Tank Balance Achieved?

[Lyth]

Here's a compilation of tank performance results for Deltascape so far.

The majority of the discussion on the forums has been on "utility" vs. damage. Utility is a catch-all phrase that is used to describe things which might benefit the group but doesn't necessarily translate directly into damage. The prevailing groupthink being that WAR has to strive oh-so-hard to compete with their PLD overlords' superior damage and utility.

But the figures show otherwise. WAR fairly comfortably outperforms the other two tanks across all skill levels on nearly every fight. A lot of this likely comes from the 4.05 changes, which revert most of the SB resource costs on WAR and then some. Gauge costs are even cheaper than they were in HW, while DRK has to pay large amounts of potency to access even their basic mitigation kit, let alone their "utility" skill.

Is the discrepancy balanced out by a single-target bubble which costs 25% of your resources and is a dps loss in the long term? Probably not.

What people subjectively report as "difficulty optimising" generally refers to the amount of skill investment required to produce an incremental gain in dps. In other words, the slope of the graph. This will largely depend on where you are on the graph. In general, these anecdotal reports aren't generally talking about how to get from the 90th to 99th percentile (which is where the slope is at its steepest).

...

The main problem that I have with the word "utility" in these discussions is that it's often used to describe things that often don't confer a benefit. I can shield a WAR with TBN on a tankbuster for 25% of my MP and a minor dps loss, but there's no point in doing so if they're more than capable of surviving on their own by having access to largest free mitigation suite in the game. It's fun, yes. If it's balanced as a dps gain (as it was in 4.01 for a whopping 4 potency per use), then it's just a personal dps gain, not utility.

The discussion of raid mitigation tools is a valid one that affects both WAR and DRK. I think that it would be less of an issue if PLD didn't have both Passage and Veil. But you also can't balance this against personal and raid dps boosts.

You can call 100% uptime buffs like Maim "synergy" or whatever cute phrases you like, but when they're mandatory for at least a quarter of your raid group, they still influence comp meta. Personally, I think that these should have been removed outright along with the old 100% raid mitigation buffs, like HW's Path and INT down buffs. This is not active synergy. You might as well make it a trait: 'Must bring one of these three jobs to enter instance'. The slashing buff was one of HW's major balance problems, and it still hasn't entirely gone away.

Pretty much any attempts that the devs made to rebalance WAR with the other two tanks at the start of SB has been reversed, and then some (now with even more Fell Cleave bot spam). The bigger issue, however, is the fact that they've shown a willingness to capitulate to the demands of an outspoken playerbase, and the loudest voice inevitably wins out. Don't like an ability? Complain about it and design a completely new one. Instead of seeing discussion on how to actually play the jobs better and tackle these supposedly 'difficult optimisations', we're instead inundated with Shake it off design contest threads.

It gets tiresome after a while, yeah?

[AdamZ]

Here's a compilation of tank performance results for Deltascape so far.

Hmm, think one issue you have, specifically on O4 (and a bit O3) is that the number of WAR's that have cleared are less then 25% of the number of DRK's or PLD. With the number of WAR clears so low, the skill level of these players could be very different from the overall pop.

O2 is good example of WAR skill, based on timing in that fight I am finding it much harder to optimize my windows compared to O1 where it is pretty much just follow rotation. If we look at that fight numbers are very close at all levels. You also run into issues if many WAR's are playing like HW, dps stance all day every day, while many DRK/Pally showing more willingness to sit in tank stance (Note I am not saying that is right, just something I see and feel is happening). Personally, I think that is why you only see the numbers of Pally/WAR matching after 80%.

[Lyth]

Bear in mind, WAR has no potency costs associated with changing stance, allowing you to reach the absolute minimum required stance uptime. On DRK, Grit costs 18% of your MP. TBN costs another 25%. If you wanted to DA DM, that's also 25%. It's easy to look at DRK and say "Oh, this looks pretty good for magic fights," but it actually ends up being fairly costly. Resource-based mitigation works only if you're doing intrinsically more dps at baseline. If you're paying potency on most of your defensive abilities just to mitigate and do less damage at baseline on top of that, it's easy to see why you're going to end up with lower dps at all percentiles. Some of this overly defensive play probably comes out of conserving resources to survive fight mechanics.

I think another factor in this is that Delirium and Blood Weapon require a lot of awareness of fight timings. It's easy to mistime these windows and just lose a bunch of dps without realising it. The key difference with SB is that HW's DRK told you outright when you played poorly. You'd lose Darkside, would get locked out of most of your abilities, and you'd probably wipe the group. SB isn't so obvious about this, and there's no strict rotation so it's often not clear when and where you're hemorrhaging dps.

[ovIm]

The main problem that I have with the word "utility" in these discussions is that it's often used to describe things that often don't confer a benefit. I can shield a WAR with TBN on a tankbuster for 25% of my MP and a minor dps loss, but there's no point in doing so if they're more than capable of surviving on their own by having access to largest free mitigation suite in the game. It's fun, yes. If it's balanced as a dps gain (as it was in 4.01 for a whopping 4 potency per use), then it's just a personal dps gain, not utility.

See, the thing is, as much as utility might or might not benefit a group, and I agree that PLD utility is situational and will become less and less required the better a fight is learned, the main discussion point here is balance. Balance is achieved when all things, added up, have a value that is about the same. The only differentiating factor between WAR/DRK and PLD are those few skills. That means PLD has something the others do not, and that puts him in a must have position, something we wanted to avoid. People bicker about this point because we are back in a 3.x situation that we did not want to have again. I was a WAR main and i absolutely despised the fact that not all combinations were perfectly viable, and that WAR was a must have OT in every raid. That made the game stale imho.

The discussion of raid mitigation tools is a valid one that affects both WAR and DRK. I think that it would be less of an issue if PLD didn't have both Passage and Veil. But you also can't balance this against personal and raid dps boosts.

You are absolutely right there, I agree with you. I think this is the general issue people have here, though it gets worded and filed under "utility".

You can call 100% uptime buffs like Maim "synergy" or whatever cute phrases you like, but when they're mandatory for at least a quarter of your raid group, they still influence comp meta. Personally, I think that these should have been removed outright along with the old 100% raid mitigation buffs, like HW's Path and INT down buffs. This is not active synergy. You might as well make it a trait: 'Must bring one of these three jobs to enter instance'. The slashing buff was one of HW's major balance problems, and it still hasn't entirely gone away.

Another point I agree with. There is no point to have "mandatory" debuffs to maintain, as that limits grouping options and favors some compositions over others. The slashing debuff they could have removed just as much as the int down debuff.

Pretty much any attempts that the devs made to rebalance WAR with the other two tanks at the start of SB has been reversed, and then some (now with even more Fell Cleave bot spam). The bigger issue, however, is the fact that they've shown a willingness to capitulate to the demands of an outspoken playerbase, and the loudest voice inevitably wins out. Don't like an ability? Complain about it and design a completely new one. Instead of seeing discussion on how to actually play the jobs better and tackle these supposedly 'difficult optimisations', we're instead inundated with Shake it off design contest threads.

Well, I have made an entire thread about what I think about Fell Cleave spam on WAR, but the tl;dr is that I think that IR reduced the WAR from a versatile tank to a class that spams fell cleaves, something I find extremely boring. Current DRK gameplay and proper usage of TBN is way more interesting and rewarding than getting ready to press 1 button 6 times imho, though it seems like SqEx is still unsure about wether TBN should be a personal gain or a loss.
The change to the stance dance penalty however was well required, and I am glad that the devs did listen to player feedback here. Of course I do hope that the devs dont just blindly follow the forums but evaluate player opinion, same as what happened with Mch back in 3.x (remember Yoshi-P saying "you are not playing the job right"?)

It gets tiresome after a while, yeah?

I understand what you mean. Currently, the forums are full of feedback and change proposal threads. However, that also means that the playerbase cares enough to spend their time doing this. I have only started posting on the forums because of SB, because I believe that with good feedback and positive thinking, you can assist the devs in finding issues that they might not have seen.

[SyzzleSpark]

seems like SqEx is still unsure about wether TBN should be a personal gain or a loss.

Just going off those graphs that Lythia posted, its clear they have plenty of room to allow it to be a personal gain.

[Lyth]

...

There are two problems with talking about "overall balance" when it comes to tanks. First, there are some things that you just can't do a proper comparison on. How does more frequent raid mitigation compare to higher raid dps? You can strike a balance between personal and raid dps, but when you add mitigation and self-healing to the mix, it becomes a comparison between apples and oranges.

Second, as a tank, you can't afford to fall too far behind in any one area. It's possible to be overpowered in one domain and underpowered in another. They tried this with the "physical tank" and "magical tank" in HW, but it just encouraged players to swap jobs on a fight-by-fight basis.

There are a few different domains in which need to be balanced independently: raid dps, personal mitigation, raid mitigation, and self-sustain.

With regards to TBN, I don't think the devs are specifically balancing around it. The value of TBN depends on the relative potency of Bloodspiller to that of your average combo action. Make Bloodspiller more powerful, and TBN becomes more powerful. Make combo actions more powerful, then TBN becomes less so. What happened over the past two patches is this: in 4.01, Bloodspiller was buffed out of Grit. This made it a dps gain on average. In 4.05, SE was buffed. This made it a dps loss on average. In both patches, it is never a consistent gain or loss, either, as it depends on which GCD combo action it replaces.

What probably happened was this. The devs created an ability which blocks an attack for either yourself or a friend. And when the shield shatters, you launch into a counterattack! That feels pretty fun! And they probably didn't think about it a whole lot further.

The problem is that most of DRK's new actions are interrelated, so flat potency gains just shift around your priorities, rather than giving you the needed dps boost. DRK's issues at the moment are resource related, rather than potency related. That's why the Quietus change made such a fantastic difference to DRK's AoE gameplay. MP is potency. Blood is potency.