Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

[Shurrikhan]

As I've said before, that depends on how everything else is tuned. If you take away stances, you have to adjust every other ability because you're likely to bake in enmity from your tank stance to certain skills and the damage from your DPS stance in other skills. You'd also have to introduce some way of increasing mitigation (assuming the increase is not passive), which in practical terms means Halone/Delirium/Storm's Path would definitely have to be equalized (tank gameplay would have to point to "use this combo to increase your mitigation" instead of each having a different debuff attached).
I can give you two that I suggested in a thread a while ago: A skill that restores HP whenever you take damage, and a skill that converts damage taken from the next hit into HP. Problem is, and I suspect I'm right on this one, those weren't given to DRK because of the overlap between WAR and DRK when it comes to drains. And the devs were too busy hitting CTRL+C => CTRL+V while tabbing between DRK and PLD. In fact, if WAR ends up getting a version of Umbral Shield (the first of my examples) in 4.0, I'm going to laugh and somehow not be surprised.

I don't honestly see how either of those differ from general mitigation or self-healing except unlike mitigation it doesn't increase your eHP, as you'd have to survive the initial blow for some of its damage to be reverted/refunded. At least there'd be healing threat generated? Though that could always end up applied eventually to all mitigation tanks do...

A tank that increases their EHP via increased health pool and increased healing received shouldn't have half of that system (the increased healing received part) sine wave with resource consumption. Sure, some might find it thrilling to have their chances of survival go down the toilet with some bad luck or missed timing between themselves and the healer, but tanking and healing hinge on reliability. This is why some but not all RNG-dependent mechanics work for either.
I can admit I looked at the design on paper back then. I didn't bother to finish leveling MRD => WAR until after 2.2. And all your comment here tells me is that the problems were already brewing if that was indeed the case.

I definitely see what you mean there. I could have gone either way on the change myself, but only if 2.0 base was buffed, e.g. had a larger % healing taken increase at maximum and Inner Beast itself were stronger to compensate (such as by the critical chance and healing received bonuses being tripled on Wrath skills themselves), or it rebuilt to 5 stacks more quickly.

The way you worded this is giving me flashbacks of the blood tank vs blink tank thing from FFXI. A tank is there to take damage, and even if all tanks take damage, you can still make them different from each other with how the damage is handled.

Except (and you can blame WoW for my thoughts on the first) I'd imagine those two concepts are much more distinct than our three tanks. Heck, it sounds like one's a meat-shield and the others a kiter, which would have very real scaling differences, differences in how the tank MUST be played, and more. Putting similar mitigation systems on each under different guises that do not bring out different gameplay—the Paladin's shield, which is *presently* RNG but CD enhanceable, the DRK's sword, which is also *presently* RNG and CD enhanceable but with some reverse-synergy to affect it perhaps, and the WAR's passive chest-hair / inner beast armor (which I can only hope is different enough to at least be more largely output-based)—don't sound nearly so distinct.

Does the rate of damage taken force a difference in healer play? How do I level out that damage differently? Do my offensive efforts ever have significant defensive returns? As any of these tanks, what would determine my gameplay, rather than just my aesthetic?

PLD is currently designed around shield blocks with cooldowns that reduce damage taken.

Which, then, is about as barebones as you can get. A iconic tank, who would need to uniquely be the only tank to feel any heft of identity from. Just... given what you've written there.

WAR, IMO, could focus on actions reducing damage taken (the beast within sort of numbing the WAR to pain) and Wrath should play a bigger role than it currently does; right now it's a build-consume resource where 5 stacks is the only thing that matters. Assuming I were to put others through something I wouldn't inflict myself with (because I hate what I'm about to suggest), I'd consider pushing WAR towards active mitigation with things like temporary damage reductions or mini-stoneskins (because the beast doesn't feel pain). Inner Beast already somewhat leans in that direction, and I feel WAR needs more things like it.

I'd largely be fine with that. It's just an output based version of Inner Beast. Of course, complete output scaling tends to be overpowered where overgeared and underpowered where undergeared, so it couldn't be a pure scalar unless its power source was somehow input-based as well (similar to how Ignore Pain ignores a set, output-based amount of damage, but its resource, rage, is at least as input-based as output-. That would make Warrior less healer dependent in fights that wouldn't necessarily overwhelm him, which *to me* is in keeping with a certain part of the Warrior idea.

DRK is where things get murky. Right now they're an edgy PLD with an extra button to push (Dark Arts). This is where the drain theme would help them stand out in exchange for their parry focus, with skills that instead of mitigating damage restore some HP when damage is taken. You could throw in a skill that negates damage taken from the next attack to restore a capped amount of HP. Passive mitigation to offer synergy with healers would probably also help. Then it's be a matter of turning Dark Dance's effect into either a full parry buff or a full evasion buff (or neither and have it do something completely different).

I feel like I get what you mean, but again, I just don't think Drains are going to be the way out, especially not standard ones. Nor refunders/reactive drains.