Let's Talk Tanks

[Kabooa]

Personally, I prefer more or less general uses, but with the way a tank would use that affect inherently being fit to what they do.

Generally speaking, sub-stats should be passive boosts that, at most, encourage angles of play.

Gameplay adjustments itself should primarily be the focus of kit interaction. Gear enhances the kit through bolstering passive effects. Unless i'm misunderstanding, giving specific interactions greater interaction through the stat itself (For Example - The auto-block when shield is present, with Determination granting the shield) seems the sort of thing stepping out of its lane.

Passive benefits might not directly change your gameplay, but it does adjust the relative value and weight of the decisions you can make, or enable some scenarios that you otherwise didn't have access to.

The offered attribute adjustments aimed for that, though admittedly as a spitball it likely misses the mark.

[Shurrikhan]

Generally speaking, sub-stats should be passive boosts that, at most, encourage angles of play.

Gameplay adjustments itself should primarily be the focus of kit interaction. Gear enhances the kit through bolstering passive effects. Unless i'm misunderstanding, giving specific interactions greater interaction through the stat itself (For Example - The auto-block when shield is present, with Determination granting the shield) seems the sort of thing stepping out of its lane.

That seems a fine opinion, but hardly any more than that. Mine is the opposite: if you can't use it for customization over gameplay, why should it even exist? Is it there only to ensure that one reward meant for your job should be better than another of equal item level, thus creating intentionally uneven or graduated gear progression targets? Is it to ensure that you have to meet priority checks like Accuracy, thus having to keep your ambitions checked against arbitrary requirements? Is any of that consistently fun, as compared to not only maintaining such checks (via gameplay breakpoints), but also being able to pursue new ones, with greater agency over those stat's use? I think stats should be simple, but gameplay-affecting, with intuitive player agency.

Passive benefits might not directly change your gameplay, but it does adjust the relative value and weight of the decisions you can make, or enable some scenarios that you otherwise didn't have access to.

Then it still changes gameplay, just in a way that feels less impactful or player-chosen. My idea is simply that there's some added flexibility and intuitive control: gear hold multiple options between which you have freedom to allot secondary stat points. You set, essentially, what you want to happen, and your gear allots its points accordingly. Where your desired breakpoints are not possible, it attempts your second choice system of priorities, or third, or so forth.

[Kabooa]

Then it still changes gameplay, just in a way that feels less impactful or player-chosen. My idea is simply that there's some added flexibility and intuitive control: gear hold multiple options between which you have freedom to allot secondary stat points. You set, essentially, what you want to happen, and your gear allots its points accordingly. Where your desired breakpoints are not possible, it attempts your second choice system of priorities, or third, or so forth.

It seems the sort of thing that would work better with a sub-stat expansion instead of a contraction, which I'm not opposed to. When the stats themselves play more direct roles into kit interaction, a greater variety of sub-stats also lets those stats have more meaningful progression since they do not cover more general cases.

In this particular example, have it be a defensive sub-stat (Maybe have gear with One Offense, One Defense stat as its budget, materia not included) with significantly higher gains, so said shield would scale significantly higher, rather than getting the same lethargic snail build over an expansion, not to mention that maybe you want to run a build without determination but still make use of a good shield.

Perhaps a retuning over the stat budget and reorganization is required. If gear is outfitted with one Offense, one Defense divided among its primary and secondary, and then materia can either fill the secondary or seek to bolster a third stat, there's a few more levers to tune in this regard.

[Shurrikhan]

It seems the sort of thing that would work better with a sub-stat expansion instead of a contraction, which I'm not opposed to.

I'm again not sure why you would assume that. Short of customization in the likeness of a sphere grid, a PoE skill map, or any other particularly dense talent tree, how are you divorcing specific gains (like "will my Shadow Wall be enough for this" or "can I have my Shadowskin counterstrike for me on all three hits of this tankbuster?") from general ones (like the Determination and Critical Hit examples I gave just before)? To separate general gains you would need tailored progression options in order to balance the weights of specific allotments, and even then those options would likely offer only a few competitive choices despite making the game far more esoteric and thereby divisive between players "in the know" and those outside. (That's not to say that I find such options to inherently boil down to "illusion of choice" -- no more so than job choice, at the least -- but that's not just a sub-stat expansion at that point; you'd be adding an entire Junction system of sorts.)

So, again, why not just take a running theme instead and apply it generally? The actual results of each can still be quite deliberate and inherently tailored to each role, since the rotational windows, procs, and numeric breakpoints of tanks and healers will inherently be linked also to tanking and healing just as those of damage-dealers will double down on dealing damage. I didn't pick those core three sub-stats arbitrarily; they specifically allow for control over rotational frames, and control over proc-based gameplay, and control over breakpoints outside of rotation or general proc chance, covering almost any and all gameplay alteration between them so you can tailor your job to your preferred macrorotations and windows for mechanical checks.

A slight sub-stat expansion, especially when allowing the choice between the offensive and defensive, only faces the same issues we already face: rather than, say, offering tanks the choice of how they want to tank, you offer the choice of whether to be more, or less, like tanks at all -- and the damage intake of any new tier, specific fight, or as faced by their toolkit in the context of their co-tank, will usually make that choice for them.

[Kabooa]

I'm again not sure why you would assume that.

Because what happens if I want to boost my shield via Determination, but I'd prefer to have Critical Strike and Haste as my focused stats? There's a specific part of my offense I want to focus on, but it's separate from what I want for my defense.

How would decoupling the defensive properties, give them their own categories, and then rebalancing the stat budget where gear comes with 1 Offense, 1 Defense, and then materia serves as your choice for where to further specialize, not serve your model better?

[Shurrikhan]

Edit: Confusion on my part.

How would decoupling the defensive properties, give them their own categories, and then rebalancing the stat budget where gear comes with 1 Offense, 1 Defense, and then materia serves as your choice for where to further specialize, not serve your model better?

Because we play under developers who prefer to make damage almost always the objectively best solution? Because when players have the choice of the unfun but numerically far superior option (as damage has pretty much always been in this game), most take it regardless of its relative cost to their gameplay? Because when you give options each from category Superior and category Inferior, the latter may as well not exist? Because it only really offers choices in answer to "How much can I be less of a tank" as the best progression path for tanks?

You'd effectively just give us gear with a single secondary stat each, completely contrary to the player choice my model is aimed at.

[Kabooa]

Because we play under developers who prefer to make damage almost always the objectively best solution? Because when players have the choice of the unfun but numerically far superior option (as damage has pretty much always been in this game), most take it regardless of its relative cost to their gameplay? Because when you give options each from category Superior and category Inferior, the latter may as well not exist? Because it only really offers choices in answer to "How much can I be less of a tank" as the best progression path for tanks?

You'd effectively just give us gear with a single secondary stat each, completely contrary to the player choice my model is aimed at.

Do recall this thread makes the assumption that additional background changes are implemented to accommodate a suggestion.

The Devs prior behavior can be, in this land of make believe, considered invalid and moving forward we can have wildly different encounter set ups. Don't work under the assumption that damage is always the more efficient solution.

If we're just going to labor under the assumption that only damage matters, we might as well close up shop, because we have a whole forum of that to work with already.

So let me clarify.

The primary issue I have with such specific secondary effects to the attributes is that I cannot choose to have those specific interactions without picking an offensive stat I may not want.

I might even argue that shifting the passive power gain to pure item Level or primary attributes and letting things that dictate your rotation be the primary sub-stats themselves would be the better course.