Are my mitigation numbers off ?

[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).