Scale back Critical Hit

[baklava151]

That leave Tenacity as a damage reduction stat is only meaningful for AOE and Auto attack. Tank pretty much just shrug off the former, and auto-attack come down to one thing: how often does a healer has to heal you for auto? Basically, it needs to reduce the damage from auto enough that it will save the healer one single target heal. The issue is ... healer's single heal are very strong, so the damage reduction have to be massive as well, otherwise all it does it adds overheal on the healer, which is the second problem.

Not only that but autos also just don't hit that frequently. In savage it always seems like the boss does like 3 or 4 autos before it starts casting something which stops autos, and often during mechanics (Snake and Centaur in P8S for example) there's just none going out. Still good to try to have a mit up for them when you can but yeah, not enough to want to stack tenacity.

[Themarvin]

The issue with Tenacity is two fold:

First problem, tank has too many defensive CD already, and all the TB mechanic has always been about them using their CD correctly to survive. Tenacity never really played a role in determining whether the tank live or die to a buster.

That leave Tenacity as a damage reduction stat is only meaningful for AOE and Auto attack. Tank pretty much just shrug off the former, and auto-attack come down to one thing: how often does a healer has to heal you for auto? Basically, it needs to reduce the damage from auto enough that it will save the healer one single target heal. The issue is ... healer's single heal are very strong, so the damage reduction have to be massive as well, otherwise all it does it adds overheal on the healer, which is the second problem.

Frankly the tank design in FF14 does not really lend itself to a passive "tank" stat. Pretty much all of their defensive cool down are duration base instead of hit base (like TBN). For example, in dungeon, with proper CD tank can have almost have 100% up time on their mit unless the DPS is really bad, and thus passive damage reduction is negligible.

Anything that adds stacks though... if the gear no matter what you do got some of it on then it can really hurt either other than a bit more protection and a bit more damage?

[Jeeqbit]

Tenacity - Tank-only stat that reduces damage taken. It reduces damage taken very, VERY slightly, and only slightly raises damage done. Not a good stat to invest into.

I disagree with the assessment that it's slight because it can reduce the incoming damage by 10%. The damage reduction is just about fine, it's just that we can get away without it. Even if it was 20% or 30% mitigation, nobody would care because we use Rampart, Sentinel and Sheltron on the busters and have the defense stat and a trait that reduces damage. Tanks survive mechanics that everyone else in the raid can't, including ones that are supposed to wipe the entire party, so why would they need yet more mitigation? Additionally, once you gear up as weeks progress, the extra Vitality makes up for not having Tenacity by giving everyone more room for error. When you combine these facts with how it increases damage less than Determination, a lot of people will choose the piece with Determination on it over the piece with Tenacity on it.

If someone is of the mindset to help the healers as much as possible with the Abyssos dots at the expense of their damage, they already have plenty of reason to stack Tenacity, but let's be honest, everyone just goes to The Balance or their friends reiterate information from there to avoid Tenacity, so they will avoid it even if it's 20%, 30% or 40% mitigation. They can say "it could be useful for prog" but people will just skip past that, seek out a BiS list and use it.

Skill/Spell Speed - A stat that determines your GCD. Definitely needs looking at, as its only purpose is to enforce certain GCD tiers and not provide much else. It's been the bane of some jobs' existence as well.

Skill/Spell Speed increases the damage of dots/damage areas and auto-attacks as well. I don't think that this stat is actually a problem itself. The problem is that we have strict rotations that can be messed up by using it and there will always be a meta, and that meta is regarded as being crit. If we got rid of crit and dh, jobs without too strict or unaffected rotations might actually use it.

There will always be a meta stat, especially while we have crit and dh available to all jobs. Without those it would probably be different stats for each job.

[Amenara]

If someone is of the mindset to help the healers as much as possible with the Abyssos dots at the expense of their damage, they already have plenty of reason to stack Tenacity, but let's be honest, everyone just goes to The Balance or their friends reiterate information from there to avoid Tenacity, so they will avoid it even if it's 20%, 30% or 40% mitigation. They can say "it could be useful for prog" but people will just skip past that, seek out a BiS list and use it.

There will always be a meta stat, especially while we have crit and dh available to all jobs. Without those it would probably be different stats for each job.

I think with heals being so strong is the biggest mitigating factor for wanting Tenacity as well. If there is little to no need for healers to burn a GCD on healing the tank then why would the tank need more mitigation when they can stack more effective sub stats. There 100% is a meta, but the meta is dps is king which makes things that dont contribute or contribute less trash stats past any breakpoints you want or need.

[Liam_Harper]

If someone is of the mindset to help the healers as much as possible with the Abyssos dots at the expense of their damage, they already have plenty of reason to stack Tenacity, but let's be honest, everyone just goes to The Balance or their friends reiterate information from there to avoid Tenacity

Good.

As a healer, the best way to help with Abyssos dots and autos is to play your job well. Not stack tenacity and sacrifice dps. The entire tier can be done without needing to GCD heal tanks. This is another reason tenacity is worthless except as a small set of training wheels while learning a job. Everything can be covered by playing well.

[DixieBellOCE]

If someone is of the mindset to help the healers as much as possible with the Abyssos dots at the expense of their damage, they already have plenty of reason to stack Tenacity, but let's be honest, everyone just goes to The Balance or their friends reiterate information from there to avoid Tenacity, so they will avoid it even if it's 20%, 30% or 40% mitigation. They can say "it could be useful for prog" but people will just skip past that, seek out a BiS list and use it.

If somebody is in the Mindset to help healers, Meld for damage and end the fight faster. (Also do mechanics correctly).

Building defensive in an offensive orientated game is a terrible design choice.

The only job that melds tenacity is Warrior, and thats just when Crit/Det are already capped on an item since DET and SKS are now dead stats to them (Thanks devs).

[Absurdity]

If somebody is in the Mindset to help healers, Meld for damage and end the fight faster. (Also do mechanics correctly).

Building defensive in an offensive orientated game is a terrible design choice.

The only job that melds tenacity is Warrior, and thats just when Crit/Det are already capped on an item since DET and SKS are now dead stats to them (Thanks devs).

Even warrior melds 0 tenacity since they changed how direct hit works, it's all crit where possible and direct hit everywhere else now...and I guess 2 DET melds for hitting the next tier there.


But my main problem isn't even with crit variance, or how potency bloat on our abilities and the 2 minute meta have made the problem that much worse, but with how utterly boring the substats are in general. They're all just "increases damage by XYZ", nerfing crit just means you'll stack one of the other "increases damage by XYZ" stats and get slightly less rng on your dps.

I'm not entirely sure why spell/skill speed increase damage instead of rate???

Jeeqbit already mentioned it but that's because this game's engine literally can't make DoTs tick faster, they're bound to server ticks which is estimated to be every 3 seconds.

Because there is a fixed tick rate of 3 seconds and increasing the damage has mostly the same effect as increasing the tick rate, which is increasing overall damage. Probably a workaround.

It achieves the same result but the gameplay "feel" is completely different. It's hard to explain but if you ever played Affliction Warlock or Shadow Priest in WoW and stacked haste you know what I mean.

[Zebraoracle]

I think the bigger issue is that secondary stats are pretty awful and need a redesign to make other options compelling. When your secondary stats for everyone are crit > everything else you have messed that one up. Good issue to bring up regardless.

Gosh I agree with this so hard. I know people here hate talking about WoW, but I think they did sub-stats pretty decently. Everything isn't "you only want crit ever", some specs actually want more haste and/or mastery (mastery does different things depending on the spec, and in some specs it's VERY strong).

Haste is actually desirable in large amounts sometimes, and not just for meme builds (gotta go fast BLM for example) or "to a certain point" or "for comfort". And unlike spell speed/skill speed, it doesn't run as much of a risk of completely screwing up your rotation if you accidentally get too much (I can never seriously use my SMN with my spell speed addiction for my BLM, but fire 4 go BRRRRRRRRRRRR). Haste also increases HoT/DoT speed which feels really nice for classes that use those, I'm not entirely sure why spell/skill speed increase damage instead of rate???

Versatility is basically determination, but better (increases your damage and healing by a % and reduces damage taken by half that percent).

As said before, mastery does different things for different specs, but for some specs it's very strong. Like for resto shamans, it basically turns every healing spell into astro's essential dignity.

In comparison to WoW's substats, FF14's substats just... feel bad. I don't get excited that I just got a new piece of gear with crit on it... because I'm going to meld crit anyways.

[Jeeqbit]

Gosh I agree with this so hard. I know people here hate talking about WoW, but I think they did sub-stats pretty decently. Everything isn't "you only want crit ever", some specs actually want more haste and/or mastery (mastery does different things depending on the spec, and in some specs it's VERY strong).

A Mastery stat would probably increase Tenacity for tanks and Piety for healers. I prefer the system we have that just makes a category for Role, otherwise the stat names become lackluster and we may as well just get rid of substats and have pure potency, weapon damage and attack power.

I'm not entirely sure why spell/skill speed increase damage instead of rate???

Because there is a fixed tick rate of 3 seconds and increasing the damage has mostly the same effect as increasing the tick rate, which is increasing overall damage. Probably a workaround.

Versatility is basically determination, but better (increases your damage and healing by a % and reduces damage taken by half that percent).

So it's Tenacity.

[dspguy]

I think the bigger issue is that secondary stats are pretty awful and need a redesign to make other options compelling. When your secondary stats for everyone are crit > everything else you have messed that one up. Good issue to bring up regardless.

The nature of MMO players is always going to be "what combination of gear/melds/rotation will yield the most DPS?" And when they find that combination, that'll be the "new crit." The closest we've ever been to having to actually think about what gear to choose was back when tanks could go with STR or VIT melds on accessories and we had accuracy thresholds. On Day 1 of a new gear tier, it was pretty clear what BiS would be... but not how to get to BiS while maintaining minimum accuracy and maximum crit.

What we have now is mostly "highest iLvl that has crit and no Skill/Spell speed." The minimal thought process we have is what to do when our gear options are higher iLvl without crit vs 10 iLvl lower with crit. That's about it.