Tank IDENTITY

[fulminating]

Why should dark knight have hp absorption when the job fantasy is sacrificing hp for high damage attacks?

[Lyth]

Trying to base PLD and WAR's identities rigidly on what they were in 1.x/ARR is an incredibly bad idea, because their design was based on them being the only two tanks ever in existence. It took over an expansion after DRK's release and a lot of complaints from here for it to stop it from being treated as a second-class 'PLD/WAR' hybrid.

Same problem existed with healers, and they still haven't quite gotten over the 'pure/shield' duality of ARR. Not every healer job needs to be designed as a WHM-replacement or a SCH-replacement.

The one feature of WAR that was fairly unique back in ARR/Heavensward that hasn't really seen much exploration since is the relationship between defense and offense. Historically, certain defensive abilities like IR and Vengeance gave you resources, such that it was beneficial to sync up periods where you were tanking with your burst windows.

There's an element of this with IR's knockback prevention, but it would probably make sense if you had some sort of a defensive bonus while in IR, or even something that synergistically boosts your defensives if you use it in the window. It certainly would fit with that 'too angry to die' aesthetic.

They do HP as a resource for DRK in PvP. The HP absorption makes it such that you're not just a drain on your healers. Works differently in single-player games since you control both the healer and the DRK.

[Vatom]

Man that was a long cat fight JK

As much as I understand and agree Lyth
I don't think we will ever see such changes

Life steal is an offensive stat which grants healing equal to a percentage of the damage dealt by basic attacks, including those that are modified

This is BW, AD and Blood bath don't go saying oh you just heal instead, they changed that because they ripped bloodbath off of tanks and needed to balance tans sustain though WAR still has really good sustain

Magical or not that's what it is Im not here to argue about weather WAR should have it or DRK just stating the fact

Also if you say that BW you have heal at a certain potency not your dmg, you still have to do dmg to get the heal don't play lawyer with me if it didnt it would just be Second wind or equilibrium

DRK being a HP for dmg is a old concept from XI that got kinda transferred over but didn't make the cut after I think StB since dying is a thing for people
They will probably never go back to it cause they want to make it very low skill floor for classes

Now does Life steal equate to only magic if we go by DnD terms yeah but many other games LoL for just and example this isn't magical but then if we go deeper magical dmg to heal would be Spell Vamp... Vamp. the closest things to that would be good old drain and AD due to the magical dmg but thats off of league concept
lets delve into FF Aether is magical in a sense its just that Everyone uses if so Its kinda of the norm thats why you see Garleans use magitek and not smack you in the face and heal but we can. Thats why in lore SAMs were clothing similar to mages to help with Aether manipulation and NINs use hand signs, and yes WAR uses aether too
Different ways of using aether to solve a problem so lore wise yes everyone is magical unless your garlean
Even if you give me the argument of its physical dmg its still considered magical in the sense of lore normal people don't do what you do
Physical and magical dmg is just flavor text

[Lyth]

Oh, I don't think that it will ever change either. It largely has to do with the fact that the dev team tries really hard to make everyone happy, and is incredibly averse to any sort of backlash. That's why we have the current setup as a compromise of sorts - they did tip the balance of lifesteal briefly in DRK's favor in early Stormblood, but then backpedaled on feedback. For that matter, it took about two expansions worth of feedback to convince everyone involved that 'doing massively more damage than everyone else' was not acceptable as an identity-defining trait of WAR.

That being said, I do get why we frequently see posts about how bizarre the job fantasy is in this game for newer players, as in this OP. You're never going to see a change because most players struggle with adapting to it.

[Vatom]

Oh, I don't think that it will ever change either. It largely has to do with the fact that the dev team tries really hard to make everyone happy, and is incredibly averse to any sort of backlash. That's why we have the current setup as a compromise of sorts - they did tip the balance of lifesteal briefly in DRK's favor in early Stormblood, but then backpedaled on feedback. For that matter, it took about two expansions worth of feedback to convince everyone involved that 'doing massively more damage than everyone else' was not acceptable as an identity-defining trait of WAR.

That being said, I do get why we frequently see posts about how bizarre the job fantasy is in this game for newer players, as in this OP. You're never going to see a change because most players struggle with adapting to it.

Amen to that one

[fulminating]

Bloodbath/Raw Instinct/Bloodwhetting are things that balance offence and defence aren't they? The more you hit, the survivier you are. Thematically it was better as a heal based on damage dealt, but for consistency the change makes some sense.

[Shurrikhan]

Trying to base PLD and WAR's identities rigidly on what they were in 1.x/ARR is an incredibly bad idea, because their design was based on them being the only two tanks ever in existence. It took over an expansion after DRK's release and a lot of complaints from here for it to stop it from being treated as a second-class 'PLD/WAR' hybrid.

HW DRK was more of a PLD-like + gimmicks, but that's not because of how PLD and WAR identities were split; it was simply due to Shadowskin being literally identical to Rampart, Shadow Wall just being a Sentinel with a 30s longer CD, etc. A lot of things were simply tossed in as "good enough" on DRK, unlike the original attention given to PLD and WAR's identities. It had fun gimmicks in a then-unique gap-closer, split defensives (DM, DD), and Dark Arts, but the job as a whole was unnecessarily short-changed.

Same problem existed with healers, and they still haven't quite gotten over the 'pure/shield' duality of ARR. Not every healer job needs to be designed as a WHM-replacement or a SCH-replacement.

I don't think anyone's recommended that jobs need to take on a A|B discrete categories, only noted that a job's apparent theme will to an extent be dependent on their differences from the other jobs in its role. For instance, it makes little sense to make Warrior the super-mitigation tank... if it's to stand right next to Paladin, who wears full plate, has a shield, for whom healing better fits thematically as a discrete and support-capable choice, etc.

The one feature of WAR that was fairly unique back in ARR/Heavensward that hasn't really seen much exploration since is the relationship between defense and offense. Historically, certain defensive abilities like IR and Vengeance gave you resources, such that it was beneficial to sync up periods where you were tanking with your burst windows.

There's an element of this with IR's knockback prevention, but it would probably make sense if you had some sort of a defensive bonus while in IR, or even something that synergistically boosts your defensives if you use it in the window. It certainly would fit with that 'too angry to die' aesthetic.

Agreed. Sadly, "streamlining" has mostly gutted that thematic connection.

That's why we have the current setup as a compromise of sorts - they did tip the balance of lifesteal briefly in DRK's favor in early Stormblood, but then backpedaled on feedback. For that matter, it took about two expansions worth of feedback to convince everyone involved that 'doing massively more damage than everyone else' was not acceptable as an identity-defining trait of WAR.

It'd take an extreme number of mobs for "lifesteal" to have been tipped in DRK's favor in Stormblood, especially early. Steel Cyclone and Inner Beast both healed and Bloodbath was available a third of the time. BW-Quietus offered DRK a lot more MP to work with and funnel into DA-AD, but it's hard to say that that actually put it ahead of DRK.

Either way, those were fun times. Well, pre-unga bunga Warrior and the other Stormblood tanks, at any rate.

[Lyth]

...

In HW, PLD/DRK was one tank slot and WAR was the other, much like WHM/AST was one healer slot and SCH was the other. It wasn't a deliberate design decision, but it happened as a consequence of the fact that ARR had so few tanks and healers. If you contrast this with DPS, you never really saw the same problem because the job pool was fairly diverse from the outset, such each job had a relatively narrow but clearly defined theme.

By the way, Steel Cyclone didn't have any self-healing on Stormblood's launch. You can see that if you pull up an older version of the job actions page circa 2017. That was only added later following complaints over Bloodbath's removal from WAR.

ARR's mistake was to try to set up PLD as a 'defensive tank' and WAR as an 'offensive tank'. Tanks need to be able to mitigate, do damage, obtain enmity, position and move, and you could argue self-sustain fits in there as an optional fifth category. You can have a small degree of variability, but large discrepancies lead to power imbalances. The way around this is that you just find alternative ways of achieving the end result. We saw this to an extent with Shield Oath's %DR vs. Defiance's %HP boost + %healing bonus, or even in Plunge vs. Tempered Will as anti-knockback tools. I don't think that there's any category of tank actions that 'has to be' done one particular way.

And that's where self-sustain comes in. I can think of many ways of doing self-sustain on a tank. PLD's classic spellcasting approach with Clemency has its issues because of the opportunity costs in cast time and resource costs, which makes it a dps loss. But that wouldn't be an issue if you had a way of generating a swiftcast proc that lets you cast healing and defensive spells instantly and for free. You wouldn't need a lifesteal effect built into Holy Spirit/Circle. Need some spot healing? Just weave in a Swiftcast Clemency. Done.

GNB has Aurora, which isn't all that interesting on its own. But what if you tapped into that 'soldier' design a bit more and gave them a Stimpack effect to boost their rate of regeneration along with other temporary bonuses? I've mentioned before that a lifesteal or the more lawful good approach of 'heal yourself on hitting the enemy (wink wink)' job like WAR could expand that same concept into mitigation by turning overhealing into temporary HP. And there are other unexplored options as well. Could you heal yourself on taking damage? Rewind your HP back to a previous timepoint? Could you convert unused shields into healing? Could you airdrop some health pickups for your party to grab? Could you build a heal-over-time effect into a stance or aura? Could you place down a support puppet that acts as a personal healer?

You can basically do this with any of the tanking 'categories' that I mentioned earlier. But it does require buy in from the community. If your tank with stimpack and regen mechanics turns around and starts demanding lifesteal as well as cure spells as well as HP rewind effects, then you end up with a bunch of identical tanks that all have way too much self-healing and defensive bloat.

[fulminating]

And that's where self-sustain comes in. I can think of many ways of doing self-sustain on a tank. PLD's classic spellcasting approach with Clemency has its issues because of the opportunity costs in cast time and resource costs, which makes it a dps loss. But that wouldn't be an issue if you had a way of generating a swiftcast proc that lets you cast healing and defensive spells instantly and for free. You wouldn't need a lifesteal effect built into Holy Spirit/Circle. Need some spot healing? Just weave in a Swiftcast Clemency. Done.
.

Clemency is a spell, no matter how hard you swiftcast it you'll still not be doing weaponskill/spell damage that gcd. Changing clemency to an ability probably wouldn't help much either because you'd now have a 1000/500p heal on demand which generates the opposite issue.

[Shurrikhan]

In HW, PLD/DRK was one tank slot and WAR was the other, much like WHM/AST was one healer slot and SCH was the other. It wasn't a deliberate design decision, but it happened as a consequence of the fact that ARR had so few tanks and healers.

I still feel like this was less a problem of what (or how little) jobs existed in each role prior as just... honestly taking the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it mentality" too far, ignoring opportunities for fleshing out their respective new job's (AST and DRK's) themes.

We had an incoming time-space support mage... and the only things we could think of for its core healing bonus was "Give it the choice between WHM mode or SCH mode"??? That theme could easily have offered either, in practice, among increased total output or increased eHP without having to simply copy HoTs and barriers verbatim.

ARR's mistake was to try to set up PLD as a 'defensive tank' and WAR as an 'offensive tank'.

Given that PLD had greater OT damage than WAR did and WAR had defensive-only mechanics that PLD had no equivalent to, I can't quite agree that the distinction was quite so clear-cut as that, but otherwise agreed.

PLD's classic spellcasting approach with Clemency has its issues because of the opportunity costs in cast time and resource costs, which makes it a dps loss.

To be fair, though, it was never sold as "self-sustain", only as an emergency support tool. The idea before was that Paladin's unreliable extra mitigation over time from blocking would take up that longer-term sustain* function.

But, yes, at least in the current state of things, I certainly wouldn't mind procced "Rapid Clemency" hotswapped button whereby Clemency becomes an ability for its next cast. I'd think that more fitting, at the least, than Knight's Benediction or Requiescat's healing-per-attack.

* To be clear, I'm referring to sustain as anything that increases your longevity, which can be via mitigation (flat or percentile) or healing (likewise flat or percentile, though we don't technically have the latter in XIV).

GNB has Aurora, which isn't all that interesting on its own. But what if you tapped into that 'soldier' design a bit more and gave them a Stimpack effect to boost their rate of regeneration along with other temporary bonuses?

...Hell yeah. Would love to see that theme played more with. I don't think we're going to get an outright Soldier at this point, so I don't think it'd be too problematic for its thematic elements to be split each across GNB and DRK.

You never want to design an action that always punishes you when using it, which was the problem with many tank actions pre-Shadowbringers. It ends up being dead hotbar space when you're playing optimally.

Ehhh. Any Raise, for example, is also that. As is, eventually... nearly every GCD heal. Since Clemency could feasibly save yourself from a death (far more dps-costly than a mere lost GCD and combo progress) or one's raid from a wipe, it certainly "always" punishing, so long as one doesn't narrow their sight to just the one player's offensive output.

Personally, I don't mind a job that is designed to have "saves the raid pitch-hitter buttons" having situational tools, so long as they come at little to no cost to that job's budget. Until ShB's oversights, for instance, I don't think Clemency was every considered part of PLD's sustain (combined effective mitigation and effective healing) budget, and so that was fine. It was a bonus tool that gave the job some unique affordances and further flavor.