DRK vs. WAR: how do they compare?

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Originally Posted by Undeadfire

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That's blatantly false. WAR was a mandatory part of every HW group, even when solo tanks were used in Creator speedrun groups. 100% uptime availability on damage down and slashing buffs, highest damage output out of any tank by a sizeable margin, 180 second recast invuln, 120 second recast 30% mitigation when PLD and DRK's were on 180s. Pretty much any semi-decent DRK player was also a PLD player out of necessity in prog, and vice versa. Please stop spreading misinformation.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

That's blatantly false. WAR was a mandatory part of every HW group, even when solo tanks were used in Creator speedrun groups. 100% uptime availability on damage down and slashing buffs, highest damage output out of any tank by a sizeable margin, 180 second recast invuln, 120 second recast 30% mitigation when PLD and DRK's were on 180s. Pretty much any semi-decent DRK player was also a PLD player out of necessity in prog, and vice versa. Please stop spreading misinformation.

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Didn't that guy from World Prog corrected you before? Stating Drk was hilariously broken.

Or we going back to this argument for the 3rd time? Don't have time with your nonsense.

Edit: You said Pld was solid or better for A7S, however again Drk still defeated.

There is literally nobody who is going to argue that WAR wasn't a mandatory pick in HW. In fact, I would challenge you to find a single raid fight in HW which the World First clear was done without WAR. The same cannot be said for DRK.

And for your own reference, A1S, A2S, A7S, and A9S were all cleared first using a WAR/PLD comp.

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Originally Posted by Undeadfire

If every job got their pure identities back, we'll likely end up with a meta issue again with some jobs being too crap/broken for current high end content tiers, or Savage/Ultimate becoming too generic and boring. What I mean is, some jobs will not be taken and SE wants to keep the vision every job needs to be clear enabled, it's difficult to do both with such a mass of jobs, either way people are always going to complain. It was a huge issue in HW, Pld vs Drk, and Ast vs Whm.

Sadly we can't have everything, I'm an omni tank so I don't really care which tank is meta I'll main the best ones.

Edit: Don't get me wrong I'll gladly take identities, but this would take insane levels of IQ to give every job one at this point of numbers.

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I’ll take 2.0 warrior any day. The timing required with self healing was incredible.
The day they decided to rework war with damage reduction buffs set in stone every tank afterwards.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

And for your own reference, A1S, A2S, A7S, and A9S were all cleared first using a WAR/PLD comp.

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Not finding history for A1S except by fflogs, Mogtalk only goes Creator.

Fflogs says Drk/War earliest A1S kill. Speed?

A2S is Pld/War, it's an add fight, what do you expect? Can it really be counted as a raid boss?

A7S correct even though far easier than A6S. A9S Angered chose Pld yes.

Anyway since this becoming an ego trip, I'll say this.

Drk permanent Int -10%, Reprisal 20s -10% damage (Against boss) with 10s downtime and easy to activate, Blood Price MP feed, free DPS taking damage. Pld: Autos, physical mechanics (which is rare), that's it, that's all it had than self stuff without much benefits. War was DPS only, DPS loss using Paths.

You must be seriously drunk out of your gourd if you don't find this broken, HW Drk had tools no job has ever come close to in history for mitigations. However on topic, I don't know what I can do for you on identities, this would take mass dedication level to return.

The reason that you didn't find it was because the A1S WF was actually Lucrezia of Final Coil fame, beating out EM by 7 minutes.

I'm not saying that HW DRK didn't have its advantages. Delirium was essentially Dragon Kick, which was a mandatory debuff. One of the core problems with comps involving PLD was that you were generally expected to bring along a MNK for DK, when you'd much rather bring a NIN (and DRG to boost your ranged). But you'll find it extremely difficult to defend the claim that HW WAR was somehow 'less broken' by any extent of your imagination.

I mean, War only out going was it's DPS and Drk really wasn't that far behind. Ignoring Wars Crit RNG, depending on fights Drk 50+/400+ less against, Drk pushed boundaries with Scourge multi targets (30s dot GCD). Looked through Fflogs.

Ninja was mandatory because Shadewalker allowed more tank DPS, 15s 80% enmity feed, drop tank stances after 3 GCDs, griefing without.

Drk 20% perma mitis, extra DPS taking damage, 20% HP/MP restore from add deaths, vs, Shield blocking, guaranteed shield block, 2 Mins 30s raid wide barrier 10% Paladin HP, Str -10%, vs, High crit tank with a optional storms path for prog (Optimal kills this was not used, occasionally used.), Equil self heal, front only self mitigation (Must not move or remove).

Come on now, Drk is far beyond, I literally raided in Alex Savage during their prime times, you were griefing the team if you didn't bring it than self survival.

The idea that Warrior wasn't laughably, absurdly overpowered in Heavensward is some mind-boggling historical revisionism.

Heavensward tank balance was basically just Stormblood tank balance except with DRK and PLD flipped around. In Heavensward, WAR was the superior tank in basically every way, DRK was WAR's sidekick whose primary advantage was having two party mitigation skills instead of one, and PLD was just kind of bad from top-to-bottom with a handful of niche advantages that never turned out to make up for its overall weakness. In Stormblood, WAR was still the superior tank in basically every way (albeit to a much smaller degree), PLD was WAR's sidekick whose primary advantage was having two party mitigation skills instead of one, and DRK was just kind of bad from top-to-bottom with a handful of niche advantages that never turned out to make up for its overall weakness.

Heavensward DRK was good, but it was appropriately balanced with upsides and downsides. WAR was stupidly overpowered, and PLD was stupidly underpowered.

Well just agree to disagree, really not gonna argue, this isn't the topic.

After experiencing it all Gordias all the way to Creator, I still give it to Drk.

The issues DRK had were things that they didn't need to gut it for. Spammable Reprisal? Just remove the spammable part. DRK outdoing PLD due to magic mitigation? Shelltron changes in SB fixed that. DRK did not need to be gutted.

But nope, gave Reprisal to every tank, gave Low Blow to every tank DESPITE PLD HAVING A SPAMMABLE STUN AND WAR ALREADY HAVING A STUN ON THE SAME COOLDOWN TIMER AS DRK, giving Dark Dance (Anticipation) to every tank DESPITE WAR ALREADY HAVING 100% PARRY RATE AND PLD HAVING 100% BLOCK RATE, removing the DoT from DRK while keeping PLD's, removing the 2nd combo from DRK while keeping WAR and PLD's, removing the high risk/reward gameplay, etc etc.

I know I'm just repeating myself, but DRK got gutted for no reason, when the playstyle was just fine. Its problems were things that could have been fixed with slight tweaks, not a complete gutting of the kit.

Reprisal and Low Blow weren't really "just fine."

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Originally Posted by Argyle_Darkheart

Reprisal and Low Blow weren't really "just fine."

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Low Blow had a chance to come off cooldown when you got a crit. Remove that interaction, it becomes fine. Reprisal had a chance of doing the same with parries. Remove that interaction, it's just fine.

If you remove the parry procs, then they're just oGCD damage spam, which is what we already have. Granted, DRK funnels most of its buttons into 60/120s, rather than spreading it out.

Low Blow was designed in relation to Brutal Swing. Brutal Swing had a 20 second recast. Low Blow had a 25 second recast, but had a 30% chance to reset on parry proc to offset this. In short, a 6% chance per physical auto (12% with standard DD up), and autos typically happened every 4 seconds or so. The main issue with this design was that it forced DRK to actively tank to get these procs, but WAR just did more damage on average so it didn't really affect them.

Reprisal was a 30 second recast ability with a 20 second damage down attached. The caveat was that it could only ever be used after a parry proc. Which again, required physical autos (which some fights didn't have - Oppressor, Manipulator, two of the four Combaticons, and Onslaughter), and required DRK to be actively tanking to fish for procs.

The issue that I see with Reprisal was that it was essentially a 100% uptime ability in line with WAR's Path, and that's a design philosophy I've actively argued against and am glad that those abilities are gone. I think anything that forces you to design your comp around particular job combinations is bad for the game, which is why it's good that the Path/Eye buffs are gone alongside old Reprisal. That being said, I don't think the dev team was entirely sure about what to do with raidwide mitigation post-Heavensward. They started out with Reprisal as a universal action (although the animation and icon weren't nearly as cool). But then they decided to give PLD two additional raidwide mitigation abilities and everyone else nothing. And since then it's been an arms race of adding in additional raidwide mitigation.

The main problem with these abilities was not the procs, but rather the fact that you had to be actively tanking to get the extra damage from them. Which is also why Blood Price was removed from the game. In fact, the only action still left that follows this philosophy is WAR's Vengeance, which still retains its legacy thorns effect. So if you want to find fault with the design philosophy around Low Blow, we really should talk about removing the thorns effect from Vengeance to bring it in line with every other tank's 30% mitigation action as the final outlier.

Yes, remove Vengeance's thorns.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

The main problem with these abilities was not the procs, but rather the fact that you had to be actively tanking to get the extra damage from them. Which is also why Blood Price was removed from the game. In fact, the only action still left that follows this philosophy is WAR's Vengeance, which still retains its legacy thorns effect. So if you want to find fault with the design philosophy around Low Blow, we really should talk about removing the thorns effect from Vengeance to bring it in line with every other tank's 30% mitigation action as the final outlier.

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Or, instead of trying to make all the 30% cds identical, introduce other things that make their cds unique. I'm honestly surprised shadow wall doesn't reflect magic or Sentinel increase oath gauge, though that would be redundant since they made PLD have 100 gauge at the start (which is proof of how useless PLD's gauge is that it requires it to be full at the start). The thorns is also such a minor issue having lost bloodbath and the ability to heal via NF that the devs removing it would only exacerbate the homogenization issue we have currently. WAR already lost overpower cone when they already have access to four other circle aoes via mythril tempest, orogeny, primal rend and decimate/CC. Lets not dilute the tanks more than they already are.

Also, ToB is still relatively unchanged since inception, with the only addition of convalescence as a trait instead of a cross class and it healed for that amount. Otherwise WAR has been the most consistent tank in design ever since release, albeit constantly getting nerfed with every expansion to lower the skill ceiling.

Regarding the procs of HW, the only issue is that it came out in a time when boss autos did not universally target the top two enmity like we have now, so being an OT literally disable some skills. Sure there were add phases but that was only at set intervals and most of time the boss was only hitting one tank. If the bosses in HW auto both tanks like we have now it might be a different scenario though personally I'm glad those procs are gone. Having dead buttons has always annoyed me to no end. It's one of the reasons why I both love and hate PR. It's a button that is only active once a minute but PR doesn't share the same button as IR so I have to macro them and don't tell me it they can't share a button because in PvP, WAR's BW literally does what I want IR to do in PvE. It's and ogcd that changes into a gcd action in a single button. It's literally be done and proven in-game so the fact that IR and PR isn't like that show how their ability to reduce button bloat falls short in the design phase.

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Originally Posted by Marxam

Or, instead of trying to make all the 30% cds identical, introduce other things that make their cds unique. I'm honestly surprised shadow wall doesn't reflect magic or Sentinel increase oath gauge, though that would be redundant since they made PLD have 100 gauge at the start (which is proof of how useless PLD's gauge is that it requires it to be full at the start). The thorns is also such a minor issue having lost bloodbath and the ability to heal via NF that the devs removing it would only exacerbate the homogenization issue we have currently. WAR already lost overpower cone when they already have access to four other circle aoes via mythril tempest, orogeny, primal rend and decimate/CC. Lets not dilute the tanks more than they already are.

Also, ToB is still relatively unchanged since inception, with the only addition of convalescence as a trait instead of a cross class and it healed for that amount. Otherwise WAR has been the most consistent tank in design ever since release, albeit constantly getting nerfed with every expansion to lower the skill ceiling.

Regarding the procs of HW, the only issue is that it came out in a time when boss autos did not universally target the top two enmity like we have now, so being an OT literally disable some skills. Sure there were add phases but that was only at set intervals and most of time the boss was only hitting one tank. If the bosses in HW auto both tanks like we have now it might be a different scenario though personally I'm glad those procs are gone. Having dead buttons has always annoyed me to no end. It's one of the reasons why I both love and hate PR. It's a button that is only active once a minute but PR doesn't share the same button as IR so I have to macro them and don't tell me it they can't share a button because in PvP, WAR's BW literally does what I want IR to do in PvE. It's and ogcd that changes into a gcd action in a single button. It's literally be done and proven in-game so the fact that IR and PR isn't like that show how their ability to reduce button bloat falls short in the design phase.

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On release? Warrior has been gutted the most and lost almost all identity after 2.0.
Devs should have kept warrior high hp and self healing with minimal damage mitigation.

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Originally Posted by Axious

On release? Warrior has been gutted the most and lost almost all identity after 2.0.
Devs should have kept warrior high hp and self healing with minimal damage mitigation.

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War couldn't even tank in 2.0... All of it's damage reduction cooldowns increased Defence than straight damage % reduction. Holmgang was a meme, I can bind target but I can't move either.

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Originally Posted by Undeadfire

War couldn't even tank in 2.0... All of it's damage reduction cooldowns increased Defence than straight damage % reduction. Holmgang was a meme, I can bind target but I can't move either.

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Exactly. Completely different identity than paladin.
Timing your self heals so you don’t die from an auto after a TB. Thrilling rush lol.

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Originally Posted by Axious

Exactly. Completely different identity than paladin.
Timing your self heals so you don’t die from an auto after a TB. Thrilling rush lol.

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Except you didn't even survive the TB. Vengeance? Only had the counterattack and no mitigation. Holmgang? Rooted you and the enemy but didn't provide the invuln. Inner Beast? Only the selfheal and 0 mitigation. Hard to outheal a tank buster when it just flattens you immediately.
It would work even less now. I guess I have to say it for the 20th time but most tank busters in the current tier put a DoT on you and the strength of that DoT depends on how much you mitigated the initial hit, which means anything that isn't flat damage mitigation just makes you take more damage, increasing your maximum HP does literally nothing.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

Except you didn't even survive the TB. Vengeance? Only had the counterattack and no mitigation. Holmgang? Rooted you and the enemy but didn't provide the invuln. Inner Beast? Only the selfheal and 0 mitigation. Hard to outheal a tank buster when it just flattens you immediately.
It would work even less now. I guess I have to say it for the 20th time but most tank busters in the current tier put a DoT on you and the strength of that DoT depends on how much you mitigated the initial hit, which means anything that isn't flat damage mitigation just makes you take more damage, increasing your maximum HP does literally nothing.

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Still doesn’t discount the fun of it.
Sure T1 T5 and titan were rough but it wasn’t impossible. Requiring a different approach to the fight than Pld would have. Only time a TB would out right KO was a crt and server ticks for autos.

As for now? Life is made easier for us lol.
Still would be interesting to see 2.0 implemented.
300% heal on fell cleave / inner beast. Bloodbath! Mercy Stroke. Old berserk! Granted the pacification was a pain.

Either way. I enjoyed my time for 2.0 warrior!

You had to be a masochist to bring 2.0 War in turn 5, it couldn't even survive Death Sentence alone.

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Originally Posted by Undeadfire

You had to be a masochist to bring 2.0 War in turn 5, it couldn't even survive Death Sentence alone.

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Guilty lol. It was a 50/50 if you would survive the initial hit on death sentence. The worse part was the healing debuff afterwards.

50/50 is being extremely generous. Your odds of surviving the initial hit were practically non-existent (but not 0) on your own, and that's to say nothing of the amount of sheer panic generated in healers the second a WAR took a hard hit from anything. The extra HP and tiny bit of healing WAR used to have in no way offset having to take just about everything straight to the face.

My static back then wanted to string me up by my ears the one time I even so much as indicated curiosity at the prospect of trying WAR against Twintania.

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Originally Posted by Absimiliard

50/50 is being extremely generous. Your odds of surviving the initial hit were practically non-existent (but not 0) on your own, and that's to say nothing of the amount of sheer panic generated in healers the second a WAR took a hard hit from anything. The extra HP and tiny bit of healing WAR used to have in no way offset having to take just about everything straight to the face.

My static back then wanted to string me up by my ears the one time I even so much as indicated curiosity at the prospect of trying WAR against Twintania.

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It’s funny and also sad how bad 2.0 war was in comparison too pld. Like the job did nothing good, dmg was meh and tank potential was also pure garbage. Like they actually had too rewamp everything about the job to make him somewhat decent. Like no other job got this much ability changes and remakes then war.

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Originally Posted by Axious

Still doesn’t discount the fun of it.
Sure T1 T5 and titan were rough but it wasn’t impossible. Requiring a different approach to the fight than Pld would have. Only time a TB would out right KO was a crt and server ticks for autos.

As for now? Life is made easier for us lol.
Still would be interesting to see 2.0 implemented.
300% heal on fell cleave / inner beast. Bloodbath! Mercy Stroke. Old berserk! Granted the pacification was a pain.

Either way. I enjoyed my time for 2.0 warrior!

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Same though I would prefer 3.0-4.1 WAR. IR reducing your gauge meters would actually work better in 6.0 where you only spend it on FC's and not have to deal with upheaval or onslaught messing up your meter. Imagine using two Infuriates and getting to spam four IC/CC back to back. I would much prefer that than the 100% crits dh that WAR has now. At least other jobs are getting it to so they get to feel the pain of dealing rng based dmg.

It's funny seeing this thread and the level of "WAR OP" complaints, then comparing the end-game clear rate for hard content, and the most popular tank is DRK, with GNB 2nd, far ahead of WAR & PLD.

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Originally Posted by Halfgeeek

It's funny seeing this thread and the level of "WAR OP" complaints, then comparing the end-game clear rate for hard content, and the most popular tank is DRK, with GNB 2nd, far ahead of WAR & PLD.

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I've been seeing a lot of PLDs since their buff.

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Originally Posted by Halfgeeek

It's funny seeing this thread and the level of "WAR OP" complaints, then comparing the end-game clear rate for hard content, and the most popular tank is DRK, with GNB 2nd, far ahead of WAR & PLD.

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Damage is all that matters when mitigation isn't required to clear.

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Originally Posted by Mithron

Damage is all that matters when mitigation isn't required to clear.

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Warrior is also just flat out not good at mitigating stuff this tier. Thrill of Battle is terrible on the DoT busters and Bloodwhetting loses a lot of value as well when the incoming damage and it's duration far exceeds your healing.
I'd take upfront mitigation over some max HP increase any day.

Hate to say it, but if SE really wants WAR's identity to be regen-based, it may behoove them to take a look at how blood DKs have historically operated. There are ways powerful healing tools, worthwhile mitigation, and an acceptable amount of damage could coexist on the job without it being a repeat of Heavensward WAR.

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Originally Posted by Absimiliard

Hate to say it, but if SE really wants WAR's identity to be regen-based, it may behoove them to take a look at how blood DKs have historically operated. There are ways powerful healing tools, worthwhile mitigation, and an acceptable amount of damage could coexist on the job without it being a repeat of Heavensward WAR.

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Tbh I think they should definitely look at making DRK the barrier and "revenge" tank, where it throws barriers on itself and others. Any barriers shattering should be giving a short bloodbath-ish effect to the target (10s), while any remaining HP should the barrier not break will be thrown into the target's HP pool. So say you get a 25K barrier and are hit for 30K. You lose 5K HP, but you gain the ability to start gaining your health back through damage, offsetting it. If you are hit for 20K, and then it expires, you get a 5K HP heal.

If you want to avoid any power creeping of TBN, just change Oblation to a 10% max HP barrier move with this function added. We've suddenly made it a rather good support that can shield for 10% of a target's HP and give them the ability to get their health back by wailing on the boss. With the 1m cooldown, 2 charges is enough to lessen DRK's problems with sustain, and increase the value of Oblation at the same time.

imo they just need to make TBN 2 charges and increase the recast timer to balance it out. It will gain the added benefit of utility and pair nicely with 2 charges of oblation. However, they will need to buff the other tanks short cd.

War is king, always will be, nothing beats a strong viking warrior

WAR has the tank invuln that isn't dependent on your Sage and Red Mage spamming all the heals in the world to prevent it from activating properly.
I'd say it edges out a fair bit, even if it lacks Blackest Night.

Honestly I think WAR and DRK are very close in terms of defensive. The only difference is that DRK is easier to not overheal. Both use ehp mitigation via shields and/or heals. Not to mention tankbusters literally line up perfectly to your cds. P7S for example has equilibrium up for every aero. While DRK uses TBN to reduce dmg, WAR uses EQ to heal back that dmg. Also, EQ can crit so in some cases you are back at 100% hp after the hit and have a regen for the dot afterwards. That being said I still don't understand why DRK does more dmg than WAR if both are nearly identical in terms of ehp-style mitigation in savage.

There's barely a 150-200 dps difference between all tanks, at a point in time when tanks in general just aren't heavy lifters in rdps. You could probably buff WAR very very marginally in damage output to make that even narrower, but first you really should start talking about achieving parity on things like Holmgang and Shake across all tanks.

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Originally Posted by Marxam

Honestly I think WAR and DRK are very close in terms of defensive. The only difference is that DRK is easier to not overheal. Both use ehp mitigation via shields and/or heals. Not to mention tankbusters literally line up perfectly to your cds. P7S for example has equilibrium up for every aero. While DRK uses TBN to reduce dmg, WAR uses EQ to heal back that dmg. Also, EQ can crit so in some cases you are back at 100% hp after the hit and have a regen for the dot afterwards. That being said I still don't understand why DRK does more dmg than WAR if both are nearly identical in terms of ehp-style mitigation in savage.

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Because DRK cannot heal itself, WAR can. That single thing is the main difference between the two. DRK can shield the hits, but still needs to be healed up. WAR can potentially heal itself back up after the hits, meaning no healing from the healers. WAR essentially allows DPS uptime for healers, meanwhile DRK requires them to actually heal. I guess their thoughts are that it balances itself out because of it?

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

Because DRK cannot heal itself, WAR can. That single thing is the main difference between the two. DRK can shield the hits, but still needs to be healed up. WAR can potentially heal itself back up after the hits, meaning no healing from the healers. WAR essentially allows DPS uptime for healers, meanwhile DRK requires them to actually heal. I guess their thoughts are that it balances itself out because of it?

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Assuming this tier is a sign of things to come and not just a one-off event of one of the devs having some kind of vendetta against WAR, then it's fair to assume the playing field between the two will be far more level in terms of survivability. In fact, I'd say DRK is better than WAR in this regard at present (dungeons and dated content notwithstanding, of course). With the advantage of healing largely neutralized, DRK's noticeably higher damage tilts things heavily in its favor.

The dots being applied to tanks are strong enough to burn straight through WAR's healing options. If they're going to need almost, if not as much, healing as the other tanks now, why not give back a little bit of the damage they used to have?

A tier where Warrior's can't brain off cheese everything.

Good, keep doing this.