PLD any better than WAR?

[Izsha]

If we're talking long, drawned out fights, paladins would still win out on damage prevention/overall healing needed because of blocking outside of tank busters. If we're talking with something like Akh Morn in mind, they'd have more than enough cooldowns to be comparable to warrior's uptime.

All things considered if you have foresight, rampart, sentinel and you're running into problems with running out of CDs for tank busters like critical rip or raven's beak, theres something wrong with either cooldown management or dps not being able to push that phase.

My fight specific comments are based on the fights when they were new and progression. Not doing t5 in i130 with 20% echo. In any fight with regular scary tank busters, once you can usually do ramp, sentinal, ramp, then stuck like chuck praying to the bulwark god for the 4th as far as direct mitigation, or a combination of foresight and convalescence. If bulwark fails you in t5 when you're ilvl 80ish, you are in trouble. Sure the sentinal one was a stoll in the park, but the for sight only one is skirting with a wipe.

War gets a free rampart for every tank buster that ever happens with ib, and every other cd is 2 min or less. Pld is often left wide open during progression. With IB as a given in concert with the weaker CDs war has, it creates a substantial effective hp effect.

IB+tob. +50% effective hp.
IB+foresight. +44% effective hp.
ib+vengence. +78% effective hp.


Ramp. +25% effective hp.
foresight. +15% effective hp.
Sentinel. +66.6% effective hp.

math people. It's your friend.

War can survive bigger hits and repeat that every 2 min. Plds tank buster suite is actually weaker and comes up slower. Those listed are the only direct mitigation abilities. (Both tank stances offer the same effective hp so no, shield oath ddoesn't change any of this vs defiance). The only boon pld has is mixing in bulwark but that's always a gamble and only vs blockable attacks.

War is the undisputed king of eating tank busters because if inner beast. Pld excels at prolonged sustained damage because of their shield. Fights like shiva that crank out continuous high, physical damage favor plds. But fights with large, predictable, and frequent tank busters favor war (like t9 when introduced).

If you are only tanking fights after they have echo and out gear content via ilvl, then it doesn't make a lick of difference what you tank as. But when you are fighting stuff you can't just overpower with phase changing dps and gear, those aforementioned factors become an issue.

[RiceisNice]

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Not sure what paladins you're playing with that would run out of cooldowns for those fights at those given times. My references were for pre-echo as well; if you had ideal dps you wouldn't be staying in that phase of the fight long enough for cooldown's to actually be a problem on the paladin's end (five/six stardusts, two critcal rips, 3 flattens, etc).

For the record, I'm speaking in context about tanking in general (PLD vs WAR in all areas, including MTing). When you mention long-drawn out fights, damage they take outside of tank busters is a concern as well.

[Izsha]

Not sure what paladins you're playing with that would run out of cooldowns for those fights at those given times. My references were for pre-echo as well; if you had ideal dps you wouldn't be staying in that phase of the fight long enough for cooldown's to actually be a problem on the paladin's end (five/six stardusts, two critcal rips, 3 flattens, etc).

For the record, I'm speaking in context about tanking in general (PLD vs WAR in all areas, including MTing). When you mention long-drawn out fights, damage they take outside of tank busters is a concern as well.

My point isn't to say war is better. My point is to dispelled the common notion that war cooldowns all suck and pld is a better MT because they have better CDs. They are very well balanced.

War excels at tank busters with higher burst levels of effective hp primarily because of inner beast and lower recasts on those CDs. Pld excels at high sustained mitigation via shield, but has weaker burst defense and very high recasts. Throughout any serious fight both sustained mitigation and burst is important. So they both tank adequately in just about everything.

The stereotype that war is somehow a wet paper bag vs pld is just wrong, but it seems to stubbornly persist in game and on forums. People still think defiance is weak and war CDS aren't as potent as pld when stances are in fact virtually identical and as shown before, war actually has higher effective hp and more often than pld for tank busters. But still the stigma persists in every war vs old thread that ever appears. /sigh.

[Zykor]

The stereotype that war is somehow a wet paper bag vs pld is just wrong, but it seems to stubbornly persist in game and on forums. People still think defiance is weak and war CDS aren't as potent as pld when stances are in fact virtually identical and as shown before, war actually has higher effective hp and more often than pld for tank busters. But still the stigma persists in every war vs old thread that ever appears. /sigh.

Did you ignore bulwark on purpose? With a zeta shield the block rate and strength is at 34%, and it goes up to 94% rate with the CD (it is additive). In t13, for flattens, if I do not have sentinel up, rampart and bulwark is up - which is the same as the warriors strongest defensive combo - IB & Vengence. Even in T12, with a tank swap, I use sentinel & rampart together because of why not.

And in T13, Paladins only have to choose where to use sentinel if holmgang is used on the 2nd Ahk Morn. If used on the 3rd, there is no problem.

[RiceisNice]

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I don't believe that warrior is inferior to paladin in general, but again they both fall short on some areas. They can still perform the role, but one does better than the other in some aspects. Which is why I still think paladin makes for a better main tank in the long run because again, tank busters are far from the only aspect in a fight.

Even if you try to speak of effective hp, there's a matter of healing back up that hp, and the 20% increased healing intake does not exactly make up for the 25% increased hp pool ( or does the self healing because that doesn't occur all the time and it's really not the case if you're using IB for the damage mitigation). On top of that having a paladin OT is a lot more room for error because they don;t have a non-enmnity combo (where I can still rip aggro in sword oats, str accessories or not) and my options for snap aggro are a bit limited compared to a warrior.

I still believe that paladin makes for a better main tank for those reasons, but not necessarily not a better tank in general.

So the great debate of which FFXIV tank is better continues yet again. This will always be a endless debate with no ending, even more so when Dark Knight becomes playable. I have already chosen what tank class I prefer, but personally OP just play the tank that is most fun for you.

Also wanted to leave this here, since several people accidentally misinformed others about this skill. (Rage of Halone does 10% str debuff) not 5%. It gets traited to 10% at lvl40 on GLD.

There's nothing wrong with a civilized debate. No insults have been thrown (yet). I just jumped in after he said that foresight was better than rampart although that was cleared up. I play both tanks and in nearly all my setups (with the exception of T12), I'm delegated to either MT or OT respectively based on what class I am or who the other tank is, and in the end just works out better.

[Lemuria]

War excels at tank busters with higher burst levels of effective hp primarily because of inner beast and lower recasts on those CDs. Pld excels at high sustained mitigation via shield, but has weaker burst defense and very high recasts. Throughout any serious fight both sustained mitigation and burst is important. So they both tank adequately in just about everything.

I don't think Inner Beast is all that great. My Paladin and Warrior are pretty much identical when it comes to gear and gear level (since one is shared by the other). The only minor difference being that my Paladin is using Nexus while my Warrior is using the i110 soldiery weapon. The level difference between them is 1.

For me, Inner Beast hits for around 400-500 damage (non-crit) unless I go crazy with cooldowns and fire up things like Unchained (which also requires Infuriate), and Berserk. That's four skills used for ONE move. And then I can maybe get a much nicer 1k or higher. Criticals fare better, at around 700-750 damage, but I don't see those nearly as often as I'd like. Taking into account a weaker 3k damage skill, Rampart reduces it by 600, which is already matching Inner Beast. Sentinel reduces it by 1200, which makes even my WAR crits look meaingless. I won't even factor in Shield Oath, since I consider WAR's 25% heal bonus to be the trade-off.

I'm genuinely interested to see how you work out your tank buster mitigation. It's entirely possible that I'm just not doing it right, but through all my time playing as both tanks I've found Paladin always pulls ahead by a significant margin. As a healer, I find Warrior's also require significantly more healing than Paladins. Perhaps it's a job where you have to be great at it to see it match an average Paladin. Either way, please do clue me in on how you handle big damage, because I've always seen it as Warrior's biggest weakness.

[RiceisNice]

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Unchained doesn't boost inner beast since it already ignores the damage penalty from defiance. Like I mentioned before, even if you do factor in "effective hp", the point remains that warrior still takes more numerical damage that needs to be healed back up. Sure defiance gives a 20% boost to healing intake, but you're still healing a sponge that has 25% more hp, and the self healing doesn't quite catch up if you're using IB for mitigation.

There's also the matter of the healers as well with regards to keeping the tanks alive and how it stresses their mana.

[Tickmeoff]

nonsense

First of all, if you are hitting for that little you must be specced 30 VIT, wearing VIT accessories and not keeping up Maim/Storm's Eye.

Second, it seems like you don't even understand anything about WAR or Inner Beast. Inner Beast is already unaffected by Defiance damage penalty, why would you use Unchained? Berserk is a skill you should be using on cooldown most of the time anyway, and you should be landing two Inner Beast during the duration, not to mention the fact that it also buffs all of your damage output.

Third, why are you comparing the damage of IB to the damage reduction of PLD cooldowns? That doesn't even make sense. I can't even imagine what strange logic you used to arrive at this making sense.

Inner Beast, for the purposes of damage reduction, is functionally equal to Rampart. -20% all damage taken for the duration. The difference being that a competent WAR will always have IB ready for every tank buster, while PLD must juggle their CD timers carefully to ensure one is always available. IB is also getting used constantly throughout the fight, providing a decent amount of constant mitigation.

The one big advantage PLD has over WAR is Hallowed Ground. This cannot be argued, Hallowed Ground is great, Holmgang is not.

[RiceisNice]

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It's not that hard to have a cooldown ready to eat a tank buster considering how scripted the encounters are, even for death sentence in T5. And even then, I wouldn't say the constant use of IB would provide anywhere the same amount of mitigation that a paladin naturally has from using a shield.

[Zykor]

snippity snip

If we are going to discuss IB and its use throughout the fight by being consistent mitigation, we should also bring up the PLD shield. 30%+ BR and 34% BS with a Zeta for those who don't know.


EDIT:

It's not that hard to have a cooldown ready to eat a tank buster considering how scripted the encounters are, even for death sentence in T5. And even then, I wouldn't say the constant use of IB would provide anywhere the same amount of mitigation that a paladin naturally has from using a shield.

Beat me to it