SE: if it aint broke, dont fix it (War)

[Lyth]

Warrior the only job where if you ask for anything at all you get a horde of people saying you shouldn't because of reasons.

Usually, people react to how you say something, rather than what you say.

In the case of the WAR community, it's a bit like having an acquiaintance who's a bit of a chronic braggart. It's not that you hate them, it's just that you sometimes wish that they'd stop talking about themselves quite so much.

Consider the following post, which you made immediately before this one:

It's probably because good warrior players have like a million different rotations they HAVE to learn or else they suffer a lot.

Meanwhile PLD facerolls and gets nearly the same dps with far more utility and DRK [...] which is even easier.

Everyone has a bit of a bias when it comes to jobs that they spend more time on. Not just because of ego, but because the more time you spend optimising a job, the more nuance you find, regardless of design. If you think any job is "braindead easy", then it's probably a reflection that you haven't spent enough time on it.

And just using common sense: even if you were a proven master of all three tanks and felt qualified to make this sort of claim, it isn't going to endear you to anyone if you do. Of course, to add insult to injury, the people who are proclaiming the loudest that the other two tanks are "braindead easy" are usually WAR one-tricks who have little to no experience or knowledge about either of the other tanks. But that's the nature of the echo chamber.

There's nothing wrong with being enthusiastic about your chosen job. One of the things that I loved about WAR in ARR was the sense of community and pride in the job. But I think somewhere along the line this has transgressed into arrogance and an overwhelming sense of entitlement.

In HW, it was "superior design". You can actually trace the origin of this phrase back to a WAR tank show between Xeno and Frosty back in 2015. "WAR is just better designed. Don't nerf WAR, buff DRK and PLD to its level." Never mind the fact that attempting to balance jobs through 'buffs' without 'nerfs' is not sustainable. But people continue to parrot it back to this day. Why debate with the echo chamber, when you can let your memes do the thinking for you?

But even two years of "superior design" isn't nearly as bad as six months of "braindead easy". It's the same development process. Xeno puts out the idea that DRK is "braindead easy" based on a whole two days of play testing, repeats himself a whole lot, and then the WAR echo chamber disseminates it. Because it's much easier to outsource your thinking than to actually critically evaluate ideas for yourself.

People lie about difficulty to make themselves look good. Pretending that something difficult is "easy" makes it seem like it was effortless. Making something you do look more difficult than it actually is makes you seem accomplished.

The problem is that less experienced players who are genuinely struggling with WAR due to a lack of practice instead attribute this to a falsely elevated sense of the job's difficulty.

If you got the memo, the devs specifically set out to make every job less punishing in SB. Buff management used to be a much more prevalent problem on WAR. In HW, there were plenty of players with sub 50% Maim and Eye uptime, because of overuse of BB combos. It was painful to watch. Players lost Eye mid-Berserk because they didn't refresh it. They'd not only scupper their own performance, but the raid's as well, by dropping slashing. That's practically a non-issue nowadays, due to revisions to the combo system and longer buff durations. The use of defensive buffs for resource gain in Berserk windows was removed. And it's still apparently too hard, if the devs and the community are to be believed. I sometimes wonder how much of the current WAR playerbase would be capable of playing HW WAR.

I don't mind playing a job that is relatively undertuned. There's a certain satisfaction that comes from outperforming someone who you theoretically shouldn't. "Superior design" wasn't so bad. When players got outperformed by a DRK on WAR back in HW, at least they used to have the self-awareness to recognise that there was a skill gap.

The WF ultimate team brings a DRK. The response: it must be because DRK is easier to play than WAR. There must have been some special advantage, some special buff. Completely ignoring the skill, dedication, and teamwork that went into the achievement. Not to mention the fact that "mechanical difficulty" is never a limiting factor in high level play. "Aw gee, I sure would like to use this job which brings higher dps and better cooldowns to WF prog, but the rotation is too difficult." Said no-one ever.

From a DRK point of view, I think people tend to overestimate our interest in which tank is on top between WAR and PLD. We don't really care. You can fight it out between yourselves. The dev focus is on these two jobs at the moment because they have the biggest impact on tank populations, and by extension, queue times.

As much as I'd like to see some reworks to DRK, it's not even the dev balance issues that bother me. It's the community's deliberate, systemic sniping at DRK's reputation just to make WAR look good. It gets old real fast.