is WAR the best MT now?

[winsock]

You're missing one thing about Defiance, the healing boost.

Suppose you're in Deliverance, but under 80% on you max HP. Taking a hit after that, wether you stay in Deliverance of switch to Defiance, is the same.
After the hit, you switch to Defiance and the healing boost will help you compensates for the hit you received previously.

On the other hand, if you take a hit out of your tank stance in PLD or DRK, you have no mean of mitigating its effect afterward.

So, in the end, ShO and Grit are only proactive mitigation, while Defiance is both proactive (with the HP boost), and reactive, hinting again that WAR is more "supposed" to switch stances (Which is pretty much confirmed by the wrath/abandon convertion)

Mathmatically, this is incorrect. Remember that the damage reduction makes the HP from the heal go further. It also highlights another advantage of Shield Oath in that you can receive a heal and extend the hp from the heal with the damage reduction, it doesnt need to be prior to the heal.

Ex:
Say a PLD has 1hp, and received a 16k heal, followed by a 20k attack.
The attack gets reduced by Shield Oath to 16k, so the activation of Shield Oath could occur before or after the heal, but so long as it is before the attack, the pld will survive with 1 hp remaining.

A WAR in a similar scenario has 1hp, receives a heal of 16k, followed by a 20k attack.
The heal will be boosted to 19.2k only if the WAR manages to get into tank stance before the heal, but will die to the 20k attack regardless.

Defiance's window of activation is smaller, and it gets poorer results. There is no defensive advantage Defiance holds over shield oath.

[Syzygian]

snip

Would ShO/Grit being oGCD make you take a PLD/DRK over a WAR in your group? I doubt it.

Tank stances being oGCD means that a tank that is in DPS stance can react to things going pear shaped much faster. Lets say your MT dies. Before you can effectively pick up and hold the boss now (particularly since the damage nerf) you have to spend a GCD activating the stance. In progression, that can be the difference between the WHM getting curb-stomped and you wrangling the situation. Sure, you're probably not gonna clear with your other tank dead even if he gets a res, but the pull will last longer and you can see/practice more.

Defiance providing a heal for the amount increased a la Thrill still doesn't actually make it OP.

Every time you jump into Defiance you'd get that heal and that HP increase which is essentially 20% damage mitigation, THE SAME AS PLD AND DRK... if Grit/ShO were oGCD.

The heal would just be providing the actual mitigation, it wouldn't be seen as a heal because regardless of whether you're at 100% HP or 50% HP in Deliverance, when you activate Defiance, the same percentage of your HP would be missing. Its the exact same benefit that an oGCD Grit or ShO would provide. 20% mitigation on demand at the cost of 15-25% DPS.

Yes this Defiance would be even more OP vs. ShO/Grit than the current Defiance, but if you moved ShO/Grit off GCD that would be the ideal balance. There's just no reason for a stance change to cost a GCD and no reason we cannot balance them all around being oGCD.