Tank comparison at 5.0?

[Absimiliard]

Dark Knight is currently the weakest of the tanks in damage output even assuming optimal play and conditions. This has been tested extensively. Attempting to deflect attention away from DRK by making the false claim that it's doing just fine is disingenuous and generally harmful to the playerbase. A small number of players finding they get the same DPS out of two or more jobs in the same role does not necessarily reflect overall game balance, as skill levels with each job will vary.

tl;dr: A handful of average player's experiences are irrelevant. These things have been tested. Hard. And DRK? DRK needs help.

[Inuk9]

Dark Knight is currently the weakest of the tanks in damage output even assuming optimal play and conditions. This has been tested extensively. Attempting to deflect attention away from DRK by making the false claim that it's doing just fine is disingenuous and generally harmful to the playerbase. A small number of players finding they get the same DPS out of two or more jobs in the same role does not necessarily reflect overall game balance, as skill levels with each job will vary.

tl;dr: A handful of average player's experiences are irrelevant. These things have been tested. Hard. And DRK? DRK needs help.

"Average players" lol

Get your orange unpadded with at least 2 tanks then you can come back and call me average.

A tip for you, the expansion is new, try things yourself instead of being the mob who listen to a famous streamer and take that as the absolute truth. The best players find their rotations instead of looking for guides.

EDIT: Oh yeah, the point is DRK and WAR needs MINOR buffs. They are NOT way behind like you are implying.

[whiskeybravo]

Dark Knight is currently the weakest of the tanks in damage output even assuming optimal play and conditions. This has been tested extensively. Attempting to deflect attention away from DRK by making the false claim that it's doing just fine is disingenuous and generally harmful to the playerbase. A small number of players finding they get the same DPS out of two or more jobs in the same role does not necessarily reflect overall game balance, as skill levels with each job will vary.

tl;dr: A handful of average player's experiences are irrelevant. These things have been tested. Hard. And DRK? DRK needs help.

Tested how? Seems to me a measure of how it's performing in actual content would be best "test" you could perform. And there's about 67,000 results from said testing pretty readily available.

The "average damage" being the lowest doesn't match it also being the 2nd highest at max level. What that really shows is that there's more to optimizing DRK's damage than say, the 1 trick pony known as Warrior, and most people are probably still trying to figure it all out.

But if you don't like raw numbers then go ahead and look at the top 10 tanks for each fight, too.

E1 - 7 GNB, 2 DRK, 1 WAR
E2 - 6 GNB, 2 PLD, 1 WAR, 1 DRK
E3 - 6 GNB, 2 DRK, 2 PLD
E4 - 4 GNB, 4 DRK, 2 PLD

40 spots total for top 10.

23 GNB. 9 DRK. 6 PLD. 2 WAR.

DRK is doing just fine. But all this really shows is GNB could take about a 5% nerf and still be top damage tank.

[Awful]

tl;dr: A handful of average player's experiences are irrelevant. These things have been tested. Hard. And DRK? DRK needs help.

I love this argument so much, I don't know how many times I'm doing Titania or Innocence EX on DRK pulling 6.7-6.8k unpadded and I have GNB in my group doing 1.2k less clearly DRK needs help and it's totally not a player thing where "OMG I got out DPS'd by a DRK but I'm a GNB I should be top!!". When a tank knows how to do DPS (gonna use GNB for this) that's unpadded by a DNC and knows how to hit their buttons they'll do 7k+ vs a good DRK doing 6.8k+ and it's only 200 DPS in this example, all tanks are perfectly playable in ALL content so please stop spreading this around.

The average player needs help playing because the tanks got dumbed down they're easy to play now right?

[DocQuixotic]

Which tank is the most complex and interesting to play these days? I've heard GNB but I've also heard that GNB is the simplest.

[Xia_Thas]

Which tank is the most complex and interesting to play these days? I've heard GNB but I've also heard that GNB is the simplest.

GNB has the most buttons and weaving thanks to the Gnashing fang combo, but it's pretty straight forward other than that. build cartridges spend cartridges.

[Jandor]

Which tank is the most complex and interesting to play these days? I've heard GNB but I've also heard that GNB is the simplest.

I don't know how people are arriving at the conclusion GNB is simplest to be honest. It isn't complicated by any stretch, but so far my experience is that none of the tanks really are anymore.

[Inuk9]

I don't know how people are arriving at the conclusion GNB is simplest to be honest. It isn't complicated by any stretch, but so far my experience is that none of the tanks really are anymore.

Even in stormblood the tank were simple, WAR in 5.0 was more complex but with the new Inner release the gameplay got simplified (for better or worse)

DRK had the DA spam and a lot of double weaving and small optimization windows, the old delirium was ok (you use it to extend blood weapon and get some MP) and aside from capping MP or blood, it was hard to get punished as a DRK.

Now In ShB

DRK got revamped. The community in general feels ok about the job only asking for small potency and QoL adjustments while the forum only complains about every little thing.

WAR got more complex due to the nascent flash now. If you overlap a inner release with a infuriate its a huge dps loss. That was not a factor in SB.

PLD got one more skill in the rotation but the complexity remains kinda the same 3X atonement replaces the second Fast/Riot/Authority in your physical phase. No more shield bash but Intervene takes its place.

GNB is a new job and got a lot of buttons, you can stop your main BnB combo to start the ammo combo and continue the BnB combo. Cartridge management is intuitive but hard to master the no mercy windows. In no mercy, you always want to spend at least 3 cartridges (5 if you have the "reload") and your dots (that conveniently shares the No mercy CD).

As for the aggro combos, nobody used then in SB, only PLD and DRK on pulls
PLD was always OT so the only job who used aggro combo was DRK and only one time in the fight.
WAR had no need to use aggro combo with unchained + equilibrium opener

[Absimiliard]

I love this argument so much, I don't know how many times I'm doing Titania or Innocence EX on DRK pulling 6.7-6.8k unpadded and I have GNB in my group doing 1.2k less clearly DRK needs help and it's totally not a player thing where "OMG I got out DPS'd by a DRK but I'm a GNB I should be top!!". When a tank knows how to do DPS (gonna use GNB for this) that's unpadded by a DNC and knows how to hit their buttons they'll do 7k+ vs a good DRK doing 6.8k+ and it's only 200 DPS in this example, all tanks are perfectly playable in ALL content so please stop spreading this around.

The average player needs help playing because the tanks got dumbed down they're easy to play now right?

Care to point out where I said anything about DRK not being playable? Yeah, you can't. Because I didn't. Now please simmer down instead of being disrespectful to others without provocation. Oh, and for that matter, who said the average player needs help? Again, nobody. This discussion is being held purely from a mechanical and mathematical standpoint.

That 200 DPS difference matters to people that like to play the game at a very high level, especially when you factor in DRK's lack of utility compared to the other tanks. Viability takes a backseat to efficiency; playing anything other than top tier jobs is a disservice to everyone you group with.

[Awful]

Care to point out where I said anything about DRK not being playable? Yeah, you can't. Because I didn't. Now please simmer down instead of being disrespectful to others without provocation. Oh, and for that matter, who said the average player needs help? Again, nobody. This discussion is being held purely from a mechanical and mathematical standpoint.

That 200 DPS difference matters to people that like to play the game at a very high level, especially when you factor in DRK's lack of utility compared to the other tanks. Viability takes a backseat to efficiency; playing anything other than top tier jobs is a disservice to everyone you group with.

And what hard math is this? You've been spouting all this hard testing was in Whiskey Bravo's post which is indeed over 67,000 individual census here, you were the one that brought up average players skill are irrelevant but a lot of people posting about DRK literally haven't even hit max lvl, let alone go into an EX trial or Eden normal for that matter. If you look at the previous posts DRK is fine, 200 DPS indeed matters in the top tier, world first group that everyone is playing optimally, average pug groups however that's not the case which is obvious.

The thing is people will always cling to the meta and think that just because DRK doesn't have utility like PLD/WAR/GNB that you can't do anything with it which isn't true at all, we have people still thinking that PLD is MT only, WAR is a one trick pony, and DRK is the magic tank, that should tell you how people still follow these mindsets.