Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

[Sarcatica]

To me, more than anything else so far up till now, DRK wins a huge margin. PLD can CLEAR A12S just fine, yes, they can but DRK can do the same and better. Call me whatever you like, but you can't deny the prowess of a DRK in speedruns. Literally every single speedrun attempt features DRK instead, PLD can't compete with DRK's damage. People like to use what's optimal and you can't deny that. PLD is far from that and again there is nothing much you can do. If you think PLD allows healers to DPS more, DRK can do it just the same and parses back that up. There is no distinction especially in speedruns where everyone has to chime in DPS to make it work. It's like people say WHM can clear just fine but AST is still strictly better while not sacrificing anything much. If you aren't fond of speedruns, then that's fine. But you have no power when literally all the parses at the top features DRK and AST heavily. I personally view speedruns as a good challenge to keep myself in the game since there is nothing else hard to do. What do you do when you have nothing to do?

PLD vs DRK in current Creator Savage:
1. PLD with Less DPS than DRK.
2. PLD don't have enough CDs to cycle in A12S, leading to taxing WAR to tank some tank busters, unlike DRK (DADM OP). PLD's overall A12S clear is about 10% of DRK's.
3. Whatever PLD can tank, DRK can tank. Good healers don't have problem keeping DRKs up.
4. Speedruns heavily favours DRK mostly due to PLD doing less DPS naturally and DRK can tank just as well, no tax on healers in a 0 death parse.
5. In a speedrun, you skip so many things that PLD's Sheltron on physical tank busters doesn't do as much and also for DRK basically sitting on extra CDs to survive.

Not to hate on PLD, I love PLD but in this situation where PLD is again in a spot where DRK heavily contests the MT slot, I have to do the job because that's optimal. You are forcing your team to adjust strats just because you are PLD, just like how Gordias treated PLD where I had my WAR stun legs and I go in to kill adds.

Like I mentioned before, MT has to be able to do both PLD/DRK well enough. Unable to do so will gimp your group to clear earlier. I have seen so many PLD mains in Tonberry admittedly struggling with A12S. Another MT I know also said "I feel so useless, I feel like getting carried by my team". My 2cents.

[Brannigan]

2. PLD don't have enough CDs to cycle in A12S, leading to taxing WAR to tank some tank busters, unlike DRK (DADM OP). PLD's overall A12S clear is about 10% of DRK's.

I mean it's not amazing but you do have at least a Rampart for everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBzS...ature=youtu.be

took this tonight just cause I wanted to paladin it. Played drk on the other floors for funsies. Paladin and DRK are really too similar so sometimes you just gotta accept that you'll have to switch.


Anyway to get back on topic if they want to close the gap between decent tanks and bad tanks they'll probably need to make tank stance way more required for actual tanking - probably by by buffing tank stances to like 40% (or equivalent) mitigation and increasing boss damage to match. Alternatively they could make the tank stance enmity (even more) required. That'd suck but it's one way to do it.

[Synestra]

snip

Timing Shelltron right by counting/remembering amount of enemy AA's before bighitter makes it so awesome CD imo! I hope we see more CD's like that in 4.0.

[Lyth]

Anyway to get back on topic if they want to close the gap between decent tanks and bad tanks they'll probably need to make tank stance way more required for actual tanking - probably by by buffing tank stances to like 40% (or equivalent) mitigation and increasing boss damage to match. Alternatively they could make the tank stance enmity (even more) required. That'd suck but it's one way to do it.

There are two 'gaps': a skill gap and a performance gap. The present stance design allows a tank who is less familiar with the damage patterns in a fight to give themselves an extra defensive cooldown by sacrificing their damage output. You sacrifice performance to tank something that is pitched at a higher skill level. It's a bit like having different difficulty settings.

If you make tank stance mandatory, or if you remove stances altogether, then you can't pitch the same fight to people of different skill levels. Failing a mitigation challenge results in a death or a wipe. Without the safety net of tank stance, a fight pitched at a higher difficulty becomes inaccessible to less experienced tanks, instead of merely lowering their dps. The fights then have to be pitched at an easier difficulty, to allow for players with inefficient cooldown usage to clear.

If you wanted to reduce the performance difference without running into this problem, you would need to reduce the damage penalty on tank stance. This would make it so that higher tank stance uptimes would reflect less poorly on your dps. I'm not advocating this, nor do I feel that this needs adjusting.

I would, however, like to see fights where it was more challenging, but still possible to stay out of stance, potentially through carefully timing short duration, short recast cooldowns like Sheltron (in addition to correctly managing long recast cooldowns, though: if you can mitigate everything with just a short recast move alone, then it defeats the purpose of having a cooldown rotation). I'd like to see fights that cater to a broader range of skill levels, rather than a narrower range. The skill gap is a good thing - it gives players more room to grow. The only requirement is that the content remains accessible (i.e. narrower performance gap) so that novice tanks have the opportunity to do so. There doesn't need to be a compromise, as long as both needs are met.