Abyssos is fun for tanks because Warriors can't cheese it

[AttilaHetzel]

I'm really hoping they don't revert it, this tier has been mad fun. Our resident WAR main has been loving the fact he can't cheese everything, and our healers are loving how they're actually having to push themselves to get us through the fight. The healer problem really is separate, and mostly because of not only the shift in party responsibility (DPS have to mitigate or it's likely you'll wipe now) leading to people blaming healers for things out of their control, but because of complaints with healer DPS design we've had for a while.

The healer DPS thing I really understand for casual content, because running Variants as a healer is so boring with how often you're spamming that 1 DPS move, over and over again...and the monsters aren't doing enough damage for you to have to GCD heal yourself...I almost fell asleep that run outside of the bosses.

Yeah honestly we've all had so much fun this tier, that we are worried that since PF is having a hard time cuz samurais want kaiten back but can't press feint consistently, or this general sentiment that the tier is too hard to heal with in reality is just... way better, we have to think outside the one button who solves it all, and actually press on and play our classes, it's really fun !

[AttilaHetzel]

Abyssos is fine stopping Invuln cheesing

The problem is everything too big with their hitboxes removing existence of positioning, all we're doing is fighting dummies that do mechanics.

Absolutely agree, it feels like someone at SE just read the bunch of parsers who complain about not having uptime sometimes and they decided to address it, but it's ruining the game in my opinion.

[Absimiliard]

Whoever that was on SE I love them, glad to see my point came across for some people <3 (I don't hate warrior players and my "hate" for the class is mostly due to these constant cheeses that are very commonplace on my data centre, is really annoying)

WAR has had low damage this entire expansion. They had the same problem last tier as this tier: people outright refusing to bring them along. All that business last tier of WAR 'trivializing everything," in addition to being greatly overstated, was largely the result of people misinterpreting a few all-WAR savage clears and a handful of Asphodelos normal solos (some of which were conducted in part due to salt over WAR being denied raid slots) as meaning they could dominate all content, when in reality a warrior's presence didn't make that much of a difference. It just meant one or two mechanics ceased to be of consequence. All the while your DPS had to work extra hard.

Now we're left with a low damage job whose self-healing isn't enough to offset its mehtigation issue. There's really zero reason to allow WAR to participate in any content above dungeons at this point in time, as the other three tanks (yes, even PLD, the train wreck it is at the moment) are all far better suited.

[ForteNightshade]

I disagree with the notion that this is only applicable in Dungeons, as it was definitely a thing in Asphodelos and the Extreme fights. I remember WAR absolutely trivialized the last unreal too compared to the other tanks.

However yeah Abyssos has been specifically designed by someone at Square Enix who really hated WAR cheese of previous tier, and it resulted in WAR's entire lifesteal gimmick coming up weak as a result of all the bleeds.
Living Dead honestly isn't terribly useful on these either, the benefit it has over Holmgang is its a singular button vs 3 to 4 buttons. But then you'll still need a healer to bail you out when using it, which is honestly probably how it should be given Holmgang's 240s CD still generally makes it the best Invul for lowering the ammount of damage your team has to deal with as a whole. WAR's double Invul cheese still has a place in P6s and P8S P2.

If Abyssos is going to be the new design philosophy going forward, and I doubt it is given the Healer Shortage as a result of this tier being particularly taxing on them, then yeah WAR could use more raw mitigation.
That said if we revert to the damage levels of Asphodelos, and stop putting bleed on every single raid wide and tank buster then I think WAR is perfectly fine there, and this will just have been a tier that countered its kit because Sqaure Enix doesn't plan things out.

Extremes are generally laughable in terms of outgoing tank damage. In fact, Zodiark and Hydaelyn were killed, on content, without any healers. The last Unreal was Ultima, one of the easiest "Extreme" fights in the entire game. All of the tanks can and have trivialized these fights. P1 normal was solo'd by both Paladin and Gunbreaker. Even Asphodelos had sparse tank damage outside P3S. Ironically, this is where Dark Knight once again shined as Dark Mind was immensely strong.

None of this is to say Warrior's self sustain isn't strong. It simply isn't broken like the OP and many seem to believe. Dark Knight mitigations much better than Warrior. Yes, even in Asphodelos. Sure, you could Holmgang both Demigods but the second comes up so late into the fight none of the tanks are wanting for CDs. Demigod can even be kitchen sinked by Dark Knight as can P2S supposed "double" tank buster. Once again, Warrior's sustain is meant to be balanced by it taking more damage upfront, thus compensating for that weakness with healing.

Living Dead doesn't need any healer intervention. Dark Knight can handle it entirely on their own now. Which is why Holmgang, ironically, went from being the best invuln to near worthless in three of the five fights. With that said, I do actually prefer this tier and the bleeds as tank busters actually hurt again. I'd still rather they simply add more of them but that's another argument. At the end of the day, Warrior's cooldown suite isn't anywhere close to being overpowered despite what a lot of people think. It certainly doesn't justify the absurd gap between Warrior and Dark Knight in damage output. Even after a buff, Dark Knight is still pulling anywhere from 300-600 aDPS ahead. Which is ridiculous.

[NightHour]

There's no reason for Holmgang to have a 240 recast.

Make it 300 like Living Dead and compensate elsewhere in the toolkit.

[AttilaHetzel]

WAR has had low damage this entire expansion. They had the same problem last tier as this tier: people outright refusing to bring them along. All that business last tier of WAR 'trivializing everything," in addition to being greatly overstated, was largely the result of people misinterpreting a few all-WAR savage clears and a handful of Asphodelos normal solos (some of which were conducted in part due to salt over WAR being denied raid slots) as meaning they could dominate all content, when in reality a warrior's presence didn't make that much of a difference. It just meant one or two mechanics ceased to be of consequence. All the while your DPS had to work extra hard.

Now we're left with a low damage job whose self-healing isn't enough to offset its mehtigation issue. There's really zero reason to allow WAR to participate in any content above dungeons at this point in time, as the other three tanks (yes, even PLD, the train wreck it is at the moment) are all far better suited.

I agree with most of your point, then again I don't know if my server is just "special" or something, but Warriors were and are everywhere still now, again just like WHM being the most accessible of its role, is to be expected, but at least where I play outside of week one of abyssos no one has closed the doors for Warriors as you're saying, that was week 1 and PLD too was affected by it, it was the result of an over tunning from the developers (and yes it was an over tunning issue because even meta comps struggled)

People keep bringing the damage difference between DRK and Warrior like the post is about damage, is not, is about sustain, mitigation and the off tank role on it, if one tank makes the other a blue dps, I think it's bad design, and yes DRK can kitchen sink some of the stuff that's been said (demigod, p7s condensed, p2s double tank buster) but just the fact that it can, doesn't mean is a good idea, doing this on an actual run is not only unnecessary it will leave you naked for the next set of things, unless your healers and co-tank are babysitting you as DRK doing this, is really not a good idea to do it, it's fun and cool? sure, I've done it, but is not at all what you'd want to do and more something you might be forced to, because once all your mit is gone, for the next 90s (60s if the boss does magic damage) you're pretty much left with TBN and oblation and still being the only tank with no way to regain health by itself (no soul eater is not even healing you for more than what an auto attack does, and therefore is kind of useless)

[Oizen]

Living Dead doesn't need any healer intervention. Dark Knight can handle it entirely on their own now. Which is why Holmgang, ironically, went from being the best invuln to near worthless in three of the five fights. With that said, I do actually prefer this tier and the bleeds as tank busters actually hurt again. I'd still rather they simply add more of them but that's another argument. At the end of the day, Warrior's cooldown suite isn't anywhere close to being overpowered despite what a lot of people think. It certainly doesn't justify the absurd gap between Warrior and Dark Knight in damage output. Even after a buff, Dark Knight is still pulling anywhere from 300-600 aDPS ahead. Which is ridiculous.

I mean you just talked about how the bleed eats into WAR's healing niche but you're also acting like its not doing that to Living Dead. It does completely, and its not like you can stack all your mitigations going into it, and bleed damage snapshots your mits at the time so no point using anything after the fact.

Yeah you can use it to fight the bleed, much like WAR can but at the end of the day you're going to need a healers help. Honestly the heal aspect of Living Dead in this tier is more of to make sure you don't die to its effect, You'll still have no health coming out of it and thus need a healers help at the end of it. In which Liviing Dead this tier is Holmgang. With a 300s cooldown, and I actually think thats pefectly fine.

Design philosophy has changed with Invuls, they are no longer "oh shit" buttons for tanks, but rather expected mitigations for you to use in every fight. In which I firmly believe the most important stat on an Invul is its Cooldown.
WAR has the best one at 240s, PLD has the worst one at 420s. Yeah their effects are nice, but at the end of the day 3/4 of them are just flavor, and 1/4 of them pay the price by basically only being usable once in a fight.

P6S can have two chelics which can be double Invul'd to keep damage off the other tank for an easier time healing
P7S can have invuls on Condensed to achieve the same thing, and then a 2nd invul for the Harvest if you're doing the ELMO strat
P8S P2 has shared tank busters for normal attacks, you can use invuls to save off a lot of these, especially WAR who can once again do the double dip on the first and 4th one, only tank that can do this.

In terms of healer resources its not even that different from DRK or GNB.
GNB naturally requires healing due to Superbolide's 1hp cost.
DRK and WAR are basically in the same boat where their health regen will be fighting with the bleed, in which the proper thing to do is to let them sit at low health until the very end of the duration then burst heal them up.

But the ability to press button to be immune to death is never going to be "near worthless" unless they start filling these fights with mechanics that specifically ignore invuls.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

P6S can have two chelics which can be double Invul'd to keep damage off the other tank for an easier time healing
P7S can have invuls on Condensed to achieve the same thing, and then a 2nd invul for the Harvest if you're doing the ELMO strat
P8S P2 has shared tank busters for normal attacks, you can use invuls to save off a lot of these, especially WAR who can once again do the double dip on the first and 4th one, only tank that can do this.

P6s - invulns are irrelevant, Chelic Synergy can be easily taken solo'd by any tank with basically no burden to the healers. It's basically the same boat as Demigod Double that was also trivial to solo soak. Dark Mind even gets some use during Chelic, since it can be used to mitigate Dark IV after the fact.
P7s - Condensed does so little damage that contemplating using an invuln on it is an actual baffling decision for me to comprehend. Especially if you're DRK. You can alternate Rampart/Shadow Wall, while having Dark Mind + Oblation + TBN + OT support CD up for every single one. It -never- does more than 45k on initial hit with proper mits. Though condensed is so weak any tank can do it without much effort, I've done it on all 4 tanks with 3/5 to 5/5 condensed patterns. It's only ever really a concern on PLD, the other 3 tanks snooze through it.

P8s pt 2 is the only real situation this tier where holmgang has any advantage. Even then its not -that- much of an advantage, since its quite easy to spread out the invulns across the sets in such a way that each of the sets of two has 1 normal mitigated set, then a 2nd set where one tank invulns and the other kitchen sinks + gets the OT support button. leading to extremely comfy damage for all 4 TBs.

Also, you seem to be forgetting that you don't need to invuln the first hit here. The strategy in my group in P8s p1 is to simply let me bleed out from the DoT and invuln a tick or two away from it killing me. That way the DoT isn't interfering with the self regen of LD for more than 1-2 ticks, meaning at worst the DRK comes out at 50%+ HP. Healers literally get to ignore me for the entire duration of the tankbusters, and I get a free benediction. With holm/Bolide the healers would still need to pump resources in for that after the fact. technically you could also do it for P5s & P6s, but Mass/Crunch/Synergy hit way too weak when properly mitigated that there isn't any real danager. The P8s one we only did to squeeze out a tiny extra bit of dps during week 1.

The bigger reality here is that they need to look at how much damage the double busters are doing. Even back in Asphodelos, DRK could literally solo tank the entirety of P2s pre-LD buff due to how strong Dark Mind is, how flexible Dark Mind & Oblation are with their 60s CDs, and how strong TBN is at diminishing returns on single hit attacks. (Solo tanked it since week 2 of Asphodelos, my co-tank was literally just cohesion stack fodder and a corrundum dispenser, otherwise he was just pretend dps). Same thing with Demigod double - the attack was so trivially easy for DRK to solo soak without LD while still having plenty of CDs to spare for the near/fars due to the crazy power & low recasts of Dark Mind, Oblation & TBN (solo soaked it since week 3 of Asphodelos). Even heart stake was so trivially easy to take both hits on as DRK and still have mitigation to spar without being remotely in danger.

It's actually ridiculous when autos of all things in P8s p2 are more threatening as a double buster mechanic than every single actual double buster from Asphodelos & Abyssos.

[Oizen]

Are you talking about that shit before or after you went into it with gear? Cause I do not remember being able to do any of that shit at 610 ilv.

Now yeah you can definitely kitchen sink a lot of it, but thats not terribly out of the ordinary.