FFXIV Tank Comparison! Easy/Hard? Strong/Weak? Intense?

let's compare the four tanks of Final Fantasy 14. if you already know you want to main a tank then this might serve to help you choose or alternatively teach you what you don't want or maybe you just want to hear about the pros and cons of each tank combined with a bit of comedy in which case you have also come to the right place please keep in mind that this video may be slightly opinionated especially in their ratings shown for each job so if you feel that I missed something or that you disagree I would love to hear about it or about your favorite tank in the comments now then let's begin with the Paladin filling the classic sword and board tank style complete with a chance to block physical attacks for some extra damage reduction every now and then for the first many levels the Paladin feels a lot more like just the Gladiator than a paladin having absolutely no magic spells to speak of until Level 58 after which the magic Arsenal is gradually filled out the general playstyle of the Paladin starts simply by making the most of the fight or flight buff with the most complex part being learning the concept called late weaving to fit an extra gcd within the buff as you reach the higher levels the magic burst starts filling out more and more of the rotation as well as being more valuable for your potential damage capping out at taking up a third of your rotation making the pellet in the closest we have to both a mage tank and a ranged tank due to how rigid the pellet in rotation is the hardest part about learning it is mastering the ability to perform the sequence that matches your skill speed reliably and knowing what skills to skip in case of down times to make sure everything lines up properly again because of this extremely rigid playstyle the Paladin uniquely among the tanks has two significantly different rotations to work with depending on how much skill speed you have namely slow Paladin and fast Paladin with some extra details to each for particular very slow or fast skill speed amounts indeed uniquely for the Paladin you need to be acutely aware of your skill speed when playing to be able to perform optimally an interesting aspect in the Paladin's rotation is that due to fight-or-flight boosting the damage of intervene it is considered optimal to only use this attack during this buff while the magic burst is entirely ranged which means that your physical burst fight or flight is the time where you are the most mobile while the magic burst is when you can get away with staying far away from your targets if needed between these two bursts you have a downtime phase waiting for the next cooldown to get ready which takes up around a fourth of your rotation in terms of Defense the Paladin has access to some of the strongest options however most of them come with some sort of downside to them shelter intervention and cover rely on a resource that is only generated from Auto attacks so bosses with significant downtime can cause problems with these tools cover additionally uniquely allows the Paladin to force damage onto them however this comes at the cost that intervention is slightly weaker than all the equivalent options of the other tanks either you use the weakest off tank tool or the excessively strongest similarly Hallowed Ground is the ultimate invulnerability tool but it also has the longest cooldown Divine Veil is a very strong raid cooldown but it requires someone to cast a Healer on you to activate and generally passage of arms cannot be used without stopping your attack and movement however you can apply it for 5 seconds and the players immediately behind you by activating it for just a moment additionally while it isn't exactly a defensive cooldown clemency can be used as extra healing in a tight spot although in most cases as it is a damage loss to use at all it is recommended to not use it unless absolutely critical perhaps the most complicated part of the Paladin may be their openers where the slow Paladin relies on just one but the first Paladin has both a fast opener that is a bit less optimal and then there is the ridiculous 18 second early fighter flight opener designed to circumvent the rigidity of the Paladin Rotation by simply starting the quote-unquote rotation without performing it such that things line up properly later while also lining up your magic burst with raid cooldowns there's not really a joke here I feel this silly opener is wild enough in its own right next up we have Warrior sometimes jokingly called the green tank due to the absolutely massive healing it is capable of providing for the first many levels of the job the main focus is on making the most of the three attacks in the berserk window which can be difficult since it both depends on resource management and planning since you don't want to delay the cooldown too much to make that magic happen optimizing this can be very difficult to master however at level 70 you can completely forget about it since in a release makes the best options free and the only options most of the strongest attacks in the Warriors Arsenal automatically maximize their damage by being guaranteed critical direct hits but as the stats associated with this add to the damage of such attacks it simply means the warrior is capable of relying by doing some absolutely massive hits especially for a tank due to this style the Warriors heavily focused on gcd damage and has very little in terms of ogcd options having only their charge Onslaught and upheaval or orogeny as such as you reach higher levels the main complexity of the job goes into planning your users of infuriate and general Beast gauge spending within time frames where your party is applying raid Buffs to get more value out of it due to this sort of Simplicity you can focus more on time in your defensive tools as you need in fact while Canada aims to master late weaving for damage reasons the warrior aims to master it for defensive reasons raw intuition and blood wedding as well as the shared nascent flesh all have the capability to fit an extra gcd to heal with if you lead wee bit will but as they are also defensive cooldowns you need to both late weave it while simultaneously timing it early enough to be able to benefit from the damage reduction for the incoming attack which can make the optimal window even tighter than for paladins now blood wedding and nice and flesh are the sources of the green tank nicknames as they make the warrior able to yield for amounts rivaling an actual healer and the fact that they also have Shake It Off equilibrium and thrill of battle only makes it even better while the Paladin has access to clemency for strong healing as a last resort sword the warrior does even more healing just as a side product most of the Warrior's extra cooldowns relate to Healing itself which means that timing your strong defensive options will can at times completely remove the need for a Healer to help you up after a big attack a disclaimer does not always reliably apply to Savage rating and while the Warriors invulnerability only prevents you from dying the short 4-minute cooldown makes it extremely convenient in any scenario where you might need it multiple times because of how the Warrior's rotation is somewhat open and more of a priority system the biggest complexities come from planning your resources for bigger bursts and then there's the opener the basic opener makes very good sense and does have a slightly faster start if needed if you have a faster gcd but it is situationally relevant however the warrior does have some other openers let's just say that any opener that involves using inner release before you pull is considered a cursed opener and should only be used if you know for certain you need to use it this of course adds the complexity to the warrior that you need to know which fights this happens to apply to to be perfectly optimal however overall I believe the warrior perfectly encapsulates the playstyle you'd hope and expect a warrior to have simple not a lot of mashing and thinking ahead and of course X go brings us to the next job that night replacing the big ax with a big sword for that ff7 cloud View and the light with Darkness The Dark Knight is opposite to both Paladin and warrior in terms of attack rotation The Dark Knight feels a lot like a much faster paced take on the warrior style with delirium being functionally similar to in a release additionally paired with the Dark Knight having just the single one to three combo to fill in with nothing else blood Spiller namely is available early on the diagonal depends on MP to do most of the ogcd attacks it has access to and then as it levels up adds more and more and more and more and more ogcd attacks to deal with due to their cooldowns most of these attacks are planned to be used during raid Buffs which causes the biggest difficulty of the job to be dealing with well using all of that within 15 or so seconds every two minutes while also dealing with things the boss throws you away this kind of frantic burst applies even at lower levels although other jobs are less likely to have raid cooldowns fire to make use of however that still means you can practice this end game strategy from the very start because the Dark Knight Stacks all of its attacks into one big burst every minute and especially every two minutes it means the downtime between these bursts are much less tense at times consisting of just using your 123 combos stockpiling MP and blood gauge without wasting any excess becomes the Mantra of the downtime periods beyond the complexity of the burst combos The Dark Knight also can further optimize by timing their signature defensive cooldown The Blackest Night to be able to stockpile an additional 3000 MP for their burst speaking of defensive cooldowns the dark Knight's tools are heavily focused on Magic damage reduction and the Blackest Night Shield making the tank particularly strong in fights where there is a heavy preference for magic damage the blackest Knight can then be combined with oblation for a very strong cooldown for your code tank as needed but the main thing Dark Knights lack are reliable healing options it's almost like all of the healing budget of the Dark Knight was placed in their somewhat recently buffed invulnerability Living Dead which makes the Dark Knight capable of healing for far more than even the warrior but only in an extremely short time frame and only in deathly scenarios nonetheless the big complexity of The Dark Knight comes from its opener and on even minutes which involve cramming around 14 ogcds into a 15 second burst window and then managing the resale stockpiling in between these bursts for the most part they're pretty honest and upfront and don't really deal in cursed openers at all however albeit a bit late they have access to both the shadowbringer named attack and oblation which makes you pose like in that shadowbringers expansion trailer so if you really want to show your love for that Dark Knight is your guy or girl you know what I mean which finally leads us to gun breaker the tank that almost tricked people into thinking it was a DPS a very unique visual Style with both slashes and explosions the weight combined with the shorter size of the gunblade logically explaining why a tank might carry a weapon in just one hand while keeping the other free to hold on to the gunplate when the pressure of the explosions makes it necessary the gun breaker is extremely upfront with how its attack rotation Works in fact surprisingly few things get added to it as you level up the general gist of it is use everything during no mercy and then a bit later use a few things leading to a big burst and a small burst once you get blood fast this leads to an alternation that goes huge burst small burst big burst small burst repeat while this very specific rotation makes gun breaker somewhat comparable to the Paladin who also alternates between big magic and smaller physical bursts the fact the gun breaker's bursts are filled entirely with downtime rotation somehow makes it a lot less rigid than the Paladin in some ways the amount of ogcd actions the gun breaker gets makes it a lot more comparable to the Dark Knight and incidentally both of these jumps tend to be much better at maximizing their burst within the raid cooldowns in comparison to Warrior and Paladin making them slightly stronger in terms of raw damage output at least at the moment essentially the gun breaker style revolves around stockpiling resources and then bursting it all in one big explosion every minute over 20 seconds and because a few of the cooldowns work on only 30 second cooldowns instead of 60 they get an extra go in between in terms of defensive tools the gun breaker thrives on having some extra long duration ones with a shorter cooldown and their shortest one even comes with a heel that is specifically only activated when it is needed making it optimal to throw out almost on cooldown for the free healing having Aurora for even more makes gunbricker the best contestant to compete with waria as a fellow green tank as well the biggest complexity of the gun breaker comes from its no mercy burst Windows which while extremely straightforward just use everything can be very difficult to perform since you need to pose properly late weave no mercy and then also be able to get to everything in those 20 seconds this means around 8 to 9 specifically planned out gcds which means you have 16 or 18 ogcd slots to fit 8 or more ogcd switch again sounds very manageable but in practice can be somewhat stressful there is also the extra fact of making sure you plan the heaviest hitters among them in the window where the other raid cooldowns are even if no mercy will be the single biggest contributor on its own in terms of openness the fact that gun Breakers cannot start with a full powder gauge means that try as you might the opener will be a little easier to manage than the big bursts that follow every two minutes but every burst is very similar in game plan we use everything while the gun breaker has no specific demands to their skill speed amounts there is a difference between having no skill speed and having some skill speed namely whether you do 8 or 9 gcds in the No Mercy window both are absolutely viable so just like Warrior and Dark Knight you can to some degree freely choose what skill speed you like finally somehow the gun breaker combines the warrior and Paladin invulnerabilities by dropping to one HP and then becoming completely impervious to damage without bonking yourself on the head for enrollability is an advantage sort of depends on the individual encounter to round up this comparison each tank clearly has some specific sort of drawers or play it for Dark Knight and gun breaker tend to be more popular for their DPS like for you while Paladin tends to draw an audience from its toolkit of Last Resort options as well as being the Mage tank and the sword and board tank Warrior draws its audience often from ironically being more mellow and less intense while also having some extremely reliable defensive cooldowns to keep you alive in fact so much so that Warrior tends to be preferable for soloing old content for a new player wanting to pick up tanking for the first time I would absolutely recommend Warrior due to its Simplicity on the other hand I would heavily advise against picking up gun breaker as your first tank both because of its entry-level complexity with its no mercy bursts making it difficult to focus on learning tanking but also because it starts at level 60 pitting you against harder fights right away either way choose a tank that you enjoy the most for all of the them are viable in all content even if one does slightly more DPS than the others they are all perfectly capable of doing what needs to be done and that leads us to the ending of this video thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed this comparison or even found it funny or interesting please consider leaving a like you can also subscribe and taunt the Bell to get notified when next I post a video and make sure to remember to let me know in the comments which tank is your favorite fun fact back in starplot and perhaps before that a strange thing that made the three takes at the time stand apart was that the Paladin needed to use a gcd to switch between its damage stance and its tanking stance The Dark Knight only needed a gcd to switch into the tank stands while the warrior could technically freely switch between them but I do believe it came at the cost of cleaning out their Beast gauge if I recall correctly a very strange point to differentiate on don't you think foreign [Music]

Channel: Caetsu Chaiji Ch.

Views: 44,589

Keywords: ff14, ffxiv, final, fantasy, ARR, Realm, Reborn, HW, Heavensward, SB, Stormblood, ShB, Shadowbringers, EW, Endwalker, Guide, Tank, Gladiator, Paladin, Marauder, Warrior, Dark, Knight, Gunbreaker, Explosions

Id: hoipQ4khZ00

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 05 2022