Most popular tank at endgame

Just a simple question asking which tanks are most popular at endgame, whether it be running for Expert roulette all the way to Alexander Savage.

I'm interested in knowing which tanks you think people play in terms of popularity.

PLD is for sure the most popular tank in this game and mostly because it's the simplest tank to play, I generally see way more PLDs in most contents. Meta pick on raiding is still WAR for the most part though.

For end game raids with two tanks composition, most people want a warrior in one of those two slots, and a paladin or dark knight in the other slot, due to the damage output and utilities they offer. War can generate a lot of aggro in their opener, so the co-tank can provoke off the war and not have to worry about healers/dps ripping aggro off them, and this is especially important for groups without a ninja (which have skills to manage aggro to help the tank). War is also the best off tank as of now, they have utilities that don't rely on incoming damage like the other two tanks and lose the least amount of dps by not tanking (pld/drk have skills that can only be used when they block/parry incoming damage, and drk has mp regeneration buff that activates by getting hit). Most groups aiming to clear savage raids have a war for these reasons.

For the other tank slot, it can be either pld or drk, depending on necessities. Pld has better physical damage mitigation, so it is better at mitigating damage in raids that have a lot of physical damage, while drk has better magic damage mitigation. Drk also has noticeably higher dmg output compared to pld, so they're very preferred in groups aiming for speed kills, even if the raid has a lot of physical damage (since apparently it seems like the extra healer dps afforded by pld's superior physical mitigation can't outweigh the dps difference between drk and pld).

From that you can probably guess that the numbers of pld and drk clearing savage add up to approximately the number of war clearing savage, and for this raid tier due to the amount of magic damage in a12s drk is a lot more popular than pld in raids (though many raiders can and will switch around between pld/drk depending on their parties).

For 4 man dungeons war and drk are both good, while pld is a bit behind due to their lack of aoe dmg skills. I'd say war is better for dungeons though, but I don't have drk lvl'd so I'm not qualified to claim that.

In expert dungeons and any and all pf parties I usually see 50% DRK, 30% WAR and 20% PLD.

A good one. Just be a good one. Those are always popular.

@aleph_null In terms of four men contents, I've played all tanks to those high level dungeons over and over again, and I can say that DRK has the EASIEST time in term of pulling enimity. I use DRK on dailies when I feeling a little lazy (Salted Earth + Abyssal/Unleash pretty much do the work), but I'll switch to WAR for a little bit more challenge.

PLD is the worst so far. Being my main class since 2.0 I was always feel something's lacking/boring, eventhough I dont know why since I only level my MRD to get Bloodbath. And you're right, you have to play all of them to truly understand the difference in feel. After playing all of them, now I know why PLD is beginner friendly but the other way around for people who's looking for much more than Halone combo..

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Originally Posted by bounddreamer

A good one. Just be a good one. Those are always popular.

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This is the correct answer.
I would add that having 2 different tanks is better than 2 of the same, but that should be obvious.

Also it might be worth noticing that in terms of skill ceiling probably warrior is the highest, which some might consider a good case for being the best.

The question was which we think is the most popular (many people like playing it) though, not which one is the best/most sought after :p

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Originally Posted by Atoli

In expert dungeons and any and all pf parties I usually see 50% DRK, 30% WAR and 20% PLD.

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Same goes with me ^

Yes, I play my DRK in dungeons, its just faster with there AOE. Other than that then its WAR and PLD, even though PLD was my main in ARR, I moved over to WAR when HW released.
But starage, when i go in with my DPS i actually mainly see PLD and WAR

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Originally Posted by bounddreamer

A good one. Just be a good one. Those are always popular.

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There is nothing more to say than that.

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Originally Posted by ZioSerpe

Also it might be worth noticing that in terms of skill ceiling probably warrior is the highest, which some might consider a good case for being the best.

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I would personally rate DRK above WAR in terms of difficulty as WAR rotation is kinda set in stone thanks to stacks it has, it reminds me alot of WoW's rogue with combo points so playing it feels kinda familiar. But in the end all 3 tanks should feel easymode after you play them for a while.

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Originally Posted by Synestra

I would personally rate DRK above WAR in terms of difficulty as WAR rotation is kinda set in stone thanks to stacks it has, it reminds me alot of WoW's rogue with combo points so playing it feels kinda familiar. But in the end all 3 tanks should feel easymode after you play them for a while.

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I agree that the skill ceiling for DRK is at least comparable with WAR, as someone who mains WAR and plays the other two tanks on a regular basis. Playing it decently is nbd; playing it to the top of its potential takes a lot of practice and skill.

Looking at fflogs, wars comprise about 40% of all tanks in casual content, while plds and drk represent about 30 % each (pld is typically 0.5% -3% higher depending on specific content). In savage raiding wars represent 48% while drk and pld each have a fairly even share around 26%

Creator Savage

• WAR - 21564 - 48.64%
• DRK - 11345 - 25.59%
• PLD - 11420 - 25.76%

Creator Normal, WCoM, VA combined totals

• WAR - 5121 - 39.98%
• DRK - 3760 - 29.36%
• PLD - 3927 - 30.66%

3.0 + EX trials

• WAR - 3757 - 42.18%
• DRK - 2053 - 23.05%
• PLD - 3097 - 34.77%

Kinda surprised that the number of pld clearing creator savage is more than that of drk, but seeing back into the four fights, the first 3 do have a lot of physical damages.

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Originally Posted by aleph_null

Kinda surprised that the number of pld clearing creator savage is more than that of drk, but seeing back into the four fights, the first 3 do have a lot of physical damages.

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Our MT has both geared, so he changes from PLD if DRK is better for the fight and vice versa.

On a side note, I continue to be baffled by the number of people that say that war is harder to master than drk. Offensive skill usage only (includes defensive buffs that grant stacks on war) drk is more than 5 skills per minute more than war, and if you include defensive skills the gap widens to almost 7 without even counting low blow procs, reprisal procs or sole survivor. They both have a secondary resource that has to be balanced between offense and defense, and war doesn't have any proc skills that have to be monitored.

It's fight dependent, but more like 10-20 in practice. The most interesting part of WAR is in how Berserk windows are tied to your defensive abilities, so if you actually have tanking responsibilities you can try to plan your windows so you can take advantage of the defensive cooldown. But the Berserk rotation itself is fixed and fairly simple, so executing it doesn't require a whole lot of thought or effort, especially if you've actually played a real melee job in any capacity.

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Originally Posted by Deathgiver

On a side note, I continue to be baffled by the number of people that say that war is harder to master than drk.

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WAR isn't even that hard to play, that attitude comes from when the only thing to compare it to was PLD. WAR was always the "harder tank to play" but when DRK came along and developed a new standard, the focus shifted to PLD being the "basic tank to play".

You can't really rely on FFlogs to showcase the most popular tank played though. There are quite a good amount of players who don't even upload anything at all.

There was a census done by SE iirc back in 3.0 or something, PLD was by far the most popular tank and I would expect the same should SE decides to give out the data.

Found it: http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...e8ff1bcf34c5ae

PLD is the easiest tank to play, just like how majority of healers stick to WHM.

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Originally Posted by bounddreamer

A good one. Just be a good one. Those are always popular.

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If I could "like" this a billioon times I would!

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Originally Posted by bounddreamer

A good one. Just be a good one. Those are always popular.

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nailed ittt.

When it comes down to it for the most part it really doesn't matter what class you are, if you're bad at the class you're bad at the class. Just because you're a Warrior doesn't mean you're gonna be the best tank out there pulling ridiculous dps, just because you're a paladin doesn't mean you're invincible with all your damage mitigation, you get the idea

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Originally Posted by Lambdafish

WAR isn't even that hard to play, that attitude comes from when the only thing to compare it to was PLD.

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Nah, that attitude comes from when Defiance actually existed and the raids were actually in any way difficult. Now everything's faceroll so every tank is a DPS that sometimes presses their defensive CDs, leading to DRK being "harder" because it has more buttons to press. In reality, atm, all the tanks are roughly the same difficulty aka not difficult at all.

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Originally Posted by SpookyGhost

Nah, that attitude comes from when Defiance actually existed and the raids were actually in any way difficult. Now everything's faceroll so every tank is a DPS that sometimes presses their defensive CDs, leading to DRK being "harder" because it has more buttons to press. In reality, atm, all the tanks are roughly the same difficulty aka not difficult at all.

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Then try to pull out high dps in savage raids and you'll see that the difficulty of a drk is the highest...

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Originally Posted by Ilan

Then try to pull out high dps in savage raids and you'll see that the difficulty of a drk is the highest...

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wat

It's hard to press oGCDs on CD? You're tanking out of Grit which means you have BW and BP so mana isn't an issue. Where exactly is the difficulty?

e: Oh, wait, the highest. Yeah, agreed, it is ever so slightly harder since there's more buttons to press. In the current meta it's 100% just doing your DPS rotation so when one of the tanks has more DPS buttons than the others, it does require like a really really small amount of extra thought to play. But, in the grand scheme of things, I'd say that they're all relatively the same which is to say they're all braindead easy.

My main class is the hardest because I play it.

It is also the hardest because if it wasn't; it wouldn't validate my skill and experiences being higher than yours.

On a serious note, as far as rotations goes, tanks have always been 'easy'. Staying in tank stance and pressing fewer buttons in coil has never been any more difficult than it is now. It's just a false perception of difficulty stemming from the tank anxiety that plagues the role.






Looking at OGCD's and MP? Timing Berserk and Stacks? Easy.

The truly hardest class is PLD.

Because you're fighting the monotony and simplicity of the class. And that is the hardest, most soul sucking hurdle you'll ever face.

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Originally Posted by SpookyGhost

wat

It's hard to press oGCDs on CD? You're tanking out of Grit which means you have BW and BP so mana isn't an issue. Where exactly is the difficulty?

e: Oh, wait, the highest. Yeah, agreed, it is ever so slightly harder since there's more buttons to press. In the current meta it's 100% just doing your DPS rotation so when one of the tanks has more DPS buttons than the others, it does require like a really really small amount of extra thought to play. But, in the grand scheme of things, I'd say that they're all relatively the same which is to say they're all braindead easy.

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I never said its completly impossible hard but for most people it is pretty hard to play drk properly and these cases are warrior and pala way easier to play. Drk needs a bit more attention and effort then the other two if you want to dps and tank at the same time.

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Originally Posted by SpookyGhost

But, in the grand scheme of things, I'd say that they're all relatively the same which is to say they're all braindead easy.

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You can make any job's target dummy rotation into muscle memory in a couple of weeks. That doesn't mean that the job is simple to optimise in a raid setting, nor does it mean that you're actually going to be any good at it in practice. The deeper you go down the rabbit hole, the more complex it gets and the more creative you have to become to improve. If you think a job is trivial to play, you probably haven't played or analysed it well enough.

Which is fair; no matter how versatile of a player you are, there will always be one job you have either spent more time on or have more skill on than the rest. It's not about seeking validation for the job you play; you just understand its depth that much better.

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Originally Posted by Sarcatica

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Found it: http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...e8ff1bcf34c5ae
<snip>

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Oh nice thanks for the link, fun stats to look at!

The gender distribution depending of the location is kind of surprising for me, I did not expect such differences, EU and NA are like switched stats O.O.
http://www.finalfantasyxiv.com/Eorze...N_Census_L.PNG

Anyway back on topic, the data from the link directly answers the OP, if not just missing the 2016 update.

As for myself, I don't tank, as in I don't tank Duties, even I still level up tank classes.
But if I decided to, I would use the PLD because I like how the skills works. Not only I don't like the WAR gameplay much but I really dislike his animations for myself.

Just for the record saying that something has an higher skill ceiling does not equal saying is harder, I went into details into explaining why the fact the war having higher skill ceiling is true twice already and twice I deleted it by mistake trying to copypaste it because my work keyboard has a weird layout and I ended up pressing fn+v leaving me with my reply consisting in a single lower case "v" and a lot of rage, I'll see if I can find the time and the mental strenght to do that again

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Originally Posted by ZioSerpe

Just for the record saying that something has an higher skill ceiling does not equal saying is harder, I went into details into explaining why the fact the war having higher skill ceiling is true twice already and twice I deleted it by mistake trying to copypaste it because my work keyboard has a weird layout and I ended up pressing fn+v leaving me with my reply consisting in a single lower case "v" and a lot of rage, I'll see if I can find the time and the mental strenght to do that again

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A higher skill ceiling does make it harder for the majority of the players to play a class properly.

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Originally Posted by FallenWings

My main class is the hardest because I play it.It is also the hardest because if it wasn't; it wouldn't validate my skill and experiences being higher than yours.

On a serious note, as far as rotations goes, tanks have always been 'easy'. Staying in tank stance and pressing fewer buttons in coil has never been any more difficult than it is now. It's just a false perception of difficulty stemming from the tank anxiety that plagues the role.

Looking at OGCD's and MP? Timing Berserk and Stacks? Easy.

The truly hardest class is PLD.

Because you're fighting the monotony and simplicity of the class. And that is the hardest, most soul sucking hurdle you'll ever face.

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Or you look at their actual toolkits and realize just pressing buttons doesn't make you a good tank. None of the tanks are necessarily hard to play, but there is a noticeably ceiling curve on how to play any of them well. Dark Knight is the highest because you have to constantly monitor when you can safely turn off Grit. In Savage, messing up your timing or staying out too long will likely wipe the raid. If you're cheating too much and the Black Mage or Machinist crit? They'll pull hate almost instantly. Warrior follows because just based on timing. If you know the job well enough, you can squeeze three Fell Cleaves in your opener, and like Dark Knight, spend a large amount of time in Deliverance even while MTing. Paladin lags behind since it lacks the burst potential of Warrior or the complexity of Dark Knight. It has nothing to do with "I like this job best!" That's just how all three work. It's also why Paladin generally lags behind in progression content.

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

Dark Knight is the highest because you have to constantly monitor when you can safely turn off Grit. In Savage, messing up your timing or staying out too long will likely wipe the raid. Warrior follows because just based on timing. If you know the job well enough, you can squeeze three Fell Cleaves in your opener, and like Dark Knight, spend a large amount of time in Deliverance even while MTing.

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I'd still say warrior stance switching is harder because of the 8 seconds cooldown, nothing major though, the turning on and off of grit is easier per se since it has no CD, the hard part of it is fitting it in in between all the other button pressing, but it is less punishing in itself since it can be turned on and off at will.
The skill ceiling of the warrior is given mostly by the fact that all of the cooldowns can be used for defense and offense and mixed and matched in multitude of ways, literally making the skill ceiling higher.

War's cd being used for defense and offense doesn't really make the skill ceiling much higher though, since in raids you should be planning your cd usages for everything instead of deciding it on the fly, thanks to the fact that these fights are very scripted. It may sound complex and intimidating but once you've mapped out your possible berserk windows and the incoming tank busters and cleaves, it's quite simple.

Drk's complexity seems to come from the number of off gcd skills and mp management. It kind of feels like playing a tank with the dps rotation of a melee dps class, while still having to manage your defensive cds. More off gcd offensive skills also means less wiggle room for weaving defensive cds without clipping gcds. Turning grit on/off or switching shield/sword oath is indeed easier due to the lack of cd, but they cost a lot of dps, so in a raid situation you should plan around those very carefully.

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Originally Posted by ZioSerpe

I'd still say warrior stance switching is harder because of the 8 seconds cooldown, nothing major though, the turning on and off of grit is easier per se since it has no CD, the hard part of it is fitting it in in between all the other button pressing, but it is less punishing in itself since it can be turned on and off at will.
The skill ceiling of the warrior is given mostly by the fact that all of the cooldowns can be used for defense and offense and mixed and matched in multitude of ways, literally making the skill ceiling higher.

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Warrior stance switch is the easiest since it is a off global cooldown. It has 10 seconds cooldown but it doesn't cost anything.

For the original topic, from an image i think PLD is most popular but for end content WAR is the most sought after. For that reason alone I main DRK as I prefer it, but I'm also leveling PLD for whatever content that comes up and the other tank in our FC is a WAR so we generally have all based covered.

From the latest official Eorzea Census:

http://livedoor.blogimg.jp/tekitou_m...3/531b7122.jpg

Quite a turn around from 2015:

http://www.finalfantasyxiv.com/Eorze...N_Census_L.PNG

RIP PLD.

Dark Knights not so edgy anymore.

I was pretty damn surprised with drk at 47% since that's the general population, not even talking about popularity in savage lol.

47%+29%+34%=110%

I think its a typo and drk is really only 37%.

Numbers are based on jobs that have been levelled to 60. If you levelled a tank job to 60 between the 2015 and 2016 Census, the percentage of that job would have gone up, and the other two would have gone down. Many active tank mains would have had their tank jobs levelled to 60 prior to Gordias, if not soon after. A relative percentage drop doesn't reflect a reduction in use, as you cannot unlevel a job that you have already levelled to 60. Players are also going to be in the process of levelling jobs to 60 that they've barely touched, in preparation for the expansion.

A further translation on reddit has the overall level 60 job percentages for PLD at 7%, WAR at 8%, and DRK at 8%, so the tank percentages probably do involve a typo, as above.