Tank IDENTITY

[Shurrikhan]

Read my whole answer before and think again...

The problem is not being over taken by dps, its by the other tank. And yes its just a toggle but most tank swaps usually happen twice.
Also very often due to tank dps ( ex: DRK + any tank except GNB in Endwalker content ) you will have to shirk even when not swapping because you are over taking the main tank in aggro.

Again. You will not overtake the MT in aggro. If you just. Turn off tank stance. Toggle it off just before you swap out and turn it on again only before Voking back in.

It's an oGCD toggle, mate. One can both turn it off before swapping out and back on, without any cost, before swapping back in.

If you're taking threat off your MT when you don't intend to, there's a much simpler solution than Shirk: turn your damn stance off, OT, until you're swapping in. You only, at most, need 2nd highest threat, which at 10x enmity doesn't take much stance uptime.

[Mikey_R]

Considering we used to swap without shirk in the past, it really isn't needed and that was before Provoke gave additional enmity, it used to be top +1.

[DannyDeDitto]

I only ever used shirk if the tank doesn't know anything about off-tanking and i need to ''force'' a tank swap in certain fights.

[Colt47]

All the tanks are the same on a basic level and it's been that way since probably Shadowbringers. Paladin was the one that I probably liked the least going from Stormblood into Shadowbringers because of making a spell combo a direct part of the rotation. Paladins never had offensive spells, they were always healing spells that were kind of semi-useless most of the time and defense buffs, so what I was expecting going into Stormblood was a melee combo with their support skills becoming spells. Instead, we got unlimited blade works confiteor.

Dark Knight basically became warrior without the self healing and having an invuln that made people want to hug their whm and pray for benediction until they patched it, so now you just hug any healer for good measure and pray they save you.

Warrior is like the only tank that feels like it never actually changed even though it did. It hits people and heals itself.

Gunbreaker is just there to attract DPS players and act as a place for disheartened / betrayed paladins.

[Lyth]

...

Here's the thing. If you want to say that a job with access to raise should do X dps less than other jobs without raise, you need to be able to mathematically quantify how much that raise is worth in dps. And you can't do that in a consistent way.

And that's why it's better to compare quantifiable benefits with quantifiable ones, and non-quantifiable benefits with non-quantifiable ones. I don't know how much a raise is worth. But if you're not giving me access to raise, give me something else that is fun and unique to use. Like what would be the mathematical dps value of being able to set up a placeable 'Warp' spell between two points in an arena that other players can interact with (i.e. up to X uses)? I don't know, and I can't compare it to raise (or anything else, for that matter). You couldn't even compare two different applications of the same ability.

There are adjustments that you can make based on trends. Jobs with timer-gated burst tend do better in fights with lots of downtime, because you spend more of the effective fight time in a burst window. Jobs with resource-gated burst tend to do worse, because you usually have to be hitting the boss to generate resources. Jobs with a lot of mobility tools might do better on fights with mechanics that force you away from the boss. I think that these are all useful considerations to make when balancing dps. But the more abstract stuff? There's nowhere to start.

I think that the primary function of the role action system is to ensure that every job has access to a basic toolkit. That doesn't mean that it can't have flavor. You could very easily attach 'action glamor' to optional quest rewards, achievements, or even craftable items. Warcraft's Glyph system was a fun way to personalize a character by adding flames to your gapclosers or changing the colour of spell effects. It removes the obligation on the devs to have to come up with duplicate actions on every job, yet also lets them fill in some fun animations when there's time.

I'd really like to see some Treasure-Hunter (THF) related 'steal' options. I once proposed that the job should be introduced as a gathering job, and let you infiltrate areas by swapping clothes sets.

[Seku]

Utility in this game doesn't matter in most cases and is only as effective as the content allows it to be or the mistakes by the player. This is why I think all roles should be within a 5% margin of each other. At least with the current game design. I think the only time this wasn't the case is when cover had native damage reduction. But some can be some what translated, but would be fight specific.

The warp example is just a question of if it can get you engaged to the boss faster than other options and if so, by how many GCDS, and where in the combo rotation. Most of that however is / would be fight dependent. A decent use would be in Dohn Mheg dungeon where the frog forces you to cross a bridge to get to him and continue attacking. The warp could easily provide an extra 3-5 GCDs per player in this situation if it allowed you over.

Raise and cures that exist to fix mistakes by your team mates on the other hand can't be translated as it's dependent on how good your team is doing and is generally why we have the DPS MOAR mentality.

Shielding in most cases from tanks seems to be worthless. Maybe not so much in the highest tier of combat. But typically they don't circumvent any mechanics or healing requirements without outside aide. Which yet again, is a hit or miss or basically does it allow your healer a offensive GCD.

Crowd control is worthless in a majority of fights and dungeons. Which eliminates quite a few role actions. However it would be good if healers had less options to OGCD heal. Then it would become a question of how well do you hold back the enemies so the healer doesn't have to heal, without losing a GCD yourself.

But they'll never go that direction.

[Shurrikhan]

Even getting hit has an eventual calculable cost, the average of a healer a ppgcd opportunity cost. The complication simply comes from different healers having different rates by which they trade offensive potential for further curative potential at increasing lower combined output efficiency... until a point after which it becomes roughly even and linear. That latter portion being so small and thus breeding so ambiguous in it's cost is just yet another unfortunate symptom of so little of our healing, if optimized, having any opportunity cost at all.

Why they decided to go that direction (of too much free healing or too little to heal), such that healers' maximum and solo offensive output would have to be squished in balance and CC and further tank mitigation at trade-off could have no real reward... well, that's the greater mystery.

[Seku]

Even getting hit has an eventual calculable cost, the average of a healer a ppgcd opportunity cost. The complication simply comes from different healers having different rates by which they trade offensive potential for further curative potential at increasing lower combined output efficiency... until a point after which it becomes roughly even and linear. That latter portion being so small and thus breeding so ambiguous in it's cost is just yet another unfortunate symptom of so little of our healing, if optimized, having any opportunity cost at all.

Why they decided to go that direction (of too much free healing or too little to heal), such that healers' maximum and solo offensive output would have to be squished in balance and CC and further tank mitigation at trade-off could have no real reward... well, that's the greater mystery.

It technically does, and I suppose you could make the argument for purposely failing mechanics would also be something to consider. As in either the group doesn't know how to get around it and when they mess up, more people die vs just having one person take it all. Or they find that by ignoring the mechanic they do more DPS.

I was thinking more in the terms of RDM or PLD healing due to unscripted damage. But I still think that in those cases (emergency heals) it wouldn't be able to translate well, due to the fact that you won't know the results until after the fight. Which is why they are great tools for progression or something like palace of the dead, where damage can come randomly or you're not expecting it instead of through scripted and known encounters.

As for why they went the direction they did, 14 wants casuals. It's not a bad thing, but your typical roulettes won't be hard as they are designed for people that don't want to think about this stuff in most cases.

If anything the game needs more relevant content outside of boss encounters and rework how they handle gear.

[Lyth]

People once made the argument at one point that 'defensive tanking' and parry builds could be used to optimize healer dps as well, back in ARR. It generally doesn't work out that way in practice, and there's no clear cut way to determine a dps equivalence for it.

[Seku]

People once made the argument at one point that 'defensive tanking' and parry builds could be used to optimize healer dps as well, back in ARR. It generally doesn't work out that way in practice, and there's no clear cut way to determine a dps equivalence for it.

Assuming you're talking to me, that's a different situation, or at least their use is. The people that made that argument probably will still argue that tenacity is a very good stat despite providing almost no actual value in most things. 'Defensive tanking' and 'parry builds' should be going more towards passive damage, which hasn't been a threat in this game for the most part. And you're right in that you can't calculate that damage too easily because it's unexpected in most cases. But it also serves an entirely different style of combat that would only serve a purpose in something like deep dungeons.

On the other hand, using mitigation purposely and with thought for something you know is coming can indeed be translated to a rough estimate of DPS gain and loss or at the very least potency gain or loss. The most simple example without going into too great of details would be that a PLD uses invincible to take a tank buster. Assuming the healer doesn't have any oGCD's up this would be a net gain in DPS as it doesn't take the PLD's action (GCD) and it doesn't take the healer's action ( GCD), thus allowing for the healer to continue their DPS.