Phantom Jobs are a step in the right direction but need iteration.

[Shurrikhan]

Well if they just balanced phantom jobs so that they didn’t do one or the other then it would be more fair even if in this situation the extra sustain on high DPS jobs would be stupidly excessive for the tanks but yes it’s also arguable that it could be fixed by making tanks not overpowered

Like using a super basic example (I’m not saying I support this change just using it to prove a point), if starfall worked more like moon flute where it caused massive damage and in exchange it cut your damage for the next 10 seconds by 20% then it doesn’t disadvantage any role besides tank using starfall. However you can also fix starfall in the other direction by simply making it as dangerous for tanks to use as the other 2 roles

Wouldn't this do the opposite? You have more to lose from the 20% damage loss as a DPS and, as DPS, less to gain from a single individual hit relative to your existing available potencies.

..Heck, Starfall already costs the party more healing to recover from if used by a tank than a non-tank, as it consumes 90% of the users max HP, and is subject to the tank's 20% Attack Power reduction affecting even "true"/unalterable potencies (i.e., those unaffected by buffs). The HP loss can't even be mitigated by Magic Defense or %DR -- only potency barriers (better in this case on non-tanks against %maxHP damage) or %HP barriers (ToB/TBN, equal on tanks and non-tanks against %maxHP damage).

Edit: Or so I had thought. I guess it's not quite so intuitive.

I guess my suggestion then, would just be to make it work as above:

• Do NOT scale Phantom Job potency with any buffs (passives like Maim and Mend, actives like Shifu, No Mercy, or raidbuffs, etc.).
• DO inherit or emulate the Attack Power loss tanks normally face (and Weakness / Brink of Death).
  
  And while we're at it...
  
  
• Don't let pJob actions break combos (as not everyone has them, imbalancing job synergy).
• Scale spammable pJob actions with innate haste (-15% GCD use = -17.6% damage, for the same overall DPS). This retains their flow but only faintly buffs potential utility rather than acting as, say, an indirect 17.6% DPS increase from them).
• And, on that note, do NOT be affected by (and do NOT consume) any single-use buffs like Life Surge. (Others will disagree with me on this, but an extra 500 potency per Phantom skill per 40s would in any tight content mean that only those jobs should be playing the pJobs with infrequent nukes.)

Like, it's already technically aimed against tanks, so long as there wouldn't be constant/unpredictable damage that 10% of tank HP could survive but 10% of a non-tanks' HP could not, no?

If we wanted it to be even more anti-tank, we could have it inflict Sundered (removing all Defense/Magic Defense or even all passive mitigation), further disproportionately affecting tanks, but... if/when you have to specifically stack things against tanks just to make it not OP for them... that's more an indicator that the baseline is too OP, I would think.

Not saying others aren't designed in a way that, in practice, overly favor tanks, but that one is already designed to be less desirable to tanks, while adding a %damage penalty would most hurt DPS, not tanks. If it's still problematically unbalanced in tanks' favor, the cause is probably more general.