Are my mitigation numbers off ?

[Reynhart]

That would be terrible because if it's balanced at an equal amount of gear, that tank would be overpowered during the middle part of progression when the DPS get weapons first

Why ?

Just give up on this stupid insistance that PLD is the pure tank when we all know it would be game-breaking to actually make them a measurably better tank than the other two and increase Paladin's DPS

Again, why ? For the increase "tankiness" part. The "increase DPS" part, for me, is not a good solution if we want each tank to be really different than the others.

It's a good thing to explain your reasoning, and even give examples, of why something would be "game-breaking" or "break the balance".

[eagledorf]

Why ?

Currently PLD is just about 20% under the other tanks for a few Paladins in the world and much more than that for the rest. To make up for that you would need a vulnerability up debuff that adds about 4-5% to total party DPS. That's like 3x Trick Attack so it would be by far the biggest party-wide DPS buff in the game.

If you give the DPS weapons first, the PLD's DPS added would go up along with theirs since that 5% is tied up in party DPS while the other tanks' would not go up. In fact, you could give the other tank and the Scholar a weapon first since the PLD buffs each of their DPS as well. This is sort of what you see with Bard (except their gear also gives much less weapon damage than other jobs). This is really bad, but it wouldn't really be game-breaking since we're still talking about less than 100 DPS. On the other hand, if they don't eliminate DPS gearing for tanks in 3.2, a PLD could gear for HP when needed and still retain a few hundred extra DPS for free on top of that in the form of this vulnerability up debuff, which really does start to cause serious balance problems on one side or the other.

As for the tankiness part, we know that that is a problem because of how 2.0 worked out. If damage on the tank is sufficiently threatening then the tank with superior mitigation provides an excessive advantage over the other tank. (Basically, an i70 PLD could fairly comfortably survive Death Sentence and even an i55 one could if perfectly prepped and WARs struggled even with higher tiers of gear until they got a mitigating toolkit in 2.1). If damage on the tank is not sufficiently threatening, that extra mitigation has little value (not quite none, but it very quickly falls toward none) as we have seen with PLD in A3S in this patch. The only time this isn't true is if you can eliminate one of the tanks or healers entirely (like how a PLD could solo-tank Bahamut Prime even with the adds tethered to him and through Ahk Morn), but this is a problem in and of itself that SE has worked very had to make impossible with mechanics like Hand of Prayer.

Trying to make the tanks unique from one another by differentiating their capability at tanking...is not the way to go. A tank needs to hit all the functions of a tank that are required by the game (right now: mitigation, DPS, effective healing, threat generation) and the uniqueness of the class should be from mechanics or unique utility skills (like Defiance or Cover).

[Reynhart]

Currently PLD is just about 10% under the other tanks. To make up for that you would need a vulnerability up debuff that adds about 2-3% to total party DPS.

Isn't that the same with slashing debuff ? WAR increases damage for NIN and other tanks, included itself. Of course, it doesn't increase the damage for the whole party, but you can have it applied 100% of the time. Adjusting the uptime of the vulnerability debuff is an easy to prevent too much DPS increase...and of course, not stacking it with Trick Attack.

As for the tankiness part, we know that that is a problem because of how 2.0 worked out.

2.0 was a little extreme on that. It wasn't that PLD had better mitigation than WAR, but that WAR had barely enough mitigation for the content.
Personnaly, I think they overdid it a little between :
- not any mitigation and healing boost tied to wrath
and
- constant healing boost to Defiance, mitigation in Inner Beast, mitigation in Storm's Path, mitigation in Vengeance and "ultimate survival" in Holmgang

Again, the extra mitigation is not inherently useless. Tanks survive because healers cure them. More mitigation requires less healing, thus healers could do something else...like DPSing.
The problem, in the current state of the game, is that the tank with the worst mitigation (Whatever it is) already allows healers to do lot of DPS, so, whatever additionnal mitigation PLD offers, it's not significant...whereas its personal lesser DPS is.

the uniqueness of the class should be from mechanics or unique, moderate-power utility skills (like Defiance or Cover).

Which is already a problem, since every tank use the same mechanic to survive. It could have been much more interesting to have one tank that survives through mitigation, one through self-healing, one though leeching, etc...
If they were, they could have the exact same mitigation and the exact same DPS, because each player would pick one depending on the gameplay. Exactly like how most DPS are mostly on par with each other, but with different mechanics.

[eagledorf]

It could have been much more interesting to have one tank that survives through mitigation, one through self-healing, one though leeching, etc

EDITING

I mean in 2.0 WAR had the self-healing and that just didn't work for the way the game works. Mitigation for tank busters is the main mechanic for tanks right now.

I'm talking about Wrath vs. oGCD Cooldowns+Casting. Unfortunately, they've made casting basically un-viable on PLD so it's just oGCD Cooldowns, oGCD Cooldowns with Dark Arts before one of them, and oGCD Cooldowns+Wrath.

I edited my post since PLD is actually 15-25% behind it seems when I checked the latest numbers.

As for mitigation=>healer DPS...it has to be a lot of extra mitigation. Like so much extra mitigation that damage that would kill a DRK or WAR in a few GCD can just be handled by Regen on a PLD. First of all healers don't get accuracy on their gear anymore and their DoTs are like twice the potency of their filler spells. Second of all this content cycle they've intentionally prevented defensive tanking from improving healer DPS by making mechanics like DPS down in A3, Throttle, and massive damage on the raid instead of on the tank so either the healers can DPS with any tank or they can't DPS with any tank.

Once you get that much extra mitigation, it's going to become a distinct advantage while learning content to just have this invincible tank that can help you top the party up instead of one of the other tanks.

[eagledorf]

Pacify+Blind was actually pretty huge in dungeons since you could prevent things like the Rotoswipe from the dread or cleave from the giant in Fractal basically as you wished while taking limited auto-attack damage. The threat was also very helpful if I got a bad (DPS) healer and decided to SwO the entire dungeon since it let me generate threat quickly if one target was dying faster without having to prep my combo or cancel my Goring Blade combo.

All told I think it was better than no change at all, but still a bad change. Now we don't have a valid method to make our Goring Blade DoT duration make sense and the TP situation is worse than it was in 3.0 (even in A4S where you only got to swipe on adds!) The DPS gained is also quite small unless you're really lucky (if you get it to proc 100% of the time on cooldown it's like 50 DPS, but my experience has been more like 15-30). Increasing the potency so that it was a comparable gain on average to Reprisal instead of just taking it off the GCD to be as similar to Reprisal as possible would have been preferable. It's just another symptom of the total lack of any thought that's been put into the tanks as of 3.0 and SE's attempt to give us the easiest possible change and pretend it will fix a deep problem.

[Isius]

Buff Paladin correctly/better plz FFXIV dev team


Step 1: Stop listening to your boss Yoshi-P, and do what is right, and fix the problem, then ignoring it.

Step 2: Buff emnity on Savage/Rage of Halone multipliers to that of the other tanks, and boost the potency of Halone.

Step 3: Buff Plds dps, mainly looking at Plds dps loss while in shield oath, and bring Shield Swipe potency back up to 210.

Step 4: Buff Plds utilities or overhaul them, or just completely throw away Clemancy/Divine Veil out of the window, and just give us two skills that are actually more useful, like idk a dmg aoe for Pld, then more niche items in a already heavy, niche, Pld tool set, or give our highly situational skills to have dual uses, like Tempered Will giving Pld a Surecast or Swiftcast effect.

Step 5: Make Plds cross class skills more useful to Pld(seriously I only use Mercy Stroke/Bloodbath/Foresight anymore during raids, and that is it....stoneskin lol..cast time, and -dps, but still a great skill, but current meta just makes it less useful.

a. If Pld is meant to cast spells then have Skill Speed affect the speed which spells are casted by a Pld.

b. Vit is suppose to be tanks main stat so have spell strength on Pld be scaled with Vit, looking at Cure 1 cross class skill a less powerful, but a more mp friend alternative to Clemancy, with a actual gcd cast time of 2.5secs, and not 3secs. So scale CNJ spells first before giving Pld other spells or heals. Seriously why doesn't Pld have a trait to make CNJ skills useful for Pld.

Edit: Mmm...spell strength is also effected by weapon strength, correct? So have spell scale off both weapon strength, and Vit for Pld.

Step 6: Stop this terrible meta of physical/magical, and heavy dps tanks ideology. Tanks are tanks telling a tank by class design they can't or are less effective to tank whatever is a very bad idea, and design choice. Change the physcial/magical mitigation, and dps heavy meta, so each tank can mt or ot effectively. Tank differance in mitigation/dps should not leave a big enough gap, where a tank can't perform it's primary role, or seen less effective/burden in content.

But whatever just my quick thoughts, and means nothing on the OF, but these are things I find annoying when I play Pld, and need to change imo, and all we got is wait till 3.2 for these "tank dps changes," since Pld really didn't get buffs it needed in 3.1. But really if SE can't fix a class now, and refuses to fix, and prefers to just ignore it. I don't see how these 3.2 whatever changes are going to be anything different. It's like putting another a band-aid on top of a band-aid, does that really help? :/

***And really Plds mitigation doesn't make up for it's difference in less dps compared to the other tanks in the current raid tier. Maybe if it was so high it allowed raid groups to only bring 1 healer or just 1 tank to a group, but people would only scream unbalanced, and how broken Pld defenses are if that was a thing, Pld already has this stigma from past raids in Coil. Easiest change would be just boost Pld dps in general.

[Alistaire]

Even your #s for rampart/sentinel are off since 2 forms of the same reduction are multiplicative not additive.

Since your form of "tank stance" is % taken, rampart is actually 16% reduction and sentinel is 32%, assuming you're using those with shield oath. (20% and 40% x .8 not 20% off +20% off or 20+40%)

And you can't just not include holmgang/walking dead. Maybe it'll turn out to be too complex to calculate but you can't just say they get nothing for it. When used properly the only difference between them and Hallowed is a benediction after. So damage taken becomes irrelevant and you might as well count it as on par with Hallowed (or figure out how much mitigation that benediction is worth and subtract it). And then multiply it by how much more frequently it can be used vs Hallowed.

PLD is truly in a sad state.

[Reynhart]

Even your #s for rampart/sentinel are off since 2 forms of the same reduction are multiplicative not additive.

No, they're not. Rampart reduces 20% of the damage you would have taken without it. The fact that those damage are already reduced from the "initial" damage is irrelevant for the sake of comparing tanks, since, again, the three stances give you the same eHP.

It really didn't work half as well as mitigation. Like you needed enough gear to actually survive DS in order to get healed or use IB while a PLD could just survive with a cooldown+Stoneskin with substantially less gear and then power through the disease debuff (and apparently SE couldn't foresee that).

Even with average gear, I've never fell from full HP to under 20% HP (Without cooldown) with a single Death Sentence, so WAR could survive each hit by having their HP almost full beforehand and proper application of Stoneskin/Succor. And the proper healing boost and self-healing would have allowed you to replenish your health to full before the next DS.
In the current state of the game, it means that healers would be focused on healing you, so they would have less time to do some additionnal damage. With a PLD, they would have more room to cast some offensive spells.

I would also change Inner Beast so that any HP that "overheals" you go directly into your HP max, like some kind of barrier.

[CGMidlander]

I love how you include Dark Mind when it only affects magic damage even though you're taking an 'average mitigation per second' approach to this given that 99% of the attacks a tank takes at any time is -physical damage-.

There is no Boss currently in game that does only magic damage.

Edit*: Wait, no Vault guy. There is no Raid* Boss currently in game that does only magic damage. Pending a quick research Edit** may appear soon!

Edit**: Node enemies in Coil apparently, but I'm half certain ADS still does physical auto attacks.

ADS is definitely magic only. Its autoattacks are lightning magic.

If you look at trials/24m, there are some more examples. (However irrelevant they might be now)
Ultima Weapon is magic only.
Ramuh is magic only.
Nabriales is magic only.
Cloud of Darkness is magic only.

The only relevant boss atm that is magic only (with the exception of a buster) is The Manipulator though.

[Kabooa]

ADS is definitely magic only. Its autoattacks are lightning magic.

other stuff

The only relevant boss atm that is magic only (with the exception of a buster) is The Manipulator though.

This would explain why the black mage gets thwacked for 12k where the dragoon got thwacked for 14k.

Even so, we're presented with a flawed view of how to value mitigation in FF14. There's a fairly excellent thread that details FF14's overall approach to boss-to-tank interaction, which tends to be on scripted tank busters with only moderate-to-above-moderate auto attacks. This coupled with the fairly unexciting and mostly ineffective 'tank stat' scaling is why we see macho beef tanks. It simply isn't required to have 'great average mitigation', which this thread is pointing out.

in terms of tank buster mitigation, the tanks are all in the same ball park. It's skewed towards Dark Knight since they tend to be magic busters right now (Dark Mind op), but how quickly the tables turn if they were all physical busters.

Hell, you throw a 30 second physical tank buster onto a boss, and suddenly paladin is the only 'viable' choice as your second tank. This is completely discounting that any weaknesses in one tank's kit can be made up for with some utility from another raid member. (GG Apocastasis; You're a Dark Knight for 10 seconds every 3 minutes!)