The Bottom Feeders: Moves You Never Use and Why.

[Freyyy]

because I always felt squishier as a War than I did as a Pld way back when I was leveling it.

That's funny because it has always been the contrary to me. I always felt tankier as WAR than PLD, especially when levelling (tanking stance 10 levels earlier than PLD, incredible self-healing on AoE, Inner Beast and Storm's Path both before level 40 too). I levelled WAR in 2.1 tho. Didn't experience the 2.0 WAR myself, was originally PLD even if my starting class was MRD. Then, when I hit 50 with my WAR back in the 2.1 days, I didn't want to play PLD anymore. Even for MTing stuff, I always wanted to go on WAR because I was always feeling much much tankier in every single situation (while having a blast playing it). I have MTed every single 2.X fights as both WAR and PLD, and in every single one of them I was feeling tankier on WAR, even on T13 (IB for every Flare Breath, IB + big CD for every Flatten, PLD couldn't achieve anything near that level of mitigation). In 3.0, I feel even tankier than before on WAR with the addition of Equilibrium and Raw Intuition, but on PLD it feels like it didn't change at all except on fights like Thordan EX or A2S. On DRK I feel as tanky as on WAR, just a little bit less when taking heavy physical damage. WAR has always felt like the tankiest for me. It's not a new thing at all. People are just starting to realize this now because a third tank has been added to the game and literally kicked out PLD, WAR remaining because of tools he already had from two years before the expac.

[Februs]

That's funny because it has always been the contrary to me. I always felt tankier as WAR than PLD, especially when levelling

I'm not surprsied lol. You're not the first to have said this to me, but for me it was precisely the opposite.

I think the difference was that Pld felt incredibly controlled and precise to me. Everything was scripted. There is a strict formula that you can use for pretty much every single pull in the game (with minor tweaks here and there), and every single boss fight can be planned down to the very second for CD usage. If you rotated the Pld CD's accurately, there is literally never a time a Pld's doesn't have some kind of decent-strong mitigation up, and that's excluding their strongest CD's of Sentinel and Hallowed Ground which are easily saved for Tank busters. On top of that, the ability to borrow Stoneskin from Whm meant that extra mitigation was never an issue if it was needed. Dps checks weren't as obnoxious back then, so it was really no skin (see what I did there?) off of anyone's nuts for a Pld to take a couple seconds to buff themselves with SS mid fight in preparation for incoming Tankbusters/AoEs/Cleaves.

By comparison, War's needed a much keener eye to detail. Given that Wrath (outside of the use of Infuriate) was not an immediate "at the ready" use for Defense, and IB has a substantially smaller (and thus much tighter) timer, a small mistake in War's defensive line up could leave the Warrior in a world of hurt. Mismanaging your wrath stacks meant risking additional dmg during Tank busters. There was also the nature of War's mitigation. War spent a lot of time making back hp that they lost... meaning you had to take the hit first. In that regard, Tank busters were far more alarming to see on a War than on a Pld, because the Dip in Hp was greater (even though your hp bar itself was much larger). You still survived and made back your Hp fairly easily, but if you were used to completely mitigating dmg(Pld) over soaking it(War) and making it back, you felt decidedly squishier as War than you did as Pld (keep in mind that with certain Pld Cd combinations could essentially turn any Tank buster pre-3.0 into a tiny boss fart, especially if coupled with Stone Skin. Even Figths like T9 were no big deal for a Pld, because you could time your SS cast to go off right after Raven's beak and almost completely nullify the dmg caused by Raven's ascent, which most people considered notorious because it was magic). War was fun, obviously, but by comparison, Pld felt safer and more adaptable regardless of the situation.

To be fair though, I had some bad experiences with MRD back in 2.0 (during the Beta phase), and it felt incredibly broken. It left a bit of a stigma with me, so it took me a long time to come back to War when I got full copy of the game. I don't think I finally gave it another chance and finished leveling it until Leviathan came out in the "through the Maelstrom" patch. Since then, War has undergone even more improvements, which have made it into the seemingly flawless tank that it is today. By comparison, SE has given Pld almost no love at all, and that's kind of sad since Pld was an amazing asset once upon a time.