Give Warrior the Dark Knight treatment in regards to Bloodwhetting

In my opinion, they should cut down on oGCD direct healing. Instead oGCDs should temporarily alter the properties of GCDs, i.e Swiftcast, Surecast, Thin Air, Emergency Tactics, Deployment Tactics, etc.

Ummm…you know that happened already right…twice in fact. Maybe you weren’t playing but…we lost almost all of our self sustain in SB and in ShB we literally couldn’t heal ourselves at all unless we targeted someone else.
What exactly does WAR have that no one else has? BW only excels in dungeon settings where there’s multiple enemies to capitalize off of. When it’s a single target, the slow gcd makes the heal per hit equal to or less then every other tanks self sustain. I’d love to understand where this blind WAR hate is coming from when we’re half what every other tank is.

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Originally Posted by A-Omega

Ummm…you know that happened already right…twice in fact. Maybe you weren’t playing but…we lost almost all of our self sustain in SB and in ShB we literally couldn’t heal ourselves at all unless we targeted someone else.
What exactly does WAR have that no one else has? BW only excels in dungeon settings where there’s multiple enemies to capitalize off of. When it’s a single target, the slow gcd makes the heal per hit equal to or less then every other tanks self sustain. I’d love to understand where this blind WAR hate is coming from when we’re half what every other tank is.

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1) They removed needing to target a party member with Nascent Flash, although I don't remember what specific patch it was

2) Equilibrium exists, so yes you could heal yourself even when it did require a target.

3) the healing on Bloodwhetting alone heals more HP than the amount of eHP TBN grants, you have a shield equal to the same potency per ST GCD heal via BW, so it's more potent than Holy Sheltron.


Warrior is literally the best tank in the game right now and it's not even a contest.

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Originally Posted by A-Omega

Ummm…you know that happened already right…twice in fact. Maybe you weren’t playing but…we lost almost all of our self sustain in SB and in ShB we literally couldn’t heal ourselves at all unless we targeted someone else.
What exactly does WAR have that no one else has? BW only excels in dungeon settings where there’s multiple enemies to capitalize off of. When it’s a single target, the slow gcd makes the heal per hit equal to or less then every other tanks self sustain. I’d love to understand where this blind WAR hate is coming from when we’re half what every other tank is.

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That was explained quite a few times. So if you were really wanted to understand you could have just read those in this thread. But again: at the very least WAR has far to much self healing against groups of enemies. A good WAR will often do higher HPS than a healer in dungeons. And there a few other issues, like my own pet peeve that PLD and WAR eat further into the healer role with a strong ogcd AoE shield+heal.

just remove all healing from all tank because if they only focus all job for extreme savage and ultimate then they are not listening to the casual midcore player that doesn't like playing healer to only simply use two buttons

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Originally Posted by A-Omega

Ummm…you know that happened already right…twice in fact. Maybe you weren’t playing but…we lost almost all of our self sustain in SB and in ShB we literally couldn’t heal ourselves at all unless we targeted someone else.
What exactly does WAR have that no one else has? BW only excels in dungeon settings where there’s multiple enemies to capitalize off of. When it’s a single target, the slow gcd makes the heal per hit equal to or less then every other tanks self sustain. I’d love to understand where this blind WAR hate is coming from when we’re half what every other tank is.

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Now as a start due to healers maim and mend traits and tanks tank mastery traits in general a tank’s healing potency is half a healers healing potency (so if a tank says 1000 it would be 500 on a healer) for the purpose of this I’m going to put all of the healing in healer potency not tank potency as it’s the more relevant potency indicator

Now with that out of the way. In a single minute WAR gets access to 2.4 casts of bloodwhetting, 1 cast of equilibrium and 0.667 casts of thrill of battle (I’m going to ignore shake it off here because shake it off is AOE)

One use of bloodwhetting in single target equals 1 200 potency shield and 4 200 potency heals. So 1000 healer potency per cast of bloodwhetting, you get 2.4 casts per minute which equals 2400 potency of healing per minute (for reference here TBN is a 25% shield of the tanks HP, a tank HP bar is about 2500 potency so since you can use TBN every 15 seconds or 4 casts you have an effective healing of 2500. So bloodwhetting functionally equals TBN alone. Now holy Shelton also has a CD of about 25 seconds given how quickly the oath gauge fills and it has a healing potency of 4 * 125 which is 500 potency per cast or 1200 potency per minute. Now heart of corrundum has a heal of 450 potency and can be used every 25 seconds or 2.4 casts so that’s 1080 potency of healing per minute.)

So currently we are at
WAR- 2400 potency
DRK- 2500 potency
PLD- 1500 potency
GNB- 1080 potency

However all but DRK also have mitigation built into their healing short CD’s 15+15 for PLD and GNB, 10+10 for WAR. Now let’s say as an easy calculation the boss whacks you twice; once during the high mitigation and once during the low mitigation. An average boss auto is about 1000 potency of damage. So PLD and GNB gain 1080 effective HP (30% mitigation on 1000= 300 potency, 15% mitigation on 1000= 150, 450 * 2.4 = 1080), WAR gets 720 (20% of 1000 = 200 10% of 1000 = 100 300 * 2.4= 720)

So now we are at a cumulative
DRK= 2500 potency
WAR= 3120 potency
PLD= 2580 potency
GNB= 2160 potency

So DRK is already third just from short mits and it’s the totality of its sustain

Now let’s add in rotational healing

-WAR gets 125 potency of healing every storms path, WAR will use storms path an average of 7 times per minute (for a total of 875)
-PLD gets 200 potency of healing on every magic spell used, it will on average use Holy Spirit 3 times and the blade combo once (for a total of 1400)
-GNB gets 200 potency of healing per brutal shell which it will use an average of 7 times (for a total of 1400)
-DRK gets a 150 potency of healing per souleater which it will use 7 times (for a total of 1050)

So now we are at
-DRK- 3550 potency
-WAR- 3995 potency
-PLD- 3980 potency
-GNB- 3560 potency

So DRK is now last. Now we still have to add in damage neutral heals some tanks have access to. This is really only equilibrium, thrill and aurora

Let’s start with equilibrium. Equilibrium is an 1100 potency heal let’s buff it and a single bloodwhetting with shake and assume the extra HP got consumed. So 1100 * 1.2= 1320, 1000 * 1.2= 1200, 2500 * 1.2= 3000. So thrill has provided an extra 920 potency but it’s a 90 second CD so 920 * 2/3 = 613. So WAR’s extra CD’s provide it another 1713 potency

Aurora is a flat 600 potency per minute so that’s easy

So our final tallies are
DRK- 3550 potency
WAR- 5708 potency
PLD- 3980 potency
GNB- 4160 potency

So we can already see the WAR is uniquely cracked but there is one thing I still haven’t mentioned. Every heal on bloodwhetting, equilibrium, heart of corrundum, the heals on the magic combo, and the rotational heals can all crit. Now let’s assume a 20% crit chance and a 1.6* crit multiplier

This adds 768 potency to WAR for bloodwhetting, 422 for equilibrium and 280 for its rotational heals for a total of 1470
This adds 332 potency to DRK for rotational heals
This adds 448 potency to PLD for the rotational heals and 480 for holy Shelton for a total of 928
This adds 448 potency to GNB for the rotational heals, 192 for aurora and 345 for HOC for a total of 985

So our grand total self healing capacity
DRK- 3682 potency
WAR- 7178 potency
PLD- 4908 potency
GNB- 4800 potency

Can we see the problem child emerging now. This is entirely single target healing and WAR is literally beyond broken even in single target and I’m being favourable to DRK here as it’s very unlikely you’ll press TBN every 15 seconds but pressing the other 4 every 25 seconds is relatively reasonable as they don’t have a potential loss attached

Edit 2; so I did some extra calculations and found that a 50% nerf might be a bit extreme (I always thought M&M was 30% up and tank mastery was 20% down but it looks like tank mastery no longer gives 20% down) so I’ll provide one extra set of calculations assuming tank healing is only 30% weaker. This would apply to everything besides TBN)

Under this system
-DRK- 3918
-WAR- 8613
-PLD- 5889
-GNB- 5760

Which paints DRK in an even worse light

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Originally Posted by A-Omega

I’d love to understand where this blind WAR hate is coming from when we’re half what every other tank is.

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I can't, i actually can't.
Good lord, people STILL think Warrior does anything remotely worse than other tanks? ''Half of every other tank''
This is exactly why people hate War. It's players think it's weak when it's literally choked out every niche in it's role.
Undeserved buff after buff after buff after buff, and War players still aren't happy when you have the best version of every tank cooldown?

You have the best utility in every category.
The best invuln, the best party mit, the best party healing, the best sustain, the easiest rotation, and you didn't want to be taxed on dps so that's no longer a factor either.
Why does Warrior need better healing and shielding than a paladin?
Why does Warrior need higher damage than the squishiest tank? It's a better main tank than the guy with a shield.
Why did Warrior need the same duration as other invulns without the longer cooldowns?
Why did Warrior need to get another tank's cooldown as a ''buff'' to it's own? (Aurora casually being slapped on to Equilibrium when your healing was already stupidly high)
It's the only tank that got fat buffs during the paladin rework just to make sure Shake it off arbitrarily remained a better cooldown than Veil. When DM and HoL were balanced to be the same.
Why did it need it's dps buffed when it was already clearing the hardest content in the game without healers?

GEEEEEE i WONDER why people hate your job?
Maybe it's the loud presence of angry Warrior mains online any time a tier comes out and Warrior isn't the best at absolutely everything and getting your way every single time.
Perhaps, it's this exact same mindset that got various tank abilities cannibalised and streamlined in previous expansions too.
Maybe it's the degradation of all the content Warrior is shitting harder and harder on because of the streamer endorsed powercreep it's introducing to the game?
What if it's the dissolvement of the holy trinity because it's *literally* replacing healers in some of the hardest content in the game?
It's the preferential treatment that has led us here. And no, i don't want Drk buffs. Tank sustain needs to come down.

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Originally Posted by Zairava

1) They removed needing to target a party member with Nascent Flash, although I don't remember what specific patch it was

2) Equilibrium exists, so yes you could heal yourself even when it did require a target.

3) the healing on Bloodwhetting alone heals more HP than the amount of eHP TBN grants, you have a shield equal to the same potency per ST GCD heal via BW, so it's more potent than Holy Sheltron.


Warrior is literally the best tank in the game right now and it's not even a contest.

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Don't leave out the invuln

My problem isn't that WAR does more self healing than other tank. If anything, it could just be part of its identity while other tanks are stronger on other things. My problem is that there is nothing else for other tanks and WAR does everything they do but better.

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Originally Posted by Valence

My problem isn't that WAR does more self healing than other tank. If anything, it could just be part of its identity while other tanks are stronger on other things. My problem is that there is nothing else for other tanks and WAR does everything they do but better.

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I've been saying this the day the 6.4 patch went live.
But i got told to shut up and that Drk would be fine, and how unfair it was for Drk to do 2% more dps than War.
It's nice to see everyone else catch on a year later though - Warrior has simply choked out every niche in the tank role.
As it stands now, there isn't really any reason for any of the other tanks to exist. War is just better at everything. The others are glorified animation packs that perform worse at everything in their role.
If things don't change in DT, War will effectively have killed the role for me.

I do not and will never condone damage output differences between jobs in exchange for one being better at its role than another (a tank tanking less but outputting more damage for example). In mind mind all jobs shouldn't be voluntarily imbalanced like that, and this includes ranged taxes and raise taxes. If a tank is better at self heals, then find something equally interesting for another instead of reverting to more damage.

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Originally Posted by Valence

I do not and will never condone damage output differences between jobs in exchange for one being better at its role than another (a tank tanking less but outputting more damage for example). In mind mind all jobs shouldn't be voluntarily imbalanced like that, and this includes ranged taxes and raise taxes. If a tank is better at self heals, then find something equally interesting for another instead of reverting to more damage.

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Sadly, the WAR community doesn't want anything but overwhelming damage, outstanding sustain, cheesing mechanics through invuln, and most recently not needing any healers to sustain the party.

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Originally Posted by Valence

I do not and will never condone damage output differences between jobs in exchange for one being better at its role than another (a tank tanking less but outputting more damage for example). In mind mind all jobs shouldn't be voluntarily imbalanced like that, and this includes ranged taxes and raise taxes. If a tank is better at self heals, then find something equally interesting for another instead of reverting to more damage.

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War was fine doing less damage though, and it has the best version of every tank cooldown.
Either it should be nerfed into the absolute *DIRT* utility wise, or it simply does a little bit less damage.
I don't want endless powecreep and homogenisation that will strip the jobs from their identity.
I'm not talking about phys range or casters. But if you want to include those, then you'll have to give melees a res, extra party mits and free permanent uptime too (More homogenisation)
Because otherwise the job without the utility just falls behind. Just like we're seeing in the tank role.

So, will we just make every tank invuln the same cooldown, let them all double dip their personal mits with other players like Warrior can, give them all blood whetting and shake it off (overtime) Furthering the powecreep.
Do we nerf the absolute shit out of War (i'd be down for this tbh) so that it no longer has a chokehold on every single tank niche. (This will likely still result in homogenisation in the long run however)
Or do we simply let War deal a little bit less dps, that never really matters anyways?

These are your only 3 options.

I think it would be really funny if they reverted tank sustain to Stormblood levels.

A good WAR back then could still solo 20-30% of a dungeon boss, but a lot of people were screaming about how WAR was ruined and they can no longer sustain themselves anymore, all because they removed Bloodbath from WAR.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

So, will we just make every tank invuln the same cooldown, let them all double dip their personal mits with other players like Warrior can, give them all blood whetting and shake it off (overtime) Furthering the powecreep.
Do we nerf the absolute shit out of War (i'd be down for this tbh) so that it no longer has a chokehold on every single tank niche. (This will likely still result in homogenisation in the long run however)
Or do we simply let War deal a little bit less dps, that never really matters anyways?

These are your only 3 options.

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I'm actually down for different parts of different options.

For the first option, I think having every tank share the same Invuln CD will streamline Raid Design a bit better and keep it from warping around WAR's 4m Holmgang. Having everyone at a 5m medium means that in 12m fights WAR no longer has an edge over every other tank just because of CD. This would also bring PLD's Hallowed Ground to where it should've been in the first place, considering a 6m Cooldown is insane for what many people seem to mistake as "The best Invuln in the game" just because it prevents damage from being taken. Sure, it does that, but having 6m because of that doesn't matter when other Tank Invulns do the same thing, except you're making Healers fix the damage(namely WHM with Benediction). PLD at most right now gets anywhere from 1-2 uses in a fight, GNB/DRK 2-3, and WAR anywhere from 3-4.

For the second option, nerfing WAR's healing capabilities is on the top of my docket and should be the first thing to go: Remove the healing from Bloodwhetting and Nascent Flash. Boom. Done. No longer a problem to the point we start excluding healers in 4-man content for speedruns(in fact requires them then) and does not invalidate normal party compositions in 8-man raids and Savage.

Third option? Honestly, I think considering that WAR does not teach anything in particular that the other tanks do( PLD teaches proper mitigation, DRK teaches Resource Management, GNB teaches Weaving between GCDs) if you're going to look at every tank they should do the least damage. Considering they bring the most mitigation options(eHP options with Thrill, big self-recovery with Equilibrium, 30% and 20% alongside a tertiary that is 10%+10%(13%) if well-timed and shielded, as well as Shake it Off(over time)? WAR has more than enough to operate - and then some. Heck, even if you revert Shake to its previous form where it only provided the shield, WAR would not be underperforming mitigation wise.

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Originally Posted by Valence

I do not and will never condone damage output differences between jobs in exchange for one being better at its role than another (a tank tanking less but outputting more damage for example). In mind mind all jobs shouldn't be voluntarily imbalanced like that, and this includes ranged taxes and raise taxes. If a tank is better at self heals, then find something equally interesting for another instead of reverting to more damage.

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Well then if all the tanks are doing the exact same damage it raises a lot of probems:
-Why are GNB and DRK investing so much into other attacks to do the same as press fell cleave
-Why are GNB and DRK so significantly weaker in terms of mitigation and raid wide utility, why is it acceptable that DM and HoL can basically be taken off your hotbar in a good amount of content
-Why don't GNB and DRK get shared mitigation on their shortmits on another ally, why don't they get to double dip their short mit and get enough healing from it not even being applied to them to shrug off autos indefinitely.
-How come PLD,DRK and GNB don't get to use their invuls 3+ times a fight and warp savage fights around it

If Damage output isn't a real balancing factor then we're basically forced to homogenize further to the point where all the tanks are capable of the exact same things.
That said, I don't get why damage can't be a balancing factor.

Parserot speedrunners are going to force themselves onto the best jobs no matter what for any level of advantage, I honestly couldn't care less if they're not having fun. Balancing the game for them has lead things to get as bad as they are right now, and they're still miserable. Its a losing game no matter how you slice it. The concept of big damage vs big utility works well enough for DPS, I really can't see a real reason it can't work for Tank.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

Well then if all the tanks are doing the exact same damage it raises a lot of probems:
-Why are GNB and DRK investing so much into other attacks to do the same as press fell cleave
-Why are GNB and DRK so significantly weaker in terms of mitigation and raid wide utility, why is it acceptable that DM and HoL can basically be taken off your hotbar in a good amount of content
-Why don't GNB and DRK get shared mitigation on their shortmits on another ally, why don't they get to double dip their short mit and get enough healing from it not even being applied to them to shrug off autos indefinitely.
-How come PLD,DRK and GNB don't get to use their invuls 3+ times a fight and warp savage fights around it

If Damage output isn't a real balancing factor then we're basically forced to homogenize further to the point where all the tanks are capable of the exact same things.
That said, I don't get why damage can't be a balancing factor.

Parserot speedrunners are going to force themselves onto the best jobs no matter what for any level of advantage, I honestly couldn't care less if they're not having fun. Balancing the game for them has lead things to get as bad as they are right now, and they're still miserable. Its a losing game no matter how you slice it. The concept of big damage vs big utility works well enough for DPS, I really can't see a real reason it can't work for Tank.

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1) Because SE decided to design easy and hard jobs, which I also despise. It brought us DNC and SMN on the DPS side, but you have probably also seen it with WHM/SGE vs AST/SCH.
2) Nothing of this is acceptable either.
3) Same thing
4) ditto

We're not forced to do anything. We can vary defensive tools in very unique ways each, make rotations actually unique (instead of GNB being PLD with ogcd and DRK being WAR with ogcd, same thing for healers: DPS can do it, so could support), etc. Total damage output is a red herring and a can of worms: either you don't have dps checks and the better job at tanking will be favored, or either dps checks are a thing and then lower dps outputs will be underappreciated. It's even worse when it comes to actual job difficulty discrepancies as seen with over half the raiding playerbase playing SMN and DNC in their respective roles being the path of least resistance, since dps checks aren't hard enough to warrant harsher dps comps with BLM. It's also the exact same root cause for rphys jobs being taxed on damage for not having positional or casting considerations and having to use a crutch on party bonuses to keep being included in parties. It's not a conundrum you can solve while staying true to that fluke of a paradigm.

If anything, focusing on damage as a so called tool to bring job identity is distracting development of actually interesting support toolkits, on top of being absolutely bland in terms of flavor.

So you'd prefer we simply the dps rotations of DRK and GNB while giving them Nascent Flash, Shake it off and Holmgang? Because there isn't much alternative if we're saying everyone needs to be doing the exact same damage and effort level.

It's very unlikely that they can make every job do the exact same damage, some variation should be expected.

Although, high utility should be balanced with lower damage, but not so low that they'd get kicked on sight. Like a 5-6% difference from highest to lowest should be fair, not the 10%+ we had in Asphodelos.

The problem the physical ranged are facing is not because of supportive abilities being taxed, it's that their free movement is being taxed despite melee also being capable of free movement while the boss is big enough for the melee to not lose uptime.

I think that larger damage swings should be fine but only because they should be able to be compensated in a different way

Like if they want to continue this ridiculous sustain on WAR then they should nerf its damage 10+% below DRK but only because it opens avenues for the healer to potentially do more damage because they aren’t babying the WAR

But that also leaks into fight design which I don’t think the devs are good enough for

DPS balance is fickle because of how readily it can be changed mid-expansion. Now is the opportunity to get mitigation and self-sustain right on tanks. Otherwise, you're going to be living with that balance for another two years.

I would like to see a shift back towards more deliberate and active self-sustain rather than passive effects. I think that a lot of the 'Additional Effect' heal and regens that were added this expansion to actions like Equilibrium and Shake it Off need to be rolled back. If you want a job to have a 'lifesteal' theme, then the HP gains need to move towards resource-gated offensive actions rather than defensive ones. So rather than placing lifesteal on something like Bloodwhetting, it really should be on an action like Inner Chaos/Chaotic Cyclone, where it heals proportionately to the damage you've taken recently or based off of the amount of damage that you've lost. That has the added effect of coupling mitigation and burst, which is something that WAR used to do back in Heavensward (Vengeance and Inner Release also generated gauge at the time).

I'd like to see invulns revised. Hallowed was designed to be 7 minutes at a time when tankbusters occurred every 30 seconds. Modern day fights have much more infrequent tankbusters. As a result, designing interesting tankbuster mechanics and swaps ends up being meaningless, simply because you'll always choose to disrespect the tankbuster with an invuln. Either the frequency of tankbusters needs to increase significantly, or tank invulns need to move towards longer recasts. Holmgang is the worst offender here, especially after this expansion's buffs. I think it should be on a 6 minute recast, not 4.

I think the balance on Shake it Off needs to be revised, especially if Vengeance is being upgraded to provide any kind of raid benefit. If Shake is to work on all damage types in contrast to Heart of Light and Dark Missionary, then it should mitigate less and be on a longer recast.

Most of all, I just want them to look at tank balance with fresh eyes. Whoever has been responsible for balancing the role over the past few years hasn't really done a very good job. I don't know if that's due to apathy or bias, but I really want to see some change within the role.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Like if they want to continue this ridiculous sustain on WAR then they should nerf its damage 10+% below DRK but only because it opens avenues for the healer to potentially do more damage because they aren’t babying the WAR

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But that doesn't work in the current design because the dev team decided arbitrarily that healers must do less damage than tanks. So even should a WAR open up more opportunities to do damage for a healer, it wouldn't even come close to covering that 10%+.

It would just end in WAR getting kicked on sight and WAR players complaining for buffs again.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

But that doesn't work in the current design because the dev team decided arbitrarily that healers must do less damage than tanks. So even should a WAR open up more opportunities to do damage for a healer, it wouldn't even come close to covering that 10%+.

It would just end in WAR getting kicked on sight and WAR players complaining for buffs again.

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It's almost like War's design is utter garbage and isn't salvageable without arbitrarily making it's values higher than all the other tanks because of the hyper focus on balance for week 1 clears.
It breaks 90% of the game's content but you had an incentive to play other tanks in current savage and ultimates. Apparently, taxing War's damage for it's ridiculous utility wasn't fair. And yet, it somehow still needs to keep all that utility.

What's perhaps more ironic than anything else, is the insistence that War's healing is part of it's identity. But this healing is constantly proving to be it's biggest balancing problem. And despite it, Warrior itself has a track record of cannibalising the job identities of other tanks. Something else i've noticed, is that Warrior players are the first ones to gatekeep any sort of healing related ideas for Dark knight, because it would take away from War's job identity.
I personally don't want healing buffs to Drk, but that's still a funny observation. Especially considering how much War took from Drk without any concern for it's job identity.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

It's almost like War's design is utter garbage and isn't salvageable without arbitrarily making it's values higher than all the other tanks because of the hyper focus on balance for week 1 clears.

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Oh, I agree that there's no way to balance a tank with that much utility. If they were taxed accordingly, they'd probably be very far behind. I'd rather see their sustain get nerfed to a more reasonable value.

It's not hard to achieve either, just changing Bloodwhetting to be based on damage done and removing the HoT from Shake would bring them in-line with the others already. I don't think the regen from Equilibrium would be particularly gamebreaking if they change Bloodwhetting.

I hope Aurora gets an additional effect that heals the GNB for 1200 potency all while having the regen still attached to it. I imagine what else could the salty spoiled brats would ask for.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

So you'd prefer we simply the dps rotations of DRK and GNB while giving them Nascent Flash, Shake it off and Holmgang? Because there isn't much alternative if we're saying everyone needs to be doing the exact same damage and effort level.

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Lack of creativity and dev skill issue. They have 2-3 years between expansion to think long and hard about creative things to do.

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Originally Posted by Valence

Lack of creativity and dev skill issue. They have 2-3 years between expansion to think long and hard about creative things to do.

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I think you're coming from a very naive point of view if you think more homogenisation won't be the end result of letting all tanks do the same dps and have equal utility.

To be fair, I remember when I was still a pitiful player choosing PLD over WAR and DRK during HW, I proposed that all tanks should have the same DPS... but varying on how to achieve it. If the homogenization we're talking about is that all tanks have the same GCDs, oGCDs, potencies across the board, sustain, etc.. and that the diff is just for visual purposes only, then that's where I draw the line.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

I think you're coming from a very naive point of view if you think more homogenisation won't be the end result of letting all tanks do the same dps and have equal utility.

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With SE's current track of pve design? Sure.

But I think you seriously lack of imagination if the only think it inspires you is naivety. Respectfully.

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Originally Posted by Valence

With SE's current track of pve design? Sure.

But I think you seriously lack of imagination if the only think it inspires you is naivety. Respectfully.

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I think its more of realism of how much the devs actually care about job design more than anything else.
And they don't really care at all.

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Originally Posted by Valence

With SE's current track of pve design? Sure.

But I think you seriously lack of imagination if the only think it inspires you is naivety. Respectfully.

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The game has been trending towards simplification and homogenisation.
Because the former drives participation, and the latter creates perfect balance. If you want a Dark knight to be different from a Warrior, how do you go about this?
One had better damage, the other had superior sustain and utility. But apparently we can't have that, so their damage is now equal. But War still has superior sustain and utility.
The only correct answer if you don't want to tax damage (You've said you don't want any job's dps taxed yourself) is to either take away from Warrior, or give to Dark knight what Warrior has.
Whether you give Dark knight spammable shields for the sake of difference, or you take away all the healing from Warrior; the gameplay will remain the same; you just end up making Dark knight tankier or Warrior squishier.
And as a consequence, they will just do the same thing in a different coat of paint. Neither will play differently, nor does one have an advantage over the other in any situation. They just become animation packs.

If you expect the devs to go any further than this and just rework all the tanks so they're no longer a different coat of paint of Warrior with some bells and whistles attached, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

So because homogenization happens, you'd rather work within its narrower and narrower confines instead of trying to fight it and bring up new interesting things again? How is this even logical? Or is the goal only to feed into our constant wallowing into self misery?

Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting things to change.

SE does not approach job design from a central vision or overarching principle. Jobs are designed and balanced reactively to player demand. If sufficient numbers of players come to the forums and demand that WAR gets a jet pack, then WAR will get a jet pack, regardless of whether that is thematically appropriate to the job or not.

Homogenization is a byproduct of player demand. If you add a powerful new action to a job, everyone else within that role category will demand it. In order to stop this from happening, you need to set player expectations around what a job's strengths and weaknesses are. In some cases, you can come up with thematic equivalents. Barriers vs. damage resistance is one such example. Healing spells vs. lifesteal is another. In others, you can trade off an unique weakness for an unique advantage. Perhaps one tank is less mobile, so they pull mobs to them rather than gap closing towards them. There are ways of diversifying gameplay, but you won't see them in this game, because there is no developer concept of what a 'Warrior' or a 'Dark Knight' actually is thematically. And without this, there's no player buy in to jobs having unique strengths and weaknesses. Job changes are all reactionary.

This is what happened with Shake it Off as well. Players didn't like the original effect introduced in Stormblood (debuff removal), and wanted something on par with either Divine Veil or Passage of Arms. Some people suggested AoE Thrill of Battle. Others suggested AoE TBN. The end result is that the action was changed into a raidwide barrier. Does a magical raidwide barrier make any sense thematically on a non-magical job? No. This is like asking for Holy on DRK. The only reason why it was added was to mollify the playerbase. And that's a big problem that I have with this game's design. I want to see the developers come out and state their vision for these jobs, and actually stick by them rather than simply firefighting all the time. And if that occasionally means telling the playerbase 'No,' then I'm fine with that.

Rather than expect all tanks to magically become more diverse and the developers to suddenly adopt a new philosophy, I would rather see players tackle this by giving clear and achievable directions on what they want from the role. In some cases, that may mean advocating for a degree of homogenization simply to eliminate longstanding balance issues.

If tank invulns change to 6 minutes across the board, I won't shed a tear. Because I know that Holmgang needs to be brought in line as a priority. If they want to do something creative after that, then I'm fine with it. Likewise, if we rewind all the tacked on instant heals and regens that were added this expansion, that's fine by me. You may be losing something 'unique', but it was uniquely bad this expansion, so let's get rid of it.

As a fundamental starting point, I want to see some uncompromising changes to tank balance to establish fairness. Once they've got a level playing field, then I'm happy to see them experiment and take the tanks in new and diverse directions. But I want to see them prove that they can balance this role fairly first. Otherwise, there's no point investing in it.

I just don't think we'll ever see them give any of the tanks something drastically different.
My tank predictions for Dawntrail aren't great. I think the reason Drk is getting an upgrade to it's delirium is to buff it's 1 minute window, because the other tanks are now getting 2 minute buttons too. Making their damage profiles identical and easier to balance.
I also predict that Warrior is getting more mitigation, because Xenosys Vex repeatedly kept complaining about it after he and his fanbase got the damage output of the tanks streamlined. There isn't really any sort of friction left besides that i guess.
And lastly, i predict Dark knight is just getting a metric shit ton of healing so that it won't have a weakness that would justify it getting anything new that Warrior doesn't already do better.

I'm glad to see other players are finally starting to pick up on the problem though.

Wouldn't surpirse me at all if they end up going that route as Dark Knight was so dominant from release to TOP almost solely on the fact its the only tank that truly operates on a 2m Burst thanks to Living Shadow, Dark Arts and 2 charges of Shadowbringer.
I also think the frankly uneeded potency changes in 6.4 was a result of them looking at TOP numbers without realizing that Dark Knight was using an exploit in that fight for even more damage.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

Wouldn't surpirse me at all if they end up going that route as Dark Knight was so dominant from release to TOP almost solely on the fact its the only tank that truly operates on a 2m Burst thanks to Living Shadow, Dark Arts and 2 charges of Shadowbringer.
I also think the frankly uneeded potency changes in 6.4 was a result of them looking at TOP numbers without realizing that Dark Knight was using an exploit in that fight for even more damage.

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That could potentially explain why they buffed Gnb. Gnb already outdps'd Drk on some fights. Something else i don't see anyone talk about though, is how they buffed War *MUCH* harder than Pld.
Which just seems... Weird? When they explicitly said the goal was for all tanks to do the same dps. You'd think they would buff Pld more than War because it was further behind than War.

PLD they had to completely redesign so I understand why it didn’t get buffed as hard

They really don’t seem to understand the maths of PLD in terms of how it interacts with the current fight design

For example if you took 6.0 PLD and tested it on a “limitless length fight with minimal downtime” PLD was competitive for second in damage with GNB. Of course no fight actually works like that so PLD sucked on 6.0 launch

Even now when they basically turned it into a generic burst job it’s still more sustained on damage than either GNB or DRK so it’s likely they still don’t really know how to balance it correctly

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Rather than expect all tanks to magically become more diverse and the developers to suddenly adopt a new philosophy, I would rather see players tackle this by giving clear and achievable directions on what they want from the role. In some cases, that may mean advocating for a degree of homogenization simply to eliminate longstanding balance issues.

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What do you think a lot of us have been doing on those forums for quite a while? Threads on what's wrong, and thread of what people would like are legion already. I'd like them to listen, but they don't. We're not a majority, and we don't go in their overall direction for the game. They don't change things just because players ask, else we'd have better healers already by now.

But DRK is really only bad in dungeons and even then that is only if you have bad group dps to where the incoming damage is faster than the adds are dying to where the healer has to actually do their job.

Many healers are so used to any other tank than DRK in the dungeon so when they do get a DRK its almost like you are trolling for bringing the DRK to the dungeon.

Funny how AD was gutted a while back, we lost sole survivor only for them to bring it back in PVP. Salted earth heals in PVP why not in PVE?

Then you have to talk about DRK pre lvl 70 because we all know compared to the other tanks how bad it is to not have TBN in dungeons. DRK is the only tank to not get homogenized in the tank sustain department and in casual content that is not a good thing.

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Originally Posted by Derio

But DRK is really only bad in dungeons and even then that is only if you have bad group dps to where the incoming damage is faster than the adds are dying to where the healer has to actually do their job.

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I wouldn't even call it bad in dungeons, it's simply the baseline. With current healer kits DrK is still easy to heal with just oGCDs (provided they actually use cooldowns), the game just doesn't play itself like it does with the other tanks.