After 1 (arguably 2) expansions what is square trying to achieve with WAR (and PLD)?

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

Not just immortal. They also want the best utility, ease of optimisation and not be penalised on anything in exchange. No tank is allowed to do anything better. With it's current design, War should be botom dps. Always. But they don't want to consider other tanks. Dude literally said the tanks can't be further balanced.

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Are you talking about me? If so you are completely misrepresenting my opinion. I said that all tanks needed a redesign, which includes WAR. And for the record, I want the 4.1 WAR rotation back.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

“Would absolutely gut WAR’s ability to self heal”

……….to the point of still being the strongest tank for self sustain by a pretty wide margin

I’m not really sure what you consider an acceptable level here

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ShB Nascent Flash was pretty acceptable to me. And I didn’t hear anyone complaining about it back then. It also required thought and planning to use it on attacks that would do a lot of damage, which was fun.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I think the point should be that WAR’s are fine to have their mitigation and their version of tanks mild self heals to be “lifesteal” based

What isn’t okay that they get a massive potency raid wide heal and can functionally bene one person per 25 seconds while also being immortal in cleave content

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I would definitely find going back to “lifesteal” to be a good option, especially if the kit was designed more around it. Lower mitigation, more max hp increases, etc. Knowing SE though, this is all just wishing at clouds.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

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WAR has the strongest singular Raidwide mit, … And thats not even going into its ability to boost that shield further.
All the other tanks get a clone skill that is 30% mit, WAR gets bonus reflect damage on theirs
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WAR isn't getting damage buffs on its Inner Release free crit attacks from crit buffs? HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE WE GOTTA REDO HOW THAT ENTIRE SYSTEM WORKS.

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And if you are going to make a mandatory Omni-job of everything, can it at least be more fun and engaging to play rather than Fell Cleave & Fell Cleave Accessories?

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SiO getting a regen is absurd, agreed. Didn’t it lose the ability to be buffed by consuming other abilities in EW though? Even if it didn’t it’s entirely not worth it to do so intentionally.

The bonus reflect damage is the original effect, and in my opinion PLD is the only one that should have a flat 30%. Every other tank should have something suited to their flavor. I.e. WAR having 10% mitigation with 40% max HP increase and the thorns effect. But the devs are too lazy for that or to remove the thorns effect.

WAR didn’t get buffs on IR or benefit from DH as a stat from 4.2 to sometime in EW. That’s at least three years. The only reason they made that change was the increase in the amount of jobs that had guaranteed crit effects.

I will once again state that 4.1 WAR is the best iteration of WAR and should be brought back.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

Warrior cannibalises everything the other tanks do without any of the downsides, because they're the loudest tank players.
It became the leech tank when Drk was supposed to do that. It took our damage when it was all we had.
It got every short tank cooldown gigabuffed except Dark knight's because that used to be it's thing, it got Aurora as a bonus effect on Equillibrium, it got a longer duration on Holmgang when that was it's only downside.
War got Paladin's rampart streamlined, it got Dark knight's Reprisal and low blow streamlined.. It even got a Shake it off buff to make sure it also got the strongest partywide mitigation in every given situation.

Warrior players want War to be the best at everything. And now that they are, they're genuinely convinced the game is super balanced. I loathe the job. We might as wel not have any tanks besides War rn, because none of them do anything better.
And when confronted with the problems they caused, they will deflect and say that the other tanks need a rework.. Which they then get, and the cycle repeats.
Other tank does something better>Wars get mad>It gets streamlined>gib rework!

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It became the leech tank in 2.0 with IB and Bloodbath before DRK was even a thing. It was also the damage tank then as well.

Pretty sure the devs don’t look at the tanks and say “let’s buff this tank to spite another”.

WAR didn’t get rampart, low blow, and reprisal “streamlined”. The removal of the cross class system and addition of the role action system did.

I don’t WAR to be the best at everything; I want it to be the best at self-healing and a builder spender rotation. The game is balanced, dps wise. It’s atrociously and lazily designed though.
Every tank needs a rework. Especially WAR. 4.2 WAR is a terrible foundation.

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Originally Posted by Reimmi

I'm sure healers disagree with you, and would rather more tanks be like DRK so they can actually play the game.

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That’s going to depend on the healer. A lot of healers are lazy and love having a WAR. Some are just too bad at the game to even heal a DRK. And that latter camp is rather large in my experience. Sure there are those that are up for the challenge, but not all healers are.

If healers are being lazy then they shouldn't be coddled by an OP class carrying the dungeon.
The game needs to get harder in the normal content, but thats a whole other discussion. I don't think a few lazy healers is an excuse for one tank to be literally immortal.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

They complained about DV/PoA as well, which was why SiO was reworked into a completely new action mid-expansion. I think that was the first time in this game's history that the devs threw out a newly added action and replaced it with a new one simply because a job's players demanded something more powerful.

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SiO wasn't really replaced mid expansion. It was what, 1 patch later? And SiO was a bit of a special case because it simply didn't work half the time.
If they give you a debuff remover that should work even while stunned, but often it just does nothing, it's an inherently flawed ability.

And the funniest part was that 4.0 SiO would've been perfect to remove the pacification from Berserk, but they removed said pacification at the same time.

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Originally Posted by TheOperator3712

The bonus reflect damage is the original effect, and in my opinion PLD is the only one that should have a flat 30%. Every other tank should have something suited to their flavor. I.e. WAR having 10% mitigation with 40% max HP increase and the thorns effect. But the devs are too lazy for that or to remove the thorns effect.

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The problem is also with certain mechanics, take the Abyssos bleed busters for example. 10% mit and +40% HP for 15 seconds is nice on single hit busters, but when you're taking damage over time and that damage is based on how much damage the initial buster did, suddenly you're taking way more damage and your HP buff does nothing.
We saw it already with Bloodwhetting and ToB to a smaller extend because they provided either low flat % DR or none, but Paladin drew the really short stick with bleeds completely ignoring Holy Shelltron's block.

WAR is absolutely wayy over-tuned in terms of self, and party healing, but I do feel like PLD's power is mostly misplaced. I feel like instead of having high self healing, PLD should have stronger personal shielding, and mitigation. I feel like PLD shouldn't need to self heal because it shouldn't be taking damage in the first place -- it has a shield after all. I generally feel like PLD should have the best party utility of the tanks, but I feel like they should be more akin to being a protector as opposed to being a healer.

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Originally Posted by mallleable

WAR is absolutely wayy over-tuned in terms of self, and party healing, but I do feel like PLD's power is mostly misplaced. I feel like instead of having high self healing, PLD should have stronger personal shielding, and mitigation. I feel like PLD shouldn't need to self heal because it shouldn't be taking damage in the first place -- it has a shield after all. I generally feel like PLD should have the best party utility of the tanks, but I feel like they should be more akin to being a protector as opposed to being a healer.

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That's what paladin pretty much used to be. 40% DR on Sentinel, 30+% DR on Block, 20% DR on Cover, the only true invincibility in Hallowed Ground.

It paid for those benefits with longer cooldowns, but in todays incredibly rigid design we can't have that, so both benefits and drawbacks went out the window.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

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'Mid-expansion' refers to during the course of the patch series, not necessarily 4.3 specifically. The action was released on June 20, 2017 and changed on October 10, 2017. The original effect was 'removes most of all detrimental effects' on a 60 second recast, which is really funny because it would have been more powerful than a self-Esuna, given its ability to simultaneously cleanse all active cleansable debuffs instead of just one, and would likely have influenced fight design to include more cleansable DoT/Vuln effects even in raid content (i.e. tankbuster effects like Crush Helm's vuln). I think had Reprisal been the one and only raidwide mitigation tool on tanks (presumably the reason for making it a role action in the first place), there would be no reason to change it. For whatever reason, they decided to still keep DV and add in PoA at the same time, and thus the raidwide mitigation arms race began.

I suppose another factor was the fact that IR, released at the same time, cleanses a large number of debuffs anyways as well, so the end result would be a tank that was functionally just immune to debuffs across the board. It just so happened that they replaced one overpowered concept with an even more overpowered one, in response to player demand.

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Originally Posted by mallleable

WAR is absolutely wayy over-tuned in terms of self, and party healing, but I do feel like PLD's power is mostly misplaced. I feel like instead of having high self healing, PLD should have stronger personal shielding, and mitigation. I feel like PLD shouldn't need to self heal because it shouldn't be taking damage in the first place -- it has a shield after all. I generally feel like PLD should have the best party utility of the tanks, but I feel like they should be more akin to being a protector as opposed to being a healer.

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WAR is way beyond over-tuned and outright broken in its self-sustain and DPS abilities. I've watched on several occasions a WAR solo current content dungeon bosses and sometimes nearly wall to wall pulls. At the rate there buffing the job, the joke is going to be: What can WAR do - Yes.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

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The problem is also with certain mechanics, take the Abyssos bleed busters for example. 10% mit and +40% HP for 15 seconds is nice on single hit busters, but when you're taking damage over time and that damage is based on how much damage the initial buster did, suddenly you're taking way more damage and your HP buff does nothing.
We saw it already with Bloodwhetting and ToB to a smaller extend because they provided either low flat % DR or none, but Paladin drew the really short stick with bleeds completely ignoring Holy Shelltron's block.

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I don't see that as necessarily being a problem. It could be an excellent opportunity for creative game design to shine. It would make dealing with those mechanics harder for WAR in the sense that they would have to hit more than one button. WAR already has self-healing in their kit and identity though, and could use that to mitigate the damage of such dots. Alternatively the devs keep adding more and more external mitigation tools to tanks and healers. Why add tools if you're not going to make uses for them? I think the game needs more situations where job design allows for creative solutions, not less.

My personal issue with the imbalance currently is that, as some already mentioned, the Healers or rather their purpose. In a dungeon you dont need one. Simple as that. You can also do treasure maps or even some normal trials without one. Now before the ultimate crew jumps at me: only a small percentage actually does or clears that content. All the Legends you see are cause of a different problem that is off topic here. That mentioned, there is now people that clear ultimates without healers. It should not be possible, simple as that.

There is simply 2 solutions: Dispellable debuffs need to be a constant thing since only Healers can remove them in a reliable way and while that would be the boring option it would at least be SOMETHING.
The other one would be: be brave and nerf the heck out of self sustain so that healers actually feel like they matter. You could also combine the two.. just saying.

One of the other MMO's i played completely killed of Healers as well but for a different reason (PvP related group play that made it impossible to kill them due to server issues and the resulting lag. Their response was to nerf Healing a flat 60 % as of now but the problem still exists). Now i barely play that one and only on the free 2 play option. People there now play mostly in tanky setups and keep themselves alive with.. you guessed it... self sustain skills. I guess Tanks are the next ones getting nerfed to the ground.

That now aside, a trend i see in the duty finder is that more and more have Adventurer in need: Healer. I just hope SE will be doing something and soon.

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Originally Posted by mallleable

WAR is absolutely wayy over-tuned in terms of self, and party healing, but I do feel like PLD's power is mostly misplaced. I feel like instead of having high self healing, PLD should have stronger personal shielding, and mitigation. I feel like PLD shouldn't need to self heal because it shouldn't be taking damage in the first place -- it has a shield after all. I generally feel like PLD should have the best party utility of the tanks, but I feel like they should be more akin to being a protector as opposed to being a healer.

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Every PLD player I have talked to tells me they want to be dead last in terms of damage output but get all the support tools under the sun, which I think is fair.

WAR is the main issue here because it doesn't pay for what it has. PLD loses damage with tools like Clemency and Passage, WAR doesn't.
Some tanks having superior support tools isn't a problem, the problem is when those tanks are also topping the dps charts. Then you get into "flat upgrade" territory, which is where WAR's design currently sits.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

Every PLD player I have talked to tells me they want to be dead last in terms of damage output but get all the support tools under the sun, which I think is fair.

WAR is the main issue here because it doesn't pay for what it has. PLD loses damage with tools like Clemency and Passage, WAR doesn't.
Some tanks having superior support tools isn't a problem, the problem is when those tanks are also topping the dps charts. Then you get into "flat upgrade" territory, which is where WAR's design currently sits.

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''Drk can clear''

It's genuinely hillarious that people are okay with one job being a direct upgrade over another.
What's perhaps even funnier is the same crowd that got job actions homogenised and streamlined by endless demand, including entire job identities.. Will cry about their job identity when you suggest another tank gets something unique that Warrior does to even the playing field.

You did not care about my job's identity. Why does yours matter?
''Dark knight needs a rework'' Is just going to be the outcome after every expansion because if we do something Warrior doesn't they get mad and every tank will get it.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

''Drk can clear''

It's genuinely hillarious that people are okay with one job being a direct upgrade over another.
What's perhaps even funnier is the same crowd that got job actions homogenised and streamlined by endless demand, including entire job identities.. Will cry about their job identity when you suggest another tank gets something unique that Warrior does to even the playing field.

You did not care about my job's identity. Why does yours matter?
''Dark knight needs a rework'' Is just going to be the outcome after every expansion because if we do something Warrior doesn't they get mad and every tank will get it.

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in p12 the difference betwwn the top drk and top pld is literally like, 300 damage, its really not that big of a deal

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Originally Posted by Oizen

I'm just tired of the favoritism honestly. WAR is being designed in a way where it feels like the developers are telling me I have to play it, because it is the best at literally everything under the sun, and is intentionally being pushed that way, and playing what I want to play is throwing.

WAR has the strongest invuln, so strong that it warps savage fights to basically downgrade the 2nd tank to a secondary DPS.
WAR has the strongest short mit, which is even stronger when applied to another target, effectively allowing you to double the amount of healing you're outputting for no real cost to yourself.
WAR has the strongest singular Raidwide mit, previously the balance behind it was DRK and GNB have literal clone skills of each other that only mit damage, with the upside of being timed mitigation rather than a shield, then they decide they should effectively nullify that advantage by giving Shake it off a Regen, which functionally does the same thing, on all damage types. And thats not even going into its ability to boost that shield further.
All the other tanks get a clone skill that is 30% mit, WAR gets bonus reflect damage on theirs


Dark Knight and Paladin cant benefit from skill speed due to being mixed attackers? Tough. GNB struggling to keep all of its buttons inline due to its endwalker additions? Who cares.
WAR isn't getting damage buffs on its Inner Release free crit attacks from crit buffs? HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE WE GOTTA REDO HOW THAT ENTIRE SYSTEM WORKS.

PLD falls so far behind that we have to rework it for being inherently incompatible with EW's gameplay? Eughhh fine but we better give WAR some more attention and make sure SIO remains superior to veil because it has to be.

Like I'm fine with the job having advantages, but it can't EVERY advantage, and if it is EVERY advantage, it shouldn't also be topping the DPS charts.
And if you are going to make a mandatory Omni-job of everything, can it at least be more fun and engaging to play rather than Fell Cleave & Fell Cleave Accessories?

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the crit change wasnt because of war, it was because of samurai, their auto crit change is what made the system of auto crit benefitting from party crit buffs change,

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Originally Posted by 4clubbedace

in p12 the difference betwwn the top drk and top pld is literally like, 300 damage, its really not that big of a deal



the crit change wasnt because of war, it was because of samurai, their auto crit change is what made the system of auto crit benefitting from party crit buffs change,

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Auto direct hit now also benefits from the direct hit stat and buffs... Which is a Warrior exclusive thing. Direct hit doesn't even come on our gear anymore, it's a meld stat for tanks and they still went out of their way to make it benefit. Meanwhile PLD and DRK have buttons that don't speed up the GCD for all of their buttons. But it's not an isolated thing, they consistently display favouritism towards Warrior across the entire expansion.
Also, idk why you brought up the dps difference in p12. We're talking about the complete picture.
They HAVE to make sure Warrior can do everything the other tanks can do, without any downsides. But if we can't do anything better than Warrior, why do we still have any downsides at all?
There's blatant favouritism. And it makes me not want to play.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

Auto direct hit now also benefits from the direct hit stat and buffs... Which is a Warrior exclusive thing. Direct hit doesn't even come on our gear anymore, it's a meld stat for tanks and they still went out of their way to make it benefit. Meanwhile PLD and DRK have buttons that don't speed up the GCD for all of their buttons. But it's not an isolated thing, they consistently display favouritism towards Warrior across the entire expansion.
Also, idk why you brought up the dps difference in p12. We're talking about the complete picture.
They HAVE to make sure Warrior can do everything the other tanks can do, without any downsides. But if we can't do anything better than Warrior, why do we still have any downsides at all?
There's blatant favouritism. And it makes me not want to play.

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Starfall dance is also affected by both crit and direct hit but you are right that it doesn’t affect midare

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Starfall dance is also affected by both crit and direct hit but you are right that it doesn’t affect midare

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Irrelevant, it still shows they put more care into one job compared to others.
If Warrior had any problems DRK had they would carefully change the entire game around the problem.
If War had 2 magic only resists then both would have become universal mits, and they would buff it through the roof just to be sure. You know this.
They buffed Warrior's shake it off when we got a Paladin rework just to ensure Warrior remained the direct upgrade.
In 6.4, the patch that was supposed to make all the tanks ''even'' with Drk in dps, they buffed War more than Paladin, when Paladin was further behind in dps than Warrior.
It's the only job in the game where a streamer is actively trying to interfere with balance.
Warrior for one reason or another throughout the expansions HAS to do EVERYTHING better than the other tanks.

Best invuln, best partywide, best main tank, easiest rotation, best utility *literally* replaced healers in the hardest difficulty content. But Can't be taxed on it's damage because DRK and GNB can clear?
Why even have different tanks if you're just going to make one of them the best solution to every problem?
Is there just going to be Warrior, and 3 incorrect tank choices?

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

Auto direct hit now also benefits from the direct hit stat and buffs... Which is a Warrior exclusive thing. Direct hit doesn't even come on our gear anymore, it's a meld stat for tanks and they still went out of their way to make it benefit. Meanwhile PLD and DRK have buttons that don't speed up the GCD for all of their buttons. But it's not an isolated thing, they consistently display favouritism towards Warrior across the entire expansion.
Also, idk why you brought up the dps difference in p12. We're talking about the complete picture.
They HAVE to make sure Warrior can do everything the other tanks can do, without any downsides. But if we can't do anything better than Warrior, why do we still have any downsides at all?
There's blatant favouritism. And it makes me not want to play.

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To be fair for the direct hit thing, it became an issue in ShB with having to remeld if you wanted to play WAR and any other tank and it took them all of ShB and half of EW to fix that problem. Not to say it isn't an issue with like BLM and the other caster DPS, but it was the extreme of a substat doing next to nothing compared to it being one of the best substats to meld for the rest of the tanks. That being said, the issues with SkS and DRK and PLD is still absolutely stupid and blows my mind we are still dealing with that. I think it's either a time issue with so few devs dedicated to job design or incompetence as we have seen some baffling design decisions across the board.

I think the WAR/PLD damage buffs were a knee jerk reaction to their last minute boss buff on P8S where you needed to bring a DRK/GNB combo to have the DPS to clear the DPS check. Their response was to buff WAR and PLD damage instead of making sure the DPS checks work with the lowest damage tank combo.

That being said, I do want them to reduce tank self-sustain and rethink what they want tanks and healers to do in DT. Not that I have faith we aren't just going to see DRK and GNB self-sustain boosted and healers have even less responsibility.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Starfall dance is also affected by both crit and direct hit but you are right that it doesn’t affect midare

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Machinist's Reassemble is also affected by this change.

I don't get the problem though that WAR's auto-crit+DH skills actually received this adjustment; like the whole point of this isn't necessarily the WAR doing more damage and more about jobs like DRG, BRD, DNC and SCH not having a "deadzone" for their buffs and by proxy get less value just because a WAR (or SAM, MCH or inherently also DNC) is present. This is a really weird hill to die on for them.

There is indeed a favoritism. But IMHO the crit/direct hit change wasn't one of them. At least not entirely. But who knows?

I’m not even saying that starfall dance having crit direct hit is or isn’t favouritism, just refuting the point that crit direct hit is specifically a WAR thing just because midare is only crit

You don't need to make stuff up to have a decent argument, all it does is undermine your side.

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That used to be the Drk job identity, it just got transplanted into Warrior.

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Lifesteal has been part of warrior since arr. i.e before drk was introduced.

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You know what else Warrior gobbled up from Dark knight? Reprisal and low blow.

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You know what dark knight gobbled up? rampart. This is a deliberate skewing of events when it's more to do with the missteps of role actions. Especially with how much they were changed when made into role actions. A better example would be requiescat in 4.1, although that'd immediately bring to mind new delirium so I can see why you avoided that. Maybe shake it off, but you also run into the issue that a cleanse that can't be used while statused is inherently flawed, especially since the reason to have a cleanse (pacification) was removed before SIO was added.

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TBN used to the the strongest short tank cd, but then Warrior took that as well.

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Warrior didn't have a short cd until shb, and tbn is a bit better than sheltron was in stormblood because it's a 5s shield duration rather than blocking a single hit. In shadowbringers, I would not say tbn is significantly stronger than nascent flash in dungeons but it was stronger or at least easier in raids.

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Dark knight used to have the most gap closers, now Warrior has 4.

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By which you mean 1 on 30s for the duration of heavensward. In stormblood, warrior had the beast gauge one added, which is different enough to a cooldown based system and allowed all tanks to deal with knockbacks. (Paladin having tempered will). Happily onslaught costing 20 beast gauge on 15s cd (then 10s in shb) means that warrior now has less gap closers than it did, so you may rejoice.

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And in EW, Warrior also needed Dark knight's damage apparently.

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Warrior has always been the damage tank up until the introduction of gunbreaker. For shadowbringers it shared dead last with dark knight, and then dark knight was top two for the first two tiers of EW. This is a non-issue with regard to dark knight, but more an issue with the role. Healers should have a higher damage potential than tanks, but generally be unable to reach it due their role responsibility. Gunbreaker is the only tank remaining with an involved rotation, and it is yet to be seen how dt will treat it. With the simplification obsession it may be that tanks are all reduced to healer level of rotational complexity. The devs need to decide how the support roles will play and how they interact with their function.

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I wouldn't say Warrior is in a good spot when Warrior's current design just cannibalises and takes away from the others.

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This is not purely a warrior problem, it's endemic across all jobs, possibly due to the workload associated with designing and upkeeping however many there are - soon to be however many +2 +1 more limited. Consider sage, you would have thought that the new healer with a broadly untapped niche would allow the devs to stretch their wings and design something unique. What we ended up with so closely mimicked scholar that they mayn't as well have bothered.

[quote]Yet, still manages to have the fewest buttons of all tanks and the easiest to optimise rotation of all jobs in the game period.[quote]
summoner, new paladin and dark knight are all down there with it. DRK needs to break tbn at some point early enough that it can carry a 4th edge into buffs and is otherwise 123 or hit all the buttons. Summoner is so on rails that it cannot be misplayed without effort. New paladin is comically flexible. Warrior would be well served by returning the gauge management elements associated with onslaught and upheaval, but realistically I can't see them increasing complexity on any tank.

If you genuinely enjoy dark knight as it is, go and enjoy it while it lasts.

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Originally Posted by fulminating

If you genuinely enjoy dark knight as it is, go and enjoy it while it lasts.

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I don't enjoy tanking anymore period.
The loud Warrior playerbase and their favourite streamer got any sort of differences there were between them removed with unnecessary buff after buff and homogenisation.
There's nothing any tank excells at, or does better than Warrior. No tank is allowed to have a job identity besides Warrior.
Everything a tank does has to be either a worse version, or equal to what Warrior does. With an extra step sometimes too.
I see absolutely no reason to play tank if i'm being shown there's only 1 right option under any given context, and it happens to be the one i like the least.
I'm not your jobber.

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Originally Posted by fulminating

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I think arguing that WAR's advantages are the natural result of historical precedent isn't a good justification for future design. ARR was developed at a point in time where they weren't really sure if there would ever be another expansion, so the design wasn't about future proofing so much as it was about desperately staying afloat. Both tanks and healers suffered from the legacy of this as a result of having only two jobs on release. The end result was that the support roles each ended up with a 'vanilla' job, and then every possible theme that they thought of was stuffed into the other. The problem is that burning through so many design directions at once on a single job limits your creative options when introducing in new jobs.

Lifesteal
Lifesteal is not the only form of self-sustain that exists. WAR currently straddles several styles of self-sustain between instant heals, barriers, regens, and lifesteal. None of these make any thematic sense as far as job fantasy is concerned. This in turn creates a push towards homogenization, because every tank job now needs all of these things in order to remain competitive. The solution is to separate these out on to different tanks, and it's relatively easy to do if they actually invest some effort into the role. A lifesteal tank doesn't need an on demand instant heal. If they want to burst heal, they line up their healing with their burst window. You don't need a barrier shield if your lifesteal can push out into temporary HP. You can achieve similar effects with the other mechanics in a way that develops job identity in unique ways.

And this is the point people have been making for multiple expansions now - it doesn't really matter 'who' the lifesteal tank is, but one tank shouldn't contain all those distinct themes at the same time.

Role Actions
The 4.0 role action system definitely impacted DRK more than other tanks. DRK had Shadowskin in Heavensward, which was a much better looking version of Rampart that did the same thing. Dark Dance was nerfed into Anticipation and made available to all tanks. Reprisal and Low Blow were nerfed and made available to all tanks. The net result was it went from having the most number of actions out of any tank to having the least after the transition. But the main problem with the change was that utility was distributed unequally. The lack of knockback mitigation was especially bad, especially given that arena-wide knockbacks was Stormblood's favorite raid gimmick.

The decision around Reprisal was probably the strangest one in Stormblood. If you wanted to consolidate Reprisal as a universal tool, why would you keep DV and then add in PoA? And this lends itself to the mitigation inflation issue. Tanks won't be balanced until every tank has Reprisal + two job-specific raidwide mitigation tools. If you wanted tanks to rely on a standardized tool, just delete DV/PoA/SiO/Missionary/HoL. If you want tanks to each have their unique tool, then give each tank one raidwide mitigation tool out of the six that exist. They clearly ran out of ideas by the time they came to Missionary/HoL.

Mobility
Mobility is an interesting discussion point. DRK definitely had a mobility advantage prior to Stormblood, and WAR after Stormblood. I think part of the problem is that the movement tools on tanks are fairly boring. If you look at melee dps, there are definite differences in movement toolsets but none of them feel particularly disadvantaged. I still think it's hilarious that the WAR playerbase had a SAM style on-demand gap closer and squandered it out of utter greed. What they should have done instead is just asked for an on-demand gap extender to consolidate their advantage, but that's like expecting the average WAR enthusiast to understand Uptime 101. I think the bigger problem though is if you add movement tools like Shukuchi/Raiju/Ingress/Egress/Thunderclap into the mix, tanks will likely complain until each type of movement tool is on every tank, rather than appreciating the differences and letting every job have its unique upsides and downsides.

I think it's completely bizarre that anyone would claim that 'doing the most damage' is part of a job's identity. That's a bit like claiming being the most powerful job is part of the job's identity.

Incidentally, the reason why SGE has so much overlap with SCH was that it was designed to split the SCH playerbase. That's likely what's going to happen to WAR as well. They'll release a hammer tank that is very similar in design to WAR. Once the playerbase is split, then you can make the appropriate balance adjustments that should have been made expansions ago without community backlash.

^what is your explanation behind “SGE splitting the SCH playerbase” especially given of any of the 5 roles healers is by far the most likely to never receive another job

SGE eats at SCH’s toolkit from every angle, the addersgall is a near 1 to 1 copy of aetherflow, the fairy as a totem is nullified by the ridiculous range on all of SGE’s actions and while it can’t equal critlo it’s strong enough in both mitigation and shields to dwarf the requirements of all but the niches of niches (say all stack meteor in DSR phase 2)

The only thing SCH still retains entirely alone is energy drain and even though they have shown they don’t like energy drain I can’t imagine even on a healer they were so creatively bankrupt the entire SGE design could be boiled down to “make SCH without energy drain so we can stop deleting energy drain and just tell SCH players who don’t like energy drain to play SGE”

I predict that you'll see another healer by 9.0 at the latest.

The split between 'pure' and 'shield' healer is a bit of code for 'SCH has been consistently powerful across every expansion, so we turned the job into its own sub-role category'. I think if ARR had launched with the healer jobs that it currently has, then we'd see a completely different landscape. There would be an expectation to see four distinct jobs with unique themes spread out amongst them.

Because we started out with only two jobs on each support role, all subsequent job and fight design has fallen into WAR and not-WAR, and SCH and not-SCH. So naturally, the design solution ends up being to create more WAR-alternative jobs and more SCH-alternative jobs to even out the balance. That's what you're starting to see now.

Other roles never had this issue because they launched with multiple jobs from the outset. You never see complaints about MNK having limited the design space for future melee. That's because the concept was a narrow one from the outset.

The only problem is that SCH isn't a one-size-fits-all job like how WAR is at the moment. There was a time during HW where Noct AST had superior barriers than SCH. I still believe that they should bring back the dichotomy of Noct/Diurnal on AST then have SGE focus on another aspect keeping Kardia as it is what sets it unique. For instance have effects pulse of the ally you have Kardion on. As for SCH, they can literally focus on a single pet, get rid of faerie gauge since it feels forced. Bringing back Rouse will get rid of Seraph, Aetherpact and Fey Blessing as the regen from Whispering Dawn and Healing from Embrace will be greatly buffed by Rouse. All SCH cooldowns will either be modifying the properties of their barriers, AF abilities and Pet augmentations.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Incidentally, the reason why SGE has so much overlap with SCH was that it was designed to split the SCH playerbase. That's likely what's going to happen to WAR as well. They'll release a hammer tank that is very similar in design to WAR. Once the playerbase is split, then you can make the appropriate balance adjustments that should have been made expansions ago without community backlash.

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The problem with that line of thinking is that SCH was never a vastly popular job, WHM was always the most popular healer. Them introducing an easier SCH was never going to split the SCH playerbase, and it didn't split the SCH playerbase, it split the WHM playerbase, because they finally have an easy access into the shield healer side.

As for WAR, WAR is currently the most popular tank, tanks also don't really have established subtypes, so maybe their efforts to split that playerbase would go much better. But whatever tank they introduce to split the WAR playerbase would have to either be as strong as or stronger than WAR, or be as easy to play as or even easier to play than WAR, and I'm not sure that's going to be a good thing for tank balance in general, especially since tank balance problems are slowly bleeding out into other roles.

My personal preference would be for the dev team to be open about nerfs to jobs and just be honest about why it needs to be done. In practice, however, they like to maintain this illusion of upward balance. As a result, jobs tend to get only nerfed during expansion transitions when nobody knows what the potencies mean and everyone is busy trying to just figure out how everything works. The problem with this approach is that people flock to jobs that have historically been more powerful, so you see those nerfs rescinded by the subsequent upward balance over the course of the expansion. The most efficient approach is to just apply a nerf openly, tell people why it's happening, and then ignore the tears. Honestly, people will get over it.

SCH has always had an outspoken fanbase. The job has been stealth nerfed at the start of every expansion since Stormblood, but it never sticks due to backlash from the playerbase. Like it or not, this is the most success they've had with it out of any expansion. Players always look at the trade-off of reward for effort. Nobody else is interested in the effort you might have put into something, they only see results. I think you're misleading yourself if you think 'difficulty' matters to the average player outside of bragging rights on internet forums. The change absolutely did split the fanbase, which was its intended purpose. You will likely see more SCH-variant clones in the future under the 'shield healer moniker' until none of the individual flavors have any lobbying power.

We'll see if this happens to tanks as well. I suspect that if they don't have the courage to stand by the next set of stealth nerfs at the start of DT, that will likely be the next play for WAR in 8.0.

If you look at the parse distribution from eden to panda SGE really didn’t pull from SCH, it pulled from WHM (and AST either gave to WHM or SGE or both), SCH hasn’t really changed at all

If their intention was to split SCH because it’s on average an incredibly powerful job they have utterly failed at that because SCH is still incredibly powerful and SGE just became shield WHM

I’m gonna ask another question here for clarification, let’s say that SGE actually succeeded in splitting the SCH playerbase, what does splitting the SCH playerbase actually do (you can also sub SCH for WAR and my question remains unchanged)

Is the idea to dilute the amount of people who oppose bad changes or nerfs (like how SCH mains were unified on removing ED being a bad thing in 5.0) so you can functionally make nerfing easier with less pushback or are you saying if we make a new class that fights SCH’s for its raw dominance over the healer role it becomes easier to mask just how strong SCH is

The first one seems to imply less popular classes are more likely to get nerfed and the latter seems to imply that as long as another class is as strong as the dominator then the rest of the role doesn’t really matter

I honestly think it would be best if different jobs within a role were all viable in all content, however with different fights clearly favoring a specific playstyle. Most people I know are happy to flex within their tank/healer roles most of the time anyway. And those who aren't could still clear, they would just have to compensate for it.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

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The problem isn't actually around nerfs themselves.

SE uses an upward balance. If a job is doing too much damage relative to the others, they will buff the potency of every other job rather than dropping the potency of a single problem job. The net effect is the exact same in the long term, but everyone instead cheers on Yoshi-p as he hands out buffs to everyone in the room ('You get a buff, and you get a buff...') A pure upward balance is not sustainable. So to counterbalance this everything gets reset between expansions, and this is typically where stealth nerfs happen. This is where jobs that have historically been really powerful over the past expansion get addressed. The problem is that jobs that offer high reward for low effort will also be very popular. So when players of such jobs go into the next expansion and catch on to the nerfs, then we start seeing complaints rolled out on the forums en masse during the lead in to the x.1 patch.

Jobs with a more vocal playerbase tend to get buffs more often. We saw this during Endwalker as well. WAR was nerfed in the Endwalker transition, but progressively became more powerful over the course of the expansion, until we reached the point that we're at today. The same thing will almost certainly happen in DT as well.

Splitting the playerbase does two things, as you mentioned. When those stealth nerfs go out at the start of the expansion, there's no longer any pushback against them, because of the split. Some people will stick to what they have known for years, and others will be lured by a fresh take with a similar aesthetic. That allows you to retain the balance that you achieved with the expansion launch. It also redistributes the player base, so that every raid group isn't running the same comp for years on end.

Imbalances on the tank and healer roles are a byproduct of having small numbers of job options historically. Splitting the population over a larger number of possibilities means that a single job isn't going to stay on top for expansions on end, reinforced by popular demand. As I said earlier, a much simpler solution is to just say 'no', but there's likely an internal reason why they try to avoid doing this openly. There will always be imbalances, and there will always be a few jobs that tends to outperform the others in the short term. The important thing is that it's not the same job for years on end. It's been 10 years, but we're just about starting to move away from that.

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Originally Posted by fulminating

You know what dark knight gobbled up? rampart.

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Its more like DRK and WAR had their own versions of rampart that got deleted and rampart got stapled onto them in the god awful "role action" update.

God I miss the Shadowskin animation

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Originally Posted by Oizen

Its more like DRK and WAR had their own versions of rampart that got deleted and rampart got stapled onto them in the god awful "role action" update.

God I miss the Shadowskin animation

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I despise the role actions.
They fill up half our hotbars with copy/pasted abilities.
You could remove half of them and give us cool stuff in their place.

Imagine if they removed Reprisal, rampart, low blow, interject and Shirk but then gave us other tools that actually make the tanks different.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

I think arguing that WAR's advantages are the natural result of historical precedent isn't a good justification for future design. ARR was developed at a point in time where they weren't really sure if there would ever be another expansion, so the design wasn't about future proofing so much as it was about desperately staying afloat. Both tanks and healers suffered from the legacy of this as a result of having only two jobs on release. The end result was that the support roles each ended up with a 'vanilla' job, and then every possible theme that they thought of was stuffed into the other. The problem is that burning through so many design directions at once on a single job limits your creative options when introducing in new jobs.

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It's been 10 years. There's been plenty of good opportunities to properly define the niche of each tank, 5.0 being the best recent example with the introduction of a 4th, but 6.0 and 6.2/3 should also have been considered.

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Lifesteal
Lifesteal is not the only form of self-sustain that exists. WAR currently straddles several styles of self-sustain between instant heals, barriers, regens, and lifesteal. None of these make any thematic sense as far as job fantasy is concerned. This in turn creates a push towards homogenization, because every tank job now needs all of these things in order to remain competitive. The solution is to separate these out on to different tanks, and it's relatively easy to do if they actually invest some effort into the role. A lifesteal tank doesn't need an on demand instant heal. If they want to burst heal, they line up their healing with their burst window. You don't need a barrier shield if your lifesteal can push out into temporary HP. You can achieve similar effects with the other mechanics in a way that develops job identity in unique ways.

And this is the point people have been making for multiple expansions now - it doesn't really matter 'who' the lifesteal tank is, but one tank shouldn't contain all those distinct themes at the same time.

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No it's not. The addition of shields and regens to warrior was generally a bad move, but let's not pretend that holy sheltron and heart of excog wouldn't be glaring issues if warrior wasn't there. I think lump heal and lifesteal fit the berserker fantasy well enough, with thrill/equilibrium acting as a second wind. There's no way you've not seen the fellowship of the ring, and surely remember the part where boromir gets up again after being filled full of arrows. I don't think this should preclude dark knight from having the abyssal drain loop returned though, as I see that as more of a representation of magic debuffing than too angry to die. Ideally I think warrior wouldn't have healing per se, but rather just increase its high health cap with every attack to convey "too angry to die", however this would not interact well with heal style doom mechanics or benediction existing so lifesteal works as an approximation there.

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Role Actions
The 4.0 role action system definitely impacted DRK more than other tanks. DRK had Shadowskin in Heavensward, which was a much better looking version of Rampart that did the same thing. Dark Dance was nerfed into Anticipation and made available to all tanks. Reprisal and Low Blow were nerfed and made available to all tanks. The net result was it went from having the most number of actions out of any tank to having the least after the transition. But the main problem with the change was that utility was distributed unequally. The lack of knockback mitigation was especially bad, especially given that arena-wide knockbacks was Stormblood's favorite raid gimmick... Missionary/HoL

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I dislike role actions as a concept, but they could be a necessary evil. I think this probably touches on the real issue, which is the conflicting desire to have shiny new toys and mechanics each expansion while also wanting everyone to be able to do it all even if they don't have them. Maybe the raid and job teams talking more in depth about their ideas for the expansion earlier than the evidently do would help address this, but that might set things in stone far too far ahead.

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Mobility
Mobility is an interesting discussion point. DRK definitely had a mobility advantage prior to Stormblood, and WAR after Stormblood. I think part of the problem is that the movement tools on tanks are fairly boring. If you look at melee dps, there are definite differences in movement toolsets but none of them feel particularly disadvantaged. I still think it's hilarious that the WAR playerbase had a SAM style on-demand gap closer and squandered it out of utter greed. What they should have done instead is just asked for an on-demand gap extender to consolidate their advantage, but that's like expecting the average WAR enthusiast to understand Uptime 101. I think the bigger problem though is if you add movement tools like Shukuchi/Raiju/Ingress/Egress/Thunderclap into the mix, tanks will likely complain until each type of movement tool is on every tank, rather than appreciating the differences and letting every job have its unique upsides and downsides.

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It's not even greed, it's just utter stupidity. Same as with overpower being changed to a pbaoe. I can't even tell if it's changes for people who don't play the job to induce them to play, but it's such a comical downgrade that you'd hope it wasn't requested by people who actually liked the job. Not that it matters if they keep the huge hitboxes, your movement tools won't actually move you usefully if they get much bigger. Of course the potency based heal is in this category too, but has been done to death.

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I think it's completely bizarre that anyone would claim that 'doing the most damage' is part of a job's identity. That's a bit like claiming being the most powerful job is part of the job's identity.

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yeah it's super weird, but sounded a bit too revisionist to let slide.

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Incidentally, the reason why SGE has so much overlap with SCH was that it was designed to split the SCH playerbase. That's likely what's going to happen to WAR as well. They'll release a hammer tank that is very similar in design to WAR. Once the playerbase is split, then you can make the appropriate balance adjustments that should have been made expansions ago without community backlash.

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Do you happen to have a source for this? I would like to believe that sage is anything other than a rushed and unimaginitive addition to a neglected role, but this is the first I've heard of that.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

I think it's completely bizarre that anyone would claim that 'doing the most damage' is part of a job's identity. That's a bit like claiming being the most powerful job is part of the job's identity.

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When that is the *ONLY* thing your job does better than others, and then they proceed to buff the damage of the medic tank that already has the best version of every tool the other tanks have access to, and already has a history of cannibalising and assuming the job identity of the job you're playing, yeah.
Warrior deserved being FIRMLY at the bottom of the dps meters, just like every other utility centered job in the entire fucking game. It MUST be at the bottom to warrant having all the other shit it has. There shouldn't even be any discussion about this.
If you're seriously going to argue for Warrior to not have it's damage taxed while it has the best utility and is the defacto best main tank, why even have 4 tanks? I'd genuinely rather play dps than whatever garbage this is where there's only 1 correct choice for any given content in the game. And if we MUST have a BiS tank for every piece of content, why make it the least interesting one? The devs shouldn't be playing favourites, Warrior in it's current state ruined tanking for me. To say i loathe the job and it's players would be an understatement.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

I despise the role actions.
They fill up half our hotbars with copy/pasted abilities.
You could remove half of them and give us cool stuff in their place.

Imagine if they removed Reprisal, rampart, low blow, interject and Shirk but then gave us other tools that actually make the tanks different.

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I mean they're ok with clone skills like Sentinel, Shadow Wall and Nebula, or even Dark Missionary and Heart of Light.
I don't get why everyone needed Paladin's Rampart, and we couldn't have had unique animations at the very least.
The only role actions I don't mind existing is like, Provoke or shirk. Everything else has potential to be turned into unique skills that give jobs just a bit more flavor.

Like imagine:
Rampart (PLD): 25% Damage mit
Foresight (WAR): 20% Damage mit, reflect damage when hit like Vengence
Shadowskin (DRK): 20% damage mit, applies Blood Price (Mp Regen on receiving damage)

Make one for GNB as well, maybe give it an HP regen like Aurora, or give it a longer duration so you can use it further in advance to not mess up your burst windows like camouflage has.

Really wouldn't be hard to inject some soul into these skills without breaking the game.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

I mean they're ok with clone skills like Sentinel, Shadow Wall and Nebula, or even Dark Missionary and Heart of Light.
I don't get why everyone needed Paladin's Rampart, and we couldn't have had unique animations at the very least.
The only role actions I don't mind existing is like, Provoke or shirk. Everything else has potential to be turned into unique skills that give jobs just a bit more flavor.

Like imagine:
Rampart (PLD): 25% Damage mit
Foresight (WAR): 20% Damage mit, reflect damage when hit like Vengence
Shadowskin (DRK): 20% damage mit, applies Blood Price (Mp Regen on receiving damage)

Make one for GNB as well, maybe give it an HP regen like Aurora, or give it a longer duration so you can use it further in advance to not mess up your burst windows like camouflage has.

Really wouldn't be hard to inject some soul into these skills without breaking the game.

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Won't work.
What we'll end up with is;
Rampart: 25% damage mit.
Shadowskin: 20% mit, applies blood price (mp regen on receiving damage)
Gnb mit: 20% and a regen.

War: 25% mit
Additional effect: Reflects incoming damage.
Additional effect: Builds beast gauge upon being hit.
Additional effect: Heals when being hit.
Additional effect: (Overtime) Restores health over time after activation.
Additional effect: The user becomes immune to most knock and and draw in effects.

Oh, and the old ''All tanks can clear it doesn't matter'' As a throwaway dismissal to any sort of concerns.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

I mean they're ok with clone skills like Sentinel, Shadow Wall and Nebula, or even Dark Missionary and Heart of Light.
I don't get why everyone needed Paladin's Rampart, and we couldn't have had unique animations at the very least.
The only role actions I don't mind existing is like, Provoke or shirk. Everything else has potential to be turned into unique skills that give jobs just a bit more flavor.

Like imagine:
Rampart (PLD): 25% Damage mit
Foresight (WAR): 20% Damage mit, reflect damage when hit like Vengence
Shadowskin (DRK): 20% damage mit, applies Blood Price (Mp Regen on receiving damage)

Make one for GNB as well, maybe give it an HP regen like Aurora, or give it a longer duration so you can use it further in advance to not mess up your burst windows like camouflage has.

Really wouldn't be hard to inject some soul into these skills without breaking the game.

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Agreed, could even extend this to the 30% skills.

Sentinel - maybe just 40% like back then, or an interaction with block strength to temporarily enhance it by half of it (block power 30%, for bulwark and passage of arms interaction).

Shadow Wall - give it an effect like MNK's Earth's Reply from PvP where it will give you a trigger (manual or automatic) healing you for a portion of damage taken/mitigated. Not the damaging part of Earth's reply tho.

Nebula - personal speedboost and/or heal boost (for own actions, Brutal Shell, Aurora, HoC) like PvP No Mercy effect.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Jobs with a more vocal playerbase tend to get buffs more often. We saw this during Endwalker as well. WAR was nerfed in the Endwalker transition, but progressively became more powerful over the course of the expansion, until we reached the point that we're at today. The same thing will almost certainly happen in DT as well.

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Only problem I see with that one is that warrior didn't really get nerfed from ShB to EW. It went from bottom of the barrel in damage to bottom of the barrel in damage, so I have no idea out of which woodwork all these "warrior mains" came to cry for damage buffs, they must've just not played for the entirety of 5.X.

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

Agreed, could even extend this to the 30% skills.

Sentinel - maybe just 40% like back then, or an interaction with block strength to temporarily enhance it by half of it (block power 30%, for bulwark and passage of arms interaction).

Shadow Wall - give it an effect like MNK's Earth's Reply from PvP where it will give you a trigger (manual or automatic) healing you for a portion of damage taken/mitigated. Not the damaging part of Earth's reply tho.

Nebula - personal speedboost and/or heal boost (for own actions, Brutal Shell, Aurora, HoC) like PvP No Mercy effect.

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PLD: Can we also get Convalescence back?