If You Were A Class/Job Designer...

[winsock]

Let's consider this:

WoW developers spent four years trying to balance Druid, Paladin and Warrior tanks throughout vanilla and BC, only to give up during WoTLK and make Druids, Paladin, Warrior and Death Knight tanks absolutely equal in terms of mitigation, DPS / threat generation and utility.

And yet here we are, playing ffxiv.

[Duelle]

And yet here we are, playing ffxiv.

WoW making stupid decisions in story and world development (not to mention the whole promising things and never delivering on them) have nothing to do with gameplay and class design. In fact, gameplay and class design is one of WoW's few remaining strengths.

To be honest, WoW tanks even now do not have exactly equal mitigation, utility, or dps, except over an average. At different points in a given fight, one class's CD will still time out better than another, much like IB vs. Rampart/Shadowskin. And it's worked just fine. That's what makes composition interesting. There's no need for them to be bland copies of each other (as per Dark-Rampart, etc.).

Most of the extra stuff between WoW's tanks is not really a big deal in the long run. At least during my time raiding you didn't see people dumping bear druids or prot warriors for prot paladins or DKs. Hell, one of the top guilds in the world at the time ran with bear druids, despite you almost never seeing them because the bulk of players went prot pally/DK.

DPS was never an issue when it came to tanks (the tank not getting crit to death or crushed matters more). Utility was not a big deal because utility was spread out between classes, so it was a matter of whether you had X buff at all over whether you have the one class that can provide it. This game for the most part treats classes like they're shaman (who had a guaranteed raid slot because of Bloodlust/Heroism), and that's what's creating part of the problem. Hence why I'd personally want certain buffs/debuffs removed and focus more on mitigation styles and gameplay.

[Immut]

Get rid of tank stances, they're dumb. Except for warrior's stances because those actually DO something. No, an indefinite buff that has no effect on the order of the buttons you push is not 'doing something'. And grit takes away things to do so it's actually doing less than nothing. For that matter i'd get rid of Protect too. Fucking useless skill contributes nothing to gameplay.


Then buff enmity in other ways. Make sword oath and shield oath actual spells that last 30 seconds and do something along the lines of sword oath reducing your GCD or shield oath reflecting damage and increasing enmity for the duration, because you can just recast it if you have the mp at the cost of a gcd. Or even have sword oath increase enmity and shield oath reduce damage so you have to pick and choose. They'd be cost prohibitive though, like 1.6k mp or something. Then buff clemency, too. Really make a paladin's MP mean something. They wouldn't get to cast often but when they did you'd notice. Also shield swipe or even bash would put a 5s disable effect on the enemy. Yes you'd be able to spam it. But it costs 170 tp a go to do that.

Ideally the balance would be warrior does the most burst damage (berserk) with paladin at a close second with sword oath and dark knight coming in last with blood sword and fuckall else. But Dark Knight would have the highest sustain, followed by warrior, followed by paladin. Paladin's advantage would be the ability to unbusy the healers with strong defense and support skills so they can get a larger share of the dps. Kind of like how AST pawns most of its dps contribution off onto everyone else through card buffs.

[MagiusNecros]

You want Dark Knight to be weaker then Paladin?

[Immut]

You want Dark Knight to be weaker then Paladin?

Only in terms of burst. They don't get anything for burst damage as it is, it's not even a change really. They'd be like monk, high sustain low burst. Where paladin would be more like machinist. Much lower damage with support skills and enough burst to get you reliably through burn phases.

[The_NPC]

PLDs are... a but load of words saying I'm a moron.

okay noted never post on tank forums with an idea again due to massive "Salty-ness" at lest u understand why I came up with such a convoluded idea at shear random right? out of some desire to give PLD more dmg metigation while getting rid of Blind from Flash as it eather is imuine on players/mobs after 2 uses (or imuine anyway). & plz don't bother with a reply to this reply as I shall not reply to u'r reply to this reply

[Sephorai]

Make DRK a DPS class and replace it with SAM as a tank ._. Is what I'd do

[Il_Gatto_Nero]

After taking in what others have said and adding ideas of my own... part I

• Rather than manually turning off Grit and using Blood Weapon, if you use Blood Weapon with Grit on, Grit is turned off for you (I believe that forsaking Grit, and having to remember to reactivate it aftewards, is an intended and important tactical consequence of using Blood Weapon, but one button press rather than two would be nice).
  
• Delirium can be augmented with Dark Arts; with augmentation, it inflicts a magic vulnerability up debuff that lasts for 15 seconds in addition to the int down debuff; the magic vulnerability up debuff cannot be overwritten by Dragon Kick (but the int down debuff still can). If another DRK uses Dark Arts Delirium, the magic vulnerability up debuff neither stacks nor replenishes the timer.
  
• Dark Arts Dark Dance procs Reprisal in addition to the evasion buff

[Il_Gatto_Nero]

After taking in what others have said and adding ideas of my own... part II

• Dark Arts Souleater- in addition to the incrase in potency, it costs 50 additional MP (Dark Arts MP cost + 50) rather than TP, and can recover HP even when not in Grit. Also, the healing trait, IMO, needs to be adjusted to give a bit more than 100% HP recovery.
  
• When you run out of MP on Darkside, it starts consuming your HP, and all MP-based abilities start using your HP instead until you recover your MP
  
• Dark Arts Dark Passenger grants Silence instead of Blind.
  
• Scourge can be augmented with Dark Arts; with Dark Arts, in addition to the 30s DoT, a 15s physical vulnerability up debuff is cast. However, when used with Dark Arts, the DoT potency decrases, and Scourge itself goes on cooldown for 30 seconds.