Slight warrior Buff/Tweak.

[Ditto]

No, ShO has to be activated too, if you don't have it on and then activate it, it doesn't go back in time and negate damage that you had taken prior to activating it.

You are the one that brought the semantics of retroactive mitigation in to this which makes no sense as it does not exist in this game at all, unless you count healing as such.

Adding in the word just to your sentance simply changed damage taken from a general time in the past to a more specific time in the past and implies no specifics as to the state of the recipient of said damage. So it was as I surmised before and the intended meaning was not clearly stated.

I am not arguing that WAR doesn't take more damage than PLD because they do, however they also heal more than PLD. Basically they just have bigger numbers going in and out of their HP pool, which are larger to compensate for this as well as to provide an equal eHP starting point.

I responded to your post originally because I felt you were making a number of incorrect statements and so I chose two of them and provided counterpoints.

WAR and PLD survivability has been proven many times to be comparable, with WAR being better in some instance and PLD being better in others.

Both types of buffs have positives and negatives associated with them.

A % damage reduction effect is nice because it reduces the damage when it is taken and therefore provides more of a safety net for unpredictable spikes in damage such as getting hit by crits, but it also reduces the % reduction from other % damage reduction cool downs when used, making the reduction from that ability less than what is displayed in the ability description.

A % increase in healing may provide less of a buffer for instances of unpredictable spike damage, but it also takes advantage of the fact that heals can crit resulting in even greater survivability gains.

Basically ShO is good with dealing with HP reducing crits while Defiance is good with HP increasing crits.

If a Paladin isn't in Shield Oath when they're tanking, then they need to stop being a Paladin. And now I really don't feel like listing out all of the CD's a Paladin has, and their cooldown times compared to Warrior (I'm sure you're already aware of them), one of which is Enhanced Convalescence which essentially gives them the benefit of having the extra healing as a Warrior for 20 seconds, every 2 minutes, on top of all of the mitigation they already have.

As you said,

Basically they just have bigger numbers going in and out of their HP pool,

Ya, that's somewhat true, but there is far more room for error, and wipes with that type of system, when the warrior is unable to fend for itself in any viable way at all. The most a Warrior can do is just stand there and take what is coming, they can inner beast, they can Vengeance, but as soon as Vengeance is over, they are right back to needing full attention and heal after heal. A Paladin is far, far better at giving healers more breathing room during rough situations than a Warrior can, and if things start to hit the fan, they have hollowed ground. Save for Thrill of Battle, all Warrior HP recovery skills are pitiful in terms of how much HP they recover. Bloodbath is useless as the MT. Path is likely only ever used to apply the debuff and that's it, assuming you can keep it up without losing aggro. And IB, being the better of the 3, still isn't all that great in terms of the HP it's recovering. Sure it's ok if it crits while you have all of your big buffs up such as unchained and berserk, but without them that heal will probably be a triple digit (If a 4 digit hit, it'll likely be just breaking 1k), which is nothing when you have 10k+ hp, and bosses are hitting you like a jet.

As a Warrior, there are times where you cant do anything but eat a blow head on, unlike where paladins can rotate their CD's to increase their survivability throughout entire fights. (T9 for example. Mitigating the damage Ravensbeak does is a must, which a Warrior can not do every time unlike a paladin if they were to rotate their CD's) While this can be applied to both classes, if a hit manages to kill you, it's killing you, and with bigger numbers going in and out, your HP is going to spike up and down, in and out of that danger zone far, far, far more than a Paladins would. And if you're in that danger zone, you can very easily be finished off before a heal even comes in.

Warrior = Jumping in and out of the danger zone.
Paladin = Reducing the time it takes to hit that danger zone.

What I really feel like SE did was make it so that our smaller heals on our self would add up in the long run, but that just doesn't work. Sure every bit of healing you get can mean life or death, but in smaller portions like that, it's overridden so easily by life or death from every bit of damage you're taking. That 39 HP you just got back from Bloodbath isn't saving anyone. That 500+ from Inner Beast possibly could, but as I said, it's the better of the 3. And then Storms Path is just.. better than bloodbath, but it doesn't hit hard enough to make 50% of what you hit save you. Damage wise, it's the weakest of a Warriors 3 combo finishers.