7.0 Tank Wishlist

[rawker]

For as long as Shield Oath and Sword Oath are oGCD, I am fine with it.

Also, they can merge Goring Blade and Confiteor, ranged and melee burst, into 1 button. Fight or Flight and Requiescat will become shared oGCDs that will determine whether the PLD will be in melee (Goring Blade) or ranged (Confiteor) rotation making PLD having two 1-2-3 combos: Fast Blade combo for melee and the Blade spell combo for ranged. This will free up some buttons for future expansions.

[Sylvain]

DRK :
At low level (about 35-40) we would get "The black Night" which has a shared CD with "TBN", but only absorb 10-15% of maximum hp. It also costs np mp but cannot grant a free Flood/Edge of darkness.
This would help DRK in low level content where they feel very squishy. It would also help DRK in higher level content when you don't take enough dmg to warrant a use of TBN because it wouldn't pop.

Carve and Spit now heals and has a 30s CD (same goes for Abyssal Drain)

Shadowbringer rework, it is currently very boring , DRK has too many "just press" ogcd which are not very interesting to play with as they have no special interaction with our kit.

BloodWeapon + Delirium merge, again, too many button press for simple burst window.
or blood weapon dropping to 30s.

Oblation getting a small buff. it feels very weak, it'd be nice if it'd also apply a "Black Night" (not TBN to avoid being used just for DPS).

War
A Wirlwind!!! Spin 2 win!

PLD
Swift clemency : After doinf Blade of Valor, we get a 45s buff which makes our next clemency ogcd



Overall i'd like tank to have more agency on their survivability. So more self healing shield and stuff. At the same time, I'd want boss AA to be much more deadly and do frequent "small TB". Especially in dungeons.

[Supersnow845]

Do tanks genuinely enjoy just being immortal and being able to ignore their party, genuinely curious

The above the comment for example you are basically giving DRK its own version of bloodwhetting on top of TBN and giving PLD its own equilibrium

If the idea is “buff sustainability then buff damage why not just not buff sustainability to fix the problem you just created

[Sylvain]

Do tanks genuinely enjoy just being immortal and being able to ignore their party, genuinely curious

The above the comment for example you are basically giving DRK its own version of bloodwhetting on top of TBN and giving PLD its own equilibrium

If the idea is “buff sustainability then buff damage why not just not buff sustainability to fix the problem you just created

I don't want tank to ignore their party, I want that there can be a significant difference between a tank that can properly selfheal, and one that can't.
if the boss does too little damage, you can't see the difference because Kardia/Fairy is enough to heal a tank that don't even know what mitigation is beside for TB.

I want, more TB, frequent small TB, and overall hard hitting AA. At the same time, I do not want the burden of keeping the tank alive only to lie on the healers' shoulder (which was the case mostly in ARR, HW and SB as tank had little way to self heal. TBN was actually my favorite tank skill in SB.) The idea is that a bad tank would require constant healer's attention, so you know he's bad. And a good tank would require very little or "much less".
At the same time, I do not enjoy the current state where, beside in some very specific content, the boss hit so little that tank can totally self heal and require no heal.

Basically, I want mitigation to become a core part of the tank identity. I want mitigation to be much more than just "I popped my 3 CD on that TB then shirked, see you in 3min for the next TB".
You can't have that without giving them the tools to do so. (and obviously the content should follow, so buff the AA from dungeons bosses by 100-200% ffs...)

[Supersnow845]

I don't want tank to ignore their party, I want that there can be a significant difference between a tank that can properly selfheal, and one that can't.
if the boss does too little damage, you can't see the difference because Kardia/Fairy is enough to heal a tank that don't even know what mitigation is beside for TB.

I want, more TB, frequent small TB, and overall hard hitting AA. At the same time, I do not want the burden of keeping the tank alive only to lie on the healers' shoulder (which was the case mostly in ARR, HW and SB as tank had little way to self heal. TBN was actually my favorite tank skill in SB.) The idea is that a bad tank would require constant healer's attention, so you know he's bad. And a good tank would require very little or "much less".
At the same time, I do not enjoy the current state where, beside in some very specific content, the boss hit so little that tank can totally self heal and require no heal.

Basically, I want mitigation to become a core part of the tank identity. I want mitigation to be much more than just "I popped my 3 CD on that TB then shirked, see you in 3min for the next TB".
You can't have that without giving them the tools to do so. (and obviously the content should follow, so buff the AA from dungeons bosses by 100-200% ffs...)

I’m still confused as to why you think buffing the healing is a necessary step to then up damage, the damage the bosses do was fine…..until they buffed the tanks heals to hells come high water, that’s why TBN was good in SB, you could skip needing to rebalance the entire game around the tanks being proto single target healers but just stop buffing tank heals

If you desire mitigation to be more front and centre in the tanks kits you could do something like how modern SCH plays where you have many weaker mitigations with differing short CD’s you stack on top of each other, tanks already play like that but they could give more weaker mitigations, again this balance is thrown out by the stupid power of the level 82 mitigations

The answer is really not to buff the healing further regardless

[AmiableApkallu]

Do tanks genuinely enjoy just being immortal and being able to ignore their party, genuinely curious

For a while, I had great fun taking PLD into Bozja/Zadnor with a ridiculous pile of Lost Cure IV and Lost Arise. Immortal and capable of dragging a party kicking and screaming through anything.

But like many things in life, the novelty wore off with time. Variety is the spice of life and all that.

[rawker]

what if the entire tank role have a shared gauge system? Have it gain gauge when the tank takes damage and the abilities that can spend the gauge are all defensive because let's be honest, the moment we introduce an offensive cooldown tied to it, even if it does 100 potency, people will fight for MT spot to squeeze out even more dps. The speed with which is filled up depends on the amount of damage taken. it will fill faster if the tank is doing wall to wall pulls or taking tank busters. To avoid abuse, gauge decays over time when out of combat. The abilities can be used can either be a self-heal, mitigation or crowd control.

[GoatOfWar]

Do tanks genuinely enjoy just being immortal and being able to ignore their party, genuinely curious

The above the comment for example you are basically giving DRK its own version of bloodwhetting on top of TBN and giving PLD its own equilibrium

If the idea is “buff sustainability then buff damage why not just not buff sustainability to fix the problem you just created

No, the reason i picked Dark knight over the others was because it had actual defensive shortcomings, but you were also rewarded with more damage. It was actually different. Now it's just arbitrarily worse for the sake of being worse.
The streamer and his fans have spoken though, they don't want the ridiculous sustain and utility they bring to be considered in tank balance. Conveniently, just forget that jobs on the other roles have their damage taxed for their utility.
Honestly, i don't see why anyone would pick up tank in FF rn. There is Warrior, Worse warrior with a shield and a long cooldown on it's invuln, Worse Warrior with a greatsword that can't heal and Worse Warrior that can sometimes do sliiiiightly more damage with a gun that's prone to drift.
And the only way they're ever going to adress the state the tanks are in is with more powercreep because there's no way they'll make the streamer and his fans mad again.

I don't think i'll be playing tank anymore going forward. I just don't think tank balance can ever be argued in good faith when hyerbolic rants of a biased streamer and their fans are taken seriously.

[Lyth]

The main issues facing tanks are as follows:

• Self-positioning/self-orientating bosses that return to center and lock themselves in place before every mechanic
• Bosses that don't have damage patterns that sufficiently challenge or place your available defensive resources under stress (i.e. invuln-swap)
• Bosses that generally don't require a second tank outside of being an understudy for when the first one dies
• Erosion of intrinsic tank value (if your tank dies then it's a wipe/if your tank dies then the adds eat your healers)
• Widening gap between raid contributions of true DPS and supports
• Unsatisfying gear progression (Tenacity vs. DH)
• General perception of support gameplay as being lower skill compared to true DPS counterparts
• Large balance discrepancies persisting across multiple expansions that consistently favor certain jobs over others
• Large balance discrepancies in critical role features (invuln recasts - Holmgang, raidwide mitigation - SiO, self-sustain)
• Slow design implementation of solutions/inertia
• Lack of innovation outside of simplified hand-me-downs from true DPS
• Several expansions behind other roles in terms of movement tools

While I don't think that you can lay the blame for this on any specific person, a lot of these issues are self-perpetuated by the community. That's where a lot of the inertia to change comes from. We get too focused on what is currently comfortable or advantageous, and that comes at the cost of improving design or even having fun.

It's worth asking yourself why you would want to currently play a tank over melee. I think the only real drawback to this historically was the fact that tanks had a lot of the really fun job aesthetics (swords). I think if they ever introduce a Mystic Knight/Ivalician-styled Unyielding Blade job into melee, there'd never be a reason to play tank again.

I would strongly recommend swapping out to melee if any of this resonates with you. If the supply of tanks drops sufficiently, then you'll see big changes and the inertia will be overcome. If not, you can enjoy everything that you currently love about tanking while having more appreciation for your skills and more value for effort. And the queue times are still fairly minimal, which makes me suspect that it's going to be the latter rather than the former in the long run.

[Loggos]

This is a small thing but I wish that pointing the boss in certain directions, e.g., away from the party, would still matter except for the rare glaukopis-style beam.

In ARR and iirc HW bosses would do considerably more attacks that cover an area in front of them without being telegraphed (or at least without being telegraphed for a really long, and obvious time like said glaukopis-esque beams). Shiva's cone aoe and some ARR/HW dungeon bosses like the minotaur in the fractal continuum or the magitec machines in Midgardsormr's dungeon come to mind. They'd also happen more frequently within a fight as opposed to now (at least in dungeons).
I do remember that we had some beams that had to be tanked away from the group in the Eden raids (Leviathan and the break-your-brain paper bird boss) but those bosses can't be positioned and I'd say those attacks are still relatively infrequent.

In ARR I made it a habit to turn the boss around in roulettes every time in case I had forgotten some of the bosses' rather frequent frontal aoe attacks. In EW there is often little need to turn them around, and if they are they can often easily be resolved in the moment or by just keeping the boss in the middle.

I'd not just like them to bring the importance of boss positioning back, I'd like them to increase the number of position-dependant aoes and perhaps pair them with other mechanics like ground aoes that appear in places in a way that forces the tank to move the boss without the directional aoe hitting other party members etc.
Or you could bring back some more gimmicky (dungeon) fights where you have to purposefully have certain boss attacks hit certain players (but not others) for certain buff/debuff removal mechanics or to hit objects to trigger enviromental effects.
Just give me anything that makes me feel I am actually tanking, i.e., "directing" the boss' attention.