Suggestions for bringing DRK up to par, and QoL changes.

[whiskeybravo]

Except it's not exactly fair to attribute the eHP gain to IB when it's clearly due to turning off Defiance.

IB is comparable to Rampart, that's what it was originally trying to mimic for war. So with rampart and IB it puts war in a really good spot (mainly because they don't have to use IB now). I'm not really of the opinion that they should take away abilities, and simply replacing rampart with shadow skin on drk doesn't put them in a better position except by knocking war down a peg. Drk needs another CD, whether it be a change to dark mind or something else. Bring DRK up to the level of PLD/WAR. All 3 tanks need to be relatively equal defensively. All 3 tanks need to provide relatively close raid utility. And all 3 tanks need to do relatively close damage. If one or more is skewed in favor of a particular tank then there will always be imbalance and they'll always be taken over the others.

[Crater]

I'm not really of the opinion that they should take away abilities, and simply replacing rampart with shadow skin on drk doesn't put them in a better position except by knocking war down a peg.

Taking Rampart away in exchange for getting to use Inner Beast in Deliverance is not "knocking WAR down a peg" - it's a massive buff to the class. It's just one that doesn't give the class basically every single defensive advantage possible.

This is preferable to "never take abilities away" because that approach leads to massive, unbelievable power creep. I can tell you right now that no matter how much you want to cling on to every ability you have, your class will neither feel satisfying nor powerful if Dark Knight and Paladin have their defenses boosted up to the point where they can match a Warrior that has Inner Beast and Rampart and Vengeance and Holmgang and Thrill/Raw/Equilibrium.

Because at that point, to make DRK on par with Warrior, you'd basically need to bump Dark Mind up to 30%, reintroduce Dark Dance as a Rampart clone that still has a 20s duration and 60s cooldown, and make all of DRK's defensive cooldowns affect the entire party with Dark Arts. You'd need to let Paladin block the same attack twice and reduce it by 26% each time, and pretty much bring Hallowed Ground down to a 3m cooldown.

I really feel like there's an issue here where the Warrior mains in this thread don't seem to realize just how incredibly strong they are defensively. I mean there are people in here who think that a Warrior in Deliverance is flimsy compared to non-Grit DRK or Sword Oath Paladin, when Warrior is currently far and away the tankiest tank - even completely disregarding Inner Beast and camping Deliverance - unless you go a mile out of your way to cherrypick a specific fight that is heavily catered to Paladin (there are zero fights that are so catered to Dark Knight that Warrior isn't stronger defensively - the best you're going to do is "They're about equal if the Dark Knight abuses the hell out of TBN and Dark Mind").

[whiskeybravo]

I never said that.

True. My apologies for implying such, I was referring more the the ambiguous "you" as people in general. However, the way it's being presented I interpreted the IB > TBN comment as a sort of indictment on warrior, as if warrior had anything to do with it. IB has been around much longer than TBN, so the devs had plenty of opportunity to balance them the way they thought best. I no longer really want to debate IB vs TBN, mainly because it's rather fruitless. Yes, it's more powerful as a primary mitigation tool, and it should be because it's entirely different type of ability compared to TBN. So I'd rather focus on:

Taking Rampart away in exchange for getting to use Inner Beast in Deliverance is not "knocking WAR down a peg" - it's a massive buff to the class. It's just one that doesn't give the class basically every single defensive advantage possible.

You're going to need to elaborate on how that's a massive buff. At best, it'd be a wash in personal defense (IB has to be used much more frequently to have equivalent uptime as Rampart) and a hefty loss of personal dps by having to replace FCs with IB to maintain *at best* equal mitigation.

This is preferable to "never take abilities away" because that approach leads to massive, unbelievable power creep. I can tell you right now that no matter how much you want to cling on to every ability you have, your class will neither feel satisfying nor powerful if Dark Knight and Paladin have their defenses boosted up to the point where they can match a Warrior that has Inner Beast and Rampart and Vengeance and Holmgang and Thrill/Raw/Equilibrium.

I don't really see a problem with this. As I mentioned they should bring DRK up to WAR/PLD levels. There's really no reason for them not to. I play warrior mainly because I've played it forever, I like that the core abilities have never really changed since I started playing it. Feels like home. So I don't forsee any time where I wouldn't want to be on warrior over the other tanks. I have the other tanks leveled, I can play them decently. But if it ever got to a point where I was unsatisfied with War, I'd more than likely just quit tanking and go back to melee dps main lol

Because at that point, to make DRK on par with Warrior, you'd basically need to bump Dark Mind up to 30%, reintroduce Dark Dance as a Rampart clone that still has a 20s duration and 60s cooldown, and make all of DRK's defensive cooldowns affect the entire party with Dark Arts. You'd need to let Paladin block the same attack twice and reduce it by 26% each time, and pretty much bring Hallowed Ground down to a 3m cooldown.

That's exaggeration for the sake of exaggeration. DRK needs help but not AoE effect on every DA cooldown lol. Realistically they need to tweak SW and LD, fix dark mind into something more useful, and add an additional medium powered CD. I don't really have any input on the dps/playstyle, obviously they need to make some adjustments to DPS, and according to the drk community try to bring back some of the feel of 3.x DRK. (I'm not a drk main so I'm not going to try to guess at what drk mains want here).

I really feel like there's an issue here where the Warrior mains in this thread don't seem to realize just how incredibly strong they are defensively. I mean there are people in here who think that a Warrior in Deliverance is flimsy compared to non-Grit DRK or Sword Oath Paladin, when Warrior is currently far and away the tankiest tank - even completely disregarding Inner Beast and camping Deliverance - unless you go a mile out of your way to cherrypick a specific fight that is heavily catered to Paladin (there are zero fights that are so catered to Dark Knight that Warrior isn't stronger defensively - the best you're going to do is "They're about equal if the Dark Knight abuses the hell out of TBN and Dark Mind").

This get's back to "primary mitigation tool" in a way. Warrior can tank the entirety of savage content without using their primary mitigation tool. Same can not be said of DRK or PLD. DRK needs TBN. PLD needs Sheltron. While warrior never leaves deliverance. It's obvious, to me at least, war is incredibly strong. I do think pld shield makes a big difference for them and is roughly equivalent, if not slightly better than, the options a deliverance war has available (especially in a raid setting where we have to swap mitigation tools for aggro tools, pld still keeps their shield).

Again, the focus should be on bringing drk up so we are all in better positions as tanks.

[Aana]

I really feel like there's an issue here where the Warrior mains in this thread don't seem to realize just how incredibly strong they are defensively. I mean there are people in here who think that a Warrior in Deliverance is flimsy compared to non-Grit DRK or Sword Oath Paladin, when Warrior is currently far and away the tankiest tank - even completely disregarding Inner Beast and camping Deliverance - unless you go a mile out of your way to cherrypick a specific fight that is heavily catered to Paladin (there are zero fights that are so catered to Dark Knight that Warrior isn't stronger defensively - the best you're going to do is "They're about equal if the Dark Knight abuses the hell out of TBN and Dark Mind").

Theres a reason War is the defacto OT DESPITE its superior agro generation. Look at the standard Neo strat. War pulls. Gets agro. HGs 1st delta, hands it off to pld after alpha, takes it back to repeat after the halfway point to HG and immediately pass it off again. Why would we do this? Why do raid groups let the drk/pld MT if war has better mitigation AND agro?

TBN/Shelltron is why. In neo for example, the pld/Drk just uses shell/tbn for every aero 3 while dps mode. War cannot afford to use a CD for every aero 3 in the fight or the ever lauded tank CD suite runs outta gas or just use tank stance which is a net loss for the group. You want to know the only way war can do these things without tank stance? A pld or Drk OT using Intervention/TBN ON THE WAR.

If you are trying to MT in DPS stance, war is flat out squishier. You can QQ about IB till the cows come home but that's not how raiders play the game because its not efficient. The same reasons that Drks have been crying for months. Drk isn't (overall) the efficient choice. Both can clear everything if you work around their weaknesses.

Its been stated 100 times. War in defiance is a fortress of invincibility. No one has denied that in the slightest. But people don't raid that way. War is categorically the strongest defensive tank in tank stance while simultaneously the weakest in defense without tank stance. And it entirely hinges on the ability to use each jobs best defensive ability that doesn't have a significant CD. For whatever reason, SE has left IB behind tank stance while giving pld/drk similar style abilities that aren't. That's why war has the better suite. When you combine a stronger suite with IB, its stronger (shocking), when you remove IB and just have the suite to stand alone its weaker (shoking!). War defensive strength is entirely dependant on using or not using IB. The meta currently shifts away from that. Maybe 4.2 will shift it back and war will be OP. Who knows. But the blanket statements about war miss the obvious pros and cons of how war lines up with what the game determines is optimal.

[whiskeybravo]

In neo for example, the pld/Drk just uses shell/tbn for every aero 3 while dps mode. War cannot afford to use a CD for every aero 3 in the fight or the ever lauded tank CD suite runs outta gas or just use tank stance which is a net loss for the group. You want to know the only way war can do these things without tank stance? A pld or Drk OT using Intervention/TBN ON THE WAR.

I'm not sure that's entirely true. I created a spreadsheet for myself and co-tank for CD usage and I was able to spread them out in such a way that we have a CD up for every important tank attack (utilizing timely swaps) and the only time I might possibly have to use IB is the charge at the end of GCO. Granted, we haven't actually got there yet so I could've entirely miscalculated everything.

2. While the best strategy (and the current meta) is to do frequent tank swaps whether they're required or not, Warrior's time spent tanking is noticeably more sturdy than Dark Knight's or Paladin's on almost every single fight, because they're less squishy in their DPS stance than the other tanks

I'm not in full agreement, but maybe I'm just not as good of a MT as my pld co-tank. Visually I see his HP spiking less then mine. But, we've been tanking together on and off since ARR, he's always been the pld mt and I was always the war ot. That's just kind of the roles we've settled in to. I did more recently start mt'ing v1 and doing the pulls, but I don't feel that sturdy unless I take out shirk/provoke for conv/anticipation.