Quote Originally Posted by Syzygian View Post
WAR does not necessarily need nerfs. Hell, nothing "needs" a nerf, like, ever. I just thought it'd be interesting to discuss how a hypothetical nerf could achieve tank balance from another direction, while ideally leaving WAR's playstyle and mechanics intact. I can delete this and make a buff PLD thread instead if you like. :P
You admit elsewhere that you're simply playing devil's advocate with this thread - however, I don't think you know what that entirely entails.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_advocate

To play devil's advocate, you strike up a discussion with an opposing view point to the one that's more generally accepted by who you're speaking with (in this case the accepted norm is "PLD should be buffed!" and you are playing devil's advocate by bringing up the proposal of nerfing WAR instead). This is good and healthy for discussion. However, after raising this discussion, you seem... confused by the people who are saying "No, don't nerf WAR, that's stupid".

This is how playing devil's advocate works - you're bringing up something controversial and seeing how they react to the idea. Some people will think it's completely stupid, some will think that it holds some merit, some (usually the minority) will agree outright. Generally the majority will be those who think it's completely stupid, as the thing you're bringing up is controversial and that inherently means that most people won't agree with you. The problem is that you started the discussion but didn't entirely follow through, you just gave up since you don't really agree with yourself and now think that most people calling you stupid didn't get that you weren't being serious. So now we have no one to actually debate this topic with unless someone else wants to show up that either actually agrees with the OP you've made or they themselves want to play devil's advocate.

What I've personally gleamed from the topic is that most people disagree with nerfing WAR - this is likely because they either play WAR and don't feel their job should be nerfed or they play PLD/DRK and feel they would rather have their job buffed than another's nerfed. You also have the minorities, those that agree that WAR should be nerfed massively or those that pretend they know how game design works, not realizing how one change can create a domino effect that would imbalance things even worse than they are now. Job balance is a really tricky thing to discuss, because without hard data on any change you make, it's impossible to tell just how it will affect balance across the board. It's fun theory crafting how to fix a job or how to make a job more fun, but at the end of the day we just have to put our faith in SE and assume they'll do enough testing to come out with some balanced adjustments. I'm fine with small nerfs myself as long as they don't affect how the job feels overall, but there are some really sweeping adjustments that people are proposing that are just... really, really bad.