Not again...

[Poison_Rose]

I'm really hoping they just nerf the potency and don't fuck with the cast time because oGCDs isn't even the biggest loss of being forced into a 2s+ cast. It's movement. Even on easy shit like Susanoo, half of my Requiescat windows line up with mechanics. Also, that's a longer time for which you're unable to block.

A potency nerf would be better than extending the cast time, we're in agreement there. Even if they do extend the cast time you could still slidecast it but let me tell you screwing that up would feel even worse since you'd be sitting there for that much longer only to mess it up by moving too soon.

Of course I'd rather them not do either, but apparently that's what's happening.

[Kacho_Nacho]

Holy magic boi

*snerk* "Boi."

I'm old enough to be a lot of players grandfather.

I suppose "holy magic" could increase an individual's damage and then you have to consider the effects of one's piety on that damage. Meanwhile, someone else is showing up with all this angsty, dark magic... In the end, I guess all the magics would all cancel each other out and we'd see a bright flash and a melted patch in the carpet.

[FallenWings]

Drg Sam are there for that. Play one.

"If you wanna DPS so much, roll DPS."

"Oh noes why is no one playing tanks."

[SyzzleSpark]

snip

Well here's the thing, they took 90% of WAR and DRK's utility away and they're highly unlikely to just hand it back over. I think most DRK/WAR mains understand this and so they're asking for potency buffs instead, or mechanical changes to make said potency easier to output. So assuming all tanks do the same damage, PLD has all these toys that benefit your raid, and the others have... TBN and a redundant slashing debuff... and now we're back to square one. With all the bells and whistles that they added to PLD, WAR and DRK could have easily kept Reprisal and Path and they would have been balanced. But they didn't, and moreover, they no longer even have a DPS advantage so... what are they gonna do, give them Trick Attack clones? Then you'd be back to HW and PLD would be benched. *shrug*

Many people think utility and damage should be balanced, and not just casual/MC folks either, I cite the most recent SOTR for reference.

[Lyth]

Syz, I don't want PLD to sit on all of the raid mitigation tools. Between Passage, Veil, and Reprisal, PLD has a raid mitigation move up every 30 seconds. That's double the amount of any tank. Passage on its own is more powerful than either Sacred Soil or Collective Unconcious, which are the big healer raid mitigation cooldowns. I don't want to see Hallowed Ground be used to cheese mechanics that other tanks cannot.

I don't WAR to sit on the only tank raid dps boost. If slashing is 'redundant', then why is it still on WAR? There are 126 different combinations of DPS that you can take. 35 of these involve neither a NIN or SAM. That's roughly 30% of compositions which simply aren't possible with a PLD/DRK comp. I don't want to see WAR have access to the largest suite of defensive cooldowns, most of which are on the shortest possible recasts. I don't want to see WAR have a clear cut advantage in both personal and raid dps, as it did in 3.x.

In short, if you balance raid mitigation against self-healing against personal mitigation against utility against raid/personal dps, you set yourself up for balance problems. If you give one tank a solution to a problem which no other tank has a solution for, then that tank becomes mandatory whenever that problem comes up. Every single balance problem that we've had with tanks and healers over the past two years can be traced back to this type of decision-making. You cannot balance the tanks without treating each of these domains separately. Which is why they haven't yet successfully balanced the tanks.

[SyzzleSpark]

I don't WAR to sit on the only tank raid dps boost. If slashing is 'redundant', then why is it still on WAR? There are 126 different combinations of DPS that you can take. 35 of these involve neither a NIN or SAM. That's roughly 30% of compositions which simply aren't possible with a PLD/DRK comp. I don't want to see WAR have access to the largest suite of defensive cooldowns, most of which are on the shortest possible recasts. I don't want to see WAR have a clear cut advantage in both personal and raid dps, as it did in 3.x.

You're right, but at the moment, NIN and SAM are probably the two most popular melee DPS. Perhaps I'm wrong, but those 30% of compositions seem like they would be not just suboptimal but undesirable currently.

In short, if you balance raid mitigation against self-healing against personal mitigation against utility against raid/personal dps, you set yourself up for balance problems. If you give one tank a solution to a problem which no other tank has a solution for, then that tank becomes mandatory whenever that problem comes up. Every single balance problem that we've had with tanks and healers over the past two years can be traced back to this type of decision-making. You cannot balance the tanks without treating each of these domains separately. Which is why they haven't yet successfully balanced the tanks.

I agree in theory. Its just that like I said, SE is far more likely to just tweak numbers rather than add new abilities or return old ones, historically, for better or for worse. People tend to make requests based on what they believe is likely to be satisfied/fulfilled.

Inb4 someone runs in here screaming "HOMOGENIZATION HNNNHHNGGG"

[Spiroglyph]

I really, REALLY don't understand this mindset where people believe no job should even be nerfed :/

No, okay, I lied.
I kind of get it.
People with a certain main that is currently in the spotlight for that certain role don't want to see their job changed, they want it to be relevent and good and AWESOME. I don't blame you for it, really, although I don't main any of the three tanks I do main a job that saw some serious nerfing in SB and as it had been amazing in HW, obviously I was not overly happy.

Please undertand though, that simply buffing and keep on buffing all jobs until they're equal could just create more problems than it's worth.

A tank with awesome survivability AND topdps at the same time like WAR was back in HW? I mean, okay, it was a thing to behold, but you can't simply buff up other tanks to its level. It would mess up not only the TANK balance but it would also drag in other roles: DPS crying about tanks having too much utility and them being redundant. tanks being shunned for not stance dancing because they're supposed to DPS because they're able to pull amazing numbers and so THEY HAVE to stance dance, etc.

A healer with too potent heals? Let's just amp up all other healer classes to HW level where they could just DPS all the damn time. Dude, as much as I like to help out and DPS, it gets boring.

A DPS with too high numbers? Well, let's increase potencies and reduce skill costs for all other DPS jobs so stuff can be burnt down so quick you won't have time to sneeze midfight anymore or risk it being over

The above examples are obvious exaggerations, but I hope I was able to make a point somewhat?
Buffing all jobs in certain role won't mess ONLY with the dynamics of that role - it will mess with other roles as well, and will implicate that BESIDES the role changes all other content would have to be revised so teams won't be too OP to clear stuff with literally no challange.

... and let's be honest, that's such a minor change I wouldn't even consider it a nerf...

tl;dr: can't just keep on buffing up classes, my dude, there'd cease to be an actual point in like, running content lmao

[Lyth]

...

I'm not so sure. The change to Shake it off indicates that they're at least willing to rework existing abilities to introduce in new effects.

Homogenisation only ever seems to be an issue when players want to keep an imbalanced status quo. People always cite the "X has superior design. Don't nerf X, buff Y to its level," meme, but when pressed on implementing the changes, the homogenisation card comes out. Let's not remove the GCD penalty or stance change resource costs from all tanks. That would make us homogenised. By the way, why can't we have a gap closer? Please fix. Okay, now that we have a gap closer, I don't like the resource costs on Onslaught. Why can't it have no resource costs like Plunge except be on half the recast? This ability is useless!

Some degree of variation is good, but you still need to be able to answer the same problem set. If not, you run into situations where you must bring X for a given fight, which forces players to switch mid-tier, instead of simply using the job's skillset to clear. Nobody wants that.

[Gravton]

Another point that I haven't seen brought up is the sheer amount of mitigation pld provides while not even tanking. Rampart + intervention, sentinel + intervention, enhanced cover, reprisal, Devine veil, passage of arms. That's more mitigation than the other 2 tanks have to use on themselves. All of this mitigation for a main tank while we off tank. With current hp climbs this ensures both tanks have 100% uptime in dps stance. This slight hit to our individual dps is a nothing burger, party dps overal will still be higher with a pld present. Super savage will also gaurentee a slot for pld.

[Tanathya]

SE leave PLD alone, it's fine, just buff WAR and DRK!

They always do this, instead of just buffing the struggling jobs they also nerf the one that's doing fine and end up reversing the situation!

While I agree with you in what they use to do, we all should rejoice, as that adjustment won't really be a nerf. I don't think they're gonna increase Holy Spirit's casting time dramatically, to be honest. Now, what I would do is remove the Gauge cost of stance changing throughout all of the tanks and not just WAR.