Do Warriors have any single disadvantage?

[Phoenicia]

People fail to realize that not all tanks are the same, and that balance should not be based around the top 1% meta. Balancing around the tip top is a bad move since they will always pick whats best, and there will always be a best. Always.

You are right. But even tip top raiders are people, they are prone to overlook things. I haven't watched the streams either, but I think I can safely assume that in As3, Lucrezia and Elysium did not try to make the WAR MT and PLD OT before kicking out the PLD and MNK and replacing them with DRK and NIN.

My point is that PLD isn't glaringly imbalanced. PLD's inherent disadvantage is that it does the lowest MT DPS as a price they pay for being the safest tank in the game. PLD has the most potent offensive stance of the three tanks at the price of lowest aggro generation out of tank stance. That is pretty balanced imo.

Now before people mistake this, Safest tank =/= highest mitigation. My post on page 9 shows that PLD has no clear advantage over WAR in mitigation and both WAR and PLD are far ahead DRK in physical and far behind DRK in magical environments.

If balance for PLD is supposed to be they are more defensive and that's why they have lower DPS, that's one thing. However, if PLD is only more defensive against physical damage (not magical) and then SE makes most of the threatening moves in a raid magical, then the PLD loses his intended advantage while keeping his weakness.

It would be similar if all of the raid content had heavy physical busters and didn't have stringent DPS checks, or didn't have stringent DPS checks that the MT could participate in for some reason. DRK would be all weakness, no strength in these situations.

As I said in my other posts, if PLD's advantage as MT is lost, just have it OT. Being so fixated on sticking PLD to the MT role is what is killing the paladin princesses out there. There are TWO other tanks in this game that do a better job in a certain fight. That is fine as that is the point of having different classes. Some classes have to be better than others at something. There is no need for PLD to level DRK or even switch to anything else.

Taking A4 as an example (As it is the only fight in the game where Shield is totally neglected when PLD main tanks), that fight has adds and quarantine, PLD SwO DPS is not far behind WAR and DRK, PLD OT utility is great with Clemency. Just switch your WAR (Since he's in every raid group, right?) to MT and let the PLD OT that one fight! Guess what happens? MAGIC!

WAR MT does far more DPS than PLD MT. The combination of WAR MT / PLD OT has overall more raid DPS than PLD MT / WAR OT specially if WAR stance dances. With roughly 1 minute intervals between busters, that's plenty of time in Deliverance!