Paladin too overpowered, nerf their damage output!

[Venur]

WAR design was flawed in the beginning. Or rather, I should say that the differentiation philosophy between the tanks was flawed.

The WAR needs to be able to MT, which means content had to be balanced to make it's "lower defense" shortcoming not a shortcoming, which meant that the PLD's superior defense was not needed, resulting in the PLD not being a tank with superior defense, but just a tank with bad dps.

This is pretty much why almost every modern MMo stoped to have defencive and offencive tanks.

In a balanced MO all tanks have about the same DPS and Defence (some have lower mitigation but higher self heal to make sure all around they are as tough). Todays tank differention is done in the flavor (different game mechanics and different animations).

otherwise you will always end with a weaker tank and a top one.

[Tegernako]

I just got done arguing with someone who said that PLD got it worse then DRK/WAR when it comes to "lost" skills and tank role abilities because it has to slot back the skills it used to have.

Never mind that provoke, convalesce, and rampart work exactly as they did before SB. Never mind that Foresight, Fracture, Bloodbath, Brutal Swing, Mercy stroke, Shadowskin, Scourge, Low Blow, Reprisal, Dark Dance, and Delirium are all skills that are either gone completely or came back in a severely nerfed fashion.

I don't want PLD to ever be back in HW state but good lord some people need to think before posting.

[Tegernako]

Or just buff the other two classes to PLD's damage.

WAR players said that before SB came out and look what happened. DRK got gutted and was heavily nerfed. WAR was gutted and got heavily nerfed. And PLD came out perfectly fine. In 5.0 when we ask for balance for tanks I don't even want to imagine what they will do to us.

Probably make PLD use a Styrofoam sword.

[Tegernako]

They're far from overpowered. WAR dished out an immense amount of damage throughout much of 2.0 and 3.0 whilst PLD was forced to hit like a wet noodle by comparison. It's fair for PLD to finally be in a strong spot after being stuck in a horrible spot for the better part of two expansions.

This is a complete lie. I didn't even play 2.0 when it was relevant (joined after weeping city) and even I know that PLD was not bad in both damage or utility for 2.0.

3.0 was bad because it had meta issues that kept it from being...meta not because it couldn't do damage.

Reading the tank forums makes me wonder if the people who claim that WAR doesn't have the best defense in the game have never read their skill tooltips. 20% damage reduction +100% parry rate on a 90 sec CD, +20% max HP plus heal and 30% damage reduction on 2 min CDs, and an immunity on a 3 min CD. How is that even the worst defense? WAR has the best defense in the game by a massive margin, and that's not even counting Inner Beast, which honestly isn't counted cause using Defiance guts your DPS by way too much. Seriously though, WAR has a CD for every tank buster a fight can throw and a lot of CDs to spare for stray damage. WAR doesn't need a shield...
DRK, on the other hand is in dire need of defensive CD recast reductions for anything non-magical.

So this is what I think.

WAR does not have a single unique CD that does not involve either taking damage or dishing out damage excluding two (something the other tanks share). They are on a low CD because everything about WAR is based on taking damage and dishing it out unlike PLD and DRK which have skills that give them sustain or reduction without damage being a factor. The 100% parry is really good...but it also requires you to be taking damage to even work.

It also has by far, the worst tank stance in the entire game, one that is not affected by effects from abilities (like SCH's fairy healing doesn't give the 20% extra healing the tooltip says it does). The only time it ever gives an equivalent amount of damage reduction is when WAR is at full health with defiance on, at any other point it's worse then PLD/DRK's stance. For instance lets assume all three tanks have 20k health. if an attack that does exactly 20k hits DRK/PLD with their stance on, they will survive it. If it hits WAR with their tank stance on they will die.

The short CD's are to make up for how WAR plays different from other tanks. It also has very little self sustain now that BB is gone, and IB and Path are nerfed in the amount they heal.

DRK does have the worst defensive CD though. I don't disagree. Just trying to explain why I think WAR is the way it is, it's because of how the job plays and how it has to take and dish out damage in order to get any of those incredible benefits you just listed. Also as you admitted, IB destroys WAR's overall dps which means ppl generally avoid using it.

I mean, imagine how WAR would be if their CD's were like the other tanks right now. It'd be really bad wouldn't it? You can see now how much WAR as a job depends on those low CD's because everything it does is about damage whether it's taking it or dishing it out. And you can not do that if you have long CD's. Yes they are really good CD's but it's to make up for us having to be more aggressive in taking damage as well.

The fact that our level 70 abillity, our so called "raid utility" is just pure damage reinforces that notion I'd think

[VenKitsune]

Snip

DRK, on the other hand is in dire need of defensive CD recast reductions for anything non-magical.

I agree completely. if WAR is played more defensively (using defiance more) then it is up there with PLD in terms of damage mitigation especially after IBs buffs and the ability to use it much more often than in 2.x-3.x. unfortunately however fight design since post-2.55 encourages you to do damage. This is ANOTHER problem with fight design honestly much like how it was a problem for PLD in HW.

DRK on the other hand has about the same DPS as PLD despite having a marginally more complicated rotation and resource management and a much more punishing stance dancing while also having the least defense and surivivability of any of the 3 tanks.
Honestly though i think WAR is fine (other than shake it off) and PLD is fine, its DRK that needs more discussion and needs changes because right now it may be viable but that doesn't make it as strong as the other 2 tanks, its like the HW situation with PLD.

[Tegernako]

WAR reigned for 2.0 and 3.0, let PLD have the stage for a change.

All tanks deserve to feel good at any point, at every point. To argue otherwise is both selfish and hypocritical. The spotlight arguement is bad because you're basically saying other people should suffer just so others can feel good.

This should never be a motivation when balancing things or when trying to decide if you should nerf/buff somethign.

[Lyth]

Two weeks ago, I posted a comparison of tank dps. You can find those results here. This is the present situation, two weeks later:

As you can see, not too much has changed. PLD seems to have the potential to edge out WAR on V2S when both jobs are performed more optimally (possibly due to the high uptime and relative lack of movement), but WAR has a fairly consistent advantage when it comes to dps across the board.

I wish that I had done a formal comparison of the tanks on the Ex Primals prior to 4.05, but I remember that prior to the WAR buffs, WAR and DRK were on a fairly even footing. The Storm's Path potency buff does not explain the difference post patch. I think the biggest factor here is that, by removing the stance swapping costs on WAR as well as the costs for IR/Unchained while leaving all of DRK's stance swapping penalties intact (not just the MP cost, but the costs associated with truncating BW/BP), the devs have created a fairly sizeable imbalance between the tanks. The gap has slightly narrowed since two weeks ago on earlier fights as tanks' stance uptime drops to zero, but it's much wider on later fights.

I don't think PLD is the problem here. It's actually sitting at a fairly healthy middle ground.

The things that make pld really powerful are the utilities, and the "easy" unpunishing rotation where war is has the strictest and most punishing rotation..

I know that there are a lot of factors that influence players' subjective perception of difficulty. If someone only played WAR in HW, with its relatively simple resource management, I could see how they would struggle with the pre-4.05 changes. In truth, from following the dev interviews pre-SB, it sounds like the stance cost was intended to prevent WAR from being too overly flexible relative to the other two tanks (i.e. to bring WAR into line with everyone else following HW's dominance.)

But after 4.05's revision and reversions, I really don't see it. If anything, looking at how dps varies with percentile, there's a much smaller dps discrepancy between playing WAR skillfully and playing it poorly. Which was sort of the point of the job system changes: to narrow the performance gap between players. Objectively, as far as the performance data goes, it appears to be the least punishing tank.

I think if you stack more WAR buffs on top of this situation, you're going to end up with a very unbalanced meta, especially if Shake it Off's planned rework ends up significantly bolstering WAR's raid utility on top of its dps advantage. As it is, nothing has really changed from HW, except that you've just swapped in PLD for DRK for the second spot.

[Accelerating]

DRK on the other hand has about the same DPS as PLD despite having a marginally more complicated rotation and resource management and a much more punishing stance dancing

Holy balls are you serious about this? DRK is the most braindead job to play right now. Also why 'stance dancing'? Building up an aggro lead and then disabling the tank stance isn't really dancing imo.
You're right about the defensive part, even tho the situation isn't as dire because TBN is really valuable.

[aleph_null]

I know that there are a lot of factors that influence players' subjective perception of difficulty. If someone only played WAR in HW, with its relatively simple resource management, I could see how they would struggle with the pre-4.05 changes. In truth, from following the dev interviews pre-SB, it sounds like the stance cost was intended to prevent WAR from being too overly flexible relative to the other two tanks (i.e. to bring WAR into line with everyone else following HW's dominance.)

But after 4.05's revision and reversions, I really don't see it. If anything, looking at how dps varies with percentile, there's a much smaller dps discrepancy between playing WAR skillfully and playing it poorly. Which was sort of the point of the job system changes: to narrow the performance gap between players. Objectively, as far as the performance data goes, it appears to be the least punishing tank.

Hmm, point taken. I guess it's less about punishing but more about strict and complex when it comes to optimizing war rotation. Admittedly even I found that optimizing infuriate outside berserk and naked fell cleave vs multiple onslaughts to be too much hassle and risk for what they reward. Going with the obvious "infuriate only in berserk" would still put you at a really high place in terms of dps (I'd say easily above 95% fflogs, but I don't play war much anymore so I can't claim it).

For progression, where you may often end up in situations where you want to switch back to tank stance, war is definitely the least punishing tank though, thanks to the lack of penalty from switching stance. I feel that while losing half of gauge from switching stance is somewhat too punishing, not losing anything makes other tanks' stance switch comparatively too punishing (gcd loss, mp loss). I'd rather see all tank stances reworked to be ogcd and rebalanced, but that's for another discussion.

[Yeol]

I've seen many detailed explanations for why the tanks currently are not balanced.

I would love to see more detailed explanations for why people think they are in fact balanced, as opposed to just statements not backed by reasoning.

According to FFlogs, they are balanced.
Don't forget that after 4.0 changes came (4.05).

If we were still talking about 4.0 then I will agree then they were not balanced.
But now they are.