Paladin or Marauder?

[Gamemako]

WAR is a drain tank. Instead of mitigation, it just acts as its own healer as it attacks, which means that attacking is its raison d'etre. WAR is undoubtedly much harder to use than PLD (i.e. more active, as you're looking for), for the player and team. A dead squirrel Carbuncle can play PLD. You have one meaningful combo, two off-GCD abilities to mash on cooldown (SW, CoS), and generally spend most of your time waiting for something to happen so you can hit Rampart or Sentinel. Healer just keeps mashing heal and barely even has to look at the screen. WAR juggles cooldowns to stay alive, actively timing drains for maximum effect. WAR takes a lot more trust in the healer, since you're never at near-max health (else your drains would do nothing). In that sense, It think many teams will prefer PLD even when it's not an efficient choice because the healer can't do a crossword puzzle while healing WAR, and nothing is certain if not human laziness. You're going to see a lot of "WAR is add tank" stuff with healers overhealing by 10,000 HP per minute anyway because they don't know or care what they're doing. If you play WAR, you should steel yourself against this, because it *WILL* happen. You're also going to see so much ignorance regarding skills it will blow your mind.

Also, note that WAR is not an AoE tank. WAR is no better than PLD for multi-target situations. Yes, really. Consider three possible activities for WAR: Overpower spam (Steel Cyclone impossible), single-target Wrath gen to Steel Cyclone spam, and Inner Beast spam with Overpower to front-load enmity. The massive TP cost on Overpower with no means of mitigation (no Wrath gen) make it pretty infeasible in general. 10 uses is only 900 equivalent potency delivered to all targets and burns 1300 TP, leaving you at zero from max. No durability left, balls for damage. Not a good idea. Steel Cyclone can be used every 17.5 to 25 seconds and hits for 200 potency. Circle of Scorn hits for 250 potency reduced by 20% to be 200 effective potency and hits every 25 seconds for free. Steel Cyclone takes away your drain again, so if you wanted to be really comparable, you'd have to take Sword Oath for PLD, which means PLD is doing just as much AoE damage and more single-target damage to boot. If you take the last option, which all but ignores the AoE element altogether the PLD's CoS is going to deal more damage than two Overpowers, plus he gets damage reduction from Flash's blind effect. The only question is whether enemy damage is low enough to make WAR preferred, and that's not an AoE factor at all. So cast that notion from your mind if you had ever considered it.

WAR is also not thumping PLD as a DPS -- that's gonna be another myth for you. If you are concerned about tanking DPS, PLD combo is 610 potency plus roughly 250 potency worth of autoattacks per 7.5 seconds. Add in Circle of Scorn (250 potency per 25s) and Spirits Within (300 potency per 30s) and reduce by 20% from Shield Oath so you have you have 107.73 potency per second. If we consider WAR's combo to be Storm's Eye -> Butcher's Block -> Inner Beast (only possible with one additional ability use), you get 127.05 potency per second -- an 18% advantage or so. Acting as DPS (i.e. when not in tanking stance), WAR delivers 154.67 potency by alternating SE and BB combos while PLD drops in 156.22 potency per second in Sword Oath due to Curtana's fast attack rate. The difference between the two acting as DPS is pretty negligible. You can tweak to add in Fracture, Berserk, Inner Release, and Fight or Flight but it's not going to make much of a difference. Just a few percentage points this way or that.

Finally, enmity is trivial on WAR and PLD both. Phase 3 enmity multipliers were insane (in Defiance or Shield Oath, you'd get 10x enmity on Butcher's Block -- you're CRUSHING the best DPS in enmity), and due to the 2x multiplier on Defiance, there's a fundamental inability for enmity to ever really matter on Jobs. You have a ton of innate headroom.

So yeah, in terms of ideal roles, what you really have is this:

WAR = tank for situations with lower enemy damage output
PLD = tank for situations with higher enemy damage output
Titan = tank for when you want to get your MNK killed

And not really anything else. That said, both are probably going to be plenty viable for all content. WAR is more active and requires more skill on behalf of the WAR and healer.

Oh, but by the way, WAR (along with ACN/SMN) is a prime contender for Ultimate Solo Championship. If you want to try soloing silly things for shits and giggles, WAR is a much better choice.

[Size]

-snip-

Thanks for this post. Sounds like you truly know what you're talking about. As a newbie to ARR, I think I will level Paladin first and use that as my main and then warrior until I am good enough to do the content on that.

[SixSixSix]

Finally, enmity is trivial on WAR and PLD both. Phase 3 enmity multipliers were insane (in Defiance or Shield Oath, you'd get 10x enmity on Butcher's Block -- you're CRUSHING the best DPS in enmity), and due to the 2x multiplier on Defiance, there's a fundamental inability for enmity to ever really matter on Jobs. You have a ton of innate headroom.

As a 50 WAR and 46 PLD, I really really want to disagree with this. Even if I'm given 5 seconds to build enmity on a boss, it could still be easily pulled off of my by a WHM or a BRD. It has happened before...many times. It's been my experience that NO ONE watches their enmity meters and we can strike that from the list of possible ways to avoid loss of threat. I believe the difference in gear plays too big of a role in enmity management. My WAR's gear isn't horrible for particular fights that I run. I would say it's sufficient to manage certain bosses and dungeons and I attest that proper cooldown management is vital to survivability. The biggest challenge shouldn't be fighting off healer and dps aggro. Which it is. And healers build way too much threat on mobs that I'm not focusing on. If I'm holding 3-4 mobs I need to maintain aggro on all of them, right? So what do I do? Like you said, we cannot spam OP forever. And Flash seems about useless compared to using it as a PLD. So I switch targets and start doing a combo on each mob to try and get a good hold on the mob and pound that healer aggro down so by the time we've killed the primary target, those other adds won't have enough built threat when it dies and I can start over. The flaw in this is...the primary target is no longer being focused meaning dps is beating away on that thing and building threat. It takes about 2.5 seconds per attack for 3 attacks on 2-3 other mobs. Do the math and that's how much time I'm not on the primary target. Bounce around? Primary>add1>Primary>add2>Primary>add3>Primary. Nope. I would have lost add3 by the time I would have finished hitting add2 with Skull Sunder...maybe even before that. I have even thrown out OP in between rotations on the Primary target and STILL lost aggro to the other adds leaving me thinking WTF is the point??

The 2.5sec GCD on top of ability animations makes it extremely difficult to build enmity and especially regain it once I have lost it. The reason why I say "ability animations" is because the abilities that especially generate threat and are NOT on the GCD still cannot be used immediately after using any other ability. I have to wait 1-2 seconds in order to use them. A friend of mine believes it's due to the animations of abilities used. Whatever. It sucks. Off the GCD should mean just that: Off the GCD. This even goes for Brutal Swing! My only interrupt! An ability that plays a critical role in boss mechanics and you can't even use it immediately after abilities even though it's not on the GCD?? What the hell is up with that?!

Anyway...I stopped caring whether or not adds get pulled off me. I was stressing about it way too much. Trying to do my job and it seems out of my control for me to do so. I just worry about bosses now. I was on Hydra yesterday and I had the boss for a good 20 seconds and a WHM pulled him right off me and basically wiped the group.

[SixSixSix]

If I'm holding 3-4 mobs I need to maintain aggro on all of them, right? So what do I do? Like you said, we cannot spam OP forever. And Flash seems about useless compared to using it as a PLD. So I switch targets and start doing a combo on each mob to try and get a good hold on the mob and pound that healer aggro down so by the time we've killed the primary target, those other adds won't have enough built threat when it dies and I can start over. The flaw in this is...the primary target is no longer being focused meaning dps is beating away on that thing and building threat. It takes about 2.5 seconds per attack for 3 attacks on 2-3 other mobs. [continued...]