Thread: Is this a better balance; 0.45 per VIT/STR?

The reduced damage in relation to DPS jobs combined with the enhanced tank stance enmity means you must rely on your tank stance far more for hate in the new content, from what I've observed so far in A5-8N and Sephex. When you drop tank stance, DPS climb on you far more than before. We just don't hit hard enough even with that extra 60 DET that you're sacrificing 1K HP (-_-) for, to keep up with DPS now without greatly increased tank stance usage as compared to A1-4. If you have a NIN, its less of a problem, but if you're a DRK or PLD, your BBing WAR OT will cut through your hate lead like molten lead through plastic-wrap if you don't build a significant hate lead with your much weaker enmity combos before dipping out of tank stance. In our tank stances, its not a problem. The enmity buffs to them are pretty big, I'm ballparking that they all probably have enmity modifiers of at least 3x now. When we were dealing damage that only vaguely trailed certain DPS jobs it was easy. Now, not so much. Tanking out of tank stance is now the exception not the rule. I reiterate that this is just from my experiences in Midas normal mode and Sephirot this morning. Savage is probably even deadlier.

The increased HP pools absolutely does not mean more time out of tank stance. I'm bewildered why anyone would suggest that more HP can mean this, but in the same paragraph talk about how we are still going to be dropping unneeded VIT. Midas and Seph hit incredibly hard right now. And there are so many swaps in the new content that by the time you have a significant lead on hate and are ready to drop into DPS stance, its time to tank-swap anyway. Even in fights where there aren't as many scripted swaps, a noticeable new favorite trend of SE's raid design is a single missed step on the part of the MT usually meaning a vul+ stack and your OT promptly taking over lest you take 15K from the next auto-attack. Mechanics that don't even specifically target the tanks hand out vul+ stacks like candy and if any one of these grazes you you're gonna be dropping tank stance and handing the boss over to your OT. Its almost not even worth the risk to stance dance in a lot of these fights because the swaps happen faster than you can find windows to DPS while MTing.

And then there's the issue of raid balance. Since the nerf, our DPS is a considerably smaller proportion of raid DPS, and % increases to our damage by extension offer proportionately less to the greater whole. Of course we should and will still maximize, but we have to weigh extra secondary stats against the means to stay alive. People are already gunning to drop all their mitigation and VIT for an extremely small gain compared to what we were dropping it for in 3.0-3.1 (gaining 20-25% DPS versus now gaining 1-5% DPS, especially factoring in the idea that all those delicious secondaries can be melded onto any gear you want making the difference such a small fraction of your total AP calculation that its exceedingly selfish and a disservice to your raid group to drop thousands of HP for accessories that are now offering only 1-5% extra DPS, particularly in content where, as many of you may have noticed today, the DPS checks are much lighter. Bosses have blatantly smaller HP pools.)

Its really sad the way people have fetishized DPS to the point where now, even though the gain is a tiny fraction of what it once was, and the content is hitting much harder (casual content is hitting tank stance tanks as hard as savage content last tier hit non-tank stance tanks), people are still trying to cling to slaying gear and keep this ridiculous wedge in the community. Has anyone even thought about what healers are going to have to deal with when we are going into new content with almost no gain to our mitigation (if people stubbornly cling to STR gear) even when shit is hitting exponentially harder?

That VIT means something now. This isn't Gordias anymore. The meta is changing. Just let go and adapt. That's what tanks do. If the more casual content is any indication, tanks going into savage wearing STR/VIT mixes capping out around 18K at i215-220 are going to be seeing their HP freefall to 1-3K constantly. I'm going to choose NOT to be carried by my healers and address this content for what it is and approach it as such, and that is a raid tier that is shaping up to be designed to break tanks that are trying to cheat the new system. This is a return to form, and the raid design is making us focus more on mitigation, positioning, enmity, and swap mechanics. You know, tank things. I for one am still going to try and maximize my DPS rotationally, and as far as stance dancing goes, but as for dropping 1-3K of HP for... DET? When I could just as easily meld that DET to a fending accessory and still maximize my actual tank gear and get the best of both worlds for both myself and my raid group? Hell no.

All day today I was having to constantly worry about enmity and mitigation and it was so foreign to me because I'd lost sight of just how pitifully weak incoming tank damage was in A1-4s. I was constantly looking for windows to drop Grit (I did find a few) but at no point did I want to trade even 1K HP for some det or extra crit. The damage is high and the mechanics are so numerous that your DPS is riding on your fingers and muscle memory, and you're thinking about mitigation and enmity far more actively and consciously. I'm almost having to relearn DRK after what fights like A3S conditioned me to. Gone are the days of tanking 90% of the fight in DPS stance thats for sure, at least until we're extremely overgeared.

Also worth repeating is the fact that because of the tank stance buff/dps nerf, PLD and DRK are seeing an extra, indirect DPS nerf, because in order to stance dance and keep hate RoH and PS must now be used almost twice as much as they were before to keep hate off some DPS jobs and definitely off of a BBing WAR OT. So WARs dodged that bullet. Sorry about your Equilibrium, but your ability to stance dance is looking much better than DRK's/PLD's is at the moment.

Do I miss the DPS meta? Sure, a little. But the new meta is a completely new and fascinating challenge that I feel like FCOB and A1-4S really made us lose touch with. Particularly this last raid tier, the mechanics of tanking (mitigation, enmity, etc.) were made so laughably easy and brainless that its no wonder we looked to our personal DPS utility to provide us with a stimulating challenge.