Tank Mitigation Autonomy: Why the proposed IB change should be mirrored on Paladin
One of the more pronounced concerns with the proposed Warrior changes is that IB will provide 20% mitigation for 6 seconds after use. Now supposedly this 20% will only be applied if IB is used at 5 stacks, so most people are claiming that the 20% mitigation boost will have a 26.7% uptime.
Other players are arguing against this maximum uptime value, instead advocating that the smarter thing to do would be to save IB for predictable damage spikes, such as Mountain Buster or Death Sentence.
This second use of IB is more concerning, and more viable, as it essentially gives the player access to a low duration, low cooldown mitigation buff, all but designed to PROACTIVELY deal with spike damage.
By adding this kind of "on demand" mitigation to a tank, any tank, you are changing the dynamic of their tanking methodology.
Right now, Paladin's tanking methodology is essentially "big hit incoming... use a cooldown. 1 minute later, another big hit incoming, use a different cooldown... etc" Until you run out of cooldowns. The one upside to this is that you can chain cooldowns together to survive continuous high damage phases. At this time only 2 exist, Caduceus with 4+ stacks, and the 4 stack Dreadnaught... Maybe the double Dreadnaught if your dps is kinda slow. This is a very limited set of uses for PLD's chained CDs.
Conversely, the current (Live) Warrior methodology is juggling between keeping up stacks of Wrath for healing, or using IB after a big hit for self healing. And as time has shown, this is not particularly effective.
Under the proposed changes, Warriors will be free of the stack juggling crisis, and will be able to focus more on fully utilizing hate combos, damage combos, debuff combos... and when a big hit is coming, pop IB to knock off 1/5 of the damage.
Now while 6 seconds of 20% mit is not much in the long run, and I am pretty sure that the total mitigation*(% uptime) of Paladin's CDs still exceeds the mitigation*(% uptime) of Warrior's CDs, the issue is that a "skilled" Warrior can pop IB before every major attack, and knock off 20% of every major attack.
Paladin simply does not have that option. For a Paladin, assuming a big hit comes every 30 seconds, we can maybe catch 1 hit on Rampart, 1 hit on Sentinel, and 1 hit on Hallowed... maybe 1 hit on Convalescence, if you care to count that one... And Bulwark is still a 90% chance at best to mitigate about 28% of a physical only hit. This is good for a while, but after the 2nd Rampart... you are essentially out of cooldowns.
So.
My proposition is thus. To make things fair, even, what have you... Give both GLA and MRD, the base classes, not jobs, an ability on a 25-30s CD, ogcd, with no cost, that provides 20% mitigation for 6 seconds. This small addition would do wonders for improving the complexity and autonomy of tanks, so that we can have greater control over our incoming damage.
Of course, this additional ability would mean undoing the change to IB, returning it to 300% healed which many Warriors seem to like. And perhaps scrapping a cooldown in GLA... like Tempered Will.
Note, that this is not a "Paladin playstyle VS Warrior playstyle" issue, this is a "dynamic control of my own survival" issue. Which honestly both tanks, and all future tanks, would benefit from.