Tank Balance Achieved?

[RLofOBFL]

If you look at the top savage parses, all tank damage is almost equal. Like PLD 35%/ WAR 35%/DRK 30%. WAR and DRK could use potency buffs to pull ahead but I don't think PLD is necessarily too OP as is. None of its utility specifically really guarantees it a spot, it just has more defensive things so you can play it safe. Intervention, cover, divine veil, clemency, hallowed, PoA, these are all just safety nets. WAR has self safety nets and PLD has party(or just the OT really) safety nets. DRK has both on a short CD...but I must admit it does seem somewhat lacking since it's literally just one skill and its not particularly OP unless used on itself.

[Alphras]

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......

They got new toys (Passage of Arms, Intervention), buffed some of the old ones (Cover, Clemency) and removed most of the utility from the other tanks (Storm's Path, Storm's Eye slashing inflation, Delirium, Reprisal).

Their utility didn't hold up to DRK and WAR in 3.x and they were weaker in general, but now they have the monopoly while having no downside in other places.

[Stormbrand]

They got new toys (Passage of Arms, Intervention), buffed some of the old ones (Cover, Clemency) and removed most of the utility from the other tanks (Storm's Path, Storm's Eye slashing inflation, Delirium, Reprisal).

Their utility didn't hold up to DRK and WAR in 3.x and they were weaker in general, but now they have the monopoly while having no downside in other places.

these are toys that are barely if ever used. Please understand that Passage of Arms is trash, it is a horrible skill and almost as useless as shake it off. no PLD will ever stop attacking, that makes no sense. Clemency = 1 less holy spirit, damage loss, useless. cover is still shit, you should know better. intervention has very little usage and unnecessary. divine veil lackluster on a 2min cd. This has never been about utility, it has always been about dmg, WAR and DRK want more dmg not utility, and they should, but dont bring something as useless as utility in this topic.

[Fernosaur]

If you look at the top savage parses, all tank damage is almost equal. Like PLD 35%/ WAR 35%/DRK 30%. WAR and DRK could use potency buffs to pull ahead but I don't think PLD is necessarily too OP as is. None of its utility specifically really guarantees it a spot, it just has more defensive things so you can play it safe. Intervention, cover, divine veil, clemency, hallowed, PoA, these are all just safety nets. WAR has self safety nets and PLD has party(or just the OT really) safety nets. DRK has both on a short CD...but I must admit it does seem somewhat lacking since it's literally just one skill and its not particularly OP unless used on itself.

I mostly agree with this, though I don't think DRK needs that big of a potency buff anymore. In Magic heavy fights DRK still has the best personal defense by far, despite people saying PLD has the best defense, I disagree with the later sentiment: the massive CD timers sort of make things a bit harder on the MT end for PLD. Frequent magical TBs mean DRK can comfortably tank in DPS stance for longer due to DM+TBN, plus the shorter CD on DRK's immunity helps a bit too. However, this could much definitely be helped even further by giving DRK a "filler" mitigation CD and/or reducing the CD the Shadow Wall, which is ridiculously high for some random reason. Even making it 90s wouldn't make it broken, imo, since the rest of their passive CD suite is kinda sadly undertuned save for DM. As long as this changes and WAR's DPS is hopefully increased and made less punishing in future patches, the speedrunning meta will eventually go back to DRK+WAR at some point.

I kind of half agree with the fact that PLD's utility should mean less DPS, but it's still defensive utility. It's only great right now because we're one week into the tier. Once the speedruns start getting more important and we overgear shit, that utility will be more or less pointless very quickly. Kinda like how I see WHM dropping off despite being pretty much mandatory for O3 and O4 atm.

Intervention is still probably the best OT skill in the game tho.

[Reynhart]

The question is: what is balance to you?

Each tank should have a reson to be in a party instead of another tank.

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......

Clemency is a selfsustain for when you need more healing in a short amount of time. Sure, healers have spells, but most of them also need a GCD. And in 3.x, Clemency was clunky for two reasons :
- Huge MP cost
- Interruption
...that were fixed.

[Alphras]

these are toys that are barely if ever used. Please understand that Passage of Arms is trash, it is a horrible skill and almost as useless as shake it off. no PLD will ever stop attacking, that makes no sense. Clemency = 1 less holy spirit, damage loss, useless. cover is still shit, you should know better. intervention has very little usage and unnecessary. divine veil lackluster on a 2min cd. This has never been about utility, it has always been about dmg, WAR and DRK want more dmg not utility, and they should, but dont bring something as useless as utility in this topic.

Maybe. I am gonna start raiding late this cycle so I don't have any hands on experience with them yet. That doesn't change the fact however that PLD is the only tank that has this amount of utility, which is not balanced. There is also the kind of utility of being able to very easily apply it's damage potential. Which is very important in progression and hugely in favor of PLD.

There is literally no objective reason to take DRK/WAR over PLD this raid cycle.

And WAR in 3.x was this strong because of utility (granted Storm's Eye was dps utility at the time) which complemented the popular group compositions.


Edit:
I want utility options on DRK and WAR, not damage. Don't generalize. If Square nerfs PLD or buffs WAR/DRK damage in 4.1 it's a lazy solution for a problem they should have seen months before release.

Edit 2:
Every O4S kill I have seen has a PLD utilizing Passage Of Arms at the end (there is a dps + heal check) ... I wouldn't call it useless at all.

[ovIm]

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.

Divine Veil is anything but overrated, especially on raid wide AoEs this skill can decide between life or death. Same for PoA, though I admit, that skill is highly situational.

I have seen a video of a PLD in O2normal that used his requiescat window to clemency his dps after the healers had fallen on the last 15-10ish%. Did he lose a lot of damage? Absolutely. Did he also turn a guaranteed wipe around? Yes he did. PLD has the skills to turn a bad situation in a non fatal one, whereas the WAR and the DRK lack those things. He also has group wide raid mitigation skills that can be used during progress to ease the burden on the healers, making him unreplaceable.

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......

Delirium and Storms path were better than the old PLD utility skills, hence why the PLD got the short end of the stick during 3.x (also, lots of magic damage instead of physical favored a DRK MT instead of an PLD, but thats raid design, not class design)
WAR now has NO own utility and DRK only has a single target 5k stoneskin.

With the changes to tanks, they are all almost equal in performance, except in utility. Say what you want, this is not balanced, on an objective, factual level.

PLD can cast clemency whenever he has mana, which is often due to the change in rotations. DRK selfheal is the third hit of a combo in Grit (lol) whereas WAR can only self heal in Defiance, so there is that.





If they wanted to achieve balance in terms of utility, they could have given the storms Path debuff to Delirium and to a PLD skill (or hells, put it on maim, riot blade and syphon strike), and remove the old Delirium int down debuff, and make sure those debuffs cant stack. Look, that was easily balanced, was it not? (note, im talking about the old Delirium here)
The other strong DRK utility, Reprisal, is now cross class, which is, imho, a rather good choice, so every tank has access to that form of utility.

[Mattzo]

As a new player with zero raiding or endgame experience who just joined for stormblood and played all 3 tanks to 58 so far my impression is that PLD is the only job of the three that feels somewhat thought out.

I started WAR, switched to DRK at 50 and now PLD at 58. Warrior feels so boring I can't figure out their vision for the job, there is absolutely nothing going on outside your basic rotation and even the rage dumps on the gcd don't feel satisfying at all to me. I guess its supposed to have good damage and cooldowns but the good feel isn't there for me and damage seems underwhelming.

DRK is kind of fun but feels kinda over the place, having the tank and dps stance pretty much on all the time and spamming dark arts all the time. It just feels weird to me and lacks cool "dark knighty" abilities imho.

PLD feels just better all around. Especially having different abilities off the gcd makes the job for me I guess.

[BluexBird]

People who say Paladin's utilities are "useless" or "no big deal" have obviously never done a single challenging content in this game. And by challenging content, I don't mean going in with 20% echo and beating it.

I'm talking about V2S when you've managed to mess up the up/down stack mechanic in the later stages of the fight, everyone's got a vulnerability stack, people are on the brink of death, and your party's about to get hit with Gravitational Wave. YOU GONNA SIT HERE AND TELL ME DIVINE VEIL WON'T MAKE A DIFFERENCE?! Oh but wait, you don't just have ONE skill to help with that. You have TWO skills!

They're either idiots, or just pretending to be to try and fool people Paladins aren't all that good right now. Or maybe they just lack the capacity and awareness to actually know how to use the tools that they have available to them, and instead think only of dealing damage. They'd rather wipe and go through the whole fight again, than take a hit to their DPS to keep the fight going and potentially clear.

[Aomine1992]

With DRK being my favorite tank I'm disappointed in SE in terms of actual dps and mitigation....TBN is starting to get annoying because of the MP cost and that being the only real mitigation we have since shadow wall sucks and the magic damage I take is the same with DA DM and another CD or TBN DM....I won't harp on Dark arts that's been beat to death already I'm pretty sure they don't intend on changing it....