-Content- is what balances the Tanks

(Waffly wall of sapph-text incoming).

So right now it seems 90% of the posts on the top of the tank forums are Paladins wanting an increase to their DPS, tank-minded tanks saying they don't like the focus on DPS being so important over survivability, people saying Warriors are hugely overpowered and Dark Knights being snarky. Random figures on damage percents are being thrown around as uncited facts, and everyone seems to be getting on each others' nerves.

People seem to feel the need to justify their tank spot in a raidgroup, or feel the reason they don't have a raid spot is due to their choice of class. It's natural to want buffs, and it's natural to feel a bit sad that Class Y does more damage than Class X.

In my mind (as a fairly average Paladin main soon to start work on A3S, who has a 60 Warrior too and tanks alongside a DRK in most cases) right now the three tanks are in a pretty good spot balance-wise. Alexander is a strange instance that differs in feel quite a lot from how raiding has been in 2.0 because the focuses vary a lot. Right now you can point to any of the alex savage encounters, and either the MT or OT role for each, and fairly objectively say "a .... would be the best tank for this role". Right now, Warrior is the most frequently used tank to fill that slot, because the focus is on hitting HARD enrages. It's literally a black or white result that if you don't have enough dps for an encounter then you fail. A lot of previous encounters have had softer enrages, where mechanics repeat constantly but getting harder each time, so DPS was important to skip phases but if you had a team that could handle the mechanics perfectly it wasnt as important.

As a result, DPS on most of these encounters is king, and thus the Paladin falls by the wayside as a choice because they do the least damage of the three (DRKs obviously do less than warriors too, but in the most minmaxy stats, DRK/War will always do more damage than PLD/War). The difference isnt that huge though, and whilst the world firsts on A1S and A3S used DRK/WAR for the damage, many groups have since cleared with Paladins. People tend to forget about A2S though - it's a paladin playground. Sure the other tanks will contribute more to the AOE damage but that generally isnt the stumbling block that makes people fail. It's the tanks falling over, and A2S is all about lots and lots of physical damage. Paladins are king.

We look back at the older 2.0 content and similar things happen. Titan Hardmode, back when everyone was in crappy gear and Warriors were poopy. All that mattered was whether your tank could survive mountain busters, comboed with the AOE stomps. T9 had mechanics you could skip with DPS but there was mostly a huge amount of Damage coming out on the tank. T13 was all about frequent tank cooldowns to mitigate dumb amounts of damage. Warriors could do it, extra DPS helped, but the stumbling block most groups faced was tanks falling over.

A1S and A3S have been different it seems entirely because of SO MUCH focus placed on DPS, along with tankbusters being primarily magic so DRKs will outshine Paladins (PLDs still mitigate a huge amount of damage across the entire fights but DRKs just make it a bit easier on the single big hit). A4S has yet to fall and people are complaining primarily about people dying in Quarantine. It might be when the gear levels are here to allow it to fall that Paladins are viewed as the ideal offtank for surviving that.

Obviously as a Paladin main I have a few niggles about my class. As a Warrior player it feels like the warrior's skillset is "smooth" - everything works nicely, it has good niches and isnt frustrating to play. It has defined roles and I don't think I've ever seen a warrior player recently asking seriously for any kind of buff. As a Paladin I'm fine with my AOE damage being the worst, i'm fine with my OT DPS being average, as I have the strongest mitigation cooldowns. I certainly wouldnt complain about a small buff to damage in an MT position, perhaps much higher threat/damage on Shield Swipe to make it actually worth pressing more and to mean a PLD MT could sit in Sword Oath a little more frequently without needing as many Halones to get that early threat lead. I definitely don't think Paladins should be -higher- in damage than DRK or WAR when MTing though. They need their niches too.

I suggest the tank forums wait until A4S is downed or the next tier of raid content starts appearing and see where SE's philosophy lies in terms of the importance of nothing but raw damage output vs a tank's actual tanking skillset. If every single encouter is purely won or lost due to having the high dps to hit a super tough hard enrage, maybe it's time to nerf the survivability of PLDs/DRKs a little and buff up their DPS. If we get more encounters like A2S or the oldschool 2.0 tank killer stuff, there's really no need for non-WARs to get angsty about their choice of tank.

TLDR: right now the balance of damage taken, mitigation, cooldowns, MT dps, debuffs and OT dps is pretty good. The most PLDs/DRKs need are some quality of life buffs, maybe a tiny dps increase in the MT role. What determines the best tanks going forward is 100% based on what SE decide to test players on in each encounter.

Um, the basis for this topic is wrong.

Content is tuned based on the participants and the abilities they have sometimes restricts design space.

Take Hallowed Ground for example. It's an ability that greatly impacts your design decisions. Whenever you introduce a mechanic, you have to balance and tune around Hallowed Ground. If a group with a PLD can use Hallowed Ground to circumvent a key mechanic, then PLD might have an unfair advantage in the content. So, this is probably why you see Hallowed Ground reduced to nothing but a glorified dCD in much of Alexander Savage. You have to balance around the other tanks not having it. At the same time, though, you end up dampening a key strength of PLD in catering to the other tanks.

Inner Beast or dCDs in general are another case of tuning and balancing based on jobs. You can't have tank busters at too often a frequency or WARs will just outshine the other tanks by too wide a margin.

So in other words, you ideally want diversity with your tanks but you want them to essentially be equal on a fundamental level so that none of them restrict design space or player choice. Unfortunately, we're not at that point of fundamental balance.

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Originally Posted by Brian_

So in other words, you ideally want diversity with your tanks but you want them to essentially be equal on a fundamental level so that none of them restrict design space or player choice. Unfortunately, we're not at that point of fundamental balance.

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Well there's two different design philosophies on the balancing front - one is that encounters should be balanced so that any tank can perform in the role. The other is that each encounter is fine if it massively favors one tank class as long as the others are capable (just the encounter will be harder, though not impossible). The first leads to perhaps too much homogeny in encounter/class design. The second leads to frustration on the player base.... UNLESS the different encounters are balanced such that each tank gets a roughly equal time in the spotlight as the best choice rather than one tank being best for everything.

The complaints right now seem to be based around the fact that Warrior is taking that spotlight more frequently than PLD/DRK, but we only really have 4 encounters ingame that actually matter on that front. Yes, you shouldnt have an encounter that is 100% impossible if a tank doesnt have Hallowed Ground, but it's fine to have one that's muuuuch easier with Hallowed Ground as long as there's a fight after it that's much easier with a tank with Dark Arts/Dark Mind every 60 seconds, or one where your offtank is primarily just dpsing.

The problem is there aren't many good ways to diversify tanks. If you have experience with tanking across multiple MMORPGs, this is immediately obvious.

Mitigation vs. avoidance tanks isn't really a debate. If you're designing around avoidance tanks, RNG is going to screw people over way too often. So, you're kind of pigeonholed into mitigation tanks (which all the tanks in FFXIV are).

And, if you're diversifying based on magic vs. physical, you're also doing it wrong. A group's tank player should not be forced to gear and level 2 different tanks just to contribute to his group in an equal way. Especially with the way esoterics currently work.

No player should be forced into a bad position purely because of their decision to play a certain job.

Ideally you want to make sure the fundamentals are equal -- so all the tanks need to be able to live through the baseline damage, all tanks need to be able to hold aggro over healers and DPS. If you're going to make DPS such an integral part of the job, then that should be equal, too. Those are the fundamentals. And, when I say equal, I do not mean the same.

As for how you diversify, you do it through style and flavor. So, WARs could be the burst damage tank, PLDs could be the sustained damage tank, DRKs could be a DoT damage tank. WARs can have a stance system with ramping effectiveness like what they have now. PLDs could have a stance system with sustained benefits. DRKs could have a stance system with better upfront gains but more upkeep. WARs could have a lot of bursty self-healing, PLDs could have weaker but targeted healing, DRKs could have steady and consistent self-healing. They could all bring equal but different buffs / debuffs. They're actually pretty even in this regard except there needs to be more options for the STR debuff and Path stacking needs to be addressed in some way.

So you would have 3 very stylistically different tanks. The rest is just flavor -- Warriors being the more raw, brutish brawlers, Paladins being the righteous knights, Dark Knights being the edgy vigilantes.

At this point, this is all pointless rhetoric. SE has already made their decisions. The most we can do is watch them tweak the numbers to achieve an ever fluctuating balance. I highly doubt we're going to see any large design shifts with the jobs any time soon.

I think the OP is spot on. The nature of the content has a big effect on which tank is most ideal for a given situation. Besides some QOL stuff and tweaks—everything is mostly fine. Nice Read.

p.s. inb4 Phoenicia

why people think warrior are overpowered anyway? well their dps is the highest among tanks and sometime even higher than some dps class
but their overall defense is a "jack of all kind but master of none" kind of defense
in physical battle they are below paladin
in magical battle they are below dark knight

Mitigation vs Avoidance tanks is easily remedied.

Boss autoattacks should be hard and fast, and that makes mitigation = avoidance.
Boss special attacks can not be avoided. All tanks have big cooldowns to blow for this.

We need to make dodge have a place in this game where it currently does not.

We also need tanks to have a more active role in their own mitigation. Simply pressing a CD at a buster is not really tanky, and leads us to these situations where tanks are perma dps and only worry about their own survival 10% of the time.

The problem with avoidance tanking is a problem with math and balance.

If it was easily remedied, it wouldn't have been an utter failure time and time again.

Simply put, it works like this:

A mitigation tank will die in 4 attacks without healing.

An avoidance tank will die in 3 attacks without healing but they have a high change of avoiding one hit so they effectively die in 4 attacks.

You will never go with the an avoidance tank because you are relying on RNG. Even if the chance of evasion is much higher, a lot of people won't want to deal with it because nobody likes wiping to circumstances completely out of their control. Seeing your tank drop like a rock and reviewing the combat log to see crit, crit, hit, hit, hit, dead is not a good feeling and happens even if your evasion is really high.

Also, from a healing perspective, if the damage is at a threshold where it matters, healers are healing a tank based on perceived damage intake, not actual damage intake. If they cancel that heal at the last second because it seems like their tank isn't taking damage and the tank ends up taking damage, they're playing catch up. And, as a healer, you are not happy about being reactive.

Good healers know a fight down to the phases and timings when damage intake is higher or lower and already know what they're healing. Avoidance can't be planned for so it's simply not planned for.

Avoidance is only really a useful stat for tanks in raid encounters when the problem is healer mana reserves rather than being burst down. I think this was a design feature of some of the original World of Warcraft raids - you basically wanted as much dodge/parry/block on your tank as possible simply so healers had to cast less heals over the course of a long encounter. There werent any major tank busters that needed a cooldown, and a tank would need fairly constant healing, but it was mostly about sustainability. (Later on in the development of WoW raids of course, it became all about stacking as much stamina as possible and ignoring avoidance because bosses could 2 shot a low-EHP tank and you needed to ensure you could only be 3 shot).

Avoidance is always inferior to flat mitigation/EHP on any encounter where the "Fail State" is due to a tank dying to a burst. Avoidance is only really noticeable when tank damage is fairly mediocre but healers have to cast as few heals as possible. Avoidance also creeps closer to mitigation the more frequent attacks are, ie tanking large packs of mobs, where high avoidance will average out and not be any noticeably different to equivalent high armor values.

In what way does paladin have "more mitigation"? A shield is a very minimal factor.On top of the fact mitigating more isnt exactly useful when less mitigation still leaves you in a safe spot.
Every tank has a cooldown for a tank buster, they will survive with that cooldown and be healed.
Everytank has a minimal cooldown for AAs.(foresight,bulwark etc).


I dont think its a fair trade off of less dmg for More mitigation when every tank will take around the same damage and be fine.


Rather, paladin has the EASIER mitigation. (i hvnt leveled drk so excluding it) Plds are very simple, press a button, less dmg. Compared to wars who have one of there major cooldowns tied to unchained while its also part of the GCD which requires attention and knowing the fights to be effective.


For a tl;dr - pld and war mitigate roughly the same, its just mch easier and thus more noticeable on pld, but war also gets high dmg

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Originally Posted by Brian_

Ideally you want to make sure the fundamentals are equal -- so all the tanks need to be able to live through the baseline damage, all tanks need to be able to hold aggro over healers and DPS.

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That would be asolutely true, if FFXIV was not frequently designed to have a coulple of tanks.

(Incoming FFXI comparison but not saying that this game need to be like FFXI, it's just an example)
In FFXI, at very-low level, NIN had only Utsusemi: Ichi, and the recast was so long that they ended without shadows frequently.
So, what did groups do ? Bring two NIN. This way, they could manage their enmity to swap when needed thus ensuring enough mitigation.
And since NIN were designed to be DPS from the get go, you didn't lose any DPS by bringing two NINs instead of a PLD with an additionnal DPS.

So, on really tough bosses, not all tanks would be able to be MT 100% of the time, but any combination could do the content. That's why I suggested on another topic to slightly reduce WAR's mitigation (To be clear, just giving them back the old Inner Beast while keeping other skills as their are now).
BUT, as a counterpart, fusing Wrath and Abandon and giving WAR full acces to Wrath/Abandon skills regardless of their stance.

In what world would someone swinging a one handed sword while blocking with a kite shield hit anything as hard as someone swinging a great axe or bastard sword worth a two handed grip, rofl. If anything, paladin deserves more defense, not more offense.

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Originally Posted by EddardStark

In what world would someone swinging a one handed sword while blocking with a kite shield hit anything as hard as someone swinging a great axe or bastard sword worth a two handed grip, rofl. If anything, paladin deserves more defense, not more offense.

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In what world would arrows do more dmg then a gun and a turret, in what world would a dude punching things with a blunt weapon do more dmg then a ninja swinging around with huge daggers?That world is: fiction.. This is not reality. Do not confuse the two.

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Originally Posted by EddardStark

In what world would someone swinging a one handed sword while blocking with a kite shield hit anything as hard as someone swinging a great axe or bastard sword worth a two handed grip, rofl. If anything, paladin deserves more defense, not more offense.

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In what world would a normal humain wield a great axe or great sword taller and heavier than he his ?

Don't go that way, comparing to real world is walking on thin ice. :p

In what world would someone swinging a one handed sword while blocking with a kite shield hit anything as hard as someone swinging a great axe or bastard sword worth a two handed grip, rofl. If anything, paladin deserves more defense, not more offense.

Agreed with the OP.

We can talk about balance til we are blue in the face, but there doesn't seem to be a huge discrepancy in balance among the three. PLD has a higher physical mitigation cap and has a little bit more room for error. WAR has a higher risk, high reward playstyle ( yes im aware its not hard to do, but just by comparison), and DRK seems to be somewhere between the two. None of them seem overwhelmingly powerful.

I've said it before and i'll say it again, WAR is just sitting on a really synchronous and complete kit that works in a streamlined fashion. Not that its overwhelmingly more effective, but it is smoother. PLD and DRK by comparison feel a bit clunky, and there are times when its frustrating to play them after playing WAR because of that clunky nature.

I think we'll have a better picture when we get some new raid material in upcoming expansions to see if this is gonna be a long term trend or we just got thrown a curve-ball with 3.0.

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Originally Posted by EddardStark

In what world would someone swinging a one handed sword while blocking with a kite shield hit anything as hard as someone swinging a great axe or bastard sword worth a two handed grip, rofl. If anything, paladin deserves more defense, not more offense.

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It must be depressing to you to realize that dudes with just their fists do more damage than gigantic axes or swords.

It's a world of magic and super heroes, of course it's fiction, but the intent is pretty obvious. In what fantasy game are two ilvl comparable weapons of the same rarity slated with the same damage where one is two handed and the other is one handed? You still ignored what I said regarding the defensive buff for paladins to help further clarify the intent.

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Originally Posted by EddardStark

In what fantasy game are two ilvl comparable weapons of the same rarity slated with the same damage where one is two handed and the other is one handed? You still ignored what I said regarding the defensive buff for paladins to help further clarify the intent.

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In the same fantasy games that don't care that by the time you swing your two-handed weapon, the one-handed is swung at least twice.

Okay lol. I was simply advocating for a logical interpretation of the rationale for damage differences based on what I belive to be the intent which happens to coincide with the general idea of the op. I never said anything about real world comparison, I said, "in what world." Somehow monks were involved and no one seemed to reference the lore about the class and called it an argument as to why a one handed sword would cause as much damage as as a great axe or two handed bastard sword. I didn't mean for your post to deteriorate to this op, my apologies.

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Originally Posted by EddardStark

I was simply advocating for a logical interpretation

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The problem of "logical interpretation" is that you can't scrap one part and keep the other.

Back in 1.x, before auto-attack, there was more emphasis on Speed vs Power, as each action cost a different value of stamina based on your weapon (And the action).
What was interesting is that you could deplete all your stamina spamming hits with a heavy weapon to quickly kill a trash mob, since it'd have refilled for the next mob. Or you could've spent all of it just before a break phase in a boss battle.

But, eh, everyone know that 1.x only had bad ideas :p

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Originally Posted by Sapphidia

(Waffly wall of sapph-text incoming).

So right now it seems 90% of the posts on the top of the tank forums are Paladins wanting an increase to their DPS, tank-minded tanks saying they don't like the focus on DPS being so important over survivability.

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Actually the only things I'd want is for our spells to be revamped to match GCD so they can be used as a "normal" action. Get Shield Swipe off GCD. And innate blocking while casting. And if their really nice, add a spell speed increase to RA, to further make Paladin into a self sufficient tank that can act as a mini healer if their OT.

But I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. Still got DRG, MNK, BLM, BRD, MCH, and NIN to get to 60. ;x But I agree with the content bit.