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

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Originally Posted by Banriikku

HOT TAKE HERE:
Tanks should not have heals except 1 on a long CD (yes i dislike WAR design). You are tanking. Mid and shields is our job not outheal a healer.
W2W should not be the norm and require skill. You are a casual and not skilled enough = NO W2W. I think W2W is a bane of this game.

Stop giving "win buttons". Easy to learn, hard to master. A full xpac with nothing to learn and be bored out our minds is enough. The skill ceiling we have now is how much boredom can i bear before I fall asleep.

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So you want the tanks become more like DRK then?

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Originally Posted by Punt0Mancer

So you want the tanks become more like DRK then?

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Yes, DRK’s sustain is perfectly fine

We don’t need 3 tanks where one gets an excog every 25 seconds and 2 stacks of regen and that’s the weakest of the three

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Why do we even talk about temp HP ruining white hole mechanics when white hole has basically been MIA from the game for nearly half its cumulative lifespan

The last fight with a focus on white hole that isn’t just a “fail a mechanic and get a white hole doom” is as kefka, kefka was 7 tiers ago

Crit healing has always been a bigger bane on white hole than temp HP especially since these days there is almost no distinction between single target and AOE healing because of how free it is

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We just had a doom mechanic in 5.3, and possibly more since then I haven't touched EW High-End content so I don't know. Boss nukes everyone to 1 HP and the healers have to heal everyone to full. Sure the tank shouldn't cast a theoretical SIO that buffs everyone's HP for that mech, but I don't trust casual pug tanks not to do it in Duty Roulette.

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Originally Posted by Arkdra

As for why tank healing is so out of whack, I could only hazard a guess. What I would imagine is that they have internal data that shows that failing casual content is a significant driver of sub cancels. Throwing some extra healing at tanks is a way to add a bit of a failsafe to that. If the tank is good and the healer is bad, they can muddle through. If the tank is mid and the healer is mid, the extra tank healing probably helps. If the tank is good and the healer is good, the healer dies of boredom but that healer probably ditches healing instead of cancelling. Or maybe ditches dungeon queues.

Which is bad, but is a less bad outcome than a cancelled sub. This also assumes that the bored healers actually quit, or even exist as a significant plurality. For all we know, their internal data shows that the shb healer changes have led to a positive uptick in the percentage of the games population playing healers, which could be why complaints have fallen on deaf-ish ears.

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I think this is sadly the case for both tanks and healers. As bad as ShB and EW were, it was probably only wins on the data side of things.

I dont mind removing some healing from PLD.. just leave Clemency the way it is.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

What’s weird (note I don’t actually want this I’m just making an observation) is that there isn’t really any sort of reciprocation, there is no mechanism for a good healer to compensate for a bad tank, they instead hush also buff tanks survivability to make that not an issue

So a bad healer is compensated for by buffing tank sustain and a bad tank is compensated for by………..also buffing tanks so that no matter how bad you are you can’t die

Healers lose on both fronts and get no power fantasy out of it like tanks do

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I mean, the mechanism for a good healer to compensate for a bad tank is all the healing cd's they have that they like to complain about not having to use ;)

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Originally Posted by Arkdra

I mean, the mechanism for a good healer to compensate for a bad tank is all the healing cd's they have that they like to complain about not having to use ;)

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Which actually requires some measure of skill, what skill is there in pressing bloodwhetting every 25 seconds

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Originally Posted by rawker

I dont mind removing some healing from PLD.. just leave Clemency the way it is.

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GCD healing is already undesirable, i don't think GCD healing is a problem.
Warrior just gets to heal everyone on 2 OGCD's and still has some to spare for itself.

WAR sucks at the moment.This is my opinion.
Is it the best at the moment regarding sustain, complexity vs dps aka what do i need to do to do pain to boss/mobs, mitigation.
Yes but at what cost?
Bloodwhetting, inner release on cd - if something is alive and you need hp hit eq if only you and if group needs healing shake it of...wait for button and smash it, i bet you can make WAR full macro and play savage with it. Writing this alone hurts but this is WAR at the moment.
And full stop with Xenos, yes bald beard is funny but his takes are BS most of the time and made to rattle on the ape-cage he calls "twitch chat".

Who ever thinks this is ok, needs maybe a couple of good games or a friend because this is nonesense on all levels.

DPS too much for rotation (hit buttons on cd = WIN), mit is the same as other tanks with no downs side, sustain is ... not sustain, when you play WAR you have a little WHM tied on youre axe because its not far off with the healing potency.
Take it or leave it but i think WAR(the tank i play, if any. the rest idk ask peep who play them, i hear drk is als not so hot, gnb ,my friend said on the other hand is good?) needs a rework.

An analogy I heard recently to try to get tank mains who think WAR (and arguably PLD) are remotely balanced was asking if you’d be happy in casual content if the enemies never grew resistant to holy’s stun or if kardia healed per hit per enemy

Like yes there is still a fail state arguably but it’s hilariously overpowered to the point of diminishing another’s role

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Originally Posted by Punt0Mancer

So you want the tanks become more like DRK then?

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Doesn't have to be a 1 to 1.
But something does need to change.
The alternative is just more annoying mechanics and a copy/paste of them that will circumvent the ridiculous levels of sustain we've reached. (Hello every Eureka Orthos mechanic being a oneshot)
At BARE minimum, they should remove overtime from shake it and the HoT from Equilibrium so that DoT's can hurt a Warrior again.
AoE BW straight up ruins casual content too, so they should just make it single target.

BW is free to use every 25s and gets 4 GCDs of benedictions with only 17s downtime on a tank, also serves as an auxiliary short cooldowns.

Benediction, a WHM button that does the same but for only 1 shot is a 3m cooldown on a healer.

Do the math. That’s just very lopsided.

inb4 “then let’s shorten Benediction cooldown!!!”

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Originally Posted by Punt0Mancer

So you want the tanks become more like DRK then?

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I'm not sure why people keep pointing at DRK as if it can't handle big pulls just fine. DRK can handle big pulls just fine, it just requires the healer to not be completely asleep at the wheel, which is a good thing in terms of role balance.

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

BW is free to use every 25s and gets 4 GCDs of benedictions with only 17s downtime on a tank, also serves as an auxiliary short cooldowns.

Benediction, a WHM button that does the same but for only 1 shot is a 3m cooldown on a healer.

Do the math. That’s just very lopsided.

inb4 “then let’s shorten Benediction cooldown!!!”

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Clearly Benediction should gain the ability to be fired off 4 times in a row to match WAR. :)

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Originally Posted by Aravell

Clearly Benediction should gain the ability to be fired off 4 times in a row to match WAR. :)

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You can now quintuplecast benediction, but you're not able to change target

DRK is just fine in W2W pulls, it's not as easy as press Bendiction 4 times every 25 seconds with no downsides, but it's not braindead and you're actively using your whole defensive kit, which is how things should be.
Also i healed all tanks in dungeons and let me tell you, i'd rather have a good DRK, than a mediocre WAR.

DRK also get a funzy healing ala Abyssal Drain (W2W only) and different shaped AoEs. Smart use of these together with their other tools really feels great.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

I'm not sure why people keep pointing at DRK as if it can't handle big pulls just fine. DRK can handle big pulls just fine, it just requires the healer to not be completely asleep at the wheel, which is a good thing in terms of role balance.

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i'm not saying it can't handle big pulls, just compared to war it can't roll it face across the key board and expect to survive, Which for Tank/Healer party dynamics is better gameplay wise

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Originally Posted by Punt0Mancer

i'm not saying it can't handle big pulls, just compared to war it can't roll it face across the key board and expect to survive, Which for Tank/Healer party dynamics is better gameplay wise

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Please tell me you mean not being able to face roll your keyboard is better for the combo

WAR is downright toxic for healers

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Please tell me you mean not being able to face roll your keyboard is better for the combo

WAR is downright toxic for healers

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yes that what i meant, a tank shouldn't be able to roll their face on a key board (AKA War), they should have to plan out their defensive cooldowns more like DRk.

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Originally Posted by Flay_wind

DRK is just fine in W2W pulls, it's not as easy as press Bendiction 4 times every 25 seconds with no downsides, but it's not braindead and you're actively using your whole defensive kit, which is how things should be.
Also i healed all tanks in dungeons and let me tell you, i'd rather have a good DRK, than a mediocre WAR.

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The only level area where DRK feels near unplayable is early stormblood with the worst of it being Bardam's Mettle, it gets difficult again around lv 82 but beyond that it works okay. Abyssal Drain feels pretty undertuned compared to other options but its not really needed.

I've been reading this thread with great interest. I'm one of those "filthy casuals", a former disillusioned RDM main who turned DRG and will sometimes heal for fun. I'll level all my jobs but never touch any of the tanks anymore once they are at max level. The reason for that? I don't trust healers in duty finder. I have met many more cure 1 White Mages than I should and Esuna doesn't even seem to be on some healers' hotbars. So I just did not tank.

However, that changed recently when I was tired of waiting in queue and didn't feel like healing either. So I queued as a tank, WAR of course (based on how the jobs played while leveling, the other tanks except maybe PLD just aren't for me), and I had really fun. I'll keep doing it! It's easy, it's fun and that's all I want from it. And I think I'm surely not the only one, so perhaps that might be a reason for WAR being as strong as it is - to give super casual players a reason to at least give tanking a try? I don't know, but that is my theory. I'll leave the discussion about jobs in high end content to people who actually know what they are talking about. :D

That's the main concern. It's simple yet strong. Think of the sweating gamer guy meme picture. That's how some of the tanks play. And then there's the gamer singing Payphone meme playing as WAR. Then for some reason, the WAR is doing more damage than the other tanks for less the effort. Unfair, isn't it?

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Originally Posted by Amvin

I've been reading this thread with great interest. I'm one of those "filthy casuals", a former disillusioned RDM main who turned DRG and will sometimes heal for fun. I'll level all my jobs but never touch any of the tanks anymore once they are at max level. The reason for that? I don't trust healers in duty finder. I have met many more cure 1 White Mages than I should and Esuna doesn't even seem to be on some healers' hotbars. So I just did not tank.

However, that changed recently when I was tired of waiting in queue and didn't feel like healing either. So I queued as a tank, WAR of course (based on how the jobs played while leveling, the other tanks except maybe PLD just aren't for me), and I had really fun. I'll keep doing it! It's easy, it's fun and that's all I want from it. And I think I'm surely not the only one, so perhaps that might be a reason for WAR being as strong as it is - to give super casual players a reason to at least give tanking a try? I don't know, but that is my theory. I'll leave the discussion about jobs in high end content to people who actually know what they are talking about. :D

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Perhaps. Yours is a theory that doesn't go untouched seldomly. Here's something that's pretty similar but might be applicable to casual DF runs as well that was written in one of healer's subforum thread:

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

Tinfoil hat time:
JP has a way higher savage clear rate than both EU and NA, especially their pug raiding.
Now could this be because the JP playerbase in general is more skilled? Maybe, no idea.

But their way of raiding is absolutely like a conveyor belt, or like fastfood. Players are basically interchangeable, you queue for savage in duty finder, zone in, get a macro posted, pick your spot (the really are only 2 for healers) and never deviate from whatever the incredibly safe macro strat tells you, you kill the boss and move on.
And it seems to work quite well for them, so they probably want to keep it that way, make the individual players in your party matter as little as possible.
So it is in their best interest to keep individual responsibilities as low as possible, because if the healer is suddenly required to contribute, or even able to do, more than spam their completely overtuned healing kit it potentially throws a wrench into their perfectly functional conveyor belt.

This would also explain why tank responsibilities/difficulty have been reduced to basically nothing and why they're perfectly happy with their ridiculous self sustain, less chances for tank players to mess up, more convenient boss kills, the conveyor belt keeps running smoothly.

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Originally Posted by rawker

That's the main concern. It's simple yet strong. Think of the sweating gamer guy meme picture. That's how some of the tanks play. And then there's the gamer singing Payphone meme playing as WAR. Then for some reason, the WAR is doing more damage than the other tanks for less the effort. Unfair, isn't it?

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Of course it sounds unfair. And I suppose it is, especially in higher end content! I personally, for the content I do, couldn't care less about damage. So long as I hold aggro and survive the W2W pulls even with a bad healer, it's all good. It doesn't matter to me if I do 10% more or 10% less damage really.

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

Perhaps. Yours is a theory that doesn't go untouched seldomly. Here's something that's pretty similar but might be applicable to casual DF runs as well that was written in one of healer's subforum thread:

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That is actually fascinating. I've never thought about how different the approach to the game is in JP vs. US/EU! But it makes sense in a way. Sounds very efficient too!

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Originally Posted by Amvin

Of course it sounds unfair. And I suppose it is, especially in higher end content! I personally, for the content I do, couldn't care less about damage. So long as I hold aggro and survive the W2W pulls even with a bad healer, it's all good. It doesn't matter to me if I do 10% more or 10% less damage really.

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If a job is simple, powerful utility, high sustain, and high damage, people will flock to it, correct? Look at EW SMN. People switched to it because it's insultingly simple in its rotation. Is it well-designed? Of course, not.

Question, and I’m not saying this rudely I’m just genuinely trying to understand

What’s the point of playing an MMO if your goal is to play a class where you can functionally ignore the other people in your party

Like WAR does everything for you and I can kinda see how that’s fun, but what’s the allure of doing that specifically in an MMO

You can go turn Clive into a walking tactical nuke and functionally achieve the same thing

the "fine I'll do it myself" mentality has always been a big part of the tank fantasy in games, for better or worse. one of the biggest appeals to tanks across the genre after all is being an invincible killing machine. we can see this reflected in tanks in other games like the Heavy from TF2 or Roadhog from Overwatch.

even in those games however, there's always been pretty clear and distinct by-design weaknesses with tank characters/classes to specifically make them rely on team coordination just as much as anyone else in their team. something that WAR has effectively erased by having no real weaknesses which is compounded by several other XIV specific issues like the dev team not really caring about anything under Savage when it comes to challenge/balance and the erosion of party coordinated mechanics.

im so sick of getting warriors in groups now whenever I play healer, i'd rather leave. If square wants tanks to be solo classes, they need to give healers other things to do.
pressing 2 button for a whole dungeon isn't fun, and never will be.

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Originally Posted by VentVanitas

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Even in the FPS PvP games that you described, the primary function of those tanks is to control positioning by denying space to the enemies by suppression fire or hooks. That in turn gives the rest of your team more room to set up angles on their opponents.

Tanks in FFXIV have very little impact on positioning, because most fights are scripted to reposition the boss automatically. The only things of value that they have left are mitigation and the ability to deal damage. The former has been inflated to excessive amounts, and the latter has atrophied. It's actually a much worse deal than those other games have, but players are being shortsighted because it lets them feel special in casual content.

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Originally Posted by rawker

If a job is simple, powerful utility, high sustain, and high damage, people will flock to it, correct? Look at EW SMN. People switched to it because it's insultingly simple in its rotation. Is it well-designed? Of course, not.

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No, and also no, though let me preface what I am about to say with this; I agree with your basic position that tanks have too much self-healing and I think the blending of role lines is generically bad, and specifically bad with regards to corundum, bloodwhetting, and clemency.

For all of EW, warrior has been simple, had powerful utility, and high sustain. It was only missing damage up until fairly recently. But taking a look at fflogs (admittedly imperfect, open to better sources if you've got any) Dark Knight's way ahead of warrior in savages. Warrior does have the lead in ultimates, but dark knight isn't that much further behind on Omega (drk 607 to war 738) and is basically at parity for thordan. So it seems to me that the most edge chasing group of people care a lot but the rest of the playerbase at large, hard to say.

People care about a lot of nebulous things when it comes to what they play. There's an amount of players who don't care about power at all. Just wholly subjective things like game feel, available job specific glams, my co-tank is already a warrior, etc. This isn't an excuse to just leave imbalances sitting around, lord knows I am tired of warriors getting constantly buffed all the time. But it's not quite as simple as more power = more players.

As for summoner, people do not flock to poorly designed jobs, unless you are taking a high level meta approach to what you mean by design and are talking overall health of the game and not just if a job is fun and coherent and such. Like HW ninja was wildly poorly designed for example, but only because they gave it all of the utility and it was bonkers imbalanced, even if that's the best iteration of nin to date imo just from a gameplay perspective. While I wouldn't use popularity as the sole determining factor in if a job is well-designed or not, I would say that it's enough to keep the job out of the bad category. Since it's so popular it is clearly filling a niche that is worth catering to. The tightest and most thoughtful design is ultimately meaningless if it does not attract players.

If I recall correctly; I think Endwalker had overtuned jobs across the board due to complaints. I remember RPR was a very dominating job at the start of the expansion, and then everyone complained that other jobs couldn't keep up with it. So, instead of nerfing the new shiny job; they buffed every other job on the list. I could say the same happened with healers compared to SGE as well, but not a lot of people spoke up about that... Like there was complaints, but it wasn't as loud as the DPS.

When P8S was overtuned; they did yet another round of buffs for certain jobs, and that included WAR and PLD.

This is my own take on the matter, but I felt the stat squish at the get go of the expansion kind of screwed with the overall balance of the entire game's content by some degree. Like even syncing down to older content in roulettes; people are just rolling through it extremely easy compared to how it felt in Shadowbringers. It could be gear creep, but gear creep + upscaling jobs due to complaints can really make small utilities in DPS and Tanks outmatch a healer's kit in some situations. The Omega Protocol was beaten without healers during the patch it was released on. I commend the group who accomplished that because that does take a lot of skill, but it shouldn't been possible at the given timeframe it happened.

I really feel at the end of the day that it is a factor of stat squish imbalances + overtuning jobs + gear, and that is why we have jobs that are too overpowered for their role right now. I hope it does get re-tuned properly for Dawntrail.

^the healers weren’t buffed to equal SGE SGE was buffed because it couldn’t keep up with SCH in TOP

WHM only got a fix to its lilys 2 expansiobs overdue and AST got nothing in terms of potency

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Originally Posted by Gullis

im so sick of getting warriors in groups now whenever I play healer, i'd rather leave. If square wants tanks to be solo classes, they need to give healers other things to do.
pressing 2 button for a whole dungeon isn't fun, and never will be.

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Maybe people would still play the other tanks if War wasn't a direct upgrade.

To be honest I still play Dark Knight regardless of the fact, there are some incredibly narrow things its does better that keep it engaging for me.
DRK has a criminally underrated mitigation gameplan, and having TBN,Oblation and Dark Mind on lower cooldowns is often disregarded as an advantage the job holds. Maybe also a hot take but I also think DRK has a far more engaging AOE rotation for dungeons than basically any other tank thanks to alternating circle and line aoes with weird tools with salted and Living Shadow.

To be the WAR sustain issue is starting to become part of a bigger problem than just one job being broken, I think tank sustain as a whole is powercreeping in a fairly unhealthy direction and I would rather not see DRK and GNB get their own equivalents to BW. I'm definately on team nerf tank sustain over nerfing WAR specifically, even PLD is starting to get pretty crazy in terms of it.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Question, and I’m not saying this rudely I’m just genuinely trying to understand

What’s the point of playing an MMO if your goal is to play a class where you can functionally ignore the other people in your party

Like WAR does everything for you and I can kinda see how that’s fun, but what’s the allure of doing that specifically in an MMO

You can go turn Clive into a walking tactical nuke and functionally achieve the same thing

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So for me, playing WAR is not my goal; my main job is DRG. WAR is just really fun for me when I do queue up for roulettes as a tank (which doesn't happen very often, but at least I do it occasionally now - before trying it on WAR I never did!), while I just don't enjoy the other tank jobs. I like the aesthetic, the sounds and just how the job plays. That is one part. The other part is that I don't want to die to a lack of healing from the actual healer in dungeons. As casual as I am, I still have my limits too.

That being said, for all I care they could nerf WAR dps to the ground and I'd still prefer it over the other tanks for above mentioned reasons.