Tank Mitigation vs Tank DPS.

[Raven2014]

If that healer is overhealing 50% of the time... then the saved heal isn't likely to be saved... because they are already healing you wayyyy too much. What makes you think they would then heal less?

Perhaps they should heal a bit less and the tank should cycle their damage reducing cool downs when they need to instead.

Wow, it seems the answer is that player skill is important during relevant content that you cannot over gear. Meaning having additional tenacity for minuscule gains in damage reduction is pointless. Because if they do not play properly in the first place, no sub stat in the world will save them.

It kinda remind of the debate of GW2 back when it was launched. The game departed from the Holy Trinity system so there is no specific tank/DPS/heal, yet many people at the time still wanted to shoe-horn it in. One of the main sticking point back then was between class-cannon vs tanky/support build.

- Class-cannon: since the game was designed in a way that "EVERY" Damage can be avoided, people with this built rely on not taking hit while kill the bosses fast enough before the mistake creep in.
- Tanky/support build: people insisted on having tank and healer to "sustain" the fight.

There was this guy in my guild who played a Paladin and very proud of his tanky/support build. He always bragged whenever his group kill Lupicus (which was the hardest boss of the time), it's thanks to him, how he can survive the hit, heal his teams and res them when they are down. I came with him once to see what his team done, and god it was painful. The fight last somewhere between 20-30 minutes with people taking damage, dying left and right.

- By tanky, it didn't mean he didn't die, it just meant he died after 4-5 hits instead of 1-2 hits.
- By "healing the party", it doesn't mean he was able to heal his group through mistake, it just means he was able to pro-long their life a bit, so instead of a person dying 8 times during the fight, they may now only die 6-7 times.

Their clear mainly relies on corpse chaining aka hope that not everyone die at the same time to res other people and wear the boss down in the long run.

So I asked if he want to come see my class-cannon group, and he came. We nuked the boss down in less then 5min with no death, in fact, except for him none of us took any damage since we dodged all of them. The best part is even after that, he still insisted that his build is "superior". Note that I'm not talking about it was a debate of playstyle, somehow even after seeing it, he still insisted players like us was "bad" or "doesn't exist" because "if you take a hit or two you gonna die, while I can take 4 hits and survive!". I didn't press him further for his 'logic' because I knew better how it would end up anyway.

[WaterShield]

It kinda remind of the debate of GW2 back when it was launched. The game departed from the Holy Trinity system so there is no specific tank/DPS/heal, yet many people at the time still wanted to shoe-horn it in. One of the main sticking point back then was between class-cannon vs tanky/support build.

- Class-cannon: since the game was designed in a way that "EVERY" Damage can be avoided, people with this built rely on not taking hit while kill the bosses fast enough before the mistake creep in.
- Tanky/support build: people insisted on having tank and healer to "sustain" the fight.

There was this guy in my guild who played a Paladin and very proud of his tanky/support build. He always bragged whenever his group kill Lupicus (which was the hardest boss of the time), it's thanks to him, how he can survive the hit, heal his teams and res them when they are down. I came with him once to see what his team done, and god it was painful. The fight last somewhere between 20-30 minutes with people taking damage, dying left and right.

- By tanky, it didn't mean he didn't die, it just meant he died after 4-5 hits instead of 1-2 hits.
- By "healing the party", it doesn't mean he was able to heal his group through mistake, it just means he was able to pro-long their life a bit, so instead of a person dying 8 times during the fight, they may now only die 6-7 times.

Their clear mainly relies on corpse chaining aka hope that not everyone die at the same time to res other people and wear the boss down in the long run.

So I asked if he want to come see my class-cannon group, and he came. We nuked the boss down in less then 5min with no death, in fact, except for him none of us took any damage since we dodged all of them. The best part is even after that, he still insisted that his build is "superior". Note that I'm not talking about it was a debate of playstyle, somehow even after seeing it, he still insisted players like us was "bad" or "doesn't exist" because "if you take a hit or two you gonna die, while I can take 4 hits and survive!". I didn't press him further for his 'logic' because I knew better how it would end up anyway.

I played with a non glass cannon build myself. However that was because I primarily played WVW. High move speed with high flat damage and health as a greatsword / rifle warrior at launch.

It was really fun memeing with that build XD

I 100% agree with what you've said for PVE though. BIS is determined by what is demanded of the content, not personal feelings. Which is the trap tenacity tanks are falling into.

[EaMett]

This has probably been said a thousand times but once you know mechanics all that is left is the dps check. Therefore dps get priority on the gear. The only way it would switch is if there were sections that were impossible to get through without more healer or tank gear.

The reality is that heal checks can easily be handled by healer’s overbloated healing kits (healers actually have so much downtime they’ll be dpsing 70+% of the time, not just “one or two” spells). And tank busters are easily mitigated enough to no be fatal even when you’re way bellow the minimum ilvl.

Either passing the dps check or minimizing the amount of mechanics to handle are therefore going to be the main priority.
It also doesn’t help that historically tenacity usually hasn’t benefitted tanks enough to be worth its cost in dps.

[Kleeya]

Meanwhile, the numerous times all healers are dead on the ground at a rank A hunt or ShB boss fate because they cant avoid this_mechanic_that_kill_you_in_one_shot correctly for the eighth time, i prefer to have more defense to survive longer, to have the time of having at least one of the afforementionned healers be rezzed/spawn in a hurry my chocobo in full healer mode. Having 1% more damage isn't gonna help me when the mob i am tanking is still at more than 75% health and when there is no dps checks on it. The game is not all about how much damage you can deal in savage raids you know.

[WaterShield]

Meanwhile, the numerous times all healers are dead on the ground at a rank A hunt or ShB boss fate because they cant avoid this_mechanic_that_kill_you_in_one_shot correctly for the eighth time, i prefer to have more defense to survive longer, to have the time of having at least one of the afforementionned healers be rezzed/spawn in a hurry my chocobo in full healer mode. Having 1% more damage isn't gonna help me when the mob i am tanking is still at more than 75% health and when there is no dps checks on it. The game is not all about how much damage you can deal in savage raids you know.

That is very much not a gearing issue.

You can't over gear mechanics on current content. The issue there is poor play.

[Raven2014]

Raiding is like a "the poor get poorer" and "the rich get richer" things, with DPS as the main currency. If you don't have enough DPS, the fight get longer and that means you have to deal with more and harder mechanic which usually stack at the end of the fight. Group with high DPS can clear the fights without even seeing the "hardest" part of it.

This also applies to outside of raid, like dungeon. Things die faster = tank takes less damage = healer has to heal less.

[Barraind]

I miss my scepter/focus guardian from back in the day.

Staff was great until they nerfed the easy farm spots for it.

[RareItems]

People think that by stacking Direct Hit your going to deal 10,000 more DPS lol when in actuality its just 500-800 DPS on single target mobs, 1000-2000 on AoE.

Also while your DPS increases, your defense lowers, so that Random Healer your going to get is going to be DPSing less which results in DPS loverall resulting in the same clearing speed if you just stacked Tenacity/Crit/Det/Skillspeed.

Keep in Mind, Tenacity also gives a nice Damage boost as well as Damage Mitigation and Self Heal.

Your literally trading in "A chance to deal 1-3% more DPS" for " 100% chance to increase your DPS/ Damage Mitigation and Self heal"

The only time you should be stacking Direct Hit on Tank Melds is if you Raid/Ex Trials otherwise Tenacity is a better option.

The only reason Raiders stack Direct Hit is to meet DPS checks on so called "Endgame Content". For some reason, they think the Twinning has a DPS check.

[Raven2014]

The only reason Raiders stack Direct Hit is to meet DPS checks on so called "Endgame Content". For some reason, they think the Twinning has a DPS check.

I'm sorry but ... I think you're the only one thinking like that? 19/20 times when people talk about meld/optimization/BiS it IS about end game content. If I wasn't reserve that 1/20 slot for your specifically I would have said 20/20 tbh. You had stated you don't do end game content, and you also said your "experiment" only came from expert roulette, and also more than one person already politely pointed out the context here is within the end game.

tbh, speaking as a healer, for dungeon run as long as you are not undergeared, like 2+ level behind the dungeon (story/lvling) or 2+ patch cycle behind (for expert) I don't think anyone really care about what you meld. Put all +CP or +GP on your dungeon gears and I don't think most people will notice the difference.