Quote Originally Posted by Alice_Rivers View Post
I think they should take a level of inspiration from RTS balance, principly "equal but different", while allowing for a loose balance point so that it never has to be perfect.

To give a couple of examples, strictly in principle:-
PLD: THE mitigation tank, all about using that shield to reduce damage taken and has minimal - if any - heals.
WAR: THE heal tank, basically the reverse of the PLD, it has many heals (though maybe not quite as powerful as now) but minimal mits.
DRK: The parry all the things tank, tapping back into it's roots it seeks to maximise it's parry chance and shields what it has to while turning incoming damage into outgoing damage be that with an HP scalar or through it's gauge.
GNB: Then becomes all about evasion, I'll leave it to more creative minds to flesh it out though - I haven't ideas.
Equal but different is what we have now, what you have described is different and not equal.

PLD is essentially what we have now (more so for DRK), so I won't comment on it.

WAR, depending on how much you want the WAR to be able to heal will depend on whether it is useful or not, with it being hard to find that sweet spot. However, the issue is with the minimal mits. You have to be able to survive anything (that you are intended to survive), so you are still going to have the bare minimum for that. So, how is that different to what we have now? And, just to say, to the person said WAR should do more damage, have more HP and take more damage, again, you will need to be able to survive anything, so what you essentially saying is to give WAR a 15% damage increase over other tanks, which destroys balance in this DPS focused game. You can also look at HW where WAR was the best tank, no questions asked. I can also tag on initial ARR WAR as a job that was meant to be high HP, minimal mitigation and big heals and it didn't work. It didn't work that they completely revamped the job in 2.1, with one of the things being more mitigation.

DRK, Parry doesn't work on magic attacks and is RNG, so you still need enough mitigation to cover an entirely magic fight. You also do not want to rely on RNG mitigation to survive, this is why all mitigation is guaranteed. PLD's old Bulwark (from the early days) just increased the block rate, but didn't make it guaranteed. You never relied upon it for tank busters. If you did make something that gives DRK a 100% guaranteed parry rate, it is then functionally the same as a 20% damage mitigation, with downsides. Downsides include not being able to block magic and not being able to parry when you are stunned or downed (or anything else that prevents you from taking action). this is the whole reason why PLD's Holy Sheltron that used to guarantee a block was changed to mitigation, as DSR made Holy Sheltron useless for certain cases.

GNB, same as Parry, it is just much more swingy in damage. You cannot rely on evasion to dodge attacks, so you need to have the guaranteed mitigation in order to survive. Pretty much the same issues with parry apply here, except, if you can guarantee evasion, not only do you avoid all damage, you could break mechanics that rely on debuffs to function. It just ruins everything.

The crux of everything is, with how damage profiles (fairly low damage with damage spikes for mechanics), you need to have the guaranteed mitigation in order to survive those high damage spikes. This is what we have. Dark Mind only being magic damage mitigation was always something that many DRK's hated, they at least wanted some sort of physical mitigation, and they finally got it. Dark Missionary and Heart of Light only being magic was a problem for physical raidwides, which has now been sorted.

All that tanks have different effects on their short cooldowns, their high mitigation cooldowns are all different, their invulns are all different, 90 second cooldowns, all different. The only things that are the same are Rampart, Reprisal and to an extent, arm's length, but these are all role actions, so that is expected.

In short, tanks are equal and they are different, mitigation wise.