WAR's 2.1 changes.

[Lyth]

Pld has already gone through a (near) War level crisis, and it happened at the start of 3.21. The Dps checks of Gordias Savage and Bismark Extreme made it very clear that Pld was damn near unusable in that content. Raid groups were actually kicking Pld's out of the party until they were already over-geared, and PF's were specifying Role Requirements for Wars and Drks. The result was that people started to abandon the job wholesale. Even long time Pld's were forced to take up Drk or War just so they could stay active in the current content.

This isn't really how it happened. The world first clears of Bismark, Ravana, as well as A1S and A2S were all done with a PLD MT. Bear in mind that this was simply an extension of PLD spending the entirety of 2.x as the de facto MT. In contrast, there was a fairly widespread belief, in this forum included, that DRK had no place in the standard two-tank setup, and people were trying to play it like a sub-par WAR.

In a way, Gordias was necessary. Watching the world first clears of A3S and A4S occur with a non-PLD MT made the wider player-base start to experiment with their raid compositions, not just with DRK MTs, but with WAR MTs as well. This also freed up people who were required to play PLD as MT to switch out to tank classes that they genuinely wanted to play. It was a liberating moment.

HW made PLD more complex, and WAR less so. PLD has gone from one combo to juggling three, with more nuanced aggro and cooldown management and support skills. WAR, on the other hand, sticks to its pre-HW two combo rotation, and no new mechanics are added for the player to manage.

All of the changes post-HW simplify WAR. Deliverance allows you to stance dance without losing stacks, so you rarely have to "hold" stacks for defensive purposes. Even if you accidently hit a cooldown out of stance, you now gain stacks for them. Paeon alleviates the problems associated with mistiming berserk during add pick-up phases. Equilibrium is effectively two very powerful skills for the price of one. Press a button, any button, even incorrectly, and something awesome is still bound to happen. Such is the power of skill "synergy". The appeal is obvious.

Most of the "trade-offs" involved in playing WAR from 2.x have effectively been removed, and it is extremely rare now to end up backing yourself into a corner through mismanaging your resources, like you can on the other two tanks. Is it surprising, then, that some people swapped out from PLD? Challenge is good, if only to ensure that the people playing the job genuinely want to do so. It's better this way.