Tank Balance Achieved?

[ovIm]

I don't mind the present tank balance so much as I do the discussion that surrounds it. "Utility" is a word that gets thrown about without any real definition, and really is just a catch-all phrase for "stuff on other tanks that I want but don't necessarily know if I'll even use." Most of the discussion of WAR's utility are thinly disguised attempts to convince the devs to buff the job back to it's former level of dominance. Maim isn't "utility", because NIN and SAM have slashing. Gap closers aren't "utility", even though players spent most of 3.x begging for it, because it's suddenly not good enough. Knockback-negation isn't "utility", because most people don't remember that it exists.

Utility Skills, strictly speaking, are beneficial skills that help the party. Back in 3.x, both WAR and DRK had extremely strong uncontested skills that were the reason why this combination was preferred.

WAR had Storms Path, and this is, I admit it, overly strong, because it reduces ANY amount of damage dealt by the boss by 10 (!!!) %. This was huge, as it reduces a lot of outgoing damage to the other players, easing the burden on everyone.

DRK had both reprisal (now a role skill) and the Delirium INT down debuff. Another thing that was huge if your party did not bring a monk, as that severly decresed the amount of magic damage a boss did. Again a tool to reduce outgoing damage to other players, easing a burden.
While PLD did have the STR reduce on halones, bear in mind that many a bosses did not utilize physical attacks for raid wide AoE attacks, making this skill less desireable. This is clearly a raid design issue however, not a class design one.

Both path and delirium are gone. Now, PLD has the only skills that reduce the amount of incoming damage. Which in itself is fine, really, however, with the balance changes to DRK and WAR DPS, this still puts PLD in a clear "must have" situation, something the devs wanted to avoid.

And yes, I know of TBN, however, that one is merely single target.


As for the other points:

Maim/Storms Eye is not utility, its synergy. It allowed NINs, PLDs and DRKs to dish out more damage, but only those classes in 3.x. I know its different now.
Gap closers are not beneficial to the group and as such, not the kind of utility we are talking about.
Also, PLDs strongest burst is a ranged magical attack, something he can even do when the boss does a PBAoE attack, which otherwise forces others to run for cover
Knockback-negation would be nice, if it wasnt half a gamble wether the current content would allow you to prevent knockback or wether the boss just pulls a Omega 1 and ignores that.

Cover and TBN are suddenly utility. Nobody cared about Cover for the past 4 years, and now that two tanks effectively have it, suddenly people are interested. And it's not even that the average WAR even wants this or knows how they'll use it. It's just being used as an excuse to buff the job. "Yeah, you have that er, bubble thingie, so we should do more dps." Right. I'll just go back to blowing bubbles at my teammates then. Look, I know that there are people out there really struggling with the new WAR compared to how it used to be in HW. That's kind of natural when new actions come out. Everyone is relearning their jobs. Nobody is playing optimally. We'll look back at some of the best players of this tier when our understanding of the jobs improves, down the line, and be surprised at all the mistakes that they're making. Opinions on what's hard or what's easy are meaningless if you don't haven't had enough time to master one job, let alone three.

Instead of "utility", I think that it's better to point to specific balance issues that you've noticed between the tanks. Is there a discrepancy in mitigation costs and self-healing on DRK compared to the other tanks? Is PLD's lack of a gap closer putting it at an uptime disadvantage on certain fights? Is there an imbalance of raid damage buffs on the three tanks? Raid mitigation buffs? These are specific questions that can be answered independently of each other, and tanks have advantages in some domains while being at a disadvantage at others.

At the very least, it'll dissuade the player-base from simply memeing the same catchphrases, and get them to actually think about tank balance and how to improve it across all three tanks.

Cover used to only really work for physical attacks. And it merely redirected the damage. Now, at level 70, cover also REDUCES the amount of damage someone else takes, effectively making it a CD for other classes.

I admit, the shock I had when I saw how much they changed the old WAR gameplay (something I really loved) to the new WAR gameplay (something I cant find fun, no matter how much I try), I was sad. Not because I am not king anymore, I dont care for that. But because I technically lost the class I was playing for over 3 years, gameplay that I inherited in flesh and blood, now gone because it was changed for the sake of change. But my own, sentimental feelings for the class I love are not getting on the way of critical thinking and understanding how the game works, how game, fight and class designs work, and how classes work with each other