war nerfs(srs bznz pls)

[Reynhart]

it'd be op for dark and pally to stance dance ogcd (sword oath should be ogcd though).

Why ? Would it suddenly make you chose a DRK or a PLD over a WAR ? "OP" is not just "Good" it's literally something that make all other choice weaker. Even if stance dancing was smooth for PLD and DRK, WAR would still have a lot up its sleeve

As far as the analogy, we're not talking about every other class, but the 2 other tanks.

Ok, so not better than every other car...but your truck can't be faster, better at off-road and consume less fuel than every other truck. Like I said, WAR's utility is so wide that you'll always lose something by not having them. It's not as if Storm's Eye only increase WAR's DPS, or Storm's Path only decreases DoT effect. They work every time, on every target and with a potential full uptime.

The same is true for its mitigation. DRK and PLD lose a lot when faced against the type of damage that doesn't fit them. WAR does not. And WAR is still on par with the other two even considering a PLD against physical damage and a DRK against magical damage. WAR is also the only whose mitigation skills offer an offensive bonus, thus making them useful even when not tanking.

Tell me, what does Shadow Wall have over Vengeance ? Same mitigation, lower duration, longer cooldown, and no offensive bonus...

[Launched]

The problem with WAR is that is has no tradeoff. You don't lose any meaningful utility by bringing a WAR over a PLD or a DRK.
Without a WAR, you lose Storm's Eye, which is a very powerful DPS increase for all tanks, and for Ninjas too. You lose Storm's Path, an on-demand raid wide 10% damage mitigation.
And I don't see how you could bring PLD and DRK on par with all of that at the same time. If you increase their DPS, you'd still Storm's Eye to buff it even more, if you increase the mitigation on RoH or Delirium, Storm's Path will still affect both pysical and magical, and stacks upon them...

So you give PLD and DRK their own useful abilities that every party would regret not bringing, instead of removing the ones WAR has. If PLD and DRK can both boost raid DPS in their own ways (e.g. PLD can buff someone with a single target "song", DRK has a raidwide Trick Attack/Wildfire with a longer cooldown) then you don't need to be boosting tank DPS with Storm's Eye. If they have their own raidwide mitigation/healing (PLD proccing a weak aoe heal every time they get hit, DRK absorbing damage meant for the party to hurt itself) they don't need to bring a WAR for Path/Deployment Tactics. Rotating Divine Veil > DRK mitigation could be more damage mitigated from the big raidwide aoes, while Divine Veil + Storm's Path would be consistent mitigation overall with DV kept for the hardest hitting aoe. All 3 tank combinations should be viable, and nerfing WAR's contribution won't make up for all the problems with the PLD+DRK combo.

In reality, you can't have a car that beats every other car in power and fuel consumption at the same time.

You can when all the other manufacturers are leaving the back wheels off their models.

[Aurius]

I did choose dark over war. I mained war until last december then switched and while i still run war sometimes, ive never considered switching back. I hope i dont sound like I'm being a jerk. Shadow wall is weaker than sentinel, and is not offensive like vengeance, but I think it's fine. I can use da dm shadow wall and da dam for magic busters, pally can do that with Shelton, warrior can make do as well with ib, but it's not better, it's all very similar.

[Aurius]

Accidentally hit post, fml. Stance dancing with instant mitigation is op. If a warrior used defiance, they need a heal to compensate the hp difference. If drk/pal use tank stance, instant mitigation is provided.

[ADVSS]

Accidentally hit post, fml. Stance dancing with instant mitigation is op. If a warrior used defiance, they need a heal to compensate the hp difference. If drk/pal use tank stance, instant mitigation is provided.

maybe all thats needed is if they do defiance a little more like thrill?(tack the difference on instantly) Id be down with that,give healers less of a stroke

[Reynhart]

All 3 tank combinations should be viable, and nerfing WAR's contribution won't make up for all the problems with the PLD+DRK combo.

All 3 combinations are viable. The only "problem" with DRK+PLD combo is that "WAR is better".

Up until now, any adjustment made for PLD and DRK only focused on personal DPS, probably because balancing raidwide DPS is really difficult for them.

What could be done is to have Slashing debuff, Physical Raidwide mitigation and Magical Raidwide mitigation, and you give each tank only two of them.

• PLD, Physical/Magical Mitigation
• WAR, Slashing debuff, Physical Mitigaiton
• DRK Slashing debuff, Magical Mitigation

So, for each pair of tanks, you always have those 3 effects available. But it means nerfing Storm's Path.

Accidentally hit post, fml. Stance dancing with instant mitigation is op. If a warrior used defiance, they need a heal to compensate the hp difference. If drk/pal use tank stance, instant mitigation is provided.

But if you use Defiance after surviving a big hit, your tank stance actually helps you recover faster. If you take a big hit in SwO, you can't reduce the impact afterwards. So you can pop Vengeance to mitigate damage while still in Deliverance, take the hit, then switch back to Defiance. And considering the very low CD on Equilibrium, make up for the missing HP without any issue.
And switching from one stance to another also keep all your stacks available.

[Launched]

What could be done is to have Slashing debuff, Physical Raidwide mitigation and Magical Raidwide mitigation, and you give each tank only two of them.

• PLD, Physical/Magical Mitigation
• WAR, Slashing debuff, Physical Mitigaiton
• DRK Slashing debuff, Magical Mitigation

So, for each pair of tanks, you always have those 3 effects available. But it means nerfing Storm's Path.

Changing the tanks by giving them all the same abilities is one of the worst and most boring ways they could fix balance.

[Launched]

All 3 combinations are viable. The only "problem" with DRK+PLD combo is that "WAR is better".

PLD+DRK is "viable" because you can clear all content with it, but it's nowhere near "good" because the two jobs are too similar in design. They both want to MT for procs, they're both selfish in DPS by not boosting anyone else, they both mitigate one kind of damage well (when you usually just want either physical or magical mitigation in a fight and not both). They have similar playstyles and cooldowns, and you don't actually gain a lot by going PLD+DRK over PLD+PLD or DRK+DRK.

Changing WAR isn't going to make PLD+DRK feel any more powerful or fun. PLD and DRK need the changes.

[Lyth]

"WAR isn't overpowered. It's just really, really well designed. We shouldn't nerf WAR, we should raise the other tanks up to the same level."

This seems to be a recurring sentiment amongst WARs in 3.0. The first time that I came across it was during the Mogtalk Warrior show featuring Xeno and Layla Bell, and the rhetoric seems to have caught on and become widespread since. WAR's "good design" is often touted through its skill synergy, in which every skill works well together, regardless of how you activate them. This is in contrast to a job like DRK, where activating two skills together incorrectly (i.e. BP and DADD or DADP) often places you at a severe disadvantage.

This is not the WAR that I remember. WAR was a job about trade-offs. You want to drop tank stance? It'll cost you all your Wrath stacks. You want to use Berserk? Take five seconds of pacification during which you can't swap or pick up adds. You used Holmgang? I hope you don't have to move for the next six seconds. If you didn't like having a penalty tied to your actions in 2.x, you gave up and played PLD.

WAR was at its pinnacle from 2.1 to 2.5. It attracted a lot of skilled players who pushed our understanding of how tanking worked. They taught us to study HP thresholds to take advantage of strength gear. They showed us how to stance dance and turn our mitigation into a weapon. There were still problems to be sure; if you wanted to play the "main tank" role in a fight people often expected you to play PLD. But it represented a high-risk, high-reward option for players craving a challenge while tanking. I loved it.

In its effort to try and balance the jobs, Heavensward changed all that. Jobs like PLD were given new combos to add complexity to their rotations and bring them up to speed. Meanwhile, WAR received a series of pure quality of life improvements. Deliverance let you keep your stacks. Wanderer's Paean negated pacification. RI gave you more tools to stay out of Defiance and made you less reliant on IB, in addition to building stacks. Then there was Equilibrium, which could either act as Invigorate or a 1200 potency instant self heal, whichever you happened to need at the moment. There were no trade-offs. It was childproof.

I used to love watching Xeno's 8 WAR clears back in ARR because there was always an element of attrition and a risk of wiping. While WARs had self-healing from SP and IB, everyone's HP gradually tracked downwards over the course of the fight, as they swapped to spread out the damage. In particular, Xeno's 8 WAR First Coil/Twintania video was epic, in that they cleared with two people left standing (one of whom had Holmgang up). Equilibrium trivialised all this. There's still technical skill involved from a dps perspective, but much of the charm has been lost. I can't bring myself to watch them anymore. The skilled playerbase still sticks around for old times' sakes, but the job just doesn't push them enough. It's such a waste.

I'm aware that people worry about nerfs and which jobs are viewed as optimal because it influences their raid desirability. But I would much rather be viewed as that one rare person who somehow manages to play a difficult job effectively, rather than be selected just because we need "a Warrior". I love that DRK is "poorly designed". I love that there are barriers to entry. I love DRK, and I would play it even if it was bad, but I'm not sure that I would play it if it were "easy". We inherited everything from WAR 2.x: the challenge, the hard choices, except that this time around, we actually got to do the lion's share of the tanking. I couldn't ask for more.

I don't envy you. I hope that you don't get nerfed. But I do hope, for your own sakes, that you get challenged. You deserve better.

[Aurius]

The extra healing helps make up for the increased health pool, and yes you can equilibrium to get some of it back but that plays into a well synergized class. If a war in deliverance has 20k hp and a paladin in shield oath has 20k, so the warrior switches to defiance for 20k hp out of 25k and they both get ready to take a 20k damage tank buster, then only the warrior will die without healing prior to the buster. Pally takes 16k, has 4k left, war takes 20k, dies. Obviously cds will be used, but if i can turn on an on demand cd without having to plan it, thats op. I dont want dark or pally to be warrior, i want them to be different, with more raid utility for dark, and more of the "holy" theme for pally.