Tank feedback and thoughts

Given the call for feedback via the official forums I figured I would make a post with my thoughts on class balance being one of the crazy people with all 90s. I am not a professional at balance and these are just opinions from time with them leveling, running endgame content, and looking at the data available online for class performance in raids. I was initially thinking of making one big post but given how much I have written down its probably for the best that its split into roles.

Tanks: Tanks got a huge boost to mitigation this time around. The changes to 25 second CDs are huge both for saving team members and protecting yourself from busters. Aside from damage and a few quirks tanks felt good this time around
PLD: PLD feels great this time around, adding the heals to requiescat casts is a huge plus and the skills feel impactful during your normal rotation. Previously I felt like I was lacking on CDs for myself as PLD but holy shelltron covers that well given its regen being almost always useful. There are 2 thing that should be tweaked. First off is DPS is low compared to other tanks, given the utility and kit PLD should probably still be the lowest tank but the race should be a bit closer. Second one is either change how cover works into a new skill or remove the oath gauge cost given the other options are just so much stronger now that it is pretty much never the right answer, even to save party members as intervention has been buffed as well. Overall fun with a single confusing skill and needing some slight number tweaks

WAR: WAR feels invincible in dungeons, their cooldown sweet and buffs to self-healing mean you can help cover a ton of the healing in dungeons and given the short CD on them its easy to tank almost anything. The only issue I have is that inner release loses stacks on non-meter spending skills. Given the 3 stacks are so important to your damage and inner release already extends storms eye meaning you won’t need to re up in a panic it would be a great qol to see the stacks only get used on fell cleave and decimate. Other than that, a little bit of a DPS tweak to catch up with GNB and DRK would help but its position as 3rd highest dps is totally fine given the crazy self-sustain it brings and how much it helps the healers

hit the word limit so I am splitting this into multiple posts

DRK: DRK needs some help. While currently top dps which is highly desirable in raids DRK suffers from a serious lack of sulf sustain and cooldowns in dungeon content as well as being lacking in its ability to absorb or recover from damage without help. TBN has been an incredible cooldown since its introduction in storm blood but given the buffs to the shorter defensives the other tanks have gotten even with the addition of oblation it feels lacking. In almost every dungeon I ran on DRK this expac I felt like I was melting even rotating every single cooldown and spamming TBN on CD mid pull. Some form of defensive buff could help or potentially taking the MP cost off of TBN and putting it on a charge system so you can focus the mitigation better. For another quality-of-life tweak hopefully blood weapon can get the same treatment as delirium to transition to a stack system rather than buff window given how much nicer that is to work with and allows far more flexibility now that unleash does not break combos. Another idea for more self-sustain is to lower the CD on abyssal drain and untie it from carve and spit, the spike it provides is nice but feels like a single GCD from a warriors self-healing burst which comes up twice as often and lasts for a while as well. Also its immunity in living dead no longer has the advantage of lasting longer than the other invulns so some form of buff or rework is in order, unless it’s a structured raid environment it’s a normal thing to die when trying to use it even with experienced healers with warning given ahead of time. Unless the plan is to bring all other tanks up to DRK to compete in raids this is the only tank I would lower the DPS on, while desirable it’s lack of mitigation really hurts the healers.

GNB: The changes to GNB feel like a pretty natural extension of what it was in ShB, the charges on aurora are great and allow you to provide consistent support to your co tank or low health party members and heart of corondum is an incredible CD to save lives given its excog like spike heal on application and mitigation that comes along with it. The things I would tweak are changing continuation to a ranged attack (so that repositioning is less of a loss while in a burst window) and potentially tweaking ammo management and double down. While double down feels great to use and has a cool animation it combined with the way things line up means that you don’t actually use the new extension to burst strike very often. The no mercy windows we get now are extremely cluttered and on the big ammo ones that come up mid fight we cant fit everything into it spending all our ammo and applying sonic break. Otherwise GNB feels great and is close enough dps wise to DRK that its still desired.

Closing thoughts: Tanks got a lot of cool stuff this expac and the quality of life changes have been great with a few strange things left behind. Aside from some small numbers tweaks to damage, mitigation help on DRK, and a few skills that feel like they got left behind with the updates (Cover,TBN,Living dead)

hit the word limit so things are split

Let's be honest, though. Nobody cares about 4-man content, especially the developers. If they cared WAR wouldn't be able to solo dungeons. It's not a valid concern in the eyes of Square Enix, especially since DRK is enough to clear dungeons, it's just the worst tank for them. The disjointed unispired kit is not something that can be backed up by solid data, so they will not allocate resources to fix it.

Blood Weapon having stacks is probably a hot-fix worth of changes, but they're cba doing even that and you're asking for deep reworks. Get real.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shinimas

Let's be honest, though. Nobody cares about 4-man content, especially the developers. If they cared WAR wouldn't be able to solo dungeons. It's not a valid concern in the eyes of Square Enix, especially since DRK is enough to clear dungeons, it's just the worst tank for them. The disjointed unispired kit is not something that can be backed up by solid data, so they will not allocate resources to fix it.

Blood Weapon having stacks is probably a hot-fix worth of changes, but they're cba doing even that and you're asking for deep reworks. Get real.

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If they don't like it, they should just delete it as a job all together. They didn't care when everyone was bringing honest criticism and ideas to them. So they won't care if they piss people off, they been doing it for 6 years with no care.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shinimas

Let's be honest, though. Nobody cares about 4-man content, especially the developers. If they cared WAR wouldn't be able to solo dungeons. It's not a valid concern in the eyes of Square Enix, especially since DRK is enough to clear dungeons, it's just the worst tank for them. The disjointed unispired kit is not something that can be backed up by solid data, so they will not allocate resources to fix it.

Blood Weapon having stacks is probably a hot-fix worth of changes, but they're cba doing even that and you're asking for deep reworks. Get real.

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It's not that SE can, it's requiring testing how much is put in to the stacks, this is a quite a code change than update potency. A small potency change can update rotation on any job. Games running on consistent balance changes tread very carefully what they do than wild change it and hope for the best, see what people think, see how the job handles in all content, not just dungeons, not just ex trials, not just savage raids.

Getting job reworks takes a lot of time, and it's not hopeless for Dark Knight obtaining a re-work. Dark Knight is pretty terrible in dungeons I know, but other content wise it's doing fine, the opinion of being fun is another subject. We all want Dark Knight to be fun again, I agree with it too, majority of peoples suggestion re-works are awful, I'm sorry lol.... Seriously though, keep up feedback nice and polite and I reckon it will come. Using profanity, etc, isn't going to make them listen, nor will I, it's a game, not your life dependency.