Quote Originally Posted by Zohnax View Post
To reiterate again, (repetition should make it sink it), this isn't about PLDs not wanting WARs to be useful tanks, it is about concerns of the potential usefulness disparity between the two in light of the incoming WAR buff.
Repetition doesn't make the claim any more true, however.

As far as we know, PLD is not getting nerfed. It is going to be just as effective then as it is now, with the exact same math and the exact same utility, much of which WAR simply does not have and never will. The only way the WAR buffs are going to create a usefulness disparity is if they are so large that they marginalize PLD in the same way that PLD marginalizes WAR right now. The math has shown quite *explicitly* that WAR will not be doing so; the mitigation advantage only exists when you use the new Inner Beast *absolutely perfectly* and the damage advantage that WAR supposed has not be been proven a single time thanks to those tests that do "prove" refusing to use certain PLD abilities (like CoS and SW) or using a monumental gear disparity (WAR in either full STR or STR/VIT fusion gear/allotment compared to PLD in straight VIT), not to mention how, for some reason, the parsers are strangely incapable of registering the additional damage from Sword Oath.

PLD will *still* have a substantial advantage over WAR where utility is concerned: they bring silence, blind, stoneskin, a stun that can be solo chained (yes, it's on GCD, but when you need to stun a target for 10 seconds straight, PLD can do it all on their lonesome while WAR requires synchronizing with 3 other people). WAR will have a *slight* damage advantage and *slight* mitigation advantage that *only* exists when played properly. Considering the opportunity cost accrued by the loss of said utility, that's perfectly fine.

WAR mean mitigation is symmetrically balanced against PLD mean mitigation (meaning that they can be directly compared to each other), with the primary difference being that WAR has variable mitigation that has to be leveraged properly whereas PLD just has constant static mitigation. WAR damage is asymmetrically balanced against PLD utility (meaning that they cannot be directly compared and must be compared indirectly). This is perfectly acceptable since it's *still* balanced. People are always asking for the tanks to not be rendered identical and the fact that *some* aspects of the class cannot be balanced symmetrically is something to just have to accept. Of course, it also means that you can't ignore the advantages that one tank has over another in a category because the classes are balanced holistically.

If people are asking for QoL and bug improvements for PLD, like causing Awareness to *not* prevent critical heals, providing a combo that can be used while off-tanking that won't cause you to have to decide between potentially ripping off of the other tank and doing substantially less damage, or giving them more than 2 useful additional skills (of course, the fact that they only *need* 2 useful additional skills because they've got amazing native capability is something you'd have to consider as well), this is perfectly fine and should even be encouraged because you're not talking about making them explicitly better tanks: you're talking about making PLD more *enjoyable* by allowing the options that class already gets to not be largely worthless or making an ability do what it should always have done.

As soon as you start talking about making abilities *stronger* rather than fixing an ability that does not do what it says it does (Awareness) or improving QoL *without* increasing performance of primary functionality (i.e. increasing enmity compared to WAR or increasing mitigation), however, you lose the high ground and end up just being a person complaining that PLD is no longer the de facto tank for everything end game.