After 1 (arguably 2) expansions what is square trying to achieve with WAR (and PLD)?

[GoatOfWar]

Every PLD player I have talked to tells me they want to be dead last in terms of damage output but get all the support tools under the sun, which I think is fair.

WAR is the main issue here because it doesn't pay for what it has. PLD loses damage with tools like Clemency and Passage, WAR doesn't.
Some tanks having superior support tools isn't a problem, the problem is when those tanks are also topping the dps charts. Then you get into "flat upgrade" territory, which is where WAR's design currently sits.

''Drk can clear''

It's genuinely hillarious that people are okay with one job being a direct upgrade over another.
What's perhaps even funnier is the same crowd that got job actions homogenised and streamlined by endless demand, including entire job identities.. Will cry about their job identity when you suggest another tank gets something unique that Warrior does to even the playing field.

You did not care about my job's identity. Why does yours matter?
''Dark knight needs a rework'' Is just going to be the outcome after every expansion because if we do something Warrior doesn't they get mad and every tank will get it.

[4clubbedace]

''Drk can clear''

It's genuinely hillarious that people are okay with one job being a direct upgrade over another.
What's perhaps even funnier is the same crowd that got job actions homogenised and streamlined by endless demand, including entire job identities.. Will cry about their job identity when you suggest another tank gets something unique that Warrior does to even the playing field.

You did not care about my job's identity. Why does yours matter?
''Dark knight needs a rework'' Is just going to be the outcome after every expansion because if we do something Warrior doesn't they get mad and every tank will get it.

in p12 the difference betwwn the top drk and top pld is literally like, 300 damage, its really not that big of a deal

I'm just tired of the favoritism honestly. WAR is being designed in a way where it feels like the developers are telling me I have to play it, because it is the best at literally everything under the sun, and is intentionally being pushed that way, and playing what I want to play is throwing.

WAR has the strongest invuln, so strong that it warps savage fights to basically downgrade the 2nd tank to a secondary DPS.
WAR has the strongest short mit, which is even stronger when applied to another target, effectively allowing you to double the amount of healing you're outputting for no real cost to yourself.
WAR has the strongest singular Raidwide mit, previously the balance behind it was DRK and GNB have literal clone skills of each other that only mit damage, with the upside of being timed mitigation rather than a shield, then they decide they should effectively nullify that advantage by giving Shake it off a Regen, which functionally does the same thing, on all damage types. And thats not even going into its ability to boost that shield further.
All the other tanks get a clone skill that is 30% mit, WAR gets bonus reflect damage on theirs


Dark Knight and Paladin cant benefit from skill speed due to being mixed attackers? Tough. GNB struggling to keep all of its buttons inline due to its endwalker additions? Who cares.
WAR isn't getting damage buffs on its Inner Release free crit attacks from crit buffs? HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE WE GOTTA REDO HOW THAT ENTIRE SYSTEM WORKS.

PLD falls so far behind that we have to rework it for being inherently incompatible with EW's gameplay? Eughhh fine but we better give WAR some more attention and make sure SIO remains superior to veil because it has to be.

Like I'm fine with the job having advantages, but it can't EVERY advantage, and if it is EVERY advantage, it shouldn't also be topping the DPS charts.
And if you are going to make a mandatory Omni-job of everything, can it at least be more fun and engaging to play rather than Fell Cleave & Fell Cleave Accessories?

the crit change wasnt because of war, it was because of samurai, their auto crit change is what made the system of auto crit benefitting from party crit buffs change,

[GoatOfWar]

in p12 the difference betwwn the top drk and top pld is literally like, 300 damage, its really not that big of a deal



the crit change wasnt because of war, it was because of samurai, their auto crit change is what made the system of auto crit benefitting from party crit buffs change,

Auto direct hit now also benefits from the direct hit stat and buffs... Which is a Warrior exclusive thing. Direct hit doesn't even come on our gear anymore, it's a meld stat for tanks and they still went out of their way to make it benefit. Meanwhile PLD and DRK have buttons that don't speed up the GCD for all of their buttons. But it's not an isolated thing, they consistently display favouritism towards Warrior across the entire expansion.
Also, idk why you brought up the dps difference in p12. We're talking about the complete picture.
They HAVE to make sure Warrior can do everything the other tanks can do, without any downsides. But if we can't do anything better than Warrior, why do we still have any downsides at all?
There's blatant favouritism. And it makes me not want to play.

[Supersnow845]

Auto direct hit now also benefits from the direct hit stat and buffs... Which is a Warrior exclusive thing. Direct hit doesn't even come on our gear anymore, it's a meld stat for tanks and they still went out of their way to make it benefit. Meanwhile PLD and DRK have buttons that don't speed up the GCD for all of their buttons. But it's not an isolated thing, they consistently display favouritism towards Warrior across the entire expansion.
Also, idk why you brought up the dps difference in p12. We're talking about the complete picture.
They HAVE to make sure Warrior can do everything the other tanks can do, without any downsides. But if we can't do anything better than Warrior, why do we still have any downsides at all?
There's blatant favouritism. And it makes me not want to play.

Starfall dance is also affected by both crit and direct hit but you are right that it doesn’t affect midare

[GoatOfWar]

Starfall dance is also affected by both crit and direct hit but you are right that it doesn’t affect midare

Irrelevant, it still shows they put more care into one job compared to others.
If Warrior had any problems DRK had they would carefully change the entire game around the problem.
If War had 2 magic only resists then both would have become universal mits, and they would buff it through the roof just to be sure. You know this.
They buffed Warrior's shake it off when we got a Paladin rework just to ensure Warrior remained the direct upgrade.
In 6.4, the patch that was supposed to make all the tanks ''even'' with Drk in dps, they buffed War more than Paladin, when Paladin was further behind in dps than Warrior.
It's the only job in the game where a streamer is actively trying to interfere with balance.
Warrior for one reason or another throughout the expansions HAS to do EVERYTHING better than the other tanks.

Best invuln, best partywide, best main tank, easiest rotation, best utility *literally* replaced healers in the hardest difficulty content. But Can't be taxed on it's damage because DRK and GNB can clear?
Why even have different tanks if you're just going to make one of them the best solution to every problem?
Is there just going to be Warrior, and 3 incorrect tank choices?

[Amenara]

Auto direct hit now also benefits from the direct hit stat and buffs... Which is a Warrior exclusive thing. Direct hit doesn't even come on our gear anymore, it's a meld stat for tanks and they still went out of their way to make it benefit. Meanwhile PLD and DRK have buttons that don't speed up the GCD for all of their buttons. But it's not an isolated thing, they consistently display favouritism towards Warrior across the entire expansion.
Also, idk why you brought up the dps difference in p12. We're talking about the complete picture.
They HAVE to make sure Warrior can do everything the other tanks can do, without any downsides. But if we can't do anything better than Warrior, why do we still have any downsides at all?
There's blatant favouritism. And it makes me not want to play.

To be fair for the direct hit thing, it became an issue in ShB with having to remeld if you wanted to play WAR and any other tank and it took them all of ShB and half of EW to fix that problem. Not to say it isn't an issue with like BLM and the other caster DPS, but it was the extreme of a substat doing next to nothing compared to it being one of the best substats to meld for the rest of the tanks. That being said, the issues with SkS and DRK and PLD is still absolutely stupid and blows my mind we are still dealing with that. I think it's either a time issue with so few devs dedicated to job design or incompetence as we have seen some baffling design decisions across the board.

I think the WAR/PLD damage buffs were a knee jerk reaction to their last minute boss buff on P8S where you needed to bring a DRK/GNB combo to have the DPS to clear the DPS check. Their response was to buff WAR and PLD damage instead of making sure the DPS checks work with the lowest damage tank combo.

That being said, I do want them to reduce tank self-sustain and rethink what they want tanks and healers to do in DT. Not that I have faith we aren't just going to see DRK and GNB self-sustain boosted and healers have even less responsibility.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Starfall dance is also affected by both crit and direct hit but you are right that it doesn’t affect midare

Machinist's Reassemble is also affected by this change.

I don't get the problem though that WAR's auto-crit+DH skills actually received this adjustment; like the whole point of this isn't necessarily the WAR doing more damage and more about jobs like DRG, BRD, DNC and SCH not having a "deadzone" for their buffs and by proxy get less value just because a WAR (or SAM, MCH or inherently also DNC) is present. This is a really weird hill to die on for them.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

There is indeed a favoritism. But IMHO the crit/direct hit change wasn't one of them. At least not entirely. But who knows?

[Supersnow845]

I’m not even saying that starfall dance having crit direct hit is or isn’t favouritism, just refuting the point that crit direct hit is specifically a WAR thing just because midare is only crit

[fulminating]

You don't need to make stuff up to have a decent argument, all it does is undermine your side.

That used to be the Drk job identity, it just got transplanted into Warrior.

Lifesteal has been part of warrior since arr. i.e before drk was introduced.

You know what else Warrior gobbled up from Dark knight? Reprisal and low blow.

You know what dark knight gobbled up? rampart. This is a deliberate skewing of events when it's more to do with the missteps of role actions. Especially with how much they were changed when made into role actions. A better example would be requiescat in 4.1, although that'd immediately bring to mind new delirium so I can see why you avoided that. Maybe shake it off, but you also run into the issue that a cleanse that can't be used while statused is inherently flawed, especially since the reason to have a cleanse (pacification) was removed before SIO was added.

TBN used to the the strongest short tank cd, but then Warrior took that as well.

Warrior didn't have a short cd until shb, and tbn is a bit better than sheltron was in stormblood because it's a 5s shield duration rather than blocking a single hit. In shadowbringers, I would not say tbn is significantly stronger than nascent flash in dungeons but it was stronger or at least easier in raids.

Dark knight used to have the most gap closers, now Warrior has 4.

By which you mean 1 on 30s for the duration of heavensward. In stormblood, warrior had the beast gauge one added, which is different enough to a cooldown based system and allowed all tanks to deal with knockbacks. (Paladin having tempered will). Happily onslaught costing 20 beast gauge on 15s cd (then 10s in shb) means that warrior now has less gap closers than it did, so you may rejoice.

And in EW, Warrior also needed Dark knight's damage apparently.

Warrior has always been the damage tank up until the introduction of gunbreaker. For shadowbringers it shared dead last with dark knight, and then dark knight was top two for the first two tiers of EW. This is a non-issue with regard to dark knight, but more an issue with the role. Healers should have a higher damage potential than tanks, but generally be unable to reach it due their role responsibility. Gunbreaker is the only tank remaining with an involved rotation, and it is yet to be seen how dt will treat it. With the simplification obsession it may be that tanks are all reduced to healer level of rotational complexity. The devs need to decide how the support roles will play and how they interact with their function.

I wouldn't say Warrior is in a good spot when Warrior's current design just cannibalises and takes away from the others.

This is not purely a warrior problem, it's endemic across all jobs, possibly due to the workload associated with designing and upkeeping however many there are - soon to be however many +2 +1 more limited. Consider sage, you would have thought that the new healer with a broadly untapped niche would allow the devs to stretch their wings and design something unique. What we ended up with so closely mimicked scholar that they mayn't as well have bothered.

[quote]Yet, still manages to have the fewest buttons of all tanks and the easiest to optimise rotation of all jobs in the game period.[quote]
summoner, new paladin and dark knight are all down there with it. DRK needs to break tbn at some point early enough that it can carry a 4th edge into buffs and is otherwise 123 or hit all the buttons. Summoner is so on rails that it cannot be misplayed without effort. New paladin is comically flexible. Warrior would be well served by returning the gauge management elements associated with onslaught and upheaval, but realistically I can't see them increasing complexity on any tank.

If you genuinely enjoy dark knight as it is, go and enjoy it while it lasts.