"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.