Please make tanks more unique by making the 30% damage reduction skills different

[Yrantis]

These are good points and I agree, if you can maintain exactly how much eHP you can put out well it could work. Although It may seem minor, having to stuff 2 OGCDs into a GCD vs just one on another tank is an advantage, especially if one of the TBs is a little bit of a faster cast.

I guess the point I'm making is: diversifying defense and still keeping balance would require VERY tight fight design, because of how scripted the boss fights are. You guys talk about the invincibilities being "balanced" and to a degree they are: in the sense that they're totally unnecessary. None of the current fights require them and most people in the PF don't even use them most of the time. If invincibility were important DRK would be shunned like a leper in groups. Because if all else is equal, DPS is balanced, tank mitigation capacity is "equal", why would you bring the guy who is a huge pain in the ass to work around rather than the guy who goes "LOL HALLOWED GROUND" and just becomes straight invincible?

I guess the overall point I'm making here is: different defensives will put extra pressure on your healers in certain situations. Now they have to learn to heal 4 different ways. Living Dead is a perfect example of this (if it were a requirement for fights). Whereas changing your DPS only affects you and YOUR rotation, changing tank defensives can and will affect other people in your party and will become a nightmare to balance around. What if the "weaker" number healer like AST gets paired with the "gimmick" defensive tank and he is now strained to the point of breaking when on other tanks his rotation will be fine? Even if their theoretical capacity is equal, they're extra trouble, and in the case of the tank, extra trouble the healer can't even opt out of.

Damage in FFXIV is just so consistent, I think is the issue here. There's a million ways to put out damage but only a few to stop it from coming in. I saw someone mention Vengeance as a potential difference to the 30%, but that small difference alone already pushes WAR away from the OT slot or they risk losing DPS for no reason, and flexibility is key in a game where your role has two slots and the game punishes you for duplicates.

Not to knock the folks because I love them, but this dev team can't even get the entirety of the ranged role up to par, and it has neglected SMN play issues and RDM power issues completely for what is now months. I've seen what happens when the roles get "differentiated" like MNK or BLM, and it's frankly what made me flee the DPS classes this expansion. GNB,PLD, and WAR feel totally different offensively, with small cute differences (that actually matter quite a bit in 4mans, just not savage) that keep things fresh, and you know what? So well balanced I can play and enjoy them all, even gear up 3/4 for the price of 1 (fuck you WAR DH/CRIT). It is amazing, so when I see people ask to be more "different" like the DPS...it just makes the former DPS player in me leery.

[MaraD_]

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Most of your argument is countering yourself, or agreeing with others you said you disagreed with.
(Outside of agreeing SE seems to fail at handling stuff for tanks/healers, and barely succeeds with DPS)
LD is an example where its not balanced eHP.
Its an example of "Good enough" when a fight requires it. But has no benefit being used outside of that.
Hallowed ground can be used like a normal CD.
So not only does PLD and DRK share the same 30% CD, but PLD also has another on top of that.

And as has been said, if the fights dont actually require the invulnerability moves, then DRK is at a disadvantage.
AND when they do require them, they need fights that show the pros and cons of each tanks invulns. Such as the longer duration and shorter CD of LD, vs the straight up invincible, with only a timer downside, styled PLD invuln. (While still offering the "work around" when you lack the best tank for that mechanic. An example is PLD could solo all the tethers in titania, or they can have an extra person take an extra tether for what they dont want to deal with.
This lets the group work around each tanks ability to invuln stuff.

A11S had a mechanic near the end, that would push the tank off the edge, and running away from it wasn't very good for the group.
Each tank has a way to deal with it, but it was best to tank swap, so WAR or PLD can prevent the pushback.
If you had DRK MT, the PLD could cover the DRK and prevent the pushback. (But PLD+DRK combos werent really that good, despite being the physical/magical combo)

In O5S when the ghost showed up to push people off the course, you could just stand at the side of the "box ghost" to prevent push back, so giving all the tanks methods to deal with push back wasnt needed.

Problem here, is that PLD and WAR let u cheese mechanics, and they gave nothing to DRK to cheese mechanics.
Its only a problem when u dont give a tool to someone, but give unique tools to everyone else.
They wouldnt come off as being that unique, if everyone had something unique. (Heck, even what we're suggesting is still sometimes considered homogenization to some, since they think the only way to have non homogenization is to have "best/worst" rather than pros/cons. The whole "If everyone's unique, then no ones unique" view, but twisted.)

SE is probably never going to stop putting all focus on the DPS, but we're still going to wish otherwise.
You could compare this to current day politics, with 1 group saying "I wish it were this way" and the other group saying "But its never gonna happen, so lets do this other thing".
I still feel its plenty "within reason", but of course it depends solely on SE to actually do it.

[Yrantis]

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A lot of my argument is counter to the point I'm making because I'm trying to balance things from dev perspective, tank player perspective, and other player perspective. I see what you guys are talking about, but realistically what happens when you ask for things like this is that you get horrible imbalance from the dev team, because if I'm being honest with you: end game content in this game probably isn't the major focus of the dev team. Small percentages of their playerbase even step into it, so you are very likely never going to get the care and detail you are asking for, but you WILL send a message to the dev team that you want tanks arbitrarily "different". And so what you get is an optimal tank setup that's different depending on the fight, and tank players now have to play every tank in the role to remain viable. This will drive people away from your game, because people don't like having to stop playing their favorite class because someone on the dev team decided it was going to suck for this particular content.

Would I like to live in a world where tank skills were evenly balanced, fights were tuned for viability for multiple diverse playstyles, and they all felt great to play? Of course, but it's a fantasy more fictional than Eorzea, and a potentially dangerous one. I really don't want to end up like RDM, where another class in your role is so overtuned you literally cannot compete with them and are like that because of an arbitrary "difference" that you're not allowed to do damage because you have absolutely useless "utility" or that your class is so bad most people choose to play SMN, a class with NOTORIOUSLY awful QoL issues, over you. How about the fact that ranged classes are just 2000 DPS behind the melee/BLM because they have to be "different" with their 100% uptime, but hey, at least they're different right? Tank balance for this game is the best its ever been, all I'm asking is for you to consider that it might have SOMETHING to do with the fact that the dev team no longer needs to balance raids around four different mitigation styles EVERY SINGLE FIGHT.

[Shurrikhan]

...

You've both oversimplified some of the points here and some missed very obvious answers to your own questions. Simply put, they have clear answers; they're not, therefore, great candidates for rhetorical questions.

Let's take the first one, for example -- effectively "Why would Living Dead ever compete with Hallowed Ground?"

1. When you would clearly have Benediction or (Reci-ET-Adlo and Excog, etc.) and the exact moment of would-be fatal damage is not as predictable, and thus lose less Living Dead duration after the full-heal than you save immunity duration before the would-be fatal blow (i.e. when the effective duration of Hallowed Ground--where actually preventing death--is less than that of [Walking Dead +] Living Dead).
2. When the invincibility is necessary for a cheese strategy of notable benefit to ease or uptime and is necessary more often than Paladin and its co-tank can cover, while DRK + cotank are instead able (e.g. when Superbolide and Holmgang are too short to deal with both or all fatal blows necessary to cheese the mechanic and these blows come more often than HG's 7-minute CD can deal with).

And this is all assuming, of course, that we continue to treat invulnerability CDs as mostly superfluous, and therefore requiring only a loose level of balance. If they were considered true parts of their respective kits, there's no way you'd still see Living Dead exactly as it is now while Holmgang was receiving direct buff after indirect buff after direct buff.

I'll agree that at present the lack of diversity in tank toolkits comes largely from a lack of diversity in how tanks take damage. It's all in the tankbusters, varying only in size, whereby one CD or precise CD pair will suffice, and another will not. A with A. B with B. It has lent design towards a one-to-one "set counter" view of tanking. I see this, I counter with Rampart. I see that, I counter with my 30%. So on and so forth. (And, to be fair, tank kits aren't the only place we see this. More and more, toolkit capacities that used to deal with, say, fatal knockbacks -- through stutter-stepping, mobility, or snap-movement -- are being replaced with "Skip Mechanic" buttons -- like Surecast and Arm's Length. Convenience and direct counters are increasingly denying the native components of job toolkits room to show any benefit.)

That lack of diversity in damage intake may have to be addressed to some extent before diversity can go more than a single step in giving tanks some diversity. But, that step we can take towards diversity now is nonetheless necessary if you ever want to see the combat sourcing our tanks' play see more variance than just "wait until next tankbuster to actually take a vaguely tank-like action" in the vast majority of 8-man gameplay.

As much as the devs have fallen short in other regards, the one thing they consistently jump upon is any excuse to simplify gameplay where depth (not just bloat) would be lost in the process. Just as there's no room for greatly diverse tanks in today's serious content, there's no need across future tiers to accommodate or include varying rates of damage or more than a single rigid concept of tanking because tanks aren't diverse. We can either allow the devs to lock us into a loop locked to its lowest denominator, or we can insist on small improvements where possible to achieve diversity until we can finally wiggle the situation into some position that isn't increasingly pushing us towards 12 jobs: BLM, SMN, RDM, MNK, SAM, DRG, NIN, BRD, MCH, DNC, Healer, and Tank.

While I'm not going to advocate for less enjoyable states of play now -- even while just as tightly balanced as now, I can imagine a few changes to most tank kits, for instance, that would give more diversity and quite likely more enjoyment to their play -- I don't think we can afford to pretend that iterations of our jobs don't establish precedent, much of it general. When we say that a given result is good without even a cautionary note in addition, we allow the narrative to be written as the change was good (and will remain good even when repeated further).

Edit (a final note):

We often toss around phrases here like "voting with your wallet", but that, too, leaves the conclusions for why you disapproved of the game as it stood then -- or, why you left the game -- entirely in the hands of people you no longer believe see eye-to-eye with what you want from the game; so why would one then expect that they would see the loss of subs and think, for instance, "Maybe they don't like half-fleshed-out side content?" instead of "Damn, look what happens when we don't have any newly produced side content! Forget quality, we need more now!" There's no conversation, no guidance, in that. It's entirely on them to do a job that one is already sure they can't perform as well as they should be able or is excluding you and players like you. How would it get any better without that discussion or the information it could provide?

Here, it's important that those who want diversity not only request diversity, but give their reasons for it, and the limits on how it should come about. For me, it's that first step in allowing for tanking (and far more, by extension) to feel like more than a one-to-one "see mechanic; hit its assigned counter button" Blue DPS + occasional extra button gameplay, and hopefully to eventually see fights with mechanics against which multiple strategies are each competitive, with different jobs variably center to each of those strategies. That's not going to come from toolkits alone; but, without diversity in toolkits, there's no incentive to design fights that could ever take advantage of those distinctions. Why have fights that can be approached in multiple ways when, in terms of response to mechanics, you only have 10 jobs: MNK, SAM, DRG, NIN, SMN, BLM, RDM, Ranged, Tank, and Healer? I'd like to see more from the raiding experience than just DDR; there seem just as many lessons that have been somehow unlearned since Coil as have been learned, with the experience outside of Savage leaving even more wasted potential, and that seems quite a shame for an MMO making as much money as this one does. Diversity in and of its self gives a bit more reason to enjoy X job, but... I'd agree that it's not worth the resources in and of itself. But I don't just want diversity; I want what it can give. I want the design paradigms that kept in mind by having it. I wouldn't mind that diversity come a balanced, reasonable nudge at a time; we don't have infinite resources here, and I'm not willing to sacrifice a decent level of balance for diversity alone. But, I want it to be something clearly kept in mind in development, rather than being treated as fundamentally impossible to balance despite all evidence to the contrary when the work's just actually been done (i.e. when the 'imbalance' isn't just a result of poor tuning or coding irrelevant to ability differences themselves).

For now, I'd agree with you: Tanks are well balanced and, where resources are mutually exclusive in allocation, we should first get everyone else up to that level of parity. But I think this is important, too, to nudge towards whenever we get the chance.

[Sylvain]

The difference between HG, LD, Holm and SB already creates a lot of fuss in term of tank balance. Which one being the best depending on / group comp / encounter /etc.

So I wouldn't want them to have different mitigation / cd value.
The only thing I wouldn't mind them doing is adding some flavor to it, a bit like how the short mitigation currently work. They all roughly achieve the same thing, with pro N cons.

For instance I wouldnt mind sentinel also granting 50 gauge, or granting a buff making the next clemency an ogcd.

Shadow wall could increase make the next TBN be applied on both the DRK and it's target.

I would be OK with those kind of addition, but don't touch the 30% and cd. It will do more harm than good

[MPNZ]

No TY. It would most likely be like way more interesting to design individual depth through how they self-sustain/recover and their trinary theme. GNB could be technical, it seems to want to be a faster high-speed assault combat style, feels and looks aggressive, and makes use of a pneumatic sword and charged cartridges, which could add a lot of impact and flavor into it's design. DRK could traditionally has a lot of risks (blood for blood is like literally what DRK is in most versions) which attracts certain players, and literally steals MP and HP in several iterations. PLD is civilized (will injure or trick/fight dirty), sturdy, self-sufficient, and is mostly ok. War could definitely be a strong-self-regen-tnk if they go more into the berserker stuff with a good momentum and aggressive high-adrenaline style. There is literally a lot that they could expand upon that would be more interesting than more generic damage-reduction buffs