There are a few interesting things about the Tactician that have become apparent now that I've spent time analysing the class to write this guide.
The first is the number of abilities that end up being very similar to each other within the Tactician's choices. There are about six different versions of "Hit and Run" available, at least six abilities focused on giving out surges, and eight abilities that can help allies spend recoveries.
These stats are even worse considering the default Mark benefits can also give out recoveries, and that I didn't count surge granting abilities that were also "Hit and Run" variants.
It altogether makes the Tactician feel like they have a lot less real diversity in their abilities than other classes, and kind of brings me to my next point about how hard to digest the Tactician heroic abilities can be.
Some of the abilities are made up of many small parts that are trying to work together to make the ability worth using, but really just serve to obscure whether the ability is useful at all. Many of these will fall flat once you do the math on them, especially the "Hit and Run" variants which at 9 or 11 Focus aren't usually efficient enough.
This is even more true for any ability or feature with a Mark Benefit to give you extra ways to spend Focus. "Targets of Opportunity" is the only one of the 7 available that can be called a significant improvement over the default options, yet each require you to parse through convoluted sentences describing their increasingly specific use cases to find this out.
The problem is that the default Mark benefit is so strong, as being able to convert 1 Focus into 4/6/8/10 damage depending on your current Reason is very hard to compete with.
It also becomes a problem for heroic abilities that they have such a strong baseline damage rate to compete with. It's hard to say many 9 or 11 Focus abilities are worth it when you could just deal between 54 and 88 damage through the Mark instead.
The main problem of this is triggering it often enough to use all your Focus, but it's definitely possible to only take support abilities and focus on doing damage through the Mark.
Getting maximum use out of the Tactician depends a lot on what your allies can do, which makes sense for the concept of the class, but can be quite annoying if you're not making characters simultaneously with your party, or if the characters change for any number of reasons.
I particularly dislike how the Insurgent Doctrine interacts within a party as so many of their abilities before level 6 are only useful for hiding, which I think is very limited in usefulness outside of Shadow and a couple of other builds.
I feel I've had so much extra to say about the Tactician this week, but I like to keep these kinds of overall thoughts on how the class is structured outside of the guide as they don't really impact how best to play them.
It would be nice if it sounded more positive, I just think there are so many things in the way of the Tactician being as interesting as the other classes. I hope you all enjoy anyway!
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