Diversifying Tanks

[DRKoftheAzure]

RIP on Gunblade. I always say that instead of Gunbreaker...I know it's the latter, but I always call it the former for some reason.

Understandable.

So I was not trying to give them multiple full combos like the DPS classes. I liked your suggestion from page 1, but it gave both classes a lot of abilities to have to put on hot bars.

So I was trying to get them "evened out" without going too big on ability bloat. I was also trying to preserve what identity they currently have--WAR being mostly GCD based with very few oGCDs; DRK having the simplest GCD rotation, but a much stronger focus on its oGCDs.

By "evened out", at least for DRK, what I mean is: get DRK to spread out its oGCD use a bit, so the opener isn't so insane (and the start of each subsequent minute) and the later half of each minute is a bit busier. I tried to accomplish that by moving the Blood GCDs to the oGCD (which means you can't start using them until a few GCDs in), and move the 'use on cd' oGCD (CaS, AD) to the GCD, but set them up as utility skills rather than part of the rotations. I was also trying to create a decision point for those abilities with Dark Arts that wasn't going to be one ability always being the best to use. It still kind of is, though: you only use CaS (well, Souleater as I had them swap for thematic/fluff reasons) or AD if you need to self heal, even with DA up. In that way, they're a bit like Clemency.

So I could see working CaS and AD into the single target or AoE rotations, respectively, to liven up the GCDs a bit. Ie, leave Souleater as it currently is (though maybe change the heal to a 5% shield), then make CaS a new combo finisher after Syphon Strike that does something (puts a DoT up, buffs Souleater in a certain way, etc). So you would go 1-2-CaS or 1-2-Soul. Or even make it a 4-hit combo, making DRK unique among the tanks for having the longest base combo.

For AD, you could do something similar, so you go either Unleash-AD or Unleash-Stalwart Soul, or like you suggested, make it a 1-2-3 kind of thing.

For WAR, it was focused more on having various finishers for combos to get buffs up, then it keeps doing its Inner Beast combo to keep the buffs up. 1 new oGCD for both single target and AoE (while also extending the AoE combo by 1 move). Though, with the way I suggested it, both Storm's Path and Eye turn into "fire and forget" abilities that you use at the start of a fight, then never really go back to.

This is the part where you just have to give the tanks multiple full combos like a melee they were DPS so that way the monotony becomes less noticeable(DRG and SAM are examples of melee DPS that do this a lot of justice, same with PLD and GNB).

As for Abyssal Drain, the 1-2-3 thing would only work if Unleash and Stalwart Soul were target AoEs like Abyssal Drain.

But the TL;DR version is that I believe having more oGCDs is raising the skill floor and having more GCDs is raising the skill ceiling, and removing GCDs is basically lowering the skill ceiling and adding oGCDs to raise the floor is to where the ceiling used to be is a bad idea(look at retail World of Warcraft as the prime example offender of this) and GCDs that have unique recast timer is a good balance of raising both skill floor and ceiling at the same time.