The endless battle - Tank attributes

[Kothos]

You get STR upgrades on left side gear from raids, you're fine. Besides tanks job is to absorb damage, dealing it is just an afterthought.

You're tanks not DPS, and raids are calculated based on basic tank damage output in tank stance nd DPS's damage rotations. Healers damage isnt taken into account, and obviously raid will be balanced around tank DPS in full VIT gear. So don't worry, babe.

And the same mantra is spoken. Could please tell me your experience with tanking so I can understand you

[Jonnycbad]

And the same mantra is spoken. Could please tell me your experience with tanking so I can understand you

Tank DPS is the meta that *players* derived. But from SE's point of view it's not necessary, it's extra. They said raid boss HP is not alculated based on damage dealt by tanks in DPS stance, but players push MT DPS anyway to beat content faster. Beating content faster or at minimum iLVL is something 1-5% of the player base cares about. SE did not intend for people to beat Gordias sdavage at i170 or whatever the min iLVL was upon release, they expected players to be i190 first from stocking up on gordias normal gear. But players did it anyway at the min ILVL by overmelding gear and pushing tank DPS and using potions.

That's all well and good and from the players POV tank and healer DPS is integtral for that, but not to SE. So saying tank DPS being lower due to STR is a developer's oversight: it's not. It's players assuming the developers should play by the players' rules and not vice versa.

I doubt SE intends for a MT to just do 1 enmity combo in tank stance at the start of the fight and then rock DPS stance the rest of the fight. That's not tanking, that's not managing enmity. That's DPSing with using defensive cooldowns occasionally to lower your healing burden sometimes.

[aleph_null]

snip

SE's intends and pov are irrelevant to the meta. I don't care what they want me to do, I care about what I, and the people in my group can do. If I can hold enmity, mitigate and survive using dps stance and 5 slaying accs while allowing the healers in my group to do good amount of damage than that's what I'll do. Of course there will be tradeoffs between hp threshold, extra mitigation (tank stance uptime) and healer dps, but you can figure out the balance by trying out things.

It's the dev's oversight if what they intend us to be able to do doesn't match what we can actually do, and it's on them to fix/change/leave it. I don't care if the devs don't want me to do zero enmity combo in the entire fight, but if I can get away with that then I will. I don't care if the devs don't want my group healers to spend half their casts on dps spells, but if they can then they will.

[Kosmos992k]

SE's intends and pov are irrelevant to the meta.

By the same token, your Meta is irrelevant to SE and they will design gear and encounters around their design imperatives. They will balance skills, stats and potencies based on their criteria, not the DPS meta. If their goals conflict with the DPS meta, guess who wins?

one of our major problems is that SE gave us the DPS candy back in 3.X and they stole it from us on 4.0; it was nice to see we skipping a mechanic with high dps because the tank can help with significant amount of damage among the DPS classes, but now since the tanks got this nerf on damage it feels like we are just there to tank it, I know we are tanks but come on... We want to be rewarded with the high knowledge of the class and how the mechanics works, so I think we just need some candy back,

For DDs, their 'candy' is big gaudy damage dealt numbers. For a tank, what is 'candy'? How about shrugging off damage that would have killed everyone else? Not to mention that tank DPS should only be compared to other tank DPS. It can still be candy, but what scale do you measure by? Relative performance of course, but relative to who? If you're in the top 5% of tanks for DPS, is that candy enough, or is the fact that your PS might be 25% (don't know the real relative difference, that's just a number) below a real DD a problem?

You don't need the DPS meta to have your candy unless you are trying to keep up with damage dealers specifically designed to maximize damage dealt. If you are measuring relative to other tanks, how the damage is calculated is irrelevant. So, what is that candy and how is it's value measured?

Since the majority of the increase in damage dealt for DPS is based on their gear, the big gaudy numbers they post are gear dependent. Thinking about tanks for a moment, I'd like to see two numbers every time we are hit. What is the raw damage being one, and how much actually got through our armor, Tenacity, mitigation skills and so on. That is the measure of being a good tank, how much damage can you mitigate? That would be my candy, if I could see on screen that I'm being hit for 50,000 HP, but through various mitigations including armor, the received damage was less than 20K, That tells me that I successfully mitigated (soaked) 30+K HP through my gear and skills. That is a meaningful measure of my ability as a tank.

[Hruodig]

By the same token, your Meta is irrelevant to SE and they will design gear and encounters around their design imperatives. They will balance skills, stats and potencies based on their criteria, not the DPS meta. If their goals conflict with the DPS meta, guess who wins?

And it's on se to change that in a meaningful way, which they have utterly failed to do time and time again so far. Ultimately the meta will always revolve around maximizing raid dps in order to clear encounters faster-as long as the win state continues to be "reduce boss's hp to 0", that will not change.

[Kosmos992k]

And it's on se to change that in a meaningful way, which they have utterly failed to do time and time again so far. Ultimately the meta will always revolve around maximizing raid dps in order to clear encounters faster-as long as the win state continues to be "reduce boss's hp to 0", that will not change.

And this is what I do not understand about encounter design in FFXIV. It's overly focused on tank busters so you have to have a tank front and center. If reducing the boss HP to 0 as quickly as possible is the goal, then the best strategy for the boss is to kill the healer and the DPS and ignore the tank. It strikes me that with a lot more adds, crowd control to protect healers and DPS becomes more important. So if our gear and abilities are able to largely mitigate the damage of adds, yet the adds could quickly shred the non tanks; the best way for the tank to kill the boss quickly is to maintain good crowd control of the adds, and intercept large focused AoEs. After all, with even rudimentary AI, Bosses should know that killing healers takes priority over tanks, and killing DPS comes next to reduce the rate at which they are taking damage.

But encounters are frequently designed around a single Boss, large front cleaves and AoE Mechanics that affect everyone. So the MT keeps the boss pointed in the right direction to avoid cleaves and the DPS beat the living crap out of the Boss from behind. Followed by everyone dancing to the new AoE tune. I think that we need more adds in boss fights and less emphasis on central AoEs. Make the tanks earn their living by keeping others alive, make it more interesting than simply popping a CD to mitigate a tank buster.

[Hruodig]

And this is what I do not understand about encounter design in FFXIV. It's overly focused on tank busters so you have to have a tank front and center. If reducing the boss HP to 0 as quickly as possible is the goal, then the best strategy for the boss is to kill the healer and the DPS and ignore the tank. It strikes me that with a lot more adds, crowd control to protect healers and DPS becomes more important. So if our gear and abilities are able to largely mitigate the damage of adds, yet the adds could quickly shred the non tanks; the best way for the tank to kill the boss quickly is to maintain good crowd control of the adds, and intercept large focused AoEs. After all, with even rudimentary AI, Bosses should know that killing healers takes priority over tanks, and killing DPS comes next to reduce the rate at which they are taking damage.

But encounters are frequently designed around a single Boss, large front cleaves and AoE Mechanics that affect everyone. So the MT keeps the boss pointed in the right direction to avoid cleaves and the DPS beat the living crap out of the Boss from behind. Followed by everyone dancing to the new AoE tune. I think that we need more adds in boss fights and less emphasis on central AoEs. Make the tanks earn their living by keeping others alive, make it more interesting than simply popping a CD to mitigate a tank buster.

I mean, it just sounds like you're whining about them not making the kind of game you want them to make, to be frank. If they did go down this route, the truly good players would either adapt and make the best of the new design, or find a different game that plays the way they want to play.

[Kinkoz]

And this is what I do not understand about encounter design in FFXIV. It's overly focused on tank busters so you have to have a tank front and center. (...)

But encounters are frequently designed around a single Boss, large front cleaves and AoE Mechanics that affect everyone.

Then... The encounter design isn't overly focused on tank busters, is it?

Killing the boss ASAP has been a focus throughout almost the entirety of content since the initial raid tiers of 2.0 as fights are either designed such that, in wars of attrition, the boss will generally exhaust the entire party's resources before the boss ever runs out of things to throw at everyone, or there is always a hard enrage built into place to prevent the former. It's one or the other a predominant majority of the time.

So if our gear and abilities are able to largely mitigate the damage of adds, yet the adds could quickly shred the non tanks; the best way for the tank to kill the boss quickly is to maintain good crowd control of the adds, and intercept large focused AoEs.

The first part of what you said are already things, though. As for intercepting large, focused AoEs... Do you mean stack/soak mechanics? Because, otherwise, how is it beneficial at all for the Tank to eat extra, unnecessary damage? That just puts extra strain on the healers, which increasing the chance of failure.

After all, with even rudimentary AI, Bosses should know that killing healers takes priority over tanks, and killing DPS comes next to reduce the rate at which they are taking damage.

But almost no boss in the game is designed like that. I don't even think most MMO bosses in general are designed like that, not counting ones that have an intentional mechanic accounting for such.

Make the tanks earn their living by keeping others alive, make it more interesting than simply popping a CD to mitigate a tank buster.

Pretty sure that Tanks are already doing exactly like that by making sure the boss isn't melting everyone else with its hard-hitting auto-attacks and tank busters.

[aleph_null]

By the same token, your Meta is irrelevant to SE and they will design gear and encounters around their design imperatives. They will balance skills, stats and potencies based on their criteria, not the DPS meta. If their goals conflict with the DPS meta, guess who wins?

The goal of players will always be to maximize dps while meeting healing/mitigation checks. Additional hp and overhealing don't kill the boss faster. If turtle tanking allows healers to dps more than what we lose from tank stance penalty then we'll stay in tank stance. The devs give us the tools (skills, stats, gear, etc), we maximize dps based on what we get. What they want us to do with those tools doesn't matter, what matters to us is what we can actually do with hose tools.

[Ameela]

So, what is that candy and how is it's value measured?

The candy would be our damage and I think a good way to damage it would be to compare it to our damage in the last expansion.
I don't know about you but I think it pretty frustrating that after leveling from 60 to 70 and grinding gear that's 50 iL better than what I had previously I only see my DPS increase by like 500, assuming I'm wearing the "correct" accessories. This is even more frustrating when you consider the fact that tank's DPS rotations got even more complicated in this expansion, maybe with the exception of DRK, so much effort for so little reward just feels bad.