It's about time Shield oath and Grit become Abilities instead of Spells. (off-GCD)

[whiskeybravo]

They can eliminate damage penalty once every 90 seconds, sure. It's exactly what players begged for for months at SB release, unbinding IR and Unchained, but now it's too OP? Adds a bit of jealousy to the tone of your comment. We've only had the skill for 5 years, I guess it's time to make it a useless button again

Consider this: Pld and Drk are given a skill that eliminates damage penalty for 15 seconds. Does that fix your problem with Pld/Drk stance dancing? No? Then this is not really the source for complaint. Unchained is a minimally used skill even with the change. Once on pull and maybe 1 or 2 times throughout a fight if you have to turn on Defiance for some reason. Since I main War and raid with a fairly casual group, there are plenty of times when I find myself needing to swap to Defiance to survive. I can tell you first hand Unchained is not up as much as you seem to think it is. And whether Unchained is up or not I still switch back to Deliverance as soon as I can. You can't act like it's a game breaking cooldown.

Same for Equilibrium. That 200 TP is soooooooo OP in Deliverance.. At least Clemency and TBN are usable without having to be in tank stance. Again, it's another practically useless skill outside of Defiance.

So, if you want to say Defiance + 2 additional abilities are > Shield Oath or Grit. Fine, I'll concede, 3 abilities are obviously better than only 1. But it's not fair to compare multiple parts of a kit to only 1 part of another. That's all I'm saying.

EDIT to your Edit :P Equilibrium does not heal for more than the 25% HP unless you get lucky with a crit, base heal is around 14k. Again, you have to use 2 abilities to mimic the effect of one, yet somehow the former is too strong. As for lost GCD/DPS, I already stated I could see them changing one or the other - mp cost or GCD - but I think both would be too strong (at least for PLD) UNLESS they are going to add a recast similar to Defiance so you can't just freely pop in and out when you feel like it.

But more than anything, this topic perplexes me when the meta is to use tank stance as little as possible, but now we need to some how make them more accessible because those 1 or 2 GCDs are really hurting my logs man..