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

[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.

[Giubba]

GNB despite the point made by kalise which are believable looks at least fun to play, DRK at the moment is in a hot tub with its wrist cut open waiting for the end of its suffering.

[JohnSeal]

Honestly the mitigation the DRK has could be improved ok but I really don’t see why seem so bad to some of you guys :P the
MP management issue had been solved, no more DA, TBN has been buffed and I find it fun to play finally.
Probably the concept of DRK is still not developed at its best but I think few of your are just prejudices because nobody never like it since the begin. Also it’s required to learn how the class work before to enjoy it , I feel confident already after few runs and I feel pretty satisfied tbh. Honestly I think without the lvl 80 skill for the shadow clone you easily tend to almost overcap your blood gauge that’s why probably still fell stiff but let’s see
I disagree with Kalise in many points about the GNB but I agree with others tbf

[Jandor]

Honestly the mitigation the DRK has could be improved ok but I really don’t see why seem so bad to some of you guys :P the
MP management issue had been solved, no more DA, TBN has been buffed and I find it fun to play finally.

But I liked Dark Arts and MP management.

[Giubba]

Now bcs one enjoy the old flow and sustained nature of the job the original one have to shut up, how nice.

As I said I could have phrased better but I was serious at all with that post. I completely agree Jandor and I feel only utter revulsion at the present state of DRK

[TouchandFeel]

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

All the tanks have a mitigation ability that is available ~20s-30s. PLD has Sheltron, WAR has Raw Intuition, DRK has The Blackest Night and GNB has Heart of Stone.

WAR and GNB have these abilities detached from anything else and are just on a 25s recast timer. WAR's is 20% but lasts 5s, while GNB's is 15% but lasts for 7s. This makes WAR's better for most busters but GNB's may be slightly better for fluff damage or the less common longer multi-hit buster, which gives WAR a slight edge with these abilities for being MT over GNB.

DRK and PLD have both of their abilities tied to resources but at the rate of resource gain, both should be able to use their abilities between every 20s and every 30s, so basically the same as GNB and WAR. PLD's will be weaker until they get the Improved Sheltron trait and will scale a bit with gear/stats, so it will become stronger as we get farther into the ShB patches and iLvls increase. DRK's TBN was strong before and is even stronger now. In virtually all instances outside of super strong busters, TBN will likely prevent more damage from being taken than any of the other tank frequent use abilities. Dark Mind being magic only means that can't really be used for fluff and should be used for busters, many of or most being magic damage. These things make DRK lean more towards being MT over PLD.

In addition to those defensive differences, PLD and GNB have a smidge more support capabilities.

So basically, DRK and WAR are slightly more suited towards being MT while PLD and GNB are slightly more suited to being OT, however the disparity is not so large that any of the tanks couldn't work in either position, unlike the much stronger divisions that we have had in the past.

[shao32]

As I said I could have phrased better but I was serious at all with that post. I completely agree Jandor and I feel only utter revulsion at the present state of DRK

It's hard to identify you tone with a written post, put a /s or something next time.

[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.

[JohnSeal]

Ok Giubba sry if I call you rude xD we misinterpreted (: honestly before was frustrating to play Drk because you could easily screw up with your mp. You greed a DA and you may not have TBN when needed, or you were stingy with DA and your mp overcap. Often running dungeons you overused you Abyssal draining or you didnt have enough mp left so you needed to slow down etc etc. Now it’s much easier I guess :P only thing leave me disappointed is salted earth on 90 sed Cd but doesn’t really matter