Warrior is OP! Paladin is OP! Make one tank class and be done with it....

[Sephirah]

I think you know your stuff Kitru, but I see many wars make the same argument about being able to do more damage is irrelevant when you're there to tank. When you say things like that, I think you should just roll a pld, if your concern is being the "main tank". You clearly view being an "off-tank" as being sub-par, all I can say is I don't think everyone sees them that way. Offtanks are a necessity, you can't send any dps out there to do it, some very skilled players could pull it off sure, but it would be an extreme strain on your healers, and why would you want to do something like that to your group when you have the option of sending a "dps" that is in actuality a "tank" to handle those adds, making things easier on everyone.

[Duelle]

OP misrepresents things by attempting to use the buff-nerf rollercoaster as a reason to not have working rosters for tanking.

Learn the different playstyles of the two, and understand that they mitigate damage DIFFERETLY.

Playstyles and mechanics are one thing, one being built to work and the other being built on a faulty premise is another. Kindly learn to differentiate.

If there is always room for an on/off tank, don't be pissy if you can't be both ALWAYS. Such is good game design, actually, encouraging cooperation and variety between classes.

Encounter mechanics are what encourage a raid to work together to oversome a boss, not whether there are main and off-tanks involved. And as someone who's tanked for years, I have done both main and off-tanking on the same class. Thus, your assertion is false and poorly developed.

Unfortunately this is exactly what many people want. WoW, while doing wonders for expanding the audience of MMO players, also watered everything down to be accessible to absolutely anyone. So that anyone could tank/heal/dps regardless of their class. Due to WoWs success most other recent MMOs have also followed this formula in an attempt to steal a sliver of WoWs player base. So for a large majority of "MMO" players, this has become par for the course, and the idea of requiring a specific role to do a specific thing is "UNFAIR AND UNBALANCED".

Requiring roles is par the course, because the roles are tank, heals and DPS. What people developed a hatred for is their favorite classes being designed to be inferior for the sake of niche gameplay. You obviously weren't there when mages (all three specs) were sat out for the entirety of Sunwell Plateau for not being "ideal" DPS. You weren't there when paladins, shaman and druids fought an uphill battle to be more than healbots to their raids. You weren't there when warriors struggled to convince their raids they could DPS if specced and geared for it instead of the eternal tank pigeonhole.

It's not fun playing a class and then finding out you were intentionally designed to not be good enough. Being able to change classes never made that any less wrong and never will, because if a guy wants to run as a WAR for his whole tanking career through the life of FFXIV he damn well has the right to do so and the game should accomodate that. I can main and off-tank as a PLD (I also did it as a prot warrior, which plays similarly to PLD), and I sure as hell would expect and want the same for WAR and any future members of the tank roster.

What it all boils down to is will there be a niche for both classes? Everything that makes a good main tank also makes a good off tank. So having one class relegated to the lesser role (off tank) while the other can effectively do both would be a bad situation.

This.

PS: Just to get it out there, I'll admit some of the reactions are jumping the gun. We're not seeing "top" FC's going on record saying WAR is inadequate, but anyone who has paid attention to how MMO communities move and think is right to show some concern. For the FFXI fogies, it wasn't too long ago that the players became convinced DRG was a gimp class that didn't warrant its existence, not to mention the BS in 1.0 where WAR outperformed PLD. People are right in not wanting that sort of thing to repeat itself.

[Wangstrong]

You clearly view being an "off-tank" as being sub-par, all I can say is I don't think everyone sees them that way.

There's more or less zero need for an off-tank in the game so far. Maybe three fights in the entire game can even benefit from a second tank, and paladins still do that better than warriors. Off-tank is not a valid role to the extent where it justifies making one of the tank classes considerably worse at tanking. If warriors are to remain that way, the entire class will simply serve no purpose and have no place in endgame content. It has never been stated by the developers that warriors are meant to be secondary tanks, that's just something people (usually paladin players) came up with to defend the paladin superiority.

[Blazn]

Only bad warriors cry about mitigation, I'll take my self heals and out last the paladins mitigation anyday. Let's see take less damage or self heal the damage away? Easy question if you are good in these games.

[Sakasa]

From an End-game Warrior's perspective:
I end up not being able to use Inner Beast as much as I would want to due to having the need for the 15% extra healing.

Question do you ever have a monk using Mantra? Or have you ever tried using Convalescence before you would pop inner beast? This are just some optional ideas to get over that delay period where Infuriate is down. Also a good for the other wrath clears but from how your post read it seems like you just want a legit way to bash the bosses head hope these help. Good luck finding a monk that won't reject idea of using mantra as well if you go that route.

[Thyrllan]

Switching specs in WoW and switching classes in FFXVI are nothing alike. If on WoW you are a paladin and decide you wanna switch from tanking to healing and you had to logout to switch to your healer character that you lvled up completely seperately, sure, then they would be the same.

Arcanist disagrees with you

[Gilcris]

Okay, one class wields a two-handed weapon and conservatively deals twice the DPS of the other class (a good deal more if it doesn't have defiance up and is just choppin').

One class is depicted in FMVs, stylization, ability names/description, the Yoshi interview in the other thread, etc, as a carefree-cleaver, pirate, barbarian badass. The other class is iconically depicted as a sword & board, traditional tank themed around shiny armor and protecting comrades.

Now, thus far, most people (sans the most voracious of self-disparaging Marauder tryhards) seem to concede Warriors can actually still tank anything they're intended to tank just fine. Instead, a week or two after the game's release, the "Tank Roles" section of the forum is saturated with people raging that they can't skip a tier of gear with the more offensively-flavored tank and stand on perfectly even footing with the defensively-flavored tank in content that is missing the segeue to it?

Do continue.

[shadeodani]

maybe im a bit off here, but isn't GLD/PLD made to handle single targets better and MRD/WAR made to be better at handling groups?

[Wangstrong]

maybe im a bit off here, but isn't GLD/PLD made to handle single targets better and MRD/WAR made to be better at handling groups?

It's possible that this was the original intention, but there's two problems with that:

1, There isn't any need for an AoE tank at least in the current content. Unless the 24-man raids are a festival of add waves, there's just no need for a warrior and no situation where they're the better choice. So far there's not a single fight in the entire game that requires - or even really benefits signficantly from - a warrior, but quite a few that require a paladin or are so difficult without one that the imbalance is obvious. It starts the very moment you hit the endgame, with HM Ifrit being vastly harder without a paladin, and this basically just stays true throughout.

2, Warriors still aren't good enough at surviving. There's simply not enough tanking power in the class. The cooldowns are basically worthless for the purpose of survival, and the mechanics are all just so inferior that warriors simply aren't safe for the tank job. Also, since both classes just queue as 'tank' and the game itself doesn't discriminate or even ensure that there's one of each in duty finder raids, they both need to be sufficient for both types of tanking. Paladins currently are, but not warriors. There's a severe lack of worthwhile tanking cooldowns and too many underpowered skills/mechanics, the class is simply not tanky enough.

[Gray_Spy]

Paladin tanks are the premier tanks in this game. They have vastly superior armor as it is made of holy prowess and weapons powered by the light that cannot be matched.