[Discuss] Bringing back mitigation-damage interaction

[Shurrikhan]

If you want an ability that trades dps for survivability, there is already Clemency, and we all know how much people love using Clemency all the time...

Clemency is worth less than any Cure II equivalent, though, due to its lacking the 30% extra healing from Healer's Main and Mend traits, while PLD's offensive ppgcd is higher than most healers' and PLD has a strict macrorotation for which adjustment disproportionately sacrifices its highest ppgcd actions. Under that tuning and context, of course it will see little use.

Compare that, however, to say, old Equilibrium, which was more often used for healing instead. Or Inner Beast, which still saw decently frequent use while being the current Tank. Or if Holy Shelltron were a spender opposite a ~250p oGCD attack.

Do you really think players consistently would forgo over 1200p worth of personal sustain value, whenever it could make a difference larger than what they could do directly (e.g., that 250p) just so they could pad their ACT numbers at expense of clear time?

The problem is, there is no feedback to let you know you saved a healer a GCD, or that you have increased party DPS by using Inner Beast over Fell Cleave.

There is. Do you not track your healer's oGCDs? Would you not know how much damage is being mitigated by, say, a defensive that grants 30% mitigation for 4s, 15% mitigation for the 4s thereafter? If you have that awareness, and you know that your healer has exhausted their oGCDs and yet, despite your coming near death, there were no GCD heals used on you, you'd know pretty damn well that GCDs would otherwise have been needed.

Ngl, that seems like a skill/knowledge/awareness issue.

This compounds when you have alternate mitigation that has no drawbacks to DPS. Why would I use Inner Beast when I can Rampart or Vengeance, which have no impact on DPS, and also save the healer that GCD.

If an at-cost tool would not nonetheless create a net increase in party damage, you do not use it. If an at-cost tool would create a net increase in party dps despite its direct cost to personal DPS, you use it. It's that simple.

You're working under the assumption that the sustain tools tanks have already would so diminish the value of any additional tools that they could never break even. But that is only true of content that is already notoriously undertuned.

That such would very rarely find use in the most overgeared of the most casual of content... does not mean that the design is unworkable. It simply means that maybe places that drop i605 really don't need to allow for up to i665 gear, nor that endgame content needs to baby players harder than leveling content. That's a content tuning issue, not a fundamental one.

The other way is this damage/mit tradeoff is your ONLY form of mitigation. Then it is how often does it come up? How strong? How long does it last? How is it going to affect other content, ie. dungeon trash?

Why are you acting like these are novel concerns? That literally applies to every form of sustain existing tanks have right now. You simply, in effect, pre-pay for them. The existing kits have a set amount of combined sustaining + offensive output, with the only variance being the volume of input to fall under percentile Damage Reduction or Damage Amplification.

Even in that all-mitigation-has-a-cost model, the only change is the ability to spend would-be excessive mitigation offensively and to get through more difficult eHP checks at even lower gear levels, given sufficient skill. *

It's the likes of Energy Drain and Verraise. They aren't going to be used all the time, but having them is a boon to flexibility. And, more importantly, it increases the reward of being aware of your team's opportunities and incoming damage beyond a mere prescribed CD schedule. That, in turn, helps Tanks feel more like Tanks, rather than merely Blue DPS, and tanking a more frequent and active part of their kit.

Why is it the tank that has to take the damage hit and not the healers

? Not "taking a damage hit" is already an illusion, so long as there is any intent at balance between roles. If you're a healer, you're already giving up more and more of your would-be potential as a greater portion of your total output gets allocated towards those "free" healing tools. That tank dps wasn't reduced despite such large sustain increases (especially, to all but DRK) in Endwalker is largely why tanks feel so OP and healers so redundant.

That "hit" is simply the degree to which you can move your outputs as you see fit, letting your total value produced scale that bit more with player agency. It's no more a "bad" or "antithetical" action than a healer actually having reason (and ability) to use a GCD heal.