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

[Shurrikhan]

DRK needs adjustments from the ground up.

Agreed. But...

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.

No, that's how you get a cluster**** of homogenized power-creep.

[Lyth]

It seems like the word 'homogenization' always gets trotted out as a way of stifling opposition to the status quo. At the very minimum, 'homogenization' is better than 'unbalanced', so you feel that it's impossible to make skills both unique and fair, then it's well within players' rights to at least demand fairness. Nobody wants to play a uniquely bad job.

Balance is mandatory to ensure that diverse playstyles can exist in the first place, otherwise everyone migrates over to the same job. Build your creativity from a point of fairness.

[Shurrikhan]

It seems like the word 'homogenization' always gets trotted out as a way of stifling opposition to the status quo. At the very minimum, 'homogenization' is better than 'unbalanced', so you feel that it's impossible to make skills both unique and fair, then it's well within players' rights to at least demand fairness. Nobody wants to play a uniquely bad job.

Balance is mandatory to ensure that diverse playstyles can exist in the first place, otherwise everyone migrates over to the same job. Build your creativity from a point of fairness.

Sure, but that requires neither among (A) purposely ignoring gameplay in the pursuit of that capacity nor (B) literally never stopping requests even after you're already balanced/ahead, as was suggested in what I was replying to.

The first is how you get increased homogeneity; the second is how you get power-creep that leaves role-balance out of whack.

[Oizen]

At the very minimum, 'homogenization' is better than 'unbalanced'

Well Endwalker was a very homogenized expansion, and also not a very well balanced one so we're living in the worst of both worlds here.

I also disagree, the game could stomache worse balance if it meant moving away from the homogenized slog it has become, Anabaseios seemed to be designed as a hard reaction to the fuckup of the damage checks of Abyssos, we honestly could push this further and make damage checks even more lenient if the devs are struggling that hard to even balance what the game has become now. To be honest the issue I'm seeing is that SE isn't putting a lot of effort into this front, especially when it comes to understanding the core of what makes a job, or why it may be meta or not.

The latest balance changes we saw were definitely a reaction to the numbers put out by TOP, hence why WAR got such an insane buff, DRK didn't get anything and the others got buffed as well. Well the reason for that is theres an exploit you can do to put out way more damage than intended as DRK in that fight specifically. The devs ignored this as they likely just reacted to the numbers, and now DRK's output has fallen behind a bit because the devs didn't bother to look into this. No this isn't crying for DRK damage potency buffs, this is pointing out how I don't think the devs particularly try when it comes to balancing jobs, and they haven't been trying for a while.

[Lyth]

This depends on where you think the balance issue is. If you're talking about damage output, then you can say with confidence that they're playing closer attention to damage values than they have been previously (i.e. WAR doesn't have a 500 rDPS advantage, like it has had in previous expansions), and the decisions are not random (even if we could debate around the philosophy behind them). DPS jobs very clearly are set up such that melee and BLM all have similar rDPS to each other, and the remaining ranged jobs have similar rdps to each other (again, design direction debate for another thread). They very clearly are capable of tweaking potencies such that 6+ jobs with different gameplay mechanics are within 100 dps of each other if they want to, so this is not an impossible dream.

Tanks used to have very similar rDPS values during Abyssos, but then WAR mains kept maintaining that tank balance should be done on the basis of aDPS instead because they couldn't tolerate a 50 rDPS disadvantage. Unsurprisingly, now WAR has both an aDPS and rDPS advantage. Abyssos was a silly tier to be doing an aDPS comparison in anyways because of Everburn, but this forum was loud on the subject when it counted. So if the tank numerical balance looks bizarre now compared to every other role, at least now you know why the balance was thrown out the window for tanks specifically. If it bothers you now, know that you could have easily objected to these arguments when the debate was actually happening. I did.

The funny thing is that the balance issues on DRK from the start of the expansion actually had nothing to do with damage numbers. They just become obvious when you take away the last thing the job had going for it. And given that expansion launches are when non-numerical balance is looked at, this is the time to get it fixed. Why is it acceptable for Shake and Veil to be so much more powerful than Missionary and HoL? If we can't come up with unique alternatives, that's fine, get rid of Dark Missionary and turn it into Dark Shake. I assure you I won't shed a tear. Oh no, power creep? That's fine, get rid of Shake, Veil, PoA, Missionary, and HoL. We supposedly took away Reprisal from DRK because it was supposed to fulfil a raidwide mitigation function across the entire role, right? Why do we need all these other layers to it? If you're unable in identifying a creative solution to this problem, at least provide a fair one.

Self-sustain is another obvious one. There are many creative ways you can do self-sustain without homogenization. You can heal yourself. You could regenerate. You could have timed lifesteal. You could absorb damage and turn it into HP. You could reverse time to a previous HP state. But lets say for the sake of the argument that you're not a particularly creative person, and you only know how to create one type of self-sustaining tank. That's fine. Homogenize it then. Or get rid of self-sustain altogether if 'power creep' bothers you. But don't use the excuse of 'we only know how to create this one flavor of advantage, so that's why WAR is the only one that has it'. Fairness comes first. And if you're able to be both creative and fair, even better.

[Shurrikhan]

Agreed on the most of the rest, but...

Tanks used to have very similar rDPS values during Abyssos, but then WAR mains kept maintaining that tank balance should be done on the basis of aDPS instead because they couldn't tolerate a 50 rDPS disadvantage.

All buffs-less jobs' damage should be balanced on the basis of aDPS rather than rDPS.

Two jobs with equal rDPS could easily vary in how much damage they actually bring to a team on the basis of how well they exploit raid buffs / team synergies. Yes, that advantage will at least appear on someone else's bars in a given party, but that is useless when comparing jobs against jobs, not an 8-man composition against the same with that single job swapped (to the same effect, but of no practical use to anyone).

I don't know why you keep trying to pretend that being better able to produce more DPS for your party shouldn't count just because that margin comes from how well one can exploit raid buffs. All jobs with any degree of rDPS buffs ought to be balanced with an eye on both their rDPS and aDPS. It's a unique property of those without any buffs, though, that you only need to look at one graph for their variance.

(Don't give me the "but aDPS depends on one's composition" BS again; every buffers' rDPS value also depends on its composition and yet we don't discount their metrics. Why? Because it's a team game; we don't balance jobs around solo play. So why would we remove the quantifiable differences in output from team synergy from our comparisons?)

The problem wasn't that WARs asked that balance look at the metric that actually includes all the damage a buffs-less job brings to the table instead of one that purposely excludes a large portion of it and ignores that we play a team-game and that jobs should be balanced accordingly.

The problem was that they asked for damage parity despite already being superior in terms of sustain (combined healing+mitigation) and features (the value of SiO over the likes of Veil or HoL/DM, IR's KB-immunity, etc.), which would then make them objectively OP overall even if the devs' hadn't slightly overshot that damage buff and put them above mere parity even there, too.

[vetch]

At the very minimum, 'homogenization' is better than 'unbalanced', so you feel that it's impossible to make skills both unique and fair, then it's well within players' rights to at least demand fairness.

In current-tier Savage/Ultimate raiding, maybe.

In the other 95% of the game? No, I want fun jobs with satisfying gameplay even at the cost of numbers parity.

[GoatOfWar]

In current-tier Savage/Ultimate raiding, maybe.

In the other 95% of the game? No, I want fun jobs with satisfying gameplay even at the cost of numbers parity.

Welp, Warrior is an upgrade over Dark knight now. It does everything better.
Can't say knowing i'm playing an objectively inferior, and therefore the incorrect job makes the game particularly enjoyable or satisfying.

[Supersnow845]

I like savage, I like progging it and I like spending time in it

I would still return to HW balance to get HW classes back even if it’s for casual content (the worst example of balance in HW wasn’t even class balance it was them trying to have magic and physical tanks)

Like think in causal content you have 1 healer, because they are all the same, you have 1.5 tanks depending on how many buttons you want to press for literally the same result and you have like 5 DPS designs (melee+MCH, DNC, BRD, BLM and RDM (SMN is a healer)), give me a reason to want to play more than 1 class in each role and I’ll take my main being 5% weaker than others in its class every other patch

[vetch]

Welp, Warrior is an upgrade over Dark knight now. It does everything better.
Can't say knowing i'm playing an objectively inferior, and therefore the incorrect job makes the game particularly enjoyable or satisfying.

Can't speak to that since I'm talking about fun jobs, not Dark Knight.