Paladin is the better tank, but Warrior is the better class

My perception on Paladin vs Warrior

Cross class abilities

Paladin's choices are non-choices. If you've leveled both your subs (WHM and MRD), then you should have Bloodbath, Foresight and Stoneskin equipped. Mercy Stroke is good too, but the last is really up to you (Cure, Raise, Protect (for soloing I guess))

Paladin, the mitigation tank, gets 2/3 warrior's cooldowns and there's no sacrifice to take them.

Warrior has too many hard to make choices from GLA and MNK. Warrior needs its own Provoke, simply because Provoke is mandatory, it's a non-choice. You can die, something new can come in. Someone can burst early, or you can just be out-hated. You want to make sure Provoke is on your bars.

You want to have flash, because of the radial nature of the ability and the precious half-second that lining things up for overpower can take.

The remaining choices come down to Convalescence, Second Wind, Featherfoot, Awareness, Mantra. As my monk doesn't have Mantra yet, and perhaps even if it did, I chose Conv, Awareness, and Featherfoot.

Style of play

I'm a Paladin main. I love the universal lore of paladin, since it's common across most games. The Holy Crusader, the bringer of justice. I have played a paladin in most games (WoW, XI, XIV) and others. I'm not knocking paladin out of some spite. Not at all.

Warrior gameplay is more fun than Paladin. I have my threat rotation, which is not so different from Paladin's, but I also have a damaging rotation that I'm fond of mixing in, because it increases my DPS, and I think it's a boon to my TPS.

Heavy Swing, Skull Sunder, Butcher's Block is war's version of the RoH combo.
Heavy Swing, Maim (Increases damage dealt by 20%), Storm's Eye (decrease's target's slashing resistance by 10% and healing received by 50%)
Heavy Swing, Mam, Storm's Path (Heals for 50% of the damage done, which is pretty negligible)

Warrior's Stun is also free and off the GCD (30s cooldown), which makes stunning on warrior more fun. On stun immune mobs, you can mix it in freely for more dps.

With 5 stacks of Wrath, Warrior can pop Unchained, a 3 minute CD, for more damage, and thus hate, and also having Berserk available to them at half the cooldown, they can do a lot of damage, and thus hate, in a very short window. Warrior is certainly more fun to play WITH defiance than without.

I would hope that Berserk's Pacified effect is taken away. Part of being a tank is reacting to the situation now, and it is silly to be locked out of offensive abilties for 5 seconds, when those are the wrong 5 seconds. Perhaps change the penalty somehow, or remove it. Honestly the dps/tps difference between War and Pld is not a concern as long as it's a tank that has hate.

I would hope that in the future, SE gives Warrior some more mitigation ability, its own Taunt, and takes some cues from Warrior on how to further develop Paladin. I still prefer my paladin but primarily because I believe it's more effective than my warrior. I feel like I have a better toolkit to handle situations. I don't want to see that taken from Paladin, but rather given to Warrior.

Being able to do "so much" damage as a tank is fun, but at what expense? You could never make white mage a better healer than scholar merely because scholar can do more damage. Monk has 3 solid defensive cooldowns, but that's no reason, none at all, to make Dragoon a better dps. An equally geared Monk and Dragoon should be able to dps about on par with each other, tanks should expect the same.

Also, please, alter Hallowed Ground. I use the ability and I love it, but it's OP. In many situations, it's equivalent to free benediction, something that Warrior has no answer to. Alternatively, design an ability for Warrior that "most" (same limitations as HG) incoming damage heals the warrior, rather than hurts him, for 5 seconds. I say 5 seconds because if both tanks popped these at 10% health and got no outside help, the warrior would have more health than he started with, the paladin would end at the same 10% health.

WAR is just a confused job. It can't decide whether it wants to be a DPS or a Tank.

I think you give WAR too much credit. They have far too many lacklustre abilities such as:

• Steel Cyclone
• Unchained
• Mercy Stroke
• Storm's Path

while PLD has one incredibly lacklustre abiliy:

• Shield Swipe

The whole Wrath mechanic is just a mess as well. You never want to lose Wrath stacks, but you have so many abilities that remove them, which just leads to you waiting until Infuriate is off CD and even then the only ability worth using is Inner Beast and what's worse is that Inner Beast is on the GCD when it's supposed to be a reactive skill.

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Originally Posted by Steeled

I would hope that Berserk's Pacified effect is taken away. Part of being a tank is reacting to the situation now, and it is silly to be locked out of offensive abilties for 5 seconds, when those are the wrong 5 seconds. Perhaps change the penalty somehow, or remove it. Honestly the dps/tps difference between War and Pld is not a concern as long as it's a tank that has hate.

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You should only really use Beserk to get a better IB and you should only use IB once every 60s unless you have absolutely no choice, so that Pacification isn't really relevant.

Unchained is lackluster? I love it. It's great for early in a fight, especially since early parts of fights are the most important time for tanks offensively, and the easiest defensively.

As far as Wrath being a mess. I can agree. I think that Storm's Eye should definitely give 2 stacks of Wrath, I think it would help a small amount, but yeah, the desire to be healed harder is pretty strong. Having Infuriate lets us use it and 5 stacks once a minute, which is nice.

Never ever use Awareness. Because boss skills don't crit only melee attacks crit for at most 1,000dmg. And there is a hidden bug on Awareness (TESTED) it prevents all incoming heals from being criticals. So you are pretty much left to use Featherfoot, Provoke, Internal Release, Convalescence and Second Wind. Mantra is only +5% area healing and has too long a CD. If Awareness didn't have the heal crit prevention bug I would have taken it over Second Wind.

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Originally Posted by Garnatian

while PLD has one incredibly lacklustre abiliy:

• Shield Swipe

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Um, how is shield swipe lackluster?

Only 40tp, doesn't break your chain, does an attack of 210 potency, pacification cancels many attacks. How is that lack luster? it's almost a free attack with the low cost.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

Um, how is shield swipe lackluster?

Only 40tp, doesn't break your chain, does an attack of 210 potency, pacification cancels many attacks. How is that lack luster? it's almost a free attack with the low cost.

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Pacifism doesn't work on a large majority of bosses, and it provides significantly less threat than halone combo steps. It is useful to conserve tp once threat is established, but otherwise you should be spamming halone. Now if it was off gcd...

This. You aren't trying to DPS, you're trying to build hate, and it doesn't do that effectively. Some bosses are very affected by pacification but most fully resist. It's just a GCD worth of time that you're falling behind in raising the hate ceiling.

both who replied mentioned bosses, I fully understand the place a Paladin has in a boss fight, but that is not the only kind of fight and a 40tp attack with potency 210 and a status effect is neither lackluster nor a waste - imho. It's an attack that conserves TP, maintains your RoH combo while reducing the threat posed by at least one of the enemy that you are holding hate on.

war just teaches you how to micro manage. i.e wrath stacks, maim, SE debuff, berserk, etc. pld just teaches you 1-2-3 and use your def skills to buy the healer some time. Other than that they are really the same other than the bad class balancing. I wonder why the war hp is no higher to begin with. A pld in the exact same dl gear and relic 1 will have about 500-600 less hp than a war which is stupid because the war's mitigation buffer comes from having a large hp pool (which it doesn't have atm). I personally feel that war should be able to reach 9400+ hp with full ilvl 90 equips in defiance w/o any other buffs.

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Originally Posted by Marxam

war just teaches you how to micro manage. i.e wrath stacks, maim, SE debuff, berserk, etc. pld just teaches you 1-2-3 and use your def skills to buy the healer some time. Other than that they are really the same other than the bad class balancing. I wonder why the war hp is no higher to begin with. A pld in the exact same dl gear and relic 1 will have about 500-600 less hp than a war which is stupid because the war's mitigation buffer comes from having a large hp pool (which it doesn't have atm). I personally feel that war should be able to reach 9400+ hp with full ilvl 90 equips in defiance w/o any other buffs.

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A Warrior in the same gear will have 25% more hitpoints than a Paladin. That is the entire point of Defiance. A 5,000hp Paladin is comparable to a 6,250hp Warrior. A 7,000hp PLD would have 8,750hp as a WAR, assuming the same gear. It is slightly more due to WAR having slightly higher base VIT... and then it will be slightly lower, because you're not gearing the same as a PLD... are you?