After 1 (arguably 2) expansions what is square trying to achieve with WAR (and PLD)?

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Warrior has all that healing in it's basic toolkit, so it doesn't need any of it.
It would just create a failstate that Holmgang doesn't have.

A failstate frankly speaking irrelevant in virtually all practical scenarios, thanks to the massive healing potency by Living Dead, you need to basically be asleep to fail the healcheck or use it with no target around.

In most relevant content DRK competes on having powerful mitigation at basically any time with Dark Mind + Oblation on 60s and TBN on 15s and as long as the damage taken over an extended period remains as low as it does in most fights then a lot of healing from Warrior is basically just excess, unnecessary.

Sure Warrior's mitigation is still powerful and the sustain is second to none, but Living Dead having a fail state and the healing being part of the invuln rather than external buttons is not a bad thing, let alone one as bad as many pretend it to be.

[Lyth]

The single most important factor in mitigation is recast. This becomes especially important for invulns because they allow you to skip tankbusters and in some cases bypass entire mechanics. Because there's a three minute discrepancy between the shortest and longest invuln recast, your tank composition can completely change the way that you swap through a fight. That's a fairly longstanding balance issue.

The only justification for Holmgang's recast was the fact that it historically had a 6 second duration, which rendered the cooldown usage more difficult on certain tankbusters (i.e. A8S Final Punch/Apocalypse/Beam), and even then it was widely considered to be the most powerful defensive in the game. Despite this, the action was systemically buffed from 5.1 to 6.0 for no reason at all during which time it gained an additional 4 seconds in duration. That's the only reason why we were able to get a fix on Living Dead after 8 years, and even then only because about 10% of the questions submitted for the March 2022 Q+A were complaints about Living Dead and the balance discrepancies that the dev team had needlessly created by buffing Holmgang. But that still doesn't address the global inbalance around tank invulns.

In practice, I think that all tank invulns should all be within 60 seconds recast of each other (and ideally, either the fight design should force you to burn through them faster, or their recasts should be adjusted so that they are less available). If that means adjusting the drawbacks, that's fine. But they do need to take a second look at the invulns and make some significant changes.

[Aravell]

While I do agree that WAR is beyond broken in dungeons and do need some tuning, I wouldn't agree that they're superior in all forms of content.

In Thordan (Unreal), a good DRK MT is really good because they can zero out a lot of the untelegraphed cleaves with TBN and Oblation. DRK was also very valuable in P6S and P7S because they could kitchen sink the stack tankbusters and take barely any DoT damage, even during week 1.

Sure, you could argue a WAR could heal through all of that as well, but most WARs I've seen in PF don't, they just hit BW on busters and expect to be invincible, then the DoT chews through them faster than Equilibrium can heal through.

[AmiableApkallu]

In Thordan (Unreal), a good DRK MT is really good because they can zero out a lot of the untelegraphed cleaves with TBN and Oblation.

lmao.

For what it's worth, when I run Thordan (Unreal) with the FC, the MT is a DRK, the OT is a WAR, and I've never heard the healers complain. Or rather, the healers complain about poor old me, the DNC/SMN that fails mechanics.

[Jeeqbit]

I agree that a really good DRK is really good. I've healed DRKs this expansion that I virtually didn't need to heal at all. I can relate to that as well because I used to be that DRK in Shadowbringers.

I like differences like that. That's why it disappoints me for WAR to get a partial TBN of its own. Achieving things in different ways at least is a way to differentiate them.

[MisterNublet]

Unless my eyes deceived me, but it looked like Warrior got Paladin's Cover in the benchmark trailer.

[Supersnow845]

The benchmark trailer really isn’t doing wonder for my hopes for healers

Honestly looked like new lily spell, AOE chain, dosis 4/potential new attack and another star themed heal

[rawker]

Oh look at the benchmark video... WAR looks like it has better Cover than PLD.

[Absurdity]

Oh look at the benchmark video... WAR looks like it has better Cover than PLD.

Hard to say at this point. It looks like a dash to the target to absorb a hit, could be a single hit like old Shelltron or multiple like Cover. Or it could be something like Passage that covers everything behind the Warrior.

Also not entirely sure if it's gonna be part of Warrior's kit or something specific to just that NPC since Trusts usually have different actions than our jobs.

Either way it's not exactly the most imaginative of new abilities.

Also not like we really need more mitigation, another one just seems excessive because they're certainly not gonna increase incoming damage.

[Oizen]

Damn we got to see the new Dark Knight OGCD that will do 600 potency of damage and nothing else.