Shelltron and critical attacks.

[SleepyNeko]

Only older content allows for bosses AA to crit, like maybe ARE old. Since they already removed awareness from role skills you can see thay they will no longer be adding avoidable critical damage to the game.

They probably will need to do some major changes to their combat system to allow for blocking to work against critical attacks.

[Shurrikhan]

While it doesn't help the critical bypass, there is also no guarantee that shield strength won't increase - only that it will not vary within a tier itself.

True. I guess I was assuming overmuch, since it seems remarkably poor design to specifically make a tank weaker at the start -- inferior to other tanks in overall mitigaition -- only to make it abnormally strong by the last tier.

[Breadgehog]

True. I guess I was assuming overmuch, since it seems remarkably poor design to specifically make a tank weaker at the start -- inferior to other tanks in overall mitigaition -- only to make it abnormally strong by the last tier.

I genuinely hadn't noticed block strength stagnated at Ronkan, that's on me. Historically it's been vaguely like BRD used to be with crit, okay to start but better as things go on. I don't necessarily think this is good design, just that it's in keeping with past decisions and seemed to be their intention. We'll see what the next tier brings, if there truly are no changes to block strength then Sheltron should probably just be a 15-20% reduction for its duration, without negating existing block.

[Nockvryca]

Are you sure? You should double check that!

Bosses AA do crit. Raid wide aoes and mechnics (such as tank busters, marks etc.) cannot crit, but AAs still do!

Also, I never saw OP mentioned dying to trash mobs because of crit hits!?
They just mentioned that Sheltron is rendered useless when getting auto critted... or worse getting hit by crit mechanic.

If they are dying to auto attacks on single bosses that is mostly a healer problem. If you are dying in trash pulls that is a combination of problems, tank not using cds, healer not healing effectively, low dps resulting in too many resources being used in one pull. Even crit autos are not dangerous, the only boss that i can really think of that is dangerous because of crits is o3s. This is boss the buster crits and she herself has a high crit chance, and only really dangerous if you are doing it synced.

[Shurrikhan]

[1] I genuinely hadn't noticed block strength stagnated at Ronkan, that's on me. Historically it's been vaguely like BRD used to be with crit, okay to start but better as things go on. I don't necessarily think this is good design, just that it's in keeping with past decisions and seemed to be their intention. We'll see what the next tier brings, if there truly are no changes to block strength then [2] Sheltron should probably just be a 15-20% reduction for its duration, without negating existing block.

[1] No worries. It was basically dumb luck that I happened to be looking over future alt gears and noticed that the moment my WHM hit 80.

[2] Personally, I like that if passive RNG blocking is to be PLD's answer to its reduced mitigation throughput over time (from its lacking an eHP CD relative to other tanks) then Shelltron effectively just makes reliable that RNG function. I just think it should then be significantly more frequent than most on-demand CDs (IR/NF and HoS at 25s regardless of uptime), rather than just barely so (Shelltron per 22.4 second of uptime). Heck, I'd almost rather the gauge be removed and Shelltron made (1) a 40-second, two-charge CD that is (2) later upgraded such that its cooldown is reduced with each auto-attack (until it averages out to 20 seconds or so in perfect uptime, or maybe 25s when including a whole away-from-boss Req phase, but still gets some benefit from downtime).

[TheForce]

Sheltron's tradeoff is that as the expansion goes on it will get strictly better at blocking most damage than other on-demand cooldowns, because block strength will likely get to the point where it mitigates about 25%. There's not going to be any content that straight out requires you to be able to ward off an autocrit, even shit like Optimized Blade Dance in O12 and Tera Slash in Shin Ex will still be fine, the same way magical tankbusters don't instagib non-DRKs. PLD is allowed to be slightly worse in one aspect of tanking that rarely actually surfaces, especially with how overwhelmingly good it is by almost any other metric.

Even though it's looking unlikely now, I do really hope that Block's strength continues to increase as the expansion goes on. Or at the very least, Square Enix should just...

A) Introduce a "Super-Block" system, basically, if we were to pop Shelltron/POA and block an attack that we would've blocked regardless, that "Super-Block" would mitigate 30% of the damage instead of 20%.

Or,

B) Make Block a static 20% that is not affected by the equipped shield, because I gotta say, I almost spit out my drink when I saw that my block was 14% while I was a doing a level synced dungeon. That's gotta be addressed, Block should never, ever, ever, ever be weaker than Parry.