Reasonable buff to war

[whiskeybravo]

That would be literally the worst solution. GNB is probably the only time a new job has released pretty much perfectly balanced for an expansion release. GNB offers more DPS in exchange for slightly more stringent uptime requirements, middling utility, and the worst personal cooldowns.

I don't see what uptime requirements has to do with anything. You should always try to get as much uptime as possible regardless of job.

And the comment was in context to the quoted poster glorifying GNB utility. Which is why I put "great" in quotation marks, implying a bit of sarcasm.

I'd still rather them nerf GNB, if no other reason than to watch the metafanboys wrinkle up from soaking in their pool of tears.

[Capn_Goggles]

I'd still rather them nerf GNB, if no other reason than to watch the metafanboys wrinkle up from soaking in their pool of tears.

Then Paladin would be meta and you'd have literally the exact same situation, until paladin gets nerfed, and now the top two tanks have a .05% DPS advantage and are now meta. That's a completely pointless sentiment to hold because meta will always exist, even if everyone is a literal gray blob. "Yes, but we're grayer and blobbier". I can't fathom why people get into these camps for certain jobs and think nerfs/buffs are salvos to other enemy camps.

[whiskeybravo]

I can't fathom why people get into these camps for certain jobs and think nerfs/buffs are salvos to other enemy camps.

Fight fire with fire, or don't fight at all. Some people certainly have no qualms holding WAR accountable for the last 3 years of tank imbalance, to the point of now having to argue "why even bring a WAR". Even with this supposedly being the DRK expansion, the blame has been heaped on WAR because of the direction of DRK's re-work, instead of looking to the elephants in the room which are outshining both right now.

[Capn_Goggles]

Fight fire with fire, or don't fight at all. Some people certainly have no qualms holding WAR accountable for the last 3 years of tank imbalance, to the point of now having to argue "why even bring a WAR". Even with this supposedly being the DRK expansion, the blame has been heaped on WAR because of the direction of DRK's re-work, instead of looking to the elephants in the room which are outshining both right now.

The only fight is the one people are inventing in their heads. If anyone considers a 2-3% difference between the absolute highest parsing tank and the absolute lowest parsing tank an "elephant in the room", then they are completely disconnected from reality, especially when each tank offers something that makes up for minor DPS differences. At this point, anybody clamoring for buffs or nerfs on X or Y tank is either ignorant of the hard data, or isn't even interested in balance in the first place and only cares about having their favorite be the best.

You mean the PLD that's been the best, most popular tank for all of Stormblood and the first raid tier of Shadowbringers? PLD could definitely use a few nerfs, more than GNB.

That's called revenge nerfing. How a job performed during the previous expansion, or even patch, is utterly irrelevant data when discussing CURRENT job performance. The numbers say that the DPS difference between the absolute maximum and absolute minimum is 2-3%, completely insignificant.

[whiskeybravo]

How a job performed during the previous expansion, or even patch, is utterly irrelevant data when discussing CURRENT job performance.

Fair enough, so tell it to people bringing up the past years of WAR dominance and then explain to them how traditionally DPS was balanced against utility, with jobs lacking party utility usually being compensated in the damage dept. And when you're done with that, go ahead explain why it's acceptable for PLD to be the second highest damage tank which also offers the most party utility out of all 4.

[Capn_Goggles]

Fair enough, so tell it to people bringing up the past years of WAR dominance and then explain to them how traditionally DPS was balanced against utility, with jobs lacking party utility usually being compensated in the damage dept. And when you're done with that, go ahead explain why it's acceptable for PLD to be the second highest damage tank which also offers the most party utility out of all 4.

Having the most party utility doesn't mean it has the best party utility. Divine Veil is objectively worse than shake it off in every conceivable way: it prevents less damage, doesn't apply to the caster, is nullified by any healing magic (succor or aspected helios will remove it), and requires paladin to get healed after they use it but before the raid-wide; it's extremely situational and barely worth noting as utility. Intervention is great OT utility since otherwise that gauge and paladins tank cooldowns aren't doing them much good, in fact this is by far paladin's best utility as an off-tank. Cover is cool, but it's less useful than it was in stormblood with more jobs having access to arms' length, and honestly it wasn't stellar even then. Passage of arms is literally only useful for situations where paladin cannot target the boss, so it's basically limited to phase transitions only; again it's nice but nothing crazy.

The only job with weaker party utility is gunbreaker, and even then heart of light is more widely applicable since it has zero opportunity cost. Warrior has shake it off every 90 seconds and it costs them nothing to use for a 12% minimum party-wide shield that also applies to the caster; nascent flash is clunky to use but it's a fairly significant heal when used at the right time and 10% damage reduction and 50% heal from glint is a damn solid ability, not to mention WAR still has the widest personal mitigation suite of any of the tanks, and as iLvl up the gap between GNB and WAR will continue to shrink in each raid tier as Warrior scales better with crit than any other job aside maybe monk.

The DPS difference isn't limited to "2-3%." I went over this no more than a page ago.

But I have to ask, at what point does the DPS difference matter?

The aDPS difference between GNB and WAR averaged from the whole tier is 4%, with the most extreme disparity being on Titan with a 4.8% difference and the smallest disparity during Eden Prime with a 2.5% difference. rDPS difference averaged through the whole tier is 2.2%, with the most extreme disparity being Titan/Leviathan with a 3% difference and the smallest disparity in Voidwalker with a 0.5% difference. This is taken from the 95th percentile where it can be assumed the players of their respective jobs are playing nearly optimally without breaking into the realm of catering. That's pretty damn close compared to the rough average I just tossed out both in terms of aDPS and rDPS.

Regardless, it's all a matter of opinion but I'd say probably to the point where a job is under-performing to such a degree that it begins to appreciably affect clear times (or even ones' ability to clear). More specifically, let's take a look at the top clears for titan, where the greatest disparity between tank DPS exists and you'll see that tanks are accounting for about 18-20% of the fight's TOTAL damage. The number one clear time for Titan has Warrior dealing 1.8% less than the Paladin in aDPS and 1.9% damage less in rDPS, with Paladin contributing to 0.2% more overall damage than the Warrior over the course of the entire fight, with Warrior having 0.2% less uptime than the paladin. Of course, this isn't Gunbreaker who is currently the highest damaging tank, but compared to the number 2 clear time (1 second less) where the paladin performed similarly to warrior in the number 1 clear, and where the tanks contributed more damage overall, the difference rises to 0.52%. The number 1 clear time Warrior dealt 5.5% less aDPS than the number 2 clear time Gunbreaker when the Gunbreaker was in a fight where tanks contributed .41% more of the fight's overall damage.


Again, just a matter of opinion.

[Satarn]

Having the most party utility doesn't mean it has the best party utility. Divine Veil is objectively worse than shake it off in every conceivable way: it prevents less damage, doesn't apply to the caster, is nullified by any healing magic (succor or aspected helios will remove it), and requires paladin to get healed after they use it but before the raid-wide; it's extremely situational and barely worth noting as utility. Intervention is great OT utility since otherwise that gauge and paladins tank cooldowns aren't doing them much good, in fact this is by far paladin's best utility as an off-tank. Cover is cool, but it's less useful than it was in stormblood with more jobs having access to arms' length, and honestly it wasn't stellar even then. Passage of arms is literally only useful for situations where paladin cannot target the boss, so it's basically limited to phase transitions only; again it's nice but nothing crazy.

Eh you've got a bunch of things about PLD utility skills wrong.

Veil isn't removed by healing - the "trigger" effect on PLD is removed because that's when you activate the shield for the party. 10% shield on Veil isn't weaker than 12% on Shake, because Veil scales with the PLD's HP and Shake scales with each party member's individual HP(so a WHM will get a weaker shield than a WAR etc). Veil and Shake give about the same overall value with one WAR cd sacrificed afaik(used to be 2 cds back in SB), although with changes to Thrill and RI it's laughably easy to get that one CD for Shake fodder.

Passage can be weaved with zero dps loss for PLD - you just need to cancel it immediately after pressing the button and you'll still apply the mitigation effect for 5 seconds to anybody standing behind you, so it works very well for any raid damage you can stack for(which you should be doing whenever possible for easier healing anyways).

SB Cover wasn't valued mainly for the ability to share your anti knockback - it was a great way to deal with tank busters and autos, because the 20% mitigation trait was basically a "free" Rampart, which you could still stack with Sheltron or whatever else you wanted and it didn't consume Oath gauge back then either. It was an insanely good skill in Stormblood. It was also used to cheese a lot of mechanics, like preys in o7s or tether in o11s, which it can still be used for now.

[Argyle_Darkheart]

If anyone considers a 2-3% difference between the absolute highest parsing tank and the absolute lowest parsing tank an "elephant in the room", then they are completely disconnected from reality, especially when each tank offers something that makes up for minor DPS differences

The DPS difference isn't limited to "2-3%." I went over this no more than a page ago.

But I have to ask, at what point does the DPS difference matter?

At this point, anybody clamoring for buffs or nerfs on X or Y tank is either ignorant of the hard data, or isn't even interested in balance in the first place and only cares about having their favorite be the best.

Hilarious.

[Launched]

Then Paladin would be meta and you'd have literally the exact same situation

You mean the PLD that's been the best, most popular tank for all of Stormblood and the first raid tier of Shadowbringers? PLD could definitely use a few nerfs, more than GNB.

[RadicalPesto]

You mean the PLD that's been the best, most popular tank for all of Stormblood and the first raid tier of Shadowbringers? PLD could definitely use a few nerfs, more than GNB.

PLD was also literally unable to pull bosses and ran out of mitigation extremely quickly for the entirety of Stormblood. Despite having slightly better damage than other tanks, PLD still maintains overall worse personal mitigation due to a low number of actual mitigation skills, with all of them being either unimpressive, equivalent to their counterparts on other tanks, or on obscenely long cooldowns. The thing that made PLD a borderline mandatory pick in Stormblood was Cover being a broken skill that effectively acted as a free, extra cooldown every 2 minutes, but aside from that PLD had horrendous mobility, would quickly run out of cooldowns (O10S giving you no swaps on PLD was a nightmare), and by the end of SB, wasn't even all that impressive in DPS. PLD has been compensated DPS-wise for the fact the biggest saving grace of the class in SB (broken Cover) has been removed due to being impossible to balance. If you want to nerf PLD's DPS it will absolutely need buffs to personal mitigation and to usability of skills like Divine Veil, since we're no longer in a SB situation where PLD and WAR hog all the party mitigation while DRK gets stuck with none.