Concise Tank Balance Changes

[Lyth]

[...]

It's not utility vs. damage.

One thing that features heavily into NA/EU players decisions is personal dps. So anything that you can do to improve another player's dps and make them look better is going to become extremely desirable. For example, Piercing may be "just" a 5% buff. But the general perception is that you must bring a DRG in order to properly play BRD or MCH. So when it comes to recruiting a melee dps, your static's BRD is going to be pushing hard for a DRG, even if it means picking a player who is clearly less competent (but still able to clear).

The end result is that you have certain jobs that are viewed as "must haves" when optimising your play. You must have a NIN for TA. You must have an AST for Balance. It doesn't really matter if these players are particularly good. What matters is that they are competent at applying the buffs to you. Problem is, I don't think this attitude necessarily carries over to the JP playerbase, which is why the devs are completely out of touch with the concept.

The core problem with WHM is that AST is perceived as "WHM with cards". So even if you want to be a WHM main, you're bound to have that conversation. You know the one I'm talking about: "Hey, you're pretty good at healing on WHM, do you want to, you know, give AST a shot so that we can get those sweet, sweet Balance procs? They're not that different, after all." So you either switch or are left with the feeling that you're letting down your teammates.

That's not to say that I dislike raid dps buffs in general. I think they're fantastic. They encourage coordination. It actually makes it feel like a team game. As a side point, I feel that the UI should do more to communicate raid buffs to the team (i.e. Trick Attack available, Trick attack used). It happens over voice regardless, but it helps bring that coordination and synergy over to PUG conditions.

What I do detest are raid dps buffs that have 100% uptime. These do absolutely nothing for gameplay. They just tell you that you must bring a particular job. Which is incredibly shortsighted, given that the several of the jobs that bring these buffs (WAR, NIN, DRG) DO NOT require additional reasons to be mandatory picks. Five years is enough. End it with fire.

Shake this off
I don't think there's a problem with Shake intrinsically. The backlash was over how it happened. In Heavensward, WAR and SCH were viewed as essential jobs. During the interviews leading into Stormblood, the devs identified the problem as coming from their versatility. Stormblood was supposedly going to fix tank and healer balance.

In fairness, the start of Stormsblood wasn't all that bad. WAR had some new costs associated with tank swapping, but then again, that was the standard for every other tank previously. WAR and DRK were about 50 dps apart (advantage WAR), despite our STR accessories shenanigans. PLD's dps was probably tuned a bit too high, but I suspect that the devs didn't want to repeat the mistake of making PLD a dps liability a second time around, and they probably didn't anticipate that we'd be using i270 STR accessories.

The problem was that a small, but vocal minority of players campaigned with the idea that WAR's "lack of utility" should be compensated for with higher dps. The problem with the 4.2 rework is that the devs overcompensated and did both. WAR got a substantial dps rework, resulting in it gaining anywhere between a 200-500 dps advantage in fights, became significantly higher reward for lower effort, and became the first job in this game's history to have an action completely changed simply because players complained about it. Oh no, an action that doesn't do a whole lot outside of pure niche flavour. It's not like we haven't seen that ever before, on other jobs. You could fill the Ruby Sea twice over with the tears that were shed.

It's like the devs seem to think that if people aren't 100% happy with WAR or SCH, the tanking and healing population will disappear off the map. But it's actually the reverse. These jobs are talked about because they're powerful. That in turn makes them popular, which in turn makes them continue to receive the lion's share of the focus from the dev team. I suppose everyone is different, but I didn't come into a Final Fantasy game with the intention of playing a World of Warcraft barbarian. Especially when there hasn't been a single protagonist in the 30+ year history of the series who specifically uses an axe as a primary weapon (there are more characters who use Anchors as weapons, by comparison).

People weren't angry about Shake it off because the ability change was bad. On the contrary. A HP boost would probably be more thematic, but there are some equally bad offenders out there on WAR. If anything, I think Veil should follow a similar approach and simply apply the shield when you activate it, instead of requiring a heal proc. The reason why people hated the change was because it's become part of a systemic, five-year long bias towards a job which, conceptually, doesn't deserve to be all that special given the series history.

You won't win over more people to tanking with more WARs and more Fell Cleaves. If anything, you'll drive people away. You'll win them over with more options, better gameplay, and more interesting, tank-focused mechanics.

Physical Tank, Magical Tank
I know this was a theme in Heavensward, but this is a meaningless, fake identity. If you can clear content on a given tank, excess mitigation doesn't really count for all that much. The idea was that you'd switch between DRK and PLD based on the predominant type. In reality, the only fight that I switched to PLD for in HW was in A7S, because 2nd cat phase was a pretty tough healing check in prog, and Hallowed was just that much safer than Living Dead.

I think if the devs want to differentiate between physical and magical attacks, it should be done at the role actions level. It would be interesting to see tanks in prog try to guess what the main tankbuster type is, and adjust their role actions accordingly. I think the Protect/Shell duality could be interesting as well, especially if we started to see physical raid-wide AoEs. It certainly would be more interesting than the present implementation of Protect of "something that you're forced to cast before every pull."