Is anyone surprised at this point?

[Cabalabob]

Reminds me of that episode of scrubs where JD complains about being the co-chief while Elliot is the chief when they both make the same amount of money and Dr. Kelso responds “you’re right, Elliot should be making $10 more and you of course should be making $10 less, it’s not much but it largely symbolises the difference in your level”.

[Xtrasweettea]

I don't know what you were all expecting.

They're not going to do full re-vamps of any job at this point.

I am surprised they touched any of the jobs to begin with. In the grand scheme of things, these small changes are not going to even matter in a few months (the WAR and DRK ones don't even matter for 80% of the playerbase). The StB version of these jobs are going away and will be replaced by the EndWalker versions.

[Danelo]

SE needs to pull their heads out of their butts. I don’t care about them buffing WAR, good for those players, but BW should have been fixed. It’s literally the one easily implemented thing that DRK mains asked for. I don’t know anyone that asked for enmity on living shadow. Seems like the dev team made a glitch into a full patch fix bcs they knew this wasn’t going to be well received with war getting a substantial buff but them failing to address bw. There was a roadmap to do it by crossing over the formula used to fix other jobs with the exact same problem. If someone with a platform will please ask what the purpose was behind leaving bw untouched? That would be great since it seems they gave up on reading the DRK forums. It defies logic.

[Katie_Kitty]

Tank balance is good enough that it doesn't matter. This isn't stormblood where warrior is mandatory and everyone else fights for the scraps.

[Absurdity]

The thing is, this balance came at the cost of everything that originally drew people towards playing tank, potency or enmity buffs are not gonna fix that issue. Being essentially a bad dps that occasionally gets hit in the face, and whose contribution to the party's success is negligeable at best, certainly didn't make me pick up the role.

But it was clear from the start that they're not gonna make any major changes to tanks, let alone rework them, at the end of this expansion so nobody should really be surprised.

[Sqwall]

I have changed from PLD to WAR since 5.3 and I have no complaints about WAR. I did feel the main attacks could have grabbed a little bit more in the potency department, but I didn't expect THIS much. I'll take it!

But as for DRK....I just don't know what to think about this. I agree with some of the posts when they say it must have been a bug that your shadow didn't generate enmity. I even think I made the comment a while back that Shadow should generate enmity or offer the buffs it gains (soul eater, abyssal drain, TBN, Dark Arts, etc.) should filter to the DRK. I don't know how much potency that would add....bug DRK is in some SERIOUS potency adjustments in the + department.

PLD,GNB,WAR imo play perfectly (Oath Gauge could use some work). But DRK seems to be getting pushed off the bench deliberately. I feel sorry, but mostly disappointed for those DRK mains at this point.

[Danelo]

The thing is, this balance came at the cost of everything that originally drew people towards playing tank, potency or enmity buffs are not gonna fix that issue. Being essentially a bad dps that occasionally gets hit in the face, and whose contribution to the party's success is negligeable at best, certainly didn't make me pick up the role.

But it was clear from the start that they're not gonna make any major changes to tanks, let alone rework them, at the end of this expansion so nobody should really be surprised.

I don’t think anyone is asking for a rework. And the bw fix has been asked for since very early in the expansion. That’s the rub here.

[Aluja89]

Tank balance is good enough that it doesn't matter. This isn't stormblood where warrior is mandatory and everyone else fights for the scraps.

That's because Warrior was the only tank that had a decent design, the other 2 were just crap. And this isn't "balance", this is homogenization.

[Lyth]

The enmity buff would be more useful if Living Shadow was temporarily capable of holding enmity, taking damage, and tanking mobs. I don't think that anyone is struggling with personal enmity generation at this point.

[Absurdity]

That's because Warrior was the only tank that had a decent design, the other 2 were just crap. And this isn't "balance", this is homogenization.

I can certainly agree that complete homogenization for the sake of balance is terrible design but I'm honestly not seeing how warrior was better designed than paladin in stormblood, paladin was a great support tank with extremely powerful defensives and party utility that could still output decent dps after several nerfs. It can be argued that dark knight had the issue of "too much dark arts" but even that job wasn't terribly designed towards the end, just not to everyone's liking.


What made warrior such an easy pick after the rework was the comparatively simple rotation, so you were less likely to have a tank that underperforms heavily, and the fight design that simply favored warrior's defensive and offensive cooldowns, they weren't as powerful as pld's or drk's but enough to survive and more readily available for certain boss mechanics whereas their burst heavy opener allowed them to quickly build threat on bosses without losing dps due to how enmity worked. They also had the benefit of their increased healing synergizing very well with SCH, a more mandatory job than warrior, but this wasn't something that was added with Stormblood.
The original 4.0 warrior was an absolute mess of juggling 2 different dps cooldowns and performing a perfect rotation to end up with a very specific amount of gauge at exactly the right moment, just to be able to output dps comparable to the other tanks.


And now that most of those benefits that the 4.2 warrior brought have been redesigned or entirely removed (enmity management, synergy with SCH's shields, shorter cooldowns that were back up for specific mechanics) you can see the design for what it actually is, monotonous and ultimately rather boring.