Is TBN a bad skill?

[Nedkel]

People really need to reevaluate the 'but it doesnt save a healer gcd so it doesnt matter's argument. Its constantly spammed for everything tank related in these forums.

No ONE thing saves a healer gcd. Ever miss reprisal on your designated aoe? Did healers spam extra gcds to make up for it? How bout your raid wide miti skill? Miss the intervention on your tabk buddy for huster 10%? Did a healer have to C2 then to make it up? No?

If none of these things cost a healer gcd then why are we doing them?

Because it's the cumulative effect of a combination of skills combined with the passive/low hanging fruit hots.

Bosses deal incoming damage. Healers have a set of 'low hanging fruit's heals that are cheap/free. Fairy heals, regen, medica ticks, ogcd heals etc. If the damage coming in is lower than the ez heals then no healer gcds are required. But bosses deal more damage than that. Then you ADD UP the additional mitigation from all sources to try to bring that damage eew back down. If you can get that overall damage down low enough you dont need extra heals. This is the goal. This is the zero gcd heal runs. No one skill gets you there. It's a group goal everyone participates in.

My cotank often takes zero damage from busters and aoe with his skills, my party skills, and my tbn/etc. Did I single handedly prevent a healer gcd? No. But I was 1 piece of the puzzle that prevented a healer gcd and that has value.

Stop looking at every skill as a binary "does x skill prevent a healer gcd, yes/no. If yes it's good skill. If bad its worthless skill". Its an oversimplification and pretty useless way to look at skills.

The goal is to combine mitigation from all sources to get damage down to match the incoming free/ogcd heals. No one skill gets that done. The entire party combines their skills to get that done.

Sure but in equation of Incoming damage > tank > healer you dont have any other party members, there is no DPS in this game that could potentially contribute into tanks damage received, only by killing things faster but it does not change the incoming damage directly in any way. There are tanks and healers, thats it.

TBN scales with other mitigation skills, making it so much more powerful than anything in the game, and this makes DRK so damn tanky.
Once you hit a certain threshold of incoming damage, the healer dps output starts to increase in comparison to other tanks, and this occurs mainly in 4 mans content, not in raids since incoming damage there is severely miscalculated and there is no real risk of killing tank ever by mismanagement.

[Izsha]

Sure but in equation of Incoming damage > tank > healer you dont have any other party members, there is no DPS in this game that could potentially contribute into tanks damage received, only by killing things faster but it does not change the incoming damage directly in any way. There are tanks and healers, thas it.

Not true at all. Dps have mitigation skills and healing abilities that work towards the goal. Addle for magic damage, feint for physical damage. Actions like bards troubadour. All of these and more directly reduce damage. Then of course theres all the healing skills (self heals, mantra, etc) dps have to lighten the load and help balance the damage vs mitigation+healing.

Everyone has tools to mitigate and heal. Tanks and healers just have the brunt of it.

No 1 skill prevents healer gcds. The combined effect of all skills prevent healer gcds.

[ArianeEwah]

My cotank often takes zero damage from busters and aoe with his skills, my party skills, and my tbn/etc. Did I single handedly prevent a healer gcd? No. But I was 1 piece of the puzzle that prevented a healer gcd and that has value.

That I agree with you. TBN is good in what it is supposed to do. Mitigating heavy hits.
It just isn't that kinda skill that prevents all incoming damage like some make it sound like it'd be.
It's short CD in most cases is irrelevent when you only get 3-4 effective uses in 3 min.
On the other hand, heavy damage that's happening in succession gets failry easily handled by TBN.

This is false.

TBN makes DRK the easiest job to heal and it saves a ton of GCD when DRK uses it consistently.
Maybe not in raids, but in dungeons where the damage is way higher on trash mobs, it does make a difference.

I would agrue that would be WAR. I've run dozens of dungeons where my healer didn't even use Excogitation or any GCD heals whatsoever. However, DRK does require at least some heals.
Not that it does hurt, you can probably heal all tanks just with oGCDs -unless your party suffers from low dps.
Certainly, DRK is easier to heal than GNB or PLD in dungeons. Just pray you never have to heal through Living Dead on any heal that's not WHM!

[SamRF]

I feel like TBN is the only skill left that can to a little extend play into the the DRK theme of edgy/dangerous sacrifice of resources. You need to save MP to be able to use TBN when it's appropiate and when you use it, you have to make sure it gets soaked otherwise you'll have sacrificed rescources. This decision you need to make, while being piss easy, is the only thing that kind of resonates with this calculated "sacrifice" theme that I think of when considering DRK.

Many were hoping it would be HP we'd be sacrificing, but before ShB we had MP instead, and it worked to some extend with that you needed MP to hold aggro in dungeon mob pulls and for Abyssal Drain (which could mean life or death in big pulls), so if you went too crazy with MP and didn't manage it well enough you wouldn't be able to keep aggro at certain moments or not have enough for Abyssal Drain. Which means that if you weren't careful with managing your resources, you'd be risking your own and your party's life. Not at all saying that this was difficult, but it was simply a distinction from other tanks that resonated a little to the DRK theme.

ShB has nothing like that anymore, you're just a juicy resource assault rifle who can go berserk if they want with little consequences. The only small thing that still plays into this sacrifice theme is TBN, for which you need sufficient MP at the occasion and need for it to be fully absorbed to get your resource back.

[EpicOverlord85]

Xenonys Vex the streamer the other day kept going on and on about how he thinks TBN is a bad skill. I think his argument is that it's a CD that takes resources to use and thus lowers your overall damage output.

He acknowledges that most people love the skill and he is in the minority. My question is, IS it a bad skill? I mean it's pretty powerful but is it really just a burden to DRK and needs a tweak?

It’s our best and most unique skill at this point and I don’t want Square screwing with it.

[TouchandFeel]

Is the skill bad?
Yes and no depending how you look at it and what framing you use to determine what constitutes "good" and "bad".
I won't go into the exacts of the differing viewpoints as I feel the posts already made in the thread cover those pretty adequately and show how the ability can both be seen as bad and seen as good, with both sides bringing legitimate points forward.

However, for all its "cons" to go with its "pros" or in a ways because of them, I really like TBN and it is my favourite defensive ability in the game. I like that it has some caveats to it that require a measure of intelligent usage as it forces a little more engagement in the defensive game-play niche for the tank role, something that as others have stated is perhaps a bit lacking. Honestly, I wish the other tanks had defensive abilities like TBN, not exactly like it of course, where there was a built in level of risk/reward to their usage.
Just to be clear, not caveats like the "be healed or die" of Living Dead, that is a bad implementation of such a caveat; ones that are under the control of and require intelligent usage by the tank player, not relying on others to save us from our own abilities.

I do however feel, and even predicted at the beginning of the expansion, that TBN being made 25% of the character's HP with no change to duration has resulted in the ability out-pacing the content a bit, greatly diminishing where and how it can be used properly and breaking as it should. It really should have 1-2 seconds added to it's duration to compensate for the greater pace of power gain that we experience progressing through an expansion versus the lesser pace of increasing difficulty.

[SpiralMask]

@OP short answer: no
long answer: nnnnnnnooooooooooo--

[Barachim]

I love TBN. It makes me feel like a support tank at times, because many times, I managed to keep dps and healers alive, who would have died otherwise without it.

[Cabalabob]

TBN has a lot going for it, but I’d agree that it is a badly designed skill. Or rather that DRK is overall badly designed.

The shield is extremely powerful, an attack that would 1 shot any other tank won’t kill a DRK using TBN and the recast is only 15 seconds. In savage content where basically anything the boss does will break that shield, TBN is flat out broken because the DRK can practically use it on CD at no dps loss.

But in basically any other content you have to be much more careful when and how you use it, because if that shield doesn’t break then you just wasted a 500 potency attack to use it. Compare that to the other tank’s equivalent skills like PLD’s sheltron. It costs gauge that isn’t used for anything other than sheltron and intervention (and cover but not really) so the PLD can use it on CD to mitigate any fluff damage and can even hold a second charge if it needs it for a tank buster. PLD can literally spam sheltron on “cooldown” at no cost. The same can be said for GNB and WAR to a slightly lesser degree since they don’t have that second charge but the recast is still fairly short.

Basically the other tanks can use their mitigation whenever they want and the only cost of “poor” usage is the recast of the ability itself. But if a DRK makes “poor” usage of TBN it’s costing them both the recast of the ability AND 2k mp (one flood of shadow if we don’t consider AoE).

No other tank has to make that kind of decision between using mitigation and dealing damage. This also nullifies the usefulness of the 15 second recast because you can’t use it on CD unless there is enough damage to warrant it. This is the problem people have with TBN, it’s powerful mitigation yes, but if you aren’t taking a specific threshold of damage in a very small window... you can’t use it (where other tanks could still use theirs).

Then if you look at the rest of DRKs kit, ignoring shadow wall and rampart as generic tools all tanks have, what does DRK bring to the table? Living dead is a garbage skill, Dark mind is situational since it’s magic only, same with dark missionary and then we have TBN, that’s all. DRK is a one trick pony and the trick isn’t very good outside of high level content.

[Seraphor]

The shield is extremely powerful, an attack that would 1 shot any other tank won’t kill a DRK using TBN and the recast is only 15 seconds. In savage content where basically anything the boss does will break that shield, TBN is flat out broken because the DRK can practically use it on CD at no dps loss.

But in basically any other content you have to be much more careful when and how you use it, because if that shield doesn’t break then you just wasted a 500 potency attack to use it. Compare that to the other tank’s equivalent skills like PLD’s sheltron. It costs gauge that isn’t used for anything other than sheltron and intervention (and cover but not really) so the PLD can use it on CD to mitigate any fluff damage and can even hold a second charge if it needs it for a tank buster. PLD can literally spam sheltron on “cooldown” at no cost. The same can be said for GNB and WAR to a slightly lesser degree since they don’t have that second charge but the recast is still fairly short.

The thing is, in anything but savage/ultimate, that dps loss really doesn't mean much.
Perhaps some extremes when progging their first week could do with it to meet dps checks, but many aren't that strict.