Discussing tank stat priority in FC, confusion.

[HeartStrong]

We`ve recently recruited a tank so we may go Wanderer Palace & Amdapor Keep. We couldn`t get past Tonberry King or Demon Wall, and our tank insisted our dps wasn`t enough. Now they may not be highly geared yet, but they have the best any lower dungeon may offer.

However, our tank has only 3800 HP, give or take, and to me that is awfully low. So I asked him where he put his points into? He said almost all STR, and tells our FC that any good tank will not invest all or hardly any VIT. On Tonberry he told group "3 stack", yet he`d just die nigh-instantly from the dozen adds near the end.

Anyway, to what I understand, you gain enough mitigation from gear and not all bosses can be fully mitigated either.

So what exactly are tanks suppose to invest their 30 points into? Our oldest tank is not 50 yet and he is getting confused with what our recruited one is saying.

EDIT: We managed to defeat Tonberry King, but much of it is from our same DPS being upgraded in gear as well my own and timing my heals with serious accuracy.
He says he used something after "Grudge" to reduce adds damage, which is great except it`s still quite rough. I`ve been relying on my Stoneskin on that fight more as damage prevention after the spike to buffer time for my healing.

[Sapphidia]

3800 is really a bit low for the tonberry king. From what i gathered, the king hits for 1000 damage per stack when he does his stab, so a 4 stack would kill that tank and a 3 stack would take him lowish. The little tonberries hit for about 300 each. I think I had about 4200 on that fight when i started doing it and even that felt a bit risky at times as our DPS wasnt as high as it is now.

Strength on paper seems a wonderful stat - it helps threat, damage, block/parry amount... but reality it gives these benefits in such hugely low quantities that 30 strength in stats gives you next to zero noticeable difference (i saw figures saying that 30 strength at 50 equates to about 1% dps increase, and likely less than 1% block value because block comes in breakpoints of 50 strength). You wont see any real noticeable difference in DPS with 30 strength, and next to zero difference in mitigation.

As boring as it feels, pure Vit is the way to go for paladins. DPS will help on tonberry king for sure, but 30 vit on that tank will ensure he survives more stabs (and not just the stab - you have to take the occasional hit from a normal tonberry too). Almost every solid raiding tank now is realising that 30 Vit is the best option because there ARE encounters all over the place that throw in a huge big spike of damage on the tank, and the damage on Tonberry King is one of the first examples of this.

Sure, 30 Vit isnt a -huge- difference in HP, but it's enough, and it's far more of an impact on performance than some strength given the values we've seen the dataminers/testers/theorycrafters give. And your tank is a perfect example. He's under 4000 health. With 30 Vit, he'd be able to survive a hit from an entire extra stack of debuff. I can almost guarantee he'd notice next to zero differencein damage/threat/mitigation from losing the 30 strength too - I certainly noticed no difference in my damage/threat output when i respecced to pure Vit at 50.

[ZinNovae]

I have been wondering this myself and while I leveled I put all my points into STR. Hitting 50 I decided I would reset them and add them all to VIT and see how it worked out. Well it works just fine i have no trouble holding hate even without the 30 in STR and from what i have heard your only getting a 1% increase in damage reduction with 30 points.

So I am for the VIT, myself, I have run Amdapor Keep with the points in VIT and still had no trouble holding hate. (I was in a very good group, which always help, and they waited for me to grab hate and cast Flash before attacking, also they watched their own hate to make sure it rarely pulled the mobs away from me). The Extra VIT really did help with a couple close calls that if i did not have it i would have been dead for sure.

More health never hurts and usually will keep you alive longer which is what a tank needs. Now I know others would disagree, however it has proven to me to be the better choice.

[Fornix]

Strength has several aspects of tanking it may potentially contribute to:

- Additional enmity by doing more damage. However, this argument for choosing strength is moot considering as to how enmity generation is by far exceeding DPS classes without any additional investment in strength.

- Additional damage.... we're tanks, nuff said.

[Fornix]

- Additional parry for mitigation. A reasonable choice, although parry tiers ought to be kept in mind: http://valk.dancing-mad.com/?page_id=227. Blindly stacking to 30 could very well mean you're wasting anything from 1-30 points on strength without hitting a next parry tier, points which could have been spent on vit. Beyond that, the benefit of the 1% extra parry chance is very unlikely to outdo the benefit of the additional HP vitality gives. Especially if it means a tank is dying as overall HP is too low to absorb the hits.



Myself I currently stack full vit. I'm not convinced by the benefit of hitting the next parry tier, and beyond that with new gear pieces still coming in so quickly from tomes I do not feel like respeccing wasted strength back into vit after every upgrade.

[Fornix]

As such I'd also recommend your older tank to not let himself be confused by the new recruit. And furthermore recommend your new recruit to reconsider taking up the additional vit, as it's going to make his tanking life so much easier.

[Jahaudant]

I'll just repost this here.



STR Tiers and Block/Parry Damage Mitigation


Each STR tier for parry provides an additional 1% damage reduction on attacks parried, and each STR tier for block provides an additional 1% damage reduction on blocked attacks.

Parry tiers are 243, 283, 324, 363 and 405, while block tiers are 270, 337, 404 and 445 meaning that at any given time, depending on your gear, you may need up to 32 STR to hit your next parry tier, and up to 67 STR to hit your next block tier. Unfortunately both of these numbers are higher than the maximum amount of STR you can apply via optional stats, and block tier gaps particularly are very wide. Luckily though, with full Darklight your base STR should fall somewhere around 305-320 which is a good spot to hit the next tier for both parry and block with a respec in to STR. Great! 1% more damage reduction on blocks and parries is the shit! Not really...

Block and Parry Rates


The best shield in the game has a block rate of roughly 16%, and with full end game gear with parry on every piece you are looking at a parry rate of roughly 20% giving you a 36% chance to trigger mitigation 1% higher than you would have without your STR spec bumping you in to the next tier. This effectively means that over any given extended fight you have roughly 0.37% extra average damage mitigation per physical attack you receive.

Even if we assume you have the "Super Shield of Win" with a block rate of 100%, giving you a permanent 1% additional damage reduction, Can you tell me how much of an EHP increase that extra 1% reduction on blocks would give a PLD with 5000 HP (roughly what you should have with a full STR build and full darklight). Hint: It's not 450 (or 480 in a party), and thus not better than 30 VIT - and the "Super Shield of Win" does not even exist.

With the mitigation argument blown away we can look for a brief moment at the argument made for STR helping to maintain hate on a monster. There aren't figures anywhere that can give us a detailed breakdown of how much we can increase our enmity generation potential via increasing our STR however, we don't need these numbers to decide if additional STR over VIT is worth it as answering this simple question is enough:

"Is holding hate a problem?"

The answer is no.

[Sapphidia]

There aren't figures anywhere that can give us a detailed breakdown of how much we can increase our enmity generation potential via increasing our STR however

Awesome post, thanks for the summary! Regarding strength to threat conversion, I read on (I believe) Blue Garter's forum that 30 Strength at 50 increases your total damage by about 2%. It has a tiny impact compared to the flat damage on your weapon. It may be incorrect, but when I respecced from 30 Str to 30 Vit I didn't really notice any difference in the size of the numbers I was hitting for. It seems Enmity Generation is a flat multiplier over the damage you do, so increasing damage by 2% should increase your total threat by 2% (I think even Flash scales its threat based on your damage figures).

Given 30 vit is around 10% max HP in average 50 gear, the choice between 10% HP and 2% threat/damage is quite easy I think!

[Resolute]

How much HP does one VIT point give? While leveling I have put 5 points into STR, 3 points into DEX (derp), and the rest into VIT. Probably will have to respec in the next few levels before I hit 50.