Tank Balance Achieved?

[ovIm]

The hilarious thing to me is that the current PLD is extremely well balanced with 3.x WAR and DRK. 4.x WAR/DRK though, not so much.

Honestly, I dont know wether to laugh or cry about that fact. Square tried so hard to achieve tank balance that they yanked the pendulum too far to the other side.

[Alphras]

I'd say tanks are pretty balanced... If you ignored PLD. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I would actually agree to this. PLD is pretty much the best in every practical aspect, except maybe hitting a dummy.

The hilarious thing to me is that the current PLD is extremely well balanced with 3.x WAR and DRK. 4.x WAR/DRK though, not so much.

I think Storm's Path and Storm's Eye in 3.x context would still have edged out PLD utility.

[Starkbeaumont]

I think SE expected PLDs to make much more use of their utility skills as a some of those mean trading in damage (clemency, PoA)
On the other hand DRK and WAR have basically no utility at all.
the overall plan of SE remains to be unclear.

[DWolfwood]

While it's not really balanced, I think it's still a lot better than 3.x tank balance though, which means they're at least going in the right direction.

I can't really say I agree with this. Their solution was to not make any tank mandatory, and instead make one obscenely better than the other two. Overall, I think we took one step forward and two steps back.

That said, I think they did take PLD in a good direction. DRK still needs the rework it deserved in 3.0, but TBN is great. WAR doesn't need TOO much more to be great. It's pretty close, so we'll see what they do. I'm hoping now that they've spent so much time on PLD, maybe they'll actually give the other tanks, DRK specifically imo, the much needed attention they deserve.

[Kyrph]

It seems the common theme of this thread is that PLD is in a much better spot than the other two tanks. I am sure since we can come to that conclusion, SE will make some changes in the future to better balance the tanks. I agree with a lot of the ideas as well giving the weaker tanks more utility while as well as continuing on balancing damage and consistency. Discussion like this is a great way to work out the problem and give feedback so SE can hopefully find a solution moving forward.

As for my opinion I really enjoy how WAR plays and like the fact its skill ceiling is higher than the other two, which is probably the reason why I decided to play WAR over the others. But with that I would like to be greatly rewarded for putting the effort to play a more difficult job if I try to work at playing at that higher level, nothing crazy though. I don't believe that the PLD job should be nerfed in anyway because I think it plays really well and does it job well. The other two tank jobs should be buffed to make it more appealing to take into harder content like savage while keeping a similar play style (at least for warrior imo.)

[Stormbrand]

Utility WAR brings no utility for the rest of the group, and DRK only brings TBN every 15 seconds, while a PLD can cover, intervention, clemency and passage of arms to prevent damage to his teammates or heal them up if required. DRK and WAR both lost their utility (Delirium and Storms Path), and have gained nothing in return. This is severly unbalanced when acknowledging the difference in possibilities (or lack thereof) in the mitigation and DPS capabilities of the tanks, as this means there is no objective reason not to pick a PLD over one of the other two classes.

except that any PLD that uses clemency or passage is doing it wrong, those are skills that sacrifice a lot of damage which no PLD will ever do. divine veil is extremely overrated, and cover is still trash. The only useful utilty PLD has is intervention. If they gave WAR passage of arms WAR would still cry, you know why? because the skill sucks, overrated and useless.

[aqskerorokero]

The question is: what is balance to you?

same damage output with different utilities? or different damage with same utilities?

same tanking results with easy mode, normal mode, hard mode keyboard pressing or with same braindead 123?

To me personally I just play the job I identify and be able to casually played....

[Aletin]

except that any PLD that uses clemency or passage is doing it wrong, those are skills that sacrifice a lot of damage which no PLD will ever do.

I would just like to elaborate on this, it's not that using them is bad, it's that it's very unoptimal. The only times I seriously use PoA when I could do damage is in O3S when it's the adds+aoe spam and that was by request of the healers. O4S on meteors (haven't been to neo yet) again by request of healers.
The only time I've done clemency was in O4S when trying to just push as far as we can to see what's happening in the fight.

As everyone gets more gear and we get more familiar with fights I of course will be phasing out the PoA and Clemency usages to gain myself more damage.

Edit: Further comments about PLD utility.
Divine Veil is nice, it replaces a deploy adlo, but at a 5k shield every 2 minutes its nothing game breaking.
Cover is still mostly useless, only having found one use, that being preventing our BRD from getting knockbacked by Vacuum Wave in O4S
Intervention is... okay?. It will only ever be 10% because you need to use your own cooldowns for mitigating the damage you take, exception being maybe O1S for Twin Bolt. And the problem with a 10% reduction, if it makes the tank live in a case they shouldn't have, the Tank and/or Healers made a mistake. Other than that, taking 3k less damage isn't allowing the healers to heal less, they will still heal using the same GCD heals and the same OGCD heals. The difference it makes is a regen tick, which ticks anyway. So intervention is doing practically nothing.

So we've come down to, 3 bits of utility in undergeared content that is done by the request of healers (PoA, Clemency and Intervention) , 1 still extremely niche skill that sees almost no use (Cover), and 1 skill that is actually worth something (Divine Veil).

[aqskerorokero]

And btw.... I still want to point out: HOW does paladin has "best" utilities when those skills have the SAME SAME SAME mitigation nature compared to 3.x?!?!????! They were considered trash even I tried to defend their usefulness...now I don't even need to...every non pld main is saying pld's utilities and quote SAME utilities are the best......ppl... decide.....

Clemency is not selfsustain, Pld has NO selfsustain, it's a SPELL like those healer have!! it's on gcd and can't do other thing when casting it......

[SyzzleSpark]

no PLD will ever do.

If I poke around on youtube I am hard pressed to find a group clear of O3/O4s from last week that didn't feature a PLD using PoA at least once. So I think outside of people that have to wait until they overgear the content, you're wrong.

Also PLD isn't taken for PoA, its taken for Cover and Intervention, meaning a PLD OT can basically hand a free Rampart to their co-tank for 6-12s every 2 minutes or every time their gauge hits 50 (every 25-30s), so essentially, about 5 times every 2 minutes, which is bananas, plain and simple.

0s Cover -20%
30s Int+Ramp -20%
60s Int+Sent -30%
90s Int -10%
120s Int+Ramp -20%
150s Cover+Int -28ish%
180s Int -10%
210s Int+Ramp -20%
240s Int+Sent -30%
270s Cover+Int -28ish%
300s Int+Ramp -20%

Basically a PLD OT is like having an extra -20% cooldown on a 30s recast that occasionally fluctuates down to 10% or up to 30%. What even is tank stance at that point?