Random Ideas: What Abilities, Traits, and/or Rework you want?

[Shurrikhan]

Feasibility aside, I'd probably start every tank damn near from scratch, focusing on a couple of core elements and expanding from there as organically as I can (as to maximize both total depth and depth per button, each in as satisfyingly cohesive a manner as possible). I'd of course keep an eye on parity of capacities, but if each reaches those capacities in very different ways... all the better.

Some spitball base concepts:

• Paladin: Sword and Shield
• Dark Knight: Blood and Shadow
• Warrior: Wrath and Abandon
• Gunbreaker: Charge(s) and Ammunition

For Paladin, for instance, the idea of the "sword" might take on a few different ideas if looking across its level span in isolated bits, but it's always be juxtoposed against the idea of the "shield". The sword might be pure offense (opposite defense), or defense/playmaking through offense (versus shield's resource-generation or meaningful spenders, including what would amount to offense through defense), or about flow or action-based momentum (opposite banking and buff-based ramping). From the start, "shield" would play almost as large a part, rotationally, as sword skills, even if they might have slightly fewer buttons, but everything ought to develop with that thematic pairing (and gradual shift in boundary or slant between the two), rather than just slapping on more, generally separable skills for raw potency or mitigation. Rather than abandoning any earlier theme or core, it just expands to find more and increasingly synergetic ways to play around and optimize upon those themes.

Doubtless, a lot of those iterations would deserve to be more pervasive than single skills' effects, and would therefore better belong as traits than as mere parts of skill tooltips.

Warrior, meanwhile, would be all about building ever stronger and sturdier, always deepening into the Thrill of the Fight (with some option of exhausting oneself for burst at cost to sustain or overall damage). Just as rough illustration, imagine if Deliverance and Defiance -- or at least their varied spenders -- were returned, but such that spending gauge on either would provide a duration and potency of that stance's benefit based on gauge spent, rather than those benefits being passive or lost upon swap. Inner Beast and Steel Cyclone, for instance, might generate % lifesteal and increase maximum HP, while Fell Cleave and Decimate might instead increase your damage to affected enemies and your critical strike chance. (In this case, any effect like auto-crits would deal greater damage based on your excess crit chance.) In this way, your best response to both an upcoming tankbuster or even to maximizing damage to be dealt might instead use both stances, prepping maximum HP before skills like (Stormblood-era) Upheaval or increasing your lifesteal percentile before nuking an enemy with an auto-crit Fell Cleave, or even buffing the heck out of your crit chance before using that for a proportionately empowered auto-crit Inner Beast and its converted self-healing.

Etc., etc.

[Absurdity]

Just a small thing, for warrior it would have to buff your actual critical hit stat because crit chance does absolutely nothing for your bonus damage on crits. Chain Stratagem and Battle Litany for example are utterly useless during IR since they do not increase your critical damage.

[WhyAmIHere]

i've been memeing it for a while but I wouldn't be surprised if in 6.0 GNB's Bloodfest gets an additional effect of "for the next [#] of seconds, burst strike and fated circle do not consume cartridges."

I do not want this to happen but i wouldn't be surprised if it does.

[Corbeau]

I want an AoE counterpart to Clemency as Paladin.

[Kabooa]

Warrior, meanwhile, would be all about building ever stronger and sturdier, always deepening into the Thrill of the Fight (with some option of exhausting oneself for burst at cost to sustain or overall damage). Just as rough illustration, imagine if Deliverance and Defiance.

I could see this being more akin to a pendulum system.

Use "Defiance" and push your gauge more to Deliverance, making the next Deliverance stronger the further it is and swing back to '0'.

use "Devlierance" skills and push the other way, doing the same.

Then mid 60s to 70s, give them a trait where instead of resetting to 0, it only hard resets at 'max'. Using an empowered skill swings the gauge back to the opposing side, plus a little further.

So in a simple 3 - 2- 1- 0 - 1- 2- 3 kind of set up, you go...

3 - 2- 1- 0 - 1- 2- 3
Push Right
3 - 2- 1- 0 - 1- 2- 3
Push Left
3 - 2- 1- 0 - 1- 2- 3
Push Right
3 - 2- 1- 0 - 1- 2- 3
Max swing, reset to 0.
3 - 2- 1- 0 - 1- 2- 3

[Shurrikhan]

I could see this being more akin to a pendulum system.

That's another way to look at it, but I just felt that having buffs from each which fade over time and stack rather than replacing each other a bit more flexible and less "gimmicky". In terms of depth, the effect would be nearly identical, but it'd just feel more responsive per action, even if it wouldn't have quite as large a nuke available. (This also would, imo, make it a bit easier to balance.)

...Then again, it could just be bad memories of Balance Druid's constant Eclipse reworks (each somehow worse than the one before) that drives me away from maxing out out actions, in that manner, or having my nuke be forced out per at most 5 rotational strings.

[WildTamarind]

All I want for Christmas is for shield bash to not be useless.

I love the sword and board aethetic, but shield attacks are under utilized. Intervene is the only thing holding it down as it looks like a sheild slam type of attack. Make shield bash actualy do dmg or whatever as long as its actualy useful. Maybe bring back sheild oath as a coold down that enhances sheild dmg and utility. All of this is admittingly poorly thought out on my part as im just spitballin here. The point is make paladins fully rounded in their bad assness. You already got the bad ass sword strikes and the holy magic, so get that shield up.

[ArianeEwah]

I believe the current tank stances and the passive tank traits are main reasons why the tank jobs are lacking identity... well, for obvious reasons.

They should rework both at the same time to seperate their effects. Maybe something like a slight enmity boost by trait, just enough to hold aggro as a decent tank without tank stance. So something around +50-100% base enmity boost.

Tank stances give a defensive bonus plus a nerfed enmity boost. Those bonuses differ for each tank, e.g.
PLD gets 15% DR in addition to block strength and rate increase. It would have great synergy with Shelltron.
WAR +25% max HP, +20/25% healing from healing actions, and maybe a lifeleech effect from Defiance. Deliverance could be a 20% DR while changing Raw Intuitions effect to Bloodbath/Nascent Flash... oh yeah, forgot to mention that Nascent Flash and Nascent Glint should be different actions, hence my suggestion on the effect change of Raw Intuition through stance dancing.

Imo, SE should revert Inner Release/Berserk to its old Berserk which increased damage instead of guaranteed crit dh. Crit dh has multiple negative points, such as no raid buff ulitiy from Bard or Dragoon, and DH melds become almost useless on WAR, making omni-tank BiS' very difficult and/or with a loss for at least one job. And since Infuriate has charges now, it could provide a guarateed crit (direct?) hit buff on your next beast gauge weaponskill, just like Reassemble for MCH. (This was apparently an "issue" from 4.1 build if you didn't crit dh your Fell Cleaves during Berserk.) About gauge cost reduction... I am not sure what a good value would be, as it would also depend on the duration of Berserk/Inner Release... and ofc what a good meme cleaves number is... "5-6-7-8..."?

If Scourge would ever find its way back into DRK toolkit, a blood gauge gain per dot tick would make dot management more engaging and rewarding (similar to Bards Soul gauge, without the rng part).

For TBN: I would rather have its "shield broken" effect changed (while the MP refund - if any cost - happens as soon as the duration expired or ended). e.g. change the base CD of TBN to 30s, but reduce it by 15s when broken. This way you could actually plan when to use TBN without the risk of MP loss, or when to use it in (rather quick) succession.

A general idea to make aoe actions in dungeons more fun: let them generate ressources per enemies hit instead of fixed values. If I take MCH for example, you either have 50 gauge rdy or from Barrel Stabilizer for Hypercharge-Auto Crossbow, but need 10 veeery slow Spread shots for your next Hypercharge... but... if it would be 5 Heat for each enemy hit, trash pulls will become more active. A tank example would be PLD: gain MP from Prominence per enemy hit, and you can weave some Holy Circles in between your physical combos instead of... well, just physical combo until Requiescat is ready.

[Shurrikhan]

Just a small thing, for warrior it would have to buff your actual critical hit stat because crit chance does absolutely nothing for your bonus damage on crits. Chain Stratagem and Battle Litany for example are utterly useless during IR since they do not increase your critical damage.

Just get rid of the quadratic scaling on Crit itself (in raising both chance and crit potency) and just have all excess chance instead become bonus potency. 120% chance of a +50% damage Crit becomes a 100% chance of a +60% damage Crit. 133% chance to block for 30% mitigation becomes a 100% chance to block for ~40% mitigation. Etc., etc.

:: Warrior would finally make sense, raid-buff-wise. Dragoon Full Thrusts would love it, in that it'd give a more concentrated burst GCD. Leaden Fist Bootshine would be a bit more of a monster, but that needs tackling regardless. Heck, Shelltron would feel better for it anyways, with less of Paladin's mitigation budget going towards RNG.

[Lyth]

Alternatively, could we learn to embrace the fact that the entire point of having critical hits is to add in an element of luck and randomness, and stop designing abilities with 100% Crit/DH? Someone once correctly pointed out that these are actually just extremely high potency abilities that cannot Crit, to keep them in check. Certain players didn't like Crit's randomness because it messes up your 'perfect run', so the devs took it out of the equation.

Tank damage in particular has been the most evenly balanced that it's ever been. I'm pretty sure that they don't want to preferentially buff WAR's damage. I think the solution to encourage players to diversify stats by giving them all diminishing returns, rather than letting Crit be the one stat to rule them all. Too much Crit? Maybe go Det instead. Too much Det? Maybe go Haste.

Speaking of which, Skill Speed and Spell Speed should really be consolidated into a single Haste stat, especially given the number of jobs that use 'hybrid' damage types across their attacks.