
WAR don't get changes because they don't need changes. They only need more enemies to cleave.
So, a couple things:
NOTE:1.I will use "sustain" here to refer to anything that increases how long you live for without having to outright kite.
Sustain has five bimodal factors: self-scaled y/n, enemy-scaled y/n, meaningfully windowed y/n, decaying y/n, capped output y/n.
(Technically, there's also whether it's placed on enemy, placeable on ally, or only on self, but those change use-cases rather than the type of sustain.)
The "best" sustain one could theoretically get, then, is enemy-scaled if undergeared or self-scaled if overgeared, not meaningfully windowed, not decaying, and uncapped... but that would just be OP unless its potency were low, which is usually the compensatory result.
WAR is XIV's original self-healing tank and was far more purely so than DRK has ever been outside of BW-Quietus-DA-AD spams in Stormblood, if even then (since WAR had Bloodbath and direct self-healing atop that from 4 different skills). It started, originally, with entirely self-scaled sustain. Even its singular indirect %DR, Foresight, scaled with existing Defense stat... and gave less than 5% mitigation even by end of ARR in BiS. All the rest of its of native sustain (which only changes <1% if including Foresight) was self-healing and temporary max-and-current-HP increases.
DRK also has more of a consistent legacy is spending HP than it stealing it. Moreover, XIV's DRK has always done so in combination with MP, for the simple fact that all MP DRK MP spenders originally would at least indirectly give sustain, just not always in the form of healing. Souleater (originally 250p) would have lifesteal in itself, yes, but Dark Arts would amplify that by more than half. Dark Mind and Dark Dance were enhanceable via Dark Arts. Dark Passenger also applied a 20% Blind (effectively identical to Dark Dance's +20% dodge chance). Abyssal Drain only stole health under Dark Arts. Power Slash's enmity was increased by a further 10x, allowing one's party even more surety that incoming damage would be naturally mitigated by their tank.
To then change DRK's "deal" into solely self-healing, especially when it had only two skills that did so while all of Warrior's skills did so through Bloodbath and four of them independently of it... doesn't make sense in the context of this game, and would, if anything, harm DRK most.
That all being said...
2.
The reason WAR provides so much more raw sustain than DRK (or, DRK so much less than WAR) even in practice --with that gap even more ridiculously large on paper-- is because barriers tend to naturally be worth more than simple healing, in that our game's barriers don't decay, aren't capped, and aren't meaningfully windowed (for instance, you can almost always use up all of TBN in any meaningful content, even if pre-popping it to get in slightly more uses per minute, while most other barriers have a whopping 15- to 30-second duration).
Last edited by Shurrikhan; 08-17-2025 at 11:53 AM.
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