Halve mana on stance swap

[YitharV2]

Anyway, its a relevant topic. The consensus seems to be that DRK/PLD is going to be meta, but I really think WAR will be better simply because it deals more damage than DRK, has better personal mitigation, and TBN's 4K shield on the MT is really not as powerful a utility as people are making it out to be.

I think the argument that you lose "half your class" on the switch is a pretty big instance of hyperbole. You just trade abilities for other abilities. SE could word it like this and no one would bat an eye, observe:

Fell Cleave: 500 potency
Defiance potency: 350, ignores penalty and heals for a portion of the damage dealt while granting 20% mitigation for 6s

Decimate: 280 potency AoE
Defiance potency, 200, ignores penalty and grants increased enmity.

Unchained: Removes damage penalty of defiance
Deliverance effect: halves beast gauge cost and grants immunity to stun/sleep/ etc.

By all means debate with people in DRK threads about how WAR has it worse. Not gonna tell you what you can and can't do.

Well, I think it depends on mechanics. Because Living Dead does have its advantages over Holmgang, although Holmgang also has its advantages over Living Dead. However, I will concede that if WAR gives up all damage, WAR doesn't run out of CDs. Honestly, I think the passive mitigation system is kind of stupid, but that's just me wanting active mitigation. Then again, I guess Sheltron, IB and TBN are sort of active mitigation. But I digress. I look back to TERA and all tanks just had a block and a dodge (although one had a few more dodges). There was none of this "oh this one has more CDs so it's better". It was argued that Warrior was better because it had more dodges, which was true, but Lancer also had higher defense and thus would take less damage (plus dungeons were designed around only needing 1 dodge as a tank), but I'd say that was still far more balanced.

Hmm, "half your class" is probably bad wording. I would say Warrior loses some signature abilities tied to stance (and quite a bit of DPS when staying in Defiance; PLD loses the least if I remember correctly).

Now that you mention it, I actually would be for them making all stances be instant cast with a cooldown. My thinking as to why Inner Beast and Grit/Shield Oath are on the GCD is just that SE didn't want such strong mitigation to be instant cast with such a short CD. Again, I think SE's opinion is stupid because I've played TERA where tanks could mitigate 60k+ damage on demand. It would just cost a resource (Resolve) that was built up rapidly by attacking.