Don't repeat the past a third time, Yoshida.

This is just an opinion, but I've been looking back on Stormblood as we're moving towards Shadowbringers.

On launch, we got DDoS'd by idiots who wanted to make the launch look worse than it was. That much I'm fine with; however, the big thing I'm worried about is the changes we've seen throughout Stormblood made to tanks in general.

PLD had to get nerfs to make it not so overbearing on the Tank side due to the fact that Holy Spirit very close in damage to WAR's Fell Cleave, but the biggest change that sparked a lot of people's ire was the fact they changed Shake it Off to a Raid Cooldown that provided shields for some odd reason. It's still among the biggest gripes I have to this date since it has solidified WAR ever since the change.

Then we get IR updates so that WAR's skill ceiling is reduced(which, honestly is ok in some manner, but DRK hadn't gotten any significant updates outside of Sole Survivor being useful).

This sounds like I'm ranting about WAR, but it's how SE has been handling tanks in General over the past years from Heavensward all the way to now: It's been a mess. In Heavensward, PLD was shunned because of the fact that it couldn't mitigate magic damage effectively(and let's face it: almost all of Alexander's raids were Magical in nature, even to the auto attacks) whereas DRK was in fact capable of doing both Magic and Physical. Now, DRK is shunned because it is overshadowed by two other tanks who have supreme utilities and damage. They tried to fix it, especially by creating an entire tier almost dedicated to DRK(Sigmascape) but it didn't work out as they thought it'd go. WAR and PLD still reigned supreme in both DPS and Mitigation even after the small changes they made.

What I hope is that going forward they look at all the tanks' capabilities and consider how strong they make them for all raids. Even if we know they playtest them(Yoshida does with his dev team) I think the Battle Team needs to consider where to draw the line between becoming the best Tank in the game like WAR and having a versatile skillset like PLD does so that we can find proper balance because right now there's only two Tanks that I see a majority of in PF: PLD and WAR.

I'm not calling for homogenization, but something needs to define Tanking in general outside of going into Tank Stance just for the pull and then deciding to turn off Grit or swap into Sword Oath/Deliverance...both as a role and for individual jobs so we can have some sort of versatility that defines the job. To call an example, consider DRK back in Heavensward; it was a tank that proc'd off of Parrying for its Low Blow ability(which was a Stun and did 100 potency) and it gave DRK a unique flow to its gameplay that people enjoyed. Even their damage output was great, but it all got neutered in Stormblood.

All I can hope going forward is that the Battle Team and Yoshida consider balance going forward and not repeat the past. I still remember a while back in Heavensward where Yoshida himself said that SCH and WAR are too powerful since they were dominating the slots at the time...and they still are. I want to see that cycle break and open up for more composition choice rather than locking in a sacred trinity of jobs(BRD, SCH, WAR to cite the biggest three jobs that people always bring).

EDIT: Misjudged the potencies on HS vs. FC from 4.0. Thanks for telling me.

Gonna add these. Other than that, I'm really glad that this discussion managed to come about now that we're nearing the end of Stormblood, and patch is only in 6 days. Let's keep the discussion going so that the devs can hear. Thank you to everyone that's participated in this thread.

Quotes worth Noting:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

People aren't necessarily mad Warrior received some adjustments. They're upset Warrior got those adjustment almost immediately yet WHM, DRK, MCH, MNK, RDM, BLM and SAM all were left in the dust for months. Case in point, RDMs told the devs for months their damage was far too low but Yoshida insisted Verraise was enough to compensate. Two full tiers later... they finally give in because surprise, surprise, Verraise isn't all that useful unless you're dying to shit you shouldn't be. Speaking of RDMs, they have Tether—a completely useless bind. Going by the WAR standards, if they complained loud enough, SE should change that into 90s Troubadour. That's how absurd the Shake it Off change was.

---

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Marxam

Assuming we are getting a fourth tank in 5.0 they need to either start pairing tanks, ex WAR/DRK and PLD/TANK, where they would complement each other much better than they would with another tank or make sure that each tank has a baseline. Things like a party shield, self-heal action/ability and offensive cd, for example, each tank would have its version but with different approaches to achieving said results.

---

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lyth

Here's the thing. If you want players to play tank, you have to figure out what draws players to the role and what makes them tick. A good tank is a facilitator. We do whatever needs to be done to make the group function more effectively. Sometimes, this means mitigating in a way that assists our healers. Sometimes, this means pushing out more dps so that our damage dealers can make a dps check.

But the most central function of a tank is this: tanks control space. They set up the fight. They control how it unfolds through effective positioning. And they control re-positioning in a way that allows the entire team to maintain good uptime.

You know why tanks care so much about damage? It's because you've given us nothing else to care about. Mitigation is trivial. You have abilities like Holmgang on a 180 second cooldown, which let us negate every second tankbuster. Positioning is trivial. Bosses re-position themselves, re-orientate themselves, and animation lock themselves in place. Your job is to move to where they spawn or jump, and just hold them where they are. It's like the people designing this fights for this game either have never played a tank before, or have no passion for the role. Because content is not designed for tanks, we play like we're a glorified melee dps.

And they're just not listening. With the advent of Stormblood, tank accessories were designed so that they just didn't offer any significant dps progression. So what did we do? We used i270 accessories. That should have been a warning sign in itself. Hey, maybe this design decision isn't what the players want.

You're not going to get us to "play like tanks" by removing the last thing that the role has going for it. The only way that you can do it is by designing content for tanks. Make us position. Give us fights with genuine, unscripted, tank-controlled movement. Make us mitigate.

Even despite the fact that we forced them to make some concessions with our accessory progression, you still hear Yoshi-p mention how tanks do too much damage, as recently as the Las Vegas Fan Fest Q+A. Do you know the one thing that I don't want to hear, as a tank main? I don't want to hear a non-tank main tell me that we're doing too much damage. I want to hear from someone who is equally passionate about tanking. I want to hear from someone who designs content for tanks. And I want to hear from someone who wants to make the tanking experience better for all of us.

People like playing dps, but there will always be a need for tanks. Those new dps players aren't going to want to wait around for hours until they find the odd person still willing to tank for them. You can't bribe us by making WAR into an overpowered supertank. I'm sorry, but Blizzard does barbarians better. This is a Final Fantasy game. Give me my greatsword or gunblade.

Do you know why 1.0 failed? It wasn't because of technical design issues. It was because you failed to listen to the people playing your game. And you're making that exact same mistake again. It's pride and a lack of communication that causes this game to repeat the same mistakes again and again.

---

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima

was the fact they changed Shake it Off to a Raid Cooldown that provided shields for some odd reason.

---

Because a self-Esuna was entirely worthless in all forms of content as WAR no longer suffered from Pacification after their burst window, and like 98% of debuffs nowadays are incurable or must be cured through mechanics (getting hit, standing in certain places, healing to full, etc.); with the 2% that are curable being no more than a minor inconvenience at most. It was a flagrant exmaple of an egregious disconnect between class design and gameplay design.
A barrier was the only thing it could be changed to that still made sense thematically. It was either that or creating a completely new ability from scratch.

I sure as hell hope so. When DRK was "revamped" in 4.0 along with other tanks with the role actions I was extremely disappointed due to them gutting the job. I hope the DRK rework in 5.0 makes the job much better or hopefully the gunblade tank will be my new main job in 5.0 assuming its a tank.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lumadurin

Because a self-Esuna was entirely worthless in all forms of content

---

You can tell they made content around it, though. Shinryu, Exdeath, etc. They had some raid-wide debuffs going on there for a bit, and the easiest way to remove them was either going to be Selene or a Warrior.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lumadurin

A barrier was the only thing it could be changed to that still made sense thematically. It was either that or creating a completely new ability from scratch.

---

From a thematic stand point making it into something more like a party wide ToB would have been more fitting for warrior, and the game has something like this in one of the bard troubador's. The major issue with adding a shield is that it can be used for limit break charging which solidified Warrior's place in the speed run meta. That and reprisal + free shield for nearly all raid wide aoe's is very helpful for prog.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Chrono_Rising

From a thematic stand point making it into something more like a party wide ToB would have been more fitting for warrior, and the game has something like this in one of the bard troubador's. The major issue with adding a shield is that it can be used for limit break charging which solidified Warrior's place in the speed run meta. That and reprisal + free shield for nearly all raid wide aoe's is very helpful for prog.

---

This I would've liked better at the time. Party-wide Thrill would be nice, but wouldn't be too powerful so as to make Shields a huge thing. Though...I still think just giving them party-wide for just about anything just solidified them regardless. My initial thought was giving WAR an ability that gave it Free Beast Abilities for a set amount of time at the time when we had to line up IR with the rest of our rotation...but they baked it into IR regardless. It still would've thrown DRK out the window given they're a rather selfish Tank that only has a single on-demand Shield as utility as well as the rest of their kit not lining up very nicely for groups.

raid mechanics will always dictate party comp. No skill is useless but the content in which they are put in makes them so. SiO is a great idea in execution, a self esuna and even worked on things like doom in exdeath but content was created so you couldn't ignore such debuffs and thus made SiO useless and changes were made. Assuming we are getting a fourth tank in 5.0 they need to either start pairing tanks, ex WAR/DRK and PLD/TANK, where they would complement each other much better than they would with another tank or make sure that each tank has a baseline. Things like a party shield, self-heal action/ability and offensive cd, for example, each tank would have its version but with different approaches to achieving said results.

I feel that they need to stick to the lore of the job and work around that. That is the only way to make jobs feel different while still being homogenized. PLD has always been the shield of the party protecting others and have skills like PoA and Cover. WAR is a berserk, beast that you had to harness and control and have skills like IR and FC. DRK has always been about inner conflict and eternal struggle with a focus on life-steal and have skills like Blood Weapon and TBN. I feel like all three tanks achieved this in 4.0 though DRK definitely got the short end.

The shake it off thing was so . . . dumb.

The Magical DPS have Erase. Which is essentially a targeted Shake it off (but only for damaging debuffs) .

Bards have Troubadour, which is essentially a pre-Esuna, for anything.

Healers have Esuna. . .

And they gave tanks a self Esuna why? So many cleanses in the game and they decide "Why not more!" It's similar to the combat team giving everyone a bind despite no one really wanting them. Or stuns on dps abilities that screw with the stun DR.

This is actually really brilliant, heck I can see that pairing idea working with the healers as well. At the moment, there’s always gonna be 1 tank (e.g. DRK) or 1 healer (e.g. WHM) left out of the meta, so having two pairs of jobs that work well with everyone but better with each other can do wonders for the meta and help boost morale of players who main them.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lumadurin

...

---

Most jobs have at least a few abilities which are incredibly situational in PvE. Why does WHM still have Repose? What is BLM supposed to do with Freeze? The original version of Shake it Off had more widespread application than either of these actions.

To make matters worse, at the launch of Stormblood, between the knockback negation effect of Inner Release (on a 120s recast) and the status effect removal of the original Shake it Off (on a 60s recast), you had a vastly superior form of Tempered Will (bind/heavy removal + knockback prevention, on a 180s recast). Did PLD players complain about Tempered Will being completely outdone by these two new actions?

There's this bizarre mindset amongst a small, but extremely vocal minority of the playerbase. If an ability isn't usable in every circumstance with twelve different functions, then it's worthless. If WAR doesn't have an answer to every single situation that is at least on par with the second strongest tank, it's an unfair disadvantage. No other part of the playerbase has this pathological mindset.

And the worst thing is that the devs are listening to them. Never, in the history of this game, has anyone gone back to the devs with a newly designed action, and demanded a refund, simply because it wasn't good enough to be a WAR ability.

Do you know what the devs should have done? Change Shake it Off, into a completely new action, as they did. And then re-implement a 10 second pacification debuff at the end of IR that can only be cleansed by the player themselves. Call it "Shake this Off," and add in the tagline "Be careful for what you wish for."

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lyth

Most jobs have at least a few abilities which are incredibly situational in PvE. Why does WHM still have Repose? What is BLM supposed to do with Freeze? The original version of Shake it Off had more widespread application than either of these actions.

---

Old skills are a pretty bad excuse to leave WAR with one that had almost no use. Every other job got 5 good skills/traits at 62+, except WHM with its Lily traits, and those have had plenty of complaints. Why should WAR players be fine with getting one less skill/trait than 14 other jobs? I've played PLD for most of this expansion and there's really nowhere I've thought "I could really use 4.0 Shake it Off now".

Next expansion, I'm not really sure what else you're going to demand. A better version of Cover/TBN, perhaps. More Fell Cleaves, perhaps. An I win button, perhaps. You've either got a monopoly on or ripped off nearly every action a tank could want.

It's a terrible design choice. If you want to fix tank balance and encourage more players to tank, then you stop catering to WAR players and start treating all tanks equally.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Launched

Old skills are a pretty bad excuse to leave WAR with one that had almost no use. Every other job got 5 good skills/traits at 62+, except WHM with its Lily traits, and those have had plenty of complaints. Why should WAR players be fine with getting one less skill/trait than 14 other jobs? I've played PLD for most of this expansion and there's really nowhere I've thought "I could really use 4.0 Shake it Off now".

---

Oh yeah how those selfish ppl dare to think they skills that have being useless since ARR and HW have more priority over a WAR skill that is just situational at best, such injustice, thank God SE know what they do and make shake it off the stronger of tank shields.
/sarcasm.

While I agree Shake it Off needed a change, it boggles the mind why they turned a near completely worthless ability into the best tank AoE shield in the game. How do those extremes even happen? Frankly, I'm of the opinion they need to remove abilities from tanks and healers and start fresh. Decide what each job will identify as and build from there. Is Warrior going to be the Berserker styled tank? Okay. Give it raw damage and HP sustainability but far less mitigation tools. The devs seem utterly terrified, or perhaps too stubborn, to do a rework like this yet we have Yoshida lamenting tanks not wanting to play like tanks. Well, yeah. You've given them all the tools imaginable so they don't have to be. And you design your content to never force it on them.

Apologies for the rant. This design philosophy just baffles me sometimes.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Launched

Old skills are a pretty bad excuse to leave WAR with one that had almost no use. Every other job got 5 good skills/traits at 62+, except WHM with its Lily traits, and those have had plenty of complaints. Why should WAR players be fine with getting one less skill/trait than 14 other jobs? I've played PLD for most of this expansion and there's really nowhere I've thought "I could really use 4.0 Shake it Off now".

---

Because Warrior has arguably the best kit in the damn game? People aren't necessarily mad Warrior received some adjustments. They're upset Warrior got those adjustment almost immediately yet WHM, DRK, MCH, MNK, RDM, BLM and SAM all were left in the dust for months. Case in point, RDMs told the devs for months their damage was far too low but Yoshida insisted Verraise was enough to compensate. Two full tiers later... they finally give in because surprise, surprise, Verraise isn't all that useful unless you're dying to shit you shouldn't be. Speaking of RDMs, they have Tether—a completely useless bind. Going by the WAR standards, if they complained loud enough, SE should change that into 90s Troubadour. That's how absurd the Shake it Off change was.

Here's the thing. If you want players to play tank, you have to figure out what draws players to the role and what makes them tick. A good tank is a facilitator. We do whatever needs to be done to make the group function more effectively. Sometimes, this means mitigating in a way that assists our healers. Sometimes, this means pushing out more dps so that our damage dealers can make a dps check.

But the most central function of a tank is this: tanks control space. They set up the fight. They control how it unfolds through effective positioning. And they control re-positioning in a way that allows the entire team to maintain good uptime.

You know why tanks care so much about damage? It's because you've given us nothing else to care about. Mitigation is trivial. You have abilities like Holmgang on a 180 second cooldown, which let us negate every second tankbuster. Positioning is trivial. Bosses re-position themselves, re-orientate themselves, and animation lock themselves in place. Your job is to move to where they spawn or jump, and just hold them where they are. It's like the people designing this fights for this game either have never played a tank before, or have no passion for the role. Because content is not designed for tanks, we play like we're a glorified melee dps.

And they're just not listening. With the advent of Stormblood, tank accessories were designed so that they just didn't offer any significant dps progression. So what did we do? We used i270 accessories. That should have been a warning sign in itself. Hey, maybe this design decision isn't what the players want.

You're not going to get us to "play like tanks" by removing the last thing that the role has going for it. The only way that you can do it is by designing content for tanks. Make us position. Give us fights with genuine, unscripted, tank-controlled movement. Make us mitigate.

Even despite the fact that we forced them to make some concessions with our accessory progression, you still hear Yoshi-p mention how tanks do too much damage, as recently as the Las Vegas Fan Fest Q+A. Do you know the one thing that I don't want to hear, as a tank main? I don't want to hear a non-tank main tell me that we're doing too much damage. I want to hear from someone who is equally passionate about tanking. I want to hear from someone who designs content for tanks. And I want to hear from someone who wants to make the tanking experience better for all of us.

People like playing dps, but there will always be a need for tanks. Those new dps players aren't going to want to wait around for hours until they find the odd person still willing to tank for them. You can't bribe us by making WAR into an overpowered supertank. I'm sorry, but Blizzard does barbarians better. This is a Final Fantasy game. Give me my greatsword or gunblade.

Do you know why 1.0 failed? It wasn't because of technical design issues. It was because you failed to listen to the people playing your game. And you're making that exact same mistake again. It's pride and a lack of communication that causes this game to repeat the same mistakes again and again.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lyth

Snip

---

Big +1 to this, would give more if I had the chance to.

During my long tenure as a tank main in this game, it always felt to me like the dev team simply wasn't listening to the concerns or complaints for the playerbase, and would often just smash a baseball bat into our knees for no good reason. The fact that Warrior even launched in the absolutely pitiful state it was in at the start of SB was appalling, no matter how fast it got hotfixed or how hard it got buffed afterwards. Their whole design philosophy going into Stormblood seemed to be to directly attack the players that enjoyed maximizing their damage, at the cost of all else.

It feels like, simply put, we're not listened to. Just like Lyth said above, that Q&A was a big hit to my desire to come back and tank in 5.0, since Yoshida seemed to say almost dismissively that tanks are still doing too much damage.... Okay, and? What are you going to do about it? Are you going to give us more mechanics to deal with? Are you going to change the way that tanks play in this game in any meaningful way? Because as the launch of SB proved, if you just gut tank damage and do nothing else to change the role on a deeper level, you have a mass exodus.

Veteran tanks have complained for years that tanking is boring as sin. Are we ever going to get listened to?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SargentToughie

Veteran tanks have complained for years that tanking is boring as sin. Are we ever going to get listened to?

---

Yes... if you're a casual player who whines your tank/job of choice doesn't play how you like it to in dungeons.

I wish I were being factious. Unfortunately, a lot of their balance decisions aren't centered around good players trying to push the limits of each individual jobs, but instead around the casual playerbase. Now I get it, they make up the bulk of people playing this game. That doesn't mean it isn't an incredibly shortsighted, and quite frankly poor, design philosophy. Casual content is so laughably undertuned you can queue on classes and breeze through pretty much everything. Sadly, it's this backwards approach that causes so many balancing issues. A prime example of how flawed their approach is are the stupid attack debuffs. When the producer of the game outright says "we don't balance Bard and Machinist around piercing. And giving it to either would make them overpowered" it highlights just how out of touch they are with players who care even the slightest bit about optimization. How, how can you design two jobs and not account for almost 400 damage only one other job gives them? It's taken Bard utterly dominating almost the whole damn expansion—with Dragoon riding its coattails—for them to finally admit, "hey... maybe they were right about this."

Sadly, my speculation regarding tanks isn't a needed overhaul to what few mechanics they have. Instead, I suspect they pull back heavily on abilities like Shirk and Diversion while removing aggro dumps from Elusive, Lucid and Refresh purely because this will force tank stance/aggro combos—in turn weakening tanks. I just cannot imagine they will ever move towards less scripted mechanics because of the perception it would be too hard for casual players. Ironically, it's that design approach that makes tanks want to hyper focus on their DPS. As Lyth said, you've given them nothing else to care about. You can't optimize enmity. Either you're first, second for a specific mechanic, or someone's dead. You can't optimize mitigation since any damage that matters comes in predictable bursts. And you can't position properly for a mechanic since most bosses jump. All you can do is crit your Fell Cleaves.

Sorry, Yoshida. But I'm not going to care about Inner Beast or Defiance when the only optimization tool I have is Crit/D.H Fell Cleaves. Five of them now!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

Sorry, Yoshida. But I'm not going to care about Inner Beast or Defiance when the only optimization tool I have is Crit/D.H Fell Cleaves. Five of them now!

---

Hilarious, that. Inner Beast is one of the best buttons in the entire game for the purpose of actually tanking, but at the same time, it's also so much overkill when tanks just chew on even the Savage level Tank Busters with basic cooldowns/shields, or just ignore them outright with invulns.

It worries me just how correct you probably are. This dev team has shown us time and time again that they're nothing if not apathetic towards the voices of the high level tank players, to the point where so many of us have just straight up abandoned ship.

I just hope that if they administer yet another shortsighted, heavy handed bat to the knees of tanks at the start of 5.0 again, that they learn a harsh lesson from it. Then again, I'd also hoped that the beating they took on SB's launch did that, and here we are again watching history repeat itself.

EDIT: that interview when Yoshida talked about Piercing Debuff, and how it would make BRD/MCH overpowered was actually infuriating. I can't believe I'd forgotten about that until you reminded me. Also, I'm pretty sure that as of 4.4, Piercing Debuff is up to a value of like 500-600ish DPS, isn't it? Or maybe that's the Battle Litany talking, which actually allows DRG to double dip on being a mandatory tag-along to the BRD show, as a proc donkey.

There's a lot of discussion that I'm enjoying reading. What matters is that we're heard, and that the developer is reminded of what they've done so that they don't repeat it again. Again, as I said before, all I can hope is that they listen and take our input from Tanks so that we can make them better. Since I've recently been working on Savage as a Tank Job, I can already tell that things are so simple there is literally NOTHING to chew on in the meantime except damage. The Boss's Positioning is really all that matters, not the mechanics since Main Tank just sits there and takes the boss where it needs to be; that's really all there is to it. If we had Tank Mechanics that revolved around something then we'd actually be more aware of it.

Like hell, TAKE A LOOK AT ULTIMATE ULTIMA. The Tank mechanic was for Tanks to take the damage from the orbs there as a group since the damage is split. I LOVE those kinds of mechanics more than anything else. It gives Tank interaction with the boss, and doesn't make it an oversimplified damage dealer. You can even go back to Heavensward's Alexander Days that had tank interactions up the wazoo instead of point and drag.

It's disheartening, though. Only a fraction of our posts actually filter through. It doesn't matter if we're having the most groundbreaking discussion ever. It has to be flagged, translated, and then brought to the devs' attention. We had thread after thread of feedback on DRK this expansion across many, many months, but the only thing that finally caught the devs' attention was hundreds of upvotes in a few critical threads. Then they were like "Huh, there's a problem with DRK?" That's also probably why they're much more up to date with opinions on housing and glamour than they are on what tanks think or feel about the game. Another glamour thread? Mash that 'Like' button.

I don't even think that this game is designed for casual tanks, either. Enmity generation is a much bigger barrier to entry for newer tanks, because of gear. The biggest fear of a new tank is not dying. It's losing aggro. That's really what keeps people in tank stance.

From a balance perspective, the discrepancies between the tanks become much, much wider when you look at average to lower skilled play. Part of this has to do with the differences between playing a job which puts out burst vs. sustained dps. But it also has to do with stances and enmity generation. WAR is the only tank job with true oGCD stance swaps which don't have any resource costs attached. They're the only job that has a way of negating the penalty associated with tank stance. They have the least amount of opportunity cost associated with their enmity generation and the best snap aggro generation.

If you're really designing around the casual player, the first thing that you do is address that. Kill off tank stances altogether. Simplify enmity generation. This is virtually never where the actual tanking challenge comes from. No matter how you set things up, experienced tanks will always find the minimum required enmity threshold and sit there.

The most challenging part of tanking comes from being forced to manually reposition a boss in response to mechanics. But oddly enough, the biggest positioning challenges seem to happen in dungeons, when you're pulling a bunch of mobs. How do I set up this pull? How do I position these AoEs so that they don't land on the group? Paradoxically, this falls off dramatically when you get to raid content, because everything has to be a scripted dance.

I've said this before, but they actually got it right with A7S. Your tank made a massive difference to your team. You could run the boss around the arena while dodging balls and cats, but nobody would get their GCDs off properly, yourself included. But if you slowly backstepped while anticipating what was happening around the arena, you could do all of your re-positioning without costing anyone in your team a single GCD. Watching really good tanks do that fight was incredible. I wish I could give you some links, but nobody seems to keep their old stuff.

That's the nice thing about fights which actually have meaningful tank movement. It's not all that intimidating for newer players, but if you execute them well, your presence in the raid is like a global dps buff.

This isn't a radical new concept, either. It's common enough in certain other games to introduce some form of tank-controlled movement into fights as a primary mechanic, even if it's something as simple as moving a boss around the edge of the arena in a fixed direction. You just need someone on your design team who actually thinks like a tank, and not like a dps.

It's true though, the devs give us nothing to worry about other than ways we can contribute more DPS, or postion for more DPS, mitigation isn't in their balancing equation here it's DPS and ilvl progression the more uptime and positioning you give to your party the faster you clear. It's like in A11S back in the day when the raiding scene was so hellbent on skipping Lapis and the devs said that it shouldn't of been possible (I'd find the quote or source but it's 3am maybe later) to skip a whole phase but we as the raiders pushed ourselves.

You'll never be rewarded for mitigating a boss for 20 seconds while the healers cheer you on from the stands instead they'll ask you "why didn't we skip Soar?" it's like Lyth said we're just glorified DPS with mitigation, there's a lot wrong with tanks especially in regards to when we were using ilvl 270 accessories at the start of SB. That to me was enough to make me wonder what was the devs team idea here? It was a big step back and it's a design choice I honestly to this day can't comprehend why it got to that point.

Honestly SE could take a page out of WoWs book back in Wrath of the Lich King even though all tanks were tanks and not DPS with mitigation cooldowns but I digress, there's 2 fights I can recall that would work well in XIV in regards to tan king. 1st one is Grobbulus where the tank has to keep moving the boss around while the boss drops fart clouds on the ground so you gotta kite em around while the OT tanks the oozes, while this is going on healers have a debuff on them that they gotta heal through the fight. This would work so well in XIV as there's a tank swap when the MT gets a poison debuff on them, this incentivizing Shirk it'd be a well designed tank fight, the second is Heigan the Unclean (dance dance) where the MT has to kite the boss to the safe areas with the rest of the raid group. It's another well designed tank fight as it gives you awareness and hindsight where to move before the poison rises up and you stand on the safe spots to avoid dying.

I was gonna include A7S but Lyth beat it to me that's great tank movement and a great fight for tanks to understand awareness but back on topic, if the Dev team repeats the same issues as this xpac then tanking is going to continue to be the same old, nothing but DPS to contribute in a straightforward way which leaves tanks with such wasted potential that could have been.

Naxx set the standard for raid design in its heyday, with multiple, well designed raid wings of bosses that you could progress through in any order to unlock the final two bosses. Thaddius remains one of my favourite fights of all time. You want a creative tank swap? The twin opening adds periodically launch their respective tanks across the arena at each other, forcing you to taunt your new add when you landed. There are so many creative ways of doing swaps which don't involve vuln stacks.

Grobb is an archetypal example, but the broader concept is a shrinking arena. It exists in this game too.

Aiatar from Brayflox is a good example. In standard raid content, the party member with the poison puddle would get a mark above their head several seconds in advance, with the expectation that they would either bait the puddle somewhere else, or that you would engage in some sort of Cover shenanigans to ignore the mechanic and maximise uptime.

Instead, the only cue that you have is his targeting arrow, which appears about a second before the puddle goes out. So if he targets you or a melee, it drops on the boss, forcing you to re-position. Which is great. You make a slow spiral inwards as the arena shrinks around you.

Likewise, the final Mamool Ja boss of Wanderer's Palace Hard places totems where he stands, also forcing you to move him or take increased damage. And these are dungeons.

I think that somewhere along the way, the raid design mantra has become more about creating the most elaborate choreography and the flashiest mechanics, while losing sight of the fundamentals. That's why raid tanking feels like it's lost its substance, and the only thing we have left is DDR dps.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lyth

Naxx set the standard for raid design in its heyday, with multiple, well designed raid wings of bosses that you could progress through in any order to unlock the final two bosses. Thaddius remains one of my favourite fights of all time. You want a creative tank swap? The twin opening adds periodically launch their respective tanks across the arena at each other, forcing you to taunt your new add when you landed. There are so many creative ways of doing swaps which don't involve vuln stacks.

---

I agree I missed this one, Thaddius is a good representation of a great tank fight instead of just moving the boss around and trading off vulen stacks, I'm even gonna throw O3S in as probably the most unique fight for tanking (at least for me) this expansion. It's unique in the sense of there's lots of adds to OT, the board is always changing so tanks have to adapt and move the boss around depending on where the adds are, it's fast, fun and really left an impression on me a much better fight than O6S, O5S, O1S, O2S, I haven't gone into this raid tier as my raid group disbanded after getting to Kefka so I can't comment on this raid tier.

What i'm saying is I hope the dev team introduces more interesting fights that aren't just a bore like 2/4 fights that require no effort, no positioning, you just "tank" like O5S you just tank and dodge AoEs, O6S the OT "add" is just auto attacking the OT and the MT is barely taking any damage as the boss moves itself making you do less work, the boss is all ass too so there's no positionals for melee.

A lot of MMOs could learn from how Naxx was made having wings and access to what bosses you want to fight I'm honestly tired of having 4 circular arenas every patch I would love to have an actual raid where we could go through, fight trash (yeah I said it), and then get to bosses at the end and progress.

I'm reminded of the some of the savage second coil stuff or final coil. In t11, you had the nodes where 2 could be tanked while the other just moved around and you each on their own thing. The cube had the shared aoe and could cleave, the sphere would always crit and place puddles on a random person which would slow them for the Kaliya's three lasers and the egg which just moved slowly, could only be damaged in melee range and would place forked lightning on a random person, when you killed one of the other two, they would try to get to the egg and absorb it and it would gain extra hp and its gimmicks. Or Phoneix and the Bennus gimmick with flames of rebirth. The add phase of T13 where the pain of Meracydia has to be kept seperate from the rest or else they would eat the the gust of meracydia and get damage buffs. HW still had moments like this, like A7S's ball phase or A8S if you decided to do the uplink correctly you had to position the boss' flarethrower to get rid of the tornado.

In Alphascape, every boss repositions themselves after their ultimate aoe or for Final, he goes to the center for hello world.

I feel that in addition to making more tank related mechanics for bosses (Also, trash, because heck, why not) they could really do with giving Tanks more tools to play with (Which could also help them include more mechanics).

Like, a core premise of a Tank is to protect your allies. But in actual gameplay it's just about bopping things on the head with an Axe/Sword.

It always feels good when I drop Shake It Off and mitigate a big AoE attack, but it's rare that it's actually necessary as well as being only a single skill devoted to actually protecting allies...

There's so much potential for actually protecting allies with skills. Stuff similar to old WoW's Paladin skill Blessing of Sacrifice (Where you take a percentage of the damage your ally takes). You could have things where you intercept the next debuff placed on an ally (So you could have mechanics that put stuff like a damage reduction debuff on DPS or a healing output debuff on Healers and you take it instead). Things like Warhammer Online (RIP) where tanks had a channelled ability that made allies behind you take 50% less damage which could easily be transferred into FF by making one of those bubbles where allies take less damage in, so for big AoE nukes everyone hides behind the tank.

This is but a small selection of a vast number of potential things that could be done to divert the Tank role away from "DPS but who takes less damage" and more towards being an actual Tank protecting their allies.

Also: Please remove stances, they suck. Especially when it's really just down to "Stay in DPS stance 24/7" because threat and mitigation are non-factors (Not to mention, DPS stances also have zero downsides compared to the significant damage reduction on Tank stances...)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kalise

You could have things where you intercept the next debuff placed on an ally (So you could have mechanics that put stuff like a damage reduction debuff on DPS or a healing output debuff on Healers and you take it instead).

---

It's called Cover and already exists.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kalise

Things like Warhammer Online (RIP) where tanks had a channelled ability that made allies behind you take 50% less damage which could easily be transferred into FF by making one of those bubbles where allies take less damage in, so for big AoE nukes everyone hides behind the tank.

---

Already exists as well in form of Passage of Arms.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Thela

It's called Cover and already exists.
Already exists as well in form of Passage of Arms.

---

If you're specifically Paladin, yes.

If you're Warrior/Dork Knight then you do not get those tools.

Also, Cover just transfers damage, not Debuffs. While Passage of Arms is only 15% mitigation, while I was more envisioning something strong enough so people hide behind the tank in encounters instead of conveniently placed rocks/pillars.

In addition to being just overall examples of things Tanks could do as a form of protecting allies as a core mechanic as opposed to a niche ability a single Tank has.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kalise

Snip

---

I feel like your heart's in the right place here, but the execution is just a little off. For instance, 50% mitigation on an ability is just hilariously broken. That's more mitigation than the Tank LB2 provides. I think that as far as being a protector/guardian goes, Paladin actually fulfils that fantasy fairly well as is, with Passage of Arms and Cover.

I think a bigger issue, coupled with the overarching gameplay squabbles from previous pages, is that the identities of the 3 tanks has become somewhat muddied. Warrior is the token barbarian, and yet it has the best party wide shield of any tank? And then Dark Knight is... uh... honestly I'm not too terribly sure what Dark Knight's identity is supposed to be. Right now it just feels like Paladin 2: Dark Boogaloo - APM harder.

Doing more to give each tank it's own unique identity would go a long way. Not that such a thing alone is quite enough, considering the deeper mechanical complaints that a lot of veteran and ex tank players are making in this thread.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SargentToughie

I feel like your heart's in the right place here, but the execution is just a little off. For instance, 50% mitigation on an ability is just hilariously broken.

---

Again, it was merely an example. Something more than 15% but less than 50% could work. Heck, you could even tie it in to mitigation stats so they actually have a use over just get stuff that increases DPS because that's the only thing that is actually relevant to increase...

Quote:

---

I think a bigger issue, coupled with the overarching gameplay squabbles from previous pages, is that the identities of the 3 tanks has become somewhat muddied. Warrior is the token barbarian, and yet it has the best party wide shield of any tank? And then Dark Knight is... uh... honestly I'm not too terribly sure what Dark Knight's identity is supposed to be. Right now it just feels like Paladin 2: Dark Boogaloo - APM harder.

Doing more to give each tank it's own unique identity would go a long way. Not that such a thing alone is quite enough, considering the deeper mechanical complaints that a lot of veteran and ex tank players are making in this thread.

---

True, though, the issue is, trying to make each Tank unique, without then breaking things so that one particular tank with one particular niche skill (Or set of skills) becoming "Mandatory" in order to deal with a mechanic.

If you make it so that mechanics then don't need any unique skills, then you end up with this current situation where they all feel similar because their only use is stuff that all the classes share...

At best you can try and do something like, give them all the same types of skill that a mechanic is based around, but each of them does it in a unique way.

For example, in regards to an AoE protection a la Passage of Arms, we have well... Passage of Arms for Paladin to provide % mitigation. Warrior's could provide an AoE health boost a la Thrill of Battle while Dork Knight could have the AoE shield with comparable strength (As an extension of The Blackest Night)

That sort of thing would be the only real way to kind of diversify the tanks. Unless you want to try and get really into balance and have their core gameplay differ (I.e. Having Warriors deal a butt load of damage compared to DRK/PLD but having something like PLD being able to buff allies DPS so their party's DD's do more damage while DRK debuff enemies making them take more damage. With the result being that they all offer similar overall party DPS. The issue is that balancing that would be an absolute NIGHTMARE)

But for sure, one of the things that needs to be done is for boss mechanics to start actually being a thing for Tanks. Which is where new utility could come in to play as an avenue for design (In addition to using existing utility such as Shirk)

To be honest one of the things that baffles me about SE is that they haven't taken advantage of the fact that in 8 Mans you can split the party into two completely cohesive 4-man groups with a tank, healer, and two DPS each.

Imagine a savage raid that actually was a raid. Where your goal was to do a speed run down two trash-packed halls side by side with two 4-man parties simultaneously, with mechanics where you specifically have to swap individual members in specific instances in order to clear the fight. Stuff like transferring keys/cargo across from one area to the other, or placing the two trying to swap in a mini-arena on order to use abilities that only that role has access to in order to deal with enemies, or allow two separate arenas to be close enough together that the healers can heal both tanks and/or prey targets in order to deal with one side getting bombarded, or just to barely let you use Ranged LB3 on a pair of giant packs.


Hell that would be a unique enough arena in of itself without having to make it a full-scale dungeon.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Grimoire-M

To be honest one of the things that baffles me about SE is that they haven't taken advantage of the fact that in 8 Mans you can split the party into two completely cohesive 4-man groups with a tank, healer, and two DPS each.

Imagine a savage raid that actually was a raid. Where your goal was to do a speed run down two trash-packed halls side by side with two 4-man parties simultaneously, with mechanics where you specifically have to swap individual members in specific instances in order to clear the fight. Stuff like transferring keys/cargo across from one area to the other, or placing the two trying to swap in a mini-arena on order to use abilities that only that role has access to in order to deal with enemies, or allow two separate arenas to be close enough together that the healers can heal both tanks and/or prey targets in order to deal with one side getting bombarded, or just to barely let you use Ranged LB3 on a pair of giant packs.


Hell that would be a unique enough arena in of itself without having to make it a full-scale dungeon.

---

They have actually done some of that back in the days when there was trash packs in raids like split groups in alexander, or multiple times in 24 man raids. They also have the party split in Alphascape 4 right now, or 'soft' splits anytime there are two bosses in a fight that self destruct. Someone mentioned being thrown for a tank swap, while not exact, they did have the interesting byakko tank swap among others.

If you look throughout the game there are many examples of basically everything suggested in this thread, and more but usually as 1 offs, or a watered down version to 'test' it in a single instance. SE is a conservative JP company. Western games tend to just boldy strike out in new directions and see what happens, and that leads to a lot of variety and creativity. But it also leads to complete and abject failures that piss off everyone. Sure nax had all this great stuff, but what happened before and after? Instead of sticking to what worked they tried a buncha new shiz and re-made their game 7 times over. Playing it safer is just the mirror of the same double edged sword. Balance is in the middle, but thats a company culture question more than 'right' answer.

There's a problem with partial homogenisation. The more similar that you make two abilities, the more their differences stand out.

If you take Sentinel/Vengeance/Shadow Wall, all three fulfil the same function. But there are very clear winners and losers. Vengeance is the clear winner, with 5 seconds extra duration, as well as the ability to deliver a 55 potency attack every time you take damage. Sentinel is probably the loser here, as the 10% extra DR that it offers doesn't offset the 60 second longer recast.

The same is true with shielding and temporary HP. In this game, temporary HP beats out shields. Why? You get healed for the amount of bonus HP that you gain. In order for the two to be truly equal, you'd have to lose that amount of HP when the effect wore off (potentially killing you in the process, à la Last Stand).

There are some things that you can trade off, though. Burst dps will always, always trump sustained dps in practical situations. Anything that causes an uptime loss, be it a mechanic, or be it an untargetable boss, will cause burst to pull ahead. If you're trying to make a dps check, you want burst, not sustain. So if you want a job to have a clear advantage in burst, it has to be the lowest dps on a target dummy. One of the many problems with WAR over the history of this game is that it consistently offers the best burst dps, best sustained dps, and an essential raid buff. Pick one. Not all three.

There are other things which either add flavour or give you creative solutions to problems. Cover is a pretty unique ability. It's not essential, and you can't really equate it to any other ability. But that's fine. You don't need a WAR or DRK equivalent. The same is true for lifesteal. This is why lines need to be drawn. You can have your super powerful Fell Cleave and crazy burst IR window. Just don't encroach on our turf.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Grimoire-M

To be honest one of the things that baffles me about SE is that they haven't taken advantage of the fact that in 8 Mans you can split the party into two completely cohesive 4-man groups with a tank, healer, and two DPS each.

---

Sounds similar to a variety of WoW boss encounters that lead you to having split groups.

Examples being:

Gothik the Harvester in Naxxramas, where there was a wall put up splitting your two groups and enemies spawned in one room and when killed their spirit went into the other room and spawned another enemy. So, one team was feeding mobs into the other team.

The Conclave of Wind in The Throne of the Four Winds required two bosses to be actively tanked and 3 targets to be DPSed and killed at the same time.

Galakras in Siege of Orgrimmar required a team to stay on the ground and deal with the siege of orcs and the mini-boss while another team needed to fight their way up 2 different towers and gain control of the cannons on top (Which then needed to both be used to bring the boss down out of the sky)

Spoils of Pandaria in Siege of Orgrimmar also required 2 separate teams to clear each side of the room. With the potential to have people use periodically spawning ropes to let them cross over to the other side to assist.

Gara'jal the Spiritbinder in Mogu'shan Vaults needed a team to go into the spirit world and deal with all the shadows that would build up over time (As well as a healer to manage health levels so that people could exit when needed, which was the same "Reach full health" mechanic as Manxome Molaa Ja Ja in Wanderer's Palace (Hard) ability Doom)

Perhaps not as detailed as your suggestion, but even outside it's glory days, WoW did quite often try and get people to have to split up into smaller groups in raids (That said, Tanking many of these encounters was boring AF since it was literally just "DPS this trash" or "Face tank this add that has no abilities" and "Taunt on X Stacks"... It's always so annoying that games just don't find a way to make the OT actually do something interesting... I think the most engaged I've ever been during OT duties was as a Druid in Cataclysm, but that was because Feral back then had the talents and gear to be 90% of a DPS when you went into cat form without losing out on any tanking proficiency in bear form...)

But yeah, a simple battle plan of having a main force go into the front of a particular engagement, while a secondary splinter group goes around the flank and takes out key targets is a thing that could be done for a dungeon/arena/raid. I mean, it's a pretty staple PvP plan and one I used a lot in Warhammer Online in the open world PvP, but never really gets utilized in PvE content and instead it's all about the full group just zerging onto a boss and that's it...

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lyth

There's a problem with partial homogenisation. The more similar that you make two abilities, the more their differences stand out.

The same is true with shielding and temporary HP. In this game, temporary HP beats out shields. Why? You get healed for the amount of bonus HP that you gain. In order for the two to be truly equal, you'd have to lose that amount of HP when the effect wore off (potentially killing you in the process, à la Last Stand).

---

Which is why balance of this kind of thing is more difficult than just giving classes the same skill for example as a Role Action.

You'd need to adjust values so that they provide a similar overall effect, even if on face value there's a huge discrepancy.

For example, in order for an AoE shield to be worth as much as an AoE health boost, it'd need to be at a higher % value (Mostly due to the fact that max health has additional benefits such as boosting certain skills like Upheaval as well as percentage healing such as Benediction. But also because max health and thus the heal, will always grant you that heal, while a shield that times out doesn't give you the full value - Which does mean that an excessive duration on a shield can help even things out)

Quote:

---

There are other things which either add flavour or give you creative solutions to problems. Cover is a pretty unique ability. It's not essential, and you can't really equate it to any other ability. But that's fine. You don't need a WAR or DRK equivalent. The same is true for lifesteal. This is why lines need to be drawn. You can have your super powerful Fell Cleave and crazy burst IR window. Just don't encroach on our turf.

---

Which is why it's essential to provide tanks with a baseline level of utility across the board that each one of them has, in order to allow for interesting mechanics to be used to keep a player engaged.

While also trying to ensure that each tank has some level of uniqueness in how it performs. Like my previous example of WAR doing more raw damage than the other 2 tanks, but PLD and DRK still being able to be equally useful for DPS checks by way of how they could enhance the DD's that will be able to burst/sustain DPS for them if using the suggested "PLD can buff damage and DRK can debuff enemy defenses" line of balancing (Of course, such things would need to scale with DPS stats in a comparatively equal manner to that of WAR's raw damage)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Izsha

They have actually done some of that back in the days when there was trash packs in raids like split groups in alexander, or multiple times in 24 man raids. They also have the party split in Alphascape 4 right now, or 'soft' splits anytime there are two bosses in a fight that self destruct. Someone mentioned being thrown for a tank swap, while not exact, they did have the interesting byakko tank swap among others.

If you look throughout the game there are many examples of basically everything suggested in this thread, and more but usually as 1 offs, or a watered down version to 'test' it in a single instance. SE is a conservative JP company. Western games tend to just boldy strike out in new directions and see what happens, and that leads to a lot of variety and creativity. But it also leads to complete and abject failures that piss off everyone. Sure nax had all this great stuff, but what happened before and after? Instead of sticking to what worked they tried a buncha new shiz and re-made their game 7 times over. Playing it safer is just the mirror of the same double edged sword. Balance is in the middle, but thats a company culture question more than 'right' answer.

---

I don't really count A12S as a split boss fight when Filter arbitrarily turns it from actually being that into O6S because the second boss is effectively turned into a temporary add due to how multi-dotting and snapshotting works in this game. Resonance could easily be replaced with a tether on both tanks and charges have been done before in Ravana and Twintania, so it's not a stretch to imagine them being done simultaneously via two sources.

And SE did stick to what worked, which is what got us into this mess. Because Gordias was rushed and the reaction was so bad, SE wound up removing design space they still had available to them on the basis of one bad raid tier, instead of looking at the problem more closely. I feel a lot of their design decisions are simply made in bad faith, but maybe that's just the community difference.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

Sadly, my speculation regarding tanks isn't a needed overhaul to what few mechanics they have. Instead, I suspect they pull back heavily on abilities like Shirk and Diversion while removing aggro dumps from Elusive, Lucid and Refresh purely because this will force tank stance/aggro combos—in turn weakening tanks. I just cannot imagine they will ever move towards less scripted mechanics because of the perception it would be too hard for casual players. Ironically, it's that design approach that makes tanks want to hyper focus on their DPS. As Lyth said, you've given them nothing else to care about. You can't optimize enmity. Either you're first, second for a specific mechanic, or someone's dead. You can't optimize mitigation since any damage that matters comes in predictable bursts. And you can't position properly for a mechanic since most bosses jump. All you can do is crit your Fell Cleaves.

---

I agree with this stance but man, oh man, the current decent tanks would REVOLT over this.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Deceptus

I agree with this stance but man, oh man, the current decent tanks would REVOLT over this.

---

It happened before, during the launch of Stormblood. Tanks were put back on STR, our accessories had none of it, causing tank players to go back and wear i270 accessories. That combined with the fact that tank mechanics in general (especially WAR) got gutted when stance dancing, and you had a tank player base that was right properly outraged.

Do that when also releasing two shiny, new, hotly anticipated DPS classes at the same time? Well the results spoke for themselves.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Deceptus

I agree with this stance but man, oh man, the current decent tanks would REVOLT over this.

---

And I will be among those tanks. Like I said, if we could optimize tank mechanics which also required tank stance, I'm all for the change. If I'm sitting in Defiance because daring to dip out for more than an Inner Release window causes the BRD to immediately rip makes for very uninteresting gameplay. I'm basically being told, "No. You can't optimize your DPS because we don't like you doing damage. Sit in tank stance like a good girl even if the extra mitigation/HP is completely unnecessary."

As others have already stated, tank stance just isn't fun in its current inception. It's the equivalent of healers getting Cleric Stance back but being unable to use it in eight man content. Healing wouldn't magically become more interesting. You'd just be standing around or contributing paltry DPS because the devs were too afraid (or stubborn) to innovate.

Something you have to be mindful of when insisting tanks and healers should just do this one thing and "suck it up." If enough players revolt, we all suffer. You'll have less tanks and healers because what enjoyment those players had was taken away. In fact, if healer DPS were nerfed significantly enough, you'd likely see statics moving towards a 1-1-5 comp; forcing healers to solo heal the entire fight. Why? Well, there isn't much point to bringing two healers when both will sit around idle for half the fight. And since every fight can be solo healed, well... you've now opened a new can of worms.

I just have a feeling that they are going to do 1 of 2 things.

1 - Buff other tanks to WAR level

2- Nerf WAR

Its that simple, I hope its the first option.

I just hope they learned their lesson from 3.x and 4.x with both the tank and healer jobs.

Before I start with my rant, a little nit-pick on the OP.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima

…the fact that Holy Spirit was more damage than WAR's Fell Cleave…

---

Holy Spirit never did more damage than Fell Cleave. In 4.0 Holy Spirit had 430 pot, Fell Cleave 500.
Requiescat increases damage by 20% – for WAR’s Fell Cleave we got „slashing“ (+10%), Storm’s Eye (+20% in 4.0), Deliverance dmg bonus +5%, and Berserk +30%. Deliverance alone was enough to outdamage a buffed Holy Spirit (516 vs 525 pot)
Holy Spirit is just „PLD’s Fell Cleave“. (Even more since 4.2 IR changes; 5 FC vs 5 HS)

I agree with everything else in the OP.

Others have already added accessories and Yoshida’s comment about tank damage.
But before get into that I want to point out the things SE actually did right in 4.x.

(TL;DR below.)

• Enmity: They changed some (dps) combos to stop this „my aggro combo has highest potency gain“ as OT. They also added Shirk, buffed Diverison, changed Refresh and Tactican (poor BRD+MCH still lost Quelling Strikes – 3.x Diversion)
  No more aggro ping pong games.

• Parry/Tenacity: Parry was useless for so many years. Tenacity still might not be the highest DPS gain, but that is fine. At least it is a DPS gain now, and significant at that. Mitigation bonus is a niche tho.

• PLD overhaul: Way overdue, not just potency-wise, but also rotation- and design-wise. imo PLD is the best designed tank right now.

…now the things they did wrong… oh boi…

• Accessories: This (big) topic probably exists since the launch of FFXIV. I just can’t understand how is it possible that SE still wasn’t able to fix such a simple problem?!
  If we ignore the 3.2 band-aid VIT+STR season, tanks always melded STR into their accessories (or VIT into their STR accessories)
  For other jobs you rarely saw them wearing VIT accessories melded with their main stat. Well, since 4.0 that isn‘t possible anymore, and every other role is melding secondary stats outside of Ultimate.
  But tanks… still melding STR as usual. That also means: DEX, INT and MND materia are USELESS, and they should be removed from the game, just as resistance and elemental materia got removed.
  But SE’s attempts to ‚fix‘ this problem just made it worse. They are just getting mired in it even further.
  And now we hear Yoshida say: „Tanks still deal too much damage.“ I. am. speechless…
  FYI: The best healer duo does about 9-10k combined in every Alphascape fight. The highest combined tank damage is about 10-12k.
  If tanks do too much damage, then so do healers. If they want reduce tank damage, adjust their power scaling, same with healers.
  I see those numbers, and I don’t understand where Yoshida gets this (dumb) idea that tanks deal too much. Just because it is ‚easier‘ to DPS as tank – and necessary – doesn’t mean they deal too much in comparison.
  There are also plenty of suggestions out there, on reddit, official forums in every language, other forum websites etc. It’s not like people wouldn’t give you ideas, but yours, SE… your solutions are just the worst.
  FIX your damn problem, SE!

• Direct Hit: Another problem SE created themselves. While it’s not a big one, it’s still there, shows bad design, and lazy work. DH should’ve been a role stat, just as Piety and Tenacity. But the team was too lazy to adjust the stats on tank (and healer) gear, thus we still have DH+Tenacity on gear on lvl 60 and below. And just because they were lazy to differ here, DH automatically became the best melded tank (and healer) stat after Crit… well, until they changed WAR’s IR…
  The team was too lazy to adjust old accessories, to lock them behind roles, just as it was too lazy to adjust the stats on old (tank and healer) gear in general.
  Now, I expect Piety to be removed in 5.0 with TP+MP-merge, too. If that’s the case, Tenacity has no place in this game either.

• Tenacity/(Self-)healing: This is a little of a nit-pick. Did you notice that probably every healing skill (including self-healing skills, like bloodbath or Inner Beast) have lower pot value than damage pot, once we hit 61+?
  Bloodbath’s tooltip in 3.x said „Converts 25%...“, since 4.x it says „Converts a portion…“. In reality those old 25% til 60 translate to ~20% on 70. Why is that a thing? It’s yet another example of bad design. Tenacity is there to reduce the damage taken, so it’s a buff, right? But: as tanks rely on (self-)healing the most, and it has been reduced, this design is actually a nerf. It doesn’t matter when you take 5 or 10% less damage thanks to Tenacity, you lose ~20% on healing compared to lvl 60 values.

• Role Actions: That change hit DRK the most, both gameplay and balance wise. This job lost Low Blow, Reprisal, and Dark Dance/Anticipation. Every action, alone or in combination, defined DRK’s gameplay. In HW DRK might not have been the best designed job ’cause they were forced into MT pos, but it was fun (at least for me). Stormblood changed DRK into a WAR wanna-be with a faster GCD (Bloodweapon), weaker DPS and mitigation, higher skill floor, and low reward to skill ratio.
  Role Actions „must-equip“ skills for every tank were Rampart, Provoke, Shirk, Reprisal, and either Awareness or Convalescence. WAR got Rampart for Foresight (+), PLD lost one (Awareness/Conva) and gained one (Reprisal). DRK on the other hand lost 2-3 actions, for nothing. Even now, after every tank has access to every Role Action, DRK suffers from action changes to Low Blow, Reprisal and Anticipation.

• DRK downfall: Role Actions, PLD overhaul, WAR re-design mid-expansion, missing synergy between the other tanks and healers, and the higher skill floor, just screwed DRK. It’s might not be unplayable, but still undesireable. Some might like the new gameplay, but most just don’t. Also, getting a major mitigation tool – TBN – only after reaching lvl 70, feels obstructively. Increased Dark Arts usage, double ressource-management, risky investment… I don’t think anyone would really WANT such a gamble job.
  (Btw SE changed SCH-Excogitation from „not-healing when not triggered“ to „heal anyway when duration runs out“. But TBN still doesn’t provide 50 Blood when not broken. That makes playing any duty overgeared a pain.)

• Tank stance(s): Still clunky for DRK and PLD, completely neglectable with Shadewalker. WAR is still king in this section.

TL;DR:
SE did good in changing enmity tools, parry to tenacity and PLD.
But they failed so many major design changes because of wrong decisions and half-assed work. DRK falls behind, Role Actions are a mess. Every change mid-expansion feels like/is a band-aid. Tanks are still the least played role, and if SE continue like this, this wouldn’t change.