What if we designed other Tank's abilities like they were made for WAR?

[GoatOfWar]

You can use TBN outside of tank busters, every fight this tier takes about 2 autos to break it, it does require knowing the fact down to the individual auto attacks though which is a bit tedious.

The issue I see with TBN is as soon as you bring it into not-current content, or place it in scenarios where the damage isn't specifically tuned for it, it starts feeling bad to use. Theres quite a bit of content in this game where TBN wont break but the damage is just enough that its going to chip you down. Eureka Orthos is a great example of this, especially solos all the way up to floor 60, bosses included. This compounds itself as an issue because DRK doesn't really have ways to get health back thats lost, so you're either taking a loss in damage or losing your health.

Now I do think DRK does have some unique utilities that lead to some upsides, using MP as a resource means you get the immediate benefits of that, such as it always regenerating or getting a full resource bar when revived via Healer LB3 (hi TOP).

But on the average day to day, I don't think anything DRK has compares to WAR's obsession with "Additional Effect" text, as anything beyond that is less a perk and more of a trade off. Dark Mind is really in content its applicable to with its shorter CD, but its worthless in a lot of other content. In comparison, Equilibirum (which has the same cd) and Thrill of Battle are good in all content, and also both get "Additional Effects".

And yet, War still outdpsses you when you're pulling heal LB shenanigans >.>
God i hate War..

[Shurrikhan]

Can't be any damage reasons, its currently doing the most damage, so...why don't the other tanks get perks like this? Not saying they need to be copied 1:1, but this could be a way to help make the tanks feel a bit more unique from eachother.

Could you give some examples of what you're imagining could be changed?

At first glance it seems like you're saying, "Making the Tanks more similar would make them feel a bit more unique from each other".

Given that the connotation seemed clearly to be that they should each get their own unique little perk atop the base form, instead of all but WAR simply getting a basic 30%, etc.... I don't see how having more variety across them could possibly be making them more similar. You might as well say that "only one tank is different from the rest, so if we were to dehomogenize all of them, none would be special and therefore all would be homogeneous." ???

And while I can't answer for Oizen in terms of examples, I can at least give some spitballs pursuant to that same goal (though in this case just playing around with effects reminiscent of their names and not at all tuning-checked):

For instance, Shadow Wall may cause temporarily increase your Defense and Magic Defense by a portion of your Edge/Flood of Shadow damage dealt, with each addition fading linearly over 7 seconds.

Sentinel can grant each ally nearby "Watcher's Vigil" or "Awareness," causing them to take less damage from the next physical or targeted magical attack (by an amount equal to, say, 15% of the PLD's HP).

Nebula might augment heal over time and damage-absorbing effects on you, refreshing any currently active and spreading them at half value to all allies within 12 yalms. Etc., etc.

The core issue isn't really the dps balance, because that can be changed on a whim. It has to do with the number of beneficial effects attached to a given action. Consider the following:

• Grants 3 stacks of Delirium, each stack allowing the execution of Quietus or Bloodspiller without Blackblood cost, restoring MP when landing either weaponskill.
• Grants 3 stacks of Inner Release, each stack allowing the use of Fell Cleave or Decimate without cost and guaranteeing they are critical and direct hits. Increases damage dealt when under an effect that raises critical hit rate or direct hit rate. Grants Inner Strength, nullifying Stun, Sleep, Bind, Heavy, and most knockback and draw-in effects. Extends Surging Tempest duration by 10s to a maximum of 60s. Grants Primal Rend Ready.

While I completely agree that WAR's kit is overly flush on the whole... insisting that every skill be have perfect parity is begging for homogeneity. You could as easily make the case that Inner Release is worse than Delirium because it doesn't come with the latter's side-dish of Shadowbringer, Carve and Spit, Salted Earth, and Living Shadow as compared to a mere Upheaval.

Moreover, an effect like "Increases damage dealt when under an effect that raises critical hit rate or direct hit rate" is obviously just a fix for something that should be universal (ALL auto-crits should exchange their excess chance for proportionately greater bonus); it's not a bonus so much as a clause that just reads "Doesn't arbitrarily face anti-synergy with raid buffs."

The core difference in design philosophy is what happens when you press a button. In most jobs, just one thing happens.

Which is, in itself, fine. Just like Requiescat being both damage and a buff is fine. Just like a gap-closer having damage is fine. It just means that they might occasionally face priority conflicts, since multiple functions are funneled through the same ability.

The issue is solely when the total number of functions and/or practical access to those functions (e.g., not so unresponsive as to lose value in practice) are out of balance.

But jobs providing their variety of functions through different routes would be a good thing, I would think, as then at least we're not just each working with a different name each for skills identical in use case and with no distinguishing idiosyncrasies for "CC immunity," "raid miti," "30% miti", etc., and we're thereby able to develop themes through those tie-ins.

This is an ongoing trend in MMORPG design (WOW has been the same way for a long time, and only quintupled-down on the idea in the newest expansion).

Basically, this is the result of something like... "Healers are the only people who really enjoy it when players have to rely on Healers to survive, and Tanks especially hate it."

The idea that a Tank can play "perfectly", but still splatter into a smear on the floor just because they get paired with an inexperienced Healer — maybe this worked in an era where almost all content was manually-recruited, and you just ran with your friends and buddies.

But in the modern, paradoxically "antisocial" MMORPG design, where you only know other people for ~20-40 minutes, and then never see them again... Tanks relying on today's mystery surprise Healer to be equally-skilled in order for the Tank to survive creates a lot of frustration and friction.

So, the newer trend is that Tanks are just "immortal" if they play correctly, and the Healer focuses on keeping everyone else alive through all the intermittent mechanical damage, or stray errors.

I get that, but it still feels to me like we're (or, WAR, especially, and then PLD > GNB > DRK) is getting way too much survivability for what little effort is (available to) put in. That's not to say that healers are putting in some huge amount of effort, either, but there just seems to be very little room for skill expression in the actual tanking/surviving aspect of tanking in XIV.

In WoW, if I wanted to be immortal, I'd have to be dodging, weaving, charging, CCing, kiting between short-CDs, focus-targeting, interrupting some more, target-marking, managing the space, etc. Here, I can just hit a single button to restore all my HP and become effectively unkillable for 4 GCDs.

[Lyth]

You should list the bonus effects that come with Warrior's cooldowns and then refer them to Dark knight's equivalent cooldowns to showcase how far ahead Warrior really is.

Most people are aware of the inconsistencies, but they become more apparent when you question them in the context of the design philosophy.

Take self-sustain, for example. I'd like to know from the dev team is whether they ultimately intend to remove tanks' reliance on healers altogether. Regardless of whether you believe this a good design direction or not, you need to ask if this applied as a consistent standard. WAR has self-healing tacked on to many of of their abilities, and even has oGCD raidwide healing potential. If this level of self-sustain is the goal, it should be the standard for all tanks. If it's unintentional, then it really needs to be seriously dialed back so that healing can become more impactful again. And there are ways that you can make self-sustain genuinely interesting, instead of being a passive reward tacked on to everything. The easiest way is to add a timing element to it - restore a percentage of the damage taken over a fixed time interval. Play around with effects that function as a double edged sword - temporary HP is great for this. It's only really meaningful if it's a struggle to stay alive against the odds.

The design philosophy around retaliatory effects is unclear as well. We've seen a progressive move from Stormblood on away from 'counter-attacks' because they supposedly disincentivize the OT 'role'. Reprisal and Low Blow were so satisfying when they were designed as counterattacks. Shield Swipe likewise felt great to use. Now we just have Vengeance, which for some reason retains its thorns effect despite having all the other 30% DR cooldowns be otherwise identical. So what's the design philosophy here? Why did the other tanks give up all this cool stuff just to keep the damage reflect as a bonus effect on WAR? And retaliation likewise doesn't need to be tied to actively tanking. Consider this. All tanks have a short recast defensive that they can apply to their co-tank (or others, as need be). What if the defensive strategy was a timed counter-attack? WAR is getting a tankbuster. The big red arrow appears. PLD uses Shield Swipe, which does big damage and applies a damage down debuff only when used when the big arrow is up. It's a bit like staggering a boss in a game like Elden Ring. Could this not introduce new ways for tanks to use their fight timing knowledge to push their damage output?

Raidwides are another problem area, as we're all aware. Veil and Shake were already superior to Missionary and HoL prior to this expansion, despite being on the same recast. Why on earth did we add raidwide healing to both of Veil and Shake? Why are Missionary and HoL ineffective against physical damage, on a tier where some groups were using Tank LB3 to get through a physical raidwide? Why does PLD have an extra raidwide mitigation tool? Why was Reprisal turned into a role action when we were going to add in additional raidwide mitigation tools to all the tanks anyways? There's no consistent, logical explanation behind these decisions. That's why I believe the only solution is to ask the dev team to state their design philosophy on these issues (perhaps at the next general Q+A), so that we can rectify these inconsistencies.

...

I don't think that asking for a fair playing field has to result in homogenization. True homogenization is boring, but at least it's fair. Partial homogenization is an even bigger problem, because it's blatantly unbalanced. But there's another way of going about this.

Let's take a look about how we could address the 30% DR cooldowns as an illustration. Vengeance is an example of partial homogenization. It's identical to the others, yet has an extra effect that nobody else has. That's bad design. Homogenization would put the issue to rest permanently, sure. But you can do more with this.

What if the bonus effect of Vengeance was that the damage resistance scales up as you take more damage, because you become angrier and angrier. What if Nebula had a delayed time reversal effect attached, reverting your HP to a previous value when a buff expires? What if Shadow Wall had a dread spikes bonus effect? What if Sentinel applied a temporary cover effect to your co-tank?

When effects are so situationally different that you can't really draw obvious comparisons between them, then you have parity without homogenization.

There are clear problems in tank design. What we need to do is to ask questions of the dev team to challenge the status quo. What is their philosophy? Is it being applied in a consistent way?

[Shurrikhan]

I don't think that asking for a fair playing field has to result in homogenization. True homogenization is boring, but at least it's fair. Partial homogenization is an even bigger problem, because it's blatantly unbalanced. But there's another way of going about this.

But that's not what such narrow comparisons lend themselves to.

Instead, you'd be looking at things like "Why does DRK get a bonus defensive?! Where's WAR, GNB, and PLD's?!" while ignoring that the addition was just wrapped up into their 25s, or asking "Where's WHM's Lightspeed-equivalent? How is a job with relatively little oGCD healing value supposed to meet burst heal checks during required movement without it?!" while ignoring that Lilies simultaneously provide free healing, mobility space, weave space, and MP retention (rather than simply comparing resultant mobility space per minute relative to what's actually needed or could be made use of).

What if the bonus effect of Vengeance was that the damage resistance scales up as you take more damage, because you become angrier and angrier.

I'd dig that, at least if the game's only threats to tanks weren't the burst damage itself that may offer little to nothing to ramp up from. But I still don't think it'd really be any more thematic, nor --if balanced for the majority of contexts-- any less likely to feel comparatively powerful.

When effects are so situationally different that you can't really draw obvious comparisons between them, then you have parity without homogenization.

I agree completely with that. My issue was solely with the implied approach of trying to balance each singular skill against its singular closest analog among each other tank. Such would mean that features and value alike could only be distributed identically for each tank's kit. I feel it can and should be a bit messier and holistic than that.

There are clear problems in tank design. What we need to do is to ask questions of the dev team to challenge the status quo. What is their philosophy? Is it being applied in a consistent way?

Agreed. And I kind of doubt it's being applied consistently unless a guiding criteria in that is simply to balance ideal balancing against what least upsets players of each job.

[Eorzean_username]

Given that the connotation seemed clearly to be that they should each get their own unique little perk atop the base form, instead of all but WAR simply getting a basic 30%, etc.... I don't see how having more variety across them could possibly be making them more similar. You might as well say that "only one tank is different from the rest, so if we were to dehomogenize all of them, none would be special and therefore all would be homogeneous." ???

Directly above the line you actually quoted from Oizen, they had first stated:

Why doesn't PLD get more knockback immunity? How come DRK isn't getting guaranteed Crit/DHs on Delirium?

And while they did follow up it with:

Not saying they need to be copied 1:1, but this could be a way to help make the tanks feel a bit more unique from eachother.

...that still left it somewhat-ambiguous exactly what they wanted, and could be (mis?)interpreted as a drive towards further "homogenisation".

I figured that would probably serve to potentially pollute or taint the tone of the responses Oizen would receive, so I thought I'd prompt them to elaborate a bit more concretely with their own intentions, rather than just making assumptions about what they want based on which direction my personal biases leaned.

Happily, my question was constructively-answered within the first few responses of the first page of the thread, and the discussion then moved on fruitfully from there.

——————————————————————

I get that, but it still feels to me like we're (or, WAR, especially, and then PLD > GNB > DRK) is getting way too much survivability for what little effort is (available to) put in. That's not to say that healers are putting in some huge amount of effort, either, but there just seems to be very little room for skill expression in the actual tanking/surviving aspect of tanking in XIV. [...] In WoW, if I wanted to be immortal, I'd have to be dodging, weaving, charging, CCing, kiting between short-CDs, focus-targeting, interrupting some more, target-marking, managing the space, etc. Here, I can just hit a single button to restore all my HP and become effectively unkillable for 4 GCDs.

Yeah I mean that's because you're playing FFXIV.

This game is not at all shy about the idea that it wants to position itself as the Mario Party Minigame version of other MMO systems.

Partially it's because I really don't think that XIV's engine/server responsiveness could handle having all the sorts of mechanics and pressures that eg, even a WOW Dungeon does, without feeling like a completely unfair mess for a lot of players. And partially it's because the developers have more-or-less explicitly stated that they don't want those sorts of skill-gaps to exist in their game anymore, and that they'd prefer if — for a contextual example — "everyone" can be immortal, as long as they understand the function of a few basic keys.

So like... "yes", it does require dramatically less Class understanding, timing, situational context, practice/experience, etc, to become "functionally immortal" as an Endwalker XIV Warrior than a WOW Blood Death Knight — that seems objectively accurate.

But do the developers care about that difference? I don't think so. Is it actually quite intentional? Probably. Is it going to change? I am guessing, "probably not".

So I think when some players realise or at least infer those points, their next line of reasoning isn't, "Let's make XIV more complex" (because the devs have outright stated that they don't want to do that) and instead, "Uhhh, okay, then could you at least make my Job also as simplistically-powerful, I guess?"

[Oizen]

I would also sooner prefer to see tank sustain nerfs rather than buff everyone to WAR's level but thats not really how the balance team works.

[Mekhana]

The DRK community is part to blame for the situation. Suggestions to increase QoL on our kit were shot down because it would "dumb down the class" and the kit is "already very strong" and other suggestions were shot down because "DRK is fine look at parse its better than ever" when DPS wasn't even being considered. First of all, its impossible to make a tank any dumber, save GNB maybe. Second of all, you can't expect precision tuning from the people driving this clown car, to put it mildly. The average player probably practices more at target dummies, based on Yoshi P's previous statement.

We have to be three things. Vocal and more annoying, stop looking at gift horses in the mouth when something actually goes our way and always demand more. That's the only way to get through. That's the only way the devs do something. That's how WARs always make things go their way. They are never satisfied, in fact, there's people still complaining. At best, 'WAR is good this tier'...

[Oizen]

The DRK community is part to blame for the situation. Suggestions to increase QoL on our kit were shot down because it would "dumb down the class" and the kit is "already very strong" and other suggestions were shot down because "DRK is fine look at parse its better than ever" when DPS wasn't even being considered. First of all, its impossible to make a tank any dumber, save GNB maybe. Second of all, you can't expect precision tuning from the people driving this clown car, to put it mildly. The average player probably practices more at target dummies, based on Yoshi P's previous statement.

We have to be three things. Vocal and more annoying, stop looking at gift horses in the mouth when something actually goes our way and always demand more. That's the only way to get through. That's the only way the devs do something. That's how WARs always make things go their way. They are never satisfied, in fact, there's people still complaining. At best, 'WAR is good this tier'...

I wouldn't say it was DRK specifically, I remember the sentiment in early on in EW being "this is probably the worst thing that could happen as now people will say DRK is fine". This is more of a problem with the high end community as a whole.

And thats probably been the most annoying thing about this community, Balance in this game starts and ends at week 1 Savage Clears specifically. Any discussion of balance in any other form of content is immediately discarded by the raiding community as irrelevant because they act like its the only content that matters, and everything else is too easy. Even if its blatantly untrue.

I'll stand by the fact that DRK feels like complete ass in Criterion, and is pretty lack luster in Deep Dungeons, and numbers for clears for jobs in that content pretty much reflects this. But as these are not week 1 Savage Clears, the balance there is irrelevant and you'll be mocked for bringing them up, ususally by people who simultaneously complain EW has no cotnent, but don't even run this content

[GoatOfWar]

The DRK community is part to blame for the situation. Suggestions to increase QoL on our kit were shot down because it would "dumb down the class" and the kit is "already very strong" and other suggestions were shot down because "DRK is fine look at parse its better than ever" when DPS wasn't even being considered. First of all, its impossible to make a tank any dumber, save GNB maybe. Second of all, you can't expect precision tuning from the people driving this clown car, to put it mildly. The average player probably practices more at target dummies, based on Yoshi P's previous statement.

We have to be three things. Vocal and more annoying, stop looking at gift horses in the mouth when something actually goes our way and always demand more. That's the only way to get through. That's the only way the devs do something. That's how WARs always make things go their way. They are never satisfied, in fact, there's people still complaining. At best, 'WAR is good this tier'...

Most people who act like that are War mains trying to gatekeep other tanks into being better than them at anything.

[Mekhana]

You are both correct but one thing I forget to mention is that so often we are abandoned and forgotten it takes one crumb or two in 2-3 years at best and suddenly all's well when the foundation is ruined from the core since the rework. It is like they put in one shiny brick and suddenly the shanty is a mansion.

DRK needs adjustments from the ground up.