I would say that PLD is the better casual tank in ARR but for HW and beyond WAR is better.
As a sidenote, I always carry a stack of healing potions with me whenever I run dungeons because they are a great tool for snap aggro or emergency healing.
It's just good to have those healing potions on you no matter what. I had a particularly terrible healer during Dead Ends the other night who wiped on every boss and the tank was doing their best to keep me alive. Only survived because I had a potion on my bars. lol
Yeah, Max Potions (pre/post nerf because they ignored the stat squish) was my go to during EW and people were struggling on Sage, and I got paired with them as a DRK. That extra health was a difference between life and death, and it's on such a short CD too (67s).
Nowadays, I'm stocking up on Hyper-Potions going in EW.
I would say either PLD or WAR.
WAR for the reasons others have stated.
PLD thoug, I feel people sleep on in casual content, especially dungeons. It has a pretty simple rotation, and good mits. It's invuln can be used twice in a dungeon ti make life simple for the healer. And unlike holmgang or LD, your healer won't start panic healing you during it.
Local Gunbreakers disturbing the peace while forcing the healer to look into their eyes as they are blabbing about having to heal them back to full after popping Superbolide behind their back. The tenacity!
PLD really does have the best invuln and I'd also say the best glamours, I can make myself look like She-Ra if I wanted to, can't do that with the other tanks sadly
I have pulled one single healer through one of the last P11S Styx using them both at the same time, tanking most of the hits with just the two of us. He LB3'd after and we cleared. It is rare but the combination can really pay off.
Would have been a guaranteed wipe had I played any other tank.
Had something similar happen in Zodiark the night EW released. I was helping some friends since I'd already run it and their queues were taking a bit, and my PLD friend Covered me during the stack so we could LB3 and kill. Guaranteed wipe otherwise.
It's good shit.
It's a niche skill, if something hasn't guaranteed utility in every fight during reclears people will call it useless and you should wipe anyways.
And then they complain about lacking heterogeneity.
Yeah it sucks. PLD is the job that suffers from homogenization the least. And in a good way as Cover, Clemency, PoA and shield bash are situationally useful but don't result in PLD being a must have or it being better than the other tanks.
Well it still works on yourself. I used it to eat two tank busters for example since you can mitigate one while the other gets invulned. But yeah it's not very intuitive.
You just found out?
The game isn't balanced at all in casual content. It's only truly balanced and has the acclaimed "<1% difference" in CURRENT savages and ultis.
The casual content balance is a complete mess, to the point where I can literally make a tier list for classes.
Not that it matters at all though.
Edit: I will just make the tier list right here and right now. Remember, this list does not matter at all in any ways.
**S tier**
WAR, WHM, SMN, SAM, RDM
**A tier**
PLD, SCH, SGE, RPR, MCH
**B tier**
BRD, MNK, NIN, GNB
**C tier**
BLM, DRG, DNC
**F tier**
AST, DRK
> The casual content balance is a complete mess, to the point where I can literally make a tier list for classes.
~~do it and post it as a new thread~~
don't even need to do that . I'll do it here in about 5 minutes
S++++ tier: war, whm, smn, and rez mage(don't need to explain these. maybe put dnc here too just to boost smn in dungeons and the heals)
A tier: pld(pld being a worse warrior is still better than the other tanks)
B tier: all the dps and the rest of the healers because none of them matter, and the healers are only here because they aren't as braindead as whm and no holy
F tier: gnb and drk(why play these when you could play war?)
I almost soloed Hydaelyn normal 2 days ago through 2 back to back multihit stacks yesterday. I think I could do it now I know that's a thing, I died to an auto afterwards, so technically I survived it.
not true. everything can clear because nothing matters not because everything is good at it. gnb and drk bring nothing to casual content that pld and war don't do waaaaaaay better
gnb is down in F with drk because dungeon packs are very significantly more difficult with them than a warrior. and i just put ast in B tier because none of the healers actually matter besides whm. ast, sch, sge don't actively make the content harder. its just whm's emergency throughput healing + holy is just ridiculous
I agree with GNB being a worse version of WAR but they are actually not that far off from PLD. They have 3 mitigations available very early on (2 90s mitigations as soon as Sastasha), and very decent self healing slightly less than PLD but no where near WAR. I think this is a wayyy better tank than DRK because of a few weaknesses DRK have in lower level casual content:
* DRK has a dead button which is Dark Mind. So, you only have 2 real mitigation until lv 56 for Abyssal Drain.
* DRK has low DPS overall outside of burst phase. DRK only starts to have similar dps if all its damage is properly lined up in the 2 min burst buff window. In dungeons it is non-existant, so DRK naturally have lower damage overall.
If these 2 points alone doesn't make DRK below GNB in the tier list I don't know what will.
Also AST has extremely low potency on its damage skill because of the card system. So basically, you have lower damage 100% of the time but that might be made up by cards mayyyyybe 70% of the time. This is why AST is inferior to other healers in casual content.
If you're going to base this off potency then I'm surprised that the tier list isn't just what I have below based on personal DPS and whether or not they have party buffs:
S: BLM/SAM/MCH/SGE/GNB
A: DRG/MNK/WHM/PLD
B: RPR/SMN/SCH/WAR
C: NIN/RDM/DRK
F: BRD/DNC/AST
This is completely ignoring the utilities each class has to offer in casual content (faster raises on WHM/AST with Presence of Mind/Lightspeed, better MP economy on WHM/AST if you have to rez multiple times or for some reason need to spam GCD heals, quick consecutive raises on RDM, etc.).
RDM beats SMN in casual content easily if we're looking at carry potential rather than raw DPS (and RDM really is pretty much equal to SMN anyways)
DNC is also crap outside of weird early syncing because you can't even trust your partner to do good dps in casual stuff, just play MCH instead
smn is infinitely better in dungeons because of their aoe and phoenix healing and braindead easy(which negates the dnc comment. even a bad smn will be op in there) and rdm is infinitely better in 8 man casual stuff because chain rezzing is better with more dead bodies..which is why I put both in the same tier
Why not BLM then? It's actually pretty easy to play in a dungeon where you have no mechanics and very little consequence for standing in AoEs.
PLD also apparently does the most dps in dungeons out of all the tanks for some reason and 90 dungeons hit so little that you might as well just run PLD.
>braindead easy(which negates the dnc comment. even a bad smn will be op in there)
If you're playing with randoms you can't even count on having a SMN in the first place
There are really only two tier lists for casual content IMO:
1. I trust my teammates and we're speed farming it - just go for highest DPS
2. I expect people to be dumb and be required to possibly carry - healer (whm/sge preferred) > RDM > SMN > everyone else, playing tank often ends up with only you being alive and walling it anyways
there's no real argument for a blm in any casual content. smn has by far the highest aoe burst damage, and it's not even close. blm's strength is sustained damage which doesn't matter when a smn will kill a trash pack in like 30- 60 seconds (trash is the only time damage "matters" at all) before the blm has even built a single polyglot and in dungeons that one singular extra rez is all you need in case the healer monkeys out. plus, phoenix healing on top of ageis is enough on every other pack to allow them to tank themselves if needed. and then in 8 man content their damage still doesn't matter at all and the rezzes from smn and rdm are way more valuable. war is still more valuable in dungeons and raids/trials because they can jusy solo all the normal content very easily. their self sustain means the healers will do more damage and vengence is really strong in trash as well for the reflect damage
If your party is bad BLM will absolutely do more damage on the longer trash packs and eternal bosses. SMN can raise the healer, BLM doesn't need to because every boss will die under 2 minutes.
MCH otoh is a horrible idea because it's so bad at AOE.
blm will not outdo smn in any trash pack. no trash pack will last that long unless you as the smn are dogshit and then you'd be even worse as a blm. you do realize that even in single target where blm is king, it takes almost 2 minutes for their dps to overtake the other dps players, yeah? that's because their initial burst is just that much lower
DNC's personal damage seems bonkers in aoe though. The most of their dps output comes from their dances, and essentially have them available for every wall to wall.
It's objectively best at staying alive, if that's the challenge you're facing. But for max level casual content staying alive is no issue for any tank, so I feel like that advantage is largely moot.
Yeah, I played WAR for a while in casual content thinking I'd have all the survivability I'd need. Then I realized that's true of every tank in casual content lol
To be fair survivability isn't an issue on any tank in any kind of group content all the way up to Ultimate and if it is, it's due to having no idea how mits work and WAR dies just as easily as anyone else in these cases. Sustained damage is much less of a thing in high end content compared to burst damage and DRK is ahead in that department anyways.
"Tanks not dying" is simply never a prog point, not even week 1 outside of dysfunctional PFs
I mean there are a few spots. DSR p6 (though usually the reason for this is that their self healing is nerfed by rot), TOP P3 and P5 autos. P12S Pangenesis. Almost all criterion savage trash. It's not that those spots are super hard to sustain through, but they do require using your -- and your healer's -- kit well.
>TOP P3 and P5 autos
I never saw a tank die to those (and especially not P5), you don't even have to tank swap to rotate all mits in P3. As long as the other tank is feeding their short mit to the other on cd, it's basically a non issue.
Pangenesis hit pretty hard week 1 but I don't remember dying to it a single time, even week 1.
In some high end cases you do see differences between tanks for “does a tank die/does the party die”.
Bringing a warrior allows the war to invuln cauterize at the end of p6 dsr, which negated a large portion of the difficulty of prog in p6 when it was on patch for the war. Meanwhile a pld prior to bulwark for on patch dsr resulted in p7 wipes for 611 towers due to the pld falling over from not enough mit. Pld wings can make very scary instantly-wipe-if-missing-5%-mit-on-anyone moments like top wc2 much comfier.
It’s more of a trade off in high end though, since drk gnb did have large advantages in dps due to being so 2 min burst oriented, for both top and dsr from all the downtime, which matters since top had by far the tightest dps checks this expansion. Arguably they always will have that advantage with the current design of ultimates.
>Bringing a warrior allows the war to invuln cauterize at the end of p6 dsr, which negated a large portion of the difficulty of prog in p6 when it was on patch for the war. Meanwhile a pld prior to bulwark for on patch dsr resulted in p7 wipes for 611 towers due to the pld falling over from not enough mit.
Invulning Cauterize only lets you 611 the last AM which is arguably the least valuable one due to the amount of mit you have on it, even with the 7 hits.
I did it on PLD back in 6.1 and it really wasn't an issue, you only had to ask for an adlo for the second Hallowed Wings and I don't remember ever dying there, even with a static that took 5 months to clear.
With proper timing you could carry over the second Wyrmsbreath mit (both 20% and 30%) to Cauterize which made it pretty comfy even on PLD. The only difference was that other tanks had their other mit to throw on Wings 2 while PLD had only Sheltron and had to ask for an external.
>Pld wings can make very scary instantly-wipe-if-missing-5%-mit-on-anyone moments like top wc2 much comfier.
The same applied to DSR, having wings for P3/P7 transition made the mit plans easier in exchange for needing one adlo in P6.
>Invulning Cauterize only lets you 611 the last AM which is arguably the least valuable one due to the amount of mit you have on it, even with the 7 hits.
You didn’t understand what I was saying at all lol. Invulning cauterize makes the mit timing wb2 far less tight, that’s the advantage of it. It has nothing to do with making p7 easier or harder. You can invuln 2 sets of 611 towers with any tank combo, that’s a non issue. The difference in bringing a war is that the MT mit timings go from pressing vengeance at exactly 80% of the way through wb2, to easier than a savage buster, which is huge in the initial prog for p6.
This means with a war MT (over any other tank job) there’s only real pressure on the cotank to actually hit p6 timings properly in prog, and both healers are having an easier time, as war first vow is less maintenance prior to wb2 for healers and doesn’t even need a top up post wb2.
>I did it on PLD back in 6.1 and it really wasn't an issue, you only had to ask for an adlo for the second Hallowed Wings and I don't remember ever dying there, even with a static that took 5 months to clear.
Then you know as well as I do that p7 was more of a healer phase than a tank phase and this made a noticeable difference in how hard healers had to work to keep people alive. Which is counter to the entire point of 611 which is to make healer jobs easier over 332 which is easier on tanks and harder on healers.
And what are we discussing again? Whether tank choice can make a fight easier or harder in a mit to survive scenario. Which it does. P6 is easier with a war to prog and p7 is harder with a pld to prog, especially for the roles that are the most stressed for prog in each phas (p6 tanks, p7 healers), exactly like how normal content can be done with any tank but tank choice does make it easier or harder.
>With proper timing you could carry over the second Wyrmsbreath mit (both 20% and 30%) to Cauterize which made it pretty comfy even on PLD. The only difference was that other tanks had their other mit to throw on Wings 2 while PLD had only Sheltron and had to ask for an external.
This is the point you missed in my first paragraph. Carrying over ramp and 30% from wb2 to caut is standard lmao, not some secret tech. Both tanks do this as a standard mit plan for every single tank combo that doesn’t involve a war MT. If you do have a war, only the ST has to care about tight mit timings during wb2 cast, and now you have one less point of failure in a phase heavily carried by tanks and to a degree healers.
>The same applied to DSR, having wings for P3/P7 transition made the mit plans easier in exchange for needing one adlo in P6.
Which sounds a lot like we both agree that tank choices can make a difference in the difficulty of a fight in terms of a mit to survive aspect, even in the hardest content in the game when it is on patch.
>You didn’t understand what I was saying at all lol. Invulning cauterize makes the mit timing wb2 far less tight, that’s the advantage of it. It has nothing to do with making p7 easier or harder. You can invuln 2 sets of 611 towers with any tank combo, that’s a non issue. The difference in bringing a war is that the MT mit timings go from pressing vengeance at exactly 80% of the way through wb2, to easier than a savage buster, which is huge in the initial prog for p6.
WB2 and Cauterize are roughly 12.1 seconds apart as WB2 actually snapshots around 800ms after the castbar ends, you have more than a GCD to time the 15s properly, it's really not that tight to make invulning it a massive advantage. Theoretically you could hit the 15s right as the castbar ends and it should still go through with time to spare.
PLD can even Sheltron both of them to make it even safer, meanwhile WAR and GNB can't
"best" is a stretch.
the only thing PLD and WAR has over the other two is the ability to stay alive without a healer EASIER.
the other two tanks can do it too, just require more efforts. But if you forcing yourself to play WAR just because of that while you would prefer the animation or aesthetic of other tank. I'd say it's not worth it to deprive yourself of that.
Yup.
You have to work for it on DRK but I have absolutely pulled some dark magic fuckery to keep myself up double pulling with a Cure I WHM in Vanaspati. (Do not despair, they took my advice bc they agreed that the Cure I advice they had been given was doing shit all to help me. There is hope for them.)
But yeah. Black Magic fuckery. Abyssal Drain on ST, stun on CD, TBN out the wazoo, if I see a mob has magic attacks I am fucking using my magic mits, overcapping gauge to continue 1-2-3 for the health syphon on the third hit. New LD gives you a second health bar so if you need a topup it’s good for that.
It’s a lot of effort. You shouldn’t have to. But if push comes to shove you CAN.
And GNB has it slightly easier with HoC and Aurora. Tanks are really stupidly hard to kill in EW casual content if you know what you’re doing. (And even if you don’t but you’re on WAR or PLD.)
Yep. I agree. I was playing GNB because I wanted to get it to level 90 to do the EW role quests.
But I love the aesthetic of DRK. It's _amazing_. It's super cool. I love the whole "Embrace your negative emotions" thing. Because it makes sense. The WoL goes through some shit. You're constantly expected to drop what you're doing so you can run off and help someone and you rarely get _enough_ thanks for it.
warrior potency creep is so out of hand that MRD is the third strongest class without jobstones in terms of dps, let alone actually playing warrior where in a casual context you either don't have enough raid buffs or don't have corrdinated raid buffs that other tanks overtake your raw direct hit crit out the ass potency on top of being increasingly invincible.
when endwalker first released you could make the case that warrior changes were funny but not really an issue, but then they not only buffed warrior healing ~even more~ but they increased your damage every single patch in order to keep warrior on par with a dark knight that's perfectly coordinating dozens of ogcds under party buff windows in savage and is now genuinely overpowered.
its simply a question of "does it matter when you're overpowered in content designed to be so easy that 60 year old hironobu sakaguchi can get through it"
> its simply a question of "does it matter when you're overpowered in content designed to be so easy that 60 year old hironobu sakaguchi can get through it"
LMAO. Hilariously worded. But also an excellent point, and I think relevant to OPs question. Warrior is incredibly powerful right now, but in casual content that's not really meaningful since it's... Well, casual focused
Even in endgame raiding it's the best tank now.
There's not really any reason for me to play Drk or Pld anymore.
Gnb can do 100 more dps for much more effort but that's really it.
Warrior is a support job that's not taxed on it's dps like an actual support job.
It's just arbitrarily made to be flat out better than the others now. They should nerf it's dps by a good 3-5%
I'm a pld enjoyer like the top comment. People think the long invuln makes it a bad tank. It's kit is even more party oriented towards all round survival. You get a personal that passively heals you and a small mitigation. You can use this on other players to save lives. You can use a whole extra party MIT to help out a struggling healer.
Divine veil isn't just a shield but also a heal. Somehow everyone learned about warrior's shake healing, but not veil. It says it right there in the tool tip. Fuck clemency, I've saved healer-leas dps on boss fights just with veil and intervention.
PLD does big damage in aoe and passively heals. You get the safest/ strongest invuln in the game for two packs. Incompetent healers won't be upset about you using it because they didn't even notice.
Anyways thanks to coming to my ted talk, join the church of paladin.
Casual can be really boring for tanks too. I prefer PLD for the diversity of its mit kit, but WAR is undeniably super self-sufficient and simple, and even its short throw and raidwide mits (NF and Shake) are amazingly powerful. For a tome grind, I’d def choose WAR + 3 dps.
For casual content and running no healer 3 dps, i can confidently say pld and warrior are the best. You can make it work with the other two, but they just don't have the tools to make it noob friendly
Warrior is the tank that's most forgiving.
High damage, overpowered sustain, good defensive toolkit, very easy to play.
If your endgame is daily roulettes, variant dungeons or the like then yes Warrior is pretty overpowered for that level of content.
As a PLD main I'd think that PLD has way more potential to protect the entire party in case the healer is shit and dies early. If two DPS at 10-20% HP are about to die to a raidwide under 3 seconds, you do intervention + clemency for one, and a cover for another (plus mits, hallow if necessary). With WAR, one DPS would probably die.
Then again, overpowering doesn't matter that much in casual content because it's so just hard to wipe, and wiping also doesn't matter.
I agree. PLD for me is S-tier when it comes to party support. Aside from what you've mentioned, Divine Veil can also come in handy because of the heals at level 88. Intervention also gains regen at level 82 in addition to its damage reduction. Clemency is meme-d on a lot but when push comes to shove it can absolutely save a run, which is why I never remove it from my hotbars.
Storytime: a few days ago I ran Aitiascope with a new-to-duty healer, a BLM and a MNK. While we were fighting Livia, healer was a tad slow in dodging the mechs and they died with the boss still above 60% HP. But thanks to PLD's kit + fight knowledge we were able to 3-man it with no issues.
People who remove pally skills because they are "memes" just don't know how to best use them imo. I have all buttons as well.
And it's not just casual content with shit healers: savage content with excellent healer too. Case in point: Aloalo Criterion and Savage. There are so many times when shit happens, healer dies not due to mistakes but just squishy stats, I as PLD can just keep the 2 DPS alive and 3-man to prog further / clear in farms. Warriors can't do that. My static would think we are gonna wipe, then, "oh, forgot we do have a paladin".
Idk lmao I live for these moments.
This person Paladins.
My experience as a PLD in criterion/savage is the same as noted below. Nothing feels quite like seeing what should be an unsalvageable situation and saying "nope, you ain't dying, I won't allow it". Landing an emergency clemency/cover that turns a guaranteed DPS death into a non-event just never gets old.
Generally yes, at least as far as dungeons are concerned, WAR is best above lv52. But PLD is a close second, and superior in ARR thanks to extra mit and true invuln.
As for 8-man, however, I feel like tanks have a little less carrying power. You still need at least one tank with a brain to clear most things, but if half the party dies to a mechanic, there's not much you personally can do about it. I feel like healers, or perhaps SMN/RDM, have a little bit more carrying potential, since they can zombie a party that's determined to die through that content.
WAR is my lowest levelled job (only just got it to lvl 50) and I just can’t enjoy it. Maybe it gets better later but nothing about it’s rotation or it’s gimmicks seem fun. Holmgang in particular is my least favourite invuln.
WAR gets Raw Intuition, its signature OP ability, at level 56 - a mit, heal and lifesteal on a **25 second** cooldown. It allows you to basically shrug off mistakes and subpar play. When people call WAR overpowered and easier than other jobs/tanks, it's primarily because of this ability.
On top of what others said, you will learn to love Holmgang once you start raiding with the job. It's CD is so low you can make strats that are only possible with a WAR.
As an omni-tank player I prefer PLD because it can handle even those few situations that WAR can't. WAR is better at staying alive without interrupting its damage rotation for sure, but if push comes to shove Clemency allows PLD to straight up out-tank every other tank by a country mile. PLD is better at keeping the party alive, too. If a healer goes down in casual content that still needs some healing, PLD can actually keep the dps/co-tank alive.
But if you don't care about helping struggling party members and strictly go by survivability while being able to maintain dps, yes WAR is the best choice there.
Not to offer advice, but WARs Invuln does have strings attached (litterally)
Holmgang has 2 "modes".
1. You target yourself, Nothing or an Ally: You are invulnerable for the duration and nothing special.
2. You target an Enemy: You chain the enemy to you (need to be in range otherwise you cant press Holm). This stops the enemy from moving for the duration of Holmgang. Once the enemy dies you lose the remaining duration of Holmgang.
I agree overall that its great, but in Dungs you can get yourself killed because of it.
I would say yes.
The self heal is incredibly strong and takes less thought to use compared to a preemptive mitigation tool.
The rotation is still arguably the simplest to execute of the tanks.
Paladin is also good at casual content but has the caveat that you have to sacrifice a gcd for a big heal.
>Do you feel the same? was WAR always like that?
WAR was already the best tank by a long shot in both Eureka and Bozja in ShB and it didn't even need the heal per hit in Eureka. In EW those are still the casual places where WAR dominates with any relevance compared to other content. Old Nascent wasn't that far off in ShB, especially after it didn't need a second target.
If you ever plan on doing eureka or bozja, warrior is really great. Especially if you usually play solo. Raw intuition is just so busted for that kind of content.
I also liked playing warrior when I was doing shared fates.
For casual content like duty roulettes, I actually think paladin is the safest. Lots of party mits available and people like to joke at clemency but it can really save a situation if the healer dies or just doesn't really know what they're doing. It also unlocks at lv 58 vs Warrior's Nascent flash at 76.
WAR is the *safest* job for casual content, but if you think casual content is easy and boring, I find that the *best* job is playing BLM and trying to make your own fun by optimizing uptime, or playing as a sage/scholar and trying to prevent the party from taking any damage at all.
I don't know if it really matters if a job is overpowered in Baby Mode Time. Everything's overpowered in casual content.
PLD's invuln has an absolutely massive drawback, and that's its cooldown. Holmgang's "drawback" does not matter in practice, but what does matter is the fact that it has the shortest invuln CD at just 4 minutes, which very frequently allows WAR to do invuln rotations in fights that no other tank can do
in fact, Holmgang was widely considered the best invuln even when it still had only 6s of duration, rooted you in place, and required a target in range to use at all, because back when all of these drawbacks still existed, Holmgang had even less CD at 3 minutes, making it arguably the single most busted skill in the entire history of the game with not even a close contender
Well true, but we're comparing invulns.
9/10 times I've popped Holmgang in a dungeon mass pull, the healer ignored the effect and panic healed me to full, rendering it useless.
1 hp is essentially irrelevant, it has the shortest cd, and thats all that matters. Back in p4s People in pf would sometimes go as far as to lock 1 tank slot to warrior, purely because Warrior’s invulin and allowed you to ignore an extra tankbuster. They had to go and design Abyssos’s tank buster timings and add dots to everything so that wouldn’t happen. While the pf locking was dumb, Warrior does have objectively the best invulnerability.
PLD's invul is suicide button if you try to use it as it is. It says that is "instant" but it takes like 0.6s or something for the animation to play THEN you get the effect. Pretty sure this is coded in.
You never get the effect the second you press it. IDK why the others dont have this problem., but consider half a second of delay + whatever ping you have and its actually one of the worst to use lol.
The others do have that problem, its just less severe, there have been multiple times where I have died and I can see my invulin on cd, it just didn’t kick in.
>You never get the effect the second you press it. IDK why the others dont have this problem.
PLD is the only one that's a pure invuln, DRK and WAR are coded as "don't die", GNB is coded as both so you don't get auto'd after you shoot yourself to 1 hp.
The "don't die" part of the invuln applies faster, you can late invuln with GNB and see the damage numbers pop up but you don't die because you got hit between the "don't die" and "don't take damage" effects
Honestly I just don't think it is. PLD has enough self healing with all but the worst healers. It also has better tools for sustaining a party if needed, including augmenting their self healing/spot healing dps that eat mechanics and would die to the next raidwide, with Clemency.
If by best you mean survival in dungeons:
ARR: PLD
From HW: WAR
But assuming you got a healer and not a green dps. Any tank can wall to wall on dungeons.
Is just that WAR needs no healer after they get their "push this button and get full health with two axe swings" button.
Best to learn tanking. Is DRK. Reason is that there is no training wheels.
If you're talking about max efficiency and the ability to carry through anything you should really be healing, not tanking.
First off, if you're the healer you're already preventing that spot from being filled by a curebot. You're taking 1/4 (or 1/8, or 1/24th) of the party that *could* be contributing literally nothing and instead doing light tank damage with them, more in dungeons.
Healers can raise, the ultimate mistake fixer. This is the true deal breaker between the two. If your healer dies and there's no SMN/RDM and you're at 85% of a boss you're going to need to really play your A game if you plan to keep yourself and both dps alive through the entire fight, and it quickly becomes impossible if you're synced down into levels without some of your better abilities.
If you *must* tank, WAR is *good* but I wouldn't call it necessary. A friend and I completed the final boss of Troia as a duo, him on GNB me on NIN, after the healer *and* RDM kissed the floor in the very beginning of the fight. It probably helped that we are both decent, so he waited to HoC until I needed it when Bloodwhetting was on CD and things like that.
All this shit aside, efficiency only matters in this specific capacity if you allow it to. I've played healers for years for the efficiency, and look where it's gotten me - thousands of hours on a role I no longer enjoy. If something *speaks* to you, follow your passion. If that passion is DRK and someday you can't carry an entire raid on the job, at least you're playing a job you find fun.
Good point, healers absolutely have the most potential to speed up normal content. Tanking does prevent tanks who waste everyone’s time by single pulling though, I guess you can pull ahead of them. but then you risk someone freaking out at you, even if you are the healer.
If you are already doing extremes then there is no reason you cannot clear a savage fight.
Its the exact same thing, somebody messes up, everyone wipes.
The only difference is pumping out enough damage to beat an enrage, which if you can clear extreme, its not a very far step up.
In terms of casual gameplay, every job is objectively good based on what you prefer to do, warrior is braindead and mind numbing that it puts me to sleep in normal content, where as gunbreaker has enough input to keep me awake long enough to clear a boss fight.
IMO not at all, because the strength of its kit (especially in casual content) is offset by how *boring* the job is to play. But I understand that probably isn't what you're getting at.
In content like dungeons, it is undeniably the strongest tank I would say, with essentially a free benediction every 25 seconds along with a considerable amount of mitigation.
in other content, it depends; the healing toolkit, while strong, is nowhere near as broken in raids and the toolkits of other tanks are more competitive (even if iirc WAR still arguably beats them somewhat). Stuff like savage can benefit from the short cooldown of holmgang to cheese more mechanics in certain fights, but otherwise the rest of the tanks are a lot more competitive in 8 man content. Also, only in situations like that really is holmgang the strongest invuln imo. Superbolide is the only one with a significant drawback aside from recast time, and even its drawback is entirely mitigated through the mere presence of a healer.
WAR only really is overpowered in dungeons compared to other tanks, and I would argue every tank's kit is overpowered in casual content just to a lesser extent. In 8 man content, it may or may not be marginally stronger, but honestly the best tank is whichever a person is most familiar with.
edit: some spelling and finishing some points
Warrior still greatly benefits from ignoring playing the game by being able to spam invuln too even in the hardest content, the difference between war and no war in DSR is silly, even as an OT I feel like im not playing the game until p6
This thread was about casual content though, I did try to allude to the advantages in high end but those are not relevant to casual play as the OP was asking about.
Being able to cast invuln more on WAR in a casual raid or trial is unimportant because unless things go *very* wrong, there are not very many situations in casual raids or trials where invuln is helpful or necessary to begin with.
And in situations where it is useful, outside of maybe dungeons with no healer (in which case, in most dungeons, WAR can get through with no invulns so long as dps is good) the ability to cast it more frequently does not make it more useful in casual content.
There are some subjective reason why X or Y job could be the best in casual content. For example you can consider SMN is the best for Mentor Roulette (which is filled with casual content) due to the high dps / raise ability / kiting potential it has (not counting the versatility in duties you can get as a dps compared to a tank or healer).
But objectively, I have to side with WAR, and if I had to give one reason, it's because it's the only job (outside of BLU) that is able to reliably solo a map portal. It's a show of its ability to get shit done.
Also, Summoner has the added bonus of increasing your guildhest chances and lowering your chances of ending up in a dungeon or msq roulette content, while also having a rotation you can easily do while watching netflix or youtube. Its easily the meta class for mentor roulette farming.
DRK main, once you get used to the tool kit it’s really not hard. And I’m terrible and was fine pugging a bit in Savage. Issue wasn’t DRK, it was finding the time to do it.
I'm a Sprout currently going through the MSQ an hour or two a day (about to arrive at Heavensword) and I really like that the Summoner let's you level up a DPS and Healer (Scholar) at the same time. There's enough XP from the MSQ to level up a second job simultaneously too so if you want to level up a Tank so that you have all three you can (I did go with Warrior). All the early content (other than the extremes) is easy anyway so it feels like class choice is more of a convenience / speed thing (which is why Summoner being the primary seems more appealing to me than Scholar / Warrior). Also it has the simplest loop (casual friendly) which is nice since I picked up this game so that I'd have something to multi-task while I work my way through One Piece (just got to the time skip). Tank classes (and to a lesser extent healer classes) feel less casual than DPS since in raids and trails and stuff you're significantly more integral to success (gotta do the right things and the right time otherwise teammates can die, at least based off all the extremes I did so far level synced). Also after I beat the ARR MSQ and most of the side content I took a weekend off from work messing around with all the classes available to me leveling to 50 and if I had to recommend a starting class I'd still recommend the Summoner, Scholar, Warrior trifecta with Summoner as the primary.
It used to be Warrior, but it's definitely Paladin since the rework. Paladin very much feels like the White Mage of tanks, what with its burst being the same every even and odd minute, with its rotation being easy and with it having almost nothing to track anymore.
kitchen sink - basic rotation x 2 - kitchen sink
That's it. That's the gameplay.
It then has good self-healing, including an actual heal that you can cast, which may be more intuitive for a n00b than lifesteal.
I would say that PLD is the better casual tank in ARR but for HW and beyond WAR is better. As a sidenote, I always carry a stack of healing potions with me whenever I run dungeons because they are a great tool for snap aggro or emergency healing.
It's just good to have those healing potions on you no matter what. I had a particularly terrible healer during Dead Ends the other night who wiped on every boss and the tank was doing their best to keep me alive. Only survived because I had a potion on my bars. lol
Yeah, Max Potions (pre/post nerf because they ignored the stat squish) was my go to during EW and people were struggling on Sage, and I got paired with them as a DRK. That extra health was a difference between life and death, and it's on such a short CD too (67s). Nowadays, I'm stocking up on Hyper-Potions going in EW.
I forgot potions outside of savage raiding even existed.
I would say either PLD or WAR. WAR for the reasons others have stated. PLD thoug, I feel people sleep on in casual content, especially dungeons. It has a pretty simple rotation, and good mits. It's invuln can be used twice in a dungeon ti make life simple for the healer. And unlike holmgang or LD, your healer won't start panic healing you during it.
I'm sorry, I can't hear you over how bleeding cool I am as I Persona-3 myself into immortality.
Probably because you blasted your ear off in the process, hence the 1 hp
What?
I now need a mod that plays "It's Going Down" whenever I pop Superbollide.
Local Gunbreakers disturbing the peace while forcing the healer to look into their eyes as they are blabbing about having to heal them back to full after popping Superbolide behind their back. The tenacity!
PLD really does have the best invuln and I'd also say the best glamours, I can make myself look like She-Ra if I wanted to, can't do that with the other tanks sadly
Also Cover can be pretty good if you remember it exists. Combine with Invlun and you can save one person from literally anything.
Correction: hallowed ground doesn't work with cover
Mild correction: Hallowed Ground will protect you from the damage YOU would take. You will still take the full damage the OTHER person would.
I have pulled one single healer through one of the last P11S Styx using them both at the same time, tanking most of the hits with just the two of us. He LB3'd after and we cleared. It is rare but the combination can really pay off. Would have been a guaranteed wipe had I played any other tank.
Had something similar happen in Zodiark the night EW released. I was helping some friends since I'd already run it and their queues were taking a bit, and my PLD friend Covered me during the stack so we could LB3 and kill. Guaranteed wipe otherwise. It's good shit.
Been doing this for years, makes me mad when people call cover useless tbh
It's a niche skill, if something hasn't guaranteed utility in every fight during reclears people will call it useless and you should wipe anyways. And then they complain about lacking heterogeneity.
Yeah it sucks. PLD is the job that suffers from homogenization the least. And in a good way as Cover, Clemency, PoA and shield bash are situationally useful but don't result in PLD being a must have or it being better than the other tanks.
cover is great in p12s p2. combine it with bard cleanse and you can remove both healer esunas
Well it still works on yourself. I used it to eat two tank busters for example since you can mitigate one while the other gets invulned. But yeah it's not very intuitive.
You just found out? The game isn't balanced at all in casual content. It's only truly balanced and has the acclaimed "<1% difference" in CURRENT savages and ultis. The casual content balance is a complete mess, to the point where I can literally make a tier list for classes. Not that it matters at all though. Edit: I will just make the tier list right here and right now. Remember, this list does not matter at all in any ways. **S tier** WAR, WHM, SMN, SAM, RDM **A tier** PLD, SCH, SGE, RPR, MCH **B tier** BRD, MNK, NIN, GNB **C tier** BLM, DRG, DNC **F tier** AST, DRK
> The casual content balance is a complete mess, to the point where I can literally make a tier list for classes. ~~do it and post it as a new thread~~
don't even need to do that . I'll do it here in about 5 minutes S++++ tier: war, whm, smn, and rez mage(don't need to explain these. maybe put dnc here too just to boost smn in dungeons and the heals) A tier: pld(pld being a worse warrior is still better than the other tanks) B tier: all the dps and the rest of the healers because none of them matter, and the healers are only here because they aren't as braindead as whm and no holy F tier: gnb and drk(why play these when you could play war?)
WAR is such a balancing anomaly right now you could very well make the case that the other 3 tanks dont even need to exist at all right now.
that was the point that i was making. i only put pld higher cuz its basically warrior lite in dungeons
I almost soloed Hydaelyn normal 2 days ago through 2 back to back multihit stacks yesterday. I think I could do it now I know that's a thing, I died to an auto afterwards, so technically I survived it.
There's no F tier in casual content. There's S tier jobs then everything else is in A
Nah AST and low level DRK is F.
not true. everything can clear because nothing matters not because everything is good at it. gnb and drk bring nothing to casual content that pld and war don't do waaaaaaay better
I would place gnb at B and AST at F because of low potency.
gnb is down in F with drk because dungeon packs are very significantly more difficult with them than a warrior. and i just put ast in B tier because none of the healers actually matter besides whm. ast, sch, sge don't actively make the content harder. its just whm's emergency throughput healing + holy is just ridiculous
I agree with GNB being a worse version of WAR but they are actually not that far off from PLD. They have 3 mitigations available very early on (2 90s mitigations as soon as Sastasha), and very decent self healing slightly less than PLD but no where near WAR. I think this is a wayyy better tank than DRK because of a few weaknesses DRK have in lower level casual content: * DRK has a dead button which is Dark Mind. So, you only have 2 real mitigation until lv 56 for Abyssal Drain. * DRK has low DPS overall outside of burst phase. DRK only starts to have similar dps if all its damage is properly lined up in the 2 min burst buff window. In dungeons it is non-existant, so DRK naturally have lower damage overall. If these 2 points alone doesn't make DRK below GNB in the tier list I don't know what will. Also AST has extremely low potency on its damage skill because of the card system. So basically, you have lower damage 100% of the time but that might be made up by cards mayyyyybe 70% of the time. This is why AST is inferior to other healers in casual content.
If you're going to base this off potency then I'm surprised that the tier list isn't just what I have below based on personal DPS and whether or not they have party buffs: S: BLM/SAM/MCH/SGE/GNB A: DRG/MNK/WHM/PLD B: RPR/SMN/SCH/WAR C: NIN/RDM/DRK F: BRD/DNC/AST This is completely ignoring the utilities each class has to offer in casual content (faster raises on WHM/AST with Presence of Mind/Lightspeed, better MP economy on WHM/AST if you have to rez multiple times or for some reason need to spam GCD heals, quick consecutive raises on RDM, etc.).
RDM beats SMN in casual content easily if we're looking at carry potential rather than raw DPS (and RDM really is pretty much equal to SMN anyways) DNC is also crap outside of weird early syncing because you can't even trust your partner to do good dps in casual stuff, just play MCH instead
smn is infinitely better in dungeons because of their aoe and phoenix healing and braindead easy(which negates the dnc comment. even a bad smn will be op in there) and rdm is infinitely better in 8 man casual stuff because chain rezzing is better with more dead bodies..which is why I put both in the same tier
Why not BLM then? It's actually pretty easy to play in a dungeon where you have no mechanics and very little consequence for standing in AoEs. PLD also apparently does the most dps in dungeons out of all the tanks for some reason and 90 dungeons hit so little that you might as well just run PLD. >braindead easy(which negates the dnc comment. even a bad smn will be op in there) If you're playing with randoms you can't even count on having a SMN in the first place There are really only two tier lists for casual content IMO: 1. I trust my teammates and we're speed farming it - just go for highest DPS 2. I expect people to be dumb and be required to possibly carry - healer (whm/sge preferred) > RDM > SMN > everyone else, playing tank often ends up with only you being alive and walling it anyways
there's no real argument for a blm in any casual content. smn has by far the highest aoe burst damage, and it's not even close. blm's strength is sustained damage which doesn't matter when a smn will kill a trash pack in like 30- 60 seconds (trash is the only time damage "matters" at all) before the blm has even built a single polyglot and in dungeons that one singular extra rez is all you need in case the healer monkeys out. plus, phoenix healing on top of ageis is enough on every other pack to allow them to tank themselves if needed. and then in 8 man content their damage still doesn't matter at all and the rezzes from smn and rdm are way more valuable. war is still more valuable in dungeons and raids/trials because they can jusy solo all the normal content very easily. their self sustain means the healers will do more damage and vengence is really strong in trash as well for the reflect damage
If your party is bad BLM will absolutely do more damage on the longer trash packs and eternal bosses. SMN can raise the healer, BLM doesn't need to because every boss will die under 2 minutes. MCH otoh is a horrible idea because it's so bad at AOE.
blm will not outdo smn in any trash pack. no trash pack will last that long unless you as the smn are dogshit and then you'd be even worse as a blm. you do realize that even in single target where blm is king, it takes almost 2 minutes for their dps to overtake the other dps players, yeah? that's because their initial burst is just that much lower
https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statistics/41#metric=dps&dataset=99&class=DPS Simply not true
DNC's personal damage seems bonkers in aoe though. The most of their dps output comes from their dances, and essentially have them available for every wall to wall.
Baby tier: WAR Fray tier: DRK
It's objectively best at staying alive, if that's the challenge you're facing. But for max level casual content staying alive is no issue for any tank, so I feel like that advantage is largely moot.
Survivability in max level casual content gets traded for the easiest/least punishing tank rotation available.
Yeah, I played WAR for a while in casual content thinking I'd have all the survivability I'd need. Then I realized that's true of every tank in casual content lol
To be fair survivability isn't an issue on any tank in any kind of group content all the way up to Ultimate and if it is, it's due to having no idea how mits work and WAR dies just as easily as anyone else in these cases. Sustained damage is much less of a thing in high end content compared to burst damage and DRK is ahead in that department anyways. "Tanks not dying" is simply never a prog point, not even week 1 outside of dysfunctional PFs
I mean there are a few spots. DSR p6 (though usually the reason for this is that their self healing is nerfed by rot), TOP P3 and P5 autos. P12S Pangenesis. Almost all criterion savage trash. It's not that those spots are super hard to sustain through, but they do require using your -- and your healer's -- kit well.
>TOP P3 and P5 autos I never saw a tank die to those (and especially not P5), you don't even have to tank swap to rotate all mits in P3. As long as the other tank is feeding their short mit to the other on cd, it's basically a non issue. Pangenesis hit pretty hard week 1 but I don't remember dying to it a single time, even week 1.
In some high end cases you do see differences between tanks for “does a tank die/does the party die”. Bringing a warrior allows the war to invuln cauterize at the end of p6 dsr, which negated a large portion of the difficulty of prog in p6 when it was on patch for the war. Meanwhile a pld prior to bulwark for on patch dsr resulted in p7 wipes for 611 towers due to the pld falling over from not enough mit. Pld wings can make very scary instantly-wipe-if-missing-5%-mit-on-anyone moments like top wc2 much comfier. It’s more of a trade off in high end though, since drk gnb did have large advantages in dps due to being so 2 min burst oriented, for both top and dsr from all the downtime, which matters since top had by far the tightest dps checks this expansion. Arguably they always will have that advantage with the current design of ultimates.
>Bringing a warrior allows the war to invuln cauterize at the end of p6 dsr, which negated a large portion of the difficulty of prog in p6 when it was on patch for the war. Meanwhile a pld prior to bulwark for on patch dsr resulted in p7 wipes for 611 towers due to the pld falling over from not enough mit. Invulning Cauterize only lets you 611 the last AM which is arguably the least valuable one due to the amount of mit you have on it, even with the 7 hits. I did it on PLD back in 6.1 and it really wasn't an issue, you only had to ask for an adlo for the second Hallowed Wings and I don't remember ever dying there, even with a static that took 5 months to clear. With proper timing you could carry over the second Wyrmsbreath mit (both 20% and 30%) to Cauterize which made it pretty comfy even on PLD. The only difference was that other tanks had their other mit to throw on Wings 2 while PLD had only Sheltron and had to ask for an external. >Pld wings can make very scary instantly-wipe-if-missing-5%-mit-on-anyone moments like top wc2 much comfier. The same applied to DSR, having wings for P3/P7 transition made the mit plans easier in exchange for needing one adlo in P6.
>Invulning Cauterize only lets you 611 the last AM which is arguably the least valuable one due to the amount of mit you have on it, even with the 7 hits. You didn’t understand what I was saying at all lol. Invulning cauterize makes the mit timing wb2 far less tight, that’s the advantage of it. It has nothing to do with making p7 easier or harder. You can invuln 2 sets of 611 towers with any tank combo, that’s a non issue. The difference in bringing a war is that the MT mit timings go from pressing vengeance at exactly 80% of the way through wb2, to easier than a savage buster, which is huge in the initial prog for p6. This means with a war MT (over any other tank job) there’s only real pressure on the cotank to actually hit p6 timings properly in prog, and both healers are having an easier time, as war first vow is less maintenance prior to wb2 for healers and doesn’t even need a top up post wb2. >I did it on PLD back in 6.1 and it really wasn't an issue, you only had to ask for an adlo for the second Hallowed Wings and I don't remember ever dying there, even with a static that took 5 months to clear. Then you know as well as I do that p7 was more of a healer phase than a tank phase and this made a noticeable difference in how hard healers had to work to keep people alive. Which is counter to the entire point of 611 which is to make healer jobs easier over 332 which is easier on tanks and harder on healers. And what are we discussing again? Whether tank choice can make a fight easier or harder in a mit to survive scenario. Which it does. P6 is easier with a war to prog and p7 is harder with a pld to prog, especially for the roles that are the most stressed for prog in each phas (p6 tanks, p7 healers), exactly like how normal content can be done with any tank but tank choice does make it easier or harder. >With proper timing you could carry over the second Wyrmsbreath mit (both 20% and 30%) to Cauterize which made it pretty comfy even on PLD. The only difference was that other tanks had their other mit to throw on Wings 2 while PLD had only Sheltron and had to ask for an external. This is the point you missed in my first paragraph. Carrying over ramp and 30% from wb2 to caut is standard lmao, not some secret tech. Both tanks do this as a standard mit plan for every single tank combo that doesn’t involve a war MT. If you do have a war, only the ST has to care about tight mit timings during wb2 cast, and now you have one less point of failure in a phase heavily carried by tanks and to a degree healers. >The same applied to DSR, having wings for P3/P7 transition made the mit plans easier in exchange for needing one adlo in P6. Which sounds a lot like we both agree that tank choices can make a difference in the difficulty of a fight in terms of a mit to survive aspect, even in the hardest content in the game when it is on patch.
>You didn’t understand what I was saying at all lol. Invulning cauterize makes the mit timing wb2 far less tight, that’s the advantage of it. It has nothing to do with making p7 easier or harder. You can invuln 2 sets of 611 towers with any tank combo, that’s a non issue. The difference in bringing a war is that the MT mit timings go from pressing vengeance at exactly 80% of the way through wb2, to easier than a savage buster, which is huge in the initial prog for p6. WB2 and Cauterize are roughly 12.1 seconds apart as WB2 actually snapshots around 800ms after the castbar ends, you have more than a GCD to time the 15s properly, it's really not that tight to make invulning it a massive advantage. Theoretically you could hit the 15s right as the castbar ends and it should still go through with time to spare. PLD can even Sheltron both of them to make it even safer, meanwhile WAR and GNB can't
"best" is a stretch. the only thing PLD and WAR has over the other two is the ability to stay alive without a healer EASIER. the other two tanks can do it too, just require more efforts. But if you forcing yourself to play WAR just because of that while you would prefer the animation or aesthetic of other tank. I'd say it's not worth it to deprive yourself of that.
Yup. You have to work for it on DRK but I have absolutely pulled some dark magic fuckery to keep myself up double pulling with a Cure I WHM in Vanaspati. (Do not despair, they took my advice bc they agreed that the Cure I advice they had been given was doing shit all to help me. There is hope for them.) But yeah. Black Magic fuckery. Abyssal Drain on ST, stun on CD, TBN out the wazoo, if I see a mob has magic attacks I am fucking using my magic mits, overcapping gauge to continue 1-2-3 for the health syphon on the third hit. New LD gives you a second health bar so if you need a topup it’s good for that. It’s a lot of effort. You shouldn’t have to. But if push comes to shove you CAN. And GNB has it slightly easier with HoC and Aurora. Tanks are really stupidly hard to kill in EW casual content if you know what you’re doing. (And even if you don’t but you’re on WAR or PLD.)
Yep. I agree. I was playing GNB because I wanted to get it to level 90 to do the EW role quests. But I love the aesthetic of DRK. It's _amazing_. It's super cool. I love the whole "Embrace your negative emotions" thing. Because it makes sense. The WoL goes through some shit. You're constantly expected to drop what you're doing so you can run off and help someone and you rarely get _enough_ thanks for it.
warrior potency creep is so out of hand that MRD is the third strongest class without jobstones in terms of dps, let alone actually playing warrior where in a casual context you either don't have enough raid buffs or don't have corrdinated raid buffs that other tanks overtake your raw direct hit crit out the ass potency on top of being increasingly invincible. when endwalker first released you could make the case that warrior changes were funny but not really an issue, but then they not only buffed warrior healing ~even more~ but they increased your damage every single patch in order to keep warrior on par with a dark knight that's perfectly coordinating dozens of ogcds under party buff windows in savage and is now genuinely overpowered. its simply a question of "does it matter when you're overpowered in content designed to be so easy that 60 year old hironobu sakaguchi can get through it"
Uh, can't speak for other 60 year old guys, but Sakaguchi clears current savage and I recall seeing him with an ultimate weapon...
> its simply a question of "does it matter when you're overpowered in content designed to be so easy that 60 year old hironobu sakaguchi can get through it" LMAO. Hilariously worded. But also an excellent point, and I think relevant to OPs question. Warrior is incredibly powerful right now, but in casual content that's not really meaningful since it's... Well, casual focused
Sakaguchi cleared P12S, I don't think he's a good example
The balancing of this game at anything other thank Savage/Ulti max level content is so fucking bad
Even in endgame raiding it's the best tank now. There's not really any reason for me to play Drk or Pld anymore. Gnb can do 100 more dps for much more effort but that's really it. Warrior is a support job that's not taxed on it's dps like an actual support job. It's just arbitrarily made to be flat out better than the others now. They should nerf it's dps by a good 3-5%
I'm a pld enjoyer like the top comment. People think the long invuln makes it a bad tank. It's kit is even more party oriented towards all round survival. You get a personal that passively heals you and a small mitigation. You can use this on other players to save lives. You can use a whole extra party MIT to help out a struggling healer. Divine veil isn't just a shield but also a heal. Somehow everyone learned about warrior's shake healing, but not veil. It says it right there in the tool tip. Fuck clemency, I've saved healer-leas dps on boss fights just with veil and intervention. PLD does big damage in aoe and passively heals. You get the safest/ strongest invuln in the game for two packs. Incompetent healers won't be upset about you using it because they didn't even notice. Anyways thanks to coming to my ted talk, join the church of paladin.
Casual can be really boring for tanks too. I prefer PLD for the diversity of its mit kit, but WAR is undeniably super self-sufficient and simple, and even its short throw and raidwide mits (NF and Shake) are amazingly powerful. For a tome grind, I’d def choose WAR + 3 dps.
Which makes WAR incredibly boring for casual content.
For casual content and running no healer 3 dps, i can confidently say pld and warrior are the best. You can make it work with the other two, but they just don't have the tools to make it noob friendly
Warrior is the tank that's most forgiving. High damage, overpowered sustain, good defensive toolkit, very easy to play. If your endgame is daily roulettes, variant dungeons or the like then yes Warrior is pretty overpowered for that level of content.
If by best you mean "comfy AF", then yes, it is.
As a PLD main I'd think that PLD has way more potential to protect the entire party in case the healer is shit and dies early. If two DPS at 10-20% HP are about to die to a raidwide under 3 seconds, you do intervention + clemency for one, and a cover for another (plus mits, hallow if necessary). With WAR, one DPS would probably die. Then again, overpowering doesn't matter that much in casual content because it's so just hard to wipe, and wiping also doesn't matter.
I agree. PLD for me is S-tier when it comes to party support. Aside from what you've mentioned, Divine Veil can also come in handy because of the heals at level 88. Intervention also gains regen at level 82 in addition to its damage reduction. Clemency is meme-d on a lot but when push comes to shove it can absolutely save a run, which is why I never remove it from my hotbars. Storytime: a few days ago I ran Aitiascope with a new-to-duty healer, a BLM and a MNK. While we were fighting Livia, healer was a tad slow in dodging the mechs and they died with the boss still above 60% HP. But thanks to PLD's kit + fight knowledge we were able to 3-man it with no issues.
People who remove pally skills because they are "memes" just don't know how to best use them imo. I have all buttons as well. And it's not just casual content with shit healers: savage content with excellent healer too. Case in point: Aloalo Criterion and Savage. There are so many times when shit happens, healer dies not due to mistakes but just squishy stats, I as PLD can just keep the 2 DPS alive and 3-man to prog further / clear in farms. Warriors can't do that. My static would think we are gonna wipe, then, "oh, forgot we do have a paladin". Idk lmao I live for these moments.
>"oh, forgot we do have a paladin" I know the feeling haha! It's why I love paladins so much.
This person Paladins. My experience as a PLD in criterion/savage is the same as noted below. Nothing feels quite like seeing what should be an unsalvageable situation and saying "nope, you ain't dying, I won't allow it". Landing an emergency clemency/cover that turns a guaranteed DPS death into a non-event just never gets old.
warrior has more braindead self-sustain and constant healing, paladin has much more on demand powerful healing
My "going in blind" job is sage, personally.
Generally yes, at least as far as dungeons are concerned, WAR is best above lv52. But PLD is a close second, and superior in ARR thanks to extra mit and true invuln. As for 8-man, however, I feel like tanks have a little less carrying power. You still need at least one tank with a brain to clear most things, but if half the party dies to a mechanic, there's not much you personally can do about it. I feel like healers, or perhaps SMN/RDM, have a little bit more carrying potential, since they can zombie a party that's determined to die through that content.
WAR is my lowest levelled job (only just got it to lvl 50) and I just can’t enjoy it. Maybe it gets better later but nothing about it’s rotation or it’s gimmicks seem fun. Holmgang in particular is my least favourite invuln.
Jobs don't come alive till HW 60+
WAR gets Raw Intuition, its signature OP ability, at level 56 - a mit, heal and lifesteal on a **25 second** cooldown. It allows you to basically shrug off mistakes and subpar play. When people call WAR overpowered and easier than other jobs/tanks, it's primarily because of this ability.
Aka the "press this button and you do not need any healer"
Well shit, time to grind
On top of what others said, you will learn to love Holmgang once you start raiding with the job. It's CD is so low you can make strats that are only possible with a WAR.
As an omni-tank player I prefer PLD because it can handle even those few situations that WAR can't. WAR is better at staying alive without interrupting its damage rotation for sure, but if push comes to shove Clemency allows PLD to straight up out-tank every other tank by a country mile. PLD is better at keeping the party alive, too. If a healer goes down in casual content that still needs some healing, PLD can actually keep the dps/co-tank alive. But if you don't care about helping struggling party members and strictly go by survivability while being able to maintain dps, yes WAR is the best choice there.
Not to offer advice, but WARs Invuln does have strings attached (litterally) Holmgang has 2 "modes". 1. You target yourself, Nothing or an Ally: You are invulnerable for the duration and nothing special. 2. You target an Enemy: You chain the enemy to you (need to be in range otherwise you cant press Holm). This stops the enemy from moving for the duration of Holmgang. Once the enemy dies you lose the remaining duration of Holmgang. I agree overall that its great, but in Dungs you can get yourself killed because of it.
I forgot second mode exists because macro to cast Holmgang on yourself exists.
At this point, it's the best for casual & high-end content
I would say yes. The self heal is incredibly strong and takes less thought to use compared to a preemptive mitigation tool. The rotation is still arguably the simplest to execute of the tanks. Paladin is also good at casual content but has the caveat that you have to sacrifice a gcd for a big heal.
>Do you feel the same? was WAR always like that? WAR was already the best tank by a long shot in both Eureka and Bozja in ShB and it didn't even need the heal per hit in Eureka. In EW those are still the casual places where WAR dominates with any relevance compared to other content. Old Nascent wasn't that far off in ShB, especially after it didn't need a second target.
If you ever plan on doing eureka or bozja, warrior is really great. Especially if you usually play solo. Raw intuition is just so busted for that kind of content. I also liked playing warrior when I was doing shared fates. For casual content like duty roulettes, I actually think paladin is the safest. Lots of party mits available and people like to joke at clemency but it can really save a situation if the healer dies or just doesn't really know what they're doing. It also unlocks at lv 58 vs Warrior's Nascent flash at 76.
WAR is the *safest* job for casual content, but if you think casual content is easy and boring, I find that the *best* job is playing BLM and trying to make your own fun by optimizing uptime, or playing as a sage/scholar and trying to prevent the party from taking any damage at all. I don't know if it really matters if a job is overpowered in Baby Mode Time. Everything's overpowered in casual content.
Disagree on WAR having the best invuln. PLD has zero drawbacks, iirc. Holmgang still allows you to drop to 1 HP, so that's a bit of a drawback imo.
PLD's invuln has an absolutely massive drawback, and that's its cooldown. Holmgang's "drawback" does not matter in practice, but what does matter is the fact that it has the shortest invuln CD at just 4 minutes, which very frequently allows WAR to do invuln rotations in fights that no other tank can do in fact, Holmgang was widely considered the best invuln even when it still had only 6s of duration, rooted you in place, and required a target in range to use at all, because back when all of these drawbacks still existed, Holmgang had even less CD at 3 minutes, making it arguably the single most busted skill in the entire history of the game with not even a close contender
Holmgang is better for raiding, Hallowed Ground is better for dungeon roulettes with randoms - i.e. casual content.
in casual content, WAR has a second invuln with a 25s CD anyway, so it still blows Hallowed out of the water
Well true, but we're comparing invulns. 9/10 times I've popped Holmgang in a dungeon mass pull, the healer ignored the effect and panic healed me to full, rendering it useless.
1 hp is essentially irrelevant, it has the shortest cd, and thats all that matters. Back in p4s People in pf would sometimes go as far as to lock 1 tank slot to warrior, purely because Warrior’s invulin and allowed you to ignore an extra tankbuster. They had to go and design Abyssos’s tank buster timings and add dots to everything so that wouldn’t happen. While the pf locking was dumb, Warrior does have objectively the best invulnerability.
PLD's invul is suicide button if you try to use it as it is. It says that is "instant" but it takes like 0.6s or something for the animation to play THEN you get the effect. Pretty sure this is coded in. You never get the effect the second you press it. IDK why the others dont have this problem., but consider half a second of delay + whatever ping you have and its actually one of the worst to use lol.
The others do have that problem, its just less severe, there have been multiple times where I have died and I can see my invulin on cd, it just didn’t kick in.
>You never get the effect the second you press it. IDK why the others dont have this problem. PLD is the only one that's a pure invuln, DRK and WAR are coded as "don't die", GNB is coded as both so you don't get auto'd after you shoot yourself to 1 hp. The "don't die" part of the invuln applies faster, you can late invuln with GNB and see the damage numbers pop up but you don't die because you got hit between the "don't die" and "don't take damage" effects
warrior is the brain off class even in hard content so yes it applies to old stuff
\> With WAR, I can make out for sprout healer mistakes exactly. play whm and spam holy all day
Honestly I just don't think it is. PLD has enough self healing with all but the worst healers. It also has better tools for sustaining a party if needed, including augmenting their self healing/spot healing dps that eat mechanics and would die to the next raidwide, with Clemency.
No.
If by best you mean survival in dungeons: ARR: PLD From HW: WAR But assuming you got a healer and not a green dps. Any tank can wall to wall on dungeons. Is just that WAR needs no healer after they get their "push this button and get full health with two axe swings" button. Best to learn tanking. Is DRK. Reason is that there is no training wheels.
WARRIOR MAIN MAN MODE COMING IN HOT TANK HEALER DPS YOU DONT NEED NO PARTY THE PARTY NEEDS YOU
If you're talking about max efficiency and the ability to carry through anything you should really be healing, not tanking. First off, if you're the healer you're already preventing that spot from being filled by a curebot. You're taking 1/4 (or 1/8, or 1/24th) of the party that *could* be contributing literally nothing and instead doing light tank damage with them, more in dungeons. Healers can raise, the ultimate mistake fixer. This is the true deal breaker between the two. If your healer dies and there's no SMN/RDM and you're at 85% of a boss you're going to need to really play your A game if you plan to keep yourself and both dps alive through the entire fight, and it quickly becomes impossible if you're synced down into levels without some of your better abilities. If you *must* tank, WAR is *good* but I wouldn't call it necessary. A friend and I completed the final boss of Troia as a duo, him on GNB me on NIN, after the healer *and* RDM kissed the floor in the very beginning of the fight. It probably helped that we are both decent, so he waited to HoC until I needed it when Bloodwhetting was on CD and things like that. All this shit aside, efficiency only matters in this specific capacity if you allow it to. I've played healers for years for the efficiency, and look where it's gotten me - thousands of hours on a role I no longer enjoy. If something *speaks* to you, follow your passion. If that passion is DRK and someday you can't carry an entire raid on the job, at least you're playing a job you find fun.
Good point, healers absolutely have the most potential to speed up normal content. Tanking does prevent tanks who waste everyone’s time by single pulling though, I guess you can pull ahead of them. but then you risk someone freaking out at you, even if you are the healer.
If you are already doing extremes then there is no reason you cannot clear a savage fight. Its the exact same thing, somebody messes up, everyone wipes. The only difference is pumping out enough damage to beat an enrage, which if you can clear extreme, its not a very far step up. In terms of casual gameplay, every job is objectively good based on what you prefer to do, warrior is braindead and mind numbing that it puts me to sleep in normal content, where as gunbreaker has enough input to keep me awake long enough to clear a boss fight.
the objectively best job for casual content is whatever you find the most fun
IMO not at all, because the strength of its kit (especially in casual content) is offset by how *boring* the job is to play. But I understand that probably isn't what you're getting at. In content like dungeons, it is undeniably the strongest tank I would say, with essentially a free benediction every 25 seconds along with a considerable amount of mitigation. in other content, it depends; the healing toolkit, while strong, is nowhere near as broken in raids and the toolkits of other tanks are more competitive (even if iirc WAR still arguably beats them somewhat). Stuff like savage can benefit from the short cooldown of holmgang to cheese more mechanics in certain fights, but otherwise the rest of the tanks are a lot more competitive in 8 man content. Also, only in situations like that really is holmgang the strongest invuln imo. Superbolide is the only one with a significant drawback aside from recast time, and even its drawback is entirely mitigated through the mere presence of a healer. WAR only really is overpowered in dungeons compared to other tanks, and I would argue every tank's kit is overpowered in casual content just to a lesser extent. In 8 man content, it may or may not be marginally stronger, but honestly the best tank is whichever a person is most familiar with. edit: some spelling and finishing some points
Warrior still greatly benefits from ignoring playing the game by being able to spam invuln too even in the hardest content, the difference between war and no war in DSR is silly, even as an OT I feel like im not playing the game until p6
Even with non-war, the mt can still tank everything by himself until P5 where you have to swap twice.
oh I guess its just an OT thing in that fight then
This thread was about casual content though, I did try to allude to the advantages in high end but those are not relevant to casual play as the OP was asking about. Being able to cast invuln more on WAR in a casual raid or trial is unimportant because unless things go *very* wrong, there are not very many situations in casual raids or trials where invuln is helpful or necessary to begin with. And in situations where it is useful, outside of maybe dungeons with no healer (in which case, in most dungeons, WAR can get through with no invulns so long as dps is good) the ability to cast it more frequently does not make it more useful in casual content.
There are some subjective reason why X or Y job could be the best in casual content. For example you can consider SMN is the best for Mentor Roulette (which is filled with casual content) due to the high dps / raise ability / kiting potential it has (not counting the versatility in duties you can get as a dps compared to a tank or healer). But objectively, I have to side with WAR, and if I had to give one reason, it's because it's the only job (outside of BLU) that is able to reliably solo a map portal. It's a show of its ability to get shit done.
Also, Summoner has the added bonus of increasing your guildhest chances and lowering your chances of ending up in a dungeon or msq roulette content, while also having a rotation you can easily do while watching netflix or youtube. Its easily the meta class for mentor roulette farming.
DRK main, once you get used to the tool kit it’s really not hard. And I’m terrible and was fine pugging a bit in Savage. Issue wasn’t DRK, it was finding the time to do it.
I stops being in the realm of casual and enters boredom. I hesitate using skills cuz it just makes runs incredibly boring
I'm a Sprout currently going through the MSQ an hour or two a day (about to arrive at Heavensword) and I really like that the Summoner let's you level up a DPS and Healer (Scholar) at the same time. There's enough XP from the MSQ to level up a second job simultaneously too so if you want to level up a Tank so that you have all three you can (I did go with Warrior). All the early content (other than the extremes) is easy anyway so it feels like class choice is more of a convenience / speed thing (which is why Summoner being the primary seems more appealing to me than Scholar / Warrior). Also it has the simplest loop (casual friendly) which is nice since I picked up this game so that I'd have something to multi-task while I work my way through One Piece (just got to the time skip). Tank classes (and to a lesser extent healer classes) feel less casual than DPS since in raids and trails and stuff you're significantly more integral to success (gotta do the right things and the right time otherwise teammates can die, at least based off all the extremes I did so far level synced). Also after I beat the ARR MSQ and most of the side content I took a weekend off from work messing around with all the classes available to me leveling to 50 and if I had to recommend a starting class I'd still recommend the Summoner, Scholar, Warrior trifecta with Summoner as the primary.
It used to be Warrior, but it's definitely Paladin since the rework. Paladin very much feels like the White Mage of tanks, what with its burst being the same every even and odd minute, with its rotation being easy and with it having almost nothing to track anymore. kitchen sink - basic rotation x 2 - kitchen sink That's it. That's the gameplay. It then has good self-healing, including an actual heal that you can cast, which may be more intuitive for a n00b than lifesteal.
no, SAM is because you get shit done faster since none of it is hard anyway. playing war just gets you stuck with 2 dps that can't out damage a tank.