What would a new tank even contribute at this point

[Kranel_San]

I think FFXIV dev team should learn more from WoW on how to design tanks and make them feel and play uniquely than each other. So far WoW has:

- A tank that relies on and increases both the "Armor" and "Block" values. Basically the tankist of tanks
- A tank with healing and supportive spells that is our FFXIV Paladin equivalent. Perfect for all situations
- A tank that turns the damage received into DoTs that are delayed or negated. Great for massive pulls.
- A self-healing tank that is our FFXIV Warrior equivalent

If we simply analyze WoW's tanks' design, then we can find that they share a common but obvious theme. "Survival" but in a different way for different situations.

We could follow a similar mindset when designing and reworking how tanks function here in XIV. For example;

Paladin: A tank with support spells such as group mitigation, group shield, with some healing spells that could turn him into a demi-healer when the situation demands it. Perfect when the healers aren't very reliable or not there but isn't good enough to replace them. Damage is slightly below moderate and armor is slightly above moderate (We can't forget it's the only tank with a protective shield, so armor value being moderate or less is ridiculous)
Warrior: The self-healing tank we all know and love, but with less than moderate damage and armor.
Dark knight: The tank dps. High dps but moderate armor (Dark knights wear full metal clad armors, so they should have more armor value than warriors RPG-wise). Great pick for people who want to feel the weight of the greatsword but on the account of being the least tank to be able to survive due to the focus on dps. Basically hardcore tank
Gunbreaker: Parry tank. Second highest tank dps but the least with armor value. However, gunbreaker rely on high parry rate to avoid getting damaged in the first place.


I understand the proposal I made is not great, but I tried to re-purpose all tanks in FFXIV without making them feel totally different, because if I had the option to erase them and re-build them from scratch, then I'd have went with different tank jobs and mechanics that are similar in design to that of WoW and some old-school MMOs.

[Boblawblah]

I think FFXIV dev team should learn more from WoW

[Zairava]

WoW does the diversity of tanking styles with both offensive and defensive kits quite well, actually. The biggest block is light vs. medium vs. heavy armor, which won't work with how ffxiv is designed.

[ForteNightshade]

snip

Unfortunately, WoW's design only works because the devs pretty much don't care if a handful of classes become unviable for a tier. Not to mention, it's common for both tanks and healers to be rotated out entirely once their relevance is no longer necessary. Both are things FF intentionally aims to avoid. This makes it significantly harder for any one job to stand out individually because it becomes a nightmare to balance. Case in point, if Paladin were group oriented but the upcoming raid tier or Ultimate ficused predominantly on single target damage, it's essentially a dead job because all it brings at that point is "below moderate" damage. Likewise, the way tank busters work in FF, a pure sustain tank simply can't work. Unmitigated busters deal upwards of 200k or more. Even with echo, Warrior can't reach that amount of raw healing. In fact, they actually intended for this when ARR first launched. Warrior had very little mitigation. It was so bad, people were bringing two Paladins. Hence why they got a complete rework to their mit suite to the basis of what we see today.

I don't want to say they can't do anything to better diversify jobs but it will virtually guarantee some degree of imbalance. Which means the community needs to accept their favourite job might be turned away for a tier or two if we ever go down that road. Sure, you could argue people shouldn't do that and "all jobs would still be able to clear. So it doesn't matter!" Said community has proven time and again that isn't how it will play out.