Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
Understood. But, it's that's not just an XIV paradigm; it's an inherent issue with capped outputs like mitigation and healing. Damage-centric progression therefore tends to norm for nearly every MMO with a serious raid community, save perhaps for the odd raid in GW2 and cutting edge progression that's meant to otherwise lock us out of completion until we've had additional weeks to gear up from the same raid. Without allowing defensive stats to themselves be flex stats of sorts, such that their would-be excess mitigation can see real purpose, you condemn them to that same inherent issue.
Flex implies you get choice in the matter.

Again - I am not getting the choice in what I want. I don't get to take A by itself. A is connected to B, and if I don't want B, too bad.

Even if you perfectly tune everything so that it is equally effective, even if we still max out two of the now three stats, that still leaves several cases - Where I want the offense of two stats, but the defense of the third.

Which still baffles me why you're so opposed to just decoupling the offense from the defense, and create the stat budget so that you must have a Defense stat. You do not lose anything if you could gain nothing in its place.

Even if changing nothing else, all it does is give the player more choice in the matter.

And that matters. The flavor in how the tank defends matters, the flavor in how the tank attacks matters, and creating a scenario where you cannot have one because of an unrelated, noncompeting choice kind of sucks, especially if they're so evenly tuned that the difference between any of it is marginal.