4.1 Dark Knight Feedback and fixes

[Aana]

IMO this is not an in theory difference in mitigation, and certainly isn't in the case of paladin vs. dark in mitigation. However, for the warrior question I would need a significant amount of time to collect enough of a sample to show it statistically. Part of the problem is that we still have this pervasive idea of warrior being only an OT which makes collecting a large random sample difficult and in groups who actually swap to maximize mitigation we need to compare boss uptime as well. I don't think there is a website which collects mitigation statistics saddly.

However, you claim that the two are equal (or at least differences are washed out) in practice, have you collected the data already and are willing to share it publicly?

Arguing from experience (inherently flawed I admit), healers generally seem to have less of an issue healing warrior through fluff damage and tank busters, the fluff is primarily physical which warrior has more mitigation there compared to dark knight. We will also need to see how the warrior shielding will be used to impact their mitigation as well. Tank busters are usually big one hits, which dark deals with well, but the majority of the damage of a fight is the time between tank busters, which is usually physical and so dark is at a disadvantage there. Maximizing healers time dpsing is roughly equivalent to minimizing the fluff damage, and dark has less tools to do this than the others.

The real disadvantage comes from turns like v3s where the damage is primarily physical including the tank busters. Dark can make it through, but pld and war are definitely at an advantage. How popular physical turns will be in the future we have no idea. Alexander became increasingly physical damage towards the end.

I have run 'theoretical' models of uptime etc which others have done before comparing CDs. But that's right back to the theoretical. As you mentioned, hard data is rare as FF logs doesn't have a lot of war MTs. But I think that is telling in and of itself. But if that shows war's squishiness out of Defiance, or rather, shows Plds strength using its shield is hard to say. But even in Drk/War comps the Drk is largely the MT.

For my own experience, I ran as war in a war/drk combo for all of HW and start of SB. We then replaced the drk with another, less experienced drk who since changed to pld. TLDR: as I was the experienced tank I have been MT as war for 1/3 (2 we swap obviously) and we haven't beat 4 yet. I think war tanking V3 over Drk makes sense for reasons you've stated. Being able to use Raw Int as a tank buster CD makes life much easier. Similarly I hate tanking V1 for the opposite and wish our pld tanked that one. Were at the point where holmgang may not even trigger and just leaves me in dire need of a heal in the lower tiers.

During progression it was really nice. War in defiance is just indestructible. We can heal, we IB everything, more CDs than we can shake a stick at. But as soon as we got comfy and started pushing DPS to clear and dropping stance, it just became a whole new ball game. The loss of both tank stance+IB for virtually every damaging move hurts. A lot. -40%ish mitigation for nearly every move is just hugely painful while drk/pld just loose 20%. The loss of insta heal equilibrium on a short CD for both oh shit moments and recovery is lost. This leaves us with the basic CD suite that every tank has. We have functionally 1 more CD than pld/drk (ToB) but loose the always on (IB/Shelltron/TBN). I think people underestimate how much padding that constantly available mitigation gives. I like to compare it to: Imagine Tanking as Drk out of grit, but we take away TBN (lock behind grit) and give you ToB to replace it. You could also swap dark mind for Raw int, but that is a pro or con depending on the fight. That doesn't sound very appealing, but that's closer to war tanking in deliverance imo.

Its certainly doable, but think of it this way. War has 1 more CD. But when we have no CD available, that's it. Drk/Pld always have a near equivalent to rampart on demand to fall back on. They never 'dont' have a CD. That easily counters 1 CD deficit and (imo) the shorter timers for that reason. If we turtle tank, war has a very distinct advantage. Defiance war is really just silly tbh. But take that away and I find war to be quite rough as MT. But on that note, pld trumps all tanks in that category by a wide margin. Were really discussing the narrow gap betweemn 2nd/3rd, not closing the gap to 1st.

I also cant ignore that the game is more than savage. War just doing normal stuff by normal players can sit in defiance and be REALLY forgiving and EZ mode. When we talk about top level performance its practically a different game. Does the fact that war has an easy time tanking lower stuff factor into balance at high end speed run style raids? Should it? /shrug.