Quote Originally Posted by aerolol View Post
so in theory Storm's Path is better than Rage of Halone.
Not in theory. Universally. Rage of Halone is something like a 7% decrease in physical damage dealt (STR and attack power are linked) whereas SP is a 10% reduction in *all* damage dealt. SP reduces more physical damage while also reducing magical damage.

[quote]the other 2 are debuffs which should be up all the time, specially Storm's Path.[/quoite]

SP should always be up, but SE doesn't necessarily. The only way to maintain both 100% of the time is via the SE>SP rotation, which is *not* going to keep decent DPS from pulling aggro (at least on its own; if you do the uber-enmity attack string every 2 minutes when you have your CDs up, you can get away with SE>SP the rest of the time). Most of the time, a tank will be doing BB>BB>SP or BB>SP since it maintains the more important debuff while generating enough enmity to keep you ahead of the DPS. BB>SE>SP is another variant, but I'm not fond of it because it doesn't have 100% uptime on SP.

The PLD dmg mitigation and WAR increased HP and cure potency even out.
No, they don't. PLD is a 20% reduction in damage taken, which is 25% effective increase to healing received (as well as a 25% increase to effective hit points). Since WAR is only 20%, from a pure stance based view, PLD has a 4.167% advantage in mean mitigation. This made up by all of the WAR self heals though (IB, SP, Bloodbath) so it's a wash from a holistic point of view.

The biggest difference comes from Stoneskin and Adloquium. For these the increased HP make a hell lot of a difference.
As has already been stated, Stoneskin provides the *exact* same benefit to PLD as it does to WAR because they have the exact same eHP. PLD gets a *slight* advantage over WAR from Adloq, however.

A good White Mage will always Stoneskin a Warrior who has used Thrill of Battle, and regen a WAR/PLD who has activated Convalescence.
Stoneskin has a 3 sec cast time (compared to 2 with a 2.5 sec GCD for the other heals) and costs the same amount as a Cure II. Stoneskin cannot crit and, even then, provides significantly less than a Cure II in the first place and ToB only brings it up to being slightly worse than a non-crit Cure II (my WAR gets ~2k Cure IIs from equally geared healers; at my ~9k hp, without ToB, a WHM Stoneskin is worth 1620; with ToB, it's still only worth 1944). So it's slower and heals for less than the equivalent heal (it also doesn't have a proc like Cure II does, but the Overcure proc is kinda terrible).

There are only 3 times that a WHM should be casting Stoneskin on you during combat: when you significantly overgear the WHM (such that a Cure II is, on average, worth less than a Stoneskin, which basically only happens when you have an i60-70 WHM thanks to crits), when you're already at full/near full hp and won't be taking damage by the time Stoneskin finishes casting (this is best used right before a big smash to the face since damage spikes kill and abs shields are your best friends for preventing spike death).

Also don't underestimate Marauder's skills such as Bloodbath, Fracture and Vengeance.
Together they heal you thousands of HP while active and Vengeance also causes damage to enemies attacking you.
Fracture is a joke. Because it's a non-combo GCD, it interferes with debuff uptimes and Wrath stack generation, which means that the *slight* increase in damage dealt that it provides is nearly a wash, not to mention that it actually increases your TP consumption so in any long fight where you stand the chance of running out of TP, it's actually a DPS loss.

Saying that Bloodbath will heal you for thousands without providing a timeframe is basically meaningless; it would be just as true to say that it will heal you for millions because, if you use it enough times, it will. I deal roughly 150-160 DPS in tank stance for most fights, which means that Bloodbath provides around 12.5-13.33 hp/sec (33% uptime * 25% healing * 150-160 DPS) over time and roughly 1125-1200 per use (30 secs * .25 healing * 150-160 DPS) spread out over 30 seconds. A vast majority of Bloodbath's healing will result in effective overhealing (even if it heals you, it often pushes heals you would have been getting anyways into overhealing). This isn't to say that you shouldn't use it; it's got no cost whatsoever (it doesn't even have an opportunity cost because we *have* to have it as WARs). It's just that you really shouldn't think of Bloodbath as being anywhere near a major contributor; you'll get about as much healing out of SP and no one uses SP for the self-heal.

Vengeance only provides appreciable damage when you're in an AoE situation. Even then, unless you know that you're not going to need it to survive some heavy hits in the next 2 minutes, it should be held in reserve as a tank CD because that's it's real purpose. Also, it provides a Wrath stack, which is often forgotten. Try to use it when you're not at 5 stacks so you get full benefit from it.