Tank IDENTITY

[Shurrikhan]

A quick search through your post history shows that even you consistently refer to WAR's 'self-healing by attacking enemies' as life steal.

Not consistently, no. But, yes I will call it that often enough, as shorthand, when those I'm talking to aren't purposely leveraging a rough term to conflate a mechanic with a motif. Just as "healing" doesn't necessarily make for a White Mage, Holy Priest, or pure-hearted, saintly oracle-mage, healing through offense doesn't necessarily make for a vampire. "Shielding", likewise, doesn't require a technomancer motif and sci-fi shield battery.

Perhaps every time they punch someone, they make their opponents drop potions, bandages, and medkits that you can pick up. But that should be part of the visual storytelling of the action itself.

It's. Literally. Right. There. Every bit as blatantly as Souleater. How is "I gutted this man from low to high, and did a spin-flip" any more a clear visual indicator of "I just sucked out this guy's lifeforce" than progressively increasing angry red glow, some backchanneling yellow energy on heals, etc., from one's strikes?

HP boosts in this game are a functionally better version of flat damage shields, because they translate into a shield + heal.

You do realize that shields likewise increase both your current and maximum HP, right? They don't convert HP into the shield. It goes... on top.

An 20k HP boost does not increase your maximum eHP at that moment by any more than a 20k shield. The shield just has the further benefit of preventing status effects, including knockback, if its applying damage is less than the shield value.

I'm a bit iffy on Equilibrium, primarily because the naming choice is somewhat random.

It makes sense less today; it was literally a matter of balancing throughput vs. sustain when it was made. The job was previously very much about trading out how to use Wrath stacks.

And there's nothing in the visual storytelling of the actions that explains it how a barbarian is capable of absorbing someone's life force.

They're not. It's not someone else's lifeforce. It's the Warrior own aether being stimulated.

That being said, I can tell you for a fact that players found comparing massive HP pools to be ridiculously good fun.

I literally just agreed to that.

And I think that designing jobs in ways that make them all individually feel fun to play should always be a priority.

I've never argued with this.

And that really comes down to identify the visual story that you want to tell through each job's ability set.

Which apparently will be ignored unless it falls into your rather narrow constraints:

"Is this job obviously magic (must use MP and have actual spells)? If not, it cannot have access to barriers or self-healing because all the lore put forward to say how and why should be held suspect" despite being in a game where all physical combatants, and indeed virtually all people, inherently channel aether within themselves to surpass normal limitations.


That's the issue at hand here. We do not need to restrict all seemingly "physical" jobs to the scraps of whatever mechanics the ostensibly "magic" ones leave behind in a world in which every person capable of taking a teleport or over level ~15 is habitually using aether manipulation to some extent. You may as well watch some Martial Arts B-movie and take offense at someone leaping a larger gap than is normally human could just because they're "not a wizard."

If you just look that larger span of jobs, Dancer being capable of heals, Monk and SAM of mitigating even magic damage, etc., etc. WAR's visual tells are still (less than they were, but still) mostly cohesive and sufficient. Yes, I'd rather WAR build more upon and around its old core, but it's not a problem that it heals as it attacks.