LawAbidingPokemon: I still think Gunbreaker is the hardest to play WELL. All tanks are pretty simple at their core, but optimization is another game altogether.

panda6907: WAR is so hard. I have to wait allllll the way to lvl 56 to get my mitigation, and all the way to 82 before i am unkillable.

Raika63: I think Dark Knight has the highest ceiling due to MP management using tbn/oblation well (actually protecting your squishies and preventing a death).

TreasureBoxGamin: I remember responding to the community comments when you posted. Was very interesting to see by just how much a job was harder to play than others. Dark Knight I feel is easier than warrior but that may be because I've mained DRK for my savage career so far.

aleclewis4894: I'm a healer for my static, which had a GNB as one of the tanks. Part of the learning curve for each fight he had to do, that wasn't a problem for our other tank, was figuring out how to handle the application of defensives during the burst period. Since GNB's burst has much more oGCD usage than the other tanks, he had to many times choose to either gimp his burst in order to activate the defensive cooldowns required to keep himself or other party members alive, or push through with damage and hope to survive. (being a parser, he mostly chose the latter, leading to frequent deaths/wipes until we could readjust CD usage to survive on damage variance).

Hoofprint: If Yoshi said tomorrow Gunbreakers are now dps and Samurai is now a tank or hell if a Dragoon gets the blue tank status instead of floor tank. not single healer would shed a tear.

That says alot....

KasterPD: I picked up Gunbreaker as my tank just for the aesthetic, and I agree with a lot of your points. I'm not much of a tank player, but I can follow my rotation pretty well. If anything goes sideways though and I drift and need to get back on track, I find myself stumbling to realign things.

kitsunehanyou09: The hardest for me as a GNB main is the pain and shame I feel when:

1. You press the wrong button during your burst and eat your gnashing fang combo

2. Your timing is so off the boss jumps early as you've just queued double down and see it miss entirely (applies to a lesser degree with bow shock

3. This new feeling of miscounting how many cartridges you still have and miss an optimal time to use gnashing fang off no mercy.

The only other Tank that knows this pain is DRK when using living shadow at the wrong time and now your self esteem stands there doing nothing and just leaves you

MomijiHVods: I’m always scared to heal for warriors in dungeons because although I know that the warrior is practically invincible, THEY may not. So when they drop to low HP, it feels like a dice roll on whether they’re going to jump back to full instantly or die. So that’s fun.

TallZeratul: Storm's Eye management being the focal point of warrior difficulty is a jebait. The real trick to optimizing warrior is managing gauge alongside mitigation. Those auto crit heals can go a long way.

HildeTheOkayish: I think the hardest for dark knight is the normal dungeons. While dark knight is good at taking things like tankbusters, it's not as good at taking more sustained damage from things like trash mobs if you don't prepare well. It's what I like most about it.

It also the real difference with war I think. While war can pretty much run into any trash mobs without thinking and live, making it seem easy. Drk needs a bit more thought

RagnarokiaNG: Paladin not breaking its combo with atonement / holy spirit, and the 1 minute magic combo not breaking normal combo either make it incredibly easy and smooth to "freestyle" if not worrying about min maxing damage. Clemency and Cover are both also very good for helping save people who others tanks might not be able to. The main downside for difficulty would be if you Clemency people too much you can run empty of MP for finishing your 1 minute magic combo and have to lose it by using normal combo. That can be quite common if the healers are struggling.

Dark Knight used to be the hardest tank job as the weapon was so big and heavy you threw yourself sword first across the room when you tried to dash, RIP Plunge.

YouChupe: Anyone who'd like to learn GNB: do PotD, you start at level 1 and see how the skills unfold naturally, and can do it solo!

LunaNx: it also depend on the peerson's who feel comfy with playing there tank as well.

AZSprocket: I'm not even gonna bother learning Gunbreaker until after Evercold.

baym73: I really enjoy gunbreaker, but i find the continuation aspect to be hard as a tank because:

1. It makes it difficult to double-weave mitigation during burst windows or when you dump cartridges. This is especially the case with heart of corondum since you need to use it within a few seconds of damage occuring to get the max benefit

2. If you need to move the boss or move out from mechanics, you have to do some awkward movement so that you don't lose continuation while maintaining uptime

DudeRaccoon26: I've been a gunbreaker main since I started really raiding in shadowbringers, and I have to say compared to the other tanks it's much more difficult at the highest difficulty of content (W1 Savage and on-content ults) when it comes to the bosses actually letting you do your rotation. Even in Kefka with Forsaken, gunbreaker needs to very rapidly decide what rotation it's doing into no mercy depending on what you're assigned to get the most potency out, and from there the random assignments can make it even more difficult to get uptime. A good example of a savage fight where you adjust starting NM with RoB or GF is M11S, especially during arena split and final tethers.

There are also some points where because GF is now a charge based ability, it's even more punishing than before since if you get into a situation where you are able to use FC and FB you need to ensure you're spending GF at a point in your rotation to ensure by the time you are done with AoE, you're not spending time over-capped on it.

Another point that wasn't mentioned, is that Gunbreaker has the hardest time weaving in mit compared to other tanks. Especially with how fights are designed, gunbreaker is always in a mini burst face at minimum every 30 seconds, which consumes minimum 3 ogcd slots that can't be moved and 1 that shouldn't, which kind of forces the job to be really reliant on proper pre-mitigation timings instead of doing them when the buster has an indicator, the punishment for not doing it being that you clip your rotation badly to the point where you move NM out of 2 min raid buffs and need to then further readjust your rotation to have the lowest potency missed at the end, or you move damage options later into burst which could mess with availability when you need it later for damage opti (firewall debuffs for example).

Obviously the other tanks have their own difficulties, but from my experience doing ulti and savage on all of them for over 4 years at this point, I believe that gunbreaker is the most difficult.

Great surveys btw, I've been voting on them and sharing them with my static for their input as well so get more perspectives on things. I'm excited for the healer video!

RyuTechLP: What is the most difficult part of any job for me is rotation clarity (ease of access and description clarity), rotation length (not having repeating chunks is extending the simon says requirement in your brain by a ton) jumping back & forth between buttons too much to play optimal (if your 12345678 turns into a 1234564748 and worse) and amount of cooldowns you have to align and therefor delay their usage.

My biggest trouble when picking up a new job is also that it can be very hard to understand what and what "not" to do in between bursts.

Imagining being in the mind of my niece there are too many "rules" of "how" to play your job making your abundance of skills feel much less rewarding without putting in your math and literature skills beforehand. I always feel like this game demands multitasking AND preperation to play well instead of giving you a clear and accessible picture of your job making the actual mechanics of fights the focus of gameplay instead.

The reason why savage raid playerbase is such a small percentage of everyone is really because they have to play 2 games at once after studying a guide and that is not what people enjoy mostly especially the upcoming young generations.

jeako777: WAR is the 2nd hardest for Savage/Ultimate raids imo

toychristopher: It's funny to me that he felt the need to defend why he didn't limit the polls to only savage raiders, as if savage raiders have some kind of monopoly on mechanics or judging difficulty.

Skywardflare758: I do think ping is also important to bring up for these videos. Dark Knight and especially Gunbreaker with higher ping can make the weaving a lot more painful. During bad server or internet days, double weaves can just not go off and I lost many a Continuation and the like to them. And on normal days, my ping is high enough that a handful of oGCDs do not reliably go off (special shout out to specifically Spirits Within in synced content).

As for the rankings themselves, it’s the exact order I have them in. Warrior might struggle a bit in Savage content due to less personal mitigation, but I don’t think that makes Warrior harder itself, as it doesn’t change how Warrior or the role itself plays, you just need additional externals. Though Warrior does have the added shenanigans of interesting interactions with its defensives and healer stuff combining. Warrior also has the advantage of being silly for every bit of non-raid combat content in DT. Paladins buttons are more complex to use than Warriors while having plenty of space to use its defensive tools and having some complicated abilities. Dark Knight’s oGCD soup can be a pain to get down and it has the least recovery, making mistakes the most punishing. And yeah, Gunbreaker is Gunbreaker.

As for Endwalker into Dawntrail, yes, both Dark Knight and Gunbreaker received substantial buffs and easy of use updates, which narrowed the gap substantially. Dark Knight now has buttons that don’t just randomly do nothing, bringing its mitigation kit incredibly high up and while its sustain is still painfully low (still feels weird that Warrior is the primary lifesteal tank), Living Dead is functional without a healer now and there’s enough to make playing stuff without a healer/downed healer manageable in most content now. And I still consider it the second hardest because it still has a ton of places to make mistakes and least amount of recovery tools.

apljack: I play GNB at 2.45GCD. I don't play optimally, but I generally get Blue/Purples in Savage fights once I get comfortable with them. The reason I have a slightly faster GCD is strictly for a bit of flexibility when dealing with moving boss stuff or having to go far away. I would scare some people with my greed and avoiding the use of my ranged abilities as much as possible. I don't do any of the hyper optimizing strats though. In fact most of my bursts after the opening start with Lionheart combo right away. I want to get my biggest hits in first, that way if ANY of the burst is forced out of range by mechanics, it'll be part of my gnashing only that loses the damage boost.

My worst pain points: Losing part of my burst because I derp and break combo. Either Lionheart or Gnashing. Hitting a GCD at the wrong time or being raised and having to decide if I just hold what CDs I have left until next burst, or remembering that it ISN'T my burst and not send things and completely separate them from by burst window.

ZolenaRose: Having picked up Gunbreaker first, I still find it as the most easy FOR ME. That, however, comes from many hours of playing the job and having a pure fundamental understanding of the job. I've spent enough time on it that I could tell you my full rotation (mits not included because those are more reaction based/change depending on the fight to some degree more than the rest) by memory. HOWEVER, I do find that learning that rotation, and all the ins and outs of the job originally, I found it to be the hardest in the beginning, followed very quickly by DRK. I do still find myself getting thrown on DRK because of some mitigation issues and it's desire to fight with healers in lower level content, however at cap I have none of these issues with DRK.

TLDR: I find DRK harder than GNB, but only because I've spent enough time on GNB that comparing them in difficulty is comparing lemons to chocolate. I've got GNB committed to memory, while DRK is still fairly new in my repertoire.

WikiED: I think before update Gunbreaker was significantly harder as punishment was way higher for any miss-timing, current Gunbreaker at worst you dont get fancy setup for the final gnash continuation in the burst.

Past gunbreaker with missing cartridges was completely dismantling your rotation, current is just minor dps loss.

Also another Gunbreaker optimization is that cartridge aoe combo is better for 2 targets so in like m10s you try to use that one instead when the bosses meet.

chuckmarius323: I still can't believe war lost to paladin :)) you don't even need to be in melee range during your burst on paladin

ZinoJinouga: My ranking will be

PLD-WAR/DRK-GNB yes it is similar to you

I believe PLD is easy because the fact there is no buff timer and gauge management

You have the best Raid and self-mits ( not invuln btw)

Cover is a lifesaver

You have a 1 min window that is literally attacking enemies from Narnia to Eorzea, basically you have no downtime at all during burst window and mini burst.

You have static rotation 1 2 3 and attonement combo and you can save the magic range for uptime if needed or before next attonement combo.

qwerty-dm8gr: Should be:

Pld

Gnb

Drk

War

Gnb would have been #1 before the changes to bloodfest.

Jul 06 2026

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