7.0 Tank Wishlist

[Absurdity]

We already have War for slow gameplay.

Nobody is talking about slow gameplay, it's about impact and feedback on your attacks. Best example would be Bloodspiller, it's a 500 potency hit but feels incredibly floaty and gives little visual or sound feedback on how much damage it's actually doing.
Granted DrK doesn't actually have a lot of big hitters, just a lot of smaller ones but the same applies to a lot of it's abilities which are just a bunch of quick particle slices that do not make the job feel like you're swinging around a giant sword.

The opposite is true for Fellcleave which has great visual and sound feedback despite being pretty mediocre nowadays.
Or basically anything in Gunbreaker's kit.

I guess I'm a bit at odds with how much Warrior heals In AOE, I think personally that should be changed to only 400 healing regardless of enemy count, Just to make it so you actually have to heal a warrior, The other thing I dislike is how Warrior is the Party healer tank...? That's something that just doesn't really fit the design I much rather Warrior be the Big Hp (passive above average tank hp would be cool), self sustaining tank that intimidates the enemy and mitigates their damage sort of support deal.

If they ever actually wanted to add interesting and varied ways in how tanks mitigate damage I would want warrior to have a damage stagger mechanic instead of selfheal (since not noticing the damage you're taking fits a berserker quite well imo). Give it above average HP (like it did before ShB) and then allow it to convert damage taken into damage over time instead, with other cooldowns reducing said DoT.

Could it cause balance issues? Hard to say, eating a buster that does 400+% of your max HP is still going to kill you, it will just take a second or two.

[Rithy255]

Nobody is talking about slow gameplay, it's about impact and feedback on your attacks. Best example would be Bloodspiller, it's a 500 potency hit but feels incredibly floaty and gives little visual or sound feedback on how much damage it's actually doing.
Granted DrK doesn't actually have a lot of big hitters, just a lot of smaller ones but the same applies to a lot of it's abilities which are just a bunch of quick particle slices that do not make the job feel like you're swinging around a giant sword.

The opposite is true for Fellcleave which has great visual and sound feedback despite being pretty mediocre nowadays.
Or basically anything in Gunbreaker's kit.

I think DRK's visuals just feel outdated and weird to me, it feels slow and clunky but you also don't really feel the weight of the sword, as much as I don't like warrior I feel like the fellcleave animation generally feels awesome.

GNB, Feels like the better fast paced tank to me, I can't really describe it that well it just feels way more fluid and less spammy, DRK also is the "dark magic" tank but barely feels like it has anything to do with magic outside having a Pet and its AOE, I wouldn't even call DRK's gameplay fast, it's fast in bursts then it follows a boring 1, 2, 3 sometimes blood spiller for the majority of the gameplay while GNB Keeps consistent fast paced throughout the fight

Personally I'd want a rework fitting of "Dark Knight" I'd want animations that fit, the use of dark magic, a wild idea but maybe a fast swinging sword segment with a haste buff (giving the feeling that you're using magic to enhance yourself able to use your sword more quickly), Slower normal animations that reflect on holding a heavy sword.

Honestly all tanks feel slow to me, GNB just feels fast in comparison which is fine, The issue is more that tanks don't really have anything complicated like lacking different combo paths, unqiue different reasons to spend gauge, ect.

[Oizen]

I'd rather not see DRK reworked for the sake of making its animations feel weightier, the only reason it works for WAR is because its a GCD centric job with much fewer and slower inputs, so you're going to frequently be seeing that fell cleave animation play out for 2 seconds. Dark Knights animations aren't bad honestly, but you're never going to see much of them due to how busy the job is with double weaving, whether that be its busy mitigation or boatloads of ogcds.

But this has always been the case with DRK. Its always been busy like this with lots to weave, I'd rather not see a rework to push it even further into WAR clone for the sake of animation clarity, especially because that could only be achieved by removing what little of the jobs identity is left.

I think they'd be better served giving DRK GCD animations that look more natural being interrupted. Bloodspiller is particularly bad because all you see of its animation is your character holding the sword above their head with both hands, and nothing else. You don't even see the swing. Its standard 123 isn't that much better. Souleater will cut off as soon as your characters starts jumping, so if you use edge after that you snap right back to the ground, its pretty jarring. On the oGCD side things are a little better, Edge/flood and Shadowbringer feel like they were made with the idea in mind that they had to be fast for weavings, but Carve and spit is a weird one where you can very easily not see the full animation.

GNB had the benefit of them knowing what they wanted the job to do when the animated it so things flow better. It be nice if they could do the same for Dark Knight
Not that I think they'd ever go back and reanimated old jobs, its basically unprecendented and this game LOVES its formula.

[CKNovel]

I also forgot.
I'd like Shirk and Taunt to be slightly buffed.

Taunt should passively generate enmity towards you for a few seconds.
Shirk should redirect generated enmity towards your target for a few seconds.

I just want to be able to put on my tank stance and shirking pre-pull without having to think about putting tank stance on, taunting and putting mitigation on while doing a gunbreaker opener.

[GoatOfWar]

Paladin:

• My main desired improvement for Paladin is that it simply has too much button bloat, so consolidating some buttons would really help me fit everything comfortably within my crosshotbars. I'm already using a ton of macros and it's still bursting at the seams. Consolidating the 1-2-3 and 1-2 combo into a single button each would be enough to grant some much-needed space, provided that new moves don't eat that space up. So in that vein, please also get rid of a move for every new move that gets added!
• In a similar vein, Requiescat and Fight or Flight should be fused into a single move, since you're always going to want to cast them at the same time. This would open up some button space and reduce some needlessly clunky weaving.
• Also, yeah, y'all gotta nerf our healing.

Dark Knight:

• I feel like Dark Knight has been left behind mechanically. Paladin has this combo that builds into magical attacks and then periodically a bunch of magic swords, while also having a few abilities focused on defending party members. DRK kind of feels like Paladin if they took that stuff away and then replaced it with nothing. The Blackest Night is certainly some of the funnest mitigation in the game, but it's late to the party at level 70, and nothing else DRK gets feels like it has the impact or oomph of Paladin's spells or Warrior's Fell Cleaves. I don't mind that Dark Knight is mechanically simple, as I think it's good that some classes are simpler/easier than others, but I do wish that it felt like its kit brought more to the table, either by feeling cool to use or by providing utility that gave the class a bit more identity compared to the other tanks.

Drk is not allowed to have an identity because any time it does, war mains want to get our tools too and everyone else gets them by proxy.
Once upon a time, Drk used to be the debuffer tank but then every tank apparently needed reprisal and it's identity got stripped.
Then, they made Drk the leech tank, but Warrior apparently needed to steal that identity.
Then, they made Drk the best at soaking tank busters with TBN and a magic mit, but then they powercreeped it by buffing every other short tank cd because streamers got mad.
Then, they made Drk the dps tank, but once again, the streamers got mad once again.

This is becoming a pattern. ''Hoh no we need to rework Drk to give it an identity'' And when it does, it needs to be streamlined into irrelevancy.

[Rithy255]

Drk is not allowed to have an identity because any time it does, war mains want to get our tools too and everyone else gets them by proxy.
Once upon a time, Drk used to be the debuffer tank but then every tank apparently needed reprisal and it's identity got stripped.
Then, they made Drk the leech tank, but Warrior apparently needed to steal that identity.
Then, they made Drk the best at soaking tank busters with TBN and a magic mit, but then they powercreeped it by buffing every other short tank cd because streamers got mad.
Then, they made Drk the dps tank, but once again, the streamers got mad once again.

This is becoming a pattern. ''Hoh no we need to rework Drk to give it an identity'' And when it does, it needs to be streamlined into irrelevancy.

The Idea should be to also rework other tanks a bit no?

Dark Knights Issues also aren't just lack of identity it's current rotation is "faster warrior without a combo path", PLD identity is spam atonement and magic, Warrior is the slow tank, Even GNB lacks any complexity outside weaving.

I don't think it's just dark Knight which is inherently flawed, it's actually tanks as a whole the current design has failed, somehow they remove tank stances but make the dps rotations Still boring and more easier, when removing such things should leave room to at least make their DPS rotations more fun and intresting from one another, The defensive abilities offer nothing Unique or interesting, the Idea is we should get away from that design as a whole, I think Dark Knight is just the most prime example of peoples frustrations with tanking because It's such a cool concept that's had pretty much everything took away from it.

I'm Not happy with PLD in it's current form, Not with DRK, GNB is "acceptable" but even then I'd like it to feel different from other tanks, Warrior obviously is broken in a lot of content (even if that's "casual content") it's also somehow one of the best defensively, with the shortest invul & the best GROUP and self healing.

[Oizen]

Well EW to DT is the first time in this game's history where they cant pad out tank content by stripping something from DRK and putting it on all the tanks. So they're probably going to have to pick WAR or PLD for that this time, unless they really want to hand out Oblation or Enhanced Unmend.

Imagine if Equilibrium gets removed from WAR and gets turned into a Role Action as a Tank version of Second Wind. That would cause some seething.

But in all honesty I think every tank is in a bad spot identity wise.
Despite WAR's tendancy to cannibalize other tank's traits and abilities it really hasn't mechanically changed at all since Stormblood, and arguably only gets easier every patch. Making odd design decisions like "every tank HAS to have their own version of another tank's skill" isn't really helping things. I don't think the lv 82 short tank mits were a healthy idea, and I think its further homogenized tank mitigation except Dark Knight's, who has the niche benefits of shorter CDs on TBN, Oblation and Dark Mind. So I'm guessing thats changing in DT.

[rawker]

Well EW to DT is the first time in this game's history where they cant pad out tank content by stripping something from DRK and putting it on all the tanks. So they're probably going to have to pick WAR or PLD for that this time, unless they really want to hand out Oblation or Enhanced Unmend.

Imagine if Equilibrium gets removed from WAR and gets turned into a Role Action as a Tank version of Second Wind. That would cause some seething.

But in all honesty I think every tank is in a bad spot identity wise.
Despite WAR's tendancy to cannibalize other tank's traits and abilities it really hasn't mechanically changed at all since Stormblood, and arguably only gets easier every patch. Making odd design decisions like "every tank HAS to have their own version of another tank's skill" isn't really helping things. I don't think the lv 82 short tank mits were a healthy idea, and I think its further homogenized tank mitigation except Dark Knight's, who has the niche benefits of shorter CDs on TBN, Oblation and Dark Mind. So I'm guessing thats changing in DT.

PLD lost Rampart and it became a Role action.. Plus Convalescence and baked it into WAR. So I dunno.

[Rithy255]

PLD lost Rampart and it became a Role action.. Plus Convalescence and baked it into WAR. So I dunno.

Good point really, considering PLD was the "og" mitigation tank, Obviously other tanks should had mitigation, but PLD was originally designed as the strongest mitigation tank for a while... at least non magic which granted isn't a good identity.

I feel like the core of the issue isn't just "warrior" but it's the fact every tank has been made similar, even if that's a fault of warrior or not, it needs changing for the better, or at least give tanks unique rotations that aren't all very simple 1, 2, 3 "spam X button"

I don't really want to blame any tank here, I certainly have issues with Warriors design, but I think all tanks could benefit from playing different and mitigating in different ways.

[Brixy]

Since all of the classes are so homogenized at this point I wouldn't mind seeing something like the old multi-classing system specifically for tank mitigation options. If you have both Warrior and Dark Knight leveled for example, then you could choose to use either Bloodwhetting or The Blackest Knight, with a linked cooldown so you have to choose one or the other. Bloodwhetting being much better suited for wall to wall pulling, while TBN is much better suited for tank busters. The main jobs would keep the extra utility like WAR being able to choose between Bloodwhetting and Nascent Flash, DRK getting the free ability out of a broken shield, etc... so there is a very slight reward for matching the job that mitigation comes from.

This will never happen, but it would fix some issues like DRK feeling pretty bad in dungeons compared to WAR lol. It would also reward those leveling multiple jobs in the form of comfort tools instead of a direct advantage.