Invulns: Problems and Solutions

[Tranquilmelody7]

Just Fix Living Dead.
Invulnerability skills are some of the most interesting CDs in the game, I don't want tanking to become even less enjoyable.

No convalescence, no sole Survivor, no DA Abyssal drain, no multiple Abyssal Drains, and the ballooning HP totals just make that already terribly unenjoyable move flat out unwieldy this expansion.

Hallowed Ground being overpowered is only a concern for solo play and casual progression.

The only flawed invulnerability is Living Dead.

[Absurdity]

I think invulns are a great way to incentivize bringing one tank over another. If you bring a WAR, you just don't have to think anymore about tank busters in E8S. I like that.

There's also a bit more to invulns than just "use them as much as you can to trivialize tank busters". It's definitely not a thing in every encounter but let's take E3S as the most recent example.


Leviathan does 4 tank busters over the whole fight which hits twice, the first hit applying a vuln that makes you unable to survive the 2nd hit. You negate the first two with both tank invulns, share the 3rd and now you have to think about what your respective invuln does for the 4th.

The last tank buster happens shortly before Black Smokers. If I remember correctly on GNB you have Superbolide ready again even if you used it on the 2nd buster and you definitely have Holmgang ready on WAR.



Now you could use Superbolide on the buster but Black Smokers is coming up soon and you might want to use it there so your healer doesn't have to worry about you for 8 seconds while they are busy with mechanics, which means you might want to share the 4th buster as well.



On warrior however sharing it means you have to use a defensive there and Holmgang isn't gonna do jack for Black Smokers since it deals continuous damage to the tanks. This means as a warrior you probably want to Holmgang the 4th buster and consequently save all your other defensives to help with damage during Black Smokers. This means you would Holm the 1st Buster, Superbolide the 2nd, share the 3rd and Holm the 4th. Now you go into Black Smokers with both tanks having all their defensive CDs and your co-tank potentially also having their invuln, making the mechanic a whole lot easier to heal.


If we would just use them on cooldown you could holmgang the 3rd buster if you used it on the 1st but this would mean you 100% have to share the 4th which means less mitigation for Black Smokers.

[Lyth]

...

I don't think that you need to remove them necessarily, but I'd see a bit more thought put into them than invuln-swap-invuln-swap. It does get old pretty fast. What I'm proposing is that smart use of the rest of your defensive kit be used to open up access to these abilities. There needs to be more to mitigation than timestamps and spreadsheets.

[Izsha]

I dont see how this makes any fundamental change. Gauge will only accrue at X rate. So you still have a set number of times that it can he used. You are just replacing a timer with a gauge which is a fancy way of putting it on a timer. Theres no additional 'decision making' to a limit break than a cooldown.

'We get 1 lb3 in this fight. We must use it by X time otherwise we wont get a 2nd lb before the end of the fight so we must use it in this 1 minute window'.

My immunity is on X minute timer so I have to use it by Y time to still have it available for Z mechanic at the end.

Theres no difference. It's an invuln that's on a timer. If that is a prebuilt cooldown or a fight specific gauge is the same thing. You could get the exact same effect by having invulns recast start when you pull a boss if you dont want to have it available from the start. Pld hast to earn gauge for shelltron while other tanks can use theirs from the 1st moment. That doesnt make shelltron this amazing decisionmaking event. You just cant use it for 20 sec then it's the same as everyone else. It's the same thing.

[Cabalabob]

I don't think that you need to remove them necessarily, but I'd see a bit more thought put into them than invuln-swap-invuln-swap. It does get old pretty fast. What I'm proposing is that smart use of the rest of your defensive kit be used to open up access to these abilities. There needs to be more to mitigation than timestamps and spreadsheets.

Invulns offer exactly that, there are no mechanics in the game that require an invuln, if you took invulns away you would just use a cooldown instead, or if you made it so they can only be used at a specific time you are LITERALLY time stamping them.

Current invulns let you handle mechanics in different ways and mix up the fight. Got a PLD? You can ignore that first tank buster in shiva, got a WAR? You can ignore every morn afah, etc.

What you’re suggesting is basically what SE did with tank LB3 in late ARR and HW. Tank LB was widely considered completely useless so SE solution? Make it 100% required at a specific time (Bahamut and Alexander’s ultimate attack). This was not good design. It didn’t make the LB3 useful, it just made it mandatory for one specific thing. Fight design was handled a lot better in stormblood on this front with fights like byakko and o7s where you didn’t HAVE to tank LB3 but you could use it to cheese a mechanic, making it useful for its own sake and not just because it was required.

[Nefimmyr]

Doesn't PLD already have to do that as it lacks personal cooldowns out of the 4 tanks? As well as the other tanks to some degree. So that notion seems unnecessary, especially since they've removed a lot of mitigation skills from Stormblood and previous xpacs so tanks universally have fewer to each job they already ration out. Each "spammy" mitigation they do have even comes with a downside or limitation inherently: Sheltron uses Oath gauge, limiting you to 2 in a row at a time; Heart of Stone is the weakest as far as protection; The Blackest Night costs 3000 mp, which you only can pull of 3 ideally before bottoming out your MP (capped at 10000); and is a WAR uses Raw Intuition, it costs a usage of Nascent Flash and to use Nascent Flash costs a usage of Raw Intuition.

[Absurdity]

Doesn't PLD already have to do that as it lacks personal cooldowns out of the 4 tanks? As well as the other tanks to some degree. So that notion seems unnecessary, especially since they've removed a lot of mitigation skills from Stormblood and previous xpacs so tanks universally have fewer to each job they already ration out. Each "spammy" mitigation they do have even comes with a downside or limitation inherently: Sheltron uses Oath gauge, limiting you to 2 in a row at a time; Heart of Stone is the weakest as far as protection; The Blackest Night costs 3000 mp, which you only can pull of 3 ideally before bottoming out your MP (capped at 10000); and is a WAR uses Raw Intuition, it costs a usage of Nascent Flash and to use Nascent Flash costs a usage of Raw Intuition.

Tank cooldowns are actually more abundant due to the relatively low tank damage and the very spread out tank busters. You pretty much always have your 30% or 20% ready for each tankbuster and your short, fast recast mitigation like Raw. So you don't really "need" invulns for a fight, it often just frees up mitigation for fluff damage.

[Hierro]

There's also a bit more to invulns than just "use them as much as you can to trivialize tank busters". It's definitely not a thing in every encounter but let's take E3S as the most recent example.


Leviathan does 4 tank busters over the whole fight which hits twice, the first hit applying a vuln that makes you unable to survive the 2nd hit. You negate the first two with both tank invulns, share the 3rd and now you have to think about what your respective invuln does for the 4th.

The last tank buster happens shortly before Black Smokers. If I remember correctly on GNB you have Superbolide ready again even if you used it on the 2nd buster and you definitely have Holmgang ready on WAR.



Now you could use Superbolide on the buster but Black Smokers is coming up soon and you might want to use it there so your healer doesn't have to worry about you for 8 seconds while they are busy with mechanics, which means you might want to share the 4th buster as well.



On warrior however sharing it means you have to use a defensive there and Holmgang isn't gonna do jack for Black Smokers since it deals continuous damage to the tanks. This means as a warrior you probably want to Holmgang the 4th buster and consequently save all your other defensives to help with damage during Black Smokers. This means you would Holm the 1st Buster, Superbolide the 2nd, share the 3rd and Holm the 4th. Now you go into Black Smokers with both tanks having all their defensive CDs and your co-tank potentially also having their invuln, making the mechanic a whole lot easier to heal.


If we would just use them on cooldown you could holmgang the 3rd buster if you used it on the 1st but this would mean you 100% have to share the 4th which means less mitigation for Black Smokers.

Or you could go DRK and WAR and invuln all the busters in E3S. gg ez

[Lyth]

...

It depends on what your gauge comes from. If you passively build gauge at a set rate over time, it's functionally identical to what we have now. If you superimpose gauge 'procs' for correctly interrupting or mitigating, then gauge generation becomes more variable. Think less modern day PLD gauge generation and more HW DRK gauge generation. The more triggers, the more variability.

It also means that if you're deliberately trying to 'farm' gauge, skewing that too heavily on one tank may impact gauge generation on another. Right now, each tank's invuln availability is completely independent of the other. Individual gauges couples your tanks' access to invulns.

...

Actually, what I'm suggesting is that they become less available at baseline, and that you have to actually put in some work if you want to get more uses out of them.

There's a lot of complaints about tanks feeling unsatisfied with tanking. On one hand, you have people complaining that tanking is just too easy. Those same people then turn around and complain about not being able to cheese and otherwise bypass having to learn mechanics if invulns were less available.

We're too powerful defensively. And invulns are at the root of this. While I understand the aesthetic appeal, they are too readily available, to the point that it completely overshadows the rest of your defensive toolkit.

I don't think that you need to have pre-planned moments when an invuln is expected to be used as part of a standard strategy. That's what we have at the moment. What I'd like to see is people prepare a strategy without invulns, and then adapt their cooldown rotation and swaps on the fly based around the rate at which each tank generates their invulns. Communication and teamplay rather than spreadsheets.

[Absurdity]

There's a lot of complaints about tanks feeling unsatisfied with tanking. On one hand, you have people complaining that tanking is just too easy. Those same people then turn around and complain about not being able to cheese and otherwise bypass having to learn mechanics if invulns were less available.

We're too powerful defensively. And invulns are at the root of this. While I understand the aesthetic appeal, they are too readily available, to the point that it completely overshadows the rest of your defensive toolkit.

I have to disagree there. Invulns never meant you don't need to learn mechanics, I'd even argue that you need to know every mechanic to use your invuln optimally.



I'm also gonna go ahead and claim that invulns aren't why we're feeling too powerful defensively, the infrequency of high damage on the tanks is. You currently could completely remove invulns from the tanks and they would still be able to easily mitigate every single tankbuster. Invulns aren't some big boogieman that allows us to cheese mechanics, it simply means we don't have to use a different defensive cooldown there and can instead use it on fluff damage, easing the burden on healers. The fact that healers don't have much to heal in the first place isn't just a tank issue but an "everyone not taking more damage" issue.


Let's take O11s as an example because that's still relatively fresh in my mind. If I didn't map my mitigation correctly no matter how low the cooldown on holmgang was, I'd die to a mustard bomb at some point because I had no mitigation available.