Tank Balance Achieved?

[ovIm]

I don't mind the present tank balance so much as I do the discussion that surrounds it. "Utility" is a word that gets thrown about without any real definition, and really is just a catch-all phrase for "stuff on other tanks that I want but don't necessarily know if I'll even use." Most of the discussion of WAR's utility are thinly disguised attempts to convince the devs to buff the job back to it's former level of dominance. Maim isn't "utility", because NIN and SAM have slashing. Gap closers aren't "utility", even though players spent most of 3.x begging for it, because it's suddenly not good enough. Knockback-negation isn't "utility", because most people don't remember that it exists.

Utility Skills, strictly speaking, are beneficial skills that help the party. Back in 3.x, both WAR and DRK had extremely strong uncontested skills that were the reason why this combination was preferred.

WAR had Storms Path, and this is, I admit it, overly strong, because it reduces ANY amount of damage dealt by the boss by 10 (!!!) %. This was huge, as it reduces a lot of outgoing damage to the other players, easing the burden on everyone.

DRK had both reprisal (now a role skill) and the Delirium INT down debuff. Another thing that was huge if your party did not bring a monk, as that severly decresed the amount of magic damage a boss did. Again a tool to reduce outgoing damage to other players, easing a burden.
While PLD did have the STR reduce on halones, bear in mind that many a bosses did not utilize physical attacks for raid wide AoE attacks, making this skill less desireable. This is clearly a raid design issue however, not a class design one.

Both path and delirium are gone. Now, PLD has the only skills that reduce the amount of incoming damage. Which in itself is fine, really, however, with the balance changes to DRK and WAR DPS, this still puts PLD in a clear "must have" situation, something the devs wanted to avoid.

And yes, I know of TBN, however, that one is merely single target.


As for the other points:

Maim/Storms Eye is not utility, its synergy. It allowed NINs, PLDs and DRKs to dish out more damage, but only those classes in 3.x. I know its different now.
Gap closers are not beneficial to the group and as such, not the kind of utility we are talking about.
Also, PLDs strongest burst is a ranged magical attack, something he can even do when the boss does a PBAoE attack, which otherwise forces others to run for cover
Knockback-negation would be nice, if it wasnt half a gamble wether the current content would allow you to prevent knockback or wether the boss just pulls a Omega 1 and ignores that.

Cover and TBN are suddenly utility. Nobody cared about Cover for the past 4 years, and now that two tanks effectively have it, suddenly people are interested. And it's not even that the average WAR even wants this or knows how they'll use it. It's just being used as an excuse to buff the job. "Yeah, you have that er, bubble thingie, so we should do more dps." Right. I'll just go back to blowing bubbles at my teammates then. Look, I know that there are people out there really struggling with the new WAR compared to how it used to be in HW. That's kind of natural when new actions come out. Everyone is relearning their jobs. Nobody is playing optimally. We'll look back at some of the best players of this tier when our understanding of the jobs improves, down the line, and be surprised at all the mistakes that they're making. Opinions on what's hard or what's easy are meaningless if you don't haven't had enough time to master one job, let alone three.

Instead of "utility", I think that it's better to point to specific balance issues that you've noticed between the tanks. Is there a discrepancy in mitigation costs and self-healing on DRK compared to the other tanks? Is PLD's lack of a gap closer putting it at an uptime disadvantage on certain fights? Is there an imbalance of raid damage buffs on the three tanks? Raid mitigation buffs? These are specific questions that can be answered independently of each other, and tanks have advantages in some domains while being at a disadvantage at others.

At the very least, it'll dissuade the player-base from simply memeing the same catchphrases, and get them to actually think about tank balance and how to improve it across all three tanks.

Cover used to only really work for physical attacks. And it merely redirected the damage. Now, at level 70, cover also REDUCES the amount of damage someone else takes, effectively making it a CD for other classes.

I admit, the shock I had when I saw how much they changed the old WAR gameplay (something I really loved) to the new WAR gameplay (something I cant find fun, no matter how much I try), I was sad. Not because I am not king anymore, I dont care for that. But because I technically lost the class I was playing for over 3 years, gameplay that I inherited in flesh and blood, now gone because it was changed for the sake of change. But my own, sentimental feelings for the class I love are not getting on the way of critical thinking and understanding how the game works, how game, fight and class designs work, and how classes work with each other

[Gojin]

no theres no balance

[Kaedan]

Well, lets look at the facts to answer this.

DPS:
WAR has the highest personal DPS, yes, but with the slashing debuff applied, all 3 tanks roughly do the same damage. So yeah, one could say in this pure metric, the tanks are balanced.
The only thing to note here is that WAR heavily relies on his IR+Zerg burst window to keep his DPS up, missing fellcleaves results in a heavy damage penalty overall.
DRK and PLD have more sustained DPS, and with the current raid design, WAR seems to have gotten the short end of the stick for progress groups.
So I'd say DPS wise, WAR is currently in a bad position, despite his high personal DPS.

Mitigation
For single enemy fights, I see no big issue with either tank really. DRKs TBN is hella useful, PLD has shelltron and WAR can easily switch to Defiance for IB thanks to 4.05.

In a group pull, thanks to the changes in blocking (now possible from all sides), PLD has a huge amount of passive mitigation always up, and the cooldowns to improve on that.
Close behind this is WAR, who can easily combine his CDs to be more effective, though, the loss of bloodbath is definitely felt.
DRK however has a very weak mitigation kit, relying a lot on TBN, which does not really help for group pulls. It has gotten a bit better with the buff to quietus, allowing you to DA-AD more often.

Utility
The real issue arises now. As you can see above, PLD already has a slight edge over WAR and DRK, however, nothing to severe and definitely within the scope of reason. However, 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.

Gameplay
This is highly subjective, but should be considered as well. IMHO, PLD is the easiest tank to play, with 2 burst windows alternating every 30s, a clear cut rotation and steady damage. WAR and DRK seem to have a much higher skill floor that needs to be reached in order to perform close to what PLD can bring. This too should be considered when talking about balance, because as it stands now, PLD bringst the easiest gameplay, the easiest DPS, the highest mitigation and the most versatile utility kit.

Conclusion
There is simply no objective reason not to play paladin, and that is because the tanks are, currently, still not balanced. However, I hope square acknoledges that and pushes out fixes in 4.1, because I really, really want to see any kind of tank combination desired for any kind of fight.

Quoting for truth. Seriously good breakdown.

[AdamZ]

For those talking FFlogs, lets look at it this way:

Pally: 135
DRK: 110
WAR: 31

Those are the number of characters (on those jobs) on FFlogs with logs for Neo Exdeath, anyone else notice something?

[HyperiusUltima]

For those talking FFlogs, lets look at it this way:

Pally: 135
DRK: 110
WAR: 31

Those are the number of characters (on those jobs) on FFlogs with logs for Neo Exdeath, anyone else notice something?

That's only a heavy skew due to the amount of players playing jobs other than WAR. Still, WAR's presence is undesired due to its lack of utility as said many times before in this thread; and don't even start saying DPS is its utility because this isn't relatable to a SAM in any way like BLM is.

[AdamZ]

That's only a heavy skew due to the amount of players playing jobs other than WAR.

... that's kind of the point, if the jobs are balanced, you would see a balance in the people playing them...

[Tankstuff]

yea and I guarantee drk would be right down there with war if you could double pld without effecting the lb gauge, or if the tankbusters werent a majority magical this raid tier

[TheCount]

That's only a heavy skew due to the amount of players playing jobs other than WAR. Still, WAR's presence is undesired due to its lack of utility as said many times before in this thread; and don't even start saying DPS is its utility because this isn't relatable to a SAM in any way like BLM is.

I'll remind you that War was the most heavily played tank in Heavensward. What do you think is the cause of this drop in their representation? It's because they are not as good as the other ones available, certainly not close to paladin

[Shinkyo]

I'll remind you that War was the most heavily played tank in Heavensward. What do you think is the cause of this drop in their representation? It's because they are not as good as the other ones available, certainly not close to paladin

I think we'll see people switching from DRK to WAR later when people gear up and have V3-4S on farm. At least I intend to.
I'm doing V1-2S on WAR already but 3-4S on DRK because it's better for progression.
But really, DRK/WAR are both fillers because you don't want to double PLD...
Sadly, that's still the most "balanced" we've had imo, i.e. WAR/DRk are equally bad...

[aleph_null]

Tbh other than the fact that drk rotation is much easier than war, I don't think pld/drk is necessarily better than pld/war in o3s and o4s. For o3s if you main tank as a war you don't really need to do any tank swap since holmgang will be up for every other critical hit, enabling you to stack at least 3 cds for the remaining critical hits. This allows really high deliverance uptime, at least until people start dying to mechanics, in which case you can go back to defiance easily and pop equilibrium.

In o4s I haven't tried going as a war since my partner wanted to use drk, but judging from the boss ability timing, you'd be able to holmgang all 3 delta attacks and hallowed ground on 2 out of 3 double attacks, which is a decent gain in uptime. Aero 3 can be mitigated with the help of intervention (should be up for every aero 3 other than the first one at pull), reprisal (almagest is every 2+ min, so one tank can reprisal it, and divine veil is also almost always up for it), and apoc from the caster. I might be missing something extremely obvious, but I don't really see how pld/drk is that much better than pld/war for o3s-o4s progression.

The only combination that's obviously worse than the others is drk/war, since they lack aoe mitigation (divine veil is really good for big aoe damage, passage of arms can be used for aoe mitigation in case of emergency when you're at low ilv). I think melee dps are also in a similar situation since sam/nin, mnk/nin and drg/nin all work really well, while any composition without nin would be a decent handicap for the group.