Gunbreaker gameplay hope and expectations

[Kalise]

But then you start layering on other things like self-sustain

Wait, WAR with notable self sustain? WAR's self-sustain is a joke outside of using IR to spam Inner Beast/Steel Cyclone.

Especially compared to DRK whom has TBN as well as DA Souleater which does appreciable amount more than Storm's Path.

short recast knockback prevention

Are you referring to IR? The skill that is necessary for WAR to use to maximize DPS? Or Holmgang that's necessary for WAR to keep for Tankbusters in order to do the things that everyone complains about WAR being too good for?

Or are you referring to PLD's Tempered Will which is a skill purely available for knockback prevention that doesn't cost them another powerful CD?

You could make every job have an equivalent burst, but then where's the difference?

The difference is how they perform that burst. WAR's rely entirely on IR and FC spam in its duration, this is a 90s CD. They have little set up (Only needing to make sure that Storm's Eye buff has adequate duration) and little cost (Since it takes no resources and in fact gives a bunch of CDR to Infuriate)

PLD has Requiescat which is a 60s CD and relies on Holy Spirit spam (Currently. There's nothing to say they couldn't get an additional offensive spell to use with it. Or even get an Oath Gauge spender that deals damage to make use of the Oath they generate while spamming HS). It has the set up of requiring 80%+ MP in order to get the effect, as well as the cost of using up a bunch of MP to spam the necessary skills. One (Or both) of these aspects could also receive a change.

DRK has Blood Weapon which is a 40s CD and boosts their SkS and gives them additional Blood generation... They just continue to spam their normal skills but more frequently rather than having a 2 button combo that sets up and then gets mashed for DPS. It could be adjusted to have more impact and a higher CD and still be different in that they wouldn't just mash 1 skill for the duration like PLD/WAR (With aforementioned possibility for PLD to also get a more diverse "Rotation" as part of Requiescat)

If burst jobs did less damage on a target dummy, you'd see different jobs excel in different fights.

No you wouldn't. You'd still see favour for burst because how it lines up with CD's.

Unless you gimp the "Burst" jobs sustained DPS to laughable levels. Which, would include PLD because they're also a "Burst" job as they rely a lot on their Requiescat CD for a significant amount their damage, just like a WAR relies on Inner Release.

DRK is really the only Tank that isn't so burst orientated at the moment, because they don't have such focused damage boosts (Blood Weapon has a 37% uptime for example). Ironically, they're also the tank with the closest DPS to that of WAR...

As far as defensives go: the sheer number that we have access to removes a lot of the challenge from fights. I'm in favour of Dark Mind, Thrill of Battle, Raw Intuition, and Bulwark all going away.

So... Make Tanks rely more on the generic Role Actions skills?

Rather than you know... Removing all of the Role Action CD's and instead relying on classes having their own, unique CD's that let them specialize in certain situations? Such as Dark Mind letting DRK shine vs Magic damage and WAR having Raw Intuition letting them shine in single target Physical situations (Due to no longer having Awareness to negate the downside that comes with multi-target situations often having attacks that come from the sides, or spells that go straight through the parry chance)?

Make Inner Beast dps neutral and make resource-based mitigation through Sheltron/IB/TBN a more central part of tanking.

So... Homogenize tanks even more?

The problem isn't homogenisation. The problem isn't a lack of homogenisation. The problem is a selective, partial homogenisation which benefits jobs like WAR at the expense of others. The changes to the role action system this expansion was another fairly good example of this.

No, the problem is that people aren't considering the fact that WAR isn't the epitome of Tanking. It merely excels in the meta that has existed. Where Raid damage is often irrelevant outside of Tankbusters, where Holmgang shines and where WAR's lack of consistent mitigation (Through not having Shelltron/TBN or a Defensive stance with Mitigation on it) is irrelevant.

Where DPS is the only concern for a Tank and as such WAR, the more offensively tuned Tank, thrives, especially with the way buff stacking works (Including Slashing debuff. If Magical debuff was as prolific as Slashing, you'd see PLD on top because then their Requiescat bursts would be far stronger)

Thus, mitigation is not a concern, so DRK/PLD whom have better mitigation than WAR don't shine. Support is not a concern, so PLD who has Cover, Intervention and Passage of Arms doesn't shine.

Where the fact that WAR kind of sucks in OT roles because all it provides for support is the AoE shield (Which, to be honest, I do feel is a skill that can be culled from WAR, it doesn't really fit with them. In addition, it actively powercreeps off Divine Veil...) is mitigated because you just toss PLD there...

The solution is to roll this back a little. People have been arguing "just balance everything through buffs" for years. That's not how balance works. If you do, the end result is a steady power creep.Sit down, look at everything that makes WAR systematically dominant, and tone it back.

Alternatively, the solution is sit back, look at everything that makes WAR systematically dominant and look at the tools other Tanks have and why they're not as strong.

Look at why WAR's DPS is so good when PLD is also burst CD based too (Also, why DRK, a not as burst CD based job outperforms PLD)

Look at why WAR's have good snap threat, while PLD/DRK less so despite their kits being so similar. (Though, personally I actually find DRK the best for snap threat because DA Plunge/Dark Passenger is an oGCD high enmity generator. With toggling off Grit also not requiring a GCD allowing for high initial threat without much cost)

Look at why WAR's are seen as the best mitigators while PLD/DRK have more consistent mitigation skills (Hint: It's because damage is designed in a way where it's all about tankbusters and where things like Shelltron/TBN/Inner Beast as well as defensive stances are not particularly notable)

Look at raid utility and how WAR's are seen as good with their Slashing debuff (That's also brought by the NIN that people prioritize for Trick Attack and threat for non-WAR comps) and AoE shield while PLD/DRK are not (When PLD has a ton of selfless skills)

There shouldn't be flat out buffs or flat out nerfs. There should be tuning. Tuning up things that are weak. Tuning down things that are strong. Tuning certain utilities that happen to work well with specific things (Like, ironically, PLD coincides better with DPS CD's since many are on the same 60s CD compared to WAR's 90s IR CD). Tuning content so that it's not nearly as focused on specific things (I.e. Tankbusters that require "Supercooldowns")

[Seraphor]

I had started a full write up detailing actions and traits and levels and, but then I was like, no.

Summary.

I want the Stances to be based around their resource utilization. A Six slot ammo system, where stance swapping between Tank and Not-Tank is also a full reload. Additional partial reloads depend on good execution and defensive skill utilization. Tie the Gunbreakers performance directly into proper utilization of the entire kit when in front of the boss rather than just half of it.

Gunbreaker's unique approach to this is that only Weaponskills are boosted or penalized by Stance shifts. Auto Attacks, Abilities (Often fueling or fueled by Ammo) and Gunblade charge expenditures are not affected by stance.

I want weaponskills divided between "Drivers" and "Breakers". Drivers naturally expend Gunblade ammo. Breakers open up an OGCD called 'Trigger' and have longer Recast times.

"Triggers" are an OGCD attack with additional effects. It consumes 1 Gunblade ammo to use, and through some timing mechanic, increases in potency the closer you are to the sweet spot. A trigger's bonus effect is based on the Breaker preceding it. A trigger hitting the 'sweet' spot is traited at later levels to restore a Gunblade charge.

Gunblade ammo grants a bonus damage effect when expended based on which 'Cylinder' (Stance) is currently in the Gunblade. 'Not Tank' is a higher single target potency while 'Is Tank' is a Point Blank AOE.

The Gunbreaker's short CD defense is a Parry and Evasion tool. It grants a short 100% evasion window for most attacks, but unavoidable attacks instead hit a guaranteed Parry. This parry tool is granted early and is traited as the Gunbreaker levels to A) Restore Gunblade charges on successful defense and B) Parry Magical attacks later. (Runic, baby!)

The Gunbreaker's moderate CD defense grants damage reduction dependent on the Gunblade charges consumed. "But my DPS" - Gunblade charges being expended grant the bonus potency. You may potentially lose a Trigger, but this is where stance management comes into play (as they act as full reloads).

The Gunbreaker's burst phase is Renzokuken. It would morph each Breaker into a powerful finishing move, remove combo restrictions, and grant unlimited Gunblade charges for the duration. Any finishing move utilized ends Renzokuken early.

The Gunbreaker's party bonus is an On-Hit effect to the target - Any attack landing on this target deals additional potency based on the Gunbreaker's combat stats. The Gunbreaker's party DPS window is best utilized when rapid attacks are coming in, such as Ninja OGCD windows, Machinist Wildfire, and Summoner Bahamoots.

The goal here is a Tank that is utilizing both their stances, with proper usage ensuring a full use of their kit at all times. Limiting resource generation to Stance swaps, successful defenses, and perfect triggers is aimed at encouraging precise play.

Just want to say I think this sounds really good. I hope Gunbreaker plays similarly to this.

[Vejj]

At first i would know, does the Gunbreaker use plate armor or shared with Monk lol.


The first preview also the cinematic shows the gunbreaker with lazy leather duster xD

[Lyth]

I don't think you need a separate armor type to keep the job aesthetic. There are always job-specific sets and glamors.

...

People really like these quote-by-quote conversation-style argument posts for some reason. I think it's because it makes them feel like they're deconstructing point-by-point, but they're tiresome to actually read through.

Self-sustain
I don't really understand why WAR has any form of lifesteal at all. I don't care how significant it is. It's like giving WAR a shield to block with. You'd be eroding PLD's job identity, and it doesn't fit with the job aesthetic. Of course, if you don't feel that WAR has any significant self-sustain, then you won't miss it if it's gone.

This TBN/self-sustain point keeps coming up. It's kind of baffling. TBN is mitigation. Grit Souleater does count as self-sustain, but people have been asking for the Grit requirement to be removed for a very long time. For practical purposes, locking something behind Grit means that it might as well not exist.

Mobility
Onslaught is an on-demand knockback prevention and mobility tool. That's on top of IR and Holmgang, which do actually get used to prevent knockbacks on occasion. The best cases are when you have a situation which you have to mitigate a big hit while preventing a knockback (like back in O5S) or when your burst window happens to line up with it. That's a lot of versatility.

DPS
Burst is a tricky issue to balance. As you pointed out, it really represents a spectrum. Shorter burst windows are more powerful and easier to execute than longer ones. But it should be a consideration when determining a job's total dps, the same way raid buffs are supposed to be. The job with the highest burst should have the lowest maximum dps.

Mitigation
Homogenization is not a bad word. Every healer needs to be able to heal. Every tank needs to be able to mitigate. When something is a fundamental requirement to perform a given role, then you need to create equivalents. You only run into problems when these "equivalents" aren't actually equal.

I'm not a fan of mitigation moves with a specific damage type. We tried the whole "physical tank/magical tank" dichotomy with PLD and DRK in Heavensward, but it just meant that WAR was good at everything.

I also think that the Role action system needs to go. I don't mind skill trees when they're properly designed, but that can be done at a job specific level. I'd like Reprisal and my old Shadowskin animation back, at least for flavour purposes.

Tuning is important, but tanks need to be reassessed from the ground up. It's not good enough to say that a job has a given ability because it's always been there.

And I'm sorry to say, if they'd actually done what they promised and properly addressed the tank inbalance going into Stormblood, my feelings on the issue wouldn't nearly be as strong. They failed. And if it means that jobs like WAR, SCH, and BRD get benched for the first time in five years, maybe that won't be such a bad thing. I would much rather they err on the side of too much nerfs than risk revisiting the past for a third expansion running. I just don't have the patience for it.

[shao32]

how really expect ppl SE make PLD,GUN and DRK more unique when WAR dominate every competent field in tanking on this game? if PLD and DRK players are against WAR superiority is for something, there is no room in shadowbringers for PLD, DRK and GUN to have a niche as longer WAR keep they niche on everything at the same we din't have room to have a proper niche on ARR, heavensward and stormblood all of then bcs WAR, WAR is the main problem of tank balance and WAR main's should stop saying the universe have to roll around WAR and the rest of tanks have to adapt.

[garret_hawke]

I would like to see positional but only if they were front ones. I t could allow something like : " Some slash; deals damage with x potency front bonus grant additional enmity". Therefore removing the need of a dedicated aggro combo and not have the dps combo be the aggro one too.

[Izsha]

The thing I dont understandfrom so many of the war hate posts is the idea that every tank needs a niche. A strength and a weakness. If you have snap aggro you have to give up something. If you have dps you have to give up something. The often trotted out war diesnt leave space for other tanks to have a niche.

The better question is why are we trying to force every tank into a niche, when niches are defined as fundamental tanking functions.

Snap aggro isnt a niche. It's a thing tanks need to function. Strong mitigation isnt a niche. It's being a tank. All this whining about how war can do 'everything' that a tank needs to do just tells me war is a well designed tank and pld/drk have some holes that need filling.

ALL tanks should be able to pull a monster and generate threat. That's not a niche. That's a fundamental part of tanking. All tanks should be able to mitigate damage because the entire purpose of tanking is to mitigate damage better than your party.

Tanks should not he separated into groups based on "I'm the pulling tank" "I'm the mitigating tank". As said before: if se put up a pp slide of gunblade job concepts and the 1st bullet was "can generate aggro" and the 2nd point was "can mitigate damage" that would be utterly stupid.

Stop confusing tank functions with job identity. All tanks should have the tools war has. Their identity is how they accomplish those tasks not what tasks they can accomplish. War can always be a burst dps, hp based tank and still have snap and mit. Old can be a protective holy knight with snap and mit and good dps.

Stop trying to make tanking zero sum gain where no tank can actually perform all tank roles because of a misplaced idea mixing basic tank functions everyone should have as a niche and further conflating that as job identity. Let tanks be tanks instead of destroying everyone in your blind war hate.

[Kalise]

-Snip-

Quote-by-quote allows more ease of reference to specific points. As opposed to snipping an entire post and trying to figure out what the response is actually referring to through a block of text.

On the topic of self sustain:

You don't understand why, the tank that is focused around raw health and increased healing, has self sustain? It's because having fat stacks of health doesn't mitigate damage. Unlike actual damage mitigation. So in order to turn increased healing into mitigation they need to have healing. Unlike PLD whom has direct mitigation as well as block capabilities or DRK that has shields in addition to damage mitigation.

It actually makes more sense for WAR to have self healing than it does for DRK. PLD only makes sense because they typically use White Magic which often includes healing rather than being mechanically defined by it in their block focused mitigation playstyle (The fact that their only heal is Clemency means that in actual fact, PLD gaining a healing skill in HW is in fact eroding WAR's job identity whom had Inner Beast back in 2.0 not to mention Bloodbath and Mercy Stroke)

TBN as self sustain is not baffling. Self-sustain means to keep your health up. This is done by mitigation, shielding or healing. Self-sustain is not wholly dependent on self-HEALING. TBN puts up a shield that stops your health going down. It's the reverse of self-healing which aims to bring your health back up after it goes down.

For example: You're about to take 1000 damage. Player A puts up a shield for 500 before they take the damage, they end up 500 life down. Player B heals for 500 after taking the full damage, they also end up 500 life down. Player C does nothing and ends up 1000 life down.

Both Player A and Player B have sustained themselves to be at a better life point total.

At the end of the day, WAR, the tank whom should have the most life gain in their kit because that's literally the core of the class - To have high health and to have increased healing received - Ends up having lacklustre life gain because of the same problem that all tanks face, that it's tied to DPS losses and Tank Stance. Or is so pitifully minor to where it essentially doesn't exist (I.e. Storm's Path or Inner Beast when it doesn't crit)

As far as mobility is concerned, Onslaught exists, but it's also a significant DPS loss because it uses up Beast Gauge. Also, again, if it's mobility that's the issue, why not give PLD/DRK thematic mobility increases (Not necessarily a charge like Onslaught) or if it's just a case of it counters knockbacks (Some at least, because for example, Shiva EX doesn't care about your Onslaught because you're knocked back into the stun field) why not address that with unique things for them? Like adjusting Tempered Will's CD?

For DPS, it's not really a clear cut case of "Best burst should = lowest DPS" - Since, that inherently means that burst jobs necessitate buff stacking in order to function (Outside specifically designed fights where you can only ever achieve sporadic uptime). While sustained DPS jobs would get to work just fine and buff stacking would just amplify their damage rather than be a necessity.

Really, if burst is becoming too much of a problem, then the best solution is to address the burst jobs and distribute some of their damage away from their burst combos. I.e. WAR would seem like less of a problem if they didn't have so much damage pushed into Inner Release + Fell Cleave. Heck, when I gained Inner Release in SB I hated the skill, because it caused this dichotomy where I had brief periods of being really strong and then long periods where I felt more limited in my output (Not to mention, it was less fun than setting up Berserk combos where maximizing output would include getting up to 100 BG, having Storm's Path combo ready and having Infuriate up in order to push out 3x Fell Cleave + a guaranteed SP along with whatever normal combos I can fit in during the duration). I'd have much preferred something else so that I would still have burst from Berserk to capitalize on, but would also have more impact during the downtime of the CD.

That way you can continue to have jobs focused around periods of burst (Such as WAR with Berserk, PLD with Requiescat, RDM with Riposte combos, MCH with Wildfire etc) without them becoming too powerful because of force amplification of stacked buffs during their burst combos.

In regards to Mitigation:

Homogenization is a bad word. Yes, every healer needs to be able to keep people alive. Every tank needs to not die. But notice the how vague I am being about their core tenets. That's because it's homogenization that every healer needs to heal and every tank needs to mitigate.

We have healers like SCH that focus on Shielding rather than healing. This is fine. We have 2.0 WAR that had focus on self healing instead of raw mitigation/blocking. That is also fine.

There are often multiple ways to achieve a similar goal, which allows jobs to play differently and have different areas where they excel. The issue comes when you're trying to homogenize everything and you get to a point where Skill A is outright better than Skill B because you were trying to differentiate Skill B to make the job feel different while your intent was still to try and replicate Skill A.

The main damage reduction skill for Tanks comes to mind. Vengeance being 30% mitigation and reprisal damage (Also, 15 seconds duration which only makes sense if you think that the initial design for WAR was to have fewer means to actually mitigate damage so they should have slightly better uptime on the few CD's they do have) vs Sentinel that was trying to be different and fit into the design of PLD which is "Mitigate Damage" at 40% mitigation and then balanced to a higher CD because 40% mitigation is a LOT vs Shadow Wall which is simply 30% mitigation because what feels like "Oh, DRK needs a skill like Vengeance/Sentinel!" and so they got the bare bones version just because they were ticking a box rather than creating the skill to fit into the job design.

As such, if they didn't homogenize things and created unique skills for the jobs based around specific designs, there would be drastically different areas where the jobs excelled. Like, if WAR was still balanced around self-healing as opposed to mitigation, they would be weakest against burst damage they couldn't ignore with Holmgang because self-healing implies being able to survive the damage to start healing up. While PLD would be the best at reducing damage because they would be focused around having the high mitigation skills as well as block capabilities. Then leaving DRK to be able to mitigate frequent bursts due to things like repeated shields from TBN.

All 3 tanks in that situation still function as tanks. They still are all focused around staying alive. But they now have different niches but in a way that wouldn't preclude them from content unless specifically designed to (I.e. Holmgang would still let WAR beat Tankbuster skills even if PLD would have more tools that would let them do so)

[Phoenicia]

This TBN/self-sustain point keeps coming up. It's kind of baffling. TBN is mitigation. Grit Souleater does count as self-sustain, but people have been asking for the Grit requirement to be removed for a very long time. For practical purposes, locking something behind Grit means that it might as well not exist.

Holy snip!

Any form of shielding is usually calculated as HPS. TBN, SiO and Veil all count as HPS. Thanks to that, DRK beats WAR in HPS and hence: Self-sustain.

I personally wish that self-healing via lifestealing was something given to DRK as part of its identity.

Ugh... I wrote a long post of numbers why WAR isn't really ahead of the other two tanks showing numbers but I accidentally closed the page and lost most (almost all) of it. I will try to roughly redo it. Will talk about DPS first, then touch on mitigation and then try to identify the "real issue" at the end.

First: Damage and DPS:

You need to know your burst-to-totalDPS ratio, how it works and what it entails.

Warrior:

* WAR's IR window is ~40% of total DPS. WAR is VERY burst heavy. Fights ending just before your burst window is back will show the "best" indicative of your average DPS and ones ending just after (i.e. at 100s , 190s, 280s etc) will greatly inflate it.

* WAR's Burst is on a 90s window, it has an awkward alignment with the popular 60/120s cycle buffs but lines up perfectly with other 90/180s buffs (Only Brotherhood comes to mind really).

* Its nature being 100% Direct Critical Hits (DCH) means it is not amplified by Battle Voice, Litany nor Chain Strategim and/or Spear.

* Outside of IR, WAR can try to manipulate Fell Cleaves and Upheavals/Onslaughts into misaligned burst windows for "mini-bursts"

Paladin:

* Buffed Holy Spirit is ~<20% of total DPS. Smart usage might allow for 3-holy spirits to replace a royal authority combo for potency gain under the right conditions. Requiscat window causes the PLD to lose 2 auto attacks on average (and the second hit from SwO). FoF openers are favored in most situations.

* PLD has two buffed phases, Requiscat and FoF, neither window can be considered "the" burst window as it depends on timing and alignment. Gives it flexibility in some situations, or just awkward placement. (i.e. SMN+MNK groups).

* PLD runs a 60s cycle regardless of starting phase, perfectly lining up with every raid buff except Brotherhood.

* PLD is definitely the most sustained DPS between the tanks (and probably all jobs).

Dark Knight:

* DRK's real burst comes from its oGCD action, Carve and Spit, MP pool and Blood Gauge where its burst window is a matter of: "How many DA'd actions can I fit into this window", optimally 4 DA'd GCDs and 1 DA+C&S. Most of the time you get 2~4 DAs in counting in the C&S.

* Bloodweapon is a 40s CD, extendable every other use, and its real purpose is to unload more DA's for a burst phase with 1 added GCD if it lines up, or preps for an upcoming burst phase is it does not line up. BW is NOT the burst phase of a DRK.

* Since the place has complete control over when to spend or pool up resources, DRK has the choice of being very burst heavy, or dealing very sustained DPS.

* Outside of Contagion, DRK can plan its bursts around EVERY raid CD regardless of composition.

* Due to the above factors, there is no definite burst-to-totalDPS ratio. This ratio is what you make it. Your only limitation is how big your mana pool is and how smart you manage it.

Now that's out of the way, here is DPS potential:

100% uptime over 6 minutes parses of tanks in various gearsets tested to find the best in slot options, courtesy The Balance Discord:


As can be seen, WAR isn't ahead at all. The bursty nature is what makes it pull ahead of the other two in actual fights. But we will soon see it is only very marginal.

What a bout FFLogs percentiles? They are a bad guideline. Why you ask? Here is why:

1- Number of parses matter a LOT. WAR is vastly over-represented whereas DRK is under-represented. WAR+ either tank much more popular than PLD+DRK comps. And PLD is much more popular than DRK for reasons I will get to at the end. This affects percentiles heavily. Less players over all means less opportunities to get the highest and lowest ends on either and as such move the median up or down, which dictates what makes an average parse, average.

2- Padding exists. A lot of us don't like it, but it does. Add in the fact there are more WARs than either tank, this greatly inflates the top percentiles. You could parse 5200 in a fight as PLD and score an orange, then do the same on WAR and find you're not even grazing the 90s. Even what people consider "padding" is different. For me it is when single target balance and other buffs are directly fed to someone as opposed to just having general AoE balances and raid buffs.

Despite seeing below that the three tanks have very close parses. Let's look at the top 3 ALL TANKS DPS on Omega (O11S):


They are padded as they can get. Difference is within 50 DPS. Not even 1% variance.

Here is Final Omega (O12S):


This one is different, the top 2 DRKs are farther ahead of the WAR, but the fact they are ahead of WAR already breaks the original argument of WAR being OP/far-ahead.

3- Our best bit to draw a ballpark mark would be to go to top parses and individually find the first unpadded parse, which would lead to the best optimized run for that class. This would probably mean going down a silly number of parses to find one (Hint: Top 10 are all padded). You will find them to be very close. I did this a while back and remember the top being a DRK for Omega. And honestly I am not feeling to do that again now. But feel free to do so.

Conclusion: Tanks are VERY close in terms of DPS there is no reason to favor any of them over the other for DPS alone. We already take PLD over DRK even when DRK is ahead.

Phew, done with DPS.

Second:Mitigation and Taking Hits:

Honestly, I do not want to go into too much detail for the second time.. But in general:

In quantity, WAR only has 1 more CD than DRK and 2 over PLD. However, when we factor in QUALITY things get confusing.

PLD's CDs on their own mostly have WAR beat in terms of "quality". Sentinel mitigates more than any of WAR's CDs on its own and Hallowed is 100% invincibility. But they are on a longer CD compared to WAR's Holmgang which is on a ridiculously short CD for what it is, which allows it to cheese through dangerous situations very frequently, freeing up its other CDs for other things. DRK is slightly lost in between with LD being shorter CD than HG but longer than Holm, having the ability to last longer than HG but against the caveat of a heal requirement that can dispel it.

This DOES give WAR an edge. But it is also balanced in a way. It makes up for a "weakness" of sorts, the necessity to trade-off Fell Cleaves for Inner Beasts and forceful entry into Defiance to even access it. So it balances out against DRK and PLD's ability to freely access their on-demand mitigation button (TBN and Sheltron respectively).

An analysis was done by the balance discord in patch 4.2 said that WAR/DRK takes more damage than any PLD composition to an amount equaling a single full-health-bar (or what would be mitigated by a hallowed ground). That was before 4.3 buffs to DRK mind you. I would assume it is now: PLD+DRK >= PLD+WAR > WAR+DRK.

EDIT: This analysis, ironically, was referred to in a post later as a tool to argue against this post.

As for raid mitigation, ignoring the role actions available to all tanks, nothing the tanks bring, healers can't cover on their own. Most of the time under optimal play Veil and Shake it Off won't save any healer GCDs. Having both is definitely redundant as fatal AoE isn't even frequent enough to warrant that. Veil costs a healer GCD regardless. SiO and Veil do have a good probability to save people from dying when healers slack but that's on healers for slacking, not tanks having a bonus. Both SCH and AST have parallels to Passage of Arms. A shield healer can do what Veil does at the same cost of 1 GCD wither it is aspected Helios, Succor or ET Adlo.

Conclusion 1: all tanks can survive everything thrown at them under proper play (not standing in fire or taking unnecessary damage and/or vulnerability stacks). Tank swaps make this even more irrelevant.

Conclusion 2:In the end, DRK+PLD or DRK+WAR isn't really behind PLD+WAR comps. Not when Reprisal, Faint, Addles and so on also exist.

Time for the meat of this whole wall-of-text...

What is really wrong with tanks?

One word: PERCEPTION!

Yes, player-base perception is the real issue. People blindly follow the best players without understanding the full picture. Best players overestimate the average player's game-sense and assume they have similar knowledge so they omit a lot of things in their explanation, and the average player overestimates their own skill.

Have you not run into a situation where you have an undergeared tank that refuses to get into tank stance or refuse to adjust their CDs because optimal play required us to never be in tank stance? I have!

Have you not run into a healer that spends literally 0 healing GCDs throwing stones and broils and when you die they just go and say: "I had nothing to heal you with, maybe you should take less damage?". What do you mean "nothing"? Cure 2 does not have a CD! It is always available!

But those tanks heard Xeno says you don't need tank stances. Even though if you watch his streams he does occasionally hop onto them to survive unexpected damage or bad healing.

Those healers heard/saw good healers saying "minimize healing GCDs and rely on oGCDs as much as possible" and they thought "0 GCDs, all oGCDs, they die, their fault".

What is even worse: once something is perceived it sticks around for a while, and usually takes a few patches (or an entire expansion) for it to go away or change. I will make the effort to mention a few examples:

* 2.0 WAR was considered garbage (and it was). WAR in 2.0 had extreme difficulty tanking 1 fight: Twintania in The Binding Coil of Bahamut Turn 5. People ended up kicking WAR out Wanderer's Palace normal despite it was never tanked by neither WAR nor PLD, WHM was the real tank because Holy was OP (300 potency and no drop off). If the WHMs survived, why even kick the WAR? If anything WAR sped up the run as they had actual AOE damage when PLD wast just a.... shield. Hint: Self-healing tanks become the better tanks once their Dmg-to-heal ratio overcomes damage taken which was the case at ilv 85 in WP.

* People saw shield + Hallowed Ground and thought: "OMG PLD BEST TANK!". Add in 2.0 WAR and PLD "strength" was further emphasized. Then, suddenly even though PLD got nothing but buffs in HW, PLD was considered UTTER Garbage when it was dropped in favor of DRK because Lucrezia thought a NIN+DRG would be better than having a MNK and wanted to retain the INT-down debuff. Forums were flooded by threads to buff it, and when they gave up, flooded with WAR (and ironically DRK) nerf requests. The DRK part is specially hilarious because 1 week before that people were asking for DRK buffs when magic damage wasn't as prevalent in extreme primals as it was in Alexander Savage.

* The physical meta comp that emerged near the end of HW lost its power early stormblood. All with DRG and MCH's clunk (the first got fixed but not the latter). SMN was not even considered despite it bringing more personal and raid DPS than MCHs. SMN finally became popular in meta comps 3 patches later (4.3), and now 2 caster comps are creeping into fastest kill times ... Despite SMN receiving 4 nerfs since the 4.1 mini-rework/buffs. I am, and probably others are, speculating the reason double caster (BLM+SMN) groups do not have the fastest kill yet is that not enough groups are attempting it.

List can go on, but I will stop, this is gone long enough lol.

[Lyth]

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Stop trying to spin it as WAR hate. We just want to see a change.

I'm extremely glad that you agree that some of these things should be universal. If so, you should agree that we need systemic nerfs to WAR for the greater good of this game, because mitigation, snap enmity generation, and dps are all areas in which WAR has historically dominated.

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I think there's some value in being concise.

WAR is not a magical tank. I'm not sure how you magically drain life from your enemies and generate party-wide barriers. I know there's a historical precedent with 1.x's Bloodbath, but you know what? 1.x wasn't all that good. Maybe let's not make gameplay decisions on the patch series that nearly destroyed this game.

TBN isn't self-sustain because it doesn't allow you to keep your HP up in the absence of a healer. Even a level 1 opponent can theoretically whittle you down with TBN use alone.

Onslaught is not a significant dps loss. I've posted the math for this in the forums multiple times. It's even less so post 4.2. And you know what? DRK used to be the most mobile tank in Heavensward. That's just how WAR encroaches on other jobs' identity.

Burst jobs don't need buff stacking in order to function. They simply benefit more from it than other jobs. You could nerf WAR's burst, as you said, but again, it's still a balance problem that needs to be addressed.

You can certainly have multiple ways of achieving the same goal. But some approaches are flat out better than others. Homogenization is the easiest way to do this. But the single worst thing that you can do is to make core skills extremely similar, but with a clear edge given to one job. That's what we have right now with actions like Holmgang.

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One quick note here, since this has already come up on the dps forums: the calculations that you've posted are theoretical. No fight in the game has 100% uptime. It's in non-perfect uptime fights that you see the differences between burst and non-burst jobs (i.e. actual content).

Also, looking at the very top results always yield massively skewed results. It's just a question of who has bothered to design the most catered run.