If you could, what order would you set tanks in terms of damage?

I have been seeing a lot of discussion around WAR recently, and I have been curious how you would rank the tank damage in the ideal scenario? Just to make things clear, this is a hypothetical situation where you can modify the tanks for the ranking.

Example: I buff tank DRK's damage and nerf WAR's damage

This is easy: If it's the tank I'm playing, then it should be doing top-notch damage, even in my imperfect hands. Otherwise, it needs to be nerfed into the ground. :p

DRK>GNB>PLD>WAR

personally there is no reason tanks shouldn't be equal across the board save Crit / DH variance. People should be able to bring the tank they want to play in all setting and shouldn't be a hinderance like it was this expansion for PLD and WAR in the first 2 tiers. considering how close the tanks were in terms of damage in ShB, the devs really screwed up the balance massively this expansion, when all they had to do was build upon what they already had so close to perfect.

If I am completely honest at the beginning of the expac, in terms of complexity in rotations, Paladin should have been the furthest ahead in DPS compared to the other tanks, due to the amount of effort required to even attempt to stay on par with the other tanks, all the while the other tanks were practically doing the same thing during each burst window ad nauseam, but now that tanks are basically all the same across the board in difficulty to optimise, there is no reason for disparity.

So my thoughts on this are that PLD should have more utility than it does right now but be lowest dps and WAR should have less utility than it does right now and lower dps than it has right now.

DRK should be top dps due to its lacking utility. When it had the best personal mitigation and the best dps we heard a lot less complaints about its lacking utility because everyone just accepted it’s the best raid tank. As soon as WAR got dps buffs to be ahead of DRK that’s when everyone rioted.

GNB is fine, high dps with some utility.

WAR just needs nerfs all around or at least some kind of limits placed on it. I personally had an idea where instead of just having everything at once, they could bring back stances for it and the stance it’s in effects what it’s mitigation will do. For example in deliverance shake it off will be an AoE shield while in defiance it will be an AoE regen. They could then focus deliverance into being WARs MT stance where it will have more counter attacks to deal more damage when being attacked, closer to a DRK or GNB with better personal mitigation and dps but lacking utility, while defiance would be their utility stance where they get access to more healing and support in exchange for less personal mitigation and losing some damage from counters.

PLD I think should just be a self reliant tank with greater party support but the least damage. Having more utility like a self esuna/debuff immunity, the best party support (it’s really sad that divine veil is worse than shake it off) and a limited raise.

Thematically it should be DRK>GNB>WAR>PLD
with how the jobs actually are it should be GNB>DRK>PLD>WAR

If you look at tank sustain stats, PLD and WAR are leading the pack by a pretty significant margin, its honestly one of the least balance statistics in the game at the moment. Their raidwide mits, and short mits on allies are objectively stronger.
DRK and GNB do not have shared mit mechanics like Nascent Flash/Intervention, DRK can almost mimmick this at the cost of using both oblation stacks and 2 ogcd weaves, while GNB is either all on itself or all on its target. And neither have something as powerful as the Nascent Flash doube dip.
Likewise WAR uniquely has the ability to crit heal on its skills which is bascically making their mitigations 1.5x more effective, no other tank has a tool as costlessly free and forgiving as Equilibrium, and I find that PLD is just generally better designed with its utility moves as they're all significantly trickier to use or just a flat out damage loss. Hence why I think PLD should be stronger than WAR.
These advantages these two hold over DRK and GNB aren't even really factored into balancing, and thus the current shitshow we have right now with tanks is what it is.

The current design of WAR feels like its made for people being forced to play tank and do not want to put in effort to do just about anything, everything is basically handed to you for free, every skill you have is overtuned which I guess is fine, but this shouldn't also be the top DPS. If anything it should be the wet noodle tank if they don't want trim down its advantages.

The issue with DPS balance is that it can be very easily changed and is one of the points that people push back hardest on. Through to Abyssos tanks were fairly obviously balanced based off of rDPS numbers with maybe 100 dps difference between them. WAR was behind maybe 50 dps at the time.

People then naturally flocked into the forums for weeks to complain that WAR was being locked out of Week 1 clears on a fight that they hadn't yet reached. The follow-up to this was that tanks should actually be balanced on aDPS values rather than rDPS values, since tanks don't provide offensive raid buffs. The problem with this approach was that aDPS on P8S is strongly influenced by the fight-specific Everburn buff in the latter half, which is why jobs that either provided a lot of burst or could stockpile for bigger burst had an advantage (Triple Enshroud RPR pushed ahead of even SAM on that fight). By cherry picking an outside case, we now have the current balance where WAR has an aDPS and rDPS advantage.

While everyone primarily cares about doing more damage, this is why I think that addressing the balance around utility and defensives takes priority in expansion transitions, because those advantages never go away for the duration of the expansion (in some cases, for multiple expansions - see Holmgang/Shake it Off). Roles ideally should be designed with damage parity, and if the difference is kept to a minimum then nobody's really going to mind.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

PLD should be stronger than WAR.

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This I agree 100%. Clemency is a damage loss since it is a GCD move. I could even argue removing the passive healing completely from all of their dps spells, remove the healing from Divine Veil and make the healing potency be barrier potency replacing the 10% of the PLD's max HP, remove the regen from Holy Sheltron and replace it with Convalescence effect, then buff Clemency to get Essential Dignity scaling to its healing. This will make PLDs rely on external healing and having the opportunity cost of sacrificing some dps to self-heal.

All the same damage with an increased focused on all having their own unique defensive toolkits.

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Originally Posted by aodhan_ofinnegain

personally there is no reason tanks shouldn't be equal across the board save Crit / DH variance. People should be able to bring the tank they want to play in all setting and shouldn't be a hinderance like it was this expansion for PLD and WAR in the first 2 tiers. considering how close the tanks were in terms of damage in ShB, the devs really screwed up the balance massively this expansion, when all they had to do was build upon what they already had so close to perfect.

If I am completely honest at the beginning of the expac, in terms of complexity in rotations, Paladin should have been the furthest ahead in DPS compared to the other tanks, due to the amount of effort required to even attempt to stay on par with the other tanks, all the while the other tanks were practically doing the same thing during each burst window ad nauseam, but now that tanks are basically all the same across the board in difficulty to optimise, there is no reason for disparity.

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Then you should advocate for the removal of all your utility and self healing to close the gap between the 4 tanks too.