Why Nobody Plays Warrior

[NaoKith]

WAR sucks started with BCoB when Inner Beast only had a 3x dmg heal attached to it (no mitigation) and they were getting whomped by death sentence constantly, 2 PLD was the main group composition for the mid-core groups in BCoB progression. Oh yeah and Vengeance didn't have mitigation attached to it, and all Holmgang did was stick the mob to you, it did not save you from death. Also, Defiance only granted its healing bonus based on the amount of stacks of wrath you were holding, so using IB/SC/Unchained was dangerous. Everything was changed to how we know it now in patch 2.1 I believe.

Thank you, I am relatively new to MMO raiding (starting with T5 > T9, now working on the T13 clear) and this explains a lot of where the stigma seems to come from. I don't understand why it still persists, though.

If only we had an in-game parser you would see how truly truly bad some DPS are at their jobs, but right now its hard to tell : D

The fact that tank mistakes frequently result in a wipe and DPS mistakes are largely invisible is a large part of the problem. Although if you compare the frustration of mechanics like divebombs to tank swaps, I can understand why SE designs around the competency of two players rather than eight ...

WAR's actually have to plan further ahead for their mitigation than PLD's do, ask any progression WAR and they can probably tell you when they need to start building wrath to mitigate an attack when they are MTing, or when they need to switch back on defiance to be able to infuriate to mitigate an attack. All a PLD has to do is go, "Oh shit! Critical Rip... Rampart! I choose you!"

As an experiment in overall effectiveness, I had the opportunity to tank T9 as both a WAR and a PLD a few weeks ago with the same group. We were mostly concerned that Ravensbeak wasn't being mitigated too well as a WAR, so I switched to PLD. The mitigation was exactly the same.

The major result of this experiment, for me, was that I noticed how much more fun I was having as a PLD without the stress of predicting attacks and working with the GCD.