The Hardest Tank in Endwalker!

The hardest tank is definitely paladin. When they use Hallowed Ground (almost) nothing can pierce them. You can't get harder than that.

The hard part about warrior is when i level sync down to anything below 56 so im not completely unkillable anymore 😢

One thing I've noticed when levelling all the tanks is how inconsistent the levelling experiences are. GNB gets brutal shell and camouflage before sastasha but paladin has to wait until sheltron on 35

I love this video and your content in general is my favorite on all XIV guides/analysis. I always get the vibe you’re trying to be as fair as possible, and consider all options. I genuinely look forward to your uploads, thank you for what you do ☺️❤️

8:31 I will admit that I'm kinda guilty of this sometimes. I learned most of my tanking fundamentals via leveling Dark Knight (and everything before that I learned via Level 50 Paladin). So things that a lot of people rightfully find difficult about the job feel second nature to me, just by virtue of the fact that I learned how to deal with them while also learning Tanking 101. I'm not trying to brag or anything - on the other side of the coin, because I learned how to play FFXIV using a job whose casual rotation is fairly freeform, I am woeful at my DPS job rotations. (As a Reaper, I have yet to go one trial/raid without forgetting to refresh Death's Design.)

Really nice video! I for one started with GNB as my first tank and WAR was last I even tried, let alone leveled, so to me GNB was significantly easier than the other 3 tanks!

i find it funny how many people in the comments are saying something along the lines of "i main xyz and its definitely the easiest" like the fact that theyre maining it isnt a major reason it seems easier for them

DRK is the hardest for me. It was my main job in StormBlood/4.x when it was the Nigh unkillable drain tank. It wasn't a hard job so long as you actually read the tooltips of the job, Left both stances on when tanking, and used the correct abilities in the rotation, which was Mainly Dark Arts and Abyssal drain followed by Quietus to refill MP and use TBN, along with Salted Earth and Blood Price, to keep you Black Blood up. Then they took that level of Selfsustain, gave it WAR and left DRK out to die

I'm glad you mentioned how WAR and PLD have a very hard time at lower levels before they have good defensive tools at their disposal. I definitely think GNB is the hardest tank in EX or Savage raids, but leveling WAR and PLD was grueling in comparison to leveling the other 2 tanks imo

Gunbreaker main here. One of the most difficult parts is with no skill speed on gunbreaker, even if you do your rotation flawlessly, your burst will drift by 1 gcd every 2 minutes after the 3 minute mark assuming there is no downtime. You will run into a situation where you are sitting on 3 cartridges with a solid barrel ready, and roughly 2 seconds left before no mercy and gnashing fang come up. You are actually forced to burst strike and then finish your solid barrel combo, drifting your gcd by one in order to go into no mercy with the 3 cartridges needed for your full burst. You will drift by 1 gcd at the 3,5,7,9,11, etc minute marks. So by minute 7, you're already 3 gcds late to the raid buffs (assuming full uptime). At that point, you need to make a choice between overcapping a cartridge on those minutes, sacrificing a burst strike inside of your burst window or drifting your gcd by 1 AND losing a burst strike in your burst window.

Nice video with interesting things to think about. Thank you! I’m a casual player who mostly tanks but sometimes heals. For my play style easy is a good thing, so I often play Warrior but sometimes Paladin. I agree with your ranking of the two, but at max level, when Paladin finally gets its full tool kit, they become quite close. Warrior has more and stronger healing options while Paladin has more and stronger mitigation. In special cases Paladin’s mitigation is better, but overall Warrior is better off with its healing. Paladin takes a much bigger hit when mechanics force it out of melee range for more than a few seconds. Both its gauge and a large chunk of its MP come from melee attacks. Also, while its spells are ranged, it can only initiate Requiescat from melee.

I almost feel like you could turn the collective opinions into two graphs. First would be a line graph that shows the relative difficulty as they level from 1-90 just doing normal content (WAR would have some satisfying drops in difficulty); Second would be a plotted graph for increasing levels of optimization (Extremes -> Savages -> Ultimates -> Theoretical optimal play). I'll have some more constructive thoughts on the other role videos as they come out. I don't play Tank enough, but wanted to leave a comment for the algorithm :D

This video actually, with all this technical talk, made look all tanks complicated xD

Dark knight is going to get quite a bit easier in Dawntrail. The removal of damage on their gap closer and living shadow not needing a resource will contribute a lot to that. It'll still have a challenge but I'm curious to see if gunbreaker remains the hardest.

With gunbreaker, during standing rotation, non bursting, in some places you use burst strike to prevent overcap, these are points of realignment I found. Another trick to get back on if you are behind a GCD, (I've done this when lost a GCD and need to get back to max carts for next burst phase), is to use the AoE rotation once. This helped me alot in P12S, just before she jumps away for limit cut - especially if stuck in the corner on lightning shot duty baiting the + with sadness and tears.

With DRK it’s always been the defensive CDs for me. Dark Knight was the tank that I originally wanted to learn, but I was still new to the game and had never tanked. It was Dark Mind specifically that spooked me since I had no clue how to tell the difference between physical and magical damage. I had just thought that DRK wasn’t tanky. Plus tank anxiety and all that. I never touched a tank again until GNB was released. Kinda ironic that the 2nd hardest scares me the most, but the hardest I am all in for 😅

This really does come down to what content you're doing. For general roulette content, who cares they're all easy. For Savage I'd say it goes to either DRK or GNB but is pretty interchangeable depending on the fight. GNB's rotation can be pretty hellish to get back on the rails in P12S P1 if you get unlucky during Para 3, and DRK just gets pummeled in P10S. But for Ultimate, it easily goes to GNB, and it's not even close. Sure, PLD has to deal with basically being a troll pick in TEA because of how long their invuln timer is and how much damage they take, but far and away GNB takes the cake because of how hard it gets screwed over by one simple thing that is ubiquitous in every ultimate: downtime. GNB gets negatively effected by downtime more than any other JOB in the whole game, with the possible exceptions of RPR and DRG. GNB is so supremely cursed in TOP and DSR because of this that playing it is basically an extra ultra-nightmare difficulty modifier on top of the nightmare difficulty of ultimate. Your burst windows will completely change depending on how many carts you go into a phase with which is dictated by kill times, so your re-opener during the DSR intermission will be entirely different if you had 2/3 carts going into it compared to having 3/3 carts going into it. It also has to contend with having the 2nd longest invuln cooldown in the game, which means it has the most awkward time adjusting to different mit plans that some tanks might have. The literal only positive to playing GNB in TOP and DSR is that you're on the absolute bottom of the LB3 priority list, meaning that during the DSR intermission and TOP P6 Cosmo Memory, GNB will never have to LB3 (although it still has to LB3 during Magic Number at the end of TOP P6). For the other ultimates it's a bit more lenient, mostly because you don't have to worry about and play around Double Down, but the cartridge system still means you can get screwed by downtime and wonky kill times and is why I'd still call it the hardest tank in those ultimates as well But again, for roulette stuff/dungeons/full uptime encounters, who cares, they're all easy.

I'm a main tank and haven't reached cap level yet, but I do have my 2 favorite classes untill now: DRK and PLD. I just have to make my mind and choose one to master and min/max for endgame content. The thing with DRK is I keep questioning myself all the time whether I should spend all my MP with EoS or TBN and, once I choose one, I keep thinking if I did the right choice or not. Also, for the magical damage mitigation skills, I just use it as if it was any other mitigation because I still don't know how to track if the damage is phys or mgc (if someone could explain me...). I like both of the classes, but i'll have to wait till cap to see which one I enjoy the most, especially when min/maxing rotations

i would love to see pulls from other jobs perspectives: healers vote which tank they prefer to see in roulettes, tanks vote with which healer they feel safest when get paired etc

Another factor to consider with regards to War being "harder" to optimize at lower levels, due to needing to stockpile gauge for berserk, is that optimization in lower level content is far less important (or at least you're far less likely to be doing something where optimization does matter at those levels). So players are more likely to think of that as something that's annoying rather than something that's difficult.