Tank adjustments we can agree on?

[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