Design of DRK and PLD

[Undeadfire]

as I recall there was a lot of complaints about this back when DRK was first released because PLD and WAR were just better against most enemies for this reason.

Actually, it was Paladin.

Drk was absolutely disgusting in HW. Blood Price (Any attack taken) adds mp for more Dark Arts spam, Delirium 3rd Combo GCD (INT down) making Monk irrelevant since you had it permanently up, any parry results to free leg kicks (DPS + Stun) meaning it reset the cooldown instantly and Dark Dance helping out (20% Parry increase), Scourge (GCD Dot), Reprisal (short cooldown triggered by parry), Abyssal Drain (GCD), Salted Earth (45 seconds CD), Plunge.

All Paladin got was Clemency , Divine Veil, Goring Blade and Royal Authority. It got no tools compared to what Dark Knight had, including Warrior.

Warrior got Deliverance (Damage Increase 5% and Crit rate) making them another dps, Equilibrium, and a strange Raw Intuition which mobs crit you if you got hit from rear/flanks.

[Kalaam]

Damn HW Dark Knight was fun and reactive with those parry procs.

[Lyth]

Most actively raiding DRK players in Heavensward also played PLD and vice versa. There definitely were fights that were easier to progress on with PLD than DRK, A7S being the blatantly obvious example. You see this decision-making reflected in the WF clears as well. WAR was the only constant in that they were good against all damage types. MNK and DK were completely equivalent to Delirium and were probably up even more often. You'd have to be playing with an incredibly subpar MNK for them to play without their blunt resistance down buff.

I wouldn't consider the proc-based gameplay on HW DRK to be 'tools' or 'utility'. It just ensured that your resource generation was more variable, forcing you to think on your feet. FFXIV players tend to be very much against any randomness or variability that prevent you from mapping out your rotations on a spreadsheet, which is why DRK unfortunately has moved closer towards PLD style faceroll rotational design despite being originally set up as resource management tank. The problem is that it feeds back into this culture that every pull that you do has to be able to potentially yield a mathematically optimal result (even if you're not at the mechanical skill level where you can achieve said result), or else we just wipe and reset until you get the numbers that you want. This was the kind of thinking that made them effectively remove Crit/DH from affecting WAR. It's an incredibly dumb design direction. Who cares if you didn't crit on your 22nd Fell Cleave? Just play your best and you'll average at what you should.

[Kalaam]

I aggree on that, most of the times bosses move, you have to get away, this will delay a GDC or two etc etc. We aren't TAS machines.
A bit of random is fun, having reprisal and low blow proc on parries (I don't remember the rate but if I recall it was fairly high if not 100% ?) was fun oGCD to weave in. The ressource management felt more organic, dynamic than what we have now.
Right now it feels very... cold ? As you said it's spreadsheet where we know exactly, to the digit, how our ressources will be generated and spent. To be honest I kind of prefered MP not being the same cap for everyone and being an actual stat.

[Ultimatecalibur]

This was the kind of thinking that made them effectively remove Crit/DH from affecting WAR. It's an incredibly dumb design direction. Who cares if you didn't crit on your 22nd Fell Cleave? Just play your best and you'll average at what you should.

Actually it was the opposite of dumb design, what it replaced was dumb design. The initial StB War was very random and Spiky due to so few attacks having such a major influence on average damage. The difference between direct crit Fell Cleave and a normal Fell Cleave during Berserk was 562 potency which was more than Fell Cleave's base potency of 500. When you have only 5 or 6 of those attacks every 2 minutes you only have a total of 25 to 30 of those attacks in a 10 minute fight which is far to few for the law of large numbers to ensure that each run was having the WAR deal roughly the same average damage.

[Lyth]

This is largely a perceptual thing, and it can be difficult to wrap your head around, but it doesn't really matter. At all. The expected value is still going to be the same under target dummy conditions, regardless of whether you are playing a burst dps job or a sustain dps job. You can go a step further and say 'Oh, I happened to Crit 522 out of 590 auto-attacks that last run out of pure dumb luck but then we wiped, game is so unfair'. But again, who cares? Anyone can get a really lucky run. What matters is your consistency, pull after pull. This is especially true if you're a tank.

The reason why WAR's 'Crit RNG' received so much attention in Stormblood was because:
1) Increased focus on Crit/DH with the introduction of DH
2) Xeno campaigned for the current 'Critless' WAR design because it was adding RNG to the fflogs rankings

For good or for ill, this was the bandwagon that the community jumped on. WAR Crit/DH on everything, and so, they Crit/DH on nothing. So enjoy, players got exactly what they asked for.

Personally, I don't care too much about whether Crit or DH actually exist. I do think that this game doubles down on comfy predictability too much, and I'd really like to see more twitch reaction-based mechanics and job design which makes you respond on the fly. But that's just my bias. You might think that your spreadsheets are the pinnacle of mechanical skill, who knows.

[Undeadfire]

And now Warrior is a pile of garbage. It provides no interaction than spam Inner Chaos/Fell Cleave, spam Nascent Flash, doesn't work under certain comps, it's Dark Knight on easy mode.

Gunbreaker is fine for now
Paladin is doing great
Warrior needs a rework
Dark Knight needs tuning

[Asta_Umbra]

They mean "Shield" as in barrier. It does feels weird for the paladin, who has a literal shield, to not be the tank using "shield" mitigation.
What's funny is that DRK also had a lot of parry incentive on release, gave it a duelist feel as a tank (which I honestly really enjoyed).

Do any of these matters when it comes to savage and ultimate? well i guess PLD does use his shield"Passage of Arms. And by shield what i mean is indeed as Kalaam mentioned. Barrier.

Divine Veil, Intervention, PoA are all "shield" based unless you mean something else again.

and it would be weird to not use them in savage and ultimate.

[shao32]

And now Warrior is a pile of garbage. It provides no interaction than spam Inner Chaos/Fell Cleave, spam Nascent Flash, doesn't work under certain comps, it's Dark Knight on easy mode.

Gunbreaker is fine for now
Paladin is doing great
Warrior needs a rework
Dark Knight needs tuning

DRK is a simlified WAR with a mountain of fluff oGCD, if WAR is bad DRK is worse overall now more clear that WAR moves to the 60s mark raid buffs with DRK, at least the job have more interesting downtime with Infuriate charges, storm eye management and having 3 charges of onslaught allowing him to have one always ready outside of raid buff if he still need it, DRK just sit there eating grass with soul eater spam and a ocasional bloodspiller while his uncohesive kit refresh his fluff and his MP regens at the stepping on eggs speed.

WAR may be no really complex and is easy to manage but his kit is one of the most solids we have in terms of design and cohesion, WAR is the arguable one that would need tweaks to make it more interesting, DRK needs a rework on almost everything it have.

[Undeadfire]

DRK is a simlified WAR with a mountain of fluff oGCD, if WAR is bad DRK is worse overall now more clear that WAR moves to the 60s mark raid buffs with DRK, at least the job have more interesting downtime with Infuriate charges, storm eye management and having 3 charges of onslaught allowing him to have one always ready outside of raid buff if he still need it, DRK just sit there eating grass with soul eater spam and a ocasional bloodspiller while his uncohesive kit refresh his fluff and his MP regens at the stepping on eggs speed.

WAR may be no really complex and is easy to manage but his kit is one of the most solids we have in terms of design and cohesion, WAR is the arguable one that would need tweaks to make it more interesting, DRK needs a rework on almost everything it have.

I'm not sure man, Dark Knight has been switching places with Paladin back to back certain Savage fights and it still does in this expansion for having the most disgusting Burst I ever seen.

Warrior doesn't work with a lot comps DPS wise, useless with Drg, useless with Sch. Warriors problem is literally Inner Release, it's a short big burst and that's it can't do anything else for 90 seconds, sits there doing 1-2-3 with a random FC falling hardcore on DPS. Dark Knight is able to keep consistent damage flowing through and take complete advantage of Chain from Sch. Comps stall 30 seconds on CDs to link up with Dark Knight certain fights for perfect timing earning cooldowns after down time. Don't be so quick to jump the band wagon, Dark Knight is in a lot of speed kills over Paladin for it's burst potential and fight timings, Paladin has flaws needing 35-36 seconds without interruption on every occasion never to happen in order to beat Dark Knight.