Which is now the easiest Tank, WAR or PLD?

They're all basically neck-and-neck at this point, but I guess I would have to go GNB>DRK/PLD>WAR for ascending ease of play [WAR=easiest, but only by a bit].

...Unless you're in a situation in which you can make a special and active effort to milk the unique affordances of TBN or ranged spell phases for additional uptime, in which case it's just GNB/DRK/PLD>WAR.

For me its Warrior.

The self sustains are strong and its damage output is decent. It has the same benefits as White Mage to healers, a little "no thrills", but it does what it says on the tin without any gimmicks.

I'd actually put Gunbreaker second. Obviously its a more challenging tank, but to pick up and play its a nice job provided you know your tanking basics.

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

I dont think everyone is optimising every little semblance of dmg out of dark knight, sure it might be harder if ur spreadsheeting tbn uses or whatever.

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The same can be said for GnB. I could just use the standard opener and rotation on every fight, or I could use a different scuffed customized rotation for every fight just to squeeze some extra potency into my team's killtime, like using Double Down way earlier just so I can cleave the Darkened Fire in P3S.
Although I haven't played the job since 2.5 GCD became the meta, maybe optimizing GnB's rotation is completely dead now.

But it's also entirely pointless in EW, you can spreadsheet everything and still do worse than a DrK that just does the basics but crits every 2-min window.

If we go by optimization potential then I guess yes, Warrior is by far the easiest since there is basically nothing to optimize. You can't do a Memeheaval opener anymore and the change to IR from 90 to 60 seconds means you rarely ever want to not use it on cooldown, the only fun that job has left is trying to squeeze as much healing out of excess Nascent Flash usages as possible.

Based on play rates, WAR is absolutely destroying the other 3 tanks in terms of how many people are actually playing the job, PLD is next(but significantly lower), GNB is 3rd, and DRK is seeing the least play.
However DRK is still sitting at the top with the fastest clears.

If Dark Knight was really easy people would be playing it more to get better clear times, but they're not.
This makes me believe that playing DRK at the highest level you can is more difficult than the other tanks or at least on par with GNB specifically because it follows a similar trend but not nearly as drastically.
And no its not a preference thing, Dark Knight completely destroyed the other 3 tanks in terms of playrates in Abyssos.
A lot of people will play what they precieve to be optimal,but with the tank balance chances, DRK is only doing that if you can squeeze out everything it has to offer at the highest level.

But the real truth is none of this matters and most of the difficulty in this game comes from the content itself and not the job, and I don't think super tight dps checks are ever going to be a thing again after abyssos so...who gives a shit

War by 500 miles. 25sec CD invuln button for dungeon packs, and a very potent heal for other stuff (equil). Extremly simple rotation with minimal ogcds to worry about. Shortest CD Tank invuln aswell.
Only thing thats janky and can be confusing with warrior is how holmgang works when you are targeting mobs without using the macro.