RDM Tanking Post 6/21 - they all give 1CE/300VE now

[Eugene]

I can see some situations where rdm tanking is still viable.

1) Lord ruthven: I've co-tanked this several times with a pld. If you have Sam/thfs they can provide a good deal of CE when the mob is turned away form you. I rarely had to touch sleep or dispel and you could keep cap ce with cures and occasional ta. Maintain ve with poison spam.

RDM is still a brick wall, anytime rdm can receive large amounts of ce from ta damage at regular intervals, it should be able to a) keep itself alive and b) maintain ve through poison spam. Ruthven is a perfect example because you won't really face the mob to be whacking away with a sword anyway.

Can anyone explain to me a good reason to nerf blind and bind without touching poison? Blind may have been slightly more time/mp efficient than poison, but poison is still a viable ve gainer. My only guess is that they left it to leave nin/drk tanking a tool for emnity.

2) Possibly JoL (with massive mdt gear). Rdm/pld / rdm/drk still has a fair amount of ce gain. Take into account that rdm can still negate magic dmg better than pld and doesn't need shadows.

Ouryu maybe. I'm kind of having trouble seeing where you are getting ce gain on armed gears. Its been a while since i did the fight.


Is this enough to make rdm tanking worth it? I'll be honest, I had rdm tank geared more for "oh we don't have a tank" situations than "oh we're doing jol, lets go for max efficiency". Did pld tanks speed up fights compared to rdm tanks? Yes. I'll agree with you there. You'll have a harder time convincing me that the speed was significant enough to make any of this deserved. I had a tool on hand to help my linkshell, whether maximally efficient or not, I could at the very least hold down the fort until more efficient tanks arrived.

I'd rather salvage the millions of gil i sunk into gear and admit defeat (and savor a small victory), than sit around and hope I'll get a chance to tank every once every couple months.

Really what's the point in arguing over this any more? People keep bringing up references to rdms and vnms, rdms vs plds with atonement. Rdm tanking existed before atonement and long before vnms. Max efficiency aside, it has a long history in this game. Leave it at that, history.

Kaeko's blog post was probably the best way to look at this, we beat the SE devs at their own game. We came up with something arguably better than all the plans they had and forced them to make drastic changes to set the game back in the direction they wanted. We made enough of an impact, and we continued to push, innovate and develop something unintentional. I agree with Kaeko in that this is something we should be proud of.

[Kazen]

Since I didn't see a tanking related post other than this I'll just put this here. With this update SE added a new spell to SCH (Libra) that can test the enmity of all players in a pt, while this is cool and all we found something strange with this. No one can go above 100% enmity... however, PLDs new ability (Divine Emblem) when combined with Flash seems to not be working properly (or maybe it is) as it can raise you above the 100% hate threshold that no other job can go above.

Edit: Actually I'm going to make a thread about this.

[Amok]

Maybe not the right place to ask, but: What stoneskin cap raise? I seached the forum couldn't find a mention of this.

[Taruking]

I can see some situations where rdm tanking is still viable.

1) Lord ruthven: I've co-tanked this several times with a pld. If you have Sam/thfs they can provide a good deal of CE when the mob is turned away form you. I rarely had to touch sleep or dispel and you could keep cap ce with cures and occasional ta. Maintain ve with poison spam.

RDM is still a brick wall, anytime rdm can receive large amounts of ce from ta damage at regular intervals, it should be able to a) keep itself alive and b) maintain ve through poison spam. Ruthven is a perfect example because you won't really face the mob to be whacking away with a sword anyway.

Ruthven makes a good example to demonstrate the consequence of RDM nerf. Straight tanking Lord Ruthven usually results in a long messy fight because of AOE drain. Badly timed Blooddrake will hit any SAM/THF and avatar in range and gives LR back 2-3% HP depending on number of targets in range. The best approach (in my opinion) is split tanking with BLU/THF SATA Cannonball on tanks and bring RNG and BRD to speed up the fight. Easy 9-10 man 15mins fight with virtually no risk of wipe. The whole strategy depends on RDM's ability to spam low cost CE/VE spells since the amount of damage dealt by your RNG is closely linked to how much hate RDM can hold.

Can anyone explain to me a good reason to nerf blind and bind without touching poison? Blind may have been slightly more time/mp efficient than poison, but poison is still a viable ve gainer. My only guess is that they left it to leave nin/drk tanking a tool for emnity.

One word - Wyrm

2) Possibly JoL (with massive mdt gear). Rdm/pld / rdm/drk still has a fair amount of ce gain. Take into account that rdm can still negate magic dmg better than pld and doesn't need shadows.

This is a common misconception, RDM has innate MDB yes but you also need to take intoconsideration of gear/support etc. PLD have access to way more MDT/MDB gear than RDM.

Is this enough to make rdm tanking worth it? I'll be honest, I had rdm tank geared more for "oh we don't have a tank" situations than "oh we're doing jol, lets go for max efficiency". Did pld tanks speed up fights compared to rdm tanks? Yes. I'll agree with you there. You'll have a harder time convincing me that the speed was significant enough to make any of this deserved. I had a tool on hand to help my linkshell, whether maximally efficient or not, I could at the very least hold down the fort until more efficient tanks arrived.

What's the point of discussion if efficiency is not the priority? When you have 40 Ruthven Nails to farm, does 15mins fight with only 9 ppl and 100% success rate not sound reasonable to you?

[Eugene]

Ok, let me reprhase. Rdm has more readily available higher levels of mdt/mdb gear. Enough more readily available that it makes more than enough to hadnle JoL. Math basis for this? none, just experience.

What's the point of talking about it if not for max efficiency? Because I had a tank that could tank when i needed to tank. Was I primary tank on every mob we fought? no of course not. But I also don't feel that in ever situation .00004% better is better. Why? because over the course of 7 years playing this game, a 5 minute longer fight isn't going to kill me. My ls resisted me tanking on rdm as much as most of bg. I was the sole rdm tank in an ls dominated by plds. They usually didn't want me tanking, even when i know i was for sure more efficient than some new pld. But you know what? when they were out of options i was still there to help them out.

[Tsuko_Asura]

This is a common misconception, RDM has innate MDB yes but you also need to take intoconsideration of gear/support etc. PLD have access to way more MDT/MDB gear than RDM.

wat

MDT caps, bro, and RDM has no problem getting to that cap. Sure, anyone with an Aegis will be able to squeeze additional MDB into thier setup, but they need a significant amount more just to keep up with RDM's job traits.

[Fingerspitz]

wat

MDT caps, bro, and RDM has no problem getting to that cap. Sure, anyone with an Aegis will be able to squeeze additional MDB into thier setup, but they need a significant amount more just to keep up with RDM's job traits.

MDB II is only 12. To cap mdt RDM will probably have to give up two or three of: back, belt, hands, or feet; on top of the 6 extra MDB pld gets in head and legs where rdm doesnt have any options. Assuming good gear it's pretty much a dead heat, with pld taking the edge if resentment cape isn't active.

[Celebrindor]

could all of this be encouraging more coordinated meleeing instead of just TPburning? Referring to /THF SATAs on tanks, skillchain damage and magic bursting?

Just a random thought, I did very little tanking on RDM but a lot of soloing, so these changes truly don't effect me. Except that I have less worry about spamming dispel on mobs and taking hate early in a fight.

As I said, could be completely off base, and if so just ignore this non-tanking RDM.

[Juna]

this post sounds familiar say what about mdt again?

[Fingerspitz]

could all of this be encouraging more coordinated meleeing instead of just TPburning? Referring to /THF SATAs on tanks, skillchain damage and magic bursting?

No. If you were meleeing something then you should have used and should continue to use pld utilizing atonement or melee tanking with third eye/utsu. This doesn't change significantly the way anything is done, it just fucks over rdms.

this post sounds familiar say what about mdt again?

Rdm has innate mdb but pld has better gear options; they are approximately equal if you gear correctly.

[Grey Jorildyn]

Kaeko's blog post was probably the best way to look at this, we beat the SE devs at their own game. We came up with something arguably better than all the plans they had and forced them to make drastic changes to set the game back in the direction they wanted. We made enough of an impact, and we continued to push, innovate and develop something unintentional. I agree with Kaeko in that this is something we should be proud of.

The "best" way to look at something if you're trying to legitimize how misinformed and lacking in foresight the devs for your game are perhaps. This is less to be proud of and more to facepalm about imo. SE is just trying to ruin your fun. Innovative gameplay should never be unrewarded. This is a really pathetic change. Nerfing RDM and /RDM tank, and start removing abilities and/or nerfing some in the SJ are a blatant display of a broken system that isn't meant to go past Lv75.

I loved paladin when I played, but watching/having the availability for other jobs to tank in full/part-time situations is what made FFXI so unique. It was a perfect utilization of the potential of the job/subjob system and you're fooling yourself if you think you ought to be proud for making SE force you to play by their rules because they created a system that can't handle ingenuity by intelligent players over the course of its lifetime. I always felt that FFXI's job system was much less of an idea "in-a-box" than most other games, but limiting what you can do seems to be the trend as the levels go up. RDM, for example, was sold to you, the player, as a jack-of-all-trades job. Well, now it's jack-of-all-trades-minus-tanking. Boo to you SE, really.

[Eugene]

Am I happy they nerfed RDM? No, am I going to cry about it when it won't do anything good? That'll just make the nerf even worse for me. The people who really should be /facepalming over the lack of SE foresight is Ninja. It's clear that they still want them to tank (Yonin/Innin), but this nerf while not crippling Ninja hits them pretty hard. A more selective and better solution would have been to give rdm some job trait that's fully active 100% of the time that reduces emnity for enfeebles.

I don't know what they're playing at with blanket nerf. It's sloppy, and reflects worse imo on SE than simply trying to steer the game in another direction. I still would have been upset if they did a better job, but I'm furious at their indiscriminate action.

[Silenka]

Well, RDM and /RDM aren't the only ones using the spells they nerfed enmity on though. Perhaps they were also thinking of the other jobs who cast these spells regularly and would benefit from not getting so much hate from them. It's just a thought; I feel bad for ninja either way. RDM itself will be fine I'm sure, but NIN...man, I just don't know. They get screwed even harder than SMN does. XD

[mcb]

sticking with rdm/nin, because its easier to list just rdm's capabilities instead of all potential subs, what are the hate tools to get CE, or are we abandoning CE and just capping VE?

same question for nin/drk; is CE still good, or are we just going to keep VE capped the whole time?

[Kaeko]

nin/drk might still be viable. Your still have Stun (180/1280) and Aspir (320/0) as CE gainers. Also, when cap hits 90 you'll have Absorb-TP, which is 320/320. Losing Sleep is probably the biggest one but I think you can get by still.

rdm only has 1 type of spell that gives CE without damage or cure and that's enspell II at 80/240. It's really weak. Imagine a NIN trying to get CE spamming Hojo, except it costs MP. RDM pretty much only has VE gaining capability now, and that's really only due to cures. Remember RDM's main VE gainer used to be blind, which is gone now too.

[Eugene]

RDM: Cure for CE gain - extremely mp inefficient will continue to weaken as level cap increases.
Enspell 2s - for maintaining CE (maybe)
Kuriyami and Hojo Ni - after cap increases for maintaining CE (maybe)
Certain fights TA - but as someone pointed out you'd almost always prefer pld on fights that you can melee. (exceptions being maybe lord ruthven, maybe a couple others)
enspells and ni spells are both 80 ce, someone did the math earlier and even with high emnity + they barely outweigh shadow loss

RDM tanking is limited to a couple fights at this point, even less fights as /nin.
For the most part it is dead. VE capping through poison spam alone will not allow you to tank extended fights.

Nin tanking maybe still viable but nins are likely to need to rely a bit more on dmg than I've seen them do in the past.
Kuriyami and hojo both give 80 CE
Stun gives 180
Aspir gives 320
Aisha ichi: undetermined enmity values
at 90 cap assuming no nerf Absorb tp for 320

they've lost sleep as their quick recast CE spell. Still seems viable to me.

sorry i posted this so late; wrote it up in an xp party so slow. has some slightly different info so i'll leave it up.

[Mojo]

Gonna say outright that Hojo and Kurayami are not adequate for building CE. You just don't get enough for the casting time and recasts, so I wouldn't hold out any hope on this one on RDM/NIN (even with Fast Cast.)

[Tsuko_Asura]

but as someone pointed out you'd almost always prefer pld on fights that you can melee.

wat

[Eugene]

Not terribly important. Something you can dd and ta on most of the time you can atonement as well.

[Istun GA's]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHKTE75dgE4 This is how all rdm/nin tanks feel. I am sad