True fault of current tank design: Lack of identity

[Carighan]

Yeah, definitely. Tanks are highly homogenized, you can even use equivalent hotbar layouts between all of them. And while that helps swapping between them, it doesn't help with giving each of them a unique identity.

If I had full tabula rasa choices, I'd change these things:

Paladin: Strongest hypothetical defense, but reliant on actively supporting others, which in turn costs damage. Weakest defense when not supporting others. Would require changes such as being able to spend the instant cast on Clemency, higher base CDs on defensive skills but reducing CDs with Clemensy and Interception used, I'd also merge Intercept and Interception to be a single skill I can also use on allies. Cover continuously reduces the damage the Paladin takes (from all sources) with each hit of damage transferred. Etc etc.

Warrior: Most self-healing removed - except Shake It Off, I suppose. Instead, current healing skills stack shields (up to a certain percentage of max-HP) for the same amount or marginally more. Fits the fantasy of ignoring incoming damage due to being lost in the bloodlest better if the damage is avoided in the first place. Some extra skills gain shield they give while Bloodwhetting is maybe marginally reduced in turn, but eh, not sure about sensible numbers for that.

Dark Knights: Retooled to be more about siphoning/draining/debuffing. Lots of the current instant damage skills removed. Instead, multiple skills apply short~medium DoTs. Many abilities + one of the short DoTs drains health to the Dark Knight, who hence gains a niche akine to the current Warrior niche: Constant and high self-healing. Coupled with a retooling of a significant portion of their damage output to be based on multiple stackable DoTs of various application and duration types. A bit more like a Shadow Knight from EQ1, basically. Whether to keep TBN or replace it with a high-mana-cost short-duration really strong health drain DoT, not sure.

Gunbreaker: The "ranged" tank. Uses a mix of the other tank tools, in fact kept quite close to how they are now. But, Lightning Shot is removed and all other skills get a 25y range, using a different animation if used from range.

So it'd be Support Tank, Damage Ignore Tank, Life-Draining Tank and Ranged Tank.

[Ramiee]

This was put to the sword sometime in Stormblood-Shadowbringers—I was on hiatus for that era so don't know exactly when the change happened, only that it did—and Warrior lost their crunchiest GCD in the process. RIP Skull Sunder.

Pretty much all tanks lost their cool animations for the lame ones.

[BabyYoda]

Hammer it is really hard to create new identity when we have this corruption in tank role

Dark knight needs a massive hit

[dspguy]

Last expansion, I made a post here and provided backup that showed that all the tank jobs were mostly the same. You could configure your hotbars in such a way that you could randomly pick a tank and put a piece of tape over the job icon and your hotbars and play just fine. Even if they have different "flavors", in many ways, they are extremely similar.

If I had to peg one that is more different than the rest, it is GNB and that is solely based on Continuation being something unique that the other tank jobs, in my opinion, don't actually get.

[Carighan]

Last expansion, I made a post here and provided backup that showed that all the tank jobs were mostly the same. You could configure your hotbars in such a way that you could randomly pick a tank and put a piece of tape over the job icon and your hotbars and play just fine. Even if they have different "flavors", in many ways, they are extremely similar.

Yeah I do it like that. On my DRK, Living Shadow and Delirium are where Imperator and Fight or Flight are on my Paladin and on my Gunbreaker that's No Mercy and Bloodfest. There's 2 oGCDs next to those, that get used once after the selfbuffs, and once in-between on some of the jobs (like on Gunbreaker one of them has a 60s CD, but I just reflexively press it anyways, on Dark Knight I got C&S and Abyssal there, and since I hit C&S first it doesn't matter that Abyssal is on CD, I can do the exact same motion every 60 seconds on all three jobs).

It's ridiculous how homogenized the tanks are. And I mean, sure, I'll bite and say that it helps get more people to play tanks if they don't feel like they picked "the wrong one". But at the same time, it's stupid that this also removed all distinction between the tanks which would not need their ability loadouts to be that different.

Minor stuff could work:

* On Dark Knight, remove the CD from TBN, remove Oblation, and add an Oblation-like effect to all defensive abilities, as a trait. Meaning that after they end, all defensive single-target buffs a DRK has also give -10% damage taken for 10 seconds, even on other targets. TBN, Living Shadow, even Rampart and so on, everything. Notable: After the primary effect ends! King of defensive CDs, but has to balance mana in turn.
* On Gunbreaker, allow all skills to be used from 25y range with a custom animation. There's a gun in that blade, do more with it than some f/x!
* On Warrior, reduce Bloodwhetting in power but add self-healing to ~everything in turn. Maybe even remove it from Bloodwhetting if needed, reduce damage overall, and make Bloodwhetting a short self-damage-buff (as in, the overall damage and healing is the exact same, but for flavor, everything heals now). Maybe go a step further, and make the tank stance here not cause extra emnity from damage dealt, but from healing, no matter if on self or others, and rebalance the +emnity so it's roughly the same output. Flavor is important!
* On Paladin, likewise, promote helping others far far more. I'd guess working on Cover and Wings is the big one here, making the job way more about taking damage intended for others.

[Wayfinder3]

Inner Release and Fell is really where things went wrong, what was once something of a reward for warriors has now been dissected thoroughly and bastardized in so many incredibly similar ways that it's no suprise this happened.

The ONLY difference between tank and healer dps rotations is that tanks have their respective glare and dots spread across multiple skills but all of them with the exception of maybe gunbreaker went to the warrior school of how dps as a tank and it really makes them rather droll once you notice it. Warrior imo is the Summoner of Tanks, it's by far the least interesting to play and has basically no skill expression, it's vapid and the easiest tank to play in and out, drk and pld aren't much different than that. GNB is the only one that feels different enough yet alot of what makes GNB different is clunky as hell interactions like continuation. Im not a tank player, and i do enjoy the way tanks play but i'd be remised if i didn't point out that tanks are designed virtually identical to healers. They just hide it better.

[Absurdity]

Inner Release and Fell is really where things went wrong, what was once something of a reward for warriors has now been dissected thoroughly and bastardized in so many incredibly similar ways that it's no suprise this happened.

It's debatable whether or not Inner Release was the start of "press button, spam same ability X times" or if it was Paladin's Requiescat, considering IR required a lot more setup for the 6 Fell Cleaves pre-4.2.
I absolutely agree though that they have taken the, once novel, design idea way too far, especially because it requires so little effort nowadays that the "reward" lost all it's meaning.

[Carighan]

It's debatable whether or not Inner Release was the start of "press button, spam same ability X times" or if it was Paladin's Requiescat, considering IR required a lot more setup for the 6 Fell Cleaves pre-4.2.
I absolutely agree though that they have taken the, once novel, design idea way too far, especially because it requires so little effort nowadays that the "reward" lost all it's meaning.

And I mean, I'm all in favor of autocombos instead of individual skills in the sadly very frequent case that there is no divergence in ability-path anyways (see for example Warriors just have 1-2-3 and 1-2-4 for their fillers, so there really just ought to be one button that goes 1-2-3 and another button that is available only after 2 and before pressing 3).

But in this case, since they're just autocombos with a CD, yeah... it's meh.

I wish there was... something.

Say for Paladins, a lot of their CD-based stuff I'd give longer CDs and every time you support somebody (heal them, actually reduce damage they take via Interception/Cover/Wings, such stuff) some cooldowns reduce based on how much damage you prevented/healed. For Warriors, every time you crit and every time your HP drops below 25% or so? Or just take damage. Whatever, basically make CDs unreliable. That'd at least do something with the concept, and on a bigger scale (say a 10 minute raid fight) the CD could still come out to be 60s, 45s, 120s, on average.

[Vinter]

If I were to redesign Warrior I'd build it from the ground up around Inner Release. You're playing a berserker, the whole point is to go berserk. Also it looks cool having the red glowy eyes.

First off we get rid of all the mitigations, we won't need them. Instead of building up beast gauge to do Fell Cleave you build up beast gauge to proc Inner Release, at which point you go berserk and gain +20% damage mitigation and +20% damage output for 30 seconds. This changes your regular combos to new fancy moves that do basically the same thing but with a new coat of paint to really sell that you're giving in to your inner beast and attacking with reckless abandon. What Inner Release also does is that for every 5% of health you lose, you gain 2% increased damage and 2% increased mitigation, so the more damage you take the harder you fight, and the more difficult it gets to kill you. This is why we won't need any of the other mitigations, it's all baked into Inner Release.

For every combo you do you get a free Fell Cleave/Decimate, which still auto crit, and once you run out of Inner Release you smash that Equilibrium to bring your health back up, ready to repeat the process. It'll essentially be 30 seconds of unga bunga followed by 30 seconds of building up more gauge to do more unga bunga. This puts warrior in a space where they rely on vit, crit, and tenacity as their main stats and gives them a risk/reward dynamic where you are encouraged to take damage to increase damage while still keeping the burst damage nature of the class. I have no idea what to do with the oGCDs for this, but I think at least Shake It Off should be kept as the one mitigation skill warrior has.

No clue if this is even a good idea, just a thought I had.

[Supersnow845]

If I were to redesign Warrior I'd build it from the ground up around Inner Release. You're playing a berserker, the whole point is to go berserk. Also it looks cool having the red glowy eyes.

First off we get rid of all the mitigations, we won't need them. Instead of building up beast gauge to do Fell Cleave you build up beast gauge to proc Inner Release, at which point you go berserk and gain +20% damage mitigation and +20% damage output for 30 seconds. This changes your regular combos to new fancy moves that do basically the same thing but with a new coat of paint to really sell that you're giving in to your inner beast and attacking with reckless abandon. What Inner Release also does is that for every 5% of health you lose, you gain 2% increased damage and 2% increased mitigation, so the more damage you take the harder you fight, and the more difficult it gets to kill you. This is why we won't need any of the other mitigations, it's all baked into Inner Release.

For every combo you do you get a free Fell Cleave/Decimate, which still auto crit, and once you run out of Inner Release you smash that Equilibrium to bring your health back up, ready to repeat the process. It'll essentially be 30 seconds of unga bunga followed by 30 seconds of building up more gauge to do more unga bunga. This puts warrior in a space where they rely on vit, crit, and tenacity as their main stats and gives them a risk/reward dynamic where you are encouraged to take damage to increase damage while still keeping the burst damage nature of the class. I have no idea what to do with the oGCDs for this, but I think at least Shake It Off should be kept as the one mitigation skill warrior has.

No clue if this is even a good idea, just a thought I had.

And if a tankbuster fell during the 30 seconds of downtime?