Please stop making new Dark Knight threads.

[Undeadfire]

Also Blocking is not a free Rampart, it's a scaling stat, with it's peak at 20% and, lowest is at 10%. So levelling, and certain Ultimates you're not getting the full potential from blocking, and also in older content a crit bypasses blockibg invalidating Sheltron.

Precisely what Aodhan says, shield blocking is meant to be Paladins sustain vs Souleater/Brutal Shell/Storm's Path, but it's too unreliable, rng vs guaranteed game and needing 50 points just to be guaranteed, it's been needing changes for years including, Spirits Within.

Endwalker, fixes the very problem preventing Paladin, remotely main tanking, now it's far stronger than, GNB/DRK self sustain.

[Valknut]

Its killing me on the inside people talking about DRK like Soul eater and A.Drain are worthy effects at all.

If you really think PLD has it rough because of some miniscule part of a 1000 hour game, or because some meta wizard told you it does. It just doesn't explain why FFlogs has DRK WAR and PLD very often within 100 logs of each class being posted. What ever tears your crying, what ever points your making. They are being muted out by FFlogs saying all the tanks except for GNB are pretty much identical.

Coming from DRK to PLD for my casual ass gameplay is staggering. A useful Heal? A useful Invulnerability? Fun utility? Insta cast AOE that isn't on 2 min freaking CD. Honestly I just couldn't give 2 cares less that 10% of the player base, and 2% of that 10% think that DRK has an easier time putting out more dmg in a burst phase.... Cool your focusing on 30 seconds of gameplay what, 5 times a day if your no lifeing or something.

[aodhan_ofinnegain]

Its killing me on the inside people talking about DRK like Soul eater and A.Drain are worthy effects at all.

Sorry but what? having passive healing is pretty damn solid to have, it's good, reliable healing on Souleater, and Abyssal Drain, while less so reliable on Single Target, in mutli target situations, it's really solid, it's user dependant on how effective it will be. Playing Paladin in end game content, it actually sucks having to resort to using Clemency to stay alive sacrificing GCDs and MP when a healer or both go down, and you need to buy time getting them back up, when said GCDs and MP can be much better spent on Holy Spirits and Confiteor during Requiescat. Paladin has to rely on Blocking as any mean of passive, which in non level 80 Savage and Ultimate, will be bypassed by crits, something your passive healing doesn't have to deal with.

If you really think PLD has it rough because of some miniscule part of a 1000 hour game, or because some meta wizard told you it does. It just doesn't explain why FFlogs has DRK WAR and PLD very often within 100 logs of each class being posted. What ever tears your crying, what ever points your making. They are being muted out by FFlogs saying all the tanks except for GNB are pretty much identical. Coming from DRK to PLD for my casual ass gameplay is staggering. A useful Heal? A useful Invulnerability? Fun utility? Insta cast AOE that isn't on 2 min freaking CD. Honestly I just couldn't give 2 cares less that 10% of the player base, and 2% of that 10% think that DRK has an easier time putting out more dmg in a burst phase.... Cool your focusing on 30 seconds of gameplay what, 5 times a day if your no lifeing or something.

In some cases, Paladin does have it rough in comparison to Dark Knight, and vice versa, all tanks have some strengths and some weaknesses, and honestly as you pointed out about being casual, try not take this the wrong way, but why should what is on FFLogs even bother you if you don't bother doing Savage or Ultimate. Unless you are chasing 99%iles and 100%iles, unless you're checking your own performance, or static performance, whatever stats are on FFLogs are completely meaningless to you.

As you have self-proclaimed to be a casual, you probably aren't even getting a sizeable amount out of playing your job, it's not meant as a shot or an insult, it's only meant that apart from the odd Extreme trial, Savage and Ultimate, no content truly pushes a job to the point where you unable to get by and clear with subpar performance. Equally, there's no need to punch down at raiders just because some or us raiders do like to optimise and get the most out of the jobs we choose to play. So I get that you may not see the full toolkits of jobs in the same light, nor do you care so much for the extreme min maxing at the top end or raiding through speed-runs or log farming, but neither casual gameplay should be dragged down due to end game optimisation, equally end game optimisation gameplay shouldn't needlessly be getting dragged down by casual gameplay.

Also "Cool your focusing on 30 seconds of gameplay what, 5 times a day if your no lifeing or something." huh? ngl, you don't need to be doing hardcore content to no life this game, you can spend 20 hours a day in Limsa RPing and still no life this game, and honestly, so what if people choose to no life this game? if they ain't got anything better to do, let them get their money's worth from the game.

[Valknut]

There is nothing hard about playing any of the tanks, getting one more OGCD off that another player wouldn't isn't going to win you an award. What could I possibly not be getting out of my class if I can clear any content I randomly que up for and winging it.

You have dmg buttons, you have take less dmg buttons, and you heal dmg buttons. If you learn to press these buttons you to can learn to tank!

I would love to know what PLD struggles at though, really. All tanks clear all content, some are better in most situations, and some are worse in most situations. DRK and WAR by logs, say they are the worst in most situations.

The problem with DRK for most long term players is not - Dmg -Mitigation or -Utility The class feels like balls to play, it lost every cool thing about it during the HW to SB transition. People have been saying that for close to 10 years now and nothing has been done about.

"no content truly pushes a job to the point where you unable to get by and clear with subpar performance" Not true what so ever, tank is the most forgiving role in all cases. There is no fight the average player cannot watch a video about and end up beating " Well x raid only has a blah blah blah clear rate" Ya, the majority of the player base probably doesn't have dun scathe unlocked either, its not a difficulty barrier its that it isnt required, and shoved in their face.

[Undeadfire]

You're miss understanding.

Raiders are people who go to raid groups, static with them a long time and push the jobs the best they can. We have world prog groups, Week 1 raid groups, speed running groups.

World prog groups look for the very best players who can optimise DPS, and acknowledge mechanics quickly spending time physically possible, Week 1 groups take it a little easier, but still they keep the same motive.

Speed running groups the same motive try to competitive teams that are listed on fflogs by legitimate reports, trying to get the fastest kill time, other speed run groups will try to get your setup and try to improve it, eventually a meta starts building up the competitive speed running scene, for example the SHBs meta is the 60 seconds meta, a lot of jobs based around Ninja for Trick Attack, pushing risky hardcore strategies you will not do in PF groups ever, aiming much uptime as possible to get extra DPS %.

Optimising jobs to their max is a difference vs casually playing the job doing what you want pressing the buttons. Cooldown syncing is super important for your raid team, everyone using their burst on Crit increases, Damage increases at the same time during a boss mechanic downtime.

There's nothing wrong with clearing the way you want to, you play what you enjoy. For me, I enjoy the game far more if I'm playing at a high potential gameplay. The competitive scene does exist in FFXIV.

[Lyth]

Passive healing is a very nice advantage to have from a player perspective in the short term, but it's a terrible design decision for an MMO. As it is, FFXIV doesn't do a good job of making tanking dangerous. You're not going to wipe because the tank died and the boss systematically oneshot everyone else with auto-attacks, unlike in other games. There's not nearly enough threatening incoming damage on tanks. The only incoming tank damage that matters is the odd tankbuster that you invuln-swap through anyways, and if you mess it up there's usually a way to pick up the pieces while you get instant-cast raised. The real threats are from raidwides, especially if you have a DPS or two who has just messed up a recent mechanic. That then spirals into you failing either a mechanics check or a dps check and wiping. Tanks have so much extra mitigation and self-healing that you're actually burning those cooldowns to ignore mechanics for uptime rather than actually worrying about surviving. Tanks are so safe to play that they're irrelevant.

While there's a certain appeal for a 'lifesteal' tank to be able to solo content without the need for a healer, they're usually based around intelligent decision-making about when to invoke that lifesteal. If you take Warcraft's Deathstrike as the classic example, you need to know when damage spikes happen to effectively reverse the damage. It's active lifesteal, not passive. But that's what you get when the game designers don't understand tanks and just cater to whatever poorly thought out demands that the playerbase throws out. It's okay for one tank to thematically focus on some form of damage reversal or active, timed self-healing as a unique playstyle. But if more and more tanks come with passive self healing on every attack, you might as well have the bosses ignore the tank and just throw out raidwides. Your healers won't know the difference because they're still ignoring you anyways. It's a bad experience for tanks and a bad experience for healers.

I thought that the bit about Sheltron not mitigating any damage was amusing, and I'm surprised nobody was called out on it. I suppose it's largely a semantic debate about whether you might have blocked it anyways if you fell asleep and didn't press the button, but at the end of the day it's an action that you use to survive a specific attack. Mitigation is pass-fail for this reason. The fact that there's a random chance that said PLD could be grossly incompetent and still survive by means of a lucky proc is besides the point.

Either way, I suppose that my mindset on all this is different. I would expect that if you're a decent player, you want the game to challenge you in ways that push you to get better, and also allow you to differentiate yourself from others by means of skilled play. You want your job to be less powerful at baseline and more powerful when played at a high skill level. Instead, I see so many people demanding that their jobs reward them for breathing. If it's just the job that's powerful, people will just swap to it blindly, and nobody sees it as skilled play. If it's powerful only at high skill levels after time and practice, then people will try to swap to it, fail, and then respectfully note that the job takes skill to do well.

Everyone knew that HW WAR was a powerful job. But everyone respected HW DRK. That's the difference that you want to see in your job. It's that Genji effect - players are drawn to it for that chance to be a game changer, but it requires a skill and time investment to get to the point where you can pull it off.

[ItMe]

I would expect that if you're a decent player, you want the game to challenge you in ways that push you to get better, and also allow you to differentiate yourself from others by means of skilled play. You want your job to be less powerful at baseline and more powerful when played at a high skill level.

I'm surprised that someone as well thought out and imaginative as you only sees one valid way for "decent players" to think.
(that's not supposed to sound aggressive, please don't read it that way, I respect you)

Skill expression is cool and all, don't get me wrong, but I rather enjoy my skill level being tested by the challenges I'm engaged with, by the bosses, and less by how well I can exercise the nuances of my job.

In either case I'm reaching for the skill ceiling and trying to optimize my runs.
-- If a boss is tough, they stand between me and the ceiling.
-- If the rotation is elaborate, it stands between me and the ceiling.
We definitely need a mix of both, but is it really so strange or wrong that some prefer more of the challenge to come from the former than the latter?

[Lyth]

It's really hard to pitch a given fight to a range of skill levels. You can do it by means of gear, which was the traditional approach in MMOs - as better gear becomes available later in the tier, more and more people clear. You can also do it by means of difficulty settings, which tends to a bit less popular because everyone wants to be a part of that 'in' crowd that is idling in town with the latest raid gear. This is why 'difficult' game modes tend to become more accessible over time and you have to invent newer and newer names for actual 'hard' version as the older names become obsolete (Hard is not Hard, Extreme is not Extreme, Savage is not Savage, and so on). The problem is that if you try to push players in terms of fight difficulty, it gets seen as making the content (and rewards) inaccessible. And we can't have that, now can we?

That's why job skill ceilings are so important. There will always be players who just want to see all the content and clear, and that's fine. It's the same reason why you have some characters with auto-aiming turrets in team-based FPS games. Yet you'll also have the odd person who wants to dedicate a lot of time to getting better, so that's why there are also high mechanical skillcap characters which take thousands of hours of practice to get good with. That variety is what we need to see in job design. You'll actually find that there are plenty of players who are willing to be bad at a hard job, just as long as they can keep practicing to reach that pinnacle of skill. It's also great from a streaming perspective, because when you have something that is widely recognized by the community as being uniquely difficult, players flock to see how the job can be played at the high end, and become inspired to do better.

I think it's a mistake to simplify every job just to make them all accessible. We have plenty of tanks. PLD can continue to be a solid, reliable tank that requires good game sense but minimal mechanical skill to play well. That's perfectly fine. I also want to see higher effort, higher skillcap alternatives that we can choose from that are appropriately rewarded. But at the moment it looks like you have to play melee dps to get that.

[ItMe]

There will always be players who just want to see all the content and clear, and that's fine.
[...]
Yet you'll also have the odd person who wants to dedicate a lot of time to getting better, so that's why there are also high mechanical skillcap characters which take thousands of hours of practice to get good with.

It isn't one or the other though is what I'm saying.
Players aren't just "I want to clear content" vs "I want the job itself to be where the complexity lies"
Those aren't even opposite stances of each other.

[Valknut]

You're miss understanding.



For me, I enjoy the game far more if I'm playing at a high potential gameplay. The competitive scene does exist in FFXIV.

I'm not misunderstanding at all. The majority of people who have a problem with DRK are NOT high end raiders. Why would prog/speed clearing groups ever care about class balance? They care about what is the best and they pick what is best, and that is the end of that conversation. You don't run ANY% on a game and and just not use the best tools in your kit.

Once again you seem to be forgetting your own enjoyment of the game. "Optimizing jobs to their max is a difference vs casually playing the job doing what you want pressing the buttons. Cooldown syncing is super important for your raid team, everyone using their burst on Crit increases, Damage increases at the same time during a boss mechanic downtime." Ya people have be doing this since the dawn of MMOs, its never been hard, want to know why its never been hard? Coincidentally burst windows always line up with one key element of the fight. A massive lull in boss mechanics. Which are scripted in this game, which makes it even less RNG dependent. You can chase top parses, you can enjoy it, but when your whole party is there to boost your dmg so you can have that top parse, maybe just maybe, it isn't really a great achievement.

If you would like hard content though, the necromancer title is always up for grabs.

That's why job skill ceilings are so important. There will always be players who just want to see all the content and clear, and that's fine. It's the same reason why you have some characters with auto-aiming turrets in team-based FPS games. Yet you'll also have the odd person who wants to dedicate a lot of time to getting better, so that's why there are also high mechanical skillcap characters which take thousands of hours of practice to get good with. That variety is what we need to see in job design. You'll actually find that there are plenty of players who are willing to be bad at a hard job, just as long as they can keep practicing to reach that pinnacle of skill. It's also great from a streaming perspective, because when you have something that is widely recognized by the community as being uniquely difficult, players flock to see how the job can be played at the high end, and become inspired to do better.

I think it's a mistake to simplify every job just to make them all accessible. We have plenty of tanks. PLD can continue to be a solid, reliable tank that requires good game sense but minimal mechanical skill to play well. That's perfectly fine. I also want to see higher effort, higher skillcap alternatives that we can choose from that are appropriately rewarded. But at the moment it looks like you have to play melee dps to get that.

Simplifying jobs is all they have done every patch/expansion since HW. The game is pretty shallow when it comes to optimizations. I agree with what you have been saying in here.