Tank Balance

[Bourne_Endeavor]

but you are comparing this to other classes, when it should be on whether or not the job clears content.

In that case, they should never touch the jobs again. Everything can clear.

There is a stark difference between viability and balance. If certain jobs are superior to their counterparts people will be naturally inclined to favour those jobs, albeit with some exceptions (Machinist). Can Dark Knight clear Savage? Absolutely. It still has a harder time doing it while equally benefiting the group less. Now in more casual oriented groups, they aren't going to care. The higher up the totem pole you climb the more likely you'll come across people who value more than simply clearing. For myself, I use FFlogs as a silly little "achievement" system no different than PS4 Trophies. I reach say, 70, then try to best myself each week. That keeps Savage interesting for me (key word: me). Without it, I would simply get the gear I want and move on to something else. Granted, with Ultimate, I'll likely do that regardless.

I suppose the simple question to ask is: Why should Dark Knight mains just accept their job has inferior utility, DPS and mitigation tools? Should Samurai mains also enjoy the fact they offer absolutely nothing to their group and will soon be out-dpsed by Monk? People like to feel their job of choice contributes on a close enough playing field.

Ultimate is content so hard that barely 2k people or so have cleared it in NA. It shouldn't be used as any balance example pro or con, any more than RDM clearing floor 200 in POTD means we need to rebalance jobs too.

On a rare occasion, we agree. Hence why I find "but it cleared Ultimate!!" little more than a cop out.

[RiyahArp]

In that case, they should never touch the jobs again. Everything can clear. .

analogy incoming

Let's imagine we are all playing a side scroller, and there are four characters. They each have some differences, mostly tailored for different types of players. Like one is slightly slower but takes less damage, one is faster and takes more, one is taller, etc.

Now while they are different, you can beat the game with any of them if you try. If you work a bit at it, you can even beat the optional harder new game + after you beat the game once. People may like or prefer one over the other, but none are really too weak or too strong.

Now imagine people get bored with the game after beating it, and decide to speedrun it as fast as possible. Those little subtle differences suddenly matter a lot more to them. The faster character is better for them because speed is better than extra health, since you aren't going to get hit much anyways. The taller character can take shortcuts, which didn't matter as much when you played the game, but shave precious seconds off your time when speed running. The fourth character doesn't have any real utility for speed runs at all; he's all around average. Suddenly, you have a meta for speed running, since the only thing that matters is one aspect of the game; how fast you can beat it.

Would you think its ok for the dev to constantly listen to those speed runners and try to near perfectly balance every one of them for speed running? Even though the closer you get to it, the more impossible it is because the difference can be in a single second or less?

This is kind of like how people in FFXIV view some job changes. If you make a self-goal that really isn't designed explicitly in the game, and its above and beyond tuning the jobs to clear all the explicit content. you can't really call jobs that meet or fail this goal as unviable. The goal is far tighter and narrower than teh devs designed the game for, and balancing for that may be hard or impossible without destroying the ability of the jobs to be individual. You get to a point where you're tuning too tightly because the goal is too tight; in this case its a very strong parity that something like a nerf of 20-30 potency becomes a huge issue. The meta shifts from clearing the game on hard to something much harder to balance for.

I think there's only so much devs can do. Like people complain about red mages utility and damage, but the plus is red mage is a lot simpler job for players to play while still being potent enough to clear content. If you try to balance them around an ideal meta, you risk destroying this.

[Ghastly]

I just want them to know that I love the warrior changes, specially changing berserk to inner release and how I can use inner release in defiance (this was the one thing I always wished for). Warrior is my main class and I'm really happy with the changes, thank you.
Hopefully they fix dark knight for 4.25..

[Ayer2015]

If they made Dark Mind both physical and magic resistance, plus art arts making it party wide, I would be happy with DRK. Making Dark Passenger useful would be nice as well.
People make out DRK to be far worse than it is.

[HoodRat]

Its the whole stupid fflogs culture that focuses on raw numbers and ranking, and it leads to constant seesawing job change.

Most of the drk complaints I've seen have to do with qol for tbn and mitigation...so clearly fflogs is the problem right? /s

[RiyahArp]

Most of the drk complaints I've seen have to do with qol for tbn and mitigation...so clearly fflogs is the problem right? /s

is the lack of mitigation making drk not a viable class to play in savage? Or is it just its slightly worse than comparable abilities? Or, is it just that the mitigation it has tends to result in minor dps losses, and people want more OGCDS not because the mitigation is bad, but because they want higher dps overall?

It usually boils down to increased dps, more than serious qol issues. and its not because drk has very low dps, its just lower than the others. And usually, when you get that kind of mincing over minor differences, its fflogs and the whole "focus on raw numbers." If it were anything more, we'd be seeing jobs being kicked for being nonviable, or there's be no disagreement like in HW launch AST or MCH. I mean, I don;t think people even kick jobs in speedruns or farm parties; the balance isn't THAT off to do so even there. It's almost pure number crunching and potential theorycraft

[Rasikko]

Because Shadow Wall takes 400 years to be ready again.

[Ametrine]

The problem is lets assume the baseline of job balance is 50 points. This community generally freaks out when a job is at 47 or 53 points, despite that variation still enough to clear the hardest content in the game.

This is a good way of thinking about it, and I do feel every job in every role sits in this level of comparison now.

What we and the devs want, is for every job to be consumable by players of any taste and skill, and for ever job to be viable in all content. We have that. Quite a few buffs here are just QoL improvements. (I.E., the Excog and Benison changes.)

The only exception being something as obscure as PotD solo runs. Only RDMs can get to those final floors, but we also wanted RDMs to be the jack of all trades job when implemented, and that's what it is.

[Hruodig]

Eh. I've thought for a long time now that the development team has no clue what they want to do with tanks. From the vit/str change in midas, to back to str now, to questionable design decisions regarding magic vs physical damage in alexander, to complete re-hashes now? I stopped expecting anything.

[Lozza]

I'm confused about why SE is making the changes they do with tanks. They say they want to simplify the job and also reduced skill bloat but PLD still has a tonne of skills, sure you don't use all of them all the time but unlike warrior and dark knight there are no skills there that HAVE to be used in one stance or under a certain buff.

Warrior gets their stance specific skills auto swapping on their bar with stance changes, but dark knight doesn't. Warrior has just had even more skills squashed together. There seem to be some fairly quick QoL fixes they could make for dark knight but they just don't. It's hard to know whether SE expects tanks to be in tank stance to tank or if they are happy to have healers pushed to the max, healing tanks in dps stance or if they want stance dancing - remember they removed it for healers - they say they want to lift the skill floor but dark knight still seems tough to play verses the ease of PLD and WAR. Yet it's WAR that's getting sweeping changes.