Just because DRK cleared ultimate first doesn't mean it doesn't need buffs

[Awful]

WAR: Super offensive with minimal defenses and utility. Trades lots of defenses and utility for much more DPS gains. Excels as OT in farm parties, not so great in prog.

What...are you smoking? Seriously I want some of that because in HW they sacrificed their buffs like Vengeance and RI to get more stacks now they don't, you also don't know how War works if you're saying they suck in prog War is the tank that universally excels in all compositions.

[Ekimmak]

What...are you smoking? Seriously I want some of that because in HW they sacrificed their buffs like Vengeance and RI to get more stacks now they don't, you also don't know how War works if you're saying they suck in prog War is the tank that universally excels in all compositions.

I will say that WAR has the least defence against O2S, since practically every attack that matters cannot be parried, so RI is objectively useless. And they can wipe the raid if Inner Release is up during the Long Drop for tanks/healers.

Honestly just nitpicking, though. WAR is in a pretty good spot.

[SyzzleSpark]

OP's in-their-dreams niches are way too broad.

"The DPS tank", "The Prog Tank", "The Farm Tank" and "The Mitigation Tank" are not niches, those are entire markets on which no job has any business owning a monopoly, nor are these what we mean when DRK players ask to have a proper niche. Nothing so big as these, but also nothing so small as "that tank that has Dark Mind".

One button does not a niche make, and it also doesn't absolve the job of all of its many design flaws that have been present since 3.0. The difference is in 3.0 these were balanced out by considerable power in other areas. Literally all we are asking for is to get that power back. We weren't OP or unbalanced with that power in HW, we wouldn't be in SB either. SB took most of that away, and then buffed the other tanks, exacerbating the gap between them.

-NOT ENOUGH TO MAKE IT UNABLE TO CLEAR CONTENT!
-But enough to make the job inferior, and unfun to a LOT of people.
-And historically, this is enough to warrant changes.
-In fact, in a majority of cases, this is all that it took.

I see that there are people out there that are completely capable of understanding what we are asking for. So I know its possible.
Its not hard.
It really comes down to simply listening and not straw-manning every word that comes out of our mouths, or shouting us down and gaslighting us with "yeah you need some little tweaks but you're pretty well balanced" - no, we're not. Furthermore nobody EVER says what they mean by "little tweaks". Sometimes they mean a lot of really small buffs, which would be fine. Other people mean "just buff DP and then its fine". One could fix things, the other is no different from adding another 10 potency to Souleater or Bloodspiller.


We would like to be balanced. But we aren't. And wanting to be balanced does NOT = wanting homogenization or carbon copies of every toy that PLD/WAR has, and it also does not = believing that we are entirely unplayable or unable to clear content. But this is how we've been portrayed in the last week in particular, and it is supremely frustrating to be this misconstrued and misinterpreted by the community on top of being unable to get a response from SE acknowledging our feedback.

[Awful]

I will say that WAR has the least defence against O2S, since practically every attack that matters cannot be parried, so RI is objectively useless. And they can wipe the raid if Inner Release is up during the Long Drop for tanks/healers.

Honestly just nitpicking, though. WAR is in a pretty good spot.

RI isn't useless you can use it in Shake it Off making it strong for the Gravitational Waves, using it as a defensive CD yeah it loses it's usefulness in TBs but those are easily mitigated, and a good War knows not to use Inner Release during the long drop and it can save you too if it's up if you mess up too so it's still really good.

So really Wars toolkit still shits allover Drks as they bring more tools and damage there's literally no reason to bring a Drk over a War for the 2nd spot and that's the whole problem with the tank balance which has been expressed many times in this thread.

[Claire_Pendragon]

I will say that WAR has the least defence against O2S

I know its nitpicking, but they have the same option a DRK has.
-20% dmg taken + 20% hp.
(1 GCD and 1 oGCD)

the difference being WAR needs the hp healed, but can get into tank stance quicker, but has a slight DPS loss relying on IB.
(Of course they still have Holmgang, which is always under estimated with its short CD)

[Mithron]

I'm not saying that's what WAR is, but how I dream of its fantasy being. I do play WAR too, but I don't enjoy it as much as PLD or DRK. When I play WAR, I want to see my DPS above PLD/DRK but have clear trade offs for it. I want to feel like an axe wielding berserker who focuses much more on offense than defense. That's just how I always view WAR, despite whatever its ever been.

[Reynhart]

I want to feel like an axe wielding berserker who focuses much more on offense than defense. That's just how I always view WAR, despite whatever its ever been.

Does it bother anyone else that, lorewise, it's exactly what a WAR should not be ? They put so much emphasis that a WAR's main focus should be protecting his comrades and not let his rage overcome it to the point of going berserk ?

[Chrono_Rising]

Yes, especially since a Dark Knight is more in this style, while warrior was about controlling their inner beast.

[Crater]

I don't think it's a good idea to encourage the idea of any one tank being better or worse than the others at "damage" as a whole. You can easily balance DPS vs DPS vs DPS for the tanks in a way that makes them all equally powerful offensively while still maintaining unique offensive identities, because different "kinds" of damage offer different value to a group:

Burst damage should be weighted more heavily than sustained/total damage, because burst damage has additional utility for pushing phases/mechanics, synergizes better with most raid buffs, and becomes stronger as a fight has more uptime. Personal damage should be weighted more heavily than damage from raid buffs, because personal damage is more reliable and raid damage loses its effectiveness more easily.

If we leave raid buffs out of the conversation, it's very possible to balance all three tanks against each other, purely offensively, just by considering the value of burst versus sustained damage:

- Give WAR the highest burst damage, but the lowest total DPS at the end of a full encounter.
- Give DRK (or PLD) the highest total damage, but give them little to no burst, so their damage is nearly a flat line, but consistently high.
- Make PLD (or DRK) the in-between tank, with bursts that are strong but nowhere near WAR's burst, and total DPS that falls in between WAR and the other tank.

Balancing by painting with an overly broad brush (like "offense" or "defense" as a whole) tends to lead to situations where one tank is the best at the most important thing (typically damage), one tank gets to be the also-ran second place who gets the we-don't-want-an-LB-penalty consolation slot, and one tank is left out of the equation entirely.

Damage should be balanced against damage; defense should be balanced against defense; utility should be balanced against utility.


The biggest problem this game has with tank balance is that Warrior ends up having the highest burst damage, and the highest total damage, and they're the only tank with a (small) contribution to raid damage in that they have the Slashing debuff. They need to, at the very least, choose between giving WAR the best burst or the best overall DPS - not both. The damage should be balanced versus other damage.

The second biggest problem it's had since Stormblood is the one they introduced by giving Paladin all of the party-wide mitigation tools, and none to the other tanks. That might have been workable if they'd stuck to their guns on it, but now that they've kicked off an arms race with this Shake it Off buff, party mitigation can now fairly be considered a mandatory part of every tank's class kit, and they need to give DRK a viable competitor to those tools.

The third biggest problem is that they worked hard to break Paladin's reliance on specific incoming damage types when it comes to how effective their mitigation toolkit is, but they did nothing about Dark Knight's similar reliance on incoming magic damage (and in fact removed several of DRK's tools for mitigating physical damage, by axing Foresight, getting rid of Reprisal, and turning Dark Dance into a shitty cross-class skill you don't have room for), and to a much lesser extent left Warrior with a physical-only cooldown that shouldn't be. There are more than enough ways to balance mitigation tools without using damage type reliance (duration, cooldown, mitigation strength, shields/HP versus damage reduction, secondary effects/costs like Vengeance's damage reflection, Bulwark's RNG, Dark Mind's DA interaction, Raw Intuition's rear/flank auto-crit mechanic, Holmgang's root, Living Dead's healing requirement, Sheltron's single-hit limitation, IB/Holmgang's target requirement, Passage of Arms stopping your damage, etc), and so magic and physical requirements should be the exclusive realm of cross-role skills rather than parts of core job toolkits. Mitigation should be balanced against mitigation.

In all those cases, it's more than possible to balance the tanks against one another while staying like-for-like, and not trying to balance your offensive apples versus your defensive oranges versus your utility kumquats. That's the ideal that the game should be chasing.

[SyzzleSpark]

snip

Considering we have influential players like Xeno who, in the interview posted recently, is shouting from the rooftops that utility should be balanced with damage, I feel this is an up-hill battle. That being said I hope some feeble grasp of these concepts reaches more players.