Paladin too overpowered, nerf their damage output!

[Lyth]

Two weeks ago, I posted a comparison of tank dps. You can find those results here. This is the present situation, two weeks later:

As you can see, not too much has changed. PLD seems to have the potential to edge out WAR on V2S when both jobs are performed more optimally (possibly due to the high uptime and relative lack of movement), but WAR has a fairly consistent advantage when it comes to dps across the board.

I wish that I had done a formal comparison of the tanks on the Ex Primals prior to 4.05, but I remember that prior to the WAR buffs, WAR and DRK were on a fairly even footing. The Storm's Path potency buff does not explain the difference post patch. I think the biggest factor here is that, by removing the stance swapping costs on WAR as well as the costs for IR/Unchained while leaving all of DRK's stance swapping penalties intact (not just the MP cost, but the costs associated with truncating BW/BP), the devs have created a fairly sizeable imbalance between the tanks. The gap has slightly narrowed since two weeks ago on earlier fights as tanks' stance uptime drops to zero, but it's much wider on later fights.

I don't think PLD is the problem here. It's actually sitting at a fairly healthy middle ground.

The things that make pld really powerful are the utilities, and the "easy" unpunishing rotation where war is has the strictest and most punishing rotation..

I know that there are a lot of factors that influence players' subjective perception of difficulty. If someone only played WAR in HW, with its relatively simple resource management, I could see how they would struggle with the pre-4.05 changes. In truth, from following the dev interviews pre-SB, it sounds like the stance cost was intended to prevent WAR from being too overly flexible relative to the other two tanks (i.e. to bring WAR into line with everyone else following HW's dominance.)

But after 4.05's revision and reversions, I really don't see it. If anything, looking at how dps varies with percentile, there's a much smaller dps discrepancy between playing WAR skillfully and playing it poorly. Which was sort of the point of the job system changes: to narrow the performance gap between players. Objectively, as far as the performance data goes, it appears to be the least punishing tank.

I think if you stack more WAR buffs on top of this situation, you're going to end up with a very unbalanced meta, especially if Shake it Off's planned rework ends up significantly bolstering WAR's raid utility on top of its dps advantage. As it is, nothing has really changed from HW, except that you've just swapped in PLD for DRK for the second spot.

[aleph_null]

I know that there are a lot of factors that influence players' subjective perception of difficulty. If someone only played WAR in HW, with its relatively simple resource management, I could see how they would struggle with the pre-4.05 changes. In truth, from following the dev interviews pre-SB, it sounds like the stance cost was intended to prevent WAR from being too overly flexible relative to the other two tanks (i.e. to bring WAR into line with everyone else following HW's dominance.)

But after 4.05's revision and reversions, I really don't see it. If anything, looking at how dps varies with percentile, there's a much smaller dps discrepancy between playing WAR skillfully and playing it poorly. Which was sort of the point of the job system changes: to narrow the performance gap between players. Objectively, as far as the performance data goes, it appears to be the least punishing tank.

Hmm, point taken. I guess it's less about punishing but more about strict and complex when it comes to optimizing war rotation. Admittedly even I found that optimizing infuriate outside berserk and naked fell cleave vs multiple onslaughts to be too much hassle and risk for what they reward. Going with the obvious "infuriate only in berserk" would still put you at a really high place in terms of dps (I'd say easily above 95% fflogs, but I don't play war much anymore so I can't claim it).

For progression, where you may often end up in situations where you want to switch back to tank stance, war is definitely the least punishing tank though, thanks to the lack of penalty from switching stance. I feel that while losing half of gauge from switching stance is somewhat too punishing, not losing anything makes other tanks' stance switch comparatively too punishing (gcd loss, mp loss). I'd rather see all tank stances reworked to be ogcd and rebalanced, but that's for another discussion.

[Starkbeaumont]

Interesting graphs. Does this consider just OT or just MT? or either position? I guess most DRKs will be MT anyway.

Since TBN isn't much utility (not even a personal DPS gain out of grit), going by those observations DRK would need quite a damage boost or at least equal utility as PLD (and we all know that won't happen).

[aleph_null]

Interesting graphs. Does this consider just OT or just MT? or either position? I guess most DRKs will be MT anyway.

Since TBN isn't much utility (not even a personal DPS gain out of grit), going by those observations DRK would need quite a damage boost or at least equal utility as PLD (and we all know that won't happen).

It's fflogs percentiles graph so it considers both MT and OT, which is probably why war is easily above the other two at lower percentiles since many people are still stuck with the war OT pld/drk MT mindset (which is completely wrong, since pld is absolutely the best OT right now).