New Tank Skills

[Oizen]

That’s just reductive to the point of parody. Inner release straight up gives free fell cleaves and primal rend with auto crits. Bloodfest is just a DPS buff.

Is it though? Bloodfest gives free 3 cartridges and Inner Release Gives free fell cleaves directly. As far as I can tell you ususally just end up spending the Bloodfest Cartridges on your Overcap Fell Cleaves, outside of the opener anyway.
I thought No Mercy was the damage buff, and Bloodfest is the free resource button.
Though I'd say that the Gnashing Fang combo is closer to Fell Cleave in nature given how you much GNB spams it.

Gnashing fang is not fell cleave with different animations. FC is just an attack that consumes gauge (or is free during IR) with no other interactions. Gnashing fang enables continuation which is an extra weave for 3 GCD’s, on top of that GNB is still consuming gauge during burst where WAR doesn’t.

Isn't it though? Its quite literally on a pvp-style combo button now, theres a reason people only call it gnashing fang and not Gnashing Fang, Savage Claw, Wicket Talon, at the end of the day its functionally very similar to Fell Cleave Spam with context sensitive Edge of Shadows you can weave in between.
WAR also does consume gauge with its Infuriate attacks, and has to watch its gauge to not overcap with said infuriate attacks.

I'm just saying it feels very illusion of choice to me, replace the 3 gnashing fangs with 3 identical attacks, and the continuations with edge of shadow and you're functionally doing the same thing with the only difference being GNB does it way more strictly.

If you’re gonna make leaps like that you may as well say black mage and red mage feel the same because they’re both DPS casters.

I'd say its more reductionist because I view tanks as so incredibly similar at a baseline that I don't really see a reason to see them as anything different. I do genuinely believe the game is moving in a direction of one tank class with 4 flavors.
I don't think you can really do this with any of the casters right now.

So no I do truly view all of the tanks as different flavors of Fell Cleave Spam, at different levels of hiding it.