After 1 (arguably 2) expansions what is square trying to achieve with WAR (and PLD)?

[GoatOfWar]

If you genuinely enjoy dark knight as it is, go and enjoy it while it lasts.

I don't enjoy tanking anymore period.
The loud Warrior playerbase and their favourite streamer got any sort of differences there were between them removed with unnecessary buff after buff and homogenisation.
There's nothing any tank excells at, or does better than Warrior. No tank is allowed to have a job identity besides Warrior.
Everything a tank does has to be either a worse version, or equal to what Warrior does. With an extra step sometimes too.
I see absolutely no reason to play tank if i'm being shown there's only 1 right option under any given context, and it happens to be the one i like the least.
I'm not your jobber.

[Lyth]

...

I think arguing that WAR's advantages are the natural result of historical precedent isn't a good justification for future design. ARR was developed at a point in time where they weren't really sure if there would ever be another expansion, so the design wasn't about future proofing so much as it was about desperately staying afloat. Both tanks and healers suffered from the legacy of this as a result of having only two jobs on release. The end result was that the support roles each ended up with a 'vanilla' job, and then every possible theme that they thought of was stuffed into the other. The problem is that burning through so many design directions at once on a single job limits your creative options when introducing in new jobs.

Lifesteal
Lifesteal is not the only form of self-sustain that exists. WAR currently straddles several styles of self-sustain between instant heals, barriers, regens, and lifesteal. None of these make any thematic sense as far as job fantasy is concerned. This in turn creates a push towards homogenization, because every tank job now needs all of these things in order to remain competitive. The solution is to separate these out on to different tanks, and it's relatively easy to do if they actually invest some effort into the role. A lifesteal tank doesn't need an on demand instant heal. If they want to burst heal, they line up their healing with their burst window. You don't need a barrier shield if your lifesteal can push out into temporary HP. You can achieve similar effects with the other mechanics in a way that develops job identity in unique ways.

And this is the point people have been making for multiple expansions now - it doesn't really matter 'who' the lifesteal tank is, but one tank shouldn't contain all those distinct themes at the same time.

Role Actions
The 4.0 role action system definitely impacted DRK more than other tanks. DRK had Shadowskin in Heavensward, which was a much better looking version of Rampart that did the same thing. Dark Dance was nerfed into Anticipation and made available to all tanks. Reprisal and Low Blow were nerfed and made available to all tanks. The net result was it went from having the most number of actions out of any tank to having the least after the transition. But the main problem with the change was that utility was distributed unequally. The lack of knockback mitigation was especially bad, especially given that arena-wide knockbacks was Stormblood's favorite raid gimmick.

The decision around Reprisal was probably the strangest one in Stormblood. If you wanted to consolidate Reprisal as a universal tool, why would you keep DV and then add in PoA? And this lends itself to the mitigation inflation issue. Tanks won't be balanced until every tank has Reprisal + two job-specific raidwide mitigation tools. If you wanted tanks to rely on a standardized tool, just delete DV/PoA/SiO/Missionary/HoL. If you want tanks to each have their unique tool, then give each tank one raidwide mitigation tool out of the six that exist. They clearly ran out of ideas by the time they came to Missionary/HoL.

Mobility
Mobility is an interesting discussion point. DRK definitely had a mobility advantage prior to Stormblood, and WAR after Stormblood. I think part of the problem is that the movement tools on tanks are fairly boring. If you look at melee dps, there are definite differences in movement toolsets but none of them feel particularly disadvantaged. I still think it's hilarious that the WAR playerbase had a SAM style on-demand gap closer and squandered it out of utter greed. What they should have done instead is just asked for an on-demand gap extender to consolidate their advantage, but that's like expecting the average WAR enthusiast to understand Uptime 101. I think the bigger problem though is if you add movement tools like Shukuchi/Raiju/Ingress/Egress/Thunderclap into the mix, tanks will likely complain until each type of movement tool is on every tank, rather than appreciating the differences and letting every job have its unique upsides and downsides.

I think it's completely bizarre that anyone would claim that 'doing the most damage' is part of a job's identity. That's a bit like claiming being the most powerful job is part of the job's identity.

Incidentally, the reason why SGE has so much overlap with SCH was that it was designed to split the SCH playerbase. That's likely what's going to happen to WAR as well. They'll release a hammer tank that is very similar in design to WAR. Once the playerbase is split, then you can make the appropriate balance adjustments that should have been made expansions ago without community backlash.

[Supersnow845]

^what is your explanation behind “SGE splitting the SCH playerbase” especially given of any of the 5 roles healers is by far the most likely to never receive another job

SGE eats at SCH’s toolkit from every angle, the addersgall is a near 1 to 1 copy of aetherflow, the fairy as a totem is nullified by the ridiculous range on all of SGE’s actions and while it can’t equal critlo it’s strong enough in both mitigation and shields to dwarf the requirements of all but the niches of niches (say all stack meteor in DSR phase 2)

The only thing SCH still retains entirely alone is energy drain and even though they have shown they don’t like energy drain I can’t imagine even on a healer they were so creatively bankrupt the entire SGE design could be boiled down to “make SCH without energy drain so we can stop deleting energy drain and just tell SCH players who don’t like energy drain to play SGE”

[Lyth]

I predict that you'll see another healer by 9.0 at the latest.

The split between 'pure' and 'shield' healer is a bit of code for 'SCH has been consistently powerful across every expansion, so we turned the job into its own sub-role category'. I think if ARR had launched with the healer jobs that it currently has, then we'd see a completely different landscape. There would be an expectation to see four distinct jobs with unique themes spread out amongst them.

Because we started out with only two jobs on each support role, all subsequent job and fight design has fallen into WAR and not-WAR, and SCH and not-SCH. So naturally, the design solution ends up being to create more WAR-alternative jobs and more SCH-alternative jobs to even out the balance. That's what you're starting to see now.

Other roles never had this issue because they launched with multiple jobs from the outset. You never see complaints about MNK having limited the design space for future melee. That's because the concept was a narrow one from the outset.

[rawker]

The only problem is that SCH isn't a one-size-fits-all job like how WAR is at the moment. There was a time during HW where Noct AST had superior barriers than SCH. I still believe that they should bring back the dichotomy of Noct/Diurnal on AST then have SGE focus on another aspect keeping Kardia as it is what sets it unique. For instance have effects pulse of the ally you have Kardion on. As for SCH, they can literally focus on a single pet, get rid of faerie gauge since it feels forced. Bringing back Rouse will get rid of Seraph, Aetherpact and Fey Blessing as the regen from Whispering Dawn and Healing from Embrace will be greatly buffed by Rouse. All SCH cooldowns will either be modifying the properties of their barriers, AF abilities and Pet augmentations.

[Aravell]

Incidentally, the reason why SGE has so much overlap with SCH was that it was designed to split the SCH playerbase. That's likely what's going to happen to WAR as well. They'll release a hammer tank that is very similar in design to WAR. Once the playerbase is split, then you can make the appropriate balance adjustments that should have been made expansions ago without community backlash.

The problem with that line of thinking is that SCH was never a vastly popular job, WHM was always the most popular healer. Them introducing an easier SCH was never going to split the SCH playerbase, and it didn't split the SCH playerbase, it split the WHM playerbase, because they finally have an easy access into the shield healer side.

As for WAR, WAR is currently the most popular tank, tanks also don't really have established subtypes, so maybe their efforts to split that playerbase would go much better. But whatever tank they introduce to split the WAR playerbase would have to either be as strong as or stronger than WAR, or be as easy to play as or even easier to play than WAR, and I'm not sure that's going to be a good thing for tank balance in general, especially since tank balance problems are slowly bleeding out into other roles.

[Lyth]

My personal preference would be for the dev team to be open about nerfs to jobs and just be honest about why it needs to be done. In practice, however, they like to maintain this illusion of upward balance. As a result, jobs tend to get only nerfed during expansion transitions when nobody knows what the potencies mean and everyone is busy trying to just figure out how everything works. The problem with this approach is that people flock to jobs that have historically been more powerful, so you see those nerfs rescinded by the subsequent upward balance over the course of the expansion. The most efficient approach is to just apply a nerf openly, tell people why it's happening, and then ignore the tears. Honestly, people will get over it.

SCH has always had an outspoken fanbase. The job has been stealth nerfed at the start of every expansion since Stormblood, but it never sticks due to backlash from the playerbase. Like it or not, this is the most success they've had with it out of any expansion. Players always look at the trade-off of reward for effort. Nobody else is interested in the effort you might have put into something, they only see results. I think you're misleading yourself if you think 'difficulty' matters to the average player outside of bragging rights on internet forums. The change absolutely did split the fanbase, which was its intended purpose. You will likely see more SCH-variant clones in the future under the 'shield healer moniker' until none of the individual flavors have any lobbying power.

We'll see if this happens to tanks as well. I suspect that if they don't have the courage to stand by the next set of stealth nerfs at the start of DT, that will likely be the next play for WAR in 8.0.

[Supersnow845]

If you look at the parse distribution from eden to panda SGE really didn’t pull from SCH, it pulled from WHM (and AST either gave to WHM or SGE or both), SCH hasn’t really changed at all

If their intention was to split SCH because it’s on average an incredibly powerful job they have utterly failed at that because SCH is still incredibly powerful and SGE just became shield WHM

[Supersnow845]

I’m gonna ask another question here for clarification, let’s say that SGE actually succeeded in splitting the SCH playerbase, what does splitting the SCH playerbase actually do (you can also sub SCH for WAR and my question remains unchanged)

Is the idea to dilute the amount of people who oppose bad changes or nerfs (like how SCH mains were unified on removing ED being a bad thing in 5.0) so you can functionally make nerfing easier with less pushback or are you saying if we make a new class that fights SCH’s for its raw dominance over the healer role it becomes easier to mask just how strong SCH is

The first one seems to imply less popular classes are more likely to get nerfed and the latter seems to imply that as long as another class is as strong as the dominator then the rest of the role doesn’t really matter

[PercibelTheren]

I honestly think it would be best if different jobs within a role were all viable in all content, however with different fights clearly favoring a specific playstyle. Most people I know are happy to flex within their tank/healer roles most of the time anyway. And those who aren't could still clear, they would just have to compensate for it.