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

[Aana]

It's completely fair to compare 3 skills to 1 because that's exactly what makes Defiance so powerful as opposed to Shield oath and Grit. On its own, Defiance is just as balance as Shield oath and Grit (as it should be) but coupled with these very strong moves, Defiance is very clearly a more polished tank stance while Shield oath and Grit are just way weaker in comparison. 3 skills are better than one, as you mentioned.

Instead of 1 skill to 1 or 1 skill to 3. Look at how the entire kit works.

Yes it's easier for war to slide in and out of defiance. That's intentional. By design.

You cant compare tank stances in a vacuum. You can have easy tank stances on pld/drk too. All you have to do is lock TBN and Shell/intervention behind Grit/Shield oaths. Then you can be just like war and well even throw in sentinel down to 2 min. How many TBN can I use during that 3 min? More than enough to throw vengeance back 60 sec.

As long as TBN/Shell are not stance limited and IB is, then war will need to be able to access it. If war plays 'like' pld/drk in the optimal meta way (never leave offense stance for raids), then we have a problem. Optimal war play slides into defiance, uses unchained, still takes small damage penalties once per CD cycle just to have something up. Ignoring roles as they are the same, war has a 60 sec reduction on their 'big' CD and ToB. Those two skills combined are weaker than TBN/Shell. ToB is basically 1 TBN/Shell use every 2 min. 60 sec reduction on vengeance is 1 extra CD every 6 min over Pld/Drk. 1 CD per. That's 4 CDs every 6 min, or 1 CD every 1:30 on average. Whats the CD on Shell/TBN again? War's play pattern is designed around using defiance as a mitigation tool.

There is a reason War is so easy so move between. You want to make me pay half my gauge and a gcd to swap to defiance and reduce vengeance to 3 min? Sure, as long as you give me acces to IB all the time. Because at that point, I can play like drk/pld and not actually NEED to use tank stance in the 1st place.

The wall to access IB and lack of one for shell/TBN is the reason tank stances are the way they are. Applying the same stance rules to all 3 tanks will not work as long as this remains the case. Tanks aren't designed the same way. Copy pasting one tanks actions and putting it on another does not fix asymmetrically balanced tanks.