Objective Considerations about the new tanks in ShB! Discuss :)

[JohnSeal]

Hi everyone, hope you are all hyped for the expansion due to release in few hours !! I have been crunching some numbers and doing some consideration with my friends about all 4 tanks:
The PLD received a super mega duper increase of potency in ShB, Atonement seems pretty solid and I love the Confiteor as finisher of the magic dmg phase. I think the buff of Requiestcast seem too OP. Still same identity and I definitely think will be still the best OT. On the paper without even considering RNG crit the PLD won’t have nothing to envy about the other tanks anymore, still you won’t be MTing simply because none of your skills restore HP.
WAR didn’t change a lot, I love the new Raw intuition with 25sec cooldown and the Trill buff but I am totally deluded how the badly nerfed Nascent Flash when they showed the skills updates during the media tour, the duration was 30secs but now is only 6 secs. Definitely nobody will ever want a War to OT nowhere. Holm will be 4 mins but will still be the invuln with lowest cooldown.
GNB definitely seems fun to play and also pretty easy, shortest opener and easy manageable dots, also the Dot potency is absurd (900+450 over time plus 270 from No mercy). Potentially a great MT with Camouflage (50% parry + 10% dmg reduction) and Hearth of stone ( 15% dmg reduction on 25 sec cooldown) also usable as OT skill. Superbolide is pretty bad xD Blasting zone on 30 sed cooldown, free of cost and 800 pot, neat ! Hearth of Light as party defence it’s better than Shake I would say.
The DRK is like fantastic to see and can’t wait to try! Seem fun and really strong, also we still don’t know how much dmg the “Shadow clone” will do but it may give the Drk the extra burst to take the War throne as top tank dps I really do appreciate the TBN buff and as tank buster mitigation if you are OT or MT is sensational. Drk got an advantage in fights with mainly magic dmg because of Dark mind but I don’t think it can keep up with the other 3 tanks personal/ party defence abilities.


Final thoughts: SE did an amazing work balancing and almost equalising all 4 tanks dmg output, thanks from us all ! PLD in the world I am happy for you all
I think the best MT will be GNB and WAR because of Raw intuition and HoS. The PLD will be always the best OT but never a good MT. The WAR the worst option as OT. The Drk in the loop but definitely can’t wait to play it asap.
Let’s discuss and don’t be salty too each other please
Have fun in ShB and best of luck !!

[Valic]

PLD: Same as always, it's good, only gets better in each expansion lately. Still not into sword and board though.
WAR: Still amazing too. Still feeling good cleaving and got some changes to make it feel even better and more unique. Kinda done playing it because of having that big burst window on a oGCD though.
GNB: Looking hella fun, fast af, glad to see those adjustments on the potencies. I'm a huge FF8 fan so I'll definitely give this a shot if not main it.
DRK: What are you anymore?

That's how I'm looking at tanks atm anyways.

[Ivellior]

I personally believe that the changes were the worst possible for the health of tanking in this game.
I have 2 major issues:
1. Dumbing down tanking
2. Homogenisation

In 1. we can include removing enmity management, removing stance dancing, removing defensive abilities like blind, pacify and generally adding more damage instead of more defense. Tanks right now are pretty much blue dps. Tanks should tank, healers should heal and damage dealers should do damage. It's called the trinity for a reason and it worked for so many games for a reason. At least they are on the right track with the healers. Hopefully they can do the same for tanks in the future.

However the real killer is the 2nd one, Homogenisation. Square enix is trying desperately to make all tanks viable for savage raiding (for any other content tanks were pretty much fine).
While the idea behind their changes (making tanks viable) is correct the way they are trying to achieve it the worst possible.

What they are pretty much doing is making all the tanks the same. All tanks have the same (or almost the same) cooldowns and abilities (20%, 30%, invul, gap closer, aoe, ot support, aoe mitigation etc). Tanks (and all classes as a matter of fact) should have their niche. You should have a magic tank, or physical tank or a shield tank or an aoe tank or whatever. And you should make content that favors the niche of each tank. For example make a boss magic heavy, then make the next boss physical heavy etc.

If every tank can do everything (like the situation we have now) the result will be that the tanks doing the most damage will be the tanks that are being used. Because when everyone is special, then noone is special. And no matter how much they try to make the dps the same, they will not be able to do it. (Unless they give the exact dps abilities to all tanks, thus making the class more of a skin than an actual class).

You can see what I mentioned above in World of Warcraft. They had the philosophy: "Bring the player, not the class". So what they did, is pretty much make everyone special, by giving all classes all abilities that would make them needed/prefered in raid enviroments. And it ended so bad for them, that their lead designer had to come out in a video and say they pretty much screwed up and they will revert it back. Because not only it didn't solve their problem (ie don't bring a specific class) but it also made people hate the classes and the game due to all being samey.

Unfortunately that is where tanks are heading.

[Nedkel]

I personally believe that the changes were the worst possible for the health of tanking in this game.
I have 2 major issues:
1. Dumbing down tanking
2. Homogenisation
In 1. we can include removing enmity management, removing stance dancing, removing defensive abilities like blind, pacify and generally adding more damage instead of more defense. Tanks right now are pretty much blue dps. Tanks should tank, healers should heal and damage dealers should do damage. It's called the trinity for a reason and it worked for so many games for a reason. At least they are on the right track with the healers. Hopefully they can do the same for tanks in the future.

However the real killer is the 2nd one, Homogenisation. Square enix is trying desperately to make all tanks viable for savage raiding (for any other content tanks were pretty much fine).
While the idea behind their changes (making tanks viable) is correct the way they are trying to achieve it the worst possible.

What they are pretty much doing is making all the tanks the same. All tanks have the same (or almost the same) cooldowns and abilities (20%, 30%, invul, gap closer, aoe, ot support, aoe mitigation etc). Tanks (and all classes as a matter of fact) should have their niche. You should have a magic tank, or physical tank or a shield tank or an aoe tank or whatever. And you should make content that favors the niche of each tank. For example make a boss magic heavy, then make the next boss physical heavy etc.

If every tank can do everything (like the situation we have now) the result will be that the tanks doing the most damage will be the tanks that are being used. Because when everyone is special, then noone is special. And no matter how much they try to make the dps the same, they will not be able to do it. (Unless they give the exact dps abilities to all tanks, thus making the class more of a skin than an actual class).

You can see what I mentioned above in World of Warcraft. They had the philosophy: "Bring the player, not the class". So what they did, is pretty much make everyone special, by giving all classes all abilities that would make them needed/prefered in raid enviroments. And it ended so bad for them, that their lead designer had to come out in a video and say they pretty much screwed up and they will revert it back. Because not only it didn't solve their problem (ie don't bring a specific class) but it also made people hate the classes and the game due to all being samey.

Unfortunately that is where tanks are heading.

Any enmity management was only present in savage raids and even there, the OT tank were giving you enmity by shirking and provoking and it was no philosophy nor a depth gameplay, just a annoying gimmick to help maintain DPS stance on both tanks.
They deleted def cooldowns and nerfed it in some way or another to make room for healers to actually heal more instead of DPSing for majority of time. You cant keep trinity with tanks being able to hold them own, or you will end up with healers being glorified DPS.
Homogenisation was present in stormblood to even higher degree, idk what you were doing for the last 2 years, but tanks were always similar to each other in that patch, at least now they are more different than then.
They had tank stance which were made for the exact same purpose, they had dedicated AOE pull, range pull, some kind of shield, they had enmity combo, they had dps combo, all had gauge to use for skills, 2 of them had dash, 1 strong offensive oGCD to single target, 1 strong def CD, one weaker def CD, one CD that allowed them to be immune to damage, well not to mention 7 shared class actions. Seriously there were no diversity in tanks anyway and you are complaining about thing that did not existed anyway, tanks now are more diverse then they were in anytime in stormblood. And no, DRK and WAR are not the same because of IR and delirium.
Comparing this game to world of warcraft is petty to say the least.
FFXIV is a game designed with mind of making all teams being able to go through the content, so you will be able to finish the content no matter the team composition you will get from PUGs, it always been like that. WoW is completely different pair of boots, because blizzard just forced same changes on their game which was different from the beginning.

I think you are complaining about wrong game lad, or you play WoW too often.

[Ivellior]

Any enmity management was only present in savage raids and even there, the OT tank were giving you enmity by shirking and provoking and it was no philosophy nor a depth gameplay, just a annoying gimmick to help maintain DPS stance on both tanks.

That is part of dumbing down I mentioned before. They could just remove shriek and decrease the enmity modifiers on the combos and magically, you have enmity management again.

They deleted def cooldowns and nerfed it in some way or another to make room for healers to actually heal more instead of DPSing for majority of time. You cant keep trinity with tanks being able to hold them own, or you will end up with healers being glorified DPS.

That is absurd. Do you want to increase healing? Just make the bosses auto attacks do 5x or 10x more damage. Problem solved, now healers actually have to heal and you still have a lot of defensive cooldowns which are now necessary and useful again. Also the trinity also requires tank to actually tank and not just be glorified blue dps like thay are now.

Homogenisation was present in stormblood to even higher degree, idk what you were doing for the last 2 years, but tanks were always similar to each other in that patch, at least now they are more different than then.
They had tank stance which were made for the exact same purpose, they had dedicated AOE pull, range pull, some kind of shield, they had enmity combo, they had dps combo, all had gauge to use for skills, 2 of them had dash, 1 strong offensive oGCD to single target, 1 strong def CD, one weaker def CD, one CD that allowed them to be immune to damage, well not to mention 7 shared class actions. Seriously there were no diversity in tanks anyway and you are complaining about thing that did not existed anyway, tanks now are more diverse then they were in anytime in stormblood. And no, DRK and WAR are not the same because of IR and delirium.

Saying that tanks are more different now is seriously disingenuous. The way tank stances worked was MUCH more different than the way they do now. WAR had a different skillset between the bloody stances...
Gauge/gimmicks were added to all classes. It really only makes sense on WAR and they just added it to the other tanks because they had to add a gauge. And WARs gauge actually has a meaning since you need to do some resource management compared to other classes. Not to mention the classes still have gauges.
Yes tanks had a lot of tools that had similar usage (some were required) and instead of making them more different they just made them even more homogenised.

Comparing this game to world of warcraft is petty to say the least.

No it's not. Both are mmos, both use the trinity and both homogenised their classes. It's also a live example of what happens when you homogenise too much. It's a very appropriate example.

FFXIV is a game designed with mind of making all teams being able to go through the content, so you will be able to finish the content no matter the team composition you will get from PUGs, it always been like that. WoW is completely different pair of boots, because blizzard just forced same changes on their game which was different from the beginning.

I think you are complaining about wrong game lad, or you play WoW too often.

Raiding in WoW and FFXIV is pretty similar. WoW also has LFR so pugging is a thing there as well (WoW probably has better raiding because they have more bosses and difficulty scales better). In FFXIV you can finish most content with PUGS because the content is not punishing/difficult. You can clear normal modes with pugs. But that is not true for difficult content. Try pugging an ultimate.

[Kalise]

I think the best MT will be GNB and WAR because of Raw intuition and HoS. The PLD will be always the best OT but never a good MT. The WAR the worst option as OT. The Drk in the loop but definitely can’t wait to play it asap.

GNB will be the worst Tank this expansion. They have the worst kit. Worst active mitigation, worst CD's, tied with DRK for worst party CD, worst burst DPS.

WAR will be the go to MT because Inner Release and that is all.

PLD will be the king of Tanks with their insane mitigation and DPS and the only reason they'll be played in the OT role is because WAR is so bad at OT, otherwise they might actually be the best MT especially later in the expansion when their Block has scaled higher.

DRK will continue to be a meme job. Now, just a slightly flashier meme job.

Basically, they buffed PLD, who was already the best Tank. Didn't do anything but double down on WAR being really focused around IR which synergizes too well with Trick Attack windows. While nerfing everything we saw with GNB that might actually make them useful since the Media Tour. With DRK being yet another design made by apparently throwing darts at a list of other jobs skills while blindfolded...

[JohnSeal]

Why you say the GNB have the worst kit for personal mitigation? Nebula is the same as Vengeance and sentinel, camouflage has high parry rate and 10% dmg reduction. Then HoS it’s soooo good 15% dmg reduction on a 25sec cooldown like the War Raw intuition and only this 2 tanks have this extra skill with such a short cooldown. Am I missing anything? :P

Drk is totally revamped and bye bye mp management, I agree personal defences wise it’s not optimal at all but TBN is amazing for TBs in savage fights with a around 25k+ shield.

I did few calculations with all tanks openers and they are so close to each other and the WAR still wins only because of IR. GNB has 2 dots that deal 1350 dmg over time + 270 from No mercy. The PLD is 595 dmg over time from Goring, in overall more powerful but you need a full combo for that.

As I said earlier I am happy for my PLDs friends (:

[Kalise]

Why you say the GNB have the worst kit for personal mitigation?

Parry is shit therefore Camouflage is bad. Parry has even been nerfed down to only 15% DR to boot.

HoS is literally the weakest active mitigation skill. It's only 15% DR. Raw Intuition is 20% DR, TBN is 25% shield and Sheltron takes the cake with being 20% that scales up to 30%+ DR.

Aurora is a HoT which means it's only useful for fluff damage.

The only mitigation skill that GNB has that is actually good, is Superbolide because it allows for the same mechanic cheesing as Hallowed Ground, but with a 1 minute shorter CD (At the cost of your entire health bar and 2s duration...)

I did few calculations with all tanks openers and they are so close to each other and the WAR still wins only because of IR. GNB has 2 dots that deal 1350 dmg over time + 270 from No mercy. The PLD is 595 dmg over time from Goring, in overall more powerful but you need a full combo for that.

The game isn't about openers though.

It's about who can best capitalize on burst windows due to stupid things existing like Trick Attack as well as bosses becoming untargetable due to phase changes or various attacks they use. Which makes burst damage result in higher DPS (Since, that's the case with Stormblood. WAR outperforms other tanks only because burst damage is king even though on paper, PLD and DRK can deal more sustained DPS)

2 DoTs that last 15/30s and a Gnashing Fang combo are just not going to be able to be as effective as 2x Inner Chaos + 3x IR FC's/4x Holy Spirit + Confiteor/5x Bloodspiller during Trick Attack windows.

Even more so when you consider... Gnashing Fang combo also utilizes your oGCD weaving time. While WAR gets a ton of opportunity to fit in their Upheaval and lulslaught, PLD can weave in their Spirits Within and Intervene and DRK can weave in their Plunge and Darkness oGCDs.

[JohnSeal]

Well, I agree with the part of burst and sustained dmg. IC will Smash everything xD
I was valuing the defences and mitigation skill more than dmg output.
I personally think Superbolide is the worst skill in the entire game, from a healing prospective much worst of LD. But that’s an opinion. About the other things we will see in the next few week from theory crafters and contents creators but also from seeing it in person by raiding ( like playing in first person or seeing others) who is right in between me and you :P
I want just to add that now all tanks mitigation cooldowns will last less than ever so you will find amazing tanks that can optimise dmg and defence greatly and thousands of others that will struggle to stay alive and using their toolkit properly. Mapping cooldowns will be even more important ( in savage) than before or poor healers xD

[Kalise]

I personally think Superbolide is the worst skill in the entire game, from a healing prospective much worst of LD. But that’s an opinion.

Superbolide is better than Holmgang and Living Dead. By a mile.

Superbolide puts you to 1HP, but then stops ANY damage you take for the duration.

Holmgang/Living Dead only stop you going below 1HP meaning that to be healed up, you have to not only be brought back UP from 1HP (Since the time you use these are to one button mitigate Tankbusters that hit for more than 100% of your health) but also have to counteract the damage that is being dealt through the duration - Such as Tankbusters that aren't just a single instance of damage, or boss auto attacks.

Living Dead being even worse because you NEED to be healed for 100% of your max health (Which means you're actually getting worse survivability by gearing up and getting more VIT...) or you die and if a trigger happy WHM Benediction's you right as your health drops down, they remove the effect meaning you can get smacked a second time and die...

This isn't even accounting for the fact that immunity such as the kind that Superbolide/Hallowed Ground gives also allows cheesing of mechanics because it will also prevent debuffs being applied to you. Such as ones that would require a Tank swap to deal with otherwise.

I want just to add that now all tanks mitigation cooldowns will last less than ever so you will find amazing tanks that can optimise dmg and defence greatly and thousands of others that will struggle to stay alive and using their toolkit properly. Mapping cooldowns will be even more important ( in savage) than before or poor healers xD

Wut?

The only CD that had its duration changed, was Vengeance. It went down to 10s duration like the other 30% DR skills.

Not only that, but every single Tank now has a short CD active mitigation skill. Sheltron got buffed to now blocking all attacks for 6 seconds, up from 1 instance. TBN got buffed up to 25% max HP shield up from 20%. WAR got Raw Intuition for 20% DR with 25s CD. GNB got HoS for 15% DR.

Rampart is unchanged. Shadow Wall is unchanged. Sentinel is now 120s CD down from 180s (But 30% DR down from 40%).

CD's are no more important than before. In fact, they're less important, because now everyone's running around with free 20% DR from the new Tank Trait, with ridiculously short CD 15-30% DR active mitigation skills and heck, all OT's can now provide 10-25% DR active mitigation skill too!

So, baseline, without factoring in any actually costly CD's, Tanks will be able to sit at 45%+ DR for any Tank buster (Considering that before, people were alternating Rampart + Vengeance for 50% DR and Holmgang for 1 button TB mitigation... Basically, everyone's getting a free Rampart + Vengeance on like 15-25s CD's...)

The only new decision making is that Holmgang can skip fewer TB's now with its increased CD. Though, given how much mitigation is now so readily available, I don't think it's likely to pose much of a problem, unless Savage encounter TB's are now requiring 90%+ mitigation to survive (Meaning Rampart + 30% skill + active mitigation + OT support) - At which point, GNB will be deleted from viability due to their crap mitigation skills.