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

[GoatOfWar]

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

Well, judging off of your post history i can see that you play Warrior, which plays very similar to Dark knight but is just stronger arbitrarily.
We have an equivalent for almost all of your buttons just lower potency and without the extra bonus effects, but with extra ogcd's we weave on top.
So i'm inclined to believe your original point is moot and you just enjoy jobs that are better.

But please, do proceed to tell me how 123 fellcleave is more fun than 123 bloodspiller.

[Shurrikhan]

Well, judging off of your post history i can see that you play Warrior, which plays very similar to Dark knight but is just stronger arbitrarily.
We have an equivalent for almost all of your buttons just lower potency and without the extra bonus effects, but with extra ogcd's we weave on top.
So i'm inclined to believe your original point is moot and you just enjoy jobs that are better.

But please, do proceed to tell me how 123 fellcleave is more fun than 123 bloodspiller.

???

The dude said nothing about Warrior, only (A) that he'd rather not sacrifice fun gameplay for a brief turn at being Flavor-of-the-Patch and (B) that current DRK is not fun to him.

Or are you honestly of the opinion that a transient place as top aDPS was worth turning DRK into a WAR-clone?

[GoatOfWar]

???

The dude said nothing about Warrior, only (A) that he'd rather not sacrifice fun gameplay for a brief turn at being Flavor-of-the-Patch and (B) that current DRK is not fun to him.

Or are you honestly of the opinion that a transient place as top aDPS was worth turning DRK into a WAR-clone?

I mean if we're going to say that a job is not fun and be dismissive about it in a balance disccusion at that, then yeah, i'm going to make a point out of it.
But no, i'm not advocating that Drk should become more like War. I want balance, but Warrior is currently better at everything.
Dark knight as of now is just Warrior but with extra steps and is strictly worse at everything. Our damage is lower, our sustain is lower, our utility is weaker and even our invuln is worse.
It's not like with the healers where some have different abilities that provide things others can not provide.

Like scholar having access to a party wide sprint, a raid buff or a fairy that will heal you even when you're cc'd. Or Ast with it's neat buffs and sage with it's instant casts and personal mobility.

Tanks as they are now are so painfully similar that there isn't really reason for Dark knight to exist. It's sustain is lacking compared to the rest, it's damage is no longer ahead, it's party wide is tied for the worst with Gnb, and it has no unique utility to make up for that gap. So i am advocating for changes in either way, really. I'd prefer Warrior nerfs if anything because it should be taxed for it's kit like paladin still is, or it should lose the bells and whistles so that it's damage is warranted. I'd also be okay with Dark knight receiving unique utility, but for now it doesn't have any. Another change i'd be interested in seeing is all tanks except for Drk losing Reprisal and perhaps a general nerf to sustain. But i highly doubt we'll see that.
More likely, they'll streamline the game further and just copy and paste War's sustain to other tanks so that they don't have to offend the streamers that play War.
War currently does everything. The only way they can balance the tanks is by either letting the other tanks do everything as well, (Homogenisation) Give them tools that War doesn't have, or they need to start taking tools away.

Choose your poison i guess.

[Oizen]

Or are you honestly of the opinion that a transient place as top aDPS was worth turning DRK into a WAR-clone?

DRK had already been considered a war-clone for 2 expansions by the time that happened.
The thing that changed was the emphasis on the 2m meta, and it just so happens that designing the entire game like that overly rewarded DRK's high number of oGCDs, I really don't think anything done here has been intentional.

I mean if we're going to say that a job is not fun and be dismissive about it in a balance disccusion at that, then yeah, i'm going to make a point out of it.
But no, i'm not advocating that Drk should become more like War. I want balance, but Warrior is currently better at everything.
Dark knight as of now is just Warrior but with extra steps and is strictly worse at everything. Our damage is lower, our sustain is lower, our utility is weaker and even our invuln is worse.
It's not like with the healers where some have different abilities that provide things others can not provide.

Like scholar having access to a party wide sprint, a raid buff or a fairy that will heal you even when you're cc'd. Or Ast with it's neat buffs and sage with it's instant casts and personal mobility.

Tanks as they are now are so painfully similar that there isn't really reason for Dark knight to exist. It's sustain is lacking compared to the rest, it's damage is no longer ahead, it's party wide is tied for the worst with Gnb, and it has no unique utility to make up for that gap. So i am advocating for changes in either way, really. I'd prefer Warrior nerfs if anything because it should be taxed for it's kit like paladin still is, or it should lose the bells and whistles so that it's damage is warranted.

It is increasingly strange to me that a PLD/DRK/GNB skill be written like:
-Reduce Damage by 20%
CD: 90

But a WAR skill will be written like:
-Reduce Damage by 20%
-Additional Effect: Cure Potency 600
-Additional Effect: Gradually Restores HP
-Cure potency: 200
-Duration: 15s
CD: 90

[vetch]

Tanks as they are now are so painfully similar that there isn't really reason for Dark knight to exist.

This is what I'm saying. Give jobs better gameplay loops and job fantasy, and balance concerns start to recede into the background.

I leveled DRK once on my free trial account, around patch 5.4 or so. If it had had fun core gameplay instead of just being 'Greatsword Warrior with forgettable oGCD spam', I might be playing it on this account too. Having worse mits and poorer aDPS at endgame did not even enter into the decision not to unlock it again. The job wasn't fun.

I wish I could go back and try the Heavensward DRK that people post about.

I'd prefer Warrior nerfs if anything because it should be taxed for it's kit like paladin still is, or it should lose the bells and whistles so that it's damage is warranted.

It should be the nerfs, because 'does the most DPS but has no real flavor or gameplay loop' isn't a valid job fantasy.

[Shurrikhan]

DRK had already been considered a war-clone for 2 expansions by the time that happened.
The thing that changed was the emphasis on the 2m meta, and it just so happens that designing the entire game like that overly rewarded DRK's high number of oGCDs, I really don't think anything done here has been intentional.

But that's still within the point.

If the idea, as Mekhana put it, should be to "never to look a gift horse in the mouth," that means that we ought not critique or analyze any state favorable to the job, even if it leaves us feeling like we have less to do overall (all meaningful action consigned to 15s per 120s), or would copy over Inner Release into ShB Delirium in giving DRK its "buff" relative to StB, etc., etc.

Imo, though, we should analyze them and critique as necessary. When we got a state better able to exploit the 2-minute cycles by having so many perfectly 60s or 120s CDs, it was good that many were asking, too, what the price of that was to our gameplay and how that advantage might stymy other capacities. When we had Delirium "buffed" by being turned into Inner Release in ShB, it was good that so many said, "No, this is now somehow even worse. Try again."

Throughput alone should never be an acceptable replacement for gameplay. We can ask for both parity and an enjoyable identity.

It should be the nerfs, because 'does the most DPS but has no real flavor or gameplay loop' isn't a valid job fantasy.

Agreed.

Though, that's mostly just because every fight in XIV is to reduce a unit's HP to zero and that gear upgrades increasingly reduce the relevance of all but damage, making it so that "identity" would at best be the default 90% of the time, rather than an actual compromise that affects how the party plays.

Otherwise, I'd just say it's a problematic and shallow one, but still potentially "valid", much like a tank capable of especially high self-healing or a tank with especially high external support -- shallow, but... not an inherently flawed niche.

[Lyth]

There are a lot of tangential issues being introduced around tank design, but the central point of this thread is about fairness and less about whether you personally enjoy every tank as it is currently designed. Even if you happen to not personally enjoy a job's gameplay as it currently exists, all jobs within a role should be able to bring the same amount of value to the table. Let's use the absolute simplest example:

Sentinel: Lv. 38 Ability. Reduces damage taken by 30%. Duration: 15s, Recast 120s.

Vengeance: Lv. 38 Ability. Reduces damage taken by 30% and delivers an attack with a potency of 55 every time you suffer physical damage. Duration: 15s, Recast 120s.

Shadow Wall: Lv. 38 Ability. Reduces damage taken by 30%. Duration: 15s, Recast 120s.

Nebula: Lv. 38 Ability. Reduces damage taken by 30%. Duration: 15s, Recast 120s.

There are two ways to resolve this in a fair way. The first is to remove the thorns effect from Vengeance, making them all identical. Oh no! Homogenization. We are stifling the deep creative expression of Vengeance's thorns effect. But don't worry, there's an alternative. Give each action its own unique effect. If you can't draw a comparison to what that benefit is, then it's simultaneously fair and heterogenous. Example:

Sentinel: Lv. 38 Ability. Reduces damage taken by 30%. Additional Effect, Watchful Eye: Any healing or shielding effects that you receive are also applied to target under the effect of Cover granted by you. Duration: 15s, Recast 120s. (Note: this would require a Cover rework functioning as a permanent buff similar to Kardia).

Vengeance: Lv. 38 Ability. Reduces damage taken by 30%. Additional Effect, Brutal Counter: The next ability that consumes Beast Gauge restores HP proportional to the amount of damage received in the previous 5 seconds. Duration: 15s, Recast 120s.

Shadow Wall: Lv. 38 Ability. Reduces damage taken by 30%. Additional Effect, Blood Price: Gain stacks of blood price proportionate to the amount of incoming damage received. The next time Oblation is used, the defensive value is increased by X% per stack and target player receives Y potency healing per stack. Duration: 15s, Recast 120s.

Nebula: Lv. 38 Ability. Reduces damage taken by 30%. Additional Effect, Event Horizon: Every time that you take damage, reduce the recast of Heart of Corundum by X seconds. Duration: 15s, Recast 120s.

And while you can debate over which of these effects is better and how to distribute them fairly, it's at least not blatantly obvious that one action is better than the rest like it is right now. Either you completely homogenize the effects so that they are identical and thus balanced, or you make them sufficiently different that you can't draw a direct comparison.

That was a relatively simple example (but one that still needs to be addressed in the next expansion), but the one that really needs to be scrutinized is the raidwide defensives. But we do need to drive this point home to the dev team so that they realize that it's a problem.

[Shurrikhan]

<Examples of each tank getting a shared base atop something extra of roughly equal value>

These would be great.

I don't think we need to necessarily need to structure each tank's value in the same way (shared template base + extra) instead of allowing job X to have some skills weaker than others and some skills stronger but to the same total value in practice, but it's a damn site better than PLD, DRK, GNB, and WAR getting, respectively, the base effect, the base effect, the base effect, and the base effect + extra.

That goes for balance, sure, but identity even more than that (as a 2-minute CD like Vengeance countering 4 autos or so for 50p each is still only an extra 100 ppm... which the rest of the kit could just be tuned according to, making it negligible outside of AoE). (Obviously, SiO and the like form far more significant imbalances; just noting the 30% because that was what was used for those examples.)

[Marxam]

I wish I could go back and try the Heavensward DRK that people post about.

Its definitely rose tinted glasses. 3.0 DRK was very jank but they designed content that prioritized magic dmg and you got a tank that specializes in magic dmg mitigation so ppl played it regardless of the high resource management and the awkward toolkit. I'm not saying we should go back to that but I think they should revisit the idea behind Dark Arts, which was an ogcd that buffed the next skill used, via damage and/or utility. That is something WAR very lightly touches on with Infuriate procing inner chaos.

DRK went heavy into it and it opposed WAR which only used Infuriate to get 50 gauge so you can FC. Some examples of Dark Arts being used include: Low blow (DRK exclusive at the time) was a stun that can be proc'd from parries. Parry rate can be increased by Dark Arts buffing Dark Dance. Dark Arts + Dark Passenger is a line aoe with a blind (which also increases chances of missing and/or parrying). If you need more MP, Dark Arts + Siphon Strike. Need more enmity? Dark Arts + Power Slash. Need more magic mitigation? Dark Arts + Dark Mind for 30% mag mitigation. You get the idea.

Dark Arts could have worked if they just focused on what it can affect instead of just letting everything work with DA. If they trimmed it down to two ogcds and two gcds it would have worked. You would have a bad ass animation that's iconic to the job similar to how WAR has Infuriate or PLD has hallowed.

[Shurrikhan]

Its definitely rose tinted glasses. 3.0 DRK was very jank but they designed content that prioritized magic dmg and you got a tank that specializes in magic dmg mitigation so ppl played it regardless of the high resource management and the awkward toolkit. I'm not saying we should go back to that but I think they should revisit the idea behind Dark Arts, which was an ogcd that buffed the next skill used, via damage and/or utility. That is something WAR very lightly touches on with Infuriate procing inner chaos.

At the time, most tanks had at least some mitigation only usable against physical damage. DRK wasn't actually much above WAR in that regard, with only PLD really dragging behind*. Without any incoming physical attacks, it wasted both Dark Dance and Reprisal (couldn't parry to unlock it). Warrior wasted Raw Intuition (which was an auto-parry at the time). Paladin wasted Bulwark and Shelltron.

* Though at least back then Clemency was worth up to 2160 or 2340 potency, iirc, since it was 1200 potency raw (up from 1000), benefited from the Job Actions Bonus II (+20% damage and healing) or Mend and Maim III (+30% damage and healing) trait for extra output, and could get an additional 50% total value by healing an ally instead. Now, it's worth only 615 healer potency or 923 on an ally, since healer potency is actually 130% of the stated value... due to healers alone retaining the Mend and Maim III trait (whereas everyone's output used to be +20% or +30% by level 40 back in HW). Sure, Clemency was still at-cost back then, but it trucked. (And it had some rare uses for preventing Shelltron from being spent on an auto-attack instead of the tankbuster, but that was rarely possible without canceling a combo and is beside the point.)

Parry rate can be increased by Dark Arts buffing Dark Dance. Dark Arts + Dark Passenger is a line aoe with a blind (which also increases chances of missing and/or parrying).

Not quite. Dark Arts caused Dark Dance to grant 20% Dodge chance, so it actually reduced your chances of getting a parry. Blinds also only increased the enemy's chance to miss, not to be parried, likewise reducing your chance to parry and thereby refresh Low Blow or to ready Reprisal.

Which, honestly, was a kind of interesting part of Dark Knight. You could go deep on mitigation short-term, but at longer-term cost.

I'd still rather (enemy) Accuracy and the way RNG mitigation works had been rehauled (Crits prevented RNG mitigation, dodge was completely bimodal, and each form of RNG mitigation was mutually exclusive with the others -- such that if you blocked, you couldn't also parry, even if the parry would have occurred and would have been stronger when carrying a light shield, since at least heavy shields had higher %mitigation than parry), but I didn't mind that DRK's skills could be slightly overpowered individually without being overpowered together in practice due to certain anti-synergies.


Agreed on reworking and revitalizing Dark Arts, though. But for that to see much value, we'd also have to bring back ways for the other tanks, too, to trade offense for sustain or vice versa (which I'd also like).