[Discuss] Bringing back mitigation-damage interaction

[Mikey_R]

All for what, to satiate a try-hard's no-clear's refusal to actually math anything out and their insistence instead that anything with direct cause cannot be a net gain, or that a fight is unclearable because not dying would cost them 80 potency? What is the reason for insisting that tanks should have nothing analogous to GCD sustain (percentile mitigation, in their case) nor Aetherflow trade-offs between damage and sustain? Who would be victimized by making it so we could open up fight design and have tanks actually play more differently from one another, including in their actual tanking (not just their Blue DPS rotations)?

How would it makes tanks different? You either need it, or not, doesn't matter what tank you are, you use it at the same time, you haven't changed anything.

You could make the fights more RNG, but what happens when you do the fight the first time and you have to spend a lot of time in tank stance and the second time you don't need to because the damage never came out frequently enough?

But, the big question is WHY? Why is it necessary? I could, again, point out everything, but why does a tank have to sacrifice their damage to put up mitigation? It isn't going to change anything anywhere near as much as you seem to expect.

As for the comment about 'losing 80 potency', my response would be, what is the point? If you have something that is so inconsequential that it doesn't even matter, why have it in the first place? It is there for no reason other than some misguided sense of 'role flavour' that serves no purpose other than, I'm losing a small amount of potency that someone arbitrarily added for no reason.

Also:

So, that "never" is... half the time tank stances were in the game, despite tank stance's gains being pathetically undertuned relative to its costs and a largely unusable mechanic on all but WAR due to its costs in changing stance

People still learning how the game plays isn't a good metric for gauging how effective a mechanic is. If we were to go back to the ARR days, but still had out knowledge and experience now, can you honestly say people would still be in tank stance when tanking, or, would they be in DPS stance. I would bet, with 99% confidence, that they would be in DPS stance. HW was the main turning point for most of the community with SB being the full switch over. Also, Warrior only used it occasionally when Unchained was available to negate any downsides to using tank stance. That should tell you all you need to know. Also, if you are calling the tank stances 'undertuned' (by which I assume you mean the defensive benefit is too small but the offensive hit is fine) then you are talking about a potency loss of more than 80, it is going to be quite a significant hit and this is before talks of whether it is an oGCD, what defensive benefits it provides etc. Which brings up the point, we have both been living in hypothetical situations where I am assuming something similar to what we used to have, however, you seem to have a different idea. Maybe it would be beneficial if you actually provided an example or 2 of what you expect with a defensive stance, a solid foundation to base a discussion on is better than talking from 2 different buildings after all.

[Shurrikhan]

You either need it, or not, doesn't matter what tank you are, you use it at the same time, you haven't changed anything.

No, that is literally not the case.

Again, are you unable to receive value from any defensive that isn't absolutely necessary to survive? Should Vengeance, unless absolutely needed to survive, only ever be popped during raid-buffs for its counter-attack damage, its actual sustain value be damned? By all means, see whether some 400k of missing mitigation produces more rDPS just from buffing those counterattacks than it does from healer GCDs saved.

There are times when a defensive is necessary to survive against the next hit.
There are times when a defensive is necessary now in order not to die to a later hit soon after (against which your HP could not otherwise be sufficiently recovered by the time it hits).
And there are times when a defensive is necessary for neither but is nonetheless worth some amount of rDPS due to the healer or DPS offensive output thus afforded.

All it takes for at-cost defensive to be worth casting is for the rDPS likely to be produced to exceed its opportunity cost.

The greater the likely reward and/or lower the opportunity cost, the more situations it will be used for. The lower the likely reward and/or greater the opportunity cost, the more situational that tool will be. That is normal. That is fine.

I'm looking for a balance point --via context and per the strength of the added skills relative to those they share resource costs with-- wherein each kit should have a skill or two optimally used with moderate frequency in Savage content, even if less often as one nears/reaches BiS, and maybe another than is more situational.

Why does a tank have to sacrifice their damage to put up mitigation? It isn't going to change anything anywhere near as much as you seem to expect.

Apply your question to any other role:

Why did healers have to "sacrifice" their damage to heal (for, ultimately, massive rDPS gains over not doing so)?

• Because it allows a further degree of flexibility to fight design that having solely CDs cannot provide, and, when the healing requirements are not pathetically low, allows for far greater skill expression than simply Dosis/EuDosis spamming every GCD. Note also that the more we've made healing "free", the more healers mixed agency and relative maximum rDPS has been squished.

Why do DPS have downtime actions? Why not just remove downtime altogether?

• Because having downtime actions allows for a further degree of flexibility to fight design due to not needing to be so painfully constrained to giant hitboxes, minimal meaningful movement requirements, zero sync optimizations, etc.

Moreover, again, there is no cost to the overall personal DPS tanks would produce. The only difference is, again, that they can now further choose between offensive and sustain outputs, with the maximum of both increasing even though the total would remain almost identical.

I've noted repeatedly that their output ceiling would be raised, increasing the change in their damage as their skill and party coordination increase and making tanks a more lucrative pick (rivaling or sometimes even surpassing DPS) for coffers among statics. How is allowing tanks more palpable progression and actually being a competitive choice for gear allocation... a bad thing?

People still learning how the game plays isn't a good metric for gauging how effective a mechanic is.

You're the one who brought up usage as if it were an indicator not only of incidental quality, but fundamental design quality. I merely pointed out that if players increasingly learned how to drop it over the course of Heavensward, that's still half of the period for which tank stances existed, not merely a blip on the radar.

a potency loss of more than 80, it is going to be quite a significant hit and this is before talks of whether it is an oGCD, what defensive benefits it provides etc.

No, there is no gauging of opportunity cost that lies outside of what costs AND benefits it has. You literally cannot compare two things without both things.

To say that anything that costs 80+ potency is going to be crippling regardless of its rDPS gains... is bonkers. You may as well say that AST can never be taken because Fall Malefic is 80 potency short of Dosis III, despite AST clearly producing more party DPS.

Maybe it would be beneficial if you actually provided an example or 2 of what you expect with a defensive stance

Again, I am not the one suggesting a defensive stance. I have never suggested a defensive stance; I merely pointed out why the ones present from ARR to SB were pathetically impotent.

I feel like, outside of maybe a single tank if they could thematically leverage it far enough, it's an unnecessarily clunky way to achieve the purpose I desire (allowing tanks more swing in their outputs, as to free up fight and tank kit design and better reward tanks' awareness of and coordination around team dynamics).

So why do you keep asking for defensive stance mock-ups... from me? They're not my idea. I don't particularly want them.

__________

I would rather see further variance in tank kits as permitted by not making them beholden to just the same precise template of rigid CDs.

For instance, I might like to be able to spend Beast Gauge on Inner Beast (Self-Healing and Defense from damage dealt) and Steel Cyclone (self-healing from damage dealt), with higher relative gauge generation (perhaps spending only 40 per skill), instead of just sharing the same old 25s on-demand. And I'd rather see WAR be able to spend gauge on a Warcry that extends some of Warrior's effects to be split over nearby allies rather than just a plain 90s raid mit and an overpowered on-demand-alternative/external in Nascent Flash.

That kind of extra flexibility would both free up fight design and toolkit design, and ultimately allow tanks' experiences with a given fight not to be damn near entirely interchangeable.