Why Crit for tanks?

[Lynnreia]

intrinsically the less damage the tank takes, the less the healer has to heal, now do healers out dps tanks? probably not, but I'm sure they'd appreciate it. besides, I can heal myself.

this makes even more sense on trash mobs, because the pld can heal oneself, whereas the healer probably wants to enfeeble or aoe or something. Half the healers are probably just filling the role to get a dungeon spot and do not actually main heal, so once again, putting less weight on their shoulders makes sense.

Now IDK about you, I am not very far in the game, but I am experienced, I did play 1.0 and beta, I did master FFXI, I know my stuff.

With a full tenacity build I was able to solo T1-T5 completing all but T5 before level 62. I used dark knight for the kill but I used PLD/WAR frequently for the rest

My point is, in my scenario, I wouldn't have done it any other way. I geared for tenacity implictly, reaching practically 1000 ten at such a low level. This made my souleaters strong enough to outlast twintania's enrage. I'll delve into this deeper on a future note but my preference is, TEN > SKILL > DET > CRIT > DIRECT TMYK

Unfortunately, as logical as it might seem for a tank to take less damage to lessen the burden for the healers, it only really matters if you're doing lower level content with an inexperienced healer.

At higher levels, both tanks and healers have a multitude of available tools which makes healing a tank, that rotates cooldowns properly, into child's play. This is why CRIT > DHT > DET is the general go-to in higher level content, because there's nothing challenging the tanks and even if something did, the healers have an abundance of OGCDs to keep the healing up without needing to lose uptime on the boss/trash.

Basically, if you pick up TEN or DET, you will deal less damage and bore the healers even more than they already are.

Furthermore, at harder content like Savage and such, the deciding factor for defeating the encounter boils down to killing the boss before their enrage and the faster you can do so, the easier a time everyone will have, including the healers. Even on the most hard-hitting fights, I get by fine with the skills I have available, and even if a healer might have to GCD heal my co-tank, we both need to focus on damage to actually beat certain phases in time. I have seen plenty of 0.5% wipes and gearing defensively would only widen that gap.

So all in all, tanks and healers both have enough tools to keep tanks alive without TEN/DET, which is why extra damage in the form of exponentially scaling CRIT is preferred.

[Espon]

intrinsically the less damage the tank takes, the less the healer has to heal, now do healers out dps tanks? probably not, but I'm sure they'd appreciate it. besides, I can heal myself.

this makes even more sense on trash mobs, because the pld can heal oneself, whereas the healer probably wants to enfeeble or aoe or something. Half the healers are probably just filling the role to get a dungeon spot and do not actually main heal, so once again, putting less weight on their shoulders makes sense.

Now IDK about you, I am not very far in the game, but I am experienced, I did play 1.0 and beta, I did master FFXI, I know my stuff.

With a full tenacity build I was able to solo T1-T5 completing all but T5 before level 62. I used dark knight for the kill but I used PLD/WAR frequently for the rest

My point is, in my scenario, I wouldn't have done it any other way. I geared for tenacity implictly, reaching practically 1000 ten at such a low level. This made my souleaters strong enough to outlast twintania's enrage. I'll delve into this deeper on a future note but my preference is, TEN > SKILL > DET > CRIT > DIRECT TMYK

The problem is healers have so many OGCD heals that throwing a few heals at the tank doesn't cut into the amount of DPS they can do. For healers that do need use a GCD to heal, it builds up to a stronger attack to make up for the DPS loss, such as White Mage and their lilies.

As for soloing old content, later fights have tight DPS checks due to adds tethering to each other or a lack of bodies to handle certain mechanics. All that extra tenacity doesn't mean anything if you're unable to kill an add that enrages in a few seconds and then smacks you for 99999999 damage, ignoring immunities.

[ThurinTurambar]

Also tank survivability is a 0-1 problem. Lets say we are introduced to a problem where both tanks are spent out of their cooldowns and boss enters a phase where it 2-shots tanks with the auto attacks, but a certain amount of tenacity makes it a 3 shot instead. What would happen is the tanks would meld exactly the amount of tenacity needed for that to happen and not a single point more, rest would go into damage.

[Carighan]

Also tank survivability is a 0-1 problem. Lets say we are introduced to a problem where both tanks are spent out of their cooldowns and boss enters a phase where it 2-shots tanks with the auto attacks, but a certain amount of tenacity makes it a 3 shot instead. What would happen is the tanks would meld exactly the amount of tenacity needed for that to happen and not a single point more, rest would go into damage.

This is also why it is inherently problematic for the tanks to do more damage when not focusing on using GCDs on defense (which they can't in this game, so let's assume 100% is spent on damage) than when the healers are doing the same.

You need for tanks to want to make the healers heal less, because that's a gain in damage. But it isn't, tanks gearing for max damage is more efficient overall.