Defiance still lacking in comparison to Shield Oath

[Duelle]

Just wanted to say, a certain MMO also known as World Of Warcraft contained four fabulous tank classes years ago, four different gameplay which were really cool to play because one was really different from the others.

People cried 'cause they were "not balanced", so patches after patches, those four amazing differents tanks became just the same gameplay and nearly the same mechanics. You now play a warrior as you play a pally, as you play a DK and as you play a feral. Tanking in WoW is boring as hell nowadays.

Tanking in WoW went through the "fixed despite not being broken" issue. Blizzard changed stuff at will without actual reasoning, which is what effectively killed tanking for me. I was a prot warrior through and through since Vanilla and LOVED how they played in WotLK, only for them to entirely change how rage worked and then when they fell in love with the DK active mitigation (AKA blood shield) mechanic to the point they changed the other tanks to go by that model I simply chose to hang up my sword & board because the aspect of gameplay choice was not there anymore; I didn't like active mitigation and stuck to my prot warrior since it had mechanics I liked.

That being said, there's only so much you can do to stray from a set tanking model, because otherwise you get the "only warriors can tank Illidan" scenario, making the other tanks chopped liver. Regardless of whether we can change classes and jobs, people should still tank using whatever class they want, not worry about whether their class and job are viable in the hard content, and certainly not affect their group's chances of success.

Imbalanced gameplay is really not something you should be so proud of.

This.

Mitigation through defense is currently the only thing PLD is superior at compared to WAR. WAR has superior HP, self-survivability, damage, and aoe control. If you get equal defense as PLD, then there is no reason to be one.

Who said anything about equal defense to a PLD? Asking for a small buff to mitigation is not suddenly going to make WAR the only tank choice in the game. There's ways you can do it, and since WAR is in part inspired by WoW's Cataclysm-era Blood DK, something akin to the Blood Shield mechanic may be all they need.

lets be honest

no one cares about balance

they care about getting an invite to group and keeping their spot based on their ability to play the game, not the class that they play.

Yes and no. I care about balance between members of the same roster because if left alone that sort of thing trickles down, and before you know it other roles are affected. Even as a PLD (I don't and have never liked axes) I want WAR to be equally viable not only to the number crunchers but to everyone that plays the game, where it's business as usual in beating content regardless of who is doing the tanking. That also applies to heals (I have some issues with SCH for the same reason I have issues with WAR) and DPS.