How to make tanks more fun to play (devs please read)

[Giantbane]

Just FYI here.


No GCD or cooldown on Shield Bash would not be overpowered, as the duration of the stun is very short and like most debuffs, stun is subject to diminishing returns.

This means that each time you stun a target, the stun duration lasts less, until the target becomes completely immune to stun for several more seconds.

This is the same reason that if you want to use Flash to blind Titan before a Mountain Buster you can't spam Flash like you normally would to hold aggro. You have to only use Flash right before he does his attack, otherwise he'll be immune to blind.

Due to diminishing returns, debuffs here aren't as powerful in FF XIV as it might be in some other games.

The main reason Shield Bash should be off the GCD is because many end-game enemies have a casting time shorter than the GCD, so if you are performing a Halone combo you will never get the Shield Bash off in time, because GCD is locking you out of using Shield Bash as a proper interrupt.

Stun on GCD, no cooldown = PLD
Stun off GCD, cooldown = WAR

you don't like it? play the other class. There are other options. Maybe the game could do a better idea of highlighting that in some way, but they are there.

Anyone who has ever off-tanked will feel the pain of low Paladin DPS. I don't even know why there was so many tanks for Crystal Tower. Even the stupidly low HP mobs that are just there to see if people are paying attention, like Iron Gloves during Acheron, the skeletons during Bone Dragon, or the balloons during the bomb fight.... a Paladin will never kill those adds by themselves. Which is pretty pathetic.

There's so many tanks in CT so you will hopefully get at least 1-2 good tanks out of 6 that can effectively tank for you and the rest can derp around without hurting the group so much.

Anyhow, tank dps is very competent when outside of tank stance. Sword oath, CoS, Spirits *should* get you *AT LEAST* 50% of the DPS of a normal DPS class (probably more). Now you may not get big flashy numbers with your abilities, but, as has been stated, you'll be getting a lot of constant dps from sword oath (something like a 16% boost to your DPS from sword oath alone). Fight or flight also has a 33% uptime for a 30% dps boost. That's *the best* DPS cooldown currently in the game, it blows away everything else in terms of duration, strength and cooldown. PLD is very capable by itself.

WAR on the other hand, focuses on boosting its own abilities more. DPS between WAR and PLD should be about equal outside of tank stance (WAR should be able to do something like 10-15% more while tanking), but since it provides bigger boosts to its abilities (as opposed to focusing more on auto-attacks and off GCD abilities, if you like numbers that are a little bigger and flashier, maybe that's the class for you.

The balance is that you can take WAY more punishment. Better defensive cooldowns, higher block/parry and 1k (or so) more HP in equal gear. You can push this higher by using STR accessories (especially pentamelded accessories) and/or putting points in STR for your attributes (not necessarily recommended, as usually the VIT is better for tanking, but the option is there if you really want to focus on being OT).

My 2nd Titan HM clear ever was 5 tanks (3 war, 2 pld), 1 mnk for limit break and 2 healers. Only 2 in the group had relics, the rest were there to get theirs. It was a little slower, but we were still able to break the heart and beat it. The healers *loved* it, because we were so much easier to keep alive than normal dps classes, as we had a lot more health to absorb and recover from mistakes. Tank DPS is fine.

Tanks are too durable compared to other classes (even without their tank stance active) to also be able to do the same amount of damage. There's no balance between classes that way.

The one (and only) thing I think they should give to PLD is to change shield swipe from an on GCD ability to a much weaker (50?) off GCD ability with a cooldown (6-10s). This should bring them in line with WAR DPS while tanking (which should be balanced better now that WAR and PLD durability was balanced out).