Mystic Knight

[Ehayte]

Mystic Knight - 30GLD/15ACN - uses LNC abilities as well

Upon equipping your Job Soul, Rampart and Sentinel are no longer available to you.
30 - Mystic (No Animation)
- Increases your Mana Pool by 125%
- Causes all damage to check against your mana pool first, if your mana pool is 100% full, 100% of damage is deducted from your mana. If it is 25% full, 25% of damage is deducted from your mana, 75% from your hit points, etc.
- Increases natural mana regeneration by 100%
- Decreases damage output by 20%
- Increases enmity generation

35 - Mystic Blade (Spirits Within Animation)
- Weaponskill on GCD (100 TP cost)
- 100 Potency attack
- 5x Enmity Modifier
- Combo'ed with Riot Blade: 240 potency attack that returns 100% of damage dealt as mana

40 - Mystic Replenishment (Invigorate Animation)
- Ability, off CGD (2min refresh)
- Adds 25% of your max mana pool to your mana pool
- Doubles the potency of any "Shield effects" currently on you (Stoneskin, Succor, Adloquim)

45 - Mystic Shield (Bulwark Animation)
- Ability, Off GCD, CD = 90s
- 100% of damage is taken from your mana pool for 5s no matter what, Effect will also fade upon having 0 mana.
- At the end of the 5s, your mana pool is replenished to 50%

50 - Mystic Ground (Hallowed Ground Animation)
- For 10s, Mana Pool is increased by 5,000%
- All attacks from the Mystic Knight return 500% of damage as mana for 10s
- Current mana is increased by 50,000

Keep in mind this tank also gets Eye for an Eye and Virus from ACN.

[MartaDemireux]

I wouldn't say I'm exclusively against a class having 2 jobs of the same role but I think it hinders them overall.

It looks as though this would play identical to PLD. The main combo would still end up doing FB>SB>RoH except when low on MP due to higher damage and lower TP costs. I'm also confused as to why you're reusing animations? That'd be very dull in gameplay in my opinion.

Mystic Ground is exactly like Hallowed Ground. It would give you roughly 70,000 MP and no hits will exceed that amount in 10s.

Mystic seems like it would greatly hinder the use of Flash. In using Flash once you automatically make yourself take 20% more HP damage. Otherwise it looks exactly like Shield Oath.

A lot of shield effects wear off in one to two hits so Mystic Replenishment would be very hard to time accurately. If timed well it'd also be unbelievably broken on a critical Adloquium. Also the 25% MP increase is kind of weak. It would let you drain one to two more hits from your MP pool, not counting special abilities.

Mystic Shield looks like just a mini Mystic Ground but will see more uptime and thus be more effective than their level 50 ability. Seems kind of wonky. Also, what happens if you're already above 50% MP?

Eye for an Eye cannot be used on yourself, only on other party members. Since you're the tank, it has no use for yourself and would function as a very weak Cover but should see no use due to the tank maintaining enmity.

Overall I don't think this concept would work very well though it is interesting. If you're draining hits from your MP all the time you'll have to spam FB>RB>MB like crazy. This would eat away at TP very fast and do less damage than PLD already does meaning less enmity built up. If you're paired with a BRD the concept becomes unbelievably overpowered. But the main issue as I said before is it essentially would play the same as PLD.

[Ehayte]

Well, no one said it was perfect, just a jumping-off point : D Overall, my potencies/%s are probably not balanced/perfect, but I mainly just wanted to float the ideas.
I intended to make Flash impractical, but I did not include an alternative to AE enmity, causing Mystic Knight to become a great single target tank with large weaknesses to AE. Mystic would increase Enmity generation OVER a Mystic Knight OUT OF Mystic. And yes, its extremely similar to Shield Oath, so is Defiance (well, its supposed to be).

Remember, you lose Rampart and Sentinel when you equip your soul, so this only plays like a PLD in terms of single target Enmity generation and stuns.

Mystic Replenishment - Reduce shield bonus to 50% or 25%, again - sorry on the numbers, I don't have a ton of cross-class or theory-craft knowledge so most of those are crazy stabs at what I think might work. Maybe the % increase to MP needs to be higher...


Mystic Ground is intended to work like Hallowed Ground, as I think every tank class should have something similar - however, think about taking a 6k Hood Swing (you don't have a Shield Oath reduction). Even at 70k mana the next hit is going to allow 10% through to your HP unless you replenish your insanely large MP pool now. It's kind of like a Hallowed Ground with diminishing returns as you take gobs of dmg. For instance, if you take 2.3k>1k>4.5k>1k from titan around the time of an MB, by the end of your 10s CD, you are now only mitigating 88% of damage instead of 100%

Mystic Shield - You're right, maybe this should be the level 50 ability, with a 60s CD, Mystic Ground is thrown out, and you add in a MP version of Bloodbath at level 45 with a much higher up-time than Bloodbath.

I didn't know that about Eye for an Eye - oops!

Overall, I totally disagree with your assessment that it would play identical to PLD though, as this is all about maintaining your Mana pool, while PLD is all about using your CDs to mitigate damage, on PLD you just press a button and close your eyes, Mystic Knight would need to manage CDs and weaponskills to try to keep their mana as high as possible at all times. If I had to make tweaks based on your comments I would say:

- Mystic: Enmity generation is increased by something like 40-50%, something that makes Mystic Knights VERY powerful on single target, but makes it so that rotating through enemies with your weaponskill is the ONLY viable way to hold AE hate.
- Mystic Blade: Decrease the TP cost, that was dumb on my part, it makes no sense
- Mystic Replenishment: Increase mana by 50%, Refreshes the duration and original values of all shields and increases them by 25%
- Mystic Shield: Change to level 50, instead of setting mana to 50%, it replenishes mana by 50%, CD tunes down to 60-70s
- Mystic Ground: Get rid of it
- Add Mana Leak @ lvl 45: 25s duration, 70s CD, converts 75% of all damage done to mana.

[MartaDemireux]

Well, that's kind of the point. Single target enmity generation is your primary thing as a GLA/PLD. Your most used abilities are going to be your main combo (FB>SB>RoH). Defensives are used in between. PLD and MYS will share this, using the exact same rotation for attacks and GLA cooldowns. With your changes though, I see you'd want their main combo to be FB>RB>MB. That's better than using the exact same combo but now SB and RoH have little to no use. I'd suggest changing their effects so that they will still have some use mid-fight.

As for Rampart and Sentinel: You can't entirely take out 2 abilities just like that. Especially 2 crucial ones. Rampart and Sentinel will need to stay or they will need to have their effects changed. I say this because it's unfair for any one job to lose out on access to their class abilities. It's never been done to date and should never be practiced. However, like I said, they can be easily changed so I would go that route before blocking them out entirely. That would make 2 less abilities for the MYS to use when they're already not really going to use SB and RoH. Wouldn't be very fun to play just spamming those 3 attacks and defensives when they're ready. In this sense, it plays the same as PLD, spamming 3 attacks with defensives when they're ready.

[Ehayte]

Again, a respectful disagreement here.

SB and RoH are very important to a MYS, they provide huge Enmity cushions for you when you are good on mana. They take the place of your AE enmity in Flash, as even an uncomboed RoH will get you 700 potency enmity. Also, RoH would still give you the 10% str debuff on the mob.

PLD is very very competitive in AE enmity. In fact, they are pretty much undisputedly the WP speed-run preferred tanks, as they can sustain AE enmity output much longer than WAR. MYS could still USE flash, but it would hurt them to do so.
RE: Rampart/Sentinel - I can and I DID take them out! ; D - But seriously, MYS gets much more active skills than PLD, so I don't think they need as many CDs. That being said, if we're looking at this like Christmas morning, everyone should get the same amount of gifts. So...I don't know, decrease their effectiveness by 70%? That gives Rampart a 10% and Sentinel a 12% benefit? I could live with that, as it would make them kind of junk CDs that you throw in here and there.

[Kitru]

30 - Mystic (No Animation)
- Increases your Mana Pool by 125%
- Causes all damage to check against your mana pool first, if your mana pool is 100% full, 100% of damage is deducted from your mana. If it is 25% full, 25% of damage is deducted from your mana, 75% from your hit points, etc.
- Increases natural mana regeneration by 100%
- Decreases damage output by 20%
- Increases enmity generation

This is going to be monumentally broken. Assuming you're having them keep the PLD mana pool, you're giving them an extra 2250 "hp" and that's without stacking any PIE, which would easily push that up to 3-4k given the size of your multiplier. On top of this, mana regen is already based off of max mp (2% of max mp every 3 seconds) and you're doubling *that* as well, which means that you're giving this class better passive regeneration than *either* of the existing tanks. Furthermore, because you're turning PIE into a tanking stat that's actually worth *more* than VIT, this class would get more out of gear than anything else thanks to effectively getting 3 mainstats on everything instead of 2 with 1 secondary.

You're not providing a DPS stance either, which a GLA job pretty obviously needs in order to offtank, especially compared to PLD since it would have the same DPS but not get the extra ~15% damage from Sword Oath.

On top of this, enmity would suffer heavily if it were played using the combo you want. PLD is built around RoH spam; even with the high enmity mod you put on Mystic Blade, you'd be getting 41% of the enmity out of that combo compared to RoH. If you want to provide some reason to use a combo that generates less enmity than RoH, it needs to provide some offensive/enmity advantage to make up for the loss, similar to how Maim and Storm's Eye increase WAR's damage by 33% to make up for taking up 33-50% of your activation time.

Furthermore, because a vast majority of what AoE threat that a GLA generates is from Flash, which consumes mp, you're going to make this class super squishy at the start of the fight or on AoE pulls and pretty much incapable of picking up multiple adds *after* the fight starts.

[COLOR="teal"]Keep in mind this tank also gets Eye for an Eye and Virus from ACN.

Eye for an Eye can't be used on yourself so only Virus is going to be really useful for them.

I'm curious why exactly you're removing Bulwark and Sentinel and replacing them with CDs that *don't* scale, especially given that you're removing their baseline CD and forcing them to go without an equivalent for 10 levels. Job abilities aren't really supposed to *replace* existing class abilities; they're supposed to augment them. You're really just replacing them. Given the size of the mp pool you're giving the class, Mystic Replenishment and Mystic Shield would be *monumentally* overpowered, especially Mystic Shield and Mystic Ground (going off of current PLD, the mp pool would be ~3400; with that active, it would shoot up to 172125 *before* you add 50k more; 4% of that is 8885, which is how much you'd be regaining every 3 seconds while it's active so there isn't even a point to having the ability return MP). In Mystic Ground, you've, effectively, just come up with an overly complicated iteration of Hallowed Ground. For Mystic Replenishment, you could just wait for an Adloq crit and then become immune to damage for the next 10 seconds (Adloq already doubles the size of the shield on a crit; a crit for 1k gives you a 2k shield and you'd double that to 4k on top of the other effects; if you get hit with an Adloq while you've got Conv up, you're getting over 5k, not to mention what would happen if they're both on you: with 6k hp, you'd have ~7200 damage worth of absorb on you).

The entire basis of your job is "MP as hp equivalent", which is going to provide a ridiculously huge amount of eHP given that it is increased by PIE (the baseline mp of my PLD is equal to how much hp my WAR gets out of Defiance; 1474 mp and 1474 hp, exactly; you're increasing that by 125%), is flawed from the outset. Because mp pools are governed by a secondary stat, you're letting them get more out of their gear than any other tank, not to mention that it *still* presents the problem that WARs have been facing from the beginning with a mitigation mechanism that doesn't scale with content. Use of mp for anything except as an action resource is going to be imbalanced because the size of it is governed by a secondary stat (that happens to have really good returns, in fact, especially since you're doing it to a class within a comparatively small amount of PIE to begin with).

Basically, you need to completely reevaluate the tank stance, add a DPS stance, and I would *seriously* look into those CDs you're providing. Rampart and Sentinel are perfectly fine on their own. Replacing them is just kind of arbitrary. Look at how WAR works: it adds a new mechanic and a set of CDs that works *with* the existing capabilities of the class rather than attempting to replace them. You can have new abilities that provide a way to burn mp *other* than Flash, but using mp as a mitigation mechanism is just going to be broken. If you *do* tie mitigation to mp in some way, make sure you provide a TP-consuming AoE enmity tool to make up for the fact that you're always screwing over either mitigation or AoE threat.

A possible variation on the theme that could work would be having the stance provide a stacking increase to parry, evasion, damage reduction, etc. every time you use an MP consuming ability. At 30, this would mean using Flash a lot, which is boring but it can still be used. The higher level job abilities could provide you with more mp consuming abilities that you can weave into your rotation better (possibly having the Riot Blade finisher be an mp consumer). The DPS stance could be done in any number of ways, but, because you're building the class off of GLA, it needs to provide a ~15% or so increase to damage.

[Kitru]

PLD is very very competitive in AE enmity. In fact, they are pretty much undisputedly the WP speed-run preferred tanks, as they can sustain AE enmity output much longer than WAR. MYS could still USE flash, but it would hurt them to do so.

PLDs aren't the kings of WP speed runs because they have great AoE enmity. They're the kings of it because they have a *way* better CD suite. I've done speed runs as a WAR and, when I'm Overpower spamming, it doesn't matter how hard the BLM is nuking, they're not pulling off of me. As a PLD, if the BLM doesn't use Quelling Strikes before a double/triple Flare, everything will be staring at them. The only reason that WAR isn't the preferred tank for them is the CDs since, if they *could* survive the same pulls, the fact that WAR throws out damage while keeping AoE enmity would make them *way* better than PLD.

[Gamemako]

Upon equipping your Job Soul, Rampart and Sentinel are no longer available to you.

With what are you replacing them?

I don't see any way to make this design work. You cannot make a tank stance with a non-controlled resource. You have enemies immediately depleting MP, which is your enmity resource, which means that you're actively killing yourself to keep aggro. Additionally, the MP/HP exchange rate is pretty damn huge (maybe 6:1). Going 1:1 is absurdly inefficient, not to mention that nobody can hit Cure on your MP pool as it tumbles. 3000 MP would be totally gone in 5 seconds in BC, leaving you utterly naked. You're also scaling directly with your own damage and level, just as WAR currently does. That alone will make you invariably gimped at endgame (like WAR currently is). Mystic Ground is pretty much Hallowed Ground rehash, obviously -- largest current challenge is to the tune of 1500-2000 DPS, which over 10 seconds is 15000-20000 damage, not 50,000. Compared to PLD, you'd be invariably as utterly worthless except for that one 7-minute cooldown -- the boost from Rampart&Sentinel&SO is +160% EHP, so with all your points weighted into VIT already, there's no way your Mystic Knight adding MP to HP could ever compare in eHP, mitigation, enmity, or anything at all of consequence.

I honestly just don't think you have much of a starting point here. You've had to ham-handedly wave off the best class abilities because they would make the second tank job redundant. That's really the long and short of it. There's already a tank job from GLA. If you want a magic tank, you're going to need to start from a base which can support it.

[Ehayte]

Ohh Kitru I really like the ideas you came up with in that last paragraph.

I don't care for the hostile undertones, but.... hehehe

Like I said, its hard to balance this idea without an practical test to see what's up, but I think you might be over and underestimating a few things:

Enmity:
- Flash is going to use 212 of roughly 3400mp, which is a 6% decrease in the mitigation your mana will provide you. That MP is replenished QUICKLY, or a flash spam could be used in concert with one of your MP regen abilities to get back up there.
- Concurrently, you won't NEED to flash spam unless you are in WP doing speed runs, as your enmity increase should be huge. Let's examine:
RoH Combo for PLD:
o Fast Blade = 150 potency = 150 Enmity
o Savage Blade = (210 potency x 3) = 630 Enmity
o Rage of Halone = (280 potency x 5) = 1400 Enmity
Total of 2180, or 726 per GCD
MB Combo for MYS:
o Fast Blade = 150x140% = 210
o Riot Blade = 210x140% = 294
o Mystic Blade = 240x5x140% = 1680
Total of 2184, or 728 per GCD

wwwhhhhhaaaaaaatttt!!!! While it might be 41% of the MYS's own RoH combo, its slightly over 100% of the PLD's RoH combo.

Also, think about this. RoH > RoH > RoH = 700 enmity per GCD, instant 700 enmity on each of 3 targets! MYS would be weak on snap AoE aggro, but ridiculously strong on single target aggro and single target tanking.

Mitigation - I'm not willing to do the math, and I honestly don't think its worth your time either, but I think you are overestimating the mitigation you get from your mana. Damage still goes through the MYS. Think about Titan, as everyone knows that fight. 4.5k MB, even if you are at full mana, will eat your 3.4k mana, and still do 1.1k of damage to you! Leaving you to scramble to get some mana back to mitigate the next attacks. If you had 1000 mana, it would allocate 30%ish of that damage to the mana pool, meaning 1300, i.e. it would mitigate 1000 dmg, leaving the MYS to eat 3500 dmg. The attacks TAKE your mana away...so the biggest shield you can accumulate against a large attack is your mana pool - if you look at the crazy hits in coil (unmitigated 8ks), the MYS is still gonna take 5kish of that (with a 3400 mana pool). Correct me if I am missing something huge here.

RE: Gear - Well...if you stack up PIE, you are going to lose vit and strength, so I fail to see a problem...and MYS armor, if it follows other tank armor, just wouldn't have it on it...Even if you can get your mana pool above your hp pool, hits will still eek into your hp pool, and you will die REAL quick on a serious of fast and hard hits with no chance for your healer to do anything about it.

RE: Mana Regen - I hardly thing 4%/tick is gonna break the game, lol.

RE: DPS Stance - Good point. I don't think that going from 120 to 138 dps is going to make or break a dungeon though... Seems silly to nit-pick that.

RE: CDs - Yes, Mystic Ground is stupid, but the text reads it goes UP to 170kish, and the rest of it was poor written and thought out. Dumb ability, not a good idea. I'm sorry : D And yeah, I guess I would just reduce Ramp/Sent, because I feel like if you leave those in there you are SUPER OP'ed. Some reduction to balance them out I think is necessary, so I re-thought removing them.

And again, this was mainly just for fun and for a basic idea : D, I still think it could be made about as viable as a WAR is right now (hehe), and managing a mana pool as a shield sounds very entertaining to me.

[Ehayte]

PLD vs WAR

I didn't say PLD is better because it has better AE Enmity, I said it has competitive AE Enmity, and as such, is the preferred tank (read: due to that and other factors).