5.3 patch complete note. Yes just keept upgrade WAR and forget about DRK

[Kabooa]

As for DRK doubling down on the bubble/shield mitigation, that potentially introduces it's own unique sets of problems.

I'm fairly certain TBN already works as follows.

All other shield effects are placed into a FIFO order while a unique spot in the shield array is designated for TBN. So the list looks like

[TBN Spot]
[Shield 1]
[Shield 2]
[Shield ..]
[Shield X]

So the damage check will always see TBN first, and then go down the line.

And if it doesn't work this way, it can work this way.

[Lyth]

...

A commonly cited problem this expansion is that every tank is just a homogenised re-skin of the others. It's a problem, but a necessary step that had to be taken. Prior to Shadowbringers, certain tank jobs were grandfathered in to advantages that made them mandatory. We've gotten rid of that. Now you have choice, but it's a boring one. But it's a step in the right direction. Now we can start looking at ways to make the tanks feel different, yet be capable of similar performance.

The next step should be to give each job unique ways of accomplishing the same tasks. Despite what anyone says, self-healing tanks are really fun, and they work (see Warcraft and Death Knights). Prior to this expansion, I had recommended that DRK be the defacto self-healing tank given their 27-year history of HP manipulation mechanics and abilities like Souleater and Abyssal Drain. It also would have made the most sense given the fact that Living Dead requires you to burst heal through a lot of damage. But for whatever reason, WAR has gone down this route, especially with the changes to NF. So if the devs, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that WAR needs to be far better at self-healing than any other tank, let them focus on that. There's really no point in giving the other three tanks equivalent abilities when they've already committed to this decision.

The issue of 'anticipating' incoming damage is simple enough. You just need two sets of abilities; one set that boosts your max HP temporarily, and a second set that gives you lots of self-healing. Let me give you an example. Let's say that Eye gave you a 'momentum' buff which increased your max HP (without healing you) and your attack speed. Both then decayed over time on a per second basis until you reapplied it. You might have some abilities that gave you a sustained rise in HP cap without healing (ToB, Raw Intuition) with others that just healed you back up (Nascent Flash, Equilibrium). Now you have a lifestealing tank that can try to boost their HP levels to anticipate incoming damage. And give them Living Dead, because let's face it, Holmgang literally means "dual to the death", and if you're going to have the shortest recast invuln with the highest offensive burst, you should be fighting for your life to survive.

DRK, by contrast, could very easily focus on revenge mechanics. TBN is all about this. Take enough damage on your bubble shield, get a free counter attack. Do you know what people miss the most about Reprisal? It's not the fact that it's damage down. It's the fact that you proc it defensively and then get to counterattack stab your opponent. What we need are barrier shields, counter attack procs when said shields pop, and lots of interplay between blood and MP. Let it feel like a completely different tank. One based around vengeance. The end should be the same, but the means should always be different.

[Marxam]

They need to get rid of that tank trait because it creates a false sense of security and creates bad tanks that don't use cds in dungeons. Reintroduce off tank stances and split the tanks into two categories:

1h weapons - PLD/GNB (they have true invuls)
-"Shield Oath" - 20% defense, -20% dmg dealt
-"Darkside" - Dmg dealt +20%, Mp decrease while active, effect ends if MP 0. MP regen from other sources, beyond your weaponskils, is negated. (oldschool DRK players know how this works.)

2h weapons - WAR/DRK (their HP cannot drop below 1)
-"Defiance" - Max HP +25%, -20% dmg dealt, Recovery via healing magic increased by 20% (2.0-4.0 version where certain weaponskills restore HP in Defiance)
-"Deliverance" - Dmg dealt +5%, Crit increase up to 10% at max gauge (10% crit gauge extended duration for a short period, if skills are executed at max gauge, even if gauge drops below 100)

The 1h tanks will play similar to DRK in 3.0 where resource management is crucial but the pay off is keeping Darkside up full time while in Shield Oath. The 2h tanks will just be like WAR, pre-ShB, where they have to manage gauge to stay between 50-100 and stance dancing to take advantage of more defense/max HP or big dmg when needed. I think this is good compromise since you get both the high defense tank and the high HP tank. All tanks will have their Tank and OT stance ogcd so no more clunky switching between the two like in 3.0-4.0 where WAR felt good to stance dance but DRK and PLD didn't. All tanks will also get Unchained as a role skill so they can remove the dmg penalty (20 sec duration, 2 min recast) while still staying in their tank stance.

Other than that I would like to see DRK move more into "Rend" skills, since WAR is FFXIV's self-heal tank. If Delirium worked more like Requisat but instead of Confiteor, DRK did Crush Armor or even Sanguine Blade. The finisher will depend on how much gauge you have at the end and give you access to several moves rather than PLD's single Confietor. It would also not feel like a broke version of Inner Release. I would also like to see Esteem reworked into Living Dead where for 10 seconds he will match your HP and take the hit for you. If he dies before the 10 secs, he will shoot out your back and grant you Walking Dead, where your health cannot drop below 1 HP for 6 seconds with non of that heal to full crap. It works just like WAR where all it does is not reduce your HP less than 1. Simple and easy to understand.

[Sqwall]

A commonly cited problem this expansion is that every tank is just a homogenised re-skin of the others. It's a problem, but a necessary step that had to be taken. Prior to Shadowbringers, certain tank jobs were grandfathered in to advantages that made them mandatory. We've gotten rid of that. Now you have choice, but it's a boring one. But it's a step in the right direction. Now we can start looking at ways to make the tanks feel different, yet be capable of similar performance.

I had a lot of fun leveling WAR back in ARR, but when you hit that higher content WAR was kind of gimp compared to PLD. WAR hit harder, but got hit harder. Back then you had Bloodbath to keep you alive and it was really OP for a warrior as it scaled way better then it did for PLD. That being said, the tanks were "balanced". PLD absorbed high amounts of damage by being a turtle. WAR healed through damage and was really good at it. I felt warrior took much more skill to be really good at the job. PLD was a cake walk for me.

I love the way WAR plays now as it's basically right back where it was in ARR. Most people see this as a bad thing, and they can see it that way fine. I'm looking forward here and can't wait for what's to come in 6.0 for WAR. I think it's going to keep this heal tank thing going since it works SO WELL right now. Before I was forced to target a party member to utilize my greatest strength, and now I can use it freely really pump out the self heals more effortlessly.

Yes I know there will be others that say it's exactly the same! No it's not....just don't. It went from a forced party mechanic to a selfish mechanic with the ability to target other players. WAR is no longer completely reliant on equilibrium now for it's self heal. Now you can follow up with Nascent after 30 sec. after you pop Equilibrium and have those heals continue to roll. IF equilibrium is sufficient enough go with Raw Intuition. I really like the choices WAR has now, and way more efficient for combat sake.

Here's hoping in 6.0 that we don't have this moment where "OMG WAR needs to do more damage!" As you said before balancing self heals is very difficult as it scales off of damage. This community is so thirsty for MOAR dps which is strange for a tank to be doing as much dmg as a DPS. Strangeness aside it's the reality we have now I suppose and I think SE has finally hit the nail on the head as far as WAR goes. Now if they can just keep that innovation moving forward and not repeat the same mistakes.

[OdinelStarrei]

I'm fairly certain TBN already works as follows.

All other shield effects are placed into a FIFO order while a unique spot in the shield array is designated for TBN. So the list looks like

[TBN Spot]
[Shield 1]
[Shield 2]
[Shield ..]
[Shield X]

So the damage check will always see TBN first, and then go down the line.

And if it doesn't work this way, it can work this way.

You are right, it already works like this, albeit indirectly. Shield priority is determined by duration, and TBN is the shortest in the entire game, therefore, it's always first. Otherwise, things like Catalyze would be really annoying.

[Lyth]

...

I have good memories of ARR (and to a lesser extent HW) WAR as well. I felt that its strength was that your defense was linked to your offensive strategy, rather than being something that you just weaved into your damage rotation. I liked HW DRK with reprisal and its counterattacks for similar reasons.

I don't think that wanting doing more damage is a problem, so long as tanks as a whole do nearly equivalent damage to each other. I think that it's absolutely daft to push the majority of raid damage output on to dps, as has been done. What I object to is the idea that one tank should do significantly more damage than the rest, because reasons. That suggestion usually comes from underperforming players who want themselves to have a secure raid spot by virtue of their job selection. But I also equally object to the idea that tanks in general should do significantly less damage because they're "there to take damage". Tanking, at its core, should be about an interplay between defense and offense. You hit me or a teammate I'm defending, I hit you back harder. Tanks should be a real credible threat, not a fictional threat that the AI attacks because its told to do so.

[AziraSyuren]

I appreciate how many years it took them to put tanks in a state where they can finally move forward with job design instead of just trying to patch things up. Tanks are finally in a spot where I'm not furious about at least one aspect of one of the jobs.

[TouchandFeel]

snip

snip

Without looking at the code to actually see the logic for determining priority, we can't really be sure and are just simply guessing as to how it works.

From what I have seen, shields seem to work in a general first in/first out priority system, as you said, but then that is further categorized by self-cast vs. cast on you by someone else, with self-cast being given higher priority. For a DRK with only one shield in TBN, that means TBN will always have priority when they are using it on themselves. I'm not so sure that TBN itself has a special hard-coded priority.

The difficulty in this all is that from a surface level, without very specific and controlled tests to help determine what exactly is going on, all three of the presented priority systems look the same to the player, where TBN will always be highest priority because of any three of the given reasons. However, while they may function virtually the same now with just TBN, adding more self-cast shields into the mix would have the three then act very differently.

So if we follow the above priority system while giving DRK more shields to use on themselves, these shields would then follow the first in/first out since they are all self-cast and that could mess up TBN being able to break.

On top of that, if these additional shields were to be given "revenge" mechanics, as was proposed or at least insinuated in the post I was responding to, then that would inevitably result in you screwing yourself over by potentially not activating one of the "revenge" mechanics when you stack shields since you are greatly increasing the chance that one of those shields will not break and provide the "revenge" mechanic aspect of the ability.

Also, coding priority systems aren't always as straightforward as they may seem. To someone looking in from the outside it may seem simple and "just make it like this" may come as an easy response, but from my experience things like that are rarely that easy or simple. Could it be that simple, maybe .... but that is a big assumption and expecting the devs to create a whole new priority system just because of DRK is potentially a big ask.

A commonly cited problem this expansion is that every tank is just a homogenised re-skin of the others. It's a problem, but a necessary step that had to be taken. Prior to Shadowbringers, certain tank jobs were grandfathered in to advantages that made them mandatory. We've gotten rid of that. Now you have choice, but it's a boring one. But it's a step in the right direction. Now we can start looking at ways to make the tanks feel different, yet be capable of similar performance.

Yes, homogenization has been a hot topic of debate, but that has been the case for longer than just this expansion. Such arguments existed in Stormsblood as well and even to a lesser degree in Heavensward and ARR.
Most of the complaints this expansion in regards to tank homogenization have been focused on DRK and WAR, most specifically around the design of their burst game-play and abilities. There has be a bit around the general state of tanks being "boring" to play and lamentations on the simplification of certain aspects like enmity generation and the removal of unique tank stances. Little to none of that focused on tank defensive abilities, so I don't really see why homogenization is being used as an argument in regards to them. In fact most of the arguments have been the opposite where more parity has been asked for for defensive aspects of the kits, such as self-healing on DRK.

Additionally if certain jobs being "grandfathered in to advantages" was a problem before, wouldn't doubling down on things like self-healing and such as being essentially the sole province of this tank or that tank be rolling things back into that same situation with the same problems?
As I have said, not all forms of defense or mitigation are created equal and trying to treat them as being essentially interchangeable or equitable will just lead to problems down the road.

The next step should be to give each job unique ways of accomplishing the same tasks. Despite what anyone says, self-healing tanks are really fun, and they work (see Warcraft and Death Knights). Prior to this expansion, I had recommended that DRK be the defacto self-healing tank given their 27-year history of HP manipulation mechanics and abilities like Souleater and Abyssal Drain. It also would have made the most sense given the fact that Living Dead requires you to burst heal through a lot of damage. But for whatever reason, WAR has gone down this route, especially with the changes to NF. So if the devs, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that WAR needs to be far better at self-healing than any other tank, let them focus on that. There's really no point in giving the other three tanks equivalent abilities when they've already committed to this decision.

I'm very familiar with drain style tanks, having played a Death Knight in WoW as well as other incarnations of the playstyle in MMOs going back to playing a Shadow Knight in EQ1. I know that they can be cool and can be fun, otherwise I never would have played them. The thing is they worked in those games, but those games are not FF14 and what worked in them doesn't necessarily work in this game. Each game needs to be looked at and regarded as it's own thing. While inspiration can be taken from different games and ideas from one can be massaged and tweaked to work in another, just trying to directly transplant an idea or implementation from one game to another pretty much never works. I've seen first-hand what happens when such an approach happens within a dev team and it just results in a lot of extra work redoing things.

Life-steal style tanking tends to work best when tanking is more a war of attrition where you are trying to slow down, stop or reverse your hp bar from being slowly worn down and chipped away at. FF14 tends to design more along surviving incoming spikes of damage in busters that would normally kill you, or close to it, right out. Unless FF14 suddenly drastically changed it's content design, a traditional self-heal/drain tank wouldn't work very well.

Additionally, I am not sure you are getting the stance that I am presenting.
I explicitly said that WAR could have more self-healing/drain style abilities than the other tanks, kept within reason, but that the other tanks would then have to be fairly equitable among themselves which is not the case and goes against the statement you made saying that trying to buff DRK's life-steal doesn't make a lot of sense. It doesn't need to be buffed to the point that it is equitable to WAR's entire self-healing kit, but it should definitely be buffed to the point where it is equitable to the other tanks. With NF, WAR still gets to be on top in regards to self-healing, it's just that DRK isnt' stuck being behind everyone else. It's like I said, start from an equitable foundation with varied methods of mitigation to cover the necessary bases and then layer on unique and thematic aspects from there. Each tank still gets their own style and niche, they just don't potentially screw themselves over by over-specializing and leaving gaps in their defenses, or potentially screwing all the other tanks over by hogging an exceptionally powerful method of mitigation. So again, no I am not saying that DRK or every tank needs an NF equivalent, but the devs should try to create a better level of parity with the other self-heal abilities like Abyssal Drain, Equilibrium, etc.

The issue of 'anticipating' incoming damage is simple enough. You just need two sets of abilities; one set that boosts your max HP temporarily, and a second set that gives you lots of self-healing. Let me give you an example. Let's say that Eye gave you a 'momentum' buff which increased your max HP (without healing you) and your attack speed. Both then decayed over time on a per second basis until you reapplied it. You might have some abilities that gave you a sustained rise in HP cap without healing (ToB, Raw Intuition) with others that just healed you back up (Nascent Flash, Equilibrium). Now you have a lifestealing tank that can try to boost their HP levels to anticipate incoming damage. And give them Living Dead, because let's face it, Holmgang literally means "dual to the death", and if you're going to have the shortest recast invuln with the highest offensive burst, you should be fighting for your life to survive

Creating a two-step method like that to accomplish a single goal is the very type of thing that you and many others argued against in regards to DRK with Dark Arts, that it made no sense that DRK had to essentially do two things to get the same outcome that others got in a single action. If that was unacceptable for DRK, why is that approach perfectly fine for WAR, especially when applied to defenses where you want to be able to react quickly to an incoming attack?

I agree that of the tanks, WAR is the probably the best equipped to deal with Living Dead, but I just generally dislike and disagree with the implementation of that ability and wouldn't wish it on anyone. The only way I would be accepting of Living Dead would be if all invulns had such potentially deadly caveats built into them.

Also, a bit of a semantics but holmgang literally means "going to the holm", with the word holm referring to a small island, or islet. "Going to the islet" basically referred to the practice of duels being fought on these islets under the premise of two men go to the island, fight their duel and only the victor survives to leave the island. This tradition evolved into the practice of settling disputes within a predetermined dueling space, such as within a ring of stones or other similar setups, and so calling for "holmgang" gained it's meaning of calling for a one on one duel to the death.

DRK, by contrast, could very easily focus on revenge mechanics. TBN is all about this. Take enough damage on your bubble shield, get a free counter attack. Do you know what people miss the most about Reprisal? It's not the fact that it's damage down. It's the fact that you proc it defensively and then get to counterattack stab your opponent. What we need are barrier shields, counter attack procs when said shields pop, and lots of interplay between blood and MP. Let it feel like a completely different tank. One based around vengeance. The end should be the same, but the means should always be different.

I don't disagree that giving DRK some sort of revenge or vengeance theme is potentially fitting and good, I'm perfectly fine with that and I would support it as long as it was implemented well. The problem that I see with your suggestion is pairing an emphasis on such revenge mechanics with shields. In order for such a mechanic to work with a shield it will either need to be triggered off of the shield breaking, as you suggested, or taking damage. Okay, makes sense and works. TBN has shown us that it can work. However, it works in isolation. If you have multiple shields each with their own "revenge" mechanic tied to them, whenever you stack them, as is likely to happen if shields are doubled down on like you suggested, you end up working against yourself and placing a barrier in the way of one of your shields from being able to trigger its "revenge" mechanic. It doesn't matter what priority the shields end up having, putting two shields together means one will always be before the other and be in the way of the other taking damage which prevents its "revenge" mechanic from triggering, you're just getting in your own way.
For "revenge" type mechanics to work they have to be more spread out across abilities that can work in tandem with each other, like for example a Blood Price type of effect that gives MP or Blood attached to different defensive like Shadow Wall. That however still leaves the problem that these "revenge" mechanics then need to be able to be triggered by abilities that can be used on other players, otherwise it forces the DRK player into favoring the MT position otherwise they can't utilize major aspects of their kit and that is something that the dev team has both said and shown that they want to avoid.

In regards to proc-triggered abilities like Reprisal, people look at them fondly now, but many, some of which are the same people lauding them now, bitched about them and their RNG nature incessantly during HW. Complaints regarding Reprisal being a pain because even if you planned ahead and fished for a proc there was no guarantee you would trigger it kept coming up. RNG is just too unpredictable and trying to build a kit around such procs makes it virtually impossible to design and balance around. That is why the devs removed as many rng based abilities as they could, like the old Reprisal. RNG aspects only really start to work when those virtual die rolls are constantly happening in the background since they then will have a much larger number of instances of potentially being triggered and will then start to get closer to equaling a predictable numerical outcome.

I am not saying that proc based abilities like the original Reprisal couldn't work or wouldn't be welcome on DRK, I just feel that anything proc related should be approached with extreme caution.
It is entirely feasible that DRK could get an ability that is only available available after a parry and enables an oGCD attack, essentially Reprisal without the damage debuff part which was honestly the main problem with Reprisal and RNG, and it would probably work just fine. However, I have my doubts about the devs' willingness to do something like that since it would be pretty much the same as Shield Swipe and they removed that from the game.

I also don't recall Shield Swipe being regarded as being very exciting by players and so have my doubts that a reskinned version on DRK would somehow end up playing out much differently. While some players have now expressed missing the counter-attack aspect of the old Reprisal, the discussions during HW surrounding Reprisal mostly centered around the problem with Reprisal only being usable as MT and the most common suggestion was to remove the counter-attack aspect and to just make it a regular ability with a cool-down. The idea that people loved Reprisal because of its counter-attack mechanic and what people were actually asking for in HW are in direct conflict.

TLDR ... sort of, or maybe more of "in conclusion".

So again, I don't disagree with you that the tanks should have different themes and different approaches to accomplishing the same goals that make them feel different and unique. In fact, I emphatically support these things and have consistently argued for exactly those things over the years.
The part where my view diverges is in the implementation.

I don't just feel, I know from experience that overly "all or nothing" types of approaches tend to not work out the way people actually want and usually end up just creating problems instead. Trying to make each tank job have their defensive kit made up primarily of a single style of mitigation is too much of an "all or nothing" approach.
Like I said, giving each tank a little bit more of a certain type of mitigation is fine and that is honestly enough to give the sense of a tank being the "shield tank", or the "drain tank", etc. I mean DRK has only a single shield ability in TBN, yet its predominance within the kit has already shaped the view of DRK being the "shield tank". An additional shield based defensive ability or two, properly implemented, is more than enough to clearly cement that niche for DRK, there is no need to go overboard on it.

As for the "vengeance" theme, having DRK thematically sell the "shadowy arbiter of justice and vengeance" idea is totally cool with me and I support it. "Revenge" themed mechanics, also totally cool with the concept. But again, the divergence is in the implementation. Multiple TBN-like shields with "revenge" mechanics tied to them, directly conflict and fight with each other, so that is problematic. Heavy reliance on RNG procs to define active game-play is often too unpredictable and can easily be more frustrating than fun. That and both of those require being able to cast/use abilities on teammates or else the player is forced into MT so that they are the one getting hit and those mechanics can be utilized, which was a major complaint with DRK during HW.
The trick is to find creative ways to sell the theme without leaning in too much on specific mechanics to define the theme.

There is no doubt in my mind, or virtually anyone's I'd wager, that each tank should have its own style and theme, and that they should be able to accomplish the same goals in an equitable fashion while relying on differing solutions to do so. Relying on heavy-handed restrictions on how this can or should be accomplished may provide an easy roadmap for making each job different, but as I have said before quick and easy answers tend to yield poor results because they tend to be too narrow sighted and fail to account for many things. Yes, such an approach may pretty much guarantee that the tanks will be different, but it doesn't guarantee that those differences will be good or balanced.

Since ARR, tank players have been arguing against vast mechanical differences and the inherent imbalances that they created. Indirect mitigation like self-healing versus direct % based mitigation. Burst damage versus consistent damage. And the list goes on.
Many of these aspects have been addressed by the dev team over the years and tanks are now in probably the most balanced place they have ever been in this game. The downside of that level of balance being achieved is that in order to achieve it, aspects of the tanks had to become very similar or virtually the same, which has become the new source of complaints for players.

I agree that perhaps the pendulum swung a bit too far towards one side of the equation, but the solution isn't to swing it all the way back to the other side just to address the problems of the present while ignoring the problems of the past. That just creates the situation of going back to where we were and then we will be back to complaining that things are too different and not balanced, and complain that things have to be made more equal. Then woosh, pendulum swings back the other way based on our feedback and we get caught in a reactionary loop of back and forth, back and forth, on and on, ad infinitum, in a constant state of dissatisfaction. I would prefer to avoid this cycle and the only real way that I know of to avoid it is to rely on thoughtful and measured adjustments to progressively nudge things towards landing in that sweet spot where things are balanced enough while also being varied enough.

[Hierro]

I appreciate how many years it took them to put tanks in a state where they can finally move forward with job design instead of just trying to patch things up. Tanks are finally in a spot where I'm not furious about at least one aspect of one of the jobs.

Who knew the secret to balance was just delete DRK and make another WAR clone?

[RyuDragnier]

Who knew the secret to balance was just delete DRK and make another WAR clone?

You mean that didn't happen going into SB? They deleted a perfectly good tank and created an abomination. The current iteration is better than what it was, but it needs more work before it can come near HW's level.