Regarding no DRK adjustments in 4.1

[Valdegarde]

I personally find TBN awful to use as well. Having to plan it for the exact window of an untelegraphed buster or one of those super quick ones like Tornado from the Kelpie in Skalla is maddening. It sure feels like there is lag, but even if it's "just" the animation, having to plan a few seconds ahead for anything nasty to be remotely non-squishy while you have a lot else to do feels far more punishing than the other tanks have to deal with, and god forbid missing it...it sets you back so much.
Comparing it to those "ultimate" skills with questionable animations is really making TBN look worse, TBN is designed to be used as often as possible on anything it can, not as an emergency or around extremely predictable junctures in a fight.

[Lyth]

TBN is not stoneskin. TBN is not Intervention. TBN is not Cover. All of these actions offer more defensively, at lower cost.

TBN is a defensive cooldown with an offensive twist. I understand why people worry about it being an offensive gain. I don't want to be mindlessly popping it on recast to break it on random autos. But it's actually a ton of fun to try to shield unmarked cleaves and tankbusters on your co-tank and counterattacking after each one. The problem is that TBN's dps neutrality so closely straddles the line of being a situational loss/situational gain that, while you can do it for your own amusement, there's always the risk that you might inadvertently hurt your dps without providing any tangible benefit in return for the risk.

If you look at the breakdown of tank dps, the biggest contributions to PLD and WAR dps, unsurprisingly, comes from Holy Spirit and Fell Cleave, respectively, followed by auto-attacks. On DRK, the biggest contribution to your dps comes from Souleater, followed by auto-attacks, followed by Bloodspiller. This isn't just because HS and FC are placed in buff windows so they hit harder. It's also because Bloodspiller generally gets less uses per fight than HS and FC. Bloodspiller doesn't need to be more powerful, but it certainly needs to occur more often. It's almost like an additional resource-based combo action, and it makes the rotation more interesting.

But if TBN is a dps gain, how do you prevent players from just throwing it out there in the hopes that a stray auto or passing wind breaks it? Simple, make it harder to break. If your teammate shield was 20% (like it is in PvP), then it really only would break on something like a cleave. It would also prevent players from preferentially off-tanking over main-tanking just to fish for procs. Even at 20%, it would probably be less powerful than Intervention, which sits at 20-30% DR after buffs, while actually making it relatively stronger than the whole party shields (DV and SiO, the latter of which can create a 8-24% party shield which benefits from both ToB and Defiance, if you really wanted to).

Basically, you could easily make TBN a potency gain if the shield was just appropriately tuned to take big hits, rather than breaking on trivial ones. There are a number of players out there that complain that tanking isn't defensively minded enough. What better way to change that than making cleave and tankbuster timings actually matter to your off-tank? The playstyle is there, they just need to make it rewarding to do so. It's ridiculously good fun.

[Valdegarde]

I agree with almost everything you mentioned, especially that TBN shouldn't be thought of as a DPS tool. However, my frustrations with it ARE defensive-minded. Ideally it'd be wonderful to prime it up for those big hits, I don't think that kind of playstyle is in question, but trying to break it on all the "little" things (which aren't so little anymore in Stormblood...), speaking at least for myself, is not to eke the tiny bit of DPS out of TBN...it's because that's all we have to use! Rampart just doesn't cut it, and otherwise we're taking rather gnarly auto attacks and critical hits that matter and set healers back with only TBN and Souleater (ha!) in between busters. Trying to catch everything possible with TBN to earn your MT spot really straddles the line between fun (on some fights) and needlessly stressful (on most others) to me.

If we did have enough cover between busters, such as...I don't know, for example, Heavensward Reprisal, I'd feel a lot less pressured to break or blow TBN on anything over 10k damage.

I feel like this has all been mentioned before, but I really just want to reiterate that not everybody finds TBN fun as a defensive tool, since the discussion about it tends to devolve into DPS frequently.

[Aana]

I agree with almost everything you mentioned, especially that TBN shouldn't be thought of as a DPS tool. However, my frustrations with it ARE defensive-minded. Ideally it'd be wonderful to prime it up for those big hits, I don't think that kind of playstyle is in question, but trying to break it on all the "little" things (which aren't so little anymore in Stormblood...), speaking at least for myself, is not to eke the tiny bit of DPS out of TBN...it's because that's all we have to use! Rampart just doesn't cut it, and otherwise we're taking rather gnarly auto attacks and critical hits that matter and set healers back with only TBN and Souleater (ha!) in between busters. Trying to catch everything possible with TBN to earn your MT spot really straddles the line between fun (on some fights) and needlessly stressful (on most others) to me.

If we did have enough cover between busters, such as...I don't know, for example, Heavensward Reprisal, I'd feel a lot less pressured to break or blow TBN on anything over 10k damage.

I feel like this has all been mentioned before, but I really just want to reiterate that not everybody finds TBN fun as a defensive tool, since the discussion about it tends to devolve into DPS frequently.

Oh I feel ya. I fully support making TBN a little more forgiving to use. (Longer shield duration or something funky like break 20% shield into 2x10% shields, if 1 breaks you get the payback etc). TBN is already the centerpiece of Drks overall mitigation and 'utlity' wrapped up into 1 and it is slightly underperforming in both areas. Drk also is behind in DPS. TBN should not be the 1 stop shop for everything wrong with drk by making it the center of their damage rotation as well. I really don't want to see DPS buffs become the centerpiece of TBN. Leave it DPS neutral, make it a little 'safer' to use in reliably recouping the blood for the MP. But dear lord don't make it some big DPS buff. Then we will just have the complaints that Drk cant maintain DPS with other tanks and use their mitigation/utility properly at the same time because they will all share the same button.

Let TBN do its job a little better. Fix Drk DPS somewhere else. Theres no shortage of weak/mediocre skills to do that with.

[Lyth]

The difficulty with TBN is that it is not consistently dps neutral. There are times, such as during your opener, during pots or raid buffs, where it's a dps gain to use. So you break it on a random auto as a sort of mini-infuriate, in part to get the extra bloodspiller under trick, but more importantly, to get the extra DA usage attached to it in the window (since you can't DA on HS - which is also why you should try to DA C+S before HS in a buff window, if possible). The problem with TBN at the moment is that it actually promotes the sort of optimisation that you're worried about, while discouraging its defensive use outside of these buff windows.

From a defensive standpoint, I don't think that TBN will ever really fill the same niche in average mitigation as Reprisal previously did or block presently does. I think a lot of those issues could be sorted by fleshing out DRK's existing lifesteal, given that it historically played an important role in the job throughout previous Final Fantasy games. Lifesteal should be our answer to block.

[Chrono_Rising]

I 100% agree about lifesteal.

TBN is not consistently a loss. In particular any time you are in grit it is the best thing you can do for your offense, besides dropping grit. At which point tbn becomes situational for your dps. It’s just odd.

Oh I see you are playing defensively: here press this as often as possible.

Oh I see you are playing offensively: why are you looking at me?

[whiskeybravo]

Only problem with that is, lifesteal didn't work out so well for 2.0 Warrior. So I'd be cautious in wanting that to be drk's niche.

Among other things such as adjusting defensive CDs and making some potency adjustments, it would be nice if drk maybe also got slashing. If you're running PLD/DRK then you have to bring sam or nin to get slashing. Not hard to find sams, at least. But even with adjustments in the other areas a pld/drk comp will still be at a disadvantage without slashing. RIP monk lol

[Aana]

Only problem with that is, lifesteal didn't work out so well for 2.0 Warrior. So I'd be cautious in wanting that to be drk's niche.

110% agree. Making a draintank as the primary function/theme of a tank is inherently problematic. There is a absurdly tiny line where its balanced. Anything easier than that line is completely neutered in difficulty. Any content above that line the draintank is useless.

Theres 2 ways draintanks can function. Drains based on your stats (grows with you, think war 2.0), or drains based on enemy power (monster hits you, you recover x% of damage taken. No matter how they drain, it creates problems. The latter is a convoluted way to just have mitigation. Instead of taking 100 damage -40%=60 damage taken, now you just take 100 then heal 60 instantly because of 'drain spikes' or whatever. Same effect in the end, but the heal tank is now extra vulnerable to 1 shots and dying because they still take the damage before they are healed compared to mitigation.

Drains based on your stats.

*OP part: Think wars pre SB. They have been able to solo content no other class has been able too because as you overgear content you BOTH take less damage and heal more damage through skills. Those effects just escalate to the point that overgearing content trivializes it MUCH faster than just ilvl alone would for any other tank. If the entire kit is centered around this mechanic it happens even faster and more dramatically.

*Broken (bad) part: Think 2.0 war vs pld. War could trivialize crap content with 300% heal IBs and such. But because your survivability was entirely based on your personal stats, it failed miserably when undergeared or in overtuned content. Pld was the ONLY MT in coil 1 because it mitigated damage based on boss damage. -40% sentinel becomes STRONGER the harder a boss hits while self heals based on stats gets worse. War couldn't survive death sentence when it 1 shot you no matter how much you 'could' have healed up after. Youre dead. To late to heal now.

Example

EZ content: Lets say IB heals 1k. Boss hits 100 damage, pld takes 60. War takes 100 but heals 10x that. War takes 10 busters neutralized by 1 IB. Pld slowly dies.

Hard content: Boss hits 100k. Pld taks 40k. Lives. War takes 100k dies, and even if they lived that 1k IB wouldn't do jack shit to help anyway.

Drain tanks have a single fine line of balance for any given ilvl. If they are at that point they are balanced. Below that point OP, above that point they suck.

Drain tanks are a fun concept and they work for things like turn based games or DOT style streams of damage tanking, but they don't do well in this tank buster/bursty style game we have. They would just get watered down into mitigation tanks just like 2.1 war did or suffer the same fate as 2.0 war. Yoyo between utter trash and OP depending on the toughness of the content.

Its a fun theme and it fits the FF iconography of Drks in other years, but drain tanks just don't work in this type of game unfortunately. We need a different type of Drk than the classic drain tank DD it has been historically.

[Valdegarde]

As much as I'd like a draining type playstyle to become more prominent, I do agree with the arguments that the precedent doesn't quite allow for it to be smooth or effective. However, there are ways to incorporate an overall drain mitigation effect that we haven't seen before on a tank, such as the damage to drain% being applied over time like a weak regen instead of in one hit, or an Excogitation effect, or increasing HP past the maximum for x amount of seconds like the Mage's Ballad Troubadour, or even being used to charge a reserve self heal cooldown that may be used on command. It's not impossible to think outside the box as far as this is concerned, however the bigger question to me is how far SE is going to consider altering a job's playstyle so dramatically for the rest of an expansion.

I guess Shake it Off was a pretty dramatic change...I don't know, I'd like to see something. I have soloed dungeon bosses with clever use of TBN and Souleater, while in anything remotely difficult it's fairly useless due to the Grit requirement and your healers ideally not letting you remain at low enough HP for Souleater to matter. Feels like a wasted opportunity even though % mitigation tends to win out.

[MauvaisOeil]

It doesn't necessary need to be replacing mitigation. While PLD can heal others, DRK could simply heal himself on a regular basis.

More like a signature work, than a fully mitigation competitive play. Since TB are everything in this game, some lifedrain shouldn't break the meta.