Diversifying Tanks

[shao32]

my idea for DRK to become more like his HW version:

bring back dark arts in the first place, having a second option with edge/flood to bring a meaning of the darkside buff, need more time? edge/flood, don't need more time? dark arts, need mitigation TBN, TBN will add a DA effect afecting only DA an not edge/flood.

dark arts mechanics will include:
- having 1 extensible combo, if you use DA on souleater you will be able to use gillotine as a 4 step of the combo (see delirium for a second option).
- buff and extend the aoe combo with abissal drain as a finisher.
- adding a dot effect on bloodspiller/quietus diferent potency and duration on each one to secure you want to apply the dot in both single and aoe target situations, the dot is called scourge on both and don't stack.

blood weapon/delirium

-blood weapon: mostly back with speed, MP rates ajusted and recast/duration extended depending of delirium to have more uptime, will affect again oGCD (tentative), no longer grant blood.

-delirium: i have 4 versions for delirium, first one act as a extender BW like in SB but free of blood cost (there the duration of bloodweapon change or not) or make it with gillotine a 4 step combo from shyphon strike, reworked again to become a oGCD of be fully removed of the game.

MP economy:
DRK will have a steady economy without much spikes, his management will be around keeping a dot (sourge from bloodspiller) and a buff (darkside from edge/flood)) and the rest of the MP for DA to extend combos and TBN, reduce the cost of all skills to 2k to add some flexibility and comfiness iwith more room to act combined with bloodweapon gains, carve and spit and shiphon strike will ensure some steady control of the job and have a acceptable rate of MP gains/uses, nothing overhelming but enough to make it feel fluid.

-living dead: grant you the status of living dead preventing you HP drop below 1 HP all attacks recover HP equal to 100% of the damage done, duration and recast balanced to his effects.

to finish living shadow: under the effect of living shadow DRK get a damage buff over all his kit to let it act as a burst window, the recast of living shadow can still remain the same or being reduced, i leave that free to share opinions.

things that will gain:

-comlexity, and a feel the kit will sinergy himself.
-identity, pretty unique gameplay in many ways.
-no more excesive downtimes.
-still be able to hold resource for buff windows and enjoy the benefict of all of them better by no longer having to spam edge (magical attack) only so brotherhood and embolden will grant DRK better gains.
-new SHB gauge 100% usefull.

actions removed:

-salted earth.

personal thoughs:


i consider DRK will recover his busy feeling, his buffer/enchanced nature the job use to have in a unique way to manipulate GCD and control his resources, still will have a burst window under living shadow and wont feel incomplete or a copy of other job anymore as the job feel more like HW again without being overhelming to anyone.


edit: i forgeth about blood, to ensure a good control of the scourge debuff the combo (or both combos if ppl love the second combo more apealing) will grant the same amount of blood so you will have bloodspiller when you need to reaply the dot.

i consider right now PLD and GNB perfect in they own, way, for WAR i have no opinion yet, diversity on tanks should be on his gameplay on my opinion.

[DRKoftheAzure]

Now to talk about offensive uniqueness for the tanks that need it most since both PLD and GNB are pretty balanced in this regard.


WAR; so my over all knowledge of WAR is very limited, but from I can gather is that WAR might need more focus on sustained DPS with at least 1 or 2 burst windows, so WAR would obviously need Skull Sunder and Butcher's block to come back but not as seperate combo paths, but as part of the full combo, which is as follows; Heavy Swing -> Maim -> Skull Sunder -> Storm's Path -> Storm's Eye -> Butcher's Block, a six hit combo path that does insane damage the higher you go up the combo, all while generating beast gauge which is used for guaranteed Critical Direct hit combo paths; Inner Beast ->Fell Cleave -> Inner Chaos for single target, and Steel Cyclone -> Decimate ->Chaotic Cyclone. Deliverance would come back as a separate 20% damage up buff that lasts 30 seconds but sits on a 60 second cooldown(cooldown timer is to keep it in line with GNB and PLD 20+% damage up buffed burst window), Inner Release would need to be adjusted to where it lasts 15 seconds and increases the damage dealt by all beast gauge abilities by 50%.


DRK; Darkside needs to go back to stop natural MP refresh in combat, but now doubles MP regain from from certain skills and abilities, and increases damage dealt by 20% and reduces weaponskill cast time and recast time, spell cast time and recast time, and auto attack delay by 20% and makes it so that while Darkside is active spells now scale with skillspeed(the devs might need to find a way to make this work) and can only enable certain offensive skills and abilites while Darkside is active. Blood Weapon converts a portion of damage dealt into HP and at a later level increases the amount restored and provides shielding based on how much is restored as the trait Blood Price, and enables certain combo paths to restore more HP as Delirium.

Now for reworking combo paths on DRK; combo path a will be Hard Slash ->Spinning Slash -> Power Slash and combo path b will be Scourge -> Syphon Strike -> Souleater. Now for how Souleater and Power Slash are going to work, Souleater doubles the potency of the next Power Slash(buff lasts 20 seconds) and Power Slash generates 10 or 20 blood gauge and doubles blood gauge gain on Souleater, and Unleash/Stalwart Soul are now target AoEs rather than PBAoE(because big pulls) and the combo path is Unleash -> Abyssal Drain ->Stalwart Soul which Abyssal Drain and Stalwart Soul both recover HP and MP and generate blood gauge, and blood gauge is used to power up MP spending combos, Edge of Shadow -> Bloodspiller -> Carve and Spit for single target and Dark Passenger -> Quietus -> Flood of Shadow for AoE(potency increase is between 140 and 280) and have 150 cure potency for AoE and 300 cure potency on single target. Dark Arts is brought back as a button by removing MP and blood gauge costs and increases damage dealt by these combo paths by 50% for 20 seconds, and sits on either a 60 second or 90 second cooldown.


EDIT: I realized that PLD and GNB would be bottom tank DPS wise if these changes somehow happened, so quick fixes to make them on par with DRK and WAR, Gnashing Fang recast is reduced to 15 seconds, Sonic Break and Bow Shock recast reduced to 30 seconds, and Intervene extends Fight or Flight buff(if it's active) by 8 seconds while granting 3 more stacks of Sword Oath

[Kali-ka]

-living dead: grant you the status of living dead preventing you HP drop below 1 HP all attacks recover HP equal to 100% of the damage done, duration and recast balanced to his effects.

This may actually be one of the best suggestions for LD I've seen so kudos. I would even go far to say to have it be a 6-8 second duration and have the damage to healing effect be the ONLY way a DRK could heal itself up during that time for balance.

As for the other tanks and my suggestions, there's quite a bit that I would want to change to make them feel different, but I'll post some of my more "realistic" ideas that I think they wouldn't have much trouble implementing:

DRK

Delirium - The only problem I really have with this is that its boring to spam the same move. So instead, make it more like GNB where using delirium will open up a specific combo window each with different animations. Each move can bring back some of the old animations (scourge, old delirium, power slash etc.) with scourge applying its old dot effect. Can have each move have its own button for complexity (less likely) or just have a one button that changes depending on where you are in the combo (somewhat like continuation). To break up the homogenization, allow the use of blood weapon to give the haste effect inside the delirium window (2sec or less recasts)

Abyssal Drain - make it "spammable" again but also make it cost 2-3k mp

Stalwart Soul and dark mind - add a 5% physical damage reduction

Shadow wall - add the old blood price effect of mp refresh per hit to it

Living shadow - I would just have tiers for blood gauge usage. 50 BG for normal duration 100 for double duration.


GNB

The only thing I really want to see different on GNB at this time is adding a third cartridge slot and giving GNB the option of having another defensive move that costs 2 cartridges and have it be a solid 25% damage reduction self buff. For balance, we could get rid of camouflage.

Heart of light - keep the magic damage reduction the same but let it apply a small shield (10% hp)

WAR

Storm's eye - either extend the duration of the damage increase to 45-60 seconds and let it be applicable with Mythril Tempest

Storm's path - slightly increase healing potency

RI and Nascent - separate these and make Nascent self targetable

Chaotic cyclone and Inner chaos - There is a part of me that wouldn't mind having these as inner release enders like Confiteor just to change up the fell cleave spam a bit, but I think that would have to change how they work outside of IR. Or make it different by having each fell cleave/decimate increase in potency slightly with the last move ending in a Chaotic or Inner chaos.

Onslaught - if they're going to keep the gauge cost, reduce it to 10 and increase the potency.

PLD

PLD is of course pretty solid right now (although personally its the most boring tank for me) so I wouldn't change much

Divine Veil - may not be diversifying but just let it be automatically activated

Atonement - even if its just 3 uses, it irks me that SE made yet another "Spam this move", so make this a unique combo.

Shelltron - add a pseudo shield swipe effect in the form of an extra auto attack per use.

Sentinel - gives oath gauge per hit taken

[shao32]

This may actually be one of the best suggestions for LD I've seen so kudos. I would even go far to say to have it be a 6-8 second duration and have the damage to healing effect be the ONLY way a DRK could heal itself up during that time for balance.

thanks, yeah a duration betwen 6-8s will make DRK have enough time to recover all his HP by himself or depending of the situation most of it since DRK will be able to use several edge betwen his attacks to fully recover himself, the recast duration should be proportional to the duration of the buff since at contrary that WAR DRK will be able to fully recover himself much better, the HP you recover can be ajusted too to don't make it so independent of the healers.


my sugestion of WAR:

well this mostly gameplay, many complaing now WAR is to easy and boring (specially for the new animations) so i was remembering when ppl tend to love WAR back in HW what they love so here my sugestion.

enchance the berserk theme:

WAR berserk window was one of the most popular mechanics of the game, triple fell cleave and the fell cleave meme was all around so i suggest bring that back.

gauge:

WAR no longer have skills that use gauge, fell cleave/decimate/upheaval and onslaught no longer cost gauge, instead this skills produce gauge to a maximun of 100, each skills grants a certain number of gauge so it takes betwen 60-90s to fill the gauge on optimal gameplay (i leave everyone how much they will love to have inner release), WAR will have a skill to build gauge during downtimes.

fell cleave/decimate: need 5 deliverance stacks to being used, each combo grant a certain number of stacks, both skills grant rage gauge.

upheaval: mostly unchanged, grants rage gauge.

onslaught: get same threatment of plunge and equivalent, the skill can grant rage gauge or a stack of deliverance to add some management here too.

infuriated: grants 5 stacks of deliverance, the rest is the same (note: meaby have a maximun of 10 stacks to add some flexibility and avoid overcaping, can be represent as a secondary bar under rage one.

inner release: can only be used at 100% rage gauge, under inner release every WAR skill get a animation and potency upgrade, path combo, eye combo, upheaval ect ect, under inner release each GCD grants 1 deliverance stack.

note: inner release can have a recast timer to have better control of the aligment with raids buffs and have a small surplus of rage to don't make the job excesively complicated to manage similar to requiem cast system.

unchained rage: works as a finisher of inner release, if 3 fell cleaves/inner chaos are used under inner release unchained rage becomes feller cleave (lol) dealing masive single target damage, if 3 decimates/chaotic cyclone are used under inner release unchained rage become fissure dealing big aoe damage.

storm eye:no longer need to be used as part of a combo so you can use it when you need it making it easy to have it early on aoe situations (tentative).


resume: WAR will work like now bulding stacks with his combos (keeping eye buff) and (meaby) onslaught as fell cleave/decimate(with they respective upgrades) and upheaval grant rage to the gauge, under inner release every skill with have a animation upgrade and you objetive is use all you kit to land 3 fell cleaves or 3 decimates to activate the respective action with unchained rage (meaby reduce fellcleave needed to 2 depending of how tight the window is but still able to land 3), the potency of the inner release window will be high but not excesively high so WAR is not excesively dependent of raid buffs windows and get to powerfull and make it more easily to balance him dps wise.

all i say im not a WAR main since 3.0 so everyone are free to think this sugestion is trash and dislike it ^^

i think thats all my contributions for tanks, im not fan of making this stuff and probably never make one of this again so thanks for reading both WAR and DRK posts.