Tank adjustments we can agree on?

[Nektulos-Tuor]

I partly agree with you on the skill speed/spell speed issue, but instead of changing spells to work with skill speed, I think skill speed and spell speed should just be removed and replaced with just plain speed.. It's not like many classes use both magic and weaponskills other than paladin and dark knight, and like you said it's just annoying to have spells on a job with no spell speed gear.

I wouldn't want healing abilities to get buffed by healing increase moves, because that would also mean they'd get nerfed by healing decrease moves.
In other words no more lustrate/equilibrium/Tetragrammation through infirmity or ramuh's overcharged lightning debuff.

I also don't agree dark dance should be changed, evasion should be changed to be viable (30% evasion should mean you have a 30% chance of dodging an attack) since evasion isn't a stat we can see or change outside of a few cooldowns anyway and evasion fits with DRK because you can dodge magic.

Tempered will needs more adjustment than what you suggest in my eyes. For its 3 min cooldown it should have far more application than what it does, in my opinion it should work more like fealty from ffxi, adding a warden's paean effect for the duration (preventing all enfeebles still including knockback and draw in) prevent interrupts like you suggest and keep its current effect of removing heavy and bind.

I don't agree on removing wrath from RI and vengeance, cause like you said it's a part of WAR's style, having to know whether you'll need the defences soon or if you should use them for quicker wrath for more offense.

As for an offensive spell for pld, I'd personally be perfectly happy with banish as a clemency counterpart, high MP cost high damage spell possibly with 25y range for pulling very distant targets without provoke.

I think Tempered Will should Drain your Mana.

Makes you unstoppable and drains your Mana, no CD or Reuse.

Maybe a small autoattack buff like 25 potency for every auto-attack. Maybe 10% attack speed. Maybe 5% damage reduction.


What I mean is, can't be knocked back or down or anything.

[Disc]

stuff

Assuming 15% parry before Dark Dance & 8 or more incoming attacks during, Reprisal has a 100% chance to proc.(Not really, but if your Reprisal fails to proc you may want to get checked for tumors) I do agree that single hit "high damage" tank-busters are a waste at this point. They're forced to weaken them to levels where WAR has better mitigation than either PLD or DRK due to HP buffers, or the job(PLD/DRK) with the weakest mitigation can't survive it. They should bring back mechanics from Turn 13 & Turn 2 if they want to keep this resistance split. I particularly like multi-hit abilities that go beyond a single IBs duration.

[Cabalabob]

I do agree that single hit "high damage" tank-busters are a waste at this point. They're forced to weaken them to levels where WAR has better mitigation than either PLD or DRK due to HP buffers, or the job(PLD/DRK) with the weakest mitigation can't survive it. They should bring back mechanics from Turn 13 & Turn 2 if they want to keep this resistance split. I particularly like multi-hit abilities that go beyond a single IBs duration.

My favourite tank busters so far are swarm and bahamut's claw. They make moves like bulwark worth using as your chance to proc a block is so high you're basically bound to block at least one of the hits. I agree I'd like to see more moves like this in the future where it's less damage over a longer period rather than all the damage in 1 second, making IB less effective and bulwark and dark dance more effective.

[eagledorf]

I particularly like multi-hit abilities that go beyond a single IBs duration.

I'm torn on these. The magic one in A4 Savage is frankly annoying and it seems like the devs bent over backwards to make a mechanic that disadvantages WAR and caters to DRK (WAR can tank these, of course, but they perform so bad compared to DRK or PLD that you would never want them to).

I would rather the damage on the tank always be high. Bahamut Prime did enough sustained damage that having a cooldown that lasts a long time (from Megaflare through the last Flare Breath) was a significant advantage, yet a WAR could still have IB on demand for every actual tank buster if you wanted a WAR to tank it. In that case, each toolkit had its strengths and weaknesses, but neither tank was overwhelmingly bad.

Right now an extended physical mechanic would probably favor WAR because of Raw Intuition and then PLD second with the right shield.

Assuming 15% parry before Dark Dance & 8 or more incoming attacks during, Reprisal has a 100% chance to proc

Well, it has a 98% chance to proc. That means every 50 times or so you should expect it to fail to proc. The chance of this happening is higher than the chance of getting crit twice in a row, but it seems like that happens all the time.

Right now Reprisal is used whenever it procs, it has over 60% uptime and no endgame mechanic actually requires you have it up so you just don't worry about it falling off too soon and use it ASAP for the DPS.

However, let's say you want to do T5 in i70 gear again, what would your cooldown rotation look like on DRK?

Keep in mind, it was impossible for a PLD to survive Death Sentence without extra mitigation even with Halone and Foresight up. Let's say that you just make your rotation flexible so that you use Foresight right away when Reprisal procs to extend it. For example:

Shadowskin->Foresight+Reprisal (heals carry me)->Shadow Wall->Shadowskin->Living Dead->Foresight+Reprisal (carry me)->Shadowskin->Carry me for realz

This rotation actually isn't bad at all. Let's compare to WAR:

IB->IB->IB...

or PLD

Sheltron->Sheltron->Sheltron...

Now imagine DS was magic damage:

DRK: DM->SS->DM->SW->DM->SS->DM->LD->DM->SS...

WAR: IB->IB->IB...

PLD: R->S->HG->R->Stoneskin+Convalescence (carry me)->carry me even moar->restart


There's no mechanic like this in the level 60 content, but the point is they can never make content like that again because of how they've boxed in PLD and DRK. Every tank buster, physical or magical, has to either come so far apart you can have a million buffs for it or be so weak the tanks can just AFK in DPS stance.

To be honest, it's not a huge deal as long as they keep designing content so that all the tanks can handle it, but it's not a very good approach imo.

[Disc]

Well, it has a 98% chance to proc. That means every 50 times or so you should expect it to fail to proc. The chance of this happening is higher than the chance of getting crit twice in a row, but it seems like that happens all the time.

Negative Ghost Rider. 15% Parry from base & gear(low estimate with current parry heavy gear) + 30% from Dark Dance = 45% Parry rate, or 11/20 chance of failure to parry on each attack. If we assume enemies have base GCD for auto-attack rate & no extra abilities that's 8 attacks during the duration of Dark Dance.

(11/20)^8 = 0.00837; or 0.0837% chance of failure on all eight attacks in a row.
lim x→0 for (11/20)^x = 1; Chances of failure go up exponentially with each attack you can't parry
lim x→∞ for (11/20)^x = 0; Chances of failure go down exponentially with each extra attack

This also does not account for the final seconds before the ability goes off at base parry rate, if you popped it early knowing that you could store it for a couple seconds. Also does not include physical abilities such as Plummet.

Right now an extended physical mechanic would probably favor WAR because of Raw Intuition and then PLD second with the right shield.

If it was 8+ they would at least be required to pop off two IBs in a row, which would substantially reduce their DPS just to be on par with PLD/DRK base mitigation. If it was mixed damage they would lose out on mitigation during magic portions while PLD still got their Sheltron mitigation.

Turn 9 & 13 are great examples of this.

Ravensbeak - Large upfront physical damage you can parry, 13 seconds later you're hit with large magic damage.

Flatten + Flarebreath - One massive physical attack, followed by an increasing number of magical attacks.

Akh Morn - Large magic attacks increasing in number/duration. Early clears saw well beyond the realm of safety for IB & Holmgang, you used a PLD for massive mitigation & Hallowed near the end.

However, let's say you want to do T5 in i70 gear again, what would your cooldown rotation look like on DRK?

I would put a Salted Earth down and walk into Conflag.

[eagledorf]

Snip

No, I'm assuming that future bosses will continue to have a 10% crit rate or so (for example, Living Liquid and the Manipulator and dolls seem to be somewhere between 5% and 10%, though these numbers are with Awareness being used so the base crit rate is probably a bit higher than you'll see in any real run) and currently critical damage cannot be parried.

So 15%+30% means you actually have a 40.5% chance to parry a given blow (0.45*0.9). That gives you 59.5%^8=>1.6% chance you'll fail to parry 8 blows in a row. With a 5% crit rate it should be about 1% chance. Of course Twintania doesn't crit at all so she's actually a bit of a special case.

Every other Dark Dance, you can fix this with Awareness. Most bosses auto every 3 seconds (Oppressor, Living Liquid, Phoenix...) so Awareness can last you through 5 autos if you time it well.

Actually, if you look at a typical 20s period in most boss fights, you only get around 5 autos because they stop for cast bars (Sluice or something) so a well timed Awareness can entirely eliminate crits. These days they also seem to like gimmicks like crit phases (the bow stance for Shiva or the hand phase for A3S) so you may not necessarily choose to stack them like this, but it's an option.

One thing I will point out to play devil's advocate is that there is also a chance the tank buster itself will be parried if it's physical for 20% reduction so there's an extra little cushion against RNG at the end.

I would put a Salted Earth down and walk into Conflag.

You can't do that except in the second phase. More realistically, you would OT and let a WAR or PLD MT or do tank swaps if you have double DRK.

[Disc]

No, I'm assuming that future bosses will continue to have a 10% crit rate or so (for example, Living Liquid has just under that and the Manipulator and dolls seem to be somewhere between 5 and 10%, though these numbers are with Awareness being used so it's probably actually a bit higher.

You kinda got me, I didn't bother to count crit rate into it. However, going to need some citation on your crit rate. My records put Living Liquid & most other raid boss auto-attacks at 2%. You may be thinking of your outgoing or the healers crit rate. Other than that, Awareness will cover every other Dark Dance & Abilities cannot crit.

You can't do that except in the second phase. More realistically, you would OT and let a WAR or PLD MT or do tank swaps if you have double DRK.

At i70 with a WAR OT I would just do tank swaps after each death sentence to boost healer & tank DPS. I'm not disagreeing with your point that both WAR & PLD would handle it better than DRK. The tank-busters I favor were developed in Second & Final coils. I just wanted to point out the actual benefit of Dark Dance, you went into the realm of hyperbole describing DRKs weakness to physical.

[eagledorf]

My crit rates come from a place where you can see...ff logs

Oppressor has a very low crit rate, but if you look across the fights for enough parses most of them are between 5 and 10% (it can be hard to judge, but I'm pretty confident it's in that range and Awareness should have...what like a 20% uptime between two tanks if you're doing swaps?) As you say, the weaponskills can't crit and the magic and cast-bars can't be parried so it varies a bit for the fight.

As for DRK and physical and PLD and magic...assuming Reprisal is up every time for a minute just so we can leave that argument behind us, just consider for a moment.

For physical busters, PLD's rotations are literally exactly the same as a DRK, except with 30% damage reduction on top of DRK's mitigation every 30s, 10% on top of that every time you use Sentinel instead of Shadow Wall, plus a better Convalescence and the ability cast a shield on themselves. WAR can have IB and Path every time, plus one of Raw Intuition, Thrill, or Vengeance every 30 seconds and they can Holmgang like 5 times in a 13 minute fight (compared to 2 HG and 3 LD respectively).

For magic busters, PLD will just run out of cooldowns if they occur too frequently (A1S, for example). The rest of their tookit can help the healers carry them successfully once it happens, but the PLD's ability to handle it by themselves is gone. DRK is just like a PLD with a with an extra cooldown that allows them to handle them easily. WAR doesn't change from physical except for the loss of Raw Intuition.

I'm not saying that there's an issue right now. SE was very careful not to make any damage on the tanks threatening at all so it doesn't matter. I'm just saying there's enough discrepancy in the design of the tanks that they can't make a mechanic that pushes the limits of any one tank anymore without making it virtually impossible for at least one of the other tanks. A huge magic attack every 60-120s that's hard for a DRK to survive would ruin PLD and a huge physical attack every 30-60 seconds that's hard for a PLD to survive would ruin DRK. There's no getting around that fact.

WAR's only real weakness in all this is SE can make it awkward for them if they set out to make that their goal in life by making extended magic tank busters. They can adapt to any other situation very well (extended physical tank buster, physical tank buster, magic tank buster) and they can even handle a long magic one quite well if you factor in Infuriate and how short their cooldowns are. PLD, on the other hand, is extremely disadvantaged with magic tank busters that come too frequently with only a small advantage over WAR for the other three situations. Likewise, DRK has a fairly substantial disadvantage compared to WAR for both frequent physical tank busters and extended physical tank busters with a minor advantage for frequent magic busters and an admittedly reasonably big advantage for extended magic busters.

I think the ideal is for everybody to be ok at everything and good at one or two things. Right now everybody has one or two things they're actually bad at in comparison with the possible exception of WAR

[Disc]

My crit rates come from a place where you can see...ff logs

Oppressor has a very low crit rate, but if you look across the fights for enough parses most of them are between 5 and 10% (it can be hard to judge, but I'm pretty confident it's in that range and Awareness should have...what like a 20% uptime between two tanks if you're doing swaps?) As you say, the weaponskills can't crit and the magic and cast-bars can't be parried so it varies a bit for the fight.

FFLogs is a pain to navigate. Your link is a small sample size that puts it at roughly 5~8%.

Some mergers as DRK.
A1S Oppressor: 3,415 auto-attacks; 3% crit(awareness with Dark Dance before missile)
Living Liquid: 7,044 auto-attacks; 3% crit rate(awareness saved until double hands to ensure up at start of DPS check)
It's possible the difference in crit rate is caused by the lack of value some tanks place on Awareness.

I'm just saying there's enough discrepancy in the design of the tanks that they can't make a mechanic that pushes the limits of any one tank anymore without making it virtually impossible for at least one of the other tanks.

We agree on that, I have stated so twice already. This is the third time in four posts I'm telling you that I agree with you.

[eagledorf]

Hm, interesting. I know that my own rate of crits received for Living Liquid is much higher than yours (In the last two months, it's never been under 5% on the PLD and it's usually around 7% on the WAR) and I use Awareness for the first time at about the same time (I use it when the hand phase first starts because he crits for like 13k then, but either way we only get one before the add phase) so it should have similar uptime.

Actually, it should be up even more for me since it lasts 10 seconds longer on PLD.