Quote Originally Posted by TouchandFeel View Post
A good PLD should be just as effective as a good WAR and vice versa.
And, by your logic, a bad PLD should be just as bad as a bad WAR, which simply isn't true and never will be. There are loads of bad PLDs out there that can tank perfectly well. You do not see many bad WARs that can get anywhere near tanking effectively. Even with these buffs, WAR will *still* require more skill to play than a PLD, if not more than it currently requires because IB usage is going to be even *more* important thanks to the 20% DR on it.

Implementing it so one class is easier and requires no thought, while the other requires more skill but will perform better in the hands of a skilled player is not good class design and is inherently flawed.
Actually, it's pretty common in MMOs to have there be a distinct performance difference between the "simple" tank and the "skill" tank. The improved performance that you can eke out of the skill tank that makes it perform better than the simple tank is the benefit for having to be *better* at the class and having greater knowledge of the content than the other class requires. In fact, it's *very good* game design because you're rewarding good players for being good players while allowing players that don't want to have to work as much to still be effective without having to work all that hard at it.

That's that entire *point* of a skill tank: if you're skilled, you get more out of it. If a faceroll tank, like PLD (and, seriously, if you *don't* think that PLD is a faceroll tank, I have to wonder if you've played anything else), could perform as well as an exceptionally well played 2.1 WAR (i.e. using Inner Beast right before *every* spike hit so that you're leveraging that 20% DR with low uptime but high rate of return for maximum benefit), what would be the point of playing a WAR since you could get the exact same performance out of a PLD without doing any of the work?

The *average* performance of a simple tank and a skill tank should be equivalent, but their top end performance *should not*. Having limitations on the crappiness of their performance is balanced by having similar limitations on the amazingness of their performance. You're never going to have 2 classes take the same amount of skill to play optimally unless they're effectively carbon copies of one another. You have to address this and allow for the variability in top end and low end performance to be a factor.