What is the General Consensus?

[TouchandFeel]

Data:
War>Pld>Drk

Forum 'concensus':
War>>Pld>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Drk

While it is true that there is often a penchant for exaggeration, which is not at all confined to DRK players or discussion about that job with the pre-SiO change WAR discussions being a perfect example, however I don't feel that it is quite the way you paint it.

If I were to portray it in the same format as you, I would say a more accurate image would be as follows:

DPS
WAR>PLD>DRK

Mititgation
WAR=PLD>DRK

Utility
PLD>WAR>DRK

Overall
WAR=PLD>>>DRK

I feel this is more accurate because, as you said, DRK is behind in every category. It may arguably be by only a bit in each category, but that bit in every category adds up to a greater overall dearth in performance. Get enough grains of sand together and you have a desert.

As far as the "loudness" of complaints, many tried the more measured approach and all it lead to was being ignored by the devs and being drowned out by others complaining about other jobs much louder and then getting heard and addressed.
Can you really fault people that have been shown that being overly vocal and hyperbolic with complaints gets you what you want, for then doing just that to avoid being ignored or drowned out by others.
It may not be what I would personally prefer, but I certainly understand why many DRK feel they have to speak out this way to be heard.

[Aana]

While it is true that there is often a penchant for exaggeration, which is not at all confined to DRK players or discussion about that job with the pre-SiO change WAR discussions being a perfect example, however I don't feel that it is quite the way you paint it.

If I were to portray it in the same format as you, I would say a more accurate image would be as follows:

DPS
WAR>PLD>DRK

Mititgation
WAR=PLD>DRK

Utility
PLD>WAR>DRK

Overall
WAR=PLD>>>DRK

I feel this is more accurate because, as you said, DRK is behind in every category. It may arguably be by only a bit in each category, but that bit in every category adds up to a greater overall dearth in performance. Get enough grains of sand together and you have a desert.

As far as the "loudness" of complaints, many tried the more measured approach and all it lead to was being ignored by the devs and being drowned out by others complaining about other jobs much louder and then getting heard and addressed.
Can you really fault people that have been shown that being overly vocal and hyperbolic with complaints gets you what you want for then doing just that to avoid being ignored or drowned out by others.
It may not be what I would personally prefer, but I certainly understand why many DRK have to speak out this way to be heard.

My only comment is that yes drk is behind in all 3 categories, but DPS is the only category that matters in shaping the meta. Pld was also considered trash tier last expac even though it had awesome mitigation and utility out the wazoo. DPS is the only measure that actually shapes the meta and why I don't give drk a multiplier effect on being worse.

I didn't mean to imply the 'loudness' is an exclusive Drk trait. Wars have been loud. Plds have been loud. Blm has been loud. (insert job in FFXI) is loud. Zerg, Terran and Protoss have been loud. Every suboptimal thing ever in a game has cried out at the injustice of being 2% lower than the meta equivalent for as long as forums have existed.

Drk have legit issues. Just like every class that has ever spent time on the bottom of the meta dogpile. And just like all non-meta things that came before and after them, they are obscenely loud about it.

[kashi11]

I feel like I would be more okay, but still not okay, with being last in every category, if DRK a more useful toolkit and more interesting playstyle. Too many of our abilities are just flat out not useful. And we already have only 1 combo.

Don't forget DRK is also the weakest in sustaining enmity, they rely on other players for shirks and shadewalkers to stay ahead effectively depending on party comp and comparative ilvls.

[InfiniDragon]

Drk have legit issues. Just like every class that has ever spent time on the bottom of the meta dogpile. And just like all non-meta things that came before and after them, they are obscenely loud about it.

To be fair, DRK players tried constructive criticism at the start, and only started being the Tri-State Pop Off Champions when they saw how well it worked for WAR and BLM. The DRK players thought they were being ignored and started the loud hyperbole and memes to get the attention, just like the other non-meta jobs as you mentioned.

[Dzian]

Warrior makes my paladin cry..

Vengance 30% shield for 15 seconds with a 120s recast. And it throws damage back at mobs..
Sentinel 40% shield for 10 seconds with a 180s recast...

The extra 10% mitigation just ain't worth a full extra minute on it's cool down imo. Sentinal should be like 120 second cooldown.

Similar thing with bulwark and raw intuition. Bulwark is another 180s cool down when raw intuition is 90s. Not to mention raw intuition is 100% parry compared to a 60% block.. though shelltron is pretty bloody sweet for that. But I still think sentinel and bulwark could both lose 60 seconds on there recast

[Chrono_Rising]

Data:
War>Pld>Drk

Forum 'concensus':
War>>Pld>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Drk

War does most DPS. Pld a smidge behind war. Drk a smidge behind pld. Each by a couple % in damage.

Pld/War mitigation kits are solid and jockey for 1st based on how much a war is in tank stance. Drk is behind by X amount in mitigation (depending on how its measured. Its an inexact science) but still has enough mitigation to be effective in all content.

Group support: Pld by miles>War (shake it off)> Drk TBN. While nice, are not nearly as important as the volume on official forums suggests.

Drk is behind by a bit in every category that matters, but only by relatively small amounts. It's entirely usable. Just not optimal. But anything that is even a fraction of a % suboptimal is always slammed as 'useless', 'unplayable', 'broken' and 100 other hyperbolic terms.

There is truth to much of the forum complaints. But the extreme loudness exaggerates them on every count.

We are undervaluing these defensive utilities.

o5s: Cover and tempered will keeps your cotank on the boss. Shields from shake it off and divine veil make it so you can keep melee on the boss for head on.

o6s: Party shields make it so you can have the ranged take the stack mechanic by themselves freeing up hollowed ground for covering ground aoes on melee increasing uptime for the party.

o7s: Party shields save healer GCD's and can be alternated in a Divine veil and SiO pattern. Covering prey targets reduces healer babysitting on dps reducing the tank babysitting to regen. Passage of arms keeps the party closer for the boss beam at no dps loss increasing uptime.

o8s: Covering Hyperdrives reduces tick damage so it can be covered by a regen, covering a ranged for double wings increases cotank uptime during trick attack windows. Divine veil and shake it off alternate on Foresakens and light of judgement to save dps, and reduce healing GCDs. Intervention saves cotank mitigation giving more flexibility in handling mechanics.

Defensive utility is absolutely a big thing. Can healers and the party adjust having a dark knight? Sure. But why? This isn't just a meta crisis, this is a "is there a reason to bring a dark knight" crisis. Monk isn't a meta class, but there are reasons you might want to bring a monk. Some have pointed out that dark knights have mitigation for every attack, while true I haven't run into this issue on paladin either and feel I mitigate more than what I would do on dark knight. Maybe warrior runs dry from time to time, but you have your paladin there to share their mitigation with them.

Take everything all together and you are mitigating for less, costing your healers more GCDs healing you and your party, costing your group dps from healers, losing uptime for melees, and doing what still appears to be slightly less damage than the other two tanks. As others have said before me, each thing is little on its own, but a little here, a little there, and a little over there can add up to alot.

[Aana]

We are undervaluing these defensive utilities.

o5s: Cover and tempered will keeps your cotank on the boss. Shields from shake it off and divine veil make it so you can keep melee on the boss for head on.

o6s: Party shields make it so you can have the ranged take the stack mechanic by themselves freeing up hollowed ground for covering ground aoes on melee increasing uptime for the party.

o7s: Party shields save healer GCD's and can be alternated in a Divine veil and SiO pattern. Covering prey targets reduces healer babysitting on dps reducing the tank babysitting to regen. Passage of arms keeps the party closer for the boss beam at no dps loss increasing uptime.

o8s: Covering Hyperdrives reduces tick damage so it can be covered by a regen, covering a ranged for double wings increases cotank uptime during trick attack windows. Divine veil and shake it off alternate on Foresakens and light of judgement to save dps, and reduce healing GCDs. Intervention saves cotank mitigation giving more flexibility in handling mechanics.

Defensive utility is absolutely a big thing. Can healers and the party adjust having a dark knight? Sure. But why? This isn't just a meta crisis, this is a "is there a reason to bring a dark knight" crisis. Monk isn't a meta class, but there are reasons you might want to bring a monk. Some have pointed out that dark knights have mitigation for every attack, while true I haven't run into this issue on paladin either and feel I mitigate more than what I would do on dark knight. Maybe warrior runs dry from time to time, but you have your paladin there to share their mitigation with them.

Take everything all together and you are mitigating for less, costing your healers more GCDs healing you and your party, costing your group dps from healers, losing uptime for melees, and doing what still appears to be slightly less damage than the other two tanks. As others have said before me, each thing is little on its own, but a little here, a little there, and a little over there can add up to alot.

Pld had nearly all off that available in 3.0 and a greater stranglehold on knockbacks as there was not a plethora of anti-knockback actions. They have been defensive powerhouses for ages and had more utility than every other tank at all stages of 14 history. Yet still it has both risen and fallen based on DPS. Healers and parties sure didn't seem to mind having to 'adjust' without plds in the past. If Drk/war did significantly more damage than Pld/X they would again. Utility has a non-zero benefit obviously, but it pales in comparison to DPS when defining the meta in this game. The meta will drop utility like a hot potato if they can grab more damage in its place. This has born out in history for both DPS, healers and tanks. Utility always takes a backseat based on this games setup. It is not of zero value, but it is, unarguably, much less value than DPS.

The thread asked 'whats the general concensus of tanks'. I really have 1 have (failed) to explain that my simple statement to answer that.

CURRENTLY: Drk is weaker than War/Pld, but the degree of weakness is exaggerated on the forums.

I don't think that is a statement many would disagree with. We can quibble over the 'how weak' and to 'what degree' but I don't think theres much room for discussion that 1: Drk is weakest. 2: Forums claim drk is weaker than reality. What is forever under debate is the delta between those 2 as the only thing we can factually measure is DPS thanks to mountains of data on FFLogs. But utility and mitigation are forever fuzzy and shifting items.

To be fair, DRK players tried constructive criticism at the start, and only started being the Tri-State Pop Off Champions when they saw how well it worked for WAR and BLM. The DRK players thought they were being ignored and started the loud hyperbole and memes to get the attention, just like the other non-meta jobs as you mentioned.

Saying that Drks are loud isn't an insult. Its just a fact. It is also a fact that every non-meta/disenfranchised group online will have an extremely loud group fighting for change. You can say "But Drk is different. We tried being polite. It worked for X group. Etc" But the fact is, its the exact same lines said by every lower tier group in every game since forums existed. That doesn't make you better or worse than them, just some perspective. In a game someone is always on bottom as perfect balance doesn't exist. Whoever that is will complain, loudly, about it. Right now its Drks. 3.0 was Plds. Next year it will be X. Year after that Y. Its how games that patch over time go. Things will eventually change for better and worse if you play long enough. My only reason fro bringing it up was to support my base statement. Drk is weak. Forum loudly exaggerates how weak (just like most every weak/non-meta group in a game forum). Not to try to 'call out drks'.

[Saeno]

Pld had nearly all off that available in 3.0 and a greater stranglehold on knockbacks as there was not a plethora of anti-knockback actions. They have been defensive powerhouses for ages and had more utility than every other tank at all stages of 14 history. Yet still it has both risen and fallen based on DPS. Healers and parties sure didn't seem to mind having to 'adjust' without plds in the past. If Drk/war did significantly more damage than Pld/X they would again. Utility has a non-zero benefit obviously, but it pales in comparison to DPS when defining the meta in this game. The meta will drop utility like a hot potato if they can grab more damage in its place. This has born out in history for both DPS, healers and tanks. Utility always takes a backseat based on this games setup. It is not of zero value, but it is, unarguably, much less value than DPS.

You're forgetting to mention that 3.0 WAR and DRK had better utility than 3.0 PLD thanks to Storms Path, Delirium and Reprisal. DRK and WAR had enough utility but they also did more damage. That's why DRK/WAR meta was a thing.

In fact im willing to go as far as saying Delirium, Reprisal and Storms path were the biggest reason why you took DRK and WAR. So yes, utility is a big thing.

[Chrono_Rising]

Pld had nearly all off that available in 3.0 and a greater stranglehold on knockbacks as there was not a plethora of anti-knockback actions. They have been defensive powerhouses for ages and had more utility than every other tank at all stages of 14 history. Yet still it has both risen and fallen based on DPS.

This completely ignores all context of Heavensward to try and prove a point that is utterly ridiculous. Lets fill it in here so that we have some semblance of reality left.

Cover: redirected physical damage only in HW. In SB this was turned into redirecting physical and magical damage and mitigating it at 20%.

Divine Veil: This existed in heavensward. So why is it good now and horrible back then? Because it was a 10% shield every 2 minutes. What did this compete with? 10% magical mitigation up 100% of the time, 10% damage down which could be kept up as much as you want, and another 10% damage down in the form of reprisal that you could get up 50 to 60% of the time. Yes, Paladin also brought a strength down on its aggro combo, but to put that up meant giving away damage, it didn't make sense to use this.

Thats all the utility that paladin had, one was useless and buffed to usefulness. The other was completely obliterated by dark knight and warrior. Divine veil is useful now that those skills are out of the game/role actions for all tanks.

Defensive options. Yes Hollowed was still OP. But the meta back then was to have your warrior OT as much of the fight as possible and push your main tank to mitigate the majority of the damage unless you wanted to use HG. Paladin could only block physical damage, saddly the majority of tank busters were magical. This mean paladin had only 2 defensive options while dark knight brought 3, one of which was on an extremely short cooldown that could be boosted to shadow wall levels of defense (this was the time before we had to dark arts every weapon skill). Dark Knight was heads and shoulders above paladin in magical fights, which was most of heavensward, and did fine in physical fights thanks to things like reprisal dark dance and other cooldowns.

Healers and parties sure didn't seem to mind having to 'adjust' without plds in the past.

Yes, because when you put it in context of the skills dark knight and warrior brought, you realize that healers didn't mind adjusting because the adjusting meant healing less and getting more damage from your tanks. The two tanks bringing the most damage also brought the best utilities. Like now only the names have changed.

If Drk/war did significantly more damage than Pld/X they would again. Utility has a non-zero benefit obviously, but it pales in comparison to DPS when defining the meta in this game. The meta will drop utility like a hot potato if they can grab more damage in its place. This has born out in history for both DPS, healers and tanks. Utility always takes a backseat based on this games setup. It is not of zero value, but it is, unarguably, much less value than DPS.

Except that it doesn't, your appeal to "reality" here isn't backed up. There are several reasons why:

(1) We haven't had a time when tank dps and defensive utilities were balanced against eachother: I.e. Higher damage means lower utilities and higher utilities means lower damage.

(2) This isn't true for the dps meta. The highest hitting classes aren't taken over those which provided direct damage utilities.

(3) This isn't true for healers where astro is within the meta despite being the weakest damaging healer by a significant margin compared to white mage.

Utility wins, every single class in the meta brings a utility (either direct damage or defense utilities: read healer dps utilities). While it is very nice that you agree that dark knight is probably the weakest of the three, I find it disingenuous that you sit here telling people how much they should be complaining or how loudly they should complain while posting context free (and therefore misleading) factoids that don't represent the actual situation at the time. I'm not disagreeing with your conclusions that maybe people over state things, but having your constant detraction of "it isn't that bad" in every thread is really less than helpful after 10 months of complaints have gone unanswered.

[Aana]

Except that it doesn't, your appeal to "reality" here isn't backed up. There are several reasons why:

(1) We haven't had a time when tank dps and defensive utilities were balanced against eachother: I.e. Higher damage means lower utilities and higher utilities means lower damage.

(2) This isn't true for the dps meta. The highest hitting classes aren't taken over those which provided direct damage utilities.

(3) This isn't true for healers where astro is within the meta despite being the weakest damaging healer by a significant margin compared to white mage.

Utility wins, every single class in the meta brings a utility (either direct damage or defense utilities: read healer dps utilities). While it is very nice that you agree that dark knight is probably the weakest of the three, I find it disingenuous that you sit here telling people how much they should be complaining or how loudly they should complain while posting context free (and therefore misleading) factoids that don't represent the actual situation at the time. I'm not disagreeing with your conclusions that maybe people over state things, but having your constant detraction of "it isn't that bad" in every thread is really less than helpful after 10 months of complaints have gone unanswered.

"This isn't true for the dps meta. The highest hitting classes aren't taken over those which provided direct damage utilities. " I just said that damage dealt is the number 1 factor. When people talk about tank 'utility' (I know this term gets thrown around a lot so lets be clear what I'm talking about) it is usually in the context of veil, shake it off, TBN, cover, etc. Defensive utilities. That is how I was using the term. Forgive the confusion in syntax.

Trick attack is not a 'utility' skill in this context. When I say damage defines the meta that includes skills like trick attack. Like sch speed buffs. Brd: Magic damage up is damage. Removing a debuff would be 'utility' in my eyes. Utility gets thrown around a LOT but this is what I mean when I talk about utility skills. Maybe a better term is 'support' skills. Whatever, you get the point.

So when I say damage defines the meta, I mean exactly that. Trick attack is a strong, meta defining skill (read: Damage). Cover is not (read defensive). The meta has very consistently been the combination of jobs that provides the most damage. Drk/War provided the most damage in HW. Right now Drg/Nin provides the most damage. If Sam/Mnk brought more total raid damage to the table than Drg/Nin it would be meta. Mnk has only been meta in the past when it did the most damage. When it has fallen behind it was promptly kicked regardless of having (defensive) utility of mantra. While it was in the meta it was praised for mantra, but conveniently overlooked that it also provided the most damage. Remember double mnk combos? Triple melee+mch combo? All Brd combos in 2.0? Whatever gets the damage done.

As you stated. Combos with the most damage and utility are 'usually' meta. However, combos that provide the HIGHEST damage are ALWAYS meta. All squares are rectangles, not all rectangles are squares. Sure, drk/war had path/reprisal. They also crapped all over pld damage. However, Pld/War was also meta at 4.0 before shake it off existed and Drk actually had more defensive utility than war. (war had zero. Drk had TBN) because it did more damage. There has never been a time in FFXIV history that the combinations of jobs that did the most damage was NOT the meta. Many of those times overlap high defensive utility combos, but not all. The single constant is that Raid Damage is the only factor that follows the meta. Defensive utility does not have this record. Damage does.

I'm not disagreeing with your conclusions that maybe people over state things, but having your constant detraction of "it isn't that bad" in every thread is really less than helpful after 10 months of complaints have gone unanswered.

But that doesn't make my position less true. I could say the same about toe constant big fish exaggeration being 'less helpful after 10 months of complaints' too. I don't see how pointing out exaggerated complaints is somehow 'less helpful' than jumping on the QQ hyperbole train making issues appear bigger and scarier than they actually are. I'll leave that to the politicians and media.