Calling All Tenacity Melders

[Reginald_Cain]

Even when trying to solo content, you're still going to want to prioritize increasing your damage. Often times what kills you when trying to solo old raids and extreme trials is not meeting DPS checks and getting 1-shot. No amount of tenacity will prevent that, but that extra bit of damage will.

That so? I wonder if the tenacity will just get deleted like strength materia did. If not they'll have to make it scale better than determination or do a lot of work designing content where the extra mit matters. However I dont see that happening.

[Oizen]

Between how broken Tank CDs are, and then how broken Off tank CDs are, and then how broken healer CDs are on top of that, tenacity really just isn't required.

The only reason it ever gets melded is if it breaks a threshold where it gives slightly more damage than the other stats, which actually happened for this tier's prog set.

[Valence]

So for high end stuff still very bad, for goofing around solo tenacity might shine thanks for the detailed answers gang!

Sure but what kind of content would even require it? Dungeons? lol

Even deep dungeons have lost their teeth when it comes to everything that's not OHKO telegraphs...

I really fail to see what would threaten tanks with no tenacity today, so what would you even use tenacity for?

[Carighan]

That so? I wonder if the tenacity will just get deleted like strength materia did. If not they'll have to make it scale better than determination or do a lot of work designing content where the extra mit matters. However I dont see that happening.

That's less of a tenacity and more of a secondary stat problem in general tbh.

There's 0 reason to keep the system with materials where we have choice/agency event around. Because .. we don't have choice or agency. There's one clear "correct" way of doing it, everything else is a trap for people who don't want to Google.

The only way of fixing this (and I'd love that) would be to make it so that none of the choices we can make affect our damage, or only super indirectly. That way, the choices would be for the players to make since there's nothing to optimise for.

[Chajii]

There's 0 reason to keep the system with materials where we have choice/agency event around. Because .. we don't have choice or agency. There's one clear "correct" way of doing it, everything else is a trap for people who don't want to Google.

I am enjoying my Tenacity Crit tank set for Mentor Roulette, I am not here to tell you to meld Tenacity so please don't remove the options that some players actually can benefit from.

Even within tanks, there are some that want Skill Speed and some don't; and if we look outside of tanks, healers have a few different Spell Speed or Pirty viable options, Summoner might want an extremely high Spell Speed for Lv70 contents and such.

If you feel like that you don't have the choice, perhaps consider trying more things that the game offers than just optimise for reclear. I agree that the degree of optimisation is low but it is not that we have absolutely no choice at all.

[Carighan]

I am enjoying my Tenacity Crit tank set for Mentor Roulette, I am not here to tell you to meld Tenacity so please don't remove the options that some players actually can benefit from.

That's kinda my point, there is no benefit. You can keep the system, but make it one where there's a benefit for choosing materia to meld. You say consider more than optimise for reclear, the entire problem is that there is no situation where DPS-maximising isn't the optimal course for:

* Damage
* Survivability
* Efficiency
* Safety

It just doesn't exist. What you can so is go marginally worse, feel like you're doing Customisashun, and it won't screw anything up as the gain or loss is quite marginal anyways. But that's not having a choice now, is it? That's letting you pick the color of your Mass Effect 3 ending, but it's always the same ending.

Same with the skill speeds, that's not an option, that's a hidden gotcha because as a player you need to know the breakpoint and which is optimal, and the game does not provide you the means to see the underlying mechanisms to find out about that, so external sources are required.

Hence the point: As long as materia melding can affect DPS (in any way, up or down!), there is no point to it being user-selectable. Not while DPS is the singular point of optimization even for tanks and healers, and even for survivability or healing efficiency (the latter mostly because while it is never needed, Crit also happens to be the best heal-boosting and heal-mana-efficiency-boosting stat). Remove the ability to affect DPS at all, and player choice would at least be possible within the options that can be provided. Or provide a system where the DPS gain is always exactly the same, but the "flavor" changes basically (do you want less crits but bigger shiney numbers in turn, faster numbers, etc).

(edit)
So to illustrate better what I mean, less DPS-affective options might be:

* Runspeed
* Reduced sprint cooldown
* Reduced damage taken
* Increased healing taken
* Faster "filler" execution, but proportionally less damage done on it, same overall damage (this has to be slightly per-job as some generate resources that way which has to be factored into the damage reduction, while others do not)
* etc etc

And of course as said above, could also have damage options, so long as the net gain is always identical, you can basically pick size-vs-speed, etc.

Could even have both! Could split materia slots into secondary (damage-affecting) and tertiary (not-damage) slots, and then allow selection only with in each group. This would remove the fool's choice we currency have, it'd also remove the newbie trap of having not looking up a system the game neither exposes you to nor explains you, but also allows actual, genuine, choice within the constraints.

[Chajii]

That's kinda my point, there is no benefit. You can keep the system, but make it one where there's a benefit for choosing materia to meld. You say consider more than optimise for reclear, the entire problem is that there is no situation where DPS-maximising isn't the optimal course for:

* Damage
* Survivability
* Efficiency
* Safety

It just doesn't exist. What you can so is go marginally worse, feel like you're doing Customisashun, and it won't screw anything up as the gain or loss is quite marginal anyways. But that's not having a choice now, is it? That's letting you pick the color of your Mass Effect 3 ending, but it's always the same ending.

In situations where you are still progging, surviability and safety come into consideration as certain safer or tankier builds that do slightly less damage might let you see more mechanics, which is important until you start seeing enrage.

Maybe the play-skill of you and your group is high enough that this doesn't matter but... well let's just say that not everyone plays the same. (I am not sure how you differentiate damage and efficiency so perhaps go into more details if you want)

Same with the skill speeds, that's not an option, that's a hidden gotcha because as a player you need to know the breakpoint and which is optimal, and the game does not provide you the means to see the underlying mechanisms to find out about that, so external sources are required.

I have difficulty understanding how you have to rely on external sources to find out breakpoints for Skill/Spell Speed stats, as all you need to do is put on the materias one by one and see if your GCD changes.

I can see how it is difficult to find out breakpoints for other stats but Skill/Spell Speed are the easiest thing to figure out without doing any damage calculations.

You can look up external sources for these information if you prefer so since they have already done the testing for you but doesn't mean you have to rely on them.

As for so said "not an option", there are literally various viable sets for GNB right now with different GCDs, as far as I know there are 2.40, 2.45, 2.50.

[Carighan]

In situations where you are still progging, surviability and safety come into consideration as certain safer or tankier builds that do slightly less damage might let you see more mechanics, which is important until you start seeing enrage.

Again, the whole point is that the inequality is so lopsided, maximizing damage is also your best bet at increasing your defense. That's the argument made. You live longer by melding for damage, but not by melding for survivability, part of the FFXIV Combat System Balance(tm) package the devs love for years now.

Even your GNB SKS example is entirely superfluous. Yes, you can build for various GCDs. Do you know what benefit that provides versus just going for max-det/dh? None, and it opens you up for being weaker for no gain in some fights depending on length of the fight. Mind you, as always the difference for all of these stats - except crit - is so small that it frankly just has no bearing what you do, you could even pick your materia at random and there isn't a single fight you'll suddenly not clear (again, assuming you max crit first, because that's the one thing that has a meaningful impact on your combat performance).

And that's not even account for tenacity or so. Which you can meld for, sure. The damage difference versus Det is small enough that it makes no meaningful difference. Only, as always, dealing more damage is your best offense. It makes you reach breakpoints instead of wiping, it makes you solo stuff better, it makes you get a kill that would have been a wipe otherwise during a prog, it's all those things. It's the best defense you have, dead enemies deal 0 damage and require 0 further attacks to kill.

That's, again, the point: The system is not unusable, it just is without merit. It provides but a fool's choice to the player, and all secondary choices are without consequence. I'm not truly advocating removing it mind you, but retooling it to provide actual choices, whether that is due to flat-damage-gain choices, non-damage-gain choices or a mix ... not even got a preference. I just want it to provide actual meaningful choice.

[Absurdity]

That's kinda my point, there is no benefit. You can keep the system, but make it one where there's a benefit for choosing materia to meld. You say consider more than optimise for reclear, the entire problem is that there is no situation where DPS-maximising isn't the optimal course for:

* Damage
* Survivability
* Efficiency
* Safety

That's basically the main reason why Tenacity will never be "good" in it's current state, it's designed for a completely different game.

You pretty much never die because you were missing 20% passive mitigation, you die because you or someone else messed up mechanics that the 20% will not save you from.
Tanks are already so sturdy at a baseline that you can eat multiple mechanics in short succession in casual content before you're in any danger.
Even in high-end content you will usually survive messing up most mechanics with a damage down or they will simply instantly kill you regardless of how much % damage reduction you have.
And tank specific mechanics are nowadays designed so you have the defensive cooldowns available to deal with them.

So if the main cause of death is messing up mechanics then killing the boss faster becomes the better choice for survivability, because the less time the boss has to do mechanics the less chance is there for you to mess them up.
Best recent example I have is M4S. What usually wiped us during prog was Sunrise Sabbath, and what was the best way to deal with that? Kill the boss before it even got to the mechanic, because no amount of tenacity is going to save you from someone pointing a cannon the wrong way.

[Espon]

I am enjoying my Tenacity Crit tank set for Mentor Roulette, I am not here to tell you to meld Tenacity so please don't remove the options that some players actually can benefit from.

Are you melding for tenacity or gearing for it? Materia melds are ignored if your item level is synced down, which is pretty much 99% of the content you'll get in Mentor Roulette. There's not a dungeon I cannot pull wall to wall, even in ARR, unless the healer is AFK or something.

In situations where you are still progging, surviability and safety come into consideration as certain safer or tankier builds that do slightly less damage might let you see more mechanics, which is important until you start seeing enrage.

Maybe the play-skill of you and your group is high enough that this doesn't matter but... well let's just say that not everyone plays the same. (I am not sure how you differentiate damage and efficiency so perhaps go into more details if you want)

In majority of situations when it's a wipe, the tanks are the last ones alive. If the tank ever dies when progging content, it's not because they couldn't be healed through the damage they were taking, but because they failed a mechanic and were killed in 1 hit. The Yans in M6S are pretty much the only exception to this as they actually do hit pretty hard, but the DPS check for that phase is so tight that you can't afford to hold back on damage. Usually you're forced to throw yourself off the ledge or into a deathwall because the rest of your party died to failed mechanics that you happened to survive through due to having so much HP and defense.