Can anyone give me some PLD tips?

[JackFross]

Still, that's sacrificing 90 potency every 3 combos - in 180s you're doing ~75 gcds which is ~25 combos. Divide that in 3 and you're left with 8 x 90 = 720 potency of damage you sacrificed, which is another full RA combo that you just flat out did not do by dropping half your RA's to RoH in a 3-minute parse - which is far and away below what you'll encounter in DF runs of any relevant content. The difference only gets exponentially worse as the encounter gets longer - more and more lost potency in favor of negligible changes in mitigation.

This comment confuses the heck out of me:

At the end of the day you're trading mitigation which in your argument can be covered by HoTs anyway, for dmg so insignificant that nobody will notice.

Like - it looks like you're trying in vain to twist my words from:
"The damage you're mitigating with Rage of Halone is so negligible that it's covered by passive healing without the debuff"
into something ludicrous like:
"Because the damage is so negligible as stated above, you clearly should be mitigating it, rather than accelerating the battle by a noticeable amount in exchange for adding literally no additional benefit to your survival or to the healers' ability to dps."

Seems legit.


Basically - don't talk out your ass, please and thank you. I know for a fact from my own testing in situations where it actually matters that weaving RoH in for the additional mitigation is not only a waste of time on the mitigation front, but it causes a significant/noticeable change in how much damage you deal. Here's a real-world example for you.

This is me, killing Sephirot Extreme on my Paladin.

Blah blah blah longwinded explanation of how replacing RA with RoH as you suggest would end up dropping my fight DPS by ~10 over the duration of the encounter. I was at 868.2 (rank #173/1397 - 87.6%). If I used RoH the way you suggest, I drop to 858.2 (197/1397 - 85.8%).

Now, that may seem like a small loss, but think of it the other way around. I just parsed 858.2 using RoH for mitigation in a GB>RoH>RA rotation in the fight. All I have to do is stop being dumb to jump up ~25 ranks in the standings. Changing NOTHING ELSE about how I played the fight. At all. No other changes. Same cooldowns in the same places, same attacks to hold hate, same Flashes in add phase, etc, etc. So, yeah. It sounds like it's small, but this is the difference between someone who plays "good enough" and someone who actively seeks to improve their play, get better, and challenge others to play up to the same level.

I personally prefer to be in the group constantly looking to improve and optimize and figure ways to do better in an encounter at all times. If I'm already mitigating damage properly and not risking death, why am I still playing it safe? Why not push the envelope and see if I can do better? Use fewer mitigation tools in favor of offense?

I know you'll ignore everything I say and laugh about how small the difference is, and I'll just ignore that post and keep on actually playing my Job optimally, not listening to people who ignore the majority when they tell them that something they said was wrong.

[ashwich]

As irrelevant as it may seem to some, and I respect your opinion on this as much as I respect my own. You ARE taking more damage for this dps increase, so it's not black and white. Sure it may not be a big deal to you or your healer, I cannot stand the value this game has created for tanking community, that your dps parse is more important than the damage you mitigated, as a TANK.

You're right, and I understand the meta. Just throwing my opinion out there, that's all. Also you need to calm down.

[JackFross]

You ARE taking more damage for this dps increase, so it's not black and white.

In the first phase of the fight, I was overhealed by ~34000 damage.
Each auto-attack from Sephirot did ~2k to me in Shield Oath and ~2.4k in Sword Oath, on average.
A Rage of Halone would mitigate ~200 from a Shield Oath auto-attack and ~240 from a Sword Oath auto-attack.
I took 35 Attacks in phase 1.
Assuming every single one of those was in Sword Oath and unmitigated in any other way,* I would have mitigated an additional 8400 damage.
(^That is a gross overestimation of how much additional mitigation I will receive, by the way.)
Then my overheal would only have been 25600.

Yikes. What a major impact on mitigation that did. Wow-ee, thanks, Rage of Halone.


*Extra mitigation makes the additional mitigation from RoH smaller not larger. Does that seem wrong to you?
If I am in Shield Oath, I will take 85% of incoming damage.
If I apply Rage of Halone, I will take 90% of incoming damage.
If I apply both Shield Oath and Rage of Halone, I will take 85% x 90% = 76.5% damage.

Assume I take 1000 damage from the attack.
Shield Oath makes me take 850.
Rage of Halone makes me take 900.
Both together makes me take 765.
RoH on its own mitigates 1000-900 = 100 damage.
RoH on top of Shield Oath mitigates 850-765 = 85 damage.

The more damage reduction you apply, the weaker RoH's additional mitigation effect applies to the overall damage taken. It's always 10% less, but that 10% acts on the current amount being taken after other buffs are applied, in essence, since buffs and debuffs are multiplicative, not additive.


What SpookyGhost said is pretty much accurate, though. The mark of a good tank, in my opinion, is naturally progressing from that Turtle-Mode into the Proper-Tanking-Mode that you achieve upon the clear (ideally) through the course of progression on the fight. It's less about getting there and more about taking the steps to get there while learning the fight. Learning when you can safely swap stances, learning when Path or RoH or Delirium aren't necessary so you can stop keeping them active 100% of the time. This is a good measure of how good you are at tanking. DPS improve by learning to mold their rotation to the mechanics of the fight and make it work for them. Tanks do the same thing, but in a different way. You phase out DPS-costly mitigation in favor of damage ouput once you've reached a certain stage of skill with the given fight.

If you remain in turtle mode forever because "I'm a tank my job is not to die" - then, in my opinion, you're just not playing your Job optimally, and it would serve you well to learn and practice and strive to improve.

[SpookyGhost]

The goal of your team is to bring the boss' HP to 0. You do this by making your gDPS as high as possible. If you mitigating more means that the healer can convert one or two of their GCDs into damage, you'll probably see a gDPS increase. I don't think this really applies to RoH, though - maybe on tank busters but even then the debuff would need to cut off a lot of damage to save a heal. Even Storm's Path, the most potent debuff, doesn't always save a healer a GCD. Defensive CDs are a different story since they come at no personal DPS cost and will save you from death or save your healers GCDs 99% of the time.

Anyway, that's in terms of actually clearing a fight. When progressing you want to play as safe as possible (unless pushing a DPS check) since nobody is comfortable with the fight yet - this is where maximizing your defensive effectiveness is important and where RoH can actually come in handy. This is also why you see WARs using Eye -> Path during progression but then switch out Path for BB where Path isn't needed.