Dark Knight needs serious help

[Grizzlpaw]

Yes. It'd definitely be easier to just nerf tanks.

But if we're talking about how we can make FF14 the best game it can be. I think going and tweaking some enemy DPS numbers up is a (relatively) small adjustment to make in exchange for the amount of good it would do. This could be done gradually the same way they've slowly homogenized jobs to fit into the 2 minute meta.

Consider that most tanks don't even get their crazy sustain until endgame, so the amount of content to be tweaked to achieve a similar result that we'd see by nerfing tanks is smaller than one would initially think.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Personally I'd prefer if tank-directed damage (busters, auto attacks) were more frequent and also higher to warrant the mitigation we have rather than nerfing it.

Could always do stuff like they did on Emerald Weapon - make raidwide or group attacks automatically include a buster or high frequency of auto attacks.

If you nerf a tank's toolkit to help themselves all you do is lessen their impact on their own survival when realistically all it takes to add a Feint/Addle for the tank to remedy it again. The gameplay will stay equally binary with the tankbusters and raidwides being sparse.

Now for dungeons honestly WAR is the main outlier here with having no diminishing returns on the heal and generally having monstrous heal tools.

[Absurdity]

I think frequency is the bigger issue than damage when it comes to busters, tank busters at minimum ilvl in savage actually hit quite hard. The problem is that because they hit so hard you pretty much need to stack 2 defensives for them so they're exactly paced to allow for that, which leads to long stretches of absolutely nothing happening.

We could definitely do with more "tiny" tank busters that prevent tanks from just throwing their short cd mitigation around like it's free candy.

[Rithy255]

I think in terms of defensive values that tanks offer, should be changed up not exactly nerfed or buffed across the board, what would be interesting is having more unique ways to mitigate without making a tank Useless. I do personally think the DPS side of tanks is the biggest Issues but both are really boring and uninspired at this point.

I'll list what I view as my "Ideal" of every tank (In terms of mitigation differences).
Paladin - Strong defensive Value, Amazing group/party support, Good targetable healing/sustain. but having Slightly lower damage on average (very small difference) but if some fights actually had more time away from the boss then it's range advantage could actually be useful, keep it having Longest Invul aswell.
Warrior - Higher max HP (15-20%), Fastest Invul, Great self sustain but in exchange Maybe has to choose between sustain or mitigation (similar to SHB), Less mitigation/team support on average, make it more selfish and less about healing the team (which much suits something like a paladin anyway).
Dark Knight - Pretty good defensive value & team support, specialises in Barrier protection, perhaps DRK could be more high skill celling and more risky then other tanks, high AP
Gunbreaker - Allrounder at most things not the best or the worst, harder to play (similar to DRK)

I just think having neat differences between how the tanks mitigate or what a tank could bring to the table in general could go a long way... Even changing up the 20% and 30% mitigations would be interesting, Instead of having a generic 20% maybe some tanks would have something that does something different? perhaps it's weaker but it's 30% would be stronger ect. That or we could literally remove Rampart as it doesn't really add anymore depth to tanks anyway.

IDK in general I just want tanks to both have different mitigations without one being OP... to me it seems like something that can be done, but it's just way easier to make everything the same currently... at the very least I'd want rampart deleted as it's just so boring and un-needed, they could even make your 3rd CD (Bulwark, DM, Camo, Thrill) stronger if they removed Rampart, 30% Mitigation could become on a faster CD As well. Tanks have too much mitigation that is similar & takes up space you could use for more intresting DPS buttons.

I'd also want tanks to have more reason to actively protect players with skills such as TBN, Cover, Intervention, HOC, Ect. Other then just being used on the MT.

[Zeastria]

Yes. It'd definitely be easier to just nerf tanks.

But if we're talking about how we can make FF14 the best game it can be. I think going and tweaking some enemy DPS numbers up is a (relatively) small adjustment to make in exchange for the amount of good it would do. This could be done gradually the same way they've slowly homogenized jobs to fit into the 2 minute meta.

Consider that most tanks don't even get their crazy sustain until endgame, so the amount of content to be tweaked to achieve a similar result that we'd see by nerfing tanks is smaller than one would initially think.

I would argue that it would be easier to inc the dmg output and frequency of said dmg, healers have strong heals, tanks have strong def..

If we scale dmg up => all 3 would balance eachother out.

Also tanks/healers get their def/heal cds way to late, so it would help to get those abilities earlier..so it would be possible on lower lvl content too!
(have to inc dps abilties too)

[Burmecia]

Because i'm sitting here comparing Warrior to Dark knight and i can't find anything that puts my job ahead of yours, but i can find a plethora of things Warrior does better than Dark knight.

Just solidarity note from fellow non-WAR tank. This is good point.
As PLD I was worried the rework they did to us in EW. Nothing surprising that we are now the same as WAR (but kinda lamer), just like DRK before us.
It's pretty disappointing for us both, I gotta admit.

[Colt47]

Somehow, I don't think the community understands what it really wants here because the healers want more complex damage rotations when new people have enough trouble already wrapping their heads around how to operate a scholar and astrologian, while at the same time people want tanks to be more dependent on their mitigations / weaker when we have a good example of this with DRK, and it is a complete crapshoot running that job in the dungeon content when the healer is just getting their paces. I literally experienced this first hand having to use Hyper potions on a DRK just to survive The Final Days of Amaurot with a struggling scholar.

The reason the two sides are going this route is probably because of...

A) people are taking this from the perspective of end-game and/or the most commonly used healers like WHM being paired with all the tanks in current content.
B) At this point it's been years since most people have taken Shadowbringers MSQ content seriously and few remember the problems of learning jobs after coming back several months later.
C) Most folks have become somewhat complacent in their positions forgetting that gear power creep is a thing in this game, especially when we are at patch 6.55 where the entire game breaks like a pretzel stick.

[Supersnow845]

The problem is designing everything single job for the lowest common denominator and giving none of them any sort of skill expression, this has been their entire philosophy that’s messing up the support roles

Yes there is someone out there who can’t figure out why spamming physick on SCH is “enough” when their tank is a WAR but not enough when their tank is a DRK, does that really mean we should both make the healers more boring to accomodate them and make the tanks even more immortal so that person can’t fail even on a “harder” healer like SCH

[Mayhemmer]

Somehow, I don't think the community understands what it really wants here because the healers want more complex damage rotations when new people have enough trouble already wrapping their heads around how to operate a scholar and astrologian, while at the same time people want tanks to be more dependent on their mitigations / weaker when we have a good example of this with DRK, and it is a complete crapshoot running that job in the dungeon content when the healer is just getting their paces. I literally experienced this first hand having to use Hyper potions on a DRK just to survive The Final Days of Amaurot with a struggling scholar.

I can say for certain the thing I, personally, want most out of DRK, PLD, and WAR is more interesting and creative design direction. Not (just) adjustments to mitigation; I want the devs to give them actual mechanics that go deeper than just get gauge > spend gauge, with almost no interaction with the rest of their kit. It baffles me why they just refuse to experiment with new job mechanics in general, let alone doubling-down on job identity and fantasy, the latter of which we've slowly been drifting away from, imo. I fear Dawntrail will just be Endwalker part 2 in terms of bland, stale, unevolved job design.

No, Yoshida, I DON'T want another round of press-and-forget, disconnected cooldowns sprinkled throughout 91-100 that don't interact with one another or your job gauge. I want deeper and more creative job gameplay. I want tanks to not be reskins of each other anymore. I don't care for ultimate optimization, I care about jobs being fun.

[mallleable]

Could having skills that cost MP, and HP be a potential solution to allow DRK to safely spend their HP on skills in PVE? It could even steal from RDM, and include a mechanics where you want to makes sure both bars are somewhat balanced.