Paladin too overpowered, nerf their damage output!

[aleph_null]

I know that there are a lot of factors that influence players' subjective perception of difficulty. If someone only played WAR in HW, with its relatively simple resource management, I could see how they would struggle with the pre-4.05 changes. In truth, from following the dev interviews pre-SB, it sounds like the stance cost was intended to prevent WAR from being too overly flexible relative to the other two tanks (i.e. to bring WAR into line with everyone else following HW's dominance.)

But after 4.05's revision and reversions, I really don't see it. If anything, looking at how dps varies with percentile, there's a much smaller dps discrepancy between playing WAR skillfully and playing it poorly. Which was sort of the point of the job system changes: to narrow the performance gap between players. Objectively, as far as the performance data goes, it appears to be the least punishing tank.

Hmm, point taken. I guess it's less about punishing but more about strict and complex when it comes to optimizing war rotation. Admittedly even I found that optimizing infuriate outside berserk and naked fell cleave vs multiple onslaughts to be too much hassle and risk for what they reward. Going with the obvious "infuriate only in berserk" would still put you at a really high place in terms of dps (I'd say easily above 95% fflogs, but I don't play war much anymore so I can't claim it).

For progression, where you may often end up in situations where you want to switch back to tank stance, war is definitely the least punishing tank though, thanks to the lack of penalty from switching stance. I feel that while losing half of gauge from switching stance is somewhat too punishing, not losing anything makes other tanks' stance switch comparatively too punishing (gcd loss, mp loss). I'd rather see all tank stances reworked to be ogcd and rebalanced, but that's for another discussion.