If You Were A Class/Job Designer...

[Shurrikhan]

The only reason you have to look at for why BB or any threat combo should never be the highest potency is that trading enmity for damage is always a skill decision while never having to trade one for the other is in fact quite the opposite.

You can make as many long winded, technical post as you like, but there is around exactly zero reasons for only one tank to always have zero threat maintenance in comparison to other tanks.

Except BB is only the highest potency combo when slashing is already up; that already limits it to every other combo. Outside of a recent SE, the WAR must still choose between enmity, damage, or mitigation (or in sequence, between dmg-enmity, dmg-mitigation, or dmg-enmity-mitigation). How is a DRK doing its maximum damage with its mitigation combos (self-heal or magic down) any less powerful? BB may put out enmity at a lesser penalty, but DRK also has considerably less need to even use its enmity combo. Why the fixation on the pairing of damage and enmity combos specifically, especially given that any skill in the enmity change can be remodded, as can any tank stance?

[Instrumentality]

Except BB is only the highest potency combo when slashing is already up; that already limits it to every other combo. Outside of a recent SE, the WAR must still choose between enmity, damage, or mitigation (or in sequence, between dmg-enmity, dmg-mitigation, or dmg-enmity-mitigation). How is a DRK doing its maximum damage with its mitigation combos (self-heal or magic down) any less powerful? BB may put out enmity at a lesser penalty, but DRK also has considerably less need to even use its enmity combo. Why the fixation on the pairing of damage and enmity combos specifically, especially given that any skill in the enmity change can be remodded, as can any tank stance?

I can't imagine why mitigation entered a conversation about threat maintenance, but, to answer your question, Warrior never has to do it. Paladin and Dark Knight do. It is explicitly unbalanced/unfair for the situation to exist where one tank literally does not ever have to do something that the other two tanks do while also decreasing the performance of the other two tanks.


You lose something when you do your best combo sets as a Paladin/Dark Knight, and that's bad, dumb, and easily correctable.

To be fair they could also go the other way and just buff RoH/Power Slash to be more potency than their other combos.

[Shurrikhan]

I can't imagine why mitigation entered a conversation about threat maintenance, but, to answer your question, Warrior never has to do it. Paladin and Dark Knight do. It is explicitly unbalanced/unfair for the situation to exist where one tank literally does not ever have to do something that the other two tanks do while also decreasing the performance of the other two tanks.


You lose something when you do your best combo sets as a Paladin/Dark Knight, and that's bad, dumb, and easily correctable.

To be fair they could also go the other way and just buff RoH/Power Slash to be more potency than their other combos.

I'm saying you're looking at just one part of what makes a tank useful, and treating it out of the context or balance of the rest. You know, the context noted by the quote you were responding to, to which I in turn replied...

You could say the same thing about DRK's being able to keep up its mitigation at almost 0 dps cost (just have to blow DA-SEs like WAR needs to maintain Main and SE). You could say the same for how a PLD can still hold threat via Savage Blade while spamming a 350 potency attack. You could say the same for how a DRK pretty well needs Power Slash (outside of a no-NIN opener) to leave Grit sooner, otherwise able to maintain threat simply off its higher-potency mitigation and absorb combos. There's a certain amount of parity to be desired, but there is no hard rule to say that the highest damage combo cannot be enmity-modded, nor that preventing that will in any way achieve general balance; it's more complicated than that.

Take buffing RoH, for instance. As much as I would like that, that'd be up to the whole mitigation of Storm's Path, at 20 greater potency, with only 20 less potency or 15% less base enmity than Butcher's Block. Are tanks really so enmity-starved that enmity generation so outweighs mitigation? Are tanks really so much more meat-shields than a more general modifier for raid damage taken vs. outgoing (wherein holding the enemy's attention is just the start)?

Power Slash on the other hand could make use of a buff, perhaps--not because it's 10 potency less than the mitigation combo (whereas a WAR loses 40 potency for his), but because of the almost half a DA's worth of mana not generated therein, likely costing closer to 60+ potency. Were both mana costs and Syphon Strike's mana generation reduced, this would be less of a difference. Were Power Slash's or Hard Slash's damage increased this would be less the case.