Thoughts on Tanks so far in Endwalker

With an almost silly amount of threads on DRK, I thought it would be cool for players to also get to know how tanks are doing in general, me included!

How are the tanks performing for you guys? In levelling and end game.
How is their:

Damage
Sustain
Mitigation
Feel
Rotation

Would really love to hear everyones thoughts.

I personally have only touched WAR so far in any great depth. It is so good, the healing is madness, more a less solod last boss tower of zot without a healer, because they died, and still kept up the remaining dps. Love WARs.

Hmm, I am no theory crafter and I would be lying if I said I pay too much attention to numbers, but my PLD has been amazing. Damage feels pretty good though again, can't talk about the numbers. Amazing sustain and mitigation with Holy Sheltron, heals on your magic phase and the amazing utility of Divine Veil. Overall it feels good and the rotation is really intuitive, though I admit, I find the skill spam in both melee and magic phase in the form of Atonement, Holy and now Confiteor to still be rather boring as the fights drags on, but that's just me, I am just not a fan of attacks like Delirium and Inner release and PLD has just too much of it.

DRK dmg is good but defensive doesn't feel much of a step up from SHB.

PLD single target damage may be a little low. I did a Trial 2 extreme prog group (no spoilers) the other day on my PLD, and I was consistently about 10% behind the GNB. This is anecdotal for sure, but I don't remember ever feeling that far behind in ShB. PLD AoE damage is absolutely ridiculous. I melt enemy packs in dungeons.

The fact I have so little to say about WAR is not out of disinterest, but satisfaction.

AOE combo putting up the buff is a great change. I still don't think making Onslaught into a free, charge-based gap closer was the only way, but it's still better than it was before. Inner Release being on a stack is a delight. Self-healing BW/NF being a flat value is, overall, for the better.

Talking about the new tools: Bloodwhetting is delicious, and a proud member of the WAR's legacy of legendary healing. Primal Rend has a hefty animation lock, but complimented with the fact we have a lot of flexibility on when and where we use it.

How could it be improved? Well, maybe the healing from NF/BW could be stack-based, but divorced from the mitigation. I LOVE Orogeny's animation... That said, maybe the damage could be increased to 200 or something, so that it's worth using over Upheaval for 2 targets, just so we get to use it more. I am afraid, as it is, I won't get to use it as much as I like with how much content we have 1-2 targets at a given time.

All in all at peace with my favourite job. Will need to spend more time with the other three to formulate a fuller opinion.

Why does there need to be spoilers? "One of the fights" etc.. Would do fine, but thanks for that...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Navnav

Why does there need to be spoilers? "One of the fights" etc.. Would do fine, but thanks for that...

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Was an accident but honestly, if you are on these forums you are begging to be spoiled. A slip of a type or anything can happen. It has been long enough that if you are not that far along you best just avoid ff 14 topics in general until you are caught up. I've run across countless threads that reference a spoiler or two. I hope they do look over the crazy self healing tanks have right now.

All is forgiven.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Navnav

With an almost silly amount of threads on DRK, I thought it would be cool for players to also get to know how tanks are doing in general, me included!

How are the tanks performing for you guys? In levelling and end game.
How is their:

Damage
Sustain
Mitigation
Feel
Rotation

Would really love to hear everyones thoughts.

I personally have only touched WAR so far in any great depth. It is so good, the healing is madness, more a less solod last boss tower of zot without a healer, because they died, and still kept up the remaining dps. Love WARs.

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Despite the horrendous 5000+ queues I was able to level up DRK to 87 through 11pm-5am PST windows using Daily Roulettes and MSQ and without mentioning any spoilers my impression on DRK so far is it performs decent enough provided you have a healer that is at least Trust Healer competency and willingness to quickly heal you.

And when I say "decent enough", I mean not dying and wiping more than once on dungeons. DRK's HP Sustain rests on 1-2-3 Single Target Combo and Abyssal Drain that is usable once per 60s and requires at least 4+ mobs to be meaningful. Like I have to really save it until my health drops below 50% to use it because once it's on CD, you aren't going to get another chance to use it again in fight and all you have are TBN HP Bubble and Reduced Damage Taken Mitigation to slow your damage intake and all that lost HP still needs to get healed up.

I always find myself going 1-2-3 Single Target Combo to restore HP when Abyssal Drain is on CD on 3+ mobs instead of the usual 2 Pre-EW. Everything seems more painful after this stat squash and the amount of incoming damage even on synced down content seems overwhelming even with a dedicated healer spamming heals, more so than I remembered. So on both current level and synced down content I have to 1-2-3 Soul Eater Single Target Combo spam on 3+ mobs occasionally to maintain some HP Sustain because defensive options aren't going to restore that lost HP.

What happens in mid fight on mob packs while rotating through Reduced Damage Taken Mitigations is I usually hold off on that Abyssal Drain until TBN is like few seconds away from being ready because that's when 25% Max HP worth of damage intake stops and I get breathing room, Hit that Abyssal Drain to get some immediate HP back and hit TBN ASAP. 1-2-3 Soul Eater Combo for a bit of HP & Mana/Blood restore while using oGCD Flood of Shadows or Salted Earth for maintaining mob pack aggro. Also helps to pray that heals from healer will be incoming soon... I hope.

It would be nice if the 2 hit AOE Combo that restores mana/blood would have some healing potency added to it like 200 Potency at least per Combo so I can stick with using just the AOE Combo on 3+ mobs without losing out on what little HP Sustain DRK has. Single Target HP Sustain is somewhat bearable with just the 1-2-3 Soul Eater Combo because it's 300 Heal Potency per Combo but I'd be holding back if I didn't say it feels like shit.

On the Damage aspect, it doesn't feel all that different from what I'm use to, which is to say DRK is really quick, controllable front loaded burst with all those oGCD Edge/Flood of Shadow, Carve & Split, Salted Earth & Darkness pop etc and Bloodspiller/Quietus for GCD blood spender, feels fine to me for most part. I'm satisfied so far with DRK Damage.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Navnav

I personally have only touched WAR so far in any great depth. It is so good, the healing is madness, more a less solod last boss tower of zot without a healer, because they died, and still kept up the remaining dps. Love WARs.

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You've explained my issue on tanks right now thank you

At least for Pld and War so far, as a healer I'm not forced to use a gcd heal in the middle of big pulls (or even leave some of my ogcd heals unused so I could save it for the next pack), which is good.

I'm wondering if tank busters will hit a good deal harder in savage than they currently do in these extreme trials. Tanks and healers have so much mitigation they can pile on, with short cooldowns, that it's barely making a dent in the HP pool. The DRK I was with the other day even asked that I stopped using Intervention because half the time tank busters weren't breaking his TBN.

I guess we'll find out in a few weeks.

I can only speak on DRK as it is the one I have capped and have been playing. My damage output feels very good but when it comes to my defense I do think it dips below what I think it should be. Even popping my various cooldowns at appropriate intervals I do get a twinge of nerves when I see my health dip. Even popping TBN doesn’t solve that, and I can’t say it is the healers. I can see them, giving it all they’ve got, for the most part, to keep my going. Sustaining oneself on DRK doesn’t feel good compared to what I’ve seen on PLDs and WARs when I’ve had to heal for them.

Defensively GNB is awesome with stacks of Aurora and Heart of Corundum. I too have also been able to stay alive and kill bosses from the lvl90 dungeons with a healer perma dead. My only issue with GNB is the forced requirement of the three cartridges needed for every burst, every minute. From Dungeons to EX Trials this feels clunky and feels more like a speed bump in what used to be a very smooth rotation. My temporary solution would be to reduce the cost of Double Down to 1 or 0 cartridges(there have been discussion about maybe make the requirements for Double Down a separate, additional gauge), and increase the duration of NM to roughly 21-22sec to include the Hypervelocity following an ending Burst Strike.

Paladin FEELS really good to play a lot of issues have been improved, his single target damage is low , very low compared to the other tanks , that makes it feel bad, very bad. Hopefully a small potency increase soon.

From what I've tested with a friend this is what we we've come up with.

WAR:
Exceptional AoE Sustain, Okay Single Target sustain.
Great AoE Damage, Good Single Target Damage.
Buttons feel Satisfying to use.

PLD:
Great AoE Sustain, Good Single Target Sustain
Good AoE Damage, Bottom of the pack for Tank damage, still better then Healers.
Buttons feels good but is still strict on rotation for maximum performance

GNB:
Okay AoE Sustain, Great Single Target Sustain
Great AoE Damage, Great Single Target Damage
Buttons are fun to press but now you have to account for Double Down for No Mercy Window. Can feel good or bad depending on the player.

DRK:
Horrible AoE Sustain, Horrible Single Target Sustain. Shrugs off TBs but needs to be baby sat for eating boss Autos.
Great AoE Damage, Amazing Single Target Damage
Buttons still feel clunky and sometimes moves don't line up with Buffs. Having AD and CnS share CD feels bad. Has a very long downtime before they get to burst again and their burst phase can be hectic.

I still haven't finished EW, so I don't know about endgame trials but... Playing a PLD feels amazing. Single-target feels kinda low as I've seen by questing, but AoE is quite better than before. You also have lots of tools at your disposal for whatever you want to do, and sustain during the magical phase is good *(albeit lacking during physical). Combo is also free-flow-ier than before; maximizing it is easy and if you screw it up, due to the long timers on Atonement and Requiescat, you can change things around without much pressure. The shareable regen on Sheltron / Intervention is fun to use, and Divine Veil healing too makes it good even if you whiff it by exploding it after the raidwide AoE.

That said, the only thing that bothers me is Clemency cannot be used during physical due to stopping combos, and neither during magical because it consumes requiescat charges and gives nothing in return. I did make a threat about changing something on that, but no responses, so maybe I'm alone in that. Would give it guaranteed crit so it can recover the power it had in the last expansion without letting it reach numbers as stupid as they were then.

I like drk being highest dps, because I think it should for how it lacks in both personal cds and raid wide mitigations and living die is hot garbage unless you planned it out for specific strats. That being said...they should REALLY make dark missionary works for both physical and magical damage, drk does deserve a bit of love in the party util department, and blood weapons really should really be changed to be like delirium, and maybe give some life drain effect on blood weapon....please...? Or have some sustain for bloodspiller or quietus perhaps....?

That being said I think pld feels like it's a bit behind in damage. In my opinion, no amount of utilities or sustain pld got justify the dps loss when things like War sustain and GNB exists. I am not saying pld need to have as high dps as GNB or DRK, but I think PLD should at least have around the same damage potential as warrior does if not slightly higher. As they are both tanks with great toolkits specialized in two different things. PLD have the best party utils and War have the best personal util/sustain, so i don't see why pld shouldn't have at least the same dps as WAR does, hopefully we get a slight potency boost for pld.

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Originally Posted by Keagian

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Not sure why you make it sound like PLD and GNB have superior single-target sustain compared to WAR when they simply do not (unless you want to count Clemency).

I gave up on tanks in ShB, and I saw no difference made to them for EW. (Or at least nothing that matters to me) I did start up PLD, to give it a shot, just before EW, but im not sold on it being that much better yet.
I may end up playing it out of boredom, when im done with DPS jobs, but still want to level something up. (rip Healers/Tanks)

I should mention im long past bored of DPS jobs, since i really dislike DPS as a role to begin with. But I'd rather play them by a long shot. Currently I just log in for MSQ, and I cant really get myself to keep playing past MSQ, because i really dislike the DPS role, but i absolutely hate tanks/healers that much more.

Warrior is my main and the other tanks are 80 still.

So here goes in the form of grades.

Damage: A

Warrior has always been a great contributor to damage, and I feel they aren't slouches in this department. Inner Release now being on a 60 sec timer, Upheavel no longer using Beast Gauge, and no longer having to cram in onslaught anymore really makes the warrior opener just pretty straight forward. Primal Rend is strong, Inner Chaos is strong, Fell Cleave is still strong. I just don't think it can compete with GNB for top tier. Maybe a toss up between 2nd spot with some good DRK players.

Sustain: S

Personally, I have always felt warriors near impossible to kill. With the sustain they have now they just simply don't want go down easily. A warrior in the hands of a good player they live longer, but in the hands of a GREAT player....they just flat out live...and then solo the boss. Just the fact that thrill of battle adds to your HP AND heals you, AND increases incoming HP + Equalibrium on a 60 CD, with a regen effect now. And don't get me started on Bloodwhetting! Bloodwhetting + AOE = God Mode, and it's pretty good against single target. Shake it off is also incredibly good now that it's a heal. Warrior sustain is top Tier

Mitigation: C+

Warrior just don't have that much to mitigate like the other tanks. Vengeance and Bloodwhetting are about it, outside rampart which all tanks get. I suppose you could throw in Holmgang also since it's on such a short CD, and it's 10sec now. I use Holmgang quite often. Vengeance is strong, but so is nebula, and sentinel. The only difference being that Vengeance is great in AOE situations as it also damages, not much, but it's something. Besides warriors don't need mitigation when they can just heal themselves.


Feel: A-

Warrior has felt comfy to play since 5.3. It's just a simple tank to play and it's also very satisfying to put into practice. Nothing beats that Fell Cleave sound, and gives me that shot of dopamine every time I hear it. Primal Rend is one of those skills i'm back and forth on. Should I use it....should I hold onto it for a gap closer? So that may be the ONLY skill that i'm on the fence about. Warrior is still the Wombo Combo master, and it just feels good to play.


Rotation: C+

The rotation is just....there. Nothing to hard, but nothing to easy. And I kind of like that for a tank. Gives me time to think about other things like mechanics rather then a ability is coming off of CD. Compared to the other tanks Warrior does have the simplest rotation, but that's also kind of liberating in a way. It's very run of the mill and straightforward. Some might like, and some might hate how slow it is. I think it's just right.