Dark Knight Megathread

[Archwizard]

For PLD, support feels like it should be a key, core, deliberate feature. Intended affordance: On-demand (esp., emergency) support. Thus, Clemency (especially at its 20% more powerful and Req-affected potency) made a lot of sense. Cover, especially with neither a gauge cost nor built-in additional mitigation, made a lot of sense.

And while I agree with that, in practice, you end up avoiding supportive skills almost entirely.
Of the four tanks, three of them can heal other people (DRK can't and that's fine IMO), but until Endwalker, PLD was the only one who had to lose momentum and stop damage-dealing to do that; even now, optimally, you avoid Clemency entirely and leave it to healers. Also, Requiescat was specifically reworked in Endwalker to only give Clemency the instant cast time -- no more healing buff.
Likewise, Cover is such a risky maneuver (unless you're using HG) that you're encouraged to just use Intervention instead. Even its most iconic support skill, Passage, has some DPS cost to use outside of downtime.

It has the tools, yes. They're implemented in such a manner they get pushed into the background, however, especially when someone like WAR or GNB can toss their equivalents around freely.

For WAR, there's little that feels like it ought to be separable, while the intended affordance appeared to be the ability to be less affected by functioning outside of normal party support (having a bit more burst damage potential in itself to shut down key targets, its sustain being less context-dependent as to be less dependent upon timely help, etc.). Thus, self-healing being tied to and around damage-dealing made sense.

And I get conceptually, 'sating your bloodlust' encourages creating an active mitigation playstyle, such as self-healing through damage actions.
But, ignoring that that doesn't make drain attacks the sole domain of WAR like some people in this thread would believe, you have two parts of that which make its existing implementation somewhat uncomfortable:

1) The fact that the Warrior can heal other people the same way. There's no way about it: that's magic.
The one tank who's supposed to be banned from magic is performing healing on other people, no bandages or potions or gadgets being tossed like GNB's excuse, just aether manipulation. As I said before, I understand the point of Shadowbringers was offering off-tanking tools to all tanks... but one can't reasonably say party healing makes little sense for DRK (who at least can do magic, just the wrong kind) while allowing it for WAR.
2) There are other ways to have an active mitigation playstyle beyond direct-healing actions, including having it build raw DR/armor or even stackable barriers -- things that increase maximum EHP in conjunction with external sources of healing.

Not to say that WAR shouldn't have any healing -- a second wind via Equilibrium or an EHP boost from Thrill make sense, even has Storm's Path for exactly the "heal by attacking" element -- but the existing method is a bit far beyond the job descriptor.

[DRK was] a bastard with a bag of tricks, with a higher than average performance gap from those tricks' utilization.

And now it doesn't even have a bag of tricks, owing to only having three ways to spend MP -- with two of them being the same and the last just facilitating the others.

And you wouldn't want "tricks" anyway, since now you're just encouraged to have the barrier get eaten before it runs out; things like Blind and Slow become counterintuitive.

And I've no idea what GNB was ever supposed to have meshed or afforded, as it's never felt like anything more than a fairly rigid DPS with some tank CDs slapped atop it.

GNB really feels like the repository job -- "Let's take every idea that we felt didn't work for the direction of any other tank and slap them together." It has barriers, on-demand DR, parry boost, HoTs, Excog... none of which are iconic to it, none of which flow into each other except for its invuln or give a clear idea of its niche... it just does everything, but poorly compared to a specialist.
How it somehow works in spite of that is either a miracle or grand illusion.

If DRK wasn't so embroiled in the concept of counterattacking as part of its own identity, I would think it would be a fine place for GNB considering its only defining feature is, y'know, its weapon and continuous slashing style. FF8 even opens with a Quickdraw with swords, while Thancred is constantly counterattacking in the ShB trailer.