Paladin is the better tank, but Warrior is the better class

[Steeled]

My perception on Paladin vs Warrior

Cross class abilities

Paladin's choices are non-choices. If you've leveled both your subs (WHM and MRD), then you should have Bloodbath, Foresight and Stoneskin equipped. Mercy Stroke is good too, but the last is really up to you (Cure, Raise, Protect (for soloing I guess))

Paladin, the mitigation tank, gets 2/3 warrior's cooldowns and there's no sacrifice to take them.

Warrior has too many hard to make choices from GLA and MNK. Warrior needs its own Provoke, simply because Provoke is mandatory, it's a non-choice. You can die, something new can come in. Someone can burst early, or you can just be out-hated. You want to make sure Provoke is on your bars.

You want to have flash, because of the radial nature of the ability and the precious half-second that lining things up for overpower can take.

The remaining choices come down to Convalescence, Second Wind, Featherfoot, Awareness, Mantra. As my monk doesn't have Mantra yet, and perhaps even if it did, I chose Conv, Awareness, and Featherfoot.

Style of play

I'm a Paladin main. I love the universal lore of paladin, since it's common across most games. The Holy Crusader, the bringer of justice. I have played a paladin in most games (WoW, XI, XIV) and others. I'm not knocking paladin out of some spite. Not at all.

Warrior gameplay is more fun than Paladin. I have my threat rotation, which is not so different from Paladin's, but I also have a damaging rotation that I'm fond of mixing in, because it increases my DPS, and I think it's a boon to my TPS.

Heavy Swing, Skull Sunder, Butcher's Block is war's version of the RoH combo.
Heavy Swing, Maim (Increases damage dealt by 20%), Storm's Eye (decrease's target's slashing resistance by 10% and healing received by 50%)
Heavy Swing, Mam, Storm's Path (Heals for 50% of the damage done, which is pretty negligible)

Warrior's Stun is also free and off the GCD (30s cooldown), which makes stunning on warrior more fun. On stun immune mobs, you can mix it in freely for more dps.

With 5 stacks of Wrath, Warrior can pop Unchained, a 3 minute CD, for more damage, and thus hate, and also having Berserk available to them at half the cooldown, they can do a lot of damage, and thus hate, in a very short window. Warrior is certainly more fun to play WITH defiance than without.

I would hope that Berserk's Pacified effect is taken away. Part of being a tank is reacting to the situation now, and it is silly to be locked out of offensive abilties for 5 seconds, when those are the wrong 5 seconds. Perhaps change the penalty somehow, or remove it. Honestly the dps/tps difference between War and Pld is not a concern as long as it's a tank that has hate.

I would hope that in the future, SE gives Warrior some more mitigation ability, its own Taunt, and takes some cues from Warrior on how to further develop Paladin. I still prefer my paladin but primarily because I believe it's more effective than my warrior. I feel like I have a better toolkit to handle situations. I don't want to see that taken from Paladin, but rather given to Warrior.

Being able to do "so much" damage as a tank is fun, but at what expense? You could never make white mage a better healer than scholar merely because scholar can do more damage. Monk has 3 solid defensive cooldowns, but that's no reason, none at all, to make Dragoon a better dps. An equally geared Monk and Dragoon should be able to dps about on par with each other, tanks should expect the same.

Also, please, alter Hallowed Ground. I use the ability and I love it, but it's OP. In many situations, it's equivalent to free benediction, something that Warrior has no answer to. Alternatively, design an ability for Warrior that "most" (same limitations as HG) incoming damage heals the warrior, rather than hurts him, for 5 seconds. I say 5 seconds because if both tanks popped these at 10% health and got no outside help, the warrior would have more health than he started with, the paladin would end at the same 10% health.

[Garnatian]

WAR is just a confused job. It can't decide whether it wants to be a DPS or a Tank.

I think you give WAR too much credit. They have far too many lacklustre abilities such as:

• Steel Cyclone
• Unchained
• Mercy Stroke
• Storm's Path

while PLD has one incredibly lacklustre abiliy:

• Shield Swipe

The whole Wrath mechanic is just a mess as well. You never want to lose Wrath stacks, but you have so many abilities that remove them, which just leads to you waiting until Infuriate is off CD and even then the only ability worth using is Inner Beast and what's worse is that Inner Beast is on the GCD when it's supposed to be a reactive skill.

I would hope that Berserk's Pacified effect is taken away. Part of being a tank is reacting to the situation now, and it is silly to be locked out of offensive abilties for 5 seconds, when those are the wrong 5 seconds. Perhaps change the penalty somehow, or remove it. Honestly the dps/tps difference between War and Pld is not a concern as long as it's a tank that has hate.

You should only really use Beserk to get a better IB and you should only use IB once every 60s unless you have absolutely no choice, so that Pacification isn't really relevant.

[Kosmos992k]

while PLD has one incredibly lacklustre abiliy:

• Shield Swipe

Um, how is shield swipe lackluster?

Only 40tp, doesn't break your chain, does an attack of 210 potency, pacification cancels many attacks. How is that lack luster? it's almost a free attack with the low cost.

[MBTL90]

Um, how is shield swipe lackluster?

Only 40tp, doesn't break your chain, does an attack of 210 potency, pacification cancels many attacks. How is that lack luster? it's almost a free attack with the low cost.

Pacifism doesn't work on a large majority of bosses, and it provides significantly less threat than halone combo steps. It is useful to conserve tp once threat is established, but otherwise you should be spamming halone. Now if it was off gcd...

[GeilLega]

This. You aren't trying to DPS, you're trying to build hate, and it doesn't do that effectively. Some bosses are very affected by pacification but most fully resist. It's just a GCD worth of time that you're falling behind in raising the hate ceiling.

[Kosmos992k]

both who replied mentioned bosses, I fully understand the place a Paladin has in a boss fight, but that is not the only kind of fight and a 40tp attack with potency 210 and a status effect is neither lackluster nor a waste - imho. It's an attack that conserves TP, maintains your RoH combo while reducing the threat posed by at least one of the enemy that you are holding hate on.

[Garnatian]

Um, how is shield swipe lackluster?

Only 40tp, doesn't break your chain, does an attack of 210 potency, pacification cancels many attacks. How is that lack luster? it's almost a free attack with the low cost.

Flash is better. More TP regeneration, more threat.

You should be using Flash every time you're capped on MP in boss fights you feel TP is going to become an issue. I'm sorry to tell you, but the only benefit Shield Swipe presents is a net-gain in DPS, and even then, it's incredibly small compared to just the 3-combo.

[Fuuljo]

WAR is just a confused job. It can't decide whether it wants to be a DPS or a Tank.

One could argue that a tank is just a dps class that sacrifices power for defense. There isn't much fundamental difference between a dps and a tank quite like there is between a healer and everything else. If not for enmity multipliers on individual skills you'd want to be doing the most dps you could.

I would hope that Berserk's Pacified effect is taken away.

I don't, it's an interesting mechanic and draw back to a powerful ability. The better option would be to give MRD/WAR something they can do while pacified, like Flash. Perhaps shouting angrily or flailing your arms in an aggressive manner. That said, you can effectively do that already with Flash and Provoke even while pacified.

Also, please, alter Hallowed Ground. I use the ability and I love it, but it's OP. In many situations, it's equivalent to free benediction, something that Warrior has no answer to. Alternatively, design an ability for Warrior that "most" (same limitations as HG) incoming damage heals the warrior, rather than hurts him, for 5 seconds. I say 5 seconds because if both tanks popped these at 10% health and got no outside help, the warrior would have more health than he started with, the paladin would end at the same 10% health.

Unfortunately the tank class design is ass backwards at the minute. Warriors take more damage passively and have little active mitigation to show for it, Paladins have the better passive and active mitigation. Lowering the effectiveness of one class is a good way to make another seem more appealing but it generally garners negative feedback. Of course playing power level hot potato with classes just causes a power creep, which is potentially even worse.

At least Warriors will always look the coolest.

[Steeled]

Never ever use Awareness. Because boss skills don't crit only melee attacks crit for at most 1,000dmg. And there is a hidden bug on Awareness (TESTED) it prevents all incoming heals from being criticals. So you are pretty much left to use Featherfoot, Provoke, Internal Release, Convalescence and Second Wind. Mantra is only +5% area healing and has too long a CD. If Awareness didn't have the heal crit prevention bug I would have taken it over Second Wind.

Interesting. I'll check this out.

This. You aren't trying to DPS, you're trying to build hate, and it doesn't do that effectively. Some bosses are very affected by pacification but most fully resist. It's just a GCD worth of time that you're falling behind in raising the hate ceiling.

We're all trying to dps, that's why we weave in circle of scorns on single target. Not to mention, Swipe allows us to stay flush on TP easier, and that's important for when something else comes into play.

A Warrior in the same gear will have 25% more hitpoints than a Paladin. That is the entire point of Defiance. A 5,000hp Paladin is comparable to a 6,250hp Warrior. A 7,000hp PLD would have 8,750hp as a WAR, assuming the same gear. It is slightly more due to WAR having slightly higher base VIT... and then it will be slightly lower, because you're not gearing the same as a PLD... are you?

And yet, I feel safer on my 5.5 Paladin than I do on my 6800 Warrior. I mean, I know you're saying what se's stance is, but I'd rather be on paladin.

But to give credit to those who dislike Shield Swipe, I too personally feel that a system where the ability would be off the GCD and with recast timer of for example 6 - 10 seconds wouldn't be bad. It would add interaction to the actions and also serve as special move interrupting ability (which, yes, the pacification actually does), with the same pre-requirement of successfully blocking an attack (which again contributes somewhat to clever use of Bulwark)

-Me

This, this, this. I've wanted this for a while. We all know we'd bury it in our Halone macro, but it would be great. Off the GCD, however, it's no longer a gain in TP, but whatever.

Under normal circumstances Paladin will not be TP starved unless he overspams Shield Lob, Riot Blade or unless the fight spans through a time of 15 minutes of continuous back to back GCD usage.

Yes it is true that warrior does more DPS than Paladin, but more threat? No, cause he has to maintain Maim, SE combo which do not have Enmity increase. Maim only buffs the warrior, and only Paladins and Warriors benefit from SE debuff.

He does "more threat" because he can do more threat. A warrior having trouble with threat will seldom switch out of Butcher's Block and walk away from a paladin in the same gear having the same trouble with threat. He also has Unchained to pop early in the fight to get a strong hate lead. (Paladin has Fight or Flight, a smaller gain, but no resource cost. Warrior has Berserk, A larger gain with, strategically placed, little resource cost)

Warrior is not the better class, warrior isn't the harder class. It is just an undertuned class, refuse to believe it is as much as believing Santa Clause will fill your socks instead of your parents.

No, Warrior is better designed, and harder. Sorry, Paladin can get away with 3 buttons on single target, but warrior can and should do so much more, because that extra dps contributes to more self healing. It is flawed in its design though, because it simply does not tank as well is a paladin.

Flash is better. More TP regeneration, more threat.

You should be using Flash every time you're capped on MP in boss fights you feel TP is going to become an issue. I'm sorry to tell you, but the only benefit Shield Swipe presents is a net-gain in DPS, and even then, it's incredibly small compared to just the 3-combo.

Small compared to Halone, but a gain on TP, and huge compared to Flash. Save Flash for things like Mountain buster, or when the OT has an add on garuda.

At least Warriors will always look the coolest.

Them are fighting words! I'm literally a white knight! You may be able to hit harder than me, but we both know I can mitigate your damage better!

[Kitru]

I don't, it's an interesting mechanic and draw back to a powerful ability.

The problem with the drawback on Berserk is that Berserk really isn't strong enough to justify a drawback if you're looking at all CDs as if they're supposed to be balanced. Since it increases attack power rather than damage outright, it's closer to a 40% increase in damage dealt for the duration than the 50% that a lot of people say it is. On top of that, the Pacification neuters the practical value of Berserk: you're doing 140% total damage for a time and then spend a quarter of the time you were buffed doing only 25% of your total damage (you only get autoattacks, which make up slightly more than 25% of total DPS). That ends up being a total of an average 12% damage buff over the 25 seconds that Berserk is affecting you. Compare that to Fight or Flight which is straight up 30% for 30 seconds on the exact same CD: FoF provides more than double the increase in damage and lasts 20% longer on top of it. Over time, thanks to the Pacification, Berserk provides you with a whopping 3.33% increase to total DPS. Fight or Flight provides a 10% increase. Cross-class Blood for Blood provides 5% (20 * 20 / 80). Berserk provides as much as a Bard's Raging Strikes, which is its second weakest CD *out of the 5 that it gets*.

Berserk is weak as hell. It is nowhere *near* as strong as some people think it is. It lets you flash big numbers, but it doesn't actually add all that much over time. As a CD, it's pretty terrible, especially given the fact that it's a unique CD that is improved by a trait.

If the Pacification on it were removed, it would be stronger (8.88% over time) but still weaker than Fight or Flight.

Of course, I don't really think that Berserk needs to be fixed or change much. WAR and PLD damage/enmity is *really* well balanced so it doesn't really matter that Berserk sucks noodles compared to Fight or Flight because WAR doesn't *need* a CD like FoF to do its job. People just need to realize that Berserk is pretty low on the spectrum of relative CD strength.