My Opinion on why WAR is the superior Tank.

[Inosaska]

I actually considered that WAR might have a higher natural Parry chance than WAR

LOL Well that some damn nice logic going on here (Btw just poking fun Kitru <3)

[Menae]

I've heard you say this on a number of threads and I'm kinda curious what makes you think this way. From limited numbers between me and my friend, PLD's parry+block rate seems to equal WAR's parry rate, at least to the degree that they're comparable. Just glancing over something I got from running brayflox HM: as PLD I was getting around 8% parry and 17% block, give or take RNG, while I heard from my raid tank doing some parry testing that he was getting around 25% parry rate. From this I'm assuming blocks are calculated before parry, and since you can't parry and block at the same time PLD's get a significantly lower parry rate.

Maybe I'm missing something really obvious here, but I don't really see how PLD's block provides any kind of advantage over WAR's parry.

What are your respective parry numbers? What was he testing parry on? Need a little more hard info before I'm going to reject the hypothesis that both classes get x% parry from y parry.

[o3o]

Since when has tanks doing more damage ever made a difference?

i usually see plds at around 90 dps as the average while tanking
for wars its around 110

Im pretty sure that wont be making or breaking fights.

[Kitfox]

What are your respective parry numbers? What was he testing parry on? Need a little more hard info before I'm going to reject the hypothesis that both classes get x% parry from y parry.

I did a controller test yesterday of 2886 hits and seems like my live numbers were skewed a lot. Probably forgot to factor out the dodges and most like had a ton of hits from unblockable angles. At 506 parry and 193 block rate I ended up at 16,0% parry and 25,5% block. So it was just me jumping to conclusions without having controlled numbers. Posting more numbers in the parry thread incase they help someone.

[Argyle_Darkheart]

Since when has tanks doing more damage ever made a difference?

i usually see plds at around 90 dps as the average while tanking
for wars its around 110

Im pretty sure that wont be making or breaking fights.

Let's say, as an example, you need 20 more collective DPS to push a phase or beat an enrage timer. It doesn't matter where that DPS comes from.

You don't think this happens?

[Danko]

Since when has tanks doing more damage ever made a difference?

i usually see plds at around 90 dps as the average while tanking
for wars its around 110

Im pretty sure that wont be making or breaking fights.

Leviathan is a good example. Tanks can solo down their spumes while dps focus on non tank spumes. A good WAR can solo theirs completely. Of course it depends on your group, but there are many instances where this is useful.

OT in a fight like Garuda ex. A good tank will use dps accessories and even drop defiance/Shield Oath quite a bit to speed up the kill process. A good tank with a mind to deal damage when appropriate and safe (and with dps gearsets for applicable fights) will deal more than 110 dps.

It's also not all about total fight average dps. That won't tell you the whole story. Tank dps is also very useful for pushing burst phases and dealing with specific mechanics.

[Ehayte]

RE: WARs only outdmging PLDs by a small amount.

Without having a parser (Because I'm not a dirty cheater and I play on PS4 - : D) I'm going to say that a good WAR will greatly out-dps a good PLD, while a good WAR and an average or below average PLD will have a closer DPS spread.

The reason? Stoneskin.

A good PLD will stoneskin recently killed allies, Healers about to take dmg (Ifrit X, Levi X, T5), themselves, the MT/WAR, etc. They should also use the new and improved Cover (which rocks btw, you actually take the dmg you were meant to). An RoH spamming PLD using SW/CoS on CD is kind of a sucky PLD, to be completely honest. If you just look @ Titan X, my opening rotation is:

Fast Blade > Spirits > Savage > Circle > Rage > FB > SB > RoH > Stoneskin Self > FB > Rampart > SB > RoH

That gives me a 700 hit point shield against MB #1, as well as mitigating 20% of it - after that, I'll look at my enmity, and start Stoneskinning DPS during tumults if I have room in the enmity gauge.

WHEREAS, I cannot think of a WAR skill that doesn't do some kind of damage to the target, besides Foresight and Holmgang. WARs should be constantly spouting damage while PLDs should be constantly putting up shields, preventing abilities, and using skills like Cover to save group mates and Flash to blind enemies (if you don't have a SMN).

Which is why I think theorycrafting is total garbage

[Kitru]

i usually see plds at around 90 dps as the average while tanking
for wars its around 110

I regularly push 160 as a WAR (in parry stacked gear), and the PLDs I run with tend to average 120-130 so you're not running with tanks that can actually show you what tank DPS can really look like. An extra 30-50 DPS is an extra 30-50 DPS, no matter if it's coming from a DPS or a tank (or a healer if yours actually use their downtime to swap into CS and throw some DoTs). Tank DPS matters in the exact same way that DPS DPS matters. For specific situations, any time that you've got a DPS race, it behooves the tank to push their DPS: in t1, I can solo my snake from 5% in the time it takes everyone else to kill the OT's snake; in t2, I'm regularly top DPS in pugs and 65-75% or so of a skilled DPS in planned runs; in t4, when I'm add tanking, I can break the stoneskin on soldiers and bring knights down to 50% before the DPS even touch them during single dread runs; as mentioned before, on Levi EX, I can crank the living hell out of spume kill times and when the OT brings the fear add over to me so that I can help (or I pick it up and he comes over to me to stunlock it), it almost always dies before it even gets to its first fear cast because of the extra DPS I push out.

There are plenty of occasions where tank DPS benefits the group, not because it's DPS coming from the *tank* but because it's simply extra DPS for the group. Unless you're doing something else with your time, like Stoneskin, kiting, or waiting for preparing to IB before a big hit, if you're not doing as much damage as possible, you're not contributing as much as you could.

[ZDamned]

Time to ignore a lot of fluff here.
Tanking is tanking, and DPS is DPS like Kitru said.
If were looking at the game objectively, the best way to help your group is to kill the boss as fast as possible. (T6) So Tank DPS is important. End of Story. (Not Stone Skin, not Cure, Shield Swipe, and Attacks)
Warriors are likely more than 10% higher on DPS than a Paladin in Sword Oath.

My latest test in ilvl 96 DPS Accessories on my Paladin yielded 245 DPS in Sword Oath.
My Warrior is ilvl 90 was able to achieve 230 DPS in full Tank gear. (Defiance off)

Its worth noting that with a Warrior in the party, my test would have been higher because of Storms Eye, but I have not tested that yet on a training dummy to see how high my Paladin can go.

[Ehayte]

Time to ignore a lot of fluff here.
..... So Tank DPS is important. End of Story. (Not Stone Skin, not Cure, Shield Swipe, and Attacks)

Tank DPS IS important, but in regards to PLDs ONLY there are some fights where your DPS in very important (In Levi X I switch to sword oath and rotate CDs during spumes to get them down faster), but in some fights (most often occuring in progression runs) damage mitigation may be much more valuable (a life-saving stoneskin prevents a DPS from eating dirt. A dead DPS is going to be a much greater DPS loss than me using Rage of Halone once). I recall stone-skin spamming the Bard while feeding slimes in T1 back when the bard had like 3600 hp.