Removing Tank Stance Argument

[Kalise]

There is also a misconception on what 20% means in accordance to tank stance. First of all, WAR doesn't get this. It gets the HP increase of 25% with no increases in defense. DRK and PLD do not get increased HP from Tank stance either.

Your base offensives are nerfed 20% (25% for WAR). I can say nerfed, because the game is ADJUSTING the damage, much like how tank stance ADJUSTS the damage you are taking. The actual problem is the removal of several abilities that comprise of the rotation and resource generation.

I just wanted to go into further detail with these things.

Paladin and Dark Knight get 20% damage reduction from their Tank Stance. However, it's worth noting that effects stack multiplicatively, meaning that this 20% damage reduction makes their CD's less effective.

For example, a Paladin popping Rampart isn't taking 40% less damage in Tank stance, they're taking 36% less damage. Making that Tank stance only providing 16% damage reduction. If they pop Sentinel, they're not taking 60% less damage, they're taking 52% less damage, making Tank stance only provide 12% damage reduction.

With Warrior... Well, their Tank stance doesn't even give them damage reduction! It only gives them extra health! But then there's the thing where extra health often doesn't matter. So long as you can survive the biggest burst that you will receive during an encounter, additional health is meaningless. Since, either way, it will need to be healed up (Yes, Defiance also gives increased healing to help with that, but it's not as if oGCD's aren't already healing for 50%+ a Tanks max health as is)

If a Tank is using Hallowed Ground, Living Dead or Holmgang... Well, their Tank stance is offering zero benefit at all because these are immunity skills!

Now, given that the vast majority of damage to a tank comes in the form of abilities such as Tankbusters and Raidbusters and thus are mitigated via defensive CD's, the worth of Tank Stances defences are being thus reduced from their already meagre stated value of 20-25% damage reduction/extra health.

Then on to damage!

Where the effect of Tank stances are HUGE.

Lets go through one by one:

For Warrior, they lose the 5% bonus damage from Deliverance and get the 20% damage reduction from Defiance to boot. Now, remember what I mentioned earlier? Effects stack multiplicatively.

A Warrior in Deliverance isn't simply dealing 5% more damage. Since Warrior has Storm's Eye for a 10% damage increase and Maim for another 10% damage increase.

This means that their damage modifier is actually 1.05 * 1.10 * 1.10 = 1.2705. That means they're doing 127.05% damage, 27.05% more than baseline.

Defiance thus means that their 20% less damage multiplier is being utilized into the stacking of the damage modifiers. So again, a Warrior with Defiance with Storm's Eye and Maim has the damage modifier of 0.8 * 1.10 * 1.10 = 0.968. That means they're are doing only 96.8% damage, 3.2% LESS than baseline.

This means that the difference is 30.25% damage. With the difference increasing for any further modifiers that will be applied during an encounter (Trick Attack, Embolden, Brotherhood, Radiant Shield, Hypercharge)

Furthermore, a Warrior in Defiance loses out on being able to use Fell Cleave and instead has to settle with Inner Beast. This is a comparison of 520 potency vs 350 potency which means a 33% loss in damage from the times when you would use this gauge dump (Which when you consider that Fell Cleave currently makes up about 40% of a Warriors total damage output, that's significant)

Next we have DRK.

Dark Knight has a 20% damage reduction modifier on their Tank stance.

But again, multiplicative stacking makes this much worse. Since they have a permanent 20% damage increase from their Darkside ability.

This means that instead of being a baseline of 120% damage (20% more than baseline) they are instead working off of 1.2 * 0.8 = 0.96 = 96% damage (4% less than baseline) making the difference 24% damage. This again, is amplified by any other effects they may receive during an encounter (Including Slashing debuff provided by say, a Warrior)

In addition to this, they lose access to Blood Weapon, the single most important skill for any Dark Knight as it provides a MASSIVE boost to resources, allowing them to deal more damage, to mitigate more damage (Via having MP to use The Blackest Night) and to even provide more enmity (Since they can use high enmity generating skills that cost MP such as Dark Arts buffed Plunge or Dark Arts buffed Dark Passenger). It is absurd how much better this skill is than the tank stance variant of Blood Price which is absolute garbage.

Next up, Paladin.

Paladin gets away with only a 15% damage loss from their tank stance right?

Wrong. Sword Oath's passive damage bonus on auto attacks, equates to roughly 10% of a Paladin's overall damage output.

In addition, multiplicative stacking rears its ugly head when Paladin's revolve heavily around their 2 CD skills, Fight or Flight (Providing 25% bonus damage) and Requiescat (Providing 20% bonus damage)

This is also to say nothing about how GARBAGE Shield Oath is for actually generating Oath Gauge to be able to use Sheltron - Which provides a ton of mitigation (Since it works outside of damage reduction modifiers because it's a Block effect which reduces the damage of an attack before it actually hits you and is affected by your damage reduction buffs) as well as an increase in DPS via Shield Swipe activation.

The TL;DR version of it is thus:

Tank Stance offers approximately 10-15% overall damage reduction. While costing up 30%+ of your damage output.

That is simply not a good deal. Thus is should be no wonder why people really don't want to be using Tank stances if they can help it.

[Kabooa]

I just wanted to go into further detail with these things

You don't get less damage reduction.

Taking 20% less damage is 25% more effective hp. (For every 5 damage you take, you ignore 1, meaning you must take 125 HP worth of damage to die with 100HP).

.8 = 125% EHP
.64 (another 20%) = 156.25% EHP.

Stacking multiplicatively on -reductions- isn't less value per instance. It's the same ratio of increase. If things stacked -additively- than each instance of damage reduction is -stronger- than the prior one.

[shao32]

WAR stuff

25%, keep in mind under defiance WAR have unchained, it's literally a 20% damage buff you don't have in deliverance that affects everything except inner beast and steel cyclone, treating unchained as a secondary burst window outside of inner release comparable to fight or flight WAR reduce the penalty in rough numbers in real combat.

And before you ask unchained makes onslaught being a DPS gain over inner beast and you can fit 2 of then with 1 upheaval so you don't waste gauge under unchained window.