Lets nerf WAR :D

[eagledorf]

The problem is that Yoshida is either totally misinformed about the situation with the three tanks or he's desperately trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the players so that they don't have to explain why fixes didn't happen months ago. It's not about one tank being disadvantaged in one set of content, it's about there being no clarity of vision in the design of the tanks or any pretense of attempting to balance the tanks from a defensive or offensive PoV.

It's not just PLD that's broken, DRK is also broken. Even DRK+WAR is broken if we were doing 2.0 content. Nerfing WAR or mindlessly buffing PLD won't really solve the problem either, they need to go do the work that they should have done before releasing 3.0 and make it so the three tanks work together properly.

I posted this in the JP forums, but here's a quick analysis of the tank situation.

Debuffs:

WAR: DMG -10%
DRK: INT -10% (overwritten by MNK), DMG -10% (depends on parry, can be applied to 1 target only)
PLD: STR -10%

Defensive Buffs:

PLD/DRK: -20% DMG 22% uptime　
WAR: -20% DMG >30% uptime

PLD: -40% DMG 5.5% uptime　　
DRK: -30% DMG 5.5% uptime
WAR: -30% DMG 12.5% uptime

PLD: Block+60% 8.3% uptime
DRK: Parry+30% 33% uptime
WAR: 100% Parry 22% uptime

Other:

PLD: Sheltron, Stoneskin, Convalescence+10%, Awareness duration enhanced, Shield
DRK:　Dark Mind
WAR: Thrill of Battle, Infuriate, Foresight recast reduced, Bloodbath duration enhanced, Wrath-based parry buff

Interruptions:

PLD: Stun, Silence, Pacification
DRK: Stun
WAR: Stun

DPS:

DRK: No Grit MT high, Grit very high, OT average, AoE high
PLD: SwO MT slightly low, ShO very low, OT somewhat low, AoE extremely low
WAR: Del MT high, Def average, OT very high, AoE very high

TP management:

DRK: Bad as OT, terrible as MT
PLD: Bad as OT, bad as MT
WAR: Virtually unlimited as OT, Excellent as MT

Self-heal:

PLD: Terrible if interrupted, Excellent if not interrupted
DRK: Limited
WAR: Good to Excellent

Utility:

PLD: Divine Veil, Protect, Stoneskin, Cover, Clemency
DRK: Reprisal (requires parrying damage), Delirium (overwritten by MNK)
WAR: Storm's Path, Storm's Eye, Defiance-buff to Deployment Tactics, Clemency, and Synastry, Mantra

So we have:

PLD: The only tank with a complete interruption toolkit (even both the other tanks combined do not make a PLD interruption toolkit). Average against physical damage. Poor against magic damage. Low DPS. Low AoE. Poor TP management. Highly conditional self-healing. Situational utility.

DRK: Good against magic damage. Poor against physical damage. Conditionally high DPS. Poor to terrible TP management. Poor self-healing. Highly conditional utility.

WAR: Good against magic damage. Excellent against physical damage. Unconditionally high DPS. Excellent TP management. Good self-healing. Unconditionally excellent utility.

Incidentally WAR does have one "weakness"; it pairs relatively badly with Scholar due to how Defiance works. Hilarious that it's contrary to the lore.

Having waited months since the drop of 3.0, if they honestly expect people to wait until 3.2 they sure as hell better start acknowledging the problem and being transparent about their plans for a solution instead of trying to feed us "well, it's about how the jobs work in the content" and trying to pretend there's nothing wrong with the jobs themselves.

The system is broken because they've kept skills as they were in 2.0 when there were only 2 options for tanks and they've brought in a new tank that doesn't form a complete debuff and interruption toolkit when paired with either other tank and a gimmick (a tremendously strong magic cooldown) that is so situational and contrary to the design of the vast majority of existing healer and tank mitigation skills (Foresight, Eye4Eye, etc.) that content that caters to it clashes badly with other jobs.

[Freyyy]

snip

I totally agree here (Kudos for the very detailed analysis), I was personally just pointing out the dev's PoV. We unfortunately can't do anything to make them do something more other than continue to scream like that everyday on the forums. Maybe we'll be heard before 3.2, but I woulnd't expect much. I really can just hope that in 3.2, everything will be as correctly fixed as WAR has been in 2.1.

[Kydi]

snip

This.

The fundamental issue comes down to the design choices made, both in the classes and the meta (speaking only up to A2S and from progression raiding in other MMOs). The meta requires a minimum threshold (let's say 1) of a variable, let's call it "tankiness". If tankiness is too low, the tank cannot survive the tank buster, thus is not viable. The second variable we have at present for tanks is damage and due to the way the meta is currently structured, damage >> tankiness where tankiness >= 1.

On Equalising tankiness

Part of the issue with the current tanking meta is that it drastically favours short, powerful cooldowns over the longer, weaker ones. Equalising the tankiness of all the tanks would, in my opinion, require a shift in the meta to ensure that damage is normalised across a fight, with some spikes, rather than spike damage being the primary source of danger, which inherently favours the short, powerful cooldown, especially if they have a short recast.

In my opinion, more focus should be placed on tanks needing to roll through cooldowns, gradually mitigating a larger amount of damage the longer they tank and eventually needing to swap with their off tank lest they be flattened (I think A3 normal did this quite well in the final phase, prior to being outgeared, with the stacking blunt resistance down). Assuming that damage is equalised, and tankiness is equalised.

On Equalising Utility

The way I would see that tanks could be put on a level playing field is to have all tanks share equal damage and tankiness, but vary a utility, for instance:

PLD - healer and warding utility with clemency and divine veil;
WAR - party wide damage reduction utility through storm's path;
DRK - damage reduction based on blinding boss, so not guaranteed, but when effective better than WAR.

This would give some interesting combos:

PLD/WAR - general damage down and offhealing/shielding from PLD;
PLD/DRK - chance for higher damage reduction but more importance placed on PLD healing when the chance fails;
DRK/WAR - general damage reduction with a chance of very high damage reduction.

This would, in my opinion, make tanking a little more interesting and synergise the classes a little better, without having one go to pairing being objectively better.

On keeping tanks unique

Notwithstanding party utility, a major concern with normalising tankiness is homogenisation of the classes. In my opinion, the classes would fundamentally share the same basic structure of agro combo, damage combo, debuff combo. However, paladin would still keep it's blocking and healing mechanics, warrior still keep the stacks and dark knight still keep its many off gCD abilities. In my opinion this is sufficient to ensure that even if damage and tankiness are the same, each tank still has a unique flavour.

Summary

Tanking is currently in a difficult situation due in part to class design, but predominantly due to the current meta. I personally am of the opinion that if the meta changed (to one of sustained high damage) we would actually see a lot more balance in the tanking classes, forcing use of tank stance for greater periods of time where we see a lot more balance as WAR ~= DRK > PLD but (on physical fights) PLD > WAR ~= DRK in terms of defence.

It will be very interesting to see what happens with the tanking requirements come 3.2, but in my opinion a buff/nerf to a single class is not the solution.