Quote Originally Posted by whiskeybravo View Post
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.