DPS should be WAR > GNB > DRK > PLD

[HyperiusUltima]

We'll find out pretty soon. If DRK ends up below GNB in damage, we may see people drop DRK since GNB would have better damage and better party utility. We already know WAR or PLD will be a shoo-in for the other slot due to their better party mitigation capabilities.

I think it was a mistake to give Shake It Off a Regen to buff up its support game. Essentially, it's a far stronger Divine Veil; except with Regen. It was already doing fine before they tacked that on, but after it's part of the reason why we had a Healerless TOP Clear. While I will say WAR did need the damage, now they have too much utility to compensate. As for PLD, the issue was instead with fight design for a tier that caused it to operate poorly and not fit in well with the timings of raid buffs. It was the only one that did not fit into the 2m buff window compared to other tanks.

Generally, in regards to EX6, there doesn't seem to be any issues for any of the tanks mitigation-wise so it comes to an arms race for DPS. However, staring at the current state of The Site That Shall Not Be Named, it seems GNB has top damage currently, and the buffs put PLD barely over DRK and WAR up quite a bit given their burst window buff; and that's just Week 1. Looking at it on its face, it looks mostly balanced looking at Max, but PLD does worse starting from the 80th Percentile, potentially saying that PLD still is weaker than DRK in some respects unless they play perfectly.

[Zordrage]

Il just hope this just all leading up to big DRK changes in 7.0

[RyuDragnier]

Il just hope this just all leading up to big DRK changes in 7.0

We hoped for the same before EW came out...

[Cabalabob]

The problem with talking class fantasy is your idea of a class fantasy can vary from someone else’s depending on which version of a job’s fantasy you’re looking at.

Let’s take DRK, it’s traditionally a dps that sacrifices HP to deal damage, usually working as a glass cannon dealing massive damage in exchange for being easily killed. So in that respect you’d think DRK should be the highest dps. But you could also make an argument for DRK being a job that mirrors PLD being a utility tank that utilises dark magic instead of light magic, focusing on drains, DoTs and enfeebling spells. This version of a DRK would probably be low dps like PLD due to high utility.

WAR you can look at as the aggressive tank who focuses purely on damage at the cost of defence, or as the tank that focuses on counter attacks, or a tank that strikes a balance between offence and defence. It has been all these things in the past and where you’d place it in damage is going to depend on which of those fantasies you ascribe to it.

GNB isn’t really a job with an established fantasy, being based on squall from ff8 who could do anything depending on how you built him. But if we look exclusively at the weapon, a sword that deals extra damage with accurate trigger pulls, it sounds like a dps to me so I’d place it high up there.

PLD is the only one that is pretty much fighting for bottom in dps, it is the invincible wall that protects the party, but even PLD can be argued to have versions of it appearing as a dps, such as a holy knight that uses light based attacks to deal high damage.

Personally I’d argue it should be DRK > GNB > WAR > PLD. DRK being the high risk, high reward tank, GNB being more well rounded but still having that focus on dps, WAR being the middle ground having an even split between utility and damage and PLD being the utility tank that protects the party but doesn’t bring as much damage.

[Oizen]

Personally I’d argue it should be DRK > GNB > WAR > PLD. DRK being the high risk, high reward tank, GNB being more well rounded but still having that focus on dps, WAR being the middle ground having an even split between utility and damage and PLD being the utility tank that protects the party but doesn’t bring as much damage.

This game's combat isn't good enough in order to realize something like this, its extremely rigid and formulaic. A high risk/reward tank doesn't work simply because if it DOES work then its the only thing that should be brought, everything else can be optimized around.

They're not going to make content too hard for one tank to do, they're going to homogenize everything to a point where every tank can clear every content, which is really disheatening but its why things have gotten as bad as they are.

[ataren3]

This game's combat isn't good enough in order to realize something like this, its extremely rigid and formulaic. A high risk/reward tank doesn't work simply because if it DOES work then its the only thing that should be brought, everything else can be optimized around.

They're not going to make content too hard for one tank to do, they're going to homogenize everything to a point where every tank can clear every content, which is really disheatening but its why things have gotten as bad as they are.

Oh how I wish they did something like role assignments. In an 8 man party:
- Let one tank be denoted as the "main tank" in the fight. This tank gets some (albeit minor) buffs to their mitigations
- Let the other be denoted as the "off tank" in the fight. This tank gets some (albeit minor) buffs to their damage

It doesn't have to be crazy. They don't suddenly need slightly different animations for abilities and things (although that'd be pretty neat). Tank swaps would give the healers a little extra to do than they have right now, and tanks would need to plan around tank swaps. The main tank would be semi-fine with that tank-buster but the off tank? He doesn't have that nice bump to mitigation that the main tank does; he's gonna need help. That help could come from some healer mit BUT why do that? The main tank got that buff to mitigation! Throw a slightly buffed TBN, Excog, Intervention, Nascent Glint their way. Assist them with surviving the autos until your debuff wears off and you can finally take control and semi-stabilize damage.

[Lyth]

MT/OT is an archaic notation, and didn't exist in its original meaning after ARR. You're probably better off calling them T1 and T2.

If you made your two tanks choose between one of them gaining a damage buff and the other a mitigation buff, I can predict what the overwhelming majority is going to be fighting over. It's bad enough when there's forced downtime on a mechanic which affects one tank but not both, because you'll have disagreements over who is forced off the boss.

You can't trade off mitigation against damage output. Mitigation is a pass-fail check. All tanks need to be able to meet the mitigation checks of every encounter, or else they get excluded from content. Anything over that, however, is superfluous. These two need to be independently balanced on all tanks.

As far as dps is concerned, all tanks should have dps parity. People come up with all kinds of clever excuses around why their job 'deserves' to have advantages over everyone else, but it creates boring comps where everyone runs the same jobs for years at a time. We've had this for most of the game's life, and it's a serious design problem.

As far as mitigation, self-healing, and utility effects are concerned, the core problem is partial-homogenization. Complete homogenization of an action can be a bit stale, but it's fine from a balance perspective. Nobody can find a balance problem in Heart of Light and Dark Missionary being identical. The problem is when you have two abilities that you can directly compare, and one is clearly superior to the others. The classic historical example was Vengeance vs. Shadow Wall, when Shadow Wall provided the same effect with a 60 second longer recast (and why does Vengeance still have a thorns effect not present on any of the other 30% DR cooldowns?) You see similar problems with raid mitigation, where PLD and WAR's raidwide mitigation tools are simply superior to DRK and GNB. And that's before we even start to talk about discrepancies in self-healing across all the tanks.

Bottom line, all of these need to be balanced simultaneously.

[fulminating]

Who cares about balance if it’s not fun.

Vengeance is exactly the kind of token difference there should be more of. Bump the block rate up for sentinel by a negligible amount. Tack a 50p regen onto shadow wall. Give gunbreaker something thematically appropriate but utterly meaningless too. The one minute cooldowns eq/dm/camo/the pld one also broadly achieve the same outcome through different paths.

[Mikey_R]

Who cares about balance if it’s not fun.

Vengeance is exactly the kind of token difference there should be more of. Bump the block rate up for sentinel by a negligible amount. Tack a 50p regen onto shadow wall. Give gunbreaker something thematically appropriate but utterly meaningless too. The one minute cooldowns eq/dm/camo/the pld one also broadly achieve the same outcome through different paths.

Short cooldowns, 90 seconds, raid mit, long cooldowns, all different. The only things the same are Rampart, Reprisal and the 2 min (ex Vengeance).

So really, the majority of defensive cooldowns ARE different from each other, with their own flare, however, people concentrate too heavily on Rampart and Sentinel/Vengeance/Nebula/Shadow Wall to notice the rest.

Also, you need to have some semblance of balance otherwise jobs get excluded from content. Why bring Job A if Job B does everything better.

[Mithron]

Let’s take DRK, it’s traditionally a dps that sacrifices HP to deal damage.

DRK is traditionally a solid tank: FF3 and FF4. It wasn't until later FFs they tried to relabel it as a DPS. In original FF3 and NA FF4, they didn't even have HP draining abilities but it still makes sense as a tank who is meant to receive most of the heals.

PLD has always embodied the high defense and healing/utility tank. FF1, FF3, FF4, FF5, FF9.
WAR has usually been high DPS low defense frontline. Berserker in FF5 comes the closest to it.
GNB is more of a modern invention with Squall, who's very well rounded and high damage/VIT. So makes sense GNB would be behind WAR and above DRK/PLD.