Thread: 4.0 tank buff ability changes, please don't do this

Originally Posted by Jandor

We're going to be using roughly the same amout of abilities at 70 as we are now. Rampart is pretty mandatory, so moving it just moves it, it doesn't free up any extra space.

Actually it does considering that most of the currently extraneous crossclass skills are getting removed. The combination of freeing up space in the cross class skill list and then moving must have abilities from the class/job skill list frees up space in the class/job skill list. Rampart/Shadowskin will no longer take up space on the Paladin/Dark Knight skill list, it will now take up the space once filled by the likes of Fracture and Foresight.

You are also misunderstanding what was said about maintaining the same number of usable buttons at 70. They said that would be doing this by having more powerful abilities replace the older ones rather than having both abilities existing separately on the hot bars.


I would not be surprised if Flash got upgraded to Holiest of Holy at some point instead of giving Paladin's a "new" AoE.

Originally Posted by shadowalker0

SO I have been reading this and mulling over the problem today. We know that they are going to do what they are going to do, but I would hate to loose the individuality of my tank. What if they add job specific side effects to the skills.

Please do nor confuse Rampart/Shadowskin moving to the cross role list with loss of job individuality. This move is moving the "Must have abilities" (i.e. the abilities that SE needs every member of that role to have in order for them to be viable in content) which Paladin, Dark Knight and Warrior already have from the job list to the cross role list.

There is no need to add job specific effects to the skills.

Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

Actually it does considering that most of the currently extraneous crossclass skills are getting removed.

That's not confirmed. We don't yet know how many cross-class skills previously available to tanks will remain afterwards, whatever their categorical name. Moving Rampart or Shadowskin, each a job-unique animation and name for a dual-job skill, to a "role" skill does trade out a would-be cross-class slot on all three tanks for new job-unique skills on two. However,

Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

Please do nor confuse Rampart/Shadowskin moving to the cross role list with loss of job individuality. This move is moving the "Must have abilities" (i.e. the abilities that SE needs every member of that role to have in order for them to be viable in content) which Paladin, Dark Knight and Warrior already have from the job list to the cross role list.

There is no need to add job specific effects to the skills.

1. Rampart is clearly not a "must-have" ability if the widely viable tank hasn't needed it. Similarly, forcing it upon Warriors as a role-based skill only means that their current CD set would need to be rebalanced, likely towards even further homogenization. Which begs the question, why would you want to homogenize any part of such a crucial arsenal component. Provoke I can understand, lest SE is willing to create three different versions that wouldn't serve only to debalance tanks further, but Rampart? If anything, Shadowskin should simply be revised to be a bit more unique in the first place.

2. Unless their are distinct job effects on the role-skills, it is a loss of job individuality. It might not be a net loss, but it is nonetheless a loss of an aesthetically fitting name and animation for either of the two jobs sharing the skill effect. But, unless the replacing skill provides more to the job aesthetic than the one being replaced (which just as easily could retain a job-specific name and animation, thereby avoiding this whole compromise), that's a net loss, too.

Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

False. Warrior did need it, does have it and they needed to add two more versions of it in 2.1 to fix Warrior when it was broken. Warrior was actually "homogenized" as you like to call it into the "best designed" tank.

Warrior needed eHP and increased effective healing-to-damage taken efficiency. It did not need Rampart specifically. Nor, unless you count every variant of a percentile mitigation tool as "Rampart", did it receive it. Rampart and Shadowskin are clones, yes, but Inner Beast and Vengeance? What?

Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

Foresight and Rampart fill the same design space, but Foresight was made weaker in order to allow Paladin to have the better Rampart so that they could be the "tough" tank.

See, this part I believe, because it smacks of SE's early shortsightedness and style of driving niche or theme. But,

Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

This along with the very narrow viability window of mitigation by self-healing forced them to buff a self heal attack and a MT dps cooldown to give Warriors a better mitigation cooldowns suite.

While it's clear that Warrior was undertuned for progression tanking, that factor wasn't determined by its self-healing alone. Warriors could originally pull up to an effective 570 potency self-heal over 1 GCD or 1020 over 2. Let's call that a simple 2400 to 4300 healing. At that point, the Warrior would need to absorb 8000 to 14333 damage over 6 seconds for the mitigation component alone to make up for the self-heal lost. The real issue is that the early Warrior only scaled with himself, not content. For that Warrior then to be viable in cutting-edge progression, he must be overpowered for everything beneath it. The input-scalars added cut that potential gap (and made it far harder to no-heal 2.0 dungeons as a result).

Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

It would make Dark Knight more unique now, but it would still lock them down in future job design.

At that point, what wouldn't? Is there any part of job uniqueness that won't "lock down" a job? Are they all therefore unwise and intolerable design elements? Warrior has done just fine without Rampart, for instance (unless, as per your above stretch, you consider Inner Beast as Rampart just because they both carry a 20% mitigation component).

Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

Because making certain that all tanks have the same basic tools means that they can design content that even future currently undesigned tanks can participate in while allowing those future tanks to be more unique. Having a bunch of unique cooldown suites makes designing content balanced for them far harder than building to a common baseline.

By moving the common baseline from within the jobs to outside the job they create more design space to make jobs unique.

Then what the hell is supposed to make a tank? If they're all to react identically to damage periods, then what's left? Percentile MT dependence? AoE damage? Without these variances entering into the defensive CD rotation as well there are even fewer ways by which to keep every job viable in a given fight. At that point you just take the most useful or fitting utility, assuming that isn't consistently championed by one overly versatile job, and screw the rest. The facilitating benefits of that utility has no compromise in ease of survival, etc. If you want jobs to be able to highlight their unique components, then there must also be something variant in the less visual or auxiliary components to rebalance those differences.

Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

That is flawed thinking. The replacement skill is always going to be a net zero in identity change if not a net gain as long as the ability is not shared with other jobs and might still be a gain if it is only shared with a few others. The only way it will not be a gain is if there is no replacement for the lost abilities.

It's the effective metric. The mere fact that a job has a unique skill does not necessarily make the job unique or significantly add to its identity. It depend on HOW unique that skill is, and HOW fitting. It's not just a number game.

That said, my point isn't that the Rampart/Shadowskin animation and name distinction is likely to hold greater uniqueness or distinction than whatever new skills are added in their place (and they in place in cross-class slots). I'm saying that there's literally no point in forcing the skill to be exactly the same. While there may be "no need to to add job-specific effects", there is zero reason not to, either. We already vary skills just based on whether they're in PvP or PvE. Savage Blade and Fracture already vary their animations with every class to use them. Why then should this Rampart-Shadowskin hybrid be unable to vary its name and animation according to the class or job using it?