Tank adjustments we can agree on?

[Brian_]

No, you can have a brawler. The archetype is perfectly fine.

The point is that in the end, your tanks must be balanced in terms of contributed raid DPS, survivability, and enmity sufficiency. How they reach that end is where the flavor exists.

So you can have a WAR deal the most individual damage to fit the brawler archetype. The problem is you cannot also give them the most raid DPS support, too.

PLD is also fine as a "defensive tank." But, the problem is you cannot also give them the least raid DPS support or else you have the current imbalance.

It's about balancing raid DPS output IF the meta is centered around raid DPS.

I'm not saying this is the solution, but going on the previous example of Storm's Eye's damage contribution, if you removed Eye from WAR and gave it to PLD, assuming that PLDs do 10% less damage than either WAR or DRK, then the result is 3 tanks that deal the same damage regardless of their pairing (excluding double pairings). But, two of the tanks deal more individual damage to fit their fantasy while one does less damage but makes up for it through raid DPS support.

Back in 2.X, PLDs did more individual damage than WARs when in Sword Oath. But, when you factored in Storm's Eye, WAR DPS contribution was balanced. Now, PLDs do less individual damage AND they have no raid DPS support.

[eagledorf]

A2 is not burst physical damage, there's nothing that will one-shot you if you don't use a cooldown and you can literally dodge all major damage by LoSing the dolls. WAR that die in that fight have a problem in their play, not with the job, since they can mitigate every cleave and keep a debuff that reduces physical damage by 10% on 2 targets at a time unlike a DRK.

I'm talking about something like Twintania. If a DRK were to tank a fight like that in i70 gear, you'd have a cooldown for the first DS, a cooldown for the second DS, Living Dead for the 3rd, and cooldown for the 4th, then you're dead if your parry doesn't proc on the 5th either to give you Reprisal or just to mitigate DS. A PLD now can Sheltron every one and a WAR can IB every one. In 2.0 a PLD could get by with Stoneskin and Bulwark so that they would just barely survive if Bulwark didn't proc, a DRK literally has nothing if RNG screws them at a certain point.

I guess SE could just never design a fight like all of coil ever again...or they could just fix the tanks. Is it seriously that weird that I think that they should just fix the tanks?

[RapBreon]

You can't really buff PLD defensive utility enough without breaking the job. Either you need content so punishing that you need that defense, in which case you have the problem from 2.0 where the tanks that can't keep up are abandoned, or PLD becomes so powerful you get things like a Paladin tanking Bahamut and all the adds with the tether and not batting an eye because they're invincible and you don't even need a co-tank anymore and bringing three Monks is better than having two tanks. Neither of these is good design.

In my opinion PLD is almost perfect from the defense side of things. They're very strong against physical damage and weak against magic damage, but able to deal with it by using their trait for Convalescence and Stoneskin. This is basically how much variation there should be in tanks in terms of what they're good at and what they're bad at. PLD's ability to sustain DPS when they tank is broken, DRK's ability to take burst physical damage is broken, and WAR's ability to contribute as OT is broken.

It literally becomes a question of much flavour you're willing to barter for homogenization of performance. Everybody's opinion on the subject will vary. My personal feelings on the subject being that I'm not willingly to overly sacrifice (it's situational for me really). In situations where the absolute min-max is required is very early weeks clear. An extremely small population of raiders; raiders who typically re-roll based on what gives them the best chance of world/region/server first anyway.

If you intend to homogenize performance; it needs to be done in thematically appealing way. Which I do support, performance should be homogenized (within reason), but consistent to class themes. WARs just straight up do more personal DPS. PLDs bring some kind of buff or ability that increases damage. DRKs...god only knows with DRKs. I like your idea of WAR doing less DPS but providing damage support; if it were on a PLD instead. Honestly, the way melee are balanced is fucking spot-on. Whoever is in charge of that shit deserves a fucking medal. It's about as close as it will ever get.

Being said, if we had more bosses and wings (rather than a linear succession) it would give SE far more wiggle room to implement that boss 'only a PLD can tank on the first week', without completely halting progress for a week (just go to the boss which favours DPS, woo!). Which would let us in-turn de-homogenize performance (within reason) and they can keep 'their sub-jobs'. But this is work, hard and no guarantees it could be done right, easier to go with the above. Right now it's just DPS checks that favour the tanks that do more DPS. Pepsiman got close to making PLDs mitigation useful enough to make up for a DRK (not a WAR; WAR too godly, no arguments there). Ultimately, it is relative to the tier, when it comes to performance.

TL;DR: Essentially what Brian said, but with far less words and therefore much more readable! Have a like!

[Syzygian]

I'm talking about something like Twintania. If a DRK were to tank a fight like that in i70 gear, you'd have a cooldown for the first DS, a cooldown for the second DS, Living Dead for the 3rd, and cooldown for the 4th, then you're dead if your parry doesn't proc on the 5th either to give you Reprisal or just to mitigate DS. A PLD now can Sheltron every one and a WAR can IB every one. In 2.0 a PLD could get by with Stoneskin and Bulwark so that they would just barely survive if Bulwark didn't proc, a DRK literally has nothing if RNG screws them at a certain point.

Your RNG has to be REALLY bad to not proc a Reprisal inside of 20s with close to a 50-60% parry rate. So regardless of their big mitigation cooldowns, a skilled DRK should be going into every physical tank buster that happens once a minute at most with Reprisal on the boss and a high chance to parry, before even touching Shadowskin/Shadow Wall etc. At current gear levels, even Foresight would be enough to survive a physical TB if Reprisal is up and you've got an SS and an Adlo.

[eagledorf]

If you removed Eye from WAR and gave it to PLD

This would also work fine, but the problem with that is now PLD has three things to juggle and WAR has 2. It sort of reverses the play-style of the two jobs. I don't know, in my opinion keeping WAR mechanically as is is preferable to preserving the flavor since this change means Maim and their OT hate management would need to also be adjusted significantly to work. I know a lot of WAR would prefer to keep high DPS, but actually I suspect this change is more likely end up screwing WAR than just adjusting DPS down.

Your RNG has to be REALLY bad to not proc a Reprisal inside of 20s with close to a 50-60% parry rate

In a fight like Twintania with a long cast bar and slow autos it's actually not at all unlikely. If we assume you have 4 chances to parry it's like a 7% chance you'll just fail to parry and die and Dark Dance is only 20% extra parry chance so you need to stack a lot of parry to get above 50% parry chance. (Actually, Twintania you would die even with Reprisal since that fight was tuned assuming Halone is always up, but that's a different issue.)

[RapBreon]

This would also work fine, but the problem with that is now PLD has three things to juggle and WAR has 2. It sort of reverses the play-style of the two jobs. I don't know, in my opinion keeping WAR mechanically as is is preferable to preserving the flavor since this change means Maim and their OT hate management would need to also be adjusted significantly to work. I know a lot of WAR would prefer to keep high DPS, but actually I suspect this change is more likely to screw WAR than just reducing DPS.

You could just bake the effect into Halone or Goring. Possibly add it to Royal Authorateh, but then you would have to juggle it.

For WAR maybe split Storm's Path double effect? Give the heal to SE or some-such. Or make it the highest potency combo instead of BB.

I suck with specific ideas but. So there maybe interactions I'm not seeing.

[eagledorf]

snip

Yeah, it could definitely done pretty much the way you suggest (making BB lower potency than Eye would be better since the self-heal is pretty iffy). Attaching the Eye effect to Goring Blade would work very well for Paladin. Still, leaving it on WAR means a NIN has the choice of saving TP and letting the WAR change their rotation for more DPS or more mitigation or the NIN can ride off Eye for max DPS so it's much more interesting mechanically. Putting it on PLD is likely to end up being 100% uptime since you'll always choose to keep Goring and Eye up. It could definitely be done, but I think the quality of gameplay will have to take a hit compared to just nerfing DPS.

I suppose it's a matter of what is more important to players, the dynamics of the job or the numbers that players that don't parse (all PS players and any player that doesn't violate the ToS) can't even see to go with the flavor. I think if you keep Fell Cleave potency so it still crits for fairly big numbers, the vast majority of players won't care or even know if overall DPS has fallen to be the lowest tank DPS as long as mathematically the total DPS added is still competitive. Min-maxers will know that the buff adds enough DPS to more than compensate and casual players will still get cool 7k+ crits.

[RapBreon]

Yeah, it could definitely done pretty much the way you suggest (making Eye higher potency than BB would be better since the self-heal is pretty iffy). Attaching the Eye effect to Goring Blade would work very well for Paladin. Still, leaving it on WAR means a NIN has the choice of saving TP and letting the WAR change their rotation for more DPS or more mitigation or the NIN can ride off Eye for max DPS so it's much more interesting mechanically. Putting it on PLD is likely to end up being 100% uptime since you'll always choose to keep Goring and Eye up. It could definitely be done, but I think the quality of game-play will have to take a hit compared to just nerfing DPS.

I suppose it's a matter of what is more important to players, the dynamics of the job or the numbers that players that don't parse can't even see to go with the flavor. I think if you keep Fell Cleave potency high so it still crits for big numbers, the vast majority of players won't care or notice if overall DPS has fallen to be the lowest tank DPS as long as mathematically the total DPS added is still competitive.

Yeah, I think you're right in that respect. I never considered NIN too much. There is good interaction there (I don't get to play WAR in raids T.T). I guess something will have to be sacrificed ultimately.

As for Fell Cleave, that's sneaky!

[eagledorf]

Well, no if the devs put forth some effort I'm sure we can have our cake and eat it too pretty much exactly as you suggested with some tweaks. There's probably a way to give PLD the slashing debuff and still have it be interesting for both PLD and WAR and that would probably be the best of all worlds for everybody.

I just don't know that I trust them to get it right in one try...or two...I like to think they could still adjust DPS outputs though.

[Shurrikhan]

All that OP said, except the DD change. Just change Blood Price to trigger based on attacks attempted against you instead, so that they return mana regardless of dodges, and make Reprisal function more like Low Blow - parries effectively granting bonus damage and/or extending the effect, but the move is still usable without a parry.
(For example, could add a Revengeance/Blood Feud/Entrenchment trait to Reprisal that allows you to use Reprisal for 5 seconds even while it's on cooldown, but it only does 120 potency and can only extend Reprisal debuff duration by 6-12 seconds, not apply it.) Either that, or make Reprisal proc from dodges as well or give some way to trigger parries when not currently tanking.

Also, 280 potency is plenty for Rage of Halone.

A few other things I'd like to see:
Fending accessories come with +enmity and +healing(dealt) modifiers (equaling STR accs in all ways outside of damage);
Flash scales with offensive CDs, and potency has been reduced by 33% but the ability now auto-crits, making use of the Critical Strike stat in addition to Det and SS.
Convalescence should also buff ability heals (even if this means they're now subject to Infirmity, etc. -- I don't think saving abilities to cheese those sections is especially fun or even intended);
Clemency should apply a temporary shield as the spell progresses (and lost if the spell in cancelled or interrupted) which is then transformed into the heal itself at the end of the cast, helping to prevent interrupts and deaths moments from completion (note that something that would finish you off w/o Clemency's shield is likely to interrupt the cast as well, thereby ignoring the shield's damage absorption -- int check before damage check??? nvm, might not be possible);
Storm's Eye/Path potency reduced slightly as to reduce WAR's raid utility simultaneous to damage, or else PLD and DRK's dmg or utility should be buffed a little further.

Final two cents: I'd actually rather see Shield Swipe buffed in some other way than just straight potency, even if it means some much larger reworks. It's biggest issue right now seems to be the sheer amount of time it takes up relative to the RoH/GB/RA (21.6 at my 2.4s GCD), or GB/other/2-swipes (20 at 2.5 GCD), and its RNG factor such that if you Swipe even once, you'll need an additional 1-2 just to avoid potency loss per GA. If it had a 15s CD and blocks caused it to refresh or its next use not to consume the CD instead, the RNG component would be taken care of, but speed is still a bit of a factor. If it were also on a unique GCD like Empyreal Arrow, it could be used much more readily during lower content and would also give more time for PLD support functions. Though this would accelerate PLD's TP loss slightly, it will still improve its overall effectiveness; we don't lose damage by dealing it faster, unless we sacrificed other stats to do so - we just end up with more time on our hands to do other things. The move itself is still as TP-efficient as RA, after all. Buff it by even another 10 potency and its totally solid. Its main issue isn't the move itself so much as what other things it prevents you from doing.

...one more: make Sword Oath a flat 65% bonus to AA damage, so it's value doesn't vary between weapon speeds. Or change it up completely.