Concise Tank Balance Changes

[Chrono_Rising]

Reprisal and Haymaker are not direct analogs. Haymaker was a counter attack, but a poor choice of one in most pve party settings. It was a dps loss, the slow didn't apply to most enemies, and cost a GCD which lowers the feel of it being a counter-attack. I don't pvp, so maybe it had uses there, but outside of solo play in pve a counter attack based on dodging on a class that shouldn't be getting hit doesn't make much sense, especially given the rarity of dodging mechanics that register as a dodge. Reprisal made sense on dark knight, oGCD, dps increase, debuff damage mitigation, and increased enmity, all of which are nice tools to have on a tank job with tools which increased its proc rate. Monk having something which "resembled" reprisal first is not an argument when the thing it resembled did it well. Even shield swipe was retooled to be oGCD to more directly resemble reprisal, which is the closer analog in my mind anyway (though again the pacification debuff does little in most content.)

The original post didn't list these things but I'll list a few other examples of rewarding HW skills: parry procs on low blow representing a second way of counter attacking, synergy between dark dance (defensive fluff mitigation) and increased low blow and parry procs, having a non-dark arts combo to weave dark arts through oGCD actions, blood price being an dps cooldown for when you are actively tanking regardless of stance (again playing on that counter attack theme), synergy in defensive skills like increasing your evasion and blinding enemies, multiple debuffs (delrium, scourage salted earth, reprisal, blind) on a class which has thematically been about enfeeblement.

I have said this in a number of places, but the things the dark knight playerbase complained about in HW were things like the stance locks on souleater hp steal, stance lock on blood weapon, anti-synergy on skills like blind and blood price, or evasion and blood price. Stormblood brought us more stance locks on abilities, and removed a number of the feedback mechanisms that made the the job feel engaging and active without feeling like spam. It is as if people's feedback was heard, but completely backwards.