Quote Originally Posted by Gamemako View Post
I explained in the text, but suppose I should be more explicit about it. I will try to improve that.
You did indeed, totally overlooked that paragraph. Well, it was late when I wrote that.


Armor values are not included because they are identical. They do reduce damage, but there is no difference between the two jobs. Same with evasion. Most bonuses are actually multiplicative -- for example, Shield Oath, Sentinel, and Rampart combine to reduce damage by 61.6%. If it were additive, the three would add up to 80% -- this does not appear to be the case. I could include that detail, but it's a horribly long post without going into extreme detail about mechanics.
Still, other mitigating factors are not trivial for the comparison, especially when you say things like "WAR is half the tank of PLD". Because if mitigation from armor is, say, 50% and mitigation is multiplicative, then PLD has a mitigation of 67%. WAR would fair much better than half against this. Thus, a relevant question is, how do differences in armor compare against the difference between PLD and WAR.
A corollary of this is, with increasingly better equip, the difference in mitigation may become less relevant. Of course, PLD will always have better mitigation, but that may very well be the purpose.


You are conflating the group's overall goal (defeat opponents) with an individual role. A healer heals. It may often be efficient for the group for the healer to also deal damage, but if the healer cannot fill the role of healing, then the group is doomed to failure. This is the same with tank. If the tank did no damage at all, that would still fill the tanking role. It's a bit like VIT: if you don't have enough, you lose by default; if you do have enough, then it's you're free put efforts elsewhere in hopes of winning. The problem is that WAR is either incapable of filling the role or requires far more resources to do so.
The individual role cannot be seperated from group goal. If a healer heals very well but the group doesn't have enough damage, the group, and therefore also the healer, will fail. Thus, a healer who does more damage is better than a healer who does less, provided they both heal enough to keep the group alive.
Of course, currently in the hardest content, survivability of the tank is much more in question than his damage, thus it's rational to bring the tank with the highest mitigation. Again, that may be PLD's purpose alone.

Er... parses?
I said reliable measures. Current parses are proven to be unreliable. Besides, some people claim, according to parses WAR does about 50% more damage than PLD while tanking. Others say the parses show little difference. So I say it's unconclusive.