huh? wha?
i've leveled every combat job other than blue mage to the current level cap and now i have Opinions on all of them that i want to post soon. look forward (?) to that, hopefully
i'm just gonna separate the jobs into posts based on their in-game categorization. here's: tanks (it's a fairly long post)
Paladin
paladin is... a weird one. at max level, i'm actually a pretty big fan: it has the most flexible short-cooldown mitigation of the tanks thanks to holy sheltron being meter-based with a cooldown shorter than its total duration, divine veil is a nice versatile raidwide mitigation tool that doesn't care about damage type (looking with an inscrutable expression at dark knight and gunbreaker), and hallowed ground is super easy to use. on the offensive side, the rotation is varied enough to keep my interest but hard to mess up if you're paying attention and follow some basic rules about resource spending. it also gets a *lot* of self-healing in burst thanks to the heal on every spell cast, even in aoe, which is something the other tanks don't get for free.unfortunately, until you get holy spirit at level 64(!!!), it's an absolute snooze-fest. even then, it takes until level 72 before you get any real additions to your aoe rotation, and single-target still doesn't really feel complete before you get atonement at 76. compounding these leveling issues is its complete lack of self-healing outside of clemency (which hardly counts) until endwalker. you need to hit level 82 before you get any kind of regular, passive healing to help out your healer. while i quite like the end result, the ability distribution on paladin as you level is just miserable.
also, increase cover's range please.
i'm not even going to talk about the job quests because everyone knows about the job quests.
Warrior
warrior is my favorite of the tanks by quite a bit. i feel as though it has a reputation for being simple, but its rotation, at least, is more involved than paladin, since you need to handle a buff timer, a resource meter, and infuriate's changing cooldown in addition to your static 30-and-60-second cooldowns. it even has most of this all the way back in a realm reborn! the rest of the expansions' offensive skills just... well, expand upon and upgrade the base of the job (including giving you a comedic amount of gapclosers). defensively, shake it off is just the most satisfying (admittedly, perhaps a little overtuned) of the unique aoe mitigation for the tanks, vengeance's little bit of spike damage is practically invisible but very funny, it's fun to see your health shoot back up with equilibrium, and...well, my only real issue with warrior is that raw intuition/bloodwhetting is... way too good for dungeon pulls? it's satisfying to use, but it just does so much work that healing a warrior in a dungeon just becomes boring if they use it well. you become basically undamageable for 3 gcds every 25 seconds, and you can extend that with holmgang every 4 minutes. while this is true to some extent for any skilled and geared tank in level cap dungeons, warrior makes it true even for leveling dungeons. the ones that actually hit hard, sometimes.
special mention to the heavensward job quests about, uh, driving those evil beast tribes back to their gross homes where they belong, oh god this is way worse than the Nothing and Nonsense of the paladin quests
Dark Knight
the first of the two Busy Opener tanks. the opener sees... what, 7 double weaves over 8 gcds? i'm personally not a big fan of how blood weapon pre-pull is the best way to get living shadow into raid buffs, but other than that it's a very nicely flowing opener. the downside is that, comparatively, the downtime between your 60s cooldowns can be a bit bland, just ensuring you don't cap mp or blood gauge. that said, for most of the leveling process, it's a more interesting experience than paladin's between-burst rotation. edge and flood of darkness come early enough to keep low levels moderately interesting, and there aren't any abilities that are clearly single target and aoe versions of the same attack introduced during separate expansions (paladin's holy circle was the first example of this, but there are many, many more).defensively, it's also the first of the two Reduce Raidwide Magic Damage tanks. if you're dealing with a physical raidwide, it's reprisal or nothing. dark mind is... silly. it's silly. 20% reduction for 10 seconds on a 60s cooldown is strong, but... being only on magic damage means sometimes you just aren't going to press it, ever. the blackest night, however, is both very strong and very fun, as well as introducing something that paladin and warrior could both take a page from: making an ability work on yourself or a party member instead of creating a whole separate ability that takes up hotbar space for when you want to target a party member. oblation is like this too, and it's great! just let me use bloodwhetting on a party member. it's fine.
...oh, and living dead being most effective in dungeon pulls if you entirely stop attacking for a while to delay your self-healing is very ??????
Gunbreaker
the final tank, the second of the Busy Opener ones, and the first one i leveled. starting at level 60 means leveling gives you a decent set of skills to start with, keeping it interesting, and even synced down its skills are paced pretty well. continuation is a fun button that allows for adding more ogcds to the job without increasing the total button count, and managing bloodfest vs. non-bloodfest no mercy windows varies burst in a way that differs from the other tanks. it can sometimes feel a little too busy, though: the amount of weaving you have to do with continuation reduces your windows for activating defensive cooldowns, which, while an interesting wrinkle, isn't something i personally enjoy dealing with.speaking of defensive cooldowns, gunbreaker has some fun ones! heart of corundum's delayed heal is a fun thing to add onto a tank cooldown, and much like dark knight, heart of corundum and aurora can both be used directly on any party member to help mitigate and/or heal, and superbolide is both powerful and funny. heart of light is... well, it's just dark missionary again. better hope that raidwide is magic damage. my biggest issue, though, is with camouflage. the way it works is fine and interesting: 10% damage reduction, and if the damage is physical you have an increased chance of parrying it for another 15% reduction. specifically, it "increases parry rate by 50%." that's all the information you have about its parry rate increase. the game doesn't make it clear what the base parry rate is or whether camouflage's listed percentage increase is additive or multiplicative (it's additive on top of a base 10% chance, for the record).
all in all, a pretty solid experience! definitely my preference over dark knight for a "busy" tank, i feel as though not needing to deal with living shadow's spawn time improves it a lot.