What Does Protect Actually Do?

[Seraphor]

Yeah, there are like a lot of duty finder parties with players that are totally reliant on protect's dmg mitigation. Like, returning players, new players, lazy players, dragoon, black mages, players that are rusty with jobs, players that don't remember what to do, tnk DC nightmares, players without job crystals that are trying experimental set-ups...

TBH, the devs might actually be tired of the content's skill level and might be trying to increase player skill so that they can make more interesting content and increase the depth of PVP. The devs do play FF14 regularly

As explained, Protect scales with your defence stat, so undergeared players benefit less from it anyway. You're only getting that full 8% as a tank if your at max synced ilvl, so thise unprepared players are already at a disadvantage anyway.

And nothing happens in a vacuum guys, you can't claim this is a nerf without seeing all other mitigation skills for tsnks and healer, or seeing how character and enemy stats have changed.

[MPNZ]

As explained, Protect scales with your defence stat, so undergeared players benefit less from it anyway. You're only getting that full 8% as a tank if your at max synced ilvl, so thise unprepared players are already at a disadvantage anyway.

And nothing happens in a vacuum guys, you can't claim this is a nerf without seeing all other mitigation skills for tsnks and healer, or seeing how character and enemy stats have changed.

But, the the dmg reduction is noticeable on every class, though. There is a big difference between 27% and 35% dmg to player's HP bars, so it's definitly enough for people to be concerned about it a little bit. But, yeah, we just really won't know anything until they release the 5.0 patch notes. It's just a bit scary to think of just how many pages might be added to "tales from the duty finder" soon

[MrThinker]

But, the the dmg reduction is noticeable on every class, though. There is a big difference between 27% and 35% dmg to player's HP bars, so it's definitly enough for people to be concerned about it a little bit. But, yeah, we just really won't know anything until they release the 5.0 patch notes. It's just a bit scary to think of just how many pages might be added to "tales from the duty finder" soon

The obvious solution is to just buff everyone's defense stats by 15%. So everyone basically has the effects of Protect built in. Or just change the effectiveness of defense stats in the damage calculation formulae by a factor of 1.15

[Jollyy5]

It was a rather pointless spell, they just kept it around because it was iconic I guess.

They've probably accounted for the loss of 3-8% mitigation, and hey, instead we get tanks with 20% damage reduction at all times instead of sometimes.

[Neophyte]

They probably increase base values for both defenses.

People need to remember that even after the changes a UCoB/UWU kill should still be possible.

Without protect and without VIT melds.
Same for any 'minimum ilvl' raid.

So some kind of adjustments will be made.

[Age_of_Oblivion]

This has been a long time coming, but if I’m being honest I would rather see Protect/Shell/Veil implemented as targeted cooldowns, like Rampart.