Quote Originally Posted by Lyth View Post
The devs disagree with you, if the Famitsu interviews are to be believed. There are a lot of "get out of jail free" cards in WAR's kit like IB and Equilibrium that allow even mediocre WARs to slip through situations reactively, instead of needing to use their knowledge of the fight to play proactively. When you optimise the job gains more depth and you lose the crutches, but you still have a pretty big safety net. WAR isn't popular because it's super demanding and brutally unforgiving. That's rarely what draws people to jobs - it's generally the exact opposite. WAR is popular because it makes you feel good about yourself and feel like you're doing a lot of damage, even if you aren't the best player (and aren't actually doing all that much damage for the job).
How are Equilibrium and IB reactive? IB requires you to have 5 Stacks to use and Equilibrium requires you to double weave it with an oGCD with heavy animation lock to use it as a reactive heal. If you are blowing Infuriate to IB, that's a big loss (especially if you are wasting stacks while doing so). If you were implying they could just Defiance + Equilibrium ahead of a tank buster, that's the same as just turning on ShO or Grit as Equilibrium will only just top off the health gap from switching to Defiance. I seriously don't get how PLD or DRK are any more proactive to play when both those are much more reliant on vanilla dCDs and WAR has the largest gains from actually knowing a fight through and through. At worst, DRK has to sit at maybe half MP instead of dipping down to almost none and loses a few DASEs when they are learning a fight and playing conservatively. A WAR might be saving stacks to IB something, holding RI and Vengeance and thus losing out on triple FCs, prioritizing Path over Eye, or holding Berserk because of a bad pacification timing or an issue with up-time windows. Nevermind that of all the immunities, Holmgang is the least forgiving.

The Famitsu interview was about versatility and utility and the resulting representation of WAR and SCH in content. Not about this made up stuff about "get out of jail free" cards. They said that there are concerns with adjusting SCH and WAR because of the large skill range of the jobs and that they aren't looking to single out WAR and SCH and are going to look more at an overall skill adjustment for all jobs.

WAR is popular because DPS tanks are more popular and people love riding that OP bandwagon. I played WoW during the vanilla / BC era of DPS Warriors and every Warrior just wanted to DPS. Tanking is not a popular role and WAR is the tank job that bridges the gap for many DPS players. If anything, as we frequently see in complaint topics about tanks, WAR seems to be constantly singled out in these topics about DPS obsessed squishy paper tanks.