Paladin too overpowered, nerf their damage output!

[Lyth]

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Hi there. Not sure what's got you riled up, but leave the ad homs and weasel words out of it. I'll happily debate you on the content of your arguments, rather than the rhetorical fluff.

The mobility on Plunge is pretty important. The average GCD on DRK is worth 280 potency under Darkside (327 when you factor in resource gains) compared to 240 potency on Plunge. So you have to trade off the cost of a lost GCD against the cost of potentially losing a recast on Plunge (Total casts = fight duration/recast is what matters at the end of the day.) You're certainly going to hold Plunge if there's a knockback in the next few seconds, unless you like leisurely rp-walking back to the boss. With regards to Tempered Will, while it was a finicky action that didn't always work when you expected it to, part of optimisation involved testing it out and seeing where you could put it to good use. It wasn't always on non-raid content, either; you could use it to good effect on A6S, A8S and A10S. Either way, knockback negation is pretty important for improving uptime.

Also, did you really just try to claim that a gap closer shouldn't be used as a gap closer?

Sprint is important too, but it's on a longer recast, gets you back slower, and is equally important as a gap extender. When you have arena-length knockbacks like Vacuum Wave, it's generally preferable to prevent the knockback than it is to jog back to the boss.

The thing with IR is that, like any buff window, you should be planning where it occurs. The argument that "IR interferes with mechanics where you need to be knocked back" doesn't really make any sense because you're not going to pop your big 2 minute cooldown on a section where you're expected to be losing uptime the boss. Why on earth would you pop it in the middle of Long Drop when you're going to be knocked away from the boss for 5 out of those 20 seconds? Likewise, if there's a knockback in a section of the fight that you are expected to negate, you can always try to sync your IR window with it and dps away. This type of thinking isn't new to WAR; it was actually commonplace in HW when at one to two of your defensive cooldowns were tied to your zerk rotation, so you'd try to take advantage of the fact when planning your mitigation cooldowns.

It's easy to say "X is not utility, it has disadvantages", but you have to remember that there are better players out there at the same time thinking "X is utility, let me see how I can take advantage of this to maximise my uptime and dps".

Invigorate was 400 TP every 2 minutes as cross-class, vs. Equilibrium's 200 TP every 1 minute. It works out to be the same. The big self-heals both have opportunity costs associated with them. That doesn't change the fact that you still have access to them. Utility doesn't stop being utility when you aren't using it.

With regards to WAR's mitigation, IB isn't really the issue (it's really just there for prog as your "on demand" cooldown). If IB was mandatory, it would be one thing. But WAR has had the largest number of cooldowns on the shortest recasts since HW. This is even moreso now, since WAR gained access to Rampart and since IR/Veng have been uncoupled from zerk. There's actually a lot of defensive cooldown bloat that has happened over the years. I'm all for the "buff the other jobs up to the same level", but there comes a point where you just need to start trimming out the surplus of cooldowns.

You can cherry-pick parses if you like, but max values change fairly dramatically on a nearly daily basis simply because people are still collecting drops. You actually won't get a good sense of what the max is like for a few weeks. My own preference is to look at all the results, as I've done here: Link. Actually, if you look at the fights and the dps patterns of the three tanks, you can make a lot of sense out of it. WAR has a relatively lower sustained dps with very powerful burst. PLD has a high sustained dps with a relatively weaker burst. Losing a GCD outside of a buff window, on average, is a bigger dps on PLD. So when you look at the more optimised results, PLD will edge out WAR on high uptime fights when played near perfectly, while WAR will generally do better everywhere else as long as you don't pop IR-zerk at a silly point in the fights (like Long Drop).

DRK's problem is that while it represents a middle ground in combo potencies and sustained dps, the burst windows are where they fall behind. This points to more of an issue with Delirium and resource generation on DRK than anything else.

I think the biggest issue with "utility" is that most people don't really know what they want. They see another tank with a cool toy and decide that they really, really want it, more because they don't want to fall behind, than out of any real understanding of how they would optimise their play with it. The existing utility on the jobs goes disregarded, because people don't know how to push the limits of what they have: "Onslaught is bad", "IR's knockback negation is bad", "Equilibrium is situational/stance locked", etc. Either that, or a miscellaneous toy on one job gets used to justify a dps or mitigation advantage on another.

It's not the WAR job that's bad. If only we could buff the players.