD on healing me or the party/raid, they can't just DPS the entire fight most of the time, they absolutely will have to heal at some point. Healing is a DPS loss, A tank however is pretty much always hitting something, so it's a lot more efficient to maximize a tanks DPS until Healers get more DPS oriented CD's to push their minimum DPS higher than a tanks maximum.

To further note something, My having 5k less health doesn't prevent a healer from DPSing in Cleric stance, most healers I run with DPS just fine. The only time this would be an issue is during big pulls in Dungeons, but ... I'm a Dark Knight , I get a Blind, a dodge %+ parry %, which I can mix with awareness. Usually that's enough for the healer to not even worry about healing me too often, and if I do take a dip I just dark arts abyssal drain. Warrior has good enough self healing + mitigation for this as well.

That's in dungeon content though. In Raid content where your biggest worries are predictable damage you know is coming, how can you hinder your healers DPS?

I would argue a DPS player standing in the red drops a healers DPS far more than a tank wearing STR accessories.


I also find it funny you called me an Epeen bully when I've said "I like doing high DPS to make up for the low DPS of the DPS players". I never said high DPS was the only way to play. But having high DPS contributes a lot more in current content and to carries than having 5k more health would.

Finally I'll note again for you that I PVP a lot. I don't apply to most of what you're saying the majority of my playtime anyway, I kill other players for fun. DPS /CC is far more important in that area. I'll always wear what makes my damage higher. If I had to wear vit in PvE that would be no concern of mine, I just wouldn't feel like I'm contributing as much.

[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.