Which tank is your favorite? Personally I've been enjoying warrior and paladin quite a lot recently! Although my raid tank partner is already a paladin so I guess I will stay as a warrior!
I've been enjoying Paladin the most recently. It has that ugly duckling to beautiful swan type of evolution while leveling, and feels incredible to play at the very end! No matter what happens in the fight, Paladin has an answer for it and it's great!
Gunbreaker has been mine. I love aesthetics and the gameplay, really feels perfectly matched to me. I'm just not a fan of some of their animations, like fated circle looking like rehash of demon slaughter or savage claw feeling like a really slow uppercut, but that's just me
@kitsunehanyou09 the fated circle observation I actually noticed myself too very recently. Quite weird! 😅 I feel like the gnashing fang combo in general looks really awkward when you let their animations play out without the continuation!
Dark knight, and it's not even close. I've loved dark knight since 1992 and every incarnation both in and out of FF since then. Even if dark knight were the worst tank in 14, I'd still play it just for that a e s t h e t i c.
Currently my tank of choice is Gunbreaker, which after looking at the difficulty ratings might seem a bit weird because my main job in general is Summoner - the job that feels like it's the most common recipient of the "easiest job" title. Actually, looking at it, my preference for tanks is basically inversely proportional to the difficulty rating(s) in this video
i love how confident and outspoken you have become with the narrating. its a stark contrast to some of your older videos, and i must say its a great improvement. well done!
As a main WAR that did many endgame content including the current savage, I can't picture myself using another job, been war since day 1 playing the game and I love it
One of the actually unique parts about dark knight that you skipped over is that you can pop invuln early and always it always lasts long enough in savage/ults since the timer refreshes. If you ever find yourself dying because of an early invuln to a multihit buster, give dark knight a try.
The best way to use Passage of Arms is to have it up for the full duration of a big attack to let your allies know you will keep them safe like a true Paladin
You know how they made astro's Macro and sage's Pneuma do dmg, so ppl would fkin use it? Give Passage and astro bubble a dmg reflect, so that people start looking for ways to mit more dmg by holding it instead of the lame flashing like it's a regular oGCD
@@pointlessmikeI think the main issue with this is that there’s no content in the game where you need to hold PoA for longer than that one weave, and any exceptions to that are typically downtime so it doesn’t matter that you’re channeling
@@pointlessmike Flashing also covers the Akh Morn stack in M4SP1. Flashing PoA the first/last few hits of M4SP2's giga attack (i.e. use it to mitigate the one attack that isn't covered by Tank LB3). The other places I would personally PoA are single hits or have people naturally too spread out to mit much.
Maybe it's because I picked GNB as my first Tank, but I picked up on its rotation rather quickly. I hit the wrong input during the Burst sometimes, but it's easily one of my favorite Jobs in the game. I play on controller and found the perfect crossbar layout for my 123, burst combo, and my AOEs.
Honestly I keep coming back to GNB as my goto tank even though I play all of them rather routinely. I also don't bother going into my 2 min with any cartridges as there's no point. After the 1:30 mini-burst I just dump them as I get them, except I'll usually build up one just prior to the full 2 min.
@@1337penguinman yeah EW gnb had you managing cartridges, and your ability to keep uptime was crucial to your burst windows. People who were learning the job ran sks to generate more than they needed so they can have some room for error. Nowadays, even with 2.5 GCD, Bloodfest corrects all your fuck ups for free. You can run around throwing lightning shots all day like just another lazy tank. Similarly, fuck SE for removing the gauge cost on Living Shadow. For a noobie, that's the one thing that enabled the whole mindset of drk: hold shit for burst!
I played healers and magical ranged DPS for the most part. I unlocked Gunbreaker as my first tank and I picked up on the playstyle pretty quick as it felt more like DPS. I didn't play it for took long though as I was still feeling the pressure of being a tank. I returned to my healers/mages for now. I'll go back to it at some point to continue it. But, I'm thinking maybe Paladin is the better fit for me. I just understood that PLD has the highest number of skills and as I play on a controller, I only have 32 slots. That made me avoid it. But I like that it has holy magic. It's kind of like a tank mage. As someone who mostly plays magical themed classes, that sounds pretty good. It also seems like the most balanced in terms of damage, defense and complexity.
Forever drk main here only changes i see that are needed all im gonna say is make dark missionary and heart of light reduce all not just magic dmg since shake and divine works for both types so dont see why those have to single out aoes. Give drk something like aurora from gnb or life steal like a Pld's confideor combo, and I'll be happy. Oh, and give carve and spit healing like its counterpart abyssal drain.
Love your videos. If I may make a suggestion, perhaps you can put a short graphic + summary of important things to reference for a particular job at the end of the video. Things like how many targets to use an aoe skill for and for what level ranges are a bit hard to look for in a long video.
In my job guides I have a section in the level 100 part that is dedicated to the aoe thing you mention ("for aoe adjustments.."), and I feel it is a bit difficult to fit all the other information in a graphic since I explain all that in the end part of the video over several minutes for a reason! 🤔 Thank you for the suggestion! 😁
Paladin for life, and for the best glams on Ethyris. 🛡 Although, I really wonder what the next Tank job will be. Square seems to have used all of the obvious options from previous Final Fantasy games, and has rolled less obvious options like Viking and Berserker into Warrior (at least thematically). It will be interesting to see where they go next. Personally, I'm hoping for something that's really unique to FFXIV, like maybe turning yourself into a miniature Primal like Ysayle, Zenos, or Louisoix.
This is a great guide. Want to say that first. Clear and concise with charts. You can't go wrong watching this. But after sitting through it, man, the 2 min meta makes everything both robotic and if you aren't the type to like that type of gameplay; very unfun. So much of this game is tied around this very rigid system of lining up your burst or having your biggest hitters up in that window, that even tanks have to be thinking about this in everything north of dungeons. I just, speaking for me, I can't. It makes vast swathes of the game's content, unfun. Has nothing to do with if it's doable, of course it's doable, but contorting each job into a line of on demand attacks and pot usages or else you fall behind while also balancing all the mechs and phases of a boss fight just unfun. I'm speaking from stock console play here. This tier of savage and even the ew raid has been some of the most unfun content I've played in an mmo. Enough to make me question why I'm even bothering. Yes, it's off point from your vid, but with each explanation of each tank it just made me think about the whole endgame design here. I'm probably done with savage raiding after this tier. It's just been really unfulfilling for me.
Thank you! And I can tell you that I agree. I have multiple videos on the channel dedicated to musing over whether the two minute burst meta is healthy for the game because it has a strong effect of making a lot of jobs feel very samey just for one thing! 😰
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I might of watched that. I'll admit, I don't watch every vid, but I'll double back and check. And lining up burst isn't inherently bad. Other MMO's do it. The problem here I think is when people asked for a way to do it, they were coming from content that was nominally fun designed as it was (SB) but wanted a way to line up that burst. The dev team listened and gave the burst lineup, but also change fight design molded around that burst. Every fight has a 30 sec window where the boss does nothing but attack the tank for the burst, then a raidwide, then does its first mech attack, then the next during the off burst min, then rinse and repeat for the entire fight. It's too robotic and I can see it as far back as ShB (I started in earnest in 5.3). Burst lining up is fine, but not for this type of gameplay. I'm serious about being done with bothering with endgame after this tier. I have fun with every other aspect of the game more or less, but this section, always leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Imo they should remove all party damage buffs in 8.0 outside of phys ranged. Maybe replace a few with personal damage buffs where appropriate, but removing party buffs altogether is the best way to kill 2 min meta for good
as a tank one trick I would loce to give my personal humble opinion: PLD: with the new abilities they got this expansion and the rework, they really feel flexible in their rotation where u dont need to downtime urself at all (holy spirit stack) then his 2 minute windows can be ranged as well, tho their rotation is a bit strict its still straightforward, but not as much as WAR for sure. Pld is my faveorite class so far and I just love what sqenix did to him in general. GNB: dont think i have much to add about this class, feels the same busy rotation style as a dps, but one thing i find it annoying is when you have to downtime during a continuation window basicaly screws up ur day. The timing is really sensitive but gotta admit they have rhe strongest short timer mit out of the 4 tanks, really fun class to play imo but when it comes a moment where uou have to downtime/position a boss during continuation window, the feeling will suck, other than that great class WAR: the unga-est of the bung-est tank, nothing needed to be said, as a main tank their job is to self sustain, and they do it really good, rotation wise its straightforward and staisfying as FFFFF since the new expansion, id say WAR is a great choice for beginner tanks DRK: no…just no
Replace "Enhanced Unmend" with something like "Enhanced Dark" that gives Dark Mind and Dark Missionary 10% Physical Mit so that DRK doesn't horribly suffer in an "all physical" raid. Also, Delirium should give 5 stacks of Blood Weapon so that we would have more MP to spend on TBN, like we could before the two abilities were merged. And the cooldown between Carve & Spit and Abyssal Drain should be un-shared, hell, make a rebalanced GCD Abyssal Drain the third part of DRK's AoE combo or something, then give Carve & Spit some Cure Potency so that we don't lose any healing for the rare instances where we'd have wanted to push the current Abyssal Drain on a single target, extremely niche but it has happened to me before. And Dark Missionary should be available at Level 70 so that it can be used in UCoB and UWU. And they should give us a 2 charge 30 second cooldown oGCD that does damage with _no_ movement so that we have something more to think about pushing outside of the 2 min and opener, I unironically miss Plunge because they didn't replace the damage part of it with a different ability, only the movement part. It could even reuse the Power Slash animation for some brownie points.
I loved the transition lmao, to put it succinctly, in terms of what tank I like the most...probably drk for its damage rotation and PLD for its defensives. I do like GNB's damage rotation but only sometimes, you need a LOT of skillspeed to feel comfortable in fitting everything inside your No Mercy window. Its defensives are pretty good overall, and heart of corundrum + great nebula is kind of crazy. Drk on the other hand... Yeah I know we all complain about it not having any identity (and the identity it DOES have sucks), but it could be worse; it could be black mage levels of bad. From having played this game for nearly a decade, Drk feels more similar to Ast in the sense that the devs keep simplifying the job (usually) to its detriment. Its burst is one of the most satisfying things in the game to line up, but outside of that, it's boring...very boring. Even worse; it has much less advantages than the other tanks at lower levels. Can we also talk about TBN being unchanged for years? It really doesn't feel good to use anymore. I'd rather eat potential damage than use it to mitigate a buster that may or may not break it. And you don't even get a bonus for having it break, you get it refunded for edge of shadow - but Afflatus Misery this is not.
You know the weirdest part about TBN is that originally the payoff for it popping was 50 blood gauge. Then the rework happened with shadowbringers! So it used to be an efficient way to convert mp into blood gauge! Whether that's any better is up for debate but that's at least a bit more interesting! 😰
I'd love to see if my little pet theory is right: they're trying to have two types of tanks like how we have two types of healers. My guess is itll be tanky tanks and dps tanks. Or mt and ot dedicated tanks.
no not really There is no such thing as MT/OT, in savage/ultimates it's basically everyone have the same mechanics and TB are double TB back in 2.0/3.0 there was real difference between Mt and Ot Also I dont think they're trying to do "tanky tanks" and "dps tanks", all of them are very reliable in savages/ultimates and there is little difference (few % when it comes to dps, few healing gcd when it comes to mitigation)
@@audrey_in_black for EE1 you can sprint between gcds with perfect uptime, for Ion cluster you can use mit and greed and I think you only lose 1 global when you disengage. What else?
@@audrey_in_black You're wrong, I went and checked my 96 parse, it's 1 lightning shot. I tried to link it but I think youtube doesn't like that. Syrrel Jance on Adamantoise if you don't believe me. What other mech do you think PLD should spam holy spirit on?
I'd say for me DRK is the most fun but WAR is the most effective - but keep in mind there that I am not yet in current content and I don't do anything especially hard - most difficult thing I regularly do is probably unsynced two person SHB mount farming with very cheap gear ^^ I like PLD as well but I can't really get on with GNB ... I don't like the look of the gunblades and somehow the rotation never really clicked for me despite playing him to 100.
GNB and PLD for me. In levelling the tanks to 100 I came to really enjoy them both so I can't really choose which I like more. I will say that GNB's new Continuation off it's AOE combo is quite possibly by favourite new button the game though. So satisfying to press with that animation and sound. DRK just feels too weak to me in standard play. Not saying it's a bad job or anything, but it's lack of self sustain is so obvious, especially before you get your big cooldown upgrade. I'm sure it's mostly fine in organized group play but when you're just out there alone doing random stuff it's kind of painful in a way that none of the other tanks are. WAR.. well, I've never liked WAR at all so yeah, not getting my vote lol
Yeah I do like how most of the spenders for gnb now interacts with continuation! 😁 And indeed, dark knight is the tank that feels a lot more reasonable in boss fights, but there is something missing outside of that! 😅
It's so interesting that people still rank DRK as hard to master... really all you have to do is find a place to use tbn before the 2m burst and don't overcap resources, and press everything on cd pretty much. Drk doesn't really do anything in between, and the 1m burst is much more simple than the other tanks.
You are probably right about that. Personally I just find both warrior and paladin much easier to optimize than dark knight, and by relative difference, that ranks dark knight higher on that! 😅
@CaetsuChaijiCh hey it's all subjective and I can understand why you rank it the way you do. There definitely isn't so much of a skill difference in playing any of the tanks relative to the other jobs in the game, especially dps. Great video.
@@CaetsuChaijiCh honestly, as a warrior main myself, I find drk harder than the other three-but not because it’s outright harder, but simply because warrior and dark knight are so similar in base concept rotationally yet not *quite* the same. It’s less of a case of outright difficulty, and more ‘this job is my job but to the left and with more ogcds, and the slight shift feels weirder to get around than an outright change’!
@aromenoir9552 the "6-2" you're referring to is the same as now (its 5-2 with mp nerfs, i think it was 5-3 before). It really only means you have to find a place to tbn before your 2m window so you'll have 5 edges in buffs, but every thing else you pretty much press on cd with the exception of shadowbringer, when you save both charges for the 2m. I suppose if you find nin hard, you'll find drk difficult. But to me, both jobs really are making sure you slightly prep for your 1m/2m then press everything on cd. Imo the "hardest" tank job in both ew and dt is 2.5 gnb. Gnb got easier in dt cause of lionheart, but depending on when you burst, you sometimes have to pop a burst strike before no mercy, so you can't always enter your burst with 3 cartridges to just cleanly press gnashing fang and double down. You always have to account for how your rotation drifts on that job and it's very sensitive to downtime unlike DRK.
Don't worry, I try to emphasize the good in the job comparisons as best I can! And dark knight is very strong at the things it excels at! (including being very edgy! 🤣)
@@CaetsuChaijiChI’d honestly love to hear your input on what you would change about DRK to improve it, I’m a DRK main causal and I’ve been really struggling with the job this expansion, it feels like if my healer is just a little to lax or stressed then I’m always struggling through the mob pull
@egettinby5173 yeah that can happen. I think the best you can do as drk is be as aggressive with using TBN as you can for survival reasons in those cases 🤔😅 My primary suggestion that I think would be neat is, for example, if the dark arts freebie edge / flood from TBN healed the dark knight. It wouldn't throw off balance much in raids, but would be immensely helpful for a bit more sustain for dark knights. But that's just one suggestion out of many! 😊
You forgot the most important part of GNB: at level 100 lion heart combo makes you float and flail about like a clown so don't forget to bring a circus glam :)
I leveled GBR to 100 (starting from PAL) and had a great time with it; for an alt second-play-through I decided to go WAR and enjoyed it into the early 70s or so... at which point I suddenly got very bored. So now I'm back on GBR and having fun again so... apparently GBR is my favorite. XD
this was a really good and comprehensive video! I would like to add that PLD, besides lacking self healing at earlier levels, also has self healing issues in savage/raid content! since your heals come up every 2 minutes, and you'll mess up your rotation if you do a Clemency GCD (using holy sheltron seems to be the best solution for such cases).
Well your heals come up every minute from requiescat, but yes that is true, they don't exactly have anywhere to the level that warrior has in terms of free burst healing! 😂
Well that's not entirely true. Holy Spirit gives a decent heal, and you get one of those on average every seven GCDs. Holy Sheltron also gives 1000 potency of heal over 12 seconds.
@@redgeoblaze3752 ^^ Yeah, a PLD that spends their gauge regularly will often outheal WARs in single target fights. Bloodwhetting is 1200 pot to Sheltron's 1000, but 50 gauge fills quicker than the 25sec cd. Add in the block chance and all the other free heals that are part the rotation, and you're easily outhealing Equilibrium too. WAR is only ridiculous on multi-target
@pointlessmike bloodwhetting is 1600 (4 gcds) and also 400 potency barrier on top. Nascent flash is closer to +1200 because the fourth swing rarely ever also heals the secondary target due to how it works 😅 However the greater flexibility of the oath gauge can of course enable a paladin to heal where it is needed more 🤔😊
I love all the tanks but… god I wish Warrior’s damage buff could be added to their job gauge like DRK. i really don’t want to redesign my entire hud to keep the buff icon in easy sight just for a single job. if they just changed that I’d play the job way more
I'd never really thought about, but yeah you're right. I can't think of another job where that's an issue. BRD, BLM, DRK of course and formerly NIN all had their persistent upkeeps turned into gauges,VPR, DRG and SAM's buffs get hit as part of their combos. WAR really is a standout here.
I've been having the mildest crisis ever over choosing a tank main. when I first started out, the choice was clear. Paladin was a lot of fun, and I didn't want to play anything else. Then 6.3 hit. It's way easier now to the point where it just feels boring most of the time. What really sucks is that Paladin still has my favorite aesthetic and mitigation by far. I decided to try Gunbreaker, but was kind of put off by the rigid and difficult rotation. I tried Dark Knight and loved the way it plays in terms of damage, but hated it's mitigation. I really want to like Paladin again, and even trying it in a few Extremes and savage, it's not terrible. But I just can't stop thinking about what we used to have, and how much better it could be.
I played old paladin on a rly high level,and new paladin now aswell,I actually liked the 6.3 changes a lot,since it put the job in line with the others even tho I rly enjoyed old Pld aswell. And the job itself has still a lot of optimization to handle,if one rly intends to perfect the gameplay,especially defensively you can get rly creative like did you know that Pld is the only tank to save a dps or healer from a double targeted Tankbuster with cover and invuln.and it ain’t even a rare occasion,last time I did the exact thing I mentioned was in M2s to save a melee from 2nd Aggro TB xD . You can even cover dbfs that would get applied on players,like the fate breaker dot on healers. I could go on and on even when it comes to the damage/rotational optimization, Pld is rly worth playing:)
so fun fact paladin's rework was probably brought forward purely because of DSR - paladins just outright could not manage phase 6 without healer help due to their lack of a "third" cooldown (now bulwark), and that old nature of paladin not really having a burst window per se but consistent damage didn't work with the new ultimate design of smaller uptime segments even trying to get all of the burst off before strength of the ward can be... an experience
I've been trying to get into tanking for a while now, and after watching this vid I think I'm gonna go with Paladin. Now all I have to do is get past the fear of playing the role 😅
I actually have a separate video that talks about the fear of tanking, or tankxiety, in case it would help you! 😊 It is this one ua-cam.com/video/uT_0jjJ-7iE/v-deo.html Good luck whatever you end up doing!
Caetsu, I sincerely appreciate your informative videos and content on FFXIV. If there's one piece of critique I can impart with is to please use informational graphics, rather than just white text for 90% of your info. It's speaks 2007 youtube content to me man
I appreciate the feedback, but it is a bit confusing, since a large part of said information can't be translated to, say, a pie chart, so wouldn't informational graphics simply become text on a background, as opposed to text with a border and potentially a shadow? 🤔😰
Not sure how relevant this will be for the wider discussions, but I'm currently a Lv. 54 Dark Knight and yeah, once opener is done I kinda feel like I'm just hitting my 1-2-3 combo over and over, and occasionally tapping one of the Darkness buttons. And I kinda love that tbh??? I greatly appreciate being able to take my eyes off my hot bar and actually look at the boss, and considering that my main DPS job is Bard...y-you can see where I'm coming from right?
you just found out why a lot of tanks become the callout people in high end duties, reminding their static members of upcoming mechanics. the less complex rotations free up a lot of mental burden, letting you pick up the slack for your teammates with more complex rotations
PLD just feels fun to me. Had DRK as my main tank for the longest time, but lately PLD has just been so enjoyable. The flexibility on when you use divine might and the Confiteor combo for both movement and sustain just rules, WAR is pretty boring. Being practically unkillable to dungeon mobs is cool I guess, but like, it's kinda whatever for me. I know it gets the "green tank" nickname, but I honestly prefer the versatility of the other tanks' spot healing/mit. WAR gets it on one party member per 20 sec, but each of the others have a heal and/or mit that they can use on multiple party members in quick succession if necessary. The animations are real fun at least. I miss SB gauge management. DRK is very boring. I miss SB everything. GNB is alright. I like pressing a lotta buttons quickly.
Dark Knight has always been my favorite tank ever since I started playing in Shadowbringers. I think Dark Knight really suffers because of the changes from Endwalker (Carve and Spit sharing a cooldown with Abyssal Drain), and then suffers even More from the Delirium/Blood Weapon change that shipped with Dawntrail. We went from having a time limit on Delirium and Blood Weapon with the *possibility* of fitting in 5 GCDs under these windows by melding SkS in Shadowbringers to having a guaranteed 5 GCDs for Blood Weapon, but *only* three GCDs under Delirium. In Dawntrail, Blood Weapon and Delirium were put onto the same action and now we only have three of both. We lost the ability to manage MP as finely as we could before and lost the potential for even *more* damage with the downsizing from 5 to 3 BW hits for using additional Edges. This is also not to mention the loss of Plunge, which just feels terrible as Dark Knight now only has Flood/Edge, Carve and Spit/Abyssal Drain and the two Shadowbringers available for oGCD attacks now. DRK just feels a lot slower now because of all of these changes and it feels like the devs can't settle on a design for my job. Feelsbadman :(
PLD will always be my favorite for its wonderful utility belt of defensives, though I'm trying to branch out to other tank jobs. Funny enough I find WAR really boring because of how easy it is to recover--but it's also the one where I stress out healers the most because I get lazy with using mitigations (Raw Intuition will be up in 5 seconds! I can wait until then, right??).
The more I bring Dark Knight into the current Savage tier, the more its strengths and nuances become apparent to me. It sort of feels like its quirks were designed with high-end duties in mind - particularly with how it's much easier to break TBN on autos and raidwides, which makes its burst optimization go hand in hand with its defensive toolkit. And it's still got enough survivability as a main tank, as long as you know when heavy autos are gonna hit you and you mit proactively. I love the job to bits, and I'll be the first to defend its performance. (It has more than enough survivability in dungeons, imo; you just gotta cycle your mits well, use TBN aggressively, and not use Abyssal Drain too early.) But it does sort of feel like one of those cases where it's obvious that it was designed and balanced around high-end duties first. Since Dark Arts smuggling just isn't reliable in normal content, it makes the job feel less nuanced than it does in Extreme/Savage. (Also Living Dead is really nice in high-end duties because of how its cooldown resets to 10 seconds when you fall to 1 HP for the first time. You don't have to carefully time it to cover all the hits of stuff like the final M3S tankbusters, you can just pop it and relax.)
@@CaetsuChaijiCh No worries! I wasn't responding to the star rating that you gave - I was just talking about how DRK is often seen by the fandom as being defensively lacking, because the other tanks' level 82 mits give them far more self-healing in dungeons than they actually need to survive, at least imo. (And also because Dark Mind only works against magic damage in a game where most trash mobs use physical damage; thankfully Dawntrail seems to be adding more magic-using trash mobs in its dungeons, creating pulls where Dark Mind should be used alongside or in lieu of Arm's Length.)
This is true. The problem with that is that every other Tank has been getting love for all their weaknesses unlike DRK. Heck, one specific change is still an outright nerf no matter how you look at it (the loss of two Blood Weapon stacks). PLD now has a bunch of self-sustain on top of strong mitigation, WAR's always getting more DPS buttons to strengthen their Burst windows, GNB now has damn-near idiotproof Burst windows, and all three have extremely strong quick mits with zero drawbacks. The conditional nature of DRK's kit right now is what makes it feel weaker right now, and its strengths are starting to actually lose face now that PLD's gaining ground on the DPS front. The Tank seemingly designed as the High-Risk-High-Reward sibling shouldn't be sitting below GNB at the highest end.
@@XernuhtZwei That was true back in 7.01; GNB eclipsed DRK in sheer DPS across all fields. But after the 7.05 buffs to its potency, DRK's been well ahead of the other tanks in terms of DPS if you account for raid buff alignment; and even if you don't, it's been neck-and-neck with GNB (as of this writing, it's currently winning). There's a reason a lot of speed kill parties use two DRKs for their tanks. And yeah, I get where you're coming from about the other tanks getting love for their weaknesses. The issue is that it sort of feels like it's... too much? Like every tank besides DRK is now at the point where healers rarely get to use their kits in dungeons. There's a reason the healer strike was a thing back in June, even if the people participating were obnoxious about it.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Paladin is the king, especially now. Warrior is still my least favorite, although I have warmed up to it a little bit since Endwalker, but I still believe its self-sustain should be dialed back. I've liked Dark Knight always, but now it feels more relaxed, which is why I like it more now. And Gunbreaker is my second. There's just something about gunblades that I like ever since I first played Final Fantasy VIII.
I dunno why ppl call WAR the "Green Tank" cuz you don't nessessarily heal party members aside from regen. I'd say this is more an atribute of PLD cuz of Clemency 🤷♂️
Hmm the optimization related to stuffing dark arts into the two minute burst on top of a mostly full mp bar and blood gauge makes me, a warrior main, estimate that dark knight is significantly harder to perform optimally with! But it's fair you feel different than me on that! 😅😊
Personally, I would agree with the difficulty of mastery being around 2 for DRK,in general I would probably say that each tank is around 2-ish depending on how much you go in depth with your job of choice. Only exception would probably be GNB for me which I would rate a definite 3 since you can butcher it rly bad,especially on phase changes in ultimate fights,cursed cartridges x)
It used to be a problem, but once the invuln properly activates, the dark knight heals itself a monstrous amount with every gcd until it has been healed enough. This makes it only really an issue if the invuln is used without an attackable target! I suppose it is slightly significant, but it is nowhere near how bad it used to be! 😊
The biggest reason this becomes a problem is because the effective healing is tied to how many enemies you hit within that time. In a crowd, each weapon hit can heal for a delightfully large amount, giving you that jump well past your max HP total. You can very easily go from your lethal dead to entirely healed, just like a warrior with blood whetting. But against single targets, the number of weapon hits you make is significantly reduced and you can essentially not reach that threshold if a healer doesn't bother to heal you. It is possible so long as you keep your hits rolling but it's also a very real threat to be just shy of your full hp total and you drop.
i played all tanks to max level (except warrior which i didn't even unlock) and all of them feels miserable to play except paladin, having so much buttons to press while also having to worry about mechs AND using mitigation skills? it's atrocious lmao, pld not only is very smooth because of insta spells and a very simple rotation, it's also feels like your playing an actual tank instead of generic dps
That's fair! If you feel that way, I do think warrior might also make sense for you(in addition to paladin), but you'd best know by giving it a chance 😊
Mastery difficulty on PLD being a 1 star is probably the only thing I disagree with, atonement shifting has been the bane of my existence in ultimates.
Thats fair. Part of the reason why I ranked mastery very low on paladin, is that I felt like most of the things that go into the mastery category for Paladin is already attained when you meet the Entry difficulty, due to how fight or flight-centric the job is!
@CaetsuChaijiCh was way easy to do in EW but you expend both fell cleaves before starting to do it then infuriate will be around 7 secs, grab it, dont use straight away youre holding for 22.5 seconds, ok then youre on 50 gauge so 2 storms path combos and 1 storms eye, now buffs are coming up in a second or 2 If they are inner chaos, inner release, fell cleave, fell cleave, fell cleave, infuriate primal rend, primal wrath, primal ruination, inner chaos, fell cleave, infuriate, inner chaos.
DRK main here, idk why im here... I know my job sucks, you know my job sucks, Yoshi-P knows my job sucks, my cat knows my job sucks, the consort at the erp club I paid to listen to me cry about how DRK was great in the past knows my job sucks, emet knows my job sucks, Krile knows my job sucks, EVERYONE KNOWS MY JOB SUCKS BRUH
I have plenty of things for healers, however the dawntrail edition of this kind of comparison is still in the works! 😊 There is an endwalker version though!
An interesting thing about PLD is that in order to maintain a 1 min rotation, you NEED to drop 2 GCDs somewhere. For perfect damage its better to drop 2 Holy Spirits outside of burst, but that then reduces self sustain. Or if you need to step away, you can drop one or two of the atonement combo, which results in 50 lost potency, but allows you to maintain optimal uptime. I really enjoy this flexibility and skill expression, as annoying as it is to watch the Divine Might debuff overwrite itself. BUT WHO CARES WARRIOR GO BRRRRRRRR
Well it actually happens to be the case that dropping anything for the "perfect burst" is a bigger loss than simply settling for a slightly less than optimal burst 😅 but yes that is a minor adjustment you can make if for some reason a fight calls for it 🤔
Something that I felt was needed for the ranged dps video and I notice here again, I think the star grading is nice on paper, but its actually hard to read. What does a 1 star mean? is it better? easier? harder? cooler? pinker? does the color of the star mean anything?
That's why there is an explanation at the start which includes explaining what more or less stars mean. The glossary explaining this is at around 20 seconds into the video. The glossary is also present in the ranged dps video 😊 And that is indeed because obviously it gets complicated. Even if I exclusively used five stars to mean good: "is five stars for difficulty meaning it is easy or hard??" I hope this helps a bit. The color scheme you're right I could perhaps explain. The way I've consistently done it is red is "bad", meaning red five stars on difficulty means very hard, and one red star on damage is weaker relatively speaking. Orange is next to red. Then yellow. Then green. And then pink, which makes sense given a recurring color on the channel is pink (all the arrow pointers I use is the same color too for example!) so it is sort of meant to be implied as good 😅 I'll think about if I can more easily explain these colors in future comparisons
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Its still very hard to read! You need to constantly pause, go back to the start, try to read small text that doesn't pop super well on the background, go back to the stars, go back to the glossary and so forth.
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Yeah. I dont have a perfect solution to offer Tho: maybe put the explanation in the video description or as a pinned comment might help? I might also suggest giving a label like ease of mastery: hard 5* defence: 3* average or something like taht
Ah yes PLD… the amount of times I’ve seen a party get cleaved by autos because the pld has the “get behind me, I’ll protect you!” mentality is hilarious xD Also rip what was it 40 second prepull fight or flight countdown?
instantly have to dissagree on how you put only 1 star to master pld pld and gnb are by far the most punishing dps loss wise if you mess up unlike warrior and dark knight
Pld unlike the other three has no resource to manage for damage, meaning it takes a lot more to get it wrong. Usually I estimate the mastery difficulty as how much MORE effort it takes past the entry point, and I feel like the difference between average performance pld and high performance pld is relatively small, especially relative to the other tanks 😅 But fair enough, if you feel different!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh small but its still there on warrior wich is my main its pretty braindead and hard to mess anything up really when i play pld and gnb and try to optimize im always stressed out
@alexmaganda5827 warrior is also my main, which is also why I recognize that once you get to actually stockpiling resources for bursts as warrior, it takes a step ahead of paladin in difficulty of mastery. But warrior is certainly incredibly simple to play to a good performance! 😊 There's also that aspect that you'd probably find jobs that you play less harder!
From what ive heard and expirienced DRK is the least desired Tank right now, squishy, out damaged by most other Tanks and has the self buffs of a piece of wet cardboard
Feels about right. Honestly. Hitting like a wet noodle outside opener has always kinda been a thing but I really do feel like damage went no where in dt. I've switched to gearing for paladin it's so dire
depends massively on the team composition and encounter in question in a buff-heavy setup with say, bard, ninja, monk, scholar - drk is still massively powerful, with a burst window that rivals melee DPS it's still extremely good in ultimate due to the ability to stockpile gauge, which is a skill quite unique to the difficulty but it does usually require more work and prerequisites than is perhaps usual
Which tank is your favorite? Personally I've been enjoying warrior and paladin quite a lot recently! Although my raid tank partner is already a paladin so I guess I will stay as a warrior!
I've been enjoying Paladin the most recently. It has that ugly duckling to beautiful swan type of evolution while leveling, and feels incredible to play at the very end! No matter what happens in the fight, Paladin has an answer for it and it's great!
Gunbreaker has been mine. I love aesthetics and the gameplay, really feels perfectly matched to me. I'm just not a fan of some of their animations, like fated circle looking like rehash of demon slaughter or savage claw feeling like a really slow uppercut, but that's just me
@kitsunehanyou09 the fated circle observation I actually noticed myself too very recently. Quite weird! 😅
I feel like the gnashing fang combo in general looks really awkward when you let their animations play out without the continuation!
Dark knight, and it's not even close. I've loved dark knight since 1992 and every incarnation both in and out of FF since then. Even if dark knight were the worst tank in 14, I'd still play it just for that a e s t h e t i c.
Currently my tank of choice is Gunbreaker, which after looking at the difficulty ratings might seem a bit weird because my main job in general is Summoner - the job that feels like it's the most common recipient of the "easiest job" title.
Actually, looking at it, my preference for tanks is basically inversely proportional to the difficulty rating(s) in this video
i love how confident and outspoken you have become with the narrating. its a stark contrast to some of your older videos, and i must say its a great improvement. well done!
I'm glad to hear that! Thank you so much! 😄
Agree. Videos were good and informative but I literally fell asleep hearing the old tone.
That was...quite the trill for the transition to DRK
Feller cleave goes very brrrrr! 😄
your voiceover has improved tremendously. keep doing what you're doing.
Thank you so much! 😄
As a main WAR that did many endgame content including the current savage, I can't picture myself using another job, been war since day 1 playing the game and I love it
One of the actually unique parts about dark knight that you skipped over is that you can pop invuln early and always it always lasts long enough in savage/ults since the timer refreshes. If you ever find yourself dying because of an early invuln to a multihit buster, give dark knight a try.
That is a good point! 😁
The best way to use Passage of Arms is to have it up for the full duration of a big attack to let your allies know you will keep them safe like a true Paladin
It is the coolest way! It is a shame it often doesn't pan out like that these days though! 😰😅
You know how they made astro's Macro and sage's Pneuma do dmg, so ppl would fkin use it? Give Passage and astro bubble a dmg reflect, so that people start looking for ways to mit more dmg by holding it instead of the lame flashing like it's a regular oGCD
@@pointlessmikeI think the main issue with this is that there’s no content in the game where you need to hold PoA for longer than that one weave, and any exceptions to that are typically downtime so it doesn’t matter that you’re channeling
@@vrim819 I can think of 2 mechs in m4s alone. Tumults in uwu, J waves in tea...
@@pointlessmike Flashing also covers the Akh Morn stack in M4SP1. Flashing PoA the first/last few hits of M4SP2's giga attack (i.e. use it to mitigate the one attack that isn't covered by Tank LB3). The other places I would personally PoA are single hits or have people naturally too spread out to mit much.
Maybe it's because I picked GNB as my first Tank, but I picked up on its rotation rather quickly. I hit the wrong input during the Burst sometimes, but it's easily one of my favorite Jobs in the game.
I play on controller and found the perfect crossbar layout for my 123, burst combo, and my AOEs.
Honestly I keep coming back to GNB as my goto tank even though I play all of them rather routinely. I also don't bother going into my 2 min with any cartridges as there's no point. After the 1:30 mini-burst I just dump them as I get them, except I'll usually build up one just prior to the full 2 min.
@@1337penguinman yeah EW gnb had you managing cartridges, and your ability to keep uptime was crucial to your burst windows. People who were learning the job ran sks to generate more than they needed so they can have some room for error. Nowadays, even with 2.5 GCD, Bloodfest corrects all your fuck ups for free. You can run around throwing lightning shots all day like just another lazy tank.
Similarly, fuck SE for removing the gauge cost on Living Shadow. For a noobie, that's the one thing that enabled the whole mindset of drk: hold shit for burst!
I played healers and magical ranged DPS for the most part. I unlocked Gunbreaker as my first tank and I picked up on the playstyle pretty quick as it felt more like DPS. I didn't play it for took long though as I was still feeling the pressure of being a tank. I returned to my healers/mages for now. I'll go back to it at some point to continue it. But, I'm thinking maybe Paladin is the better fit for me. I just understood that PLD has the highest number of skills and as I play on a controller, I only have 32 slots. That made me avoid it. But I like that it has holy magic. It's kind of like a tank mage. As someone who mostly plays magical themed classes, that sounds pretty good. It also seems like the most balanced in terms of damage, defense and complexity.
Forever drk main here only changes i see that are needed all im gonna say is make dark missionary and heart of light reduce all not just magic dmg since shake and divine works for both types so dont see why those have to single out aoes.
Give drk something like aurora from gnb or life steal like a Pld's confideor combo, and I'll be happy.
Oh, and give carve and spit healing like its counterpart abyssal drain.
Ask and you shall receive I guess lol
Love your videos. If I may make a suggestion, perhaps you can put a short graphic + summary of important things to reference for a particular job at the end of the video. Things like how many targets to use an aoe skill for and for what level ranges are a bit hard to look for in a long video.
In my job guides I have a section in the level 100 part that is dedicated to the aoe thing you mention ("for aoe adjustments.."), and I feel it is a bit difficult to fit all the other information in a graphic since I explain all that in the end part of the video over several minutes for a reason! 🤔 Thank you for the suggestion! 😁
Paladin for life, and for the best glams on Ethyris. 🛡
Although, I really wonder what the next Tank job will be. Square seems to have used all of the obvious options from previous Final Fantasy games, and has rolled less obvious options like Viking and Berserker into Warrior (at least thematically). It will be interesting to see where they go next. Personally, I'm hoping for something that's really unique to FFXIV, like maybe turning yourself into a miniature Primal like Ysayle, Zenos, or Louisoix.
This is a great guide. Want to say that first. Clear and concise with charts. You can't go wrong watching this.
But after sitting through it, man, the 2 min meta makes everything both robotic and if you aren't the type to like that type of gameplay; very unfun.
So much of this game is tied around this very rigid system of lining up your burst or having your biggest hitters up in that window, that even tanks have to be thinking about this in everything north of dungeons.
I just, speaking for me, I can't. It makes vast swathes of the game's content, unfun. Has nothing to do with if it's doable, of course it's doable, but contorting each job into a line of on demand attacks and pot usages or else you fall behind while also balancing all the mechs and phases of a boss fight just unfun.
I'm speaking from stock console play here. This tier of savage and even the ew raid has been some of the most unfun content I've played in an mmo. Enough to make me question why I'm even bothering.
Yes, it's off point from your vid, but with each explanation of each tank it just made me think about the whole endgame design here. I'm probably done with savage raiding after this tier. It's just been really unfulfilling for me.
Thank you!
And I can tell you that I agree. I have multiple videos on the channel dedicated to musing over whether the two minute burst meta is healthy for the game because it has a strong effect of making a lot of jobs feel very samey just for one thing! 😰
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I might of watched that. I'll admit, I don't watch every vid, but I'll double back and check.
And lining up burst isn't inherently bad. Other MMO's do it. The problem here I think is when people asked for a way to do it, they were coming from content that was nominally fun designed as it was (SB) but wanted a way to line up that burst.
The dev team listened and gave the burst lineup, but also change fight design molded around that burst. Every fight has a 30 sec window where the boss does nothing but attack the tank for the burst, then a raidwide, then does its first mech attack, then the next during the off burst min, then rinse and repeat for the entire fight.
It's too robotic and I can see it as far back as ShB (I started in earnest in 5.3). Burst lining up is fine, but not for this type of gameplay.
I'm serious about being done with bothering with endgame after this tier. I have fun with every other aspect of the game more or less, but this section, always leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Imo they should remove all party damage buffs in 8.0 outside of phys ranged. Maybe replace a few with personal damage buffs where appropriate, but removing party buffs altogether is the best way to kill 2 min meta for good
as a tank one trick I would loce to give my personal humble opinion:
PLD: with the new abilities they got this expansion and the rework, they really feel flexible in their rotation where u dont need to downtime urself at all (holy spirit stack) then his 2 minute windows can be ranged as well, tho their rotation is a bit strict its still straightforward, but not as much as WAR for sure. Pld is my faveorite class so far and I just love what sqenix did to him in general.
GNB: dont think i have much to add about this class, feels the same busy rotation style as a dps, but one thing i find it annoying is when you have to downtime during a continuation window basicaly screws up ur day. The timing is really sensitive but gotta admit they have rhe strongest short timer mit out of the 4 tanks, really fun class to play imo but when it comes a moment where uou have to downtime/position a boss during continuation window, the feeling will suck, other than that great class
WAR: the unga-est of the bung-est tank, nothing needed to be said, as a main tank their job is to self sustain, and they do it really good, rotation wise its straightforward and staisfying as FFFFF since the new expansion, id say WAR is a great choice for beginner tanks
DRK: no…just no
I just like listening to this in the background
I'm glad to hear that! 😉😁
Replace "Enhanced Unmend" with something like "Enhanced Dark" that gives Dark Mind and Dark Missionary 10% Physical Mit so that DRK doesn't horribly suffer in an "all physical" raid.
Also, Delirium should give 5 stacks of Blood Weapon so that we would have more MP to spend on TBN, like we could before the two abilities were merged.
And the cooldown between Carve & Spit and Abyssal Drain should be un-shared, hell, make a rebalanced GCD Abyssal Drain the third part of DRK's AoE combo or something, then give Carve & Spit some Cure Potency so that we don't lose any healing for the rare instances where we'd have wanted to push the current Abyssal Drain on a single target, extremely niche but it has happened to me before.
And Dark Missionary should be available at Level 70 so that it can be used in UCoB and UWU.
And they should give us a 2 charge 30 second cooldown oGCD that does damage with _no_ movement so that we have something more to think about pushing outside of the 2 min and opener, I unironically miss Plunge because they didn't replace the damage part of it with a different ability, only the movement part. It could even reuse the Power Slash animation for some brownie points.
I loved the transition lmao, to put it succinctly, in terms of what tank I like the most...probably drk for its damage rotation and PLD for its defensives.
I do like GNB's damage rotation but only sometimes, you need a LOT of skillspeed to feel comfortable in fitting everything inside your No Mercy window. Its defensives are pretty good overall, and heart of corundrum + great nebula is kind of crazy.
Drk on the other hand... Yeah I know we all complain about it not having any identity (and the identity it DOES have sucks), but it could be worse; it could be black mage levels of bad. From having played this game for nearly a decade, Drk feels more similar to Ast in the sense that the devs keep simplifying the job (usually) to its detriment. Its burst is one of the most satisfying things in the game to line up, but outside of that, it's boring...very boring. Even worse; it has much less advantages than the other tanks at lower levels.
Can we also talk about TBN being unchanged for years? It really doesn't feel good to use anymore. I'd rather eat potential damage than use it to mitigate a buster that may or may not break it. And you don't even get a bonus for having it break, you get it refunded for edge of shadow - but Afflatus Misery this is not.
You know the weirdest part about TBN is that originally the payoff for it popping was 50 blood gauge. Then the rework happened with shadowbringers!
So it used to be an efficient way to convert mp into blood gauge!
Whether that's any better is up for debate but that's at least a bit more interesting! 😰
I'd love to see if my little pet theory is right: they're trying to have two types of tanks like how we have two types of healers. My guess is itll be tanky tanks and dps tanks. Or mt and ot dedicated tanks.
Hasn't there always been more or an off tank and MT design to the tanks?
no not really
There is no such thing as MT/OT, in savage/ultimates it's basically everyone have the same mechanics and TB are double TB
back in 2.0/3.0 there was real difference between Mt and Ot
Also I dont think they're trying to do "tanky tanks" and "dps tanks", all of them are very reliable in savages/ultimates and there is little difference (few % when it comes to dps, few healing gcd when it comes to mitigation)
There's a few fights on PLD where it actually makes sense to just spam holy spirit for certain phases.
Which mechs in which fights?
@@pointlessmike EE1 and Ion Cluster immediately come to mind, both from M4S.
@@audrey_in_black for EE1 you can sprint between gcds with perfect uptime, for Ion cluster you can use mit and greed and I think you only lose 1 global when you disengage. What else?
@@pointlessmike no, Ion costs more than one global no matter what you do.
@@audrey_in_black You're wrong, I went and checked my 96 parse, it's 1 lightning shot. I tried to link it but I think youtube doesn't like that. Syrrel Jance on Adamantoise if you don't believe me. What other mech do you think PLD should spam holy spirit on?
I'd say for me DRK is the most fun but WAR is the most effective - but keep in mind there that I am not yet in current content and I don't do anything especially hard - most difficult thing I regularly do is probably unsynced two person SHB mount farming with very cheap gear ^^
I like PLD as well but I can't really get on with GNB ... I don't like the look of the gunblades and somehow the rotation never really clicked for me despite playing him to 100.
Yeah I know that feeling! Where the favorite job is not the one you feel works the best 😅
GNB and PLD for me. In levelling the tanks to 100 I came to really enjoy them both so I can't really choose which I like more. I will say that GNB's new Continuation off it's AOE combo is quite possibly by favourite new button the game though. So satisfying to press with that animation and sound.
DRK just feels too weak to me in standard play. Not saying it's a bad job or anything, but it's lack of self sustain is so obvious, especially before you get your big cooldown upgrade. I'm sure it's mostly fine in organized group play but when you're just out there alone doing random stuff it's kind of painful in a way that none of the other tanks are.
WAR.. well, I've never liked WAR at all so yeah, not getting my vote lol
Yeah I do like how most of the spenders for gnb now interacts with continuation! 😁
And indeed, dark knight is the tank that feels a lot more reasonable in boss fights, but there is something missing outside of that! 😅
It's so interesting that people still rank DRK as hard to master... really all you have to do is find a place to use tbn before the 2m burst and don't overcap resources, and press everything on cd pretty much. Drk doesn't really do anything in between, and the 1m burst is much more simple than the other tanks.
You are probably right about that. Personally I just find both warrior and paladin much easier to optimize than dark knight, and by relative difference, that ranks dark knight higher on that! 😅
@CaetsuChaijiCh hey it's all subjective and I can understand why you rank it the way you do. There definitely isn't so much of a skill difference in playing any of the tanks relative to the other jobs in the game, especially dps. Great video.
@@CaetsuChaijiCh honestly, as a warrior main myself, I find drk harder than the other three-but not because it’s outright harder, but simply because warrior and dark knight are so similar in base concept rotationally yet not *quite* the same. It’s less of a case of outright difficulty, and more ‘this job is my job but to the left and with more ogcds, and the slight shift feels weirder to get around than an outright change’!
Didnt play DRK during DT, but in EW there was something called "6-2" rotation, and it was by far, the hardest rotations among tanks
@aromenoir9552 the "6-2" you're referring to is the same as now (its 5-2 with mp nerfs, i think it was 5-3 before). It really only means you have to find a place to tbn before your 2m window so you'll have 5 edges in buffs, but every thing else you pretty much press on cd with the exception of shadowbringer, when you save both charges for the 2m. I suppose if you find nin hard, you'll find drk difficult. But to me, both jobs really are making sure you slightly prep for your 1m/2m then press everything on cd.
Imo the "hardest" tank job in both ew and dt is 2.5 gnb. Gnb got easier in dt cause of lionheart, but depending on when you burst, you sometimes have to pop a burst strike before no mercy, so you can't always enter your burst with 3 cartridges to just cleanly press gnashing fang and double down. You always have to account for how your rotation drifts on that job and it's very sensitive to downtime unlike DRK.
Commenting before starting the video.... im gonna guess DRK is the cool edgy relative that everyone loves right... right :(
Don't worry, I try to emphasize the good in the job comparisons as best I can!
And dark knight is very strong at the things it excels at! (including being very edgy! 🤣)
@@CaetsuChaijiChI’d honestly love to hear your input on what you would change about DRK to improve it, I’m a DRK main causal and I’ve been really struggling with the job this expansion, it feels like if my healer is just a little to lax or stressed then I’m always struggling through the mob pull
@egettinby5173 yeah that can happen. I think the best you can do as drk is be as aggressive with using TBN as you can for survival reasons in those cases 🤔😅
My primary suggestion that I think would be neat is, for example, if the dark arts freebie edge / flood from TBN healed the dark knight. It wouldn't throw off balance much in raids, but would be immensely helpful for a bit more sustain for dark knights. But that's just one suggestion out of many! 😊
I mean DRK is literally the strongest tank right now. Their damage is insane and many top parse teams use double DRK
You forgot the most important part of GNB: at level 100 lion heart combo makes you float and flail about like a clown so don't forget to bring a circus glam :)
Hahaha! Or at least some wings to make it look more believable! 😂
Fun drinking game to do with your FC: every time he says, "in a vacuum", take a shot!
I leveled GBR to 100 (starting from PAL) and had a great time with it; for an alt second-play-through I decided to go WAR and enjoyed it into the early 70s or so... at which point I suddenly got very bored. So now I'm back on GBR and having fun again so... apparently GBR is my favorite. XD
this was a really good and comprehensive video! I would like to add that PLD, besides lacking self healing at earlier levels, also has self healing issues in savage/raid content! since your heals come up every 2 minutes, and you'll mess up your rotation if you do a Clemency GCD (using holy sheltron seems to be the best solution for such cases).
Well your heals come up every minute from requiescat, but yes that is true, they don't exactly have anywhere to the level that warrior has in terms of free burst healing! 😂
@@CaetsuChaijiCh completely understandable, also sorry i meant to write 1 minute.
Well that's not entirely true. Holy Spirit gives a decent heal, and you get one of those on average every seven GCDs. Holy Sheltron also gives 1000 potency of heal over 12 seconds.
@@redgeoblaze3752 ^^ Yeah, a PLD that spends their gauge regularly will often outheal WARs in single target fights. Bloodwhetting is 1200 pot to Sheltron's 1000, but 50 gauge fills quicker than the 25sec cd. Add in the block chance and all the other free heals that are part the rotation, and you're easily outhealing Equilibrium too. WAR is only ridiculous on multi-target
@pointlessmike bloodwhetting is 1600 (4 gcds) and also 400 potency barrier on top.
Nascent flash is closer to +1200 because the fourth swing rarely ever also heals the secondary target due to how it works 😅
However the greater flexibility of the oath gauge can of course enable a paladin to heal where it is needed more 🤔😊
I love all the tanks but… god I wish Warrior’s damage buff could be added to their job gauge like DRK. i really don’t want to redesign my entire hud to keep the buff icon in easy sight just for a single job. if they just changed that I’d play the job way more
I'd never really thought about, but yeah you're right. I can't think of another job where that's an issue. BRD, BLM, DRK of course and formerly NIN all had their persistent upkeeps turned into gauges,VPR, DRG and SAM's buffs get hit as part of their combos. WAR really is a standout here.
I've been having the mildest crisis ever over choosing a tank main.
when I first started out, the choice was clear. Paladin was a lot of fun, and I didn't want to play anything else. Then 6.3 hit.
It's way easier now to the point where it just feels boring most of the time. What really sucks is that Paladin still has my favorite aesthetic and mitigation by far.
I decided to try Gunbreaker, but was kind of put off by the rigid and difficult rotation. I tried Dark Knight and loved the way it plays in terms of damage, but hated it's mitigation.
I really want to like Paladin again, and even trying it in a few Extremes and savage, it's not terrible. But I just can't stop thinking about what we used to have, and how much better it could be.
Yeah paladin changed quite a lot! I will say that the old style of paladin had a rough time in hard content! That is not to say it wasn't fun too! 😅😊
I played old paladin on a rly high level,and new paladin now aswell,I actually liked the 6.3 changes a lot,since it put the job in line with the others even tho I rly enjoyed old Pld aswell. And the job itself has still a lot of optimization to handle,if one rly intends to perfect the gameplay,especially defensively you can get rly creative like did you know that Pld is the only tank to save a dps or healer from a double targeted Tankbuster with cover and invuln.and it ain’t even a rare occasion,last time I did the exact thing I mentioned was in M2s to save a melee from 2nd Aggro TB xD . You can even cover dbfs that would get applied on players,like the fate breaker dot on healers. I could go on and on even when it comes to the damage/rotational optimization, Pld is rly worth playing:)
so fun fact paladin's rework was probably brought forward purely because of DSR - paladins just outright could not manage phase 6 without healer help due to their lack of a "third" cooldown (now bulwark), and that old nature of paladin not really having a burst window per se but consistent damage didn't work with the new ultimate design of smaller uptime segments
even trying to get all of the burst off before strength of the ward can be... an experience
I've been trying to get into tanking for a while now, and after watching this vid I think I'm gonna go with Paladin. Now all I have to do is get past the fear of playing the role 😅
I actually have a separate video that talks about the fear of tanking, or tankxiety, in case it would help you! 😊
It is this one ua-cam.com/video/uT_0jjJ-7iE/v-deo.html
Good luck whatever you end up doing!
Caetsu, I sincerely appreciate your informative videos and content on FFXIV. If there's one piece of critique I can impart with is to please use informational graphics, rather than just white text for 90% of your info. It's speaks 2007 youtube content to me man
I appreciate the feedback, but it is a bit confusing, since a large part of said information can't be translated to, say, a pie chart, so wouldn't informational graphics simply become text on a background, as opposed to text with a border and potentially a shadow? 🤔😰
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Mmm, perhaps a dimmed background footage for wordy sections, to help pop the texts 😌
@Samx197 you know, that is a pretty good idea, I will try this looking forward! Someone else suggested something a bit similar I think, too 😊
PLD is my go-to tank, since you have so much damn utilities. So, damn good.
Not sure how relevant this will be for the wider discussions, but I'm currently a Lv. 54 Dark Knight and yeah, once opener is done I kinda feel like I'm just hitting my 1-2-3 combo over and over, and occasionally tapping one of the Darkness buttons. And I kinda love that tbh??? I greatly appreciate being able to take my eyes off my hot bar and actually look at the boss, and considering that my main DPS job is Bard...y-you can see where I'm coming from right?
I see it!
And yeah optimally dark knight still feels kinda like that at max level! And as you say, for some, that's a good thing!
you just found out why a lot of tanks become the callout people in high end duties, reminding their static members of upcoming mechanics. the less complex rotations free up a lot of mental burden, letting you pick up the slack for your teammates with more complex rotations
PLD just feels fun to me. Had DRK as my main tank for the longest time, but lately PLD has just been so enjoyable. The flexibility on when you use divine might and the Confiteor combo for both movement and sustain just rules,
WAR is pretty boring. Being practically unkillable to dungeon mobs is cool I guess, but like, it's kinda whatever for me. I know it gets the "green tank" nickname, but I honestly prefer the versatility of the other tanks' spot healing/mit. WAR gets it on one party member per 20 sec, but each of the others have a heal and/or mit that they can use on multiple party members in quick succession if necessary. The animations are real fun at least. I miss SB gauge management.
DRK is very boring. I miss SB everything.
GNB is alright. I like pressing a lotta buttons quickly.
Dark Knight has always been my favorite tank ever since I started playing in Shadowbringers.
I think Dark Knight really suffers because of the changes from Endwalker (Carve and Spit sharing a cooldown with Abyssal Drain), and then suffers even More from the Delirium/Blood Weapon change that shipped with Dawntrail. We went from having a time limit on Delirium and Blood Weapon with the *possibility* of fitting in 5 GCDs under these windows by melding SkS in Shadowbringers to having a guaranteed 5 GCDs for Blood Weapon, but *only* three GCDs under Delirium.
In Dawntrail, Blood Weapon and Delirium were put onto the same action and now we only have three of both. We lost the ability to manage MP as finely as we could before and lost the potential for even *more* damage with the downsizing from 5 to 3 BW hits for using additional Edges. This is also not to mention the loss of Plunge, which just feels terrible as Dark Knight now only has Flood/Edge, Carve and Spit/Abyssal Drain and the two Shadowbringers available for oGCD attacks now. DRK just feels a lot slower now because of all of these changes and it feels like the devs can't settle on a design for my job. Feelsbadman :(
That is a good point, just from shadowbringers to dt, despite for many it not feeling that way, dark knight has lost some of the stuff they used! 😰
PLD will always be my favorite for its wonderful utility belt of defensives, though I'm trying to branch out to other tank jobs. Funny enough I find WAR really boring because of how easy it is to recover--but it's also the one where I stress out healers the most because I get lazy with using mitigations (Raw Intuition will be up in 5 seconds! I can wait until then, right??).
The more I bring Dark Knight into the current Savage tier, the more its strengths and nuances become apparent to me. It sort of feels like its quirks were designed with high-end duties in mind - particularly with how it's much easier to break TBN on autos and raidwides, which makes its burst optimization go hand in hand with its defensive toolkit. And it's still got enough survivability as a main tank, as long as you know when heavy autos are gonna hit you and you mit proactively.
I love the job to bits, and I'll be the first to defend its performance. (It has more than enough survivability in dungeons, imo; you just gotta cycle your mits well, use TBN aggressively, and not use Abyssal Drain too early.) But it does sort of feel like one of those cases where it's obvious that it was designed and balanced around high-end duties first. Since Dark Arts smuggling just isn't reliable in normal content, it makes the job feel less nuanced than it does in Extreme/Savage.
(Also Living Dead is really nice in high-end duties because of how its cooldown resets to 10 seconds when you fall to 1 HP for the first time. You don't have to carefully time it to cover all the hits of stuff like the final M3S tankbusters, you can just pop it and relax.)
I also agree that drk is perfectly fine on defense and would never suggest otherwise even if the star ratings might make it appear so! 😅
@@CaetsuChaijiCh No worries! I wasn't responding to the star rating that you gave - I was just talking about how DRK is often seen by the fandom as being defensively lacking, because the other tanks' level 82 mits give them far more self-healing in dungeons than they actually need to survive, at least imo. (And also because Dark Mind only works against magic damage in a game where most trash mobs use physical damage; thankfully Dawntrail seems to be adding more magic-using trash mobs in its dungeons, creating pulls where Dark Mind should be used alongside or in lieu of Arm's Length.)
This is true. The problem with that is that every other Tank has been getting love for all their weaknesses unlike DRK. Heck, one specific change is still an outright nerf no matter how you look at it (the loss of two Blood Weapon stacks).
PLD now has a bunch of self-sustain on top of strong mitigation, WAR's always getting more DPS buttons to strengthen their Burst windows, GNB now has damn-near idiotproof Burst windows, and all three have extremely strong quick mits with zero drawbacks.
The conditional nature of DRK's kit right now is what makes it feel weaker right now, and its strengths are starting to actually lose face now that PLD's gaining ground on the DPS front. The Tank seemingly designed as the High-Risk-High-Reward sibling shouldn't be sitting below GNB at the highest end.
@@XernuhtZwei That was true back in 7.01; GNB eclipsed DRK in sheer DPS across all fields. But after the 7.05 buffs to its potency, DRK's been well ahead of the other tanks in terms of DPS if you account for raid buff alignment; and even if you don't, it's been neck-and-neck with GNB (as of this writing, it's currently winning). There's a reason a lot of speed kill parties use two DRKs for their tanks.
And yeah, I get where you're coming from about the other tanks getting love for their weaknesses. The issue is that it sort of feels like it's... too much? Like every tank besides DRK is now at the point where healers rarely get to use their kits in dungeons. There's a reason the healer strike was a thing back in June, even if the people participating were obnoxious about it.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Paladin is the king, especially now. Warrior is still my least favorite, although I have warmed up to it a little bit since Endwalker, but I still believe its self-sustain should be dialed back. I've liked Dark Knight always, but now it feels more relaxed, which is why I like it more now. And Gunbreaker is my second. There's just something about gunblades that I like ever since I first played Final Fantasy VIII.
Crazy that i chose gunbreaker as my first tank to level 😅 i guess i just understood the cartridge mechanic more than the others
The most important part is you figured it out and had fun! 😄
Pld and gnb are ny top 2 tanks and i could never decide between which one to commit too (so i played whm for a while naturally)
I dunno why ppl call WAR the "Green Tank" cuz you don't nessessarily heal party members aside from regen. I'd say this is more an atribute of PLD cuz of Clemency 🤷♂️
Gunbreaker is my favorite tank on aesthetic alone
I'm dying knowing my tank of choice is the "hardest," while also struggling to play any other tank xD
Also Dark Knight Mastery is more like a 2 not a 4, its literally 1,2,3, bloodspiller hit any OGCDs, Warrior mastery is harder
Hmm the optimization related to stuffing dark arts into the two minute burst on top of a mostly full mp bar and blood gauge makes me, a warrior main, estimate that dark knight is significantly harder to perform optimally with! But it's fair you feel different than me on that! 😅😊
Personally, I would agree with the difficulty of mastery being around 2 for DRK,in general I would probably say that each tank is around 2-ish depending on how much you go in depth with your job of choice. Only exception would probably be GNB for me which I would rate a definite 3 since you can butcher it rly bad,especially on phase changes in ultimate fights,cursed cartridges x)
Doesn't the dark knights invuln kill you too if you don't get healed? I feel like that's an important detail.
It used to be a problem, but once the invuln properly activates, the dark knight heals itself a monstrous amount with every gcd until it has been healed enough. This makes it only really an issue if the invuln is used without an attackable target! I suppose it is slightly significant, but it is nowhere near how bad it used to be! 😊
Oh okay I was unaware of that change. I've not leveled it myself, kind of been putting it off as it's my least favorite of the tanks.
The biggest reason this becomes a problem is because the effective healing is tied to how many enemies you hit within that time. In a crowd, each weapon hit can heal for a delightfully large amount, giving you that jump well past your max HP total. You can very easily go from your lethal dead to entirely healed, just like a warrior with blood whetting. But against single targets, the number of weapon hits you make is significantly reduced and you can essentially not reach that threshold if a healer doesn't bother to heal you. It is possible so long as you keep your hits rolling but it's also a very real threat to be just shy of your full hp total and you drop.
i played all tanks to max level (except warrior which i didn't even unlock) and all of them feels miserable to play except paladin, having so much buttons to press while also having to worry about mechs AND using mitigation skills? it's atrocious lmao, pld not only is very smooth because of insta spells and a very simple rotation, it's also feels like your playing an actual tank instead of generic dps
That's fair! If you feel that way, I do think warrior might also make sense for you(in addition to paladin), but you'd best know by giving it a chance 😊
Mastery difficulty on PLD being a 1 star is probably the only thing I disagree with, atonement shifting has been the bane of my existence in ultimates.
Thats fair. Part of the reason why I ranked mastery very low on paladin, is that I felt like most of the things that go into the mastery category for Paladin is already attained when you meet the Entry difficulty, due to how fight or flight-centric the job is!
"Makes paladin the closest to both a mage tank and a ranged tank". Blue mages who tank in shambles. 😆
Well in fairness, blue mage tanks feel like they just tagged a "hi I'm a tank" sticker on their shirt sometimes! 😂
7.19 if you really optimise you can get 3 infuriate in Raid burst ;)
Hmm I wonder how you'd do this without overcapping a ton on beast gauge! 🤔 Maybe I am missing something obvious! 😅
@CaetsuChaijiCh was way easy to do in EW but you expend both fell cleaves before starting to do it then infuriate will be around 7 secs, grab it, dont use straight away youre holding for 22.5 seconds, ok then youre on 50 gauge so 2 storms path combos and 1 storms eye, now buffs are coming up in a second or 2 If they are inner chaos, inner release, fell cleave, fell cleave, fell cleave, infuriate primal rend, primal wrath, primal ruination, inner chaos, fell cleave, infuriate, inner chaos.
DRK main here, idk why im here... I know my job sucks, you know my job sucks, Yoshi-P knows my job sucks, my cat knows my job sucks, the consort at the erp club I paid to listen to me cry about how DRK was great in the past knows my job sucks, emet knows my job sucks, Krile knows my job sucks, EVERYONE KNOWS MY JOB SUCKS BRUH
Do you have something for healers? :)
I have plenty of things for healers, however the dawntrail edition of this kind of comparison is still in the works! 😊 There is an endwalker version though!
An interesting thing about PLD is that in order to maintain a 1 min rotation, you NEED to drop 2 GCDs somewhere. For perfect damage its better to drop 2 Holy Spirits outside of burst, but that then reduces self sustain. Or if you need to step away, you can drop one or two of the atonement combo, which results in 50 lost potency, but allows you to maintain optimal uptime. I really enjoy this flexibility and skill expression, as annoying as it is to watch the Divine Might debuff overwrite itself.
BUT WHO CARES WARRIOR GO BRRRRRRRR
Well it actually happens to be the case that dropping anything for the "perfect burst" is a bigger loss than simply settling for a slightly less than optimal burst 😅 but yes that is a minor adjustment you can make if for some reason a fight calls for it 🤔
Something that I felt was needed for the ranged dps video and I notice here again, I think the star grading is nice on paper, but its actually hard to read.
What does a 1 star mean? is it better? easier? harder? cooler? pinker? does the color of the star mean anything?
That's why there is an explanation at the start which includes explaining what more or less stars mean. The glossary explaining this is at around 20 seconds into the video. The glossary is also present in the ranged dps video 😊
And that is indeed because obviously it gets complicated.
Even if I exclusively used five stars to mean good: "is five stars for difficulty meaning it is easy or hard??"
I hope this helps a bit.
The color scheme you're right I could perhaps explain. The way I've consistently done it is red is "bad", meaning red five stars on difficulty means very hard, and one red star on damage is weaker relatively speaking.
Orange is next to red. Then yellow. Then green. And then pink, which makes sense given a recurring color on the channel is pink (all the arrow pointers I use is the same color too for example!) so it is sort of meant to be implied as good 😅
I'll think about if I can more easily explain these colors in future comparisons
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Its still very hard to read! You need to constantly pause, go back to the start, try to read small text that doesn't pop super well on the background, go back to the stars, go back to the glossary and so forth.
@ursulcx299 yeah unfortunately there the problem is of course that explaining even more would require the text to be even smaller 😰
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Yeah. I dont have a perfect solution to offer
Tho: maybe put the explanation in the video description or as a pinned comment might help?
I might also suggest giving a label like ease of mastery: hard 5*
defence: 3* average or something like taht
why were you weaving shadowstride, then 3 seconds later you say it doesnt deal dmg anymore. 💀
am i tripping...
Likely a misclick 😂
It generates enmity on the target so it isn't entirely pointless i suppose! 🤔😊
Ah yes PLD… the amount of times I’ve seen a party get cleaved by autos because the pld has the “get behind me, I’ll protect you!” mentality is hilarious xD
Also rip what was it 40 second prepull fight or flight countdown?
Ah I believe it was ummm 17 second prepull but I have heard rumors of worse than that!
instantly have to dissagree on how you put only 1 star to master pld pld and gnb are by far the most punishing dps loss wise if you mess up unlike warrior and dark knight
Pld unlike the other three has no resource to manage for damage, meaning it takes a lot more to get it wrong.
Usually I estimate the mastery difficulty as how much MORE effort it takes past the entry point, and I feel like the difference between average performance pld and high performance pld is relatively small, especially relative to the other tanks 😅
But fair enough, if you feel different!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh small but its still there on warrior wich is my main its pretty braindead and hard to mess anything up really when i play pld and gnb and try to optimize im always stressed out
@alexmaganda5827 warrior is also my main, which is also why I recognize that once you get to actually stockpiling resources for bursts as warrior, it takes a step ahead of paladin in difficulty of mastery. But warrior is certainly incredibly simple to play to a good performance! 😊
There's also that aspect that you'd probably find jobs that you play less harder!
From what ive heard and expirienced DRK is the least desired Tank right now, squishy, out damaged by most other Tanks and has the self buffs of a piece of wet cardboard
Feels about right. Honestly. Hitting like a wet noodle outside opener has always kinda been a thing but I really do feel like damage went no where in dt.
I've switched to gearing for paladin it's so dire
@@anierikidemona join me in the holy crusade brother.
depends massively on the team composition and encounter in question
in a buff-heavy setup with say, bard, ninja, monk, scholar - drk is still massively powerful, with a burst window that rivals melee DPS
it's still extremely good in ultimate due to the ability to stockpile gauge, which is a skill quite unique to the difficulty
but it does usually require more work and prerequisites than is perhaps usual
"out damaged by most other Tanks"
what xd
@@aromenoir9552 bro does not play other Tanks.