So if PLD is the defensive what does that make WAR and DRK?

[MomoOG]

No, it's not bad design and it's not unbalanced. It's diverse and it caters to different playstyles. You can't measure Tanks by DPS alone. I played WAR in Heavensward because I liked that Offensive, HP draining playstyle. My friend, who was a very nervous, Aggro and Defense oriented Tank would never touch WAR--but had a lot of fun playing Paladin.

If they want more people playing Tanks, they need to diversify them and make room for people who like different types of play to find something that works for them.

Every class needs strengths and weaknesses. Gives you more incentive to level all of them. If every class is just the same at everything, then what's the point?

The point is to have different flavors. That flavor can be achieved through different mechanics and rotations. Not through something as fundamental for balance like overall mitigation or damage. The optimal goal for dps classes is also to achieve similar dps but through different flavors (which includes indirect dps by buffing other party members). One doesn't say what is the point of different dps classes because they all do the same dps.

Now if you need me to break down why having similar mitigation and dps is so fundamental for tank balance I could do so for you.

[Pyrali]

The point is to have different flavors. That flavor can be achieved through different mechanics and rotations. Not through something as fundamental for balance like overall mitigation or damage. The optimal goal for dps classes is also to achieve similar dps but through different flavors (which includes indirect dps by buffing other party members). One doesn't say what is the point of different dps classes because they all do the same dps.

Now if you need me to break down why having similar mitigation and dps is so fundamental for tank balance I could do so for you.

Really? Because I think having DPS classes with more support viability in exchange for less damage is a fair trade. I can help my party more, but my own damage is a little lower. It's a trade-off. I don't need to be good at everything all the time. If I want to be maximum offense, I'll play MNK. If I want to have more utility in a Raid, I'll bring my MCH instead.

I'm against Homogenizing roles.

Also, you can drop the condescending tone, chief. It doesn't endear you to anyone.

[Gunnie]

Really? Because I think having DPS classes with more support viability in exchange for less damage is a fair trade. I can help my party more, but my own damage is a little lower. It's a trade-off. I don't need to be good at everything all the time. If I want to be maximum offense, I'll play MNK. If I want to have more utility in a Raid, I'll bring my MCH instead.

Then they should lower PLD DPS and give them a more supportive role not just defensively, but also give them DPS buffs for their group. Then their personal DPS is lower, but they contribute more towards the group. If it's just defensively you'll get HW all over again. The highest DPS tank gets invited, seeing they can all survive the tankbusters, and PLD will be left out.

Seeing the above will never happen, for the simple reason a PLD is more a bastion then anything else, having simular DPS as the other tanks is the easiest way to get PLD in the running again. Yes, I said simular, not ahead.

[MomoOG]

Really? Because I think having DPS classes with more support viability in exchange for less damage is a fair trade. I can help my party more, but my own damage is a little lower. It's a trade-off. I don't need to be good at everything all the time. If I want to be maximum offense, I'll play MNK. If I want to have more utility in a Raid, I'll bring my MCH instead.

I'm against Homogenizing roles.

Also, you can drop the condescending tone, chief. It doesn't endear you to anyone.

Those support abilities are present to augment the groups dps and so are indirect dps abilities. And you are also trying very hard to cherry pick with your dps example. Why have a MNK, SAM, or BLM class when they are all dps? Are they all homogenized in how they play though? Not at all, they all do dps but with very different flavors.

Okay let me break it down. Mitigation at the end of the day for a tank is fairly binary. You either have enough mitigation to survive what you are tanking or you don't. It does not have an infinite cap in utility (infinite is a clear exaggeration as dps limits are set by the amount of hp the enemy has but on a practical level it is infinite) the way damage does. In simple terms, more dps is always useful while mitigation has a hard drop off in use. Why does this cause a problem? If all tanks are able to survive an encounter there is no purpose to being a "mitigation specialized" tank. Everyone will min/max their groups with "dps tanks". If an encounter is designed so that only the mitigation based tank can survive than we have a very problematic situation where some classes designed as tanks (the dps tanks) aren't even able to perform their basic role of being a tank. More often than not the first scenario is going to occur and "mitigation tanks" get the short end of the stick and get excluded from groups. Or Mitigation tanks are more useful as progression occurs and then once people understand the encounters or become more geared the mitigation based tanks are again excluded from groups.

Now one can argue that the mitigation based tank can be designated as the main tank and the dps tanks can be designated as the off tanks but this would again only hold if the encounter is designed such that there is so much damage that the dps tanks simply can't fulfill the role of the main tank.

One could finally argue that the mitigation tank is able to take so much less dmg that the healers are than able to dps that much more to make up the dps loss of having a mitigation tank. This results in far more difficult balancing act because now balance is now going involving interdependence of classes.

[Furious]

Really? Because I think having DPS classes with more support viability in exchange for less damage is a fair trade. I can help my party more, but my own damage is a little lower. It's a trade-off. I don't need to be good at everything all the time. If I want to be maximum offense, I'll play MNK. If I want to have more utility in a Raid, I'll bring my MCH instead.

I'm against Homogenizing roles.

Also, you can drop the condescending tone, chief. It doesn't endear you to anyone.

Trading off utility for DPS means that it is impossible to balance across multiple group sizes. Classes that have higher personal dps completely destroy small man content if the classes that bring utility to higher man content are balanced around that fact.

If
A = B+Utility[b]*8
then
A > B+Utility[b]*4

Conversely, if you don't want sams running around doubling everyone else's dps in 4man stuff, then they are relegated to obscurity in 8man, where the multiplicative effect of different forms of utility then becomes an issue for those without (circa heavensward group stacking)

A = B+Utility[b]*4
then
A < B+Utility[b]*8

Obviously, it wont always be 4 people and 8 people benefiting (or not benefiting) from the utility in question, but that changes the numbers and not the fundamental reason the outcome is as it is. Because this effect is multiplicative, it becomes more pronounced as time goes on and gear gets better.

It is definitionally impossible to balance a class around "no utility, so more dps", without fundamentally making it a fact that one is measurably better than the other somewhere in the game that matters. It's not a trade off; it's irrefutably a trade-up or a trade-down, depending on which side of the equation your chosen class sits.


In the case of tanks, the choice is much more binary. Tanking is a zero sum game; you either have enough mitigation or you don't. Trading off dps to get more utility means giving up dps for nothing, since all tanks have enough mitigation to cover the content. If they don't have enough, they are literally dysfunctional and do not work. You can never have "too much" dps, but you only need enough survival to live through a fight.

[Shurrikhan]

Really? Because I think having DPS classes with more support viability in exchange for less damage is a fair trade. I can help my party more, but my own damage is a little lower. It's a trade-off. I don't need to be good at everything all the time. If I want to be maximum offense, I'll play MNK. If I want to have more utility in a Raid, I'll bring my MCH instead.

Support is also DPS. If it does not contribute to clear times it is wasted. Just like anything else.

The reason personal vs. indirect DPS aren't seen as imbalanced is because there's only one size of serious content—the 8-man. Allow for 4-man serious content and the indirect DPS contribution fades from reduced user manpower, and its users kicked from that 4-man meta unless they were already overtuned for 8-man content, in which case direct DPS only classes will be kicked from the 8-man meta.