Quote Originally Posted by Phoenicia View Post
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A PLD will always deal less damage than a DRK or WAR given the same environment.

The extra DPS is always helpful.

A PLD will only situationally have better survivability than a DRK or WAR.

Of those situations, only a handful actually matter. And when I say matter, I mean that it actually changes how they need to be healed to a significant degree.

Notice the imbalance here?

If PLDs were ALWAYS the best tank for survivability in any situation, then fine. That's an actual trade-off. They aren't.

Also, like I said, the tanking meta is what it is. That PLD has more survivability doesn't matter because once it is beyond a certain threshold, it is dropped for more DPS anyways.

As for every class needing others to carry them, let's use the parse you cling to for dear life as an example.

WAR requires nothing.

PLD / DRK requires a dedicated TP bot and someone to keep the slashing debuff up.

Nevermind the blatantly obvious flaws in how it's a dummy parse of pure DPS which is completely disconnected from PLD MTing. Also disregard the fact that people love to claim PLDs have higher overall mitigation and comparable DPS but fail to mention that a PLD needs to stay in Sword Oath to achieve said DPS so they won't have higher overall eHP. Swap back to Shield Oath at the appropriate times you say? Well have fun breaking your combos, losing GCDs, and gimping your DPS for that duration. Nobody has posted a real comparison of their DPS in actual live environments. But, we have multiple top progression groups dropping PLDs because they just didn't do enough. Think about that.

Raiding is a team experience, obviously. But, what we're looking at is different amounts of carry. The reality is WARs and DRKs in the current end-game don't require drastically different healing than a PLD. Ask the groups that have switched. It's not like because they're using a DRK instead of a PLD, their SCH is now stuck full-time healing. No. Their SCH is still full-time DPSing during light damage phases outside of spot support and support healing when the damage starts ramping up. So in the end, you have negligible differences in actual healing with real differences in DPS.

Next, design. Skill trees can offer variety when it's used to give the same class different roles. But, within those roles, there is very little variety at the highest level. I stopped playing WoW shortly before WotLK. I was in a guild that was consistently alliance first or second for all major kills on one of the largest PvP servers. The only reason we weren't server first was the horde first guild was a top 10 guild in the world. Back when I played, there was 1 tanking build, 1 DPS build, and 1 PvP build for Warrior. Maybe years later, Blizzard would find better luck with their skill balance, but there were obvious imbalances through stretches of WoW's history that lead to cookie-cutter talent builds that robbed players of their choices. To deny the existence of imbalances during a game's infancy is unbelievably stupid. Balance is something you work towards and something very hard to achieve. Last I checked, HW is still pretty new and yet you'll have some obviously biased voices clinging to the idea that everything is fine.