Give Warrior the Dark Knight treatment in regards to Bloodwhetting

[GoatOfWar]

With SE's current track of pve design? Sure.

But I think you seriously lack of imagination if the only think it inspires you is naivety. Respectfully.

The game has been trending towards simplification and homogenisation.
Because the former drives participation, and the latter creates perfect balance. If you want a Dark knight to be different from a Warrior, how do you go about this?
One had better damage, the other had superior sustain and utility. But apparently we can't have that, so their damage is now equal. But War still has superior sustain and utility.
The only correct answer if you don't want to tax damage (You've said you don't want any job's dps taxed yourself) is to either take away from Warrior, or give to Dark knight what Warrior has.
Whether you give Dark knight spammable shields for the sake of difference, or you take away all the healing from Warrior; the gameplay will remain the same; you just end up making Dark knight tankier or Warrior squishier.
And as a consequence, they will just do the same thing in a different coat of paint. Neither will play differently, nor does one have an advantage over the other in any situation. They just become animation packs.

If you expect the devs to go any further than this and just rework all the tanks so they're no longer a different coat of paint of Warrior with some bells and whistles attached, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

[Valence]

So because homogenization happens, you'd rather work within its narrower and narrower confines instead of trying to fight it and bring up new interesting things again? How is this even logical? Or is the goal only to feed into our constant wallowing into self misery?

[Lyth]

Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting things to change.

SE does not approach job design from a central vision or overarching principle. Jobs are designed and balanced reactively to player demand. If sufficient numbers of players come to the forums and demand that WAR gets a jet pack, then WAR will get a jet pack, regardless of whether that is thematically appropriate to the job or not.

Homogenization is a byproduct of player demand. If you add a powerful new action to a job, everyone else within that role category will demand it. In order to stop this from happening, you need to set player expectations around what a job's strengths and weaknesses are. In some cases, you can come up with thematic equivalents. Barriers vs. damage resistance is one such example. Healing spells vs. lifesteal is another. In others, you can trade off an unique weakness for an unique advantage. Perhaps one tank is less mobile, so they pull mobs to them rather than gap closing towards them. There are ways of diversifying gameplay, but you won't see them in this game, because there is no developer concept of what a 'Warrior' or a 'Dark Knight' actually is thematically. And without this, there's no player buy in to jobs having unique strengths and weaknesses. Job changes are all reactionary.

This is what happened with Shake it Off as well. Players didn't like the original effect introduced in Stormblood (debuff removal), and wanted something on par with either Divine Veil or Passage of Arms. Some people suggested AoE Thrill of Battle. Others suggested AoE TBN. The end result is that the action was changed into a raidwide barrier. Does a magical raidwide barrier make any sense thematically on a non-magical job? No. This is like asking for Holy on DRK. The only reason why it was added was to mollify the playerbase. And that's a big problem that I have with this game's design. I want to see the developers come out and state their vision for these jobs, and actually stick by them rather than simply firefighting all the time. And if that occasionally means telling the playerbase 'No,' then I'm fine with that.

Rather than expect all tanks to magically become more diverse and the developers to suddenly adopt a new philosophy, I would rather see players tackle this by giving clear and achievable directions on what they want from the role. In some cases, that may mean advocating for a degree of homogenization simply to eliminate longstanding balance issues.

If tank invulns change to 6 minutes across the board, I won't shed a tear. Because I know that Holmgang needs to be brought in line as a priority. If they want to do something creative after that, then I'm fine with it. Likewise, if we rewind all the tacked on instant heals and regens that were added this expansion, that's fine by me. You may be losing something 'unique', but it was uniquely bad this expansion, so let's get rid of it.

As a fundamental starting point, I want to see some uncompromising changes to tank balance to establish fairness. Once they've got a level playing field, then I'm happy to see them experiment and take the tanks in new and diverse directions. But I want to see them prove that they can balance this role fairly first. Otherwise, there's no point investing in it.

[GoatOfWar]

I just don't think we'll ever see them give any of the tanks something drastically different.
My tank predictions for Dawntrail aren't great. I think the reason Drk is getting an upgrade to it's delirium is to buff it's 1 minute window, because the other tanks are now getting 2 minute buttons too. Making their damage profiles identical and easier to balance.
I also predict that Warrior is getting more mitigation, because Xenosys Vex repeatedly kept complaining about it after he and his fanbase got the damage output of the tanks streamlined. There isn't really any sort of friction left besides that i guess.
And lastly, i predict Dark knight is just getting a metric shit ton of healing so that it won't have a weakness that would justify it getting anything new that Warrior doesn't already do better.

I'm glad to see other players are finally starting to pick up on the problem though.

[Oizen]

Wouldn't surpirse me at all if they end up going that route as Dark Knight was so dominant from release to TOP almost solely on the fact its the only tank that truly operates on a 2m Burst thanks to Living Shadow, Dark Arts and 2 charges of Shadowbringer.
I also think the frankly uneeded potency changes in 6.4 was a result of them looking at TOP numbers without realizing that Dark Knight was using an exploit in that fight for even more damage.

[GoatOfWar]

Wouldn't surpirse me at all if they end up going that route as Dark Knight was so dominant from release to TOP almost solely on the fact its the only tank that truly operates on a 2m Burst thanks to Living Shadow, Dark Arts and 2 charges of Shadowbringer.
I also think the frankly uneeded potency changes in 6.4 was a result of them looking at TOP numbers without realizing that Dark Knight was using an exploit in that fight for even more damage.

That could potentially explain why they buffed Gnb. Gnb already outdps'd Drk on some fights. Something else i don't see anyone talk about though, is how they buffed War *MUCH* harder than Pld.
Which just seems... Weird? When they explicitly said the goal was for all tanks to do the same dps. You'd think they would buff Pld more than War because it was further behind than War.

[Supersnow845]

PLD they had to completely redesign so I understand why it didn’t get buffed as hard

They really don’t seem to understand the maths of PLD in terms of how it interacts with the current fight design

For example if you took 6.0 PLD and tested it on a “limitless length fight with minimal downtime” PLD was competitive for second in damage with GNB. Of course no fight actually works like that so PLD sucked on 6.0 launch

Even now when they basically turned it into a generic burst job it’s still more sustained on damage than either GNB or DRK so it’s likely they still don’t really know how to balance it correctly

[Valence]

Rather than expect all tanks to magically become more diverse and the developers to suddenly adopt a new philosophy, I would rather see players tackle this by giving clear and achievable directions on what they want from the role. In some cases, that may mean advocating for a degree of homogenization simply to eliminate longstanding balance issues.

What do you think a lot of us have been doing on those forums for quite a while? Threads on what's wrong, and thread of what people would like are legion already. I'd like them to listen, but they don't. We're not a majority, and we don't go in their overall direction for the game. They don't change things just because players ask, else we'd have better healers already by now.

[Derio]

But DRK is really only bad in dungeons and even then that is only if you have bad group dps to where the incoming damage is faster than the adds are dying to where the healer has to actually do their job.

Many healers are so used to any other tank than DRK in the dungeon so when they do get a DRK its almost like you are trolling for bringing the DRK to the dungeon.

Funny how AD was gutted a while back, we lost sole survivor only for them to bring it back in PVP. Salted earth heals in PVP why not in PVE?

Then you have to talk about DRK pre lvl 70 because we all know compared to the other tanks how bad it is to not have TBN in dungeons. DRK is the only tank to not get homogenized in the tank sustain department and in casual content that is not a good thing.

[Absurdity]

But DRK is really only bad in dungeons and even then that is only if you have bad group dps to where the incoming damage is faster than the adds are dying to where the healer has to actually do their job.

I wouldn't even call it bad in dungeons, it's simply the baseline. With current healer kits DrK is still easy to heal with just oGCDs (provided they actually use cooldowns), the game just doesn't play itself like it does with the other tanks.