Making The DRK/PLD Comp Viable/Meta - Think They're Gonna Do It?

See topic.

Don't confuse viable with optimal. Sure. It's not optimal, but it is completely and totally viable. There is only one optimal, and there will always be a preferred composition. There is literally no way to avoid this unless they make all the classes exactly the same, which from a gameplay and design point of view would be terrible. If they make PLD/DRK optimal then there will be posts asking if they will "make DRK/WAR viable" or "PLD/WAR viable".

I disagree. There will always be one "meta" god comp that the metagame believes to be optimal. Generally, right now, its DRK/WAR.

That said, PLD/WAR and WAR/WAR are still good and viable.

PLD/DRK is viable now that you have 15% echo and 20 extra ilvls. In prog it is also probably still "viable" if by "viable" you mean "within the realms of possibility" but it overworks the rest of your group to make up for the loss of utilities and dps to do so.

They've done this with the healers for instance. WHM/AST is not "meta" but no one is going to demand one of them go SCH in a farm party. Same cannot be said for tanks. The opinion of most people is to play to the meta and have people improve their play, and jobs like WAR/SCH have always been meta no matter what. Almost no one but the most casual and innocent of pugs will currently tolerate not having a WAR in the group.

They said they're giving PLD some love, so...hopefully?

I doubt it. They've made absolutely no effort to fix PLD vs DRK in the last 2 years, and even if WAR didn't exist it would feel like a horrible combo. The few things we know about Stormblood skills make me think they have no idea where the actual tank balance problems are: a damaging aoe and more magic mitigation won't make PLD any more wanted in raids, and a targetable mitigation cooldown won't make DRK a better OT because it has so many things it needs to get hit for. Plus healer balance wasn't fixed.

I think there's going to be one composition that's way above the others, whether it's DRK/WAR like now or PLD/DRK if WAR gets nerfed into the ground, but I don't think they have the ability to make PLD/WAR, PLD/DRK and WAR/DRK all fairly similar.

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Originally Posted by SyzzleSpark

I disagree. There will always be one "meta" god comp that the metagame believes to be optimal. Generally, right now, its DRK/WAR.

That said, PLD/WAR and WAR/WAR are still good and viable.

PLD/DRK is viable now that you have 15% echo and 20 extra ilvls. In prog it is also probably still "viable" if by "viable" you mean "within the realms of possibility" but it overworks the rest of your group to make up for the loss of utilities and dps to do so.

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You disagree with me? Or with Op? because you agreed with and restated nearly every part of my post. By the way it's not "the metagame believes to be optimal", it's what is well and truly optimal. These conclusions are not arrived at randomly, people put in time playing and parsing and calculating to find out these things.
Also that's exactly what viable means: "Capable of working".

I think the point being that all comps are "viable", but some comps are more viable than others.

There are two reasons why WAR is considered essential: it brings the slashing debuff, and it gives you more dps for less effort.

The slashing debuff is an obvious problem. When only one job is capable of providing an essential debuff for four out of twelve jobs, then it becomes mandatory. NIN has access to it, sure, but it costs the NIN dps to maintain, while it's part of optimal play on WAR. It's a functional monopoly.

The dps issue is a bit more complicated. It seems like the design philosophy for tanks is to trade off mitigation for more dps. But this isn't really a fair deal. As long as all three tanks are capable of mitigating the same tankbusters, there is no benefit to extra mitigation. There is absolutely no reason why one tank should have a complete dps advantage. If you provide more personal dps, you should lose out when it comes to raid dps buffs, and vice versa.

You can figure out the present meta from first principles by just using these two points. Slashing is mandatory, so you must bring a WAR. That leaves you with PLD/WAR and DRK/WAR. Which comp brings you the most dps? DRK/WAR. Address these two points, and you can change the meta. This isn't new; we've been talking about this for two to three raid tiers now.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

The slashing debuff is an obvious problem. When only one job is capable of providing an essential debuff for four out of twelve jobs, then it becomes mandatory. NIN has access to it, sure, but it costs the NIN dps to maintain, while it's part of optimal play on WAR. It's a functional monopoly.

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Calling a 60 potency price tag once every 20 seconds a monopoly for the warrior is grossly overstating it. "4 out of 12 jobs" is also misleading since 3 of those 4 are tank roles and won't be sharing a group anyways. Realistically a WAR is only applying that debuff for 1 to 2 people aside from himself. (Also considering that in the current game only tanks use slashing, and things may change in Stormblood).

My point is simply in the current game "viable" can describe any combination of tanks, and we don't know enough about the expansion to say for certain if that will change or not. "more" viable isn't a thing by the way, something is either viable or not.

The thing is, PLD and DRK are built to be MTs, WAR is built to be OT. So WAR is always going to be the go to OT while PLD and DRK are interchangeable as MT depending on the fight (magic heavy = DRK, physical heavy = PLD).

The issue with this isn't that DRK and PLD can't be optimal as a combination, it's that there is only 1 relevant raid per expansion. If there was 2 raids, one which leans towards magic and another that leans towards physical, then PLD would be the go to MT for one and DRK for the other. But with only 1 raid, only 1 tank can be relevant as MT.

WAR is simply the only tank built to OT so it has no competition for its slot except for fights that can be solo tanked making it better to just bring another dps. E.G. Zurvan ex. This is going to be the case until another tank designed with OTing in mind is added. WAR will remain the meta OT while DRK and PLD will have to fight for their spot.

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Originally Posted by Steelbreeze

Calling a 60 potency price tag once every 20 seconds a monopoly for the warrior is grossly overstating it. "4 out of 12 jobs" is also misleading since 3 of those 4 are tank roles and won't be sharing a group anyways. Realistically a WAR is only applying that debuff for 1 to 2 people aside from himself. (Also considering that in the current game only tanks use slashing, and things may change in Stormblood).

My point is simply in the current game "viable" can describe any combination of tanks, and we don't know enough about the expansion to say for certain if that will change or not. "more" viable isn't a thing by the way, something is either viable or not.

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That's a bit disingenuous, to say the least. 25-37.7% of your party will always benefit from the slashing debuff at any given time. It may be "60 potency", but NINs aren't willing to take that loss. We had a hard enough time convincing WARs to take a 20 potency loss to give the raid a net advantage, let alone a 60 potency loss to give the raid a net disadvantage.

A11S was cleared with 4 WARs and 4 PLDs. That doesn't make this comp "viable". Fact is, world firsts tend to decide what most people prefer to play in prog, as opposed to with 15-20% echo. WAR has some absurd advantages which force certain comps during progression. You'd see a lot more variety if this were not the case. It's bad for the game, and bad for the playerbase.