Lets nerf WAR :D

[Syzygian]

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.

Numerical adjustments definitely need to be made. And honestly, neither myself nor anyone else has any real reason to be skeptical of Squenix's ability to make this balance work, given the glorious (in my opinion) way that they balanced DPS and Healing jobs over the course of the transition to 3.0 and the months that followed, to say nothing of bringing DRG from the most maligned job in the game and butt of countless jokes to the staple of raid groups that it is now. There's not a single DPS or healer job that I wouldn't seriously consider bringing to my raid group, provided an over-all party balance is still struck (no 3 caster 1 melee-type shenanigans). The tank design and performance data in content right now is grossly skewed as we all know and I'm frankly shocked that they've done so little about it and that it wasn't addressed alongside the fixes to AST/MCH and the minor buff to DRK. The state PLD is in compared to the state WAR is in, is a straight-up stain on the dev team's talent for designing jobs. The fact that people are even discussing bringing a second WAR to their raid group in a meta where WAR+DRK has tremendous synergy is saddening, almost as saddening as the almost-completely unexplored synergy of a DRK+PLD group.

My biggest worry with PLD is (and I've outlined this in other threads), the fact that Squenix picked up the shovel and glued it to their hands with these all-but-useless defensive utilities that serve next-to-no purpose in end-game content, or serve their purpose for a relatively minimal amount of uptime, or are just cumbersome to use for a tank. If PLD's DPS and/or enmity is buffed it still won't change the fact that their raid utilities are ham-handed at best, and the offensive combo finishers they received are pure damage and offer no utility, making them the only tank to have their solo combo-based utility tied to their enmity combo, which also happens to be their weakest combo. If they nerfed WAR, they would not have to nerf it nearly as hard as they would have to buff PLD. I absolutely want every tank to be able to succeed in content, but it just feels like in order for the job to "feel" as good as WAR and DRK do, they would have to do SO... MUCH... that it almost seems like they would HAVE to nerf WAR ever-so-slightly to keep them from having to completely etch-n-sketch PLD's design.

But at the end of the day, you're pretty much 100% right.