What is going on with tanks & self-sustain?

[ataren3]

Can someone explain it to me? I'm a little confused. My understanding with dps & healer classes was that if you brought party buffs like brotherhood, mantra, nature's minne, etc. you would do less damage to compensate. With BLM, you bring big damage (even bigger now) and have no self sustain outside your barrier.

I thought this applied to tanks but I guess not? it made sense that PLD generally brought the least DPS because it's a ridiculous utility tank. Cover, intervention, Passage, healing at will that also heals you when you heal a target. WAR got ridiculous with its heals this expac but does a lot of damage. And gunbreaker got basically excog with two HoTs and usually does the most damage out of all of them.

But DRK? It has little to no sustain which to me means it's the equivalent of a "selfish" tank. Sure you have TBN but it's the only party mit that can actually cost you for using it improperly. You don't get refunded that mana or any compensation for the shield wearing off before it breaks and you get oblation for single person mit. No self sustain in raids and extremes outside of your tank invuln.

So why is it that they seem to love giving self-sustain to tanks (minus DRK I guess) and buffing their damage? Why can't we leave the sustain to the healers? Tank sustain in this expansion specifically is just... ridiculous. It legitimately feels like you'd be better off bringing another dps and a WAR/PLD/GNB than an actual healer for difficult fights.

[fulminating]

Dark knight has the best mitigation of all the tanks. Dark mind and tbn counts for a hell of a lot more than you’re crediting it with. Not to mention dark missionary being % of damage rather than ehp.

We also don’t know the criteria SE use for allocating damage. They’ve said conflicting things, have buffed some jobs and left others. Their fight design has been all over the place which doesn’t help either. Paladin was highest damage or second place in shadowbringers too, monk does loads of damage and has good utility, mch has good damage for a phys ranged and good mitigation, blue mage has the highest potential in all aspects of combat, the list goes on.

[Oizen]

I think its more of a result of Balancing only really considering week 1 savage clears specifically and ignoring all other content. In Savage, Damage is king, utility is basically a crutch for prog and falls off from there. As a result, punishing jobs for extra utility by not giving them damage doesn't work. The game's core design is so restrictive thats what it boils down to.

The other tanks (except GNB) didn't have damage, so they focused on buffing them in that area.
Does this mean we may very well see a situation where WAR is not only top damage, but also has the utility to act as healer #3? Yes.

Is that balanced? Not at all, but thats how balance works here. Seeing changes to anything other than damage potency buffs is surprisingly rare.

[ataren3]

Dark knight has the best mitigation of all the tanks. Dark mind and tbn counts for a hell of a lot more than you’re crediting it with. Not to mention dark missionary being % of damage rather than ehp.

We also don’t know the criteria SE use for allocating damage. They’ve said conflicting things, have buffed some jobs and left others. Their fight design has been all over the place which doesn’t help either. Paladin was highest damage or second place in shadowbringers too, monk does loads of damage and has good utility, mch has good damage for a phys ranged and good mitigation, blue mage has the highest potential in all aspects of combat, the list goes on.

That's what I'm so confused about. They've mentioned a few times in the past that if something brings utility they generally reduce the damage to compensate. There used to be the whole "ranged tax" which is now mostly gone. The buffs they gave are nice though I don't understand why it's the thousandth time gunbreaker got a buff.

In my opinion tanks having self-sustain, while nice... shouldn't be there. Maybe I'm just thinking from the perspective of a healer and I'm still salty I rarely do my job.

[Malthir]

The TLDR version is that Drk's are the unloved step child that SE has to keep in but doesn't want to take care of. Or maybe I'm just still super salty about them removing the powerslash animation and giving us really bad animations instead and removed all our cool moves and gave them to other classes :'(

[Cabalabob]

Tanks have more damage but less healing than healers, tanks have more healing than dps but less damage, DRK has the most damage of all the tanks, all checks out to me.

PLD and WAR got dps buffs because they were lagging behind GNB and DRK by more than the devs wanted them to, they’re still weaker than those 2 jobs even with the buffs, the gap is just smaller now. PLD in particular was very behind since the rework actually left it doing less damage than pre-rework which was the exact opposite of what the rework was supposed to do.

[RyuDragnier]

Tanks have more damage but less healing than healers, tanks have more healing than dps but less damage, DRK has the most damage of all the tanks, all checks out to me.

Correction, DRK has the most damage, least healing, and worst kit out of all of the tanks. Like seriously, DRK's kit is horribly made. Who made the bright idea of having a capstone ability that is just an oGCD you press that isn't linked to anything else in the kit? Who thought it was a good idea to attach AD instead of Flood to CnS? Who thought it was a good idea for DRK to have 0 healing in single target situations (no, Souleater's 300 cure potency that can only come out during a 1-2-3 doesn't count, nor does Living Dead)? Who thought it was a good idea for MP to just be spam on use most of the time? Who thought it was a good idea for DRK's unique cooldown to only show up at level 70, when the others get theirs in the mid 50s/60s? Who thought it was a good idea for DRK to only get their party wide mitigation in the 70s instead of the 60s?

[ataren3]

I thought gunbreakers had the most damage out of all tanks, even more-so now with the small buff they got?

[Oizen]

Hard to say where the damage falls after this patch, but its pretty clear that it means utility tanks will also have high damage.

But yes GNB is probably cemented as the strongest tank, and its not lacking in sustain like DRK is, so any theory as to why things are balanced they way they are is pretty much just speculation at this point

[Derio]

DRK has the most mitigation. The only time self sustain is an issue is in dungeons where you have a bad healer or the healer died and you are trying to finish the boss with the remaining dps or where you need to sustain from a heavy dot but again that is the healer's responsibility after you mitigated properly.

Savage is a longer fight so we will have to see how the balance is when that releases. If DRK is behind both WAR and GNB then we should see some buffs because they are not going to give us more sustain because that is an expansion level update.