Tank IDENTITY

[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.