Blood TankFollow

Absorbs damage taken
PDT
reduce enmity decrease when damaged


All taken from PLD AF3.


Looks like SE is trying to make blood tanking viable.

Do you think it is possible that blood tanking may make a comeback?

Warning: Wall of text ahead

I will try to write a bit, to have a idea of the size of the problem.

There are 2 things that a tank must do: Keep hate and mitigate damage. Anything else that it can do is a bonus.

Today, /nin is the rule because it does both things better than blood tanking. PLD can easily cap hate, loosing shadows looses you less hate than loosing health, and it is fairly difficult to mitigate more than 100% of damage. Well, its not really 100%, but I will get into specifics below.

For blood tanking to work, it must do one or both of those jobs better than /nin. Lets take a look at the challenge, shall we?

1) Keep Hate - This is actually not so hard. If SE keeps up with introducing items that reduce the amount of hate lost when getting hit, it is somewhat easy to do. If it can reach 80~100% reduction on enmity reduction, then it should be on par with /nin on enmity lost. The culprit here is the fact that hate can be capped, and PLD has a fairly easy job doing so if it isnt loosing huge amounts of hate. Once you cap hate and loose only little every time you get hit, you are keeping hate in FFXI.

The hate cap and the fact that PLD/NIN can reach and mantain it also means that it is impossible to keep hate better than a PLD/NIN can. The best a blood tanking PLD can hope to acomplish is to get to hate cap and maitain hate very close to it - exactly the same as a PLD/NIN does today. That means that to be viable, it must mitigate damage at least as well as PLD/NIN.

2) Mitigate damage - Here is the big challenge. For one simple reason: Utsusemi is overpowered.

Ever since its launch Utsusemi has been overpowered. It had several nerfs applied to it, and it is still overpowered. The fault is not just the design of the spell - the fact that defense and VIT do very little to reduce incoming damage is a factor too.

Lets not turn this into a Utsusemi rant. Lets just see how much damage reduction is needed to compare to Utsusemi.

On Physical attacks - Its not happening. Unless the mob triple attacks like mad, or has a hundred fist like speed, Utsusemi has 100% damage mitigation here. When the mobs has either multiple attacks per round or attacks lightning fast, Utsusemi advantage is much smaller. But it is still 100% damage reduction anytime it is up.

There is also another factor that we must consider: If the mob triple attacks like mad or has hundred fists like speed, it might be worth to tank is as something/SAM with Seigan + Third Eye. TE has instant recast, 100% physical damage mitigation while it is up and a chance to stay up for quite a few attacks. If you can get utsu NI up almost twice every 30 seconds, Seigan + TE might absorb more damage than Utsu.

TP Moves:

There are 3 kinds of TP moves:

#1 The ones that take shadows off utsusemi and have their damage reduced by it. These are the most common moves. Things like Pecking Fury, Sickle Slash, etc. Unless it is a 3-4 or more hit move, it is again quite hard to compete with Utsusemi's effectiveness against these.

#2 The ones that ignore utsusemi and dont take shadows off. Few of these around only. Siphon Discharge, for exemple. Utsusemi is completely useless against those, but will still protect you from the follow up physical attacks. On this case, PDT might win depending on how strong are the follow up physical attacks.

#3 The ones that ignore utsusemi and take off shadows. Any -ga spell does this. Utsusemi is useless against them, and you are not protected from follow up attacks. PDT wins hands down here.


On all but the last case, Utsu has one advantage: There are few surprises. Suppose a paladin is subject to this, for example: Critical hit, Tp move, Critical hit. Having Utsu up will protect the user for the first critical if it is a Type #3 move. From both the first and last criticals if it is a type #2. And from the first critical and part of the TP move if it is a Type #1. After the 2nd critical, there is time to recast utsu, or even try casting Utsu Ichi.

On a pdt set, you are subject to all that damage. Yes, the damage will be reduced by your pdt, but can a paladin survive that sequence of hits from a mob today?

Lets get a example: Minhocao does hit a decently geared PLD for 450ish damage. Criticals are around 700. Even with 50% pdt, that means a PLD must be able to take 700 damage + Tp move and stay alive long enough for a Cure V to land. Another hit between o*hit moment and we are looking at 1k HP + tp move lost before a WHM has time to land a cure. That is a lot of HPs. I know that Minhocao isnt exaclty a light hitter, but it isnt by far the hardest hitting mob around.

Conclusion

It is very hard to compare a blood tank with a Utsu tank because of the way different attack speeds, rates of double/triple attack and damage per hit work on final fantasy XI. But i believe that even if PLD had ready acess to 50% pdt, the amount of damage reduction that Utsusemi provides on current NMs is better than what a pure pdt set would provide. And that only even comes into question if said blood tanking PLD can loose almost no hate from getting hit in the first place.

IE: I think that unless SE mess up with the damage high end NMs deal or the way Utsusemi works, even a 50% PDT PLD that doesnt loose hate when he gets hit will have a hard time comparing itself to a PLD/NIN. And messing with the way Utsusemi works TODAY is about as healthy to FFXI as turning off the switches on the servers.

Also, said PLD/NIN can get 50% PDT if the PLD/ANYTHING blood tank can. Plus Shadows.

Your thoughts?

Edited, Sep 10th 2010 1:32pm by TheKhory

-gas were just the first example that came to my head. And they were a bad one, my mistake. There are still plenty of physical moves that wipes shadows and ignore any protection they would give.


Our problem with damage taken is that mobs are using D400 weapons, have 500 attack and are limited at the minimum of 1.0 pdif. In this case, 500 def is capped def, but you are still taking anywhere between 300-500 damage each hit. It was a design mistake in the beggining of FFXI that wasnt corrected, and now is probably too late to be corrected. It would require reviewing the D and ATK of every mob of the game.


You did hit the point a little bit deeper than i have though - damage mitigation isnt important because it mitigates damage, but it is important because it conserves the back line mp. If you have infinite MP, you dont need damage mitigation, you just need enough HP to survive the time between cures landing.

And i was in a PLD/WAR only sky LS before quitting and coming back. Made me want to bang my head against a wall. It suffers terribily from what i mentioned - Crit + triple attack = dead tank.

Edited, Sep 10th 2010 2:31pm by TheKhory

Thanks for proving me wrong Itazura.

How much pdt you have on that set anyway? Shield blocks?

Either way, i probably have exagerated a bit Minhocao damage. Change it to Chuckwa if you want. Lacovie. Briareus. Mannagal. Even Kirin, although Kirin doesnt do as much physical damage, the problem there is the tp spam. Like i said, it was just a example, the point still of the post still stands.

Mine had me dead because the WHMs (all 3 of them) couldnt target through gear swap. Im glad i left that place.

I think I may have had Jelly Ring on. (Was fiddling with macros a bit.)

Should be able to use max melee damage taken (224 for myself, 314 for RNG, 309 for SAM) as the magnitude for damage, roughly.

And, it wasn't about proving anything; I was merely confused why your numbers seemed so off from my very recent experience. (If you're making up numbers for illustration purposes, you should really say so.)

* * *

I think there are already a large number of NMs which are difficult (for the average LS) using a single PLD/NIN to tank. Some are even difficult with two PLD/NIN co-tanking. Many NMs are easier to kite than tank, while a few can (and should be) distance tanked.

Had quite a variety recently, requiring backward tanking (Kukulkan), partial backward tanking (Tefenet), not-bothering-Utsusemi-even-though-I'm-/NIN tanking (Cuelebre), run-for-my-life-since-we-can't-zerg Kirin kiting, triple-triple-triple-attacked-dead-PLD alliance wiping (Adze--which we later won with PLD/NIN x2 instead of x1), and a I-give-up--I'll-just-melee-and-cure-and-Flash NOT-tanking (Gancanagh).

Even though I'm /NIN for them all, I have to say I am enjoying the variety of fights a lot--don't think I've ever had this much fun as PLD/WAR.

The point is, do we really need to focus on blood tanking and ask SE to give us more of that specifically? Or would adding monsters with more varied attacks and behavior--which naturally lead to more variations on how to tank--mean more fun to play as Paladin?