Breaking the Tanking mechanics - once again

[Ryoii/Nonomii]

Our testing was done against the Lv45 and 50 Guardian Crawlers and Lv50 and 55 Drone Crawlers. Please see my other post for more details: http://www.ffxionline.com/forums/fre...-questions-13/

I was mostly trying to respond to the belief that NIN/RDM could never perform as well as NIN/DRK and present some more information for further discussion. Sorry for my lack of experience at HNMs in recent years (basically know they have about 60-80k HP). This has all been very interesting to read with the comments made by people who are experienced with HNM tanking.

I probably should have instead said that CE alone could possibly be used to tank if your damage dealers keep well below the cap, which should be feasible if they only do about 5k damage each (expect multiplier to be closer to 1 for Lv90+). However, with trends today to use far fewer DD, there is now a need to both cap CE and produce a high level of VE or build a very high level of VE while entirely forgoing CE.

We certainly need to learn more about VE for both damage and cures, which really makes nearly all discussion at this point purely speculative.

[Beckwin]

iirc grand wyrms weigh in at about 100k hp, before? regen.

nq kings are 50k?, but time to build maxed CE is kinda lol, a full stacked ally will drop them in sub 10 minutes no problem, and even weaker alliances can take a fafnir in 20 minutes easy.

[Ryoii/Nonomii]

Thank you for providing some numbers for the HQ kings. I was unaware that they had so much HP and didn't think about the regen being that significant. This makes me understand that a VE or combined CE and VE strategy is far more applicable for tanking as the HP of enemies rises.

Once I get back to testing in a week, I'll try to get VE numbers for damage as well, which will help us understand if DD can continually build VE, and see how much VE is needed by tanks to keep hate through the large damage spikes in XP. I'm mostly interested in seeing how to allow for more strategies while XPing from Lv1-74 without our typical tanks (PLD and NIN).

[Ashira]

dumbest fucking conversation ever.... right next to RDM/NIN tanking anything of signifigance... haste your ass right back to the mage groups and start refreshing

"anything of significance"...

Gee, I dunno.. I guess JoL and Tiamat are pretty insignificant if RDM/NIN can tank them... seeing as another shell on our server has a preference for a RDM/NIN tank on Tia and we've used RDM/NIN on JoL.... /shrug

Honestly any retard with an HP bar can tank JoL, it's the easiest absolutely most boring sleepingbag-worthy fight in the game. (There's more to come but I have to go back and quote the chunks I want to respond to.)

Wasn't about the tanking, was the 'mob of signifiicance' more that I was pointing out. I didn't think people would care for another Fafnir/Nidhogg mention or something. ;P

[Quizno]

Honestly, the whole "Ryko/Blite vs. The World" thing kind of reminds a bit of what happens at work.


Kids come out of college with equations, formulas, and book smarts and try to tell the old guys they are doing it wrong.

The old guys get testy and tell them experience is more important than "all that crap" they learned in school.

The smart people look at both sides and say, "hey, I think i might just be able to learn something from both of these people".

[Suiram]

Do you work at a Quizno's?

[evilpaul]

Couldn't Cure 3/4's VE be determined using basically the same technique as Provoke with a Sorc's Ring macro?

[Ryko]

Honestly, the whole "Ryko/Blite vs. The World" thing kind of reminds a bit of what happens at work.


Kids come out of college with equations, formulas, and book smarts and try to tell the old guys they are doing it wrong.

The old guys get testy and tell them experience is more important than "all that crap" they learned in school.

The smart people look at both sides and say, "hey, I think i might just be able to learn something from both of these people".

Note that I kept my mouth good and shut (because whether or not I personally know how enmity works doesn't mean that there are plenty of people who do not. Personally I think if a person couldn't figure it out beforehand then they honestly have no business tanking a mob even with the numbers but I digress) about it until my name got essentially dropped by someone who I didn't even know who it was till much later. Beyond that I did acknowledge the good that came from it, especially the unique info that wouldn't have come up otherwise, and furthermore explained to whom which parts of the study would be most beneficial for them to learn.

So you can frankly fuck yourself if you're just going to read what you want to then summarize my point into some blind stupid tunnel visioned blanket statement that didn't really apply. The "smart people" should realize that it's not remotely hard for a DD to pull out 10k CE or VE worth of damage on an HNM before it's dead (which once again goes back to my saying that the study would be most beneficial for DD's to read but most of them will ignore it since it's only being discussed in a tanking light, which is honestly rather redundant) and yeah, 4 years of being on both sides of thae hate tug of war are going to be my proof.

[Kaeko]

I don't think Ryko ever said anything he didn't immediately back up like Blight in this topic, so I wouldn't necessarily lump them together. I think people just assumed you guys were in the same LS because he mentioned you and TG.

Also regarding the work analogy, it's not meant to be a perfect relation I know, but it's not like Ashira and I have any less endgame experience than Ryko or the others here. It's just meant to be a difference of opinion and I think most will agree that no one has said anything outright retarded and without backing it up in the thread other than Blight (who I actually thought was a troll at first). Not everyone is meant to agree because not everyone plays the same or has the same type of LS - even though we're basically doing the same events.

Anyways, to get back on topic, it appears that since both CE and VE do happen to cap, DDs probably reach both caps fairly easily - I would say CE caps in the 10,000-20,000 damage range. Once something like this occurs, really the only thing you can do is keep the DD at only 3600 VE/sec worth of damage or less over the long run and only spike for very short times.

What is interesting is if the tank has reached that dual cap for CE and VE, no matter what a DD does to take hate (as far as how much damage), the tank is only required to spam 1 mid/high VE action to regain hate. For example, a BLM who's already near both caps can do a 3500 MB on Fafnir and the tank would theoredically only need to cast say Flash once to regain hate! In a scenario like this, since you are dealing with 2 players at a cap, the timing of the action becomes important, i.e. casting Flash before the MB is significantly different than casting it after in this scenario.

DDs can actually use the CE/VE caps to their advantage I think because once you start getting either capped, the excess enmity that was "cut off" is like free damage without enmity. All you would need to do is have your tank time an action to recap CE/VE right after your DD's major spike action and the DD can basically do as much damage as they want in 1 burst or volley without getting hate for more than half a second. I think this may be the biggest advantage of understanding this concept and getting a tank that fully caps both values.

[Ryko]

Yeah I got a PM telling me who it was some time later, he actually is in TG.

[Quizno]

Don't need to be full of piss and vinegar Ryko.

Did you attend a liberal arts college?

[Ryko]

A pharmacy college actually still a semester short for my 2 year degree, which is sort of discouraging since for a pharmacy degree you're looking at 6 years.

[Blight]

My point wasn't that the data wasn't good information... My point is, everyone comes in with these I'm gonna revolutionize the way we play this game posts, and its really not...