Warriors Thoughts

[Vyrerus]

ARR had two tank spots

I know this post is almost two weeks old, but man, gotta disagree. ARR had two tank spots for PLD x2 until 2.1. Then people started bringing WARs seriously, before that if you were a WAR then you were benefitting from tokenism/people's desire for diversity (or a PLD's desire for e-peen). After 2.1 it goes as you said, but WAR still didn't cement in for a lot of people due to a lot of folks being unwillingly to drop Defiance, ever. Not too mention the majority of healers not wanting to heal you if you dropped it, thinking you'd committed a deadly sin.

HW had two tanks spots, and those spots were for DRK and WAR. PLD didn't get a fight that was good for it in reality until Thordan Extreme. Even then its low damage made more serious types frown it down still. Due to the magical damage tethers in A3S it would run out of CDs. It also didn't leverage enough damage, particularly in early weeks. Whereas Inner Beast was a godsend in that fight. My group did it PLD/WAR when we finally cleared, and I wound up having to catch pretty much every tether in the final 3 tornado phases with Inner Beast. Of course, my co-tank was pretty bad so... that's also a factor.

The addition of Deliverance and Fell Cleave was supposed to guide all tank players into realizing they were supposed to drop tank stance when OTing, a the very least, and it more or less worked by being enforced by visibility. It showed you what the tank was doing when Defiance went off. Only, nothing in the game leans on teaching concepts to players, so we got a bunch of non-tanks crying foul. As for that minute opener thing, that was a whole thing with SMN and SCH and aetherflow too, and it certainly didn't eclipse that.

I don't miss that, constantly having to debate non-tanks about how to play my job, but I do miss my jobs being more involved with more combos and oGCDs. I also miss that little exploit where Raw Intuition caused heals to 100% crit from behind too, guarantee that Adlo. Can't remember when that got patched.

Maim -> 10%

Maim buff was 20% dmg buff.

[Absurdity]

HW had two tanks spots, and those spots were for DRK and WAR. PLD didn't get a fight that was good for it in reality until Thordan Extreme. Even then its low damage made more serious types frown it down still. Due to the magical damage tethers in A3S it would run out of CDs. It also didn't leverage enough damage, particularly in early weeks. Whereas Inner Beast was a godsend in that fight. My group did it PLD/WAR when we finally cleared, and I wound up having to catch pretty much every tether in the final 3 tornado phases with Inner Beast. Of course, my co-tank was pretty bad so... that's also a factor.

PLD really got the short end of the stick in HW, both it's own and the encounter design worked against it. One of PLD's major features, the ability to block, didn't work on magic which made Shelltron and Bulwark completely useless in most fights since they dealt mostly magic damage. On top of PLD's low dps it made tank swaps extremely awkward because for some reason it's Halone's combo included Riot Blade for MP regen and Royal combo included Savage Blade, having all your combos include an enmity generator wasn't exactly great design.

[Sqwall]

PLD really got the short end of the stick in HW, both it's own and the encounter design worked against it. One of PLD's major features, the ability to block, didn't work on magic which made Shelltron and Bulwark completely useless in most fights since they dealt mostly magic damage. On top of PLD's low dps it made tank swaps extremely awkward because for some reason it's Halone's combo included Riot Blade for MP regen and Royal combo included Savage Blade, having all your combos include an enmity generator wasn't exactly great design.

I agree here about PLD getting the short end of the stick here. For me personally I liked the whole block to gain oath, but at the same time I felt it was lackluster and executed wrong. The current iteration of PLD gaining oath on auto attacks is much better, but it pretty much undermines the whole blocking mechanic. Now I still like the idea to block and reduce damage, but it's much more on demand now. Ugh this is hard since I would rather go back to a block rate vs. block strength. Let me choose how to increase my block chance which we were able to do in HW to boost our oath gains. IDK...I'm ranting now. Now I do feel that we are in a great spot now moving forward after Shadowbringers. I'm confident that the job mechanics are going to be improved upon further for more interesting combat interaction.