Tank adjustments we can agree on?

[eagledorf]

I know that there are a lot of threads demanding nerfs and buffs in this sub-forum, but having thought about the tank classes quite a bit, I wanted to bring up some adjustments to the tank jobs that I think would an improvement and see if there isn’t at least some stuff we can all agree on. While some of them do work out to being buffs, they really are more about awkwardness that got built in or exposed with 3.0 and should be fixed. (Cross posted in Japanese)

• Native tank spells (Flash/Unmend/Unleash/Clemency) should have their cast times and recast times based on Skill Speed, not Spell Speed.

Skill Speed is completely worthless if you're spamming AoE spells or casting. There shouldn't be a stat with literally 0 value so much of the time. If this is hard to implement, putting an equal amount of spell speed on tank gear with skill speed would be a quick temporary fix like when they introduced Ninja.

• It should be possible to parry and block critical damage.

While this would be a slight Awareness nerf, it really should not be possible for you to have Raw Intuition or Sheltron up and then have the Hand in A3 Savage crit you for 13k from the front. If this seriously can't be implemented (really? I would never believe that it's not possible) at least adjust the tooltip for these skills to say "excluding critical damage"

• Dark Knight should have a means of managing TP without dropping Grit other than spamming Unmend.

One option would be to give a Dark Arts effect to Delirium or Power Slash that reduces the TP cost dramatically when in Grit, but there might be a better way to handle it (suggested in this thread was attaching some TP recovery to Sole Survivor, perhaps exclusive to Grit). Since DRK does have Unmend it's fine (desirable even) for them to have inferior TP management to PLD and WAR, but having none is a strange decision.

• Shield Swipe needs its potency increased. It’s just not worth using at its current potency.

Currently Shield Swipe is so much of a potency loss it's actually almost equal in potency/TP to Goring Blade. It's useful roughly once every minute and otherwise you're better off ignoring the proc.

I think about 250 potency would be similar to where it was at before 3.0 in terms of the DPS gain and it makes TP management and buff timings more interesting. To be honest, even higher potency wouldn't be unbalanced with Reprisal.

Edit: Fixed in terms of potency gained as of 3.1; however, now PLD has worse TP problems than before the fix. 2 steps forward, 1 back.

• Defiance should buff Lustrate/Tetragrammaton/Essential Dignity

While WAR is doing fine, it's pretty messed up that Defiance doesn’t extend to instant heals. Besides the obvious issue with a Scholar, it just reduces the value of even using Defiance.

P.S. Don't you think Mantra, Fey Illumination, and Dissipation should work on Indomitability? Obviously it shouldn't on Second Wind so I realize this is asking for a pain-in-the-butt change, but the current state of instant heals just feels half-assed.

• Paladin should have an offensive spell as an option to manage TP as OT. (Alternatively, Paladin should have a means of managing TP as OT other than healing spells, Paladin should have a non-combo attack to line up Goring Blade ticks, Paladin should have a mechanic that allows them to choose between defense and offense like WAR and DRK, and Paladin's lack of AoE DPS should be rectified now that there's 3 tanks. An offensive spell fixes all of these things with one change.)

Paladin still has no TP management as OT and no use for its extensive MP management toolkit most of the time. This would also finally give some significance to Fight or Flight buffing only physical damage other than being an annoyance when you have to Flash.

• Rage of Halone should have its potency increased slightly.

The potency penalty for keeping the Rage of Halone debuff up as OT is too high. Increasing the potency to 300 would make the potency gap 40 compared to Royal Authority (the same potency a WAR loses by replacing Butcher’s Block with Storm’s Path, which is a better debuff to begin with) so it would be worth thinking about the STR debuff. This change wouldn't increase PLD's max DPS at all, it's about how Halone fits in with the new skills.

• The combination PLD+DRK should be made viable

Currently the fact that WAR has the slashing debuff that increases tank and NIN DPS, high DPS of their own, and the most flexible defensive debuff means they are the one tank that you will always bring. In fact, even just the first two things are enough to ensure them a spot. You'll bring a WAR even if the devs design a fight that is absolute crap for a WAR to tank just because it'll add 10% to the other tank's DPS and the WAR doesn't have inferior DPS of their own to balance it. This was fine in 2.x, but with the introduction of DRK this should be adjusted so PLD+DRK is usable and even favorable in some situations.

The easiest solution is probably to give the Slashing debuff to at least 2 of the tanks, preferably all of them, then balance tank DPS and NIN DPS and TP drain assuming it's up. Otherwise, the tank with the slashing debuff must have lower DPS than the other two to be balanced, which means that a NIN has too much potential DPS added since they bring it as well (part of the mess of having damage types shared across different job types).

• A Surecast-like aspect could added on to Tempered Will (casts cannot be interrupted during its duration)

It would be nice if it was possible to reliably cast sometimes while tanking.

• Maximum tank DPS must just be balanced, both in and out of tank stance, as must their tanking capabilities.

I think there is a particular challenge here in that DRK DPS fluctuates depending on their MP recovery. This and the failure to adjust Shield Swipe for 3.0 are really the only reasons DRK and PLD have unbalanced OT DPS. In order for DRK to be balanced both when they take damage and when they don't, it may be simplest to limit Blood Price to Grit and Blood Weapon to out of Grit and balance DPS after making this adjustment. I suppose this wouldn't be as necessary if they gave PLD a DPS use for their MP since Sheltron also regenerates MP.

This must be done so that each tank can be viable both as OT and as MT, in progression and at the farm stage. There is no alternative whatsoever that can sufficiently substitute for this fix that would not cause comparable or even worse problems.

If Square Enix ever wants us to wear Fending gear with a Summoner and a Monk in the party:

• AoE threat modifiers should be buffed slightly. With the changes to DPS classes in 3.0, keeping ARR threat modifiers means that with good DPS you pretty much never want to wear Fending accessories in dungeons.

Flash especially needs more potency because it can’t crit and FoF doesn’t work on it, but if you have a Summoner ready to DoT in Dreadwyrm Trance and a Monk with GL, 2.0 potencies in Fending gear is a poor joke all around.

Things I’m less certain about, but think are probably good ideas:

• Grit, Sword Oath, and Shield Oath should not cancel combos. The DPS penalty for Shield Oath should be adjusted.

I think it’s fine that these cost a global cooldown and MP, but having them cancel combos is disadvantageous if you suddenly need to swap in when the MT dies or otherwise suddenly need to tank. Also, because of this awkwardness compared to Cleric Stance, it is preferable in almost all situations to sit in Sword Oath/out of Grit and force your healer to deal instead of turning on your tank stance, which I personally think is bad.

Finally, because Shield Oath is a huge DPS penalty compared to the other two and costs 2 GCD to swap in and out of, players will always find a ways to avoid using it at all costs. What's the point of an unusable tank stance? In terms of how, certain skills could ignore Shield Oath's DPS penalty (Spirits Within, Shield Swipe, and Scorn?), they could just outright lower the penalty, or allow it to stack with Sword Oath. Or they could come up with something else, but these seem pretty simple.

• Shield Bash should probably not cancel combos

If you do the math, it's like never optimal for DPS for a Paladin to stun. If a Paladin cancels a Royal Authority for Shield Bash, the lost potency is 230 so a Monk would have to have saved Steel Peak for more than its entire cooldown for it to be preferable for the Paladin to Stun. Even without cancelling a combo, the potency loss is over 100 (like 120 if all you lose is the difference with the average Royal Authority potency). The cripplingly high TP cost and potency loss even without cancelling combos is sufficiently punishing for the 1 extra second and ability to chain-stun a Paladin has over other jobs.

• The cooldown for Bulwark and Divine Veil could be reconsidered

I think they're perhaps a tiny bit long, though not as much as many people seem to think. Admittedly Bulwark's long cooldown is alleviated by the addition of Sheltron, but 3 minutes is long for such a short-lasting and RNG-dependent cooldown now that they've nerfed shields.

• If SE intends to keep one tank as a magic tank and another as a physical tank, I would like them to be balanced to eliminate major weaknesses.

There are ≥11 skills and statuses and 2 stats that are physical only and only ~5 that are magic only (one of which is a silence that doesn't work for general mitigation and 2 of which are designed for party-wide damage); therefore, to be totally honest it would be best for SE to go back to the drawing board with this as it makes for restrictive content.

Currently WAR has situations where it's awkward or not ideal to have them tank (e.g. Perpetual Ray), but there's no situation where they are ineffective or majorly disadvantaged compared to both other tanks. While each tank having a particular strength is good in my mind, having situations where they are substantially disadvantaged compared to both the other two is not.

I have some idea of how to start, but it's not entirely developed. For example, you could probably shuffle debuffs around by making Halone and Delerium both debuff all damage, then change Reprisal to debuff STR for ~10s and give PLD a ~10s INT debuff on some skill with a cooldown (not Shield Swipe obviously, maybe Spirits Within?) so their specific debuffs are opposite their burst damage cooldowns, then give WAR both physical and magic debuffs with a longer duration that can't stack with the other tanks' instead of damage down since their burst cooldown is for all damage types. This works well except it becomes slightly disadvantageous to have DRK as OT since Reprisal requires parrying...

But the best in my opinion is probably just to give everybody a unique damage down debuff, allow it to stack (to encourage bringing 2 different tanks), change Reprisal to Pacification to match Shield Swipe so it can be part of content again, and rework Dark Mind to be some kind of physical mitigation or even better give Paladin a magic cooldown and DRK another physical cooldown (some Sheltron equivalent with Parry maybe?) to match Inner Beast's versatility.

• (Finally) increase PLD's VIT and STR to match the other two tanks?

• Blood Prince maybe should have a chance to recover MP when you dodge (maybe a 20% chance or something)

I do like that you have to think about when to use Blood Prince and that you sometimes have to choose between extra mitigation and extra MP. Maybe this is fine as is, but it can be awkward finding a time for evasion and blind if you’re working with other crowd-control abilities like Holy.

• The extra Wrath should perhaps be removed from Raw Intuition and/or Vengeance

Currently you can skip a Heavy Swing and use any Abandon/Wrath ability 3 times in a row by wasting your two defensive cooldowns at once with Berserk. I think this is not desirable overall. Also, 7 extra Wrath a minute just seems like a lot now that WAR has RI, but maybe that's just me.

The one on Berserk makes sense to me to balance the lost Wrath from the Pacification. This is the one I'm most unsure of since the option to blow or save skills is part of what makes WAR gameplay what it is and sufficient adjustment to DRK and PLD could make it unnecessary.

• The Dark Arts effect for Dark Dance should just be changed entirely to an extra ~10% parry rate.

This would make it useful on bosses that can't miss and fix the Blood Prince issue automatically.

I could see other adjustments to DRK being desirable in the future, but this one might be unnecessary if parry crits is fixed and would possibly end up an undesirable nerf to mitigation in dungeons in that case.

In terms of a spell for Paladin...

In a perfect world I desperately want Stasis Sword from FFT, but in a world of recycled animations I could see Banish being recycled from Pharos Sirius or Aero from Conjurer and still being a traditional FF Paladin spell. The Clemency animation could be recycled for the casting animation. (Clemency cast=>Banish animation for example)

My dream spell would be something like this:

Some spell name
MP: ~3300. Should be between 3100 and 3430 (can't cast Clemency. Can still Flash or change stances.)
Cast: 2s (If instant, decrease potency by 140-170 to account for lost autos+SwO. A cast time increases the difficulty of PLD if that is desirable)
Recast: 2.5s
Range: 10y
Radius: 5y
Potency: ~450. Would have to be between 420 and 520 (Single target DPS loss if cast during FoF, but gain if cast outside of it.)
Additional effect: Increased enmity when in Shield Oath.
Other: Cancels combo when used
Additional effect because Stasis Sword needs some Stasis: Slow +5% when in Shield Oath. Duration: 10s (conflicts with Shadowflare)
Yes, I love FFT. Who doesn't?

Alternatively it could be a DoT (PLD's version of Scourge) that costs MP. That would be the easy version, but substantially less complex and fun to play.