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

[Laxus_Dreyar]

From an End-game Warrior's perspective:

Paladin has the edge but not by much. Gear really plays a big role but it balances out once you have the same end-game gear or close. Warriors need the gear more than Paladin since they scale off of Vit. Our hp at end-game will easily be enough to outweigh the lack of mitigation we have.

I've tanked Titan Hardmode so this is just my opinion on the matter. A buff would be nice but nothing revolutionary. Defiance just needs a little more tweaking. 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.

[Sephirah]

Firstly, I'd like to see a link to one of those interviews.

This is an old interview, but I'm pretty sure they have kept this in mind moving forward.

"JPGAMES.DE: The marauder is a very good damage dealer and also, for example in the Ifrit fights, a really good tank, even a better one than the gladiator. What are your plans for the marauder and its job warrior? How can the paladin/gladiator keep up?

Yoshida Naoki: We are going to make sure to do everything to get the balance right and then we are going to make adjustments to that. For example, the marauder is going to be a really strong attacker, but we don’t want to spoil all the gladiator’s tank positional skills....Of course we need to improve some areas and some areas might be shifted to a different job, so some people might get disappointed. *laughs* So, you can look forward to it, but you can also be quite wary of it.

http://www.bluegartr.com/archive/ind.../t-107491.html

There are some more I'll need to do some digging to find them again where they are both talked about, but point is. If you're waiting for dev to say "btw guys war is offtank" that won't happen, but you can see by the way it's designed, how it plays, and how they talk about it, that that's what they're going for. Again I'm not saying this means they're offtank by default, they may have plans for fights in the future where you need a war over a pld, it's too soon to tell. But they shouldn't homogenous.

[Kitru]

This is an old interview, but I'm pretty sure they have kept this in mind moving forward.

I'm still not seeing anything that suggests that WAR is supposed to be an inferior tank in any sense of the word. The dev specifically compared WAR damage dealing to PAL positioning skills rather than survivability. He even says that Warrior will be more "warrior-like" than Marauder, which would lend credence to the view that the Warrior is supposed to be just as tanky rather than just a more durable Marauder.

[Sephirah]

I'm still not seeing anything that suggests that WAR is supposed to be an inferior tank in any sense of the word. The dev specifically compared WAR damage dealing to PAL positioning skills rather than survivability. He even says that Warrior will be more "warrior-like" than Marauder, which would lend credence to the view that the Warrior is supposed to be just as tanky rather than just a more durable Marauder.

Being an offtank does not mean you are an inferior tank, it means they are better at dealing with groups of enemies, dealing damage, and being more self-sufficient than a pld; which can't deal dmg, can't heal themselves (don't even try to say cure counts, at least not until we get swords with matk) and has a harder time holding aoe threat. They're simply different.

[Kitru]

Being an offtank does not mean you are an inferior tank

Yes, it does. That's pretty much the explicit definition of "off tank". It is inferior for anything where a tank is actually required and, as such, is only suited for those situations where you don't need a tank that can actually tank as effectively as possible. A DPS with a decent survivability CD can *easily* qualify as an "off tank" for any situation that is actually designed for an off tank rather than a second tank entirely.

You're *choosing* to interpret the assignation of "different" as "one is an off tank the other is an actual tank", which makes *no* sense. The devs have set up the game with 3 roles: tank, DPS, and heals. You don't see off DPS and off heals. When you queue up as a WAR, it says *tank*. You are forcing the creation of an entirely fictitious role upon the game so as to justify the current state of WARs being inferior to PAL in the single most important way that a tank is defined: mitigation.

By your own logic here, Summoners should have inferior DPS compared to every other DPS class because they bring some heals. You could make the same argument for Bards because they pack some +mp.

There *are* no fusion roles. That's the entire point of a game with a trinity: DPS is DPS, heals is heals, and tank is tank. Off tank only exists as an arbitrary justification rather than an explicit design concern, which is especially comical since you're claiming that the self heals that WARs pack is somehow more useful for them as an "off tank" because, you know, tanks (in groups) are well known for walking up to massive packs of adds without a healer. The issue of WAR self sufficiency only ever comes up when discussing soloing content; in any group context, it's pointless because self-sustainability means nothing.

[Sephirah]

There *are* no fusion roles. That's the entire point of a game with a trinity: DPS is DPS, heals is heals, and tank is tank. Off tank only exists as an arbitrary justification rather than an explicit design concern

That's absolutely not true. They are not designing the game to be "Hey you need 1 tank, 1 healer, and 1 dps, doesn't matter which class, any will do, just 1 of each." They are balanced to work together, and I'm sure content will be released that makes that more apparent to you. They are intentionally designing the class to do something DIFFERENT. Right now there are 2 tanks, if they have equal defense, and one has higher hp and damage, then that is imbalanced. I'm sorry if you're hung-up on the idea that "main tank" is the only "real" tank and that "off-tanking" is inferior, but that simply isn't true. Like I've said before I'm sure there will be boss mechanics later that REQUIRE warrior over paladin for specific things.

[Delorean]

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.

The argument was that the option is available in this game and that there were more options, not that they did not exist because you had to level them up.

I mean hell if you want to push it even further Druids can be every role in the game and just have to visit a trainer to respec. Either way, I think we've gone off on a bit of a tangent. I was just trying to understand why someone hates options in another video game when they are given more options in the game they are currently playing.

Not true, Yoshi-P has mentioned in several interviews that the warrior/marauder is designed to be exactly what it sounds like, a barbarian if you will. They are both tanks yes, but they are tanks that are good at different things. This is a team game, people need to stop worrying about which tank is 10% more effective than the other and think about how they work together.

There is a difference between "Warrior is harder to play/has a more difficult time" and "Warrior is so much harder to play or worse by comparison that it would be a better investment of time to just play Paladin".

Though I really don't think that's a problem many people are facing at the moment.

[Delorean]

Yes, it does. That's pretty much the explicit definition of "off tank".

not really

warrior is offtank on maloriak because they could spec into piercing howl etc., off tank just means you are the tank that is not tanking the boss.

Though I do laugh when people say "warriors make good offtanks". if anything we are better suited to the role of main tank than off tank.

GLDs Flash gives Blind and they have the passive 20% damage reduction as PLD. If they are swarmed by adds a few misses and passive reduction is going to amount to significantly more than 15% healing.

in the role of tanking the only thing an enormous healthpool is good for is taking a large hit. that is why when you can avoid being almost one shot comfortably, you stack stats to smooth out damage spikes, not more health.

[Kitru]

They are not designing the game to be "Hey you need 1 tank, 1 healer, and 1 dps, doesn't matter which class, any will do, just 1 of each."

The trinity refers to roles, not group composition. They *are* designing content with an explicit ratio though: 25% tank, 25% healer, and 50% DPS.

They are intentionally designing the class to do something DIFFERENT. Right now there are 2 tanks, if they have equal defense, and one has higher hp and damage, then that is imbalanced.

Once again, you have decided, via fiat rather than logical assertion, that "different" means "effective at different things" rather than "effective at the same things using different methods".

You're also using a straw man argument of what the WAR issue is. WARs are not asking for equal defense: we're asking for equal *survivability*. PALs are *supposed* to have higher mitigation. That's how they operate. WAR, on the other hand, is supposed to have higher hp and incoming healing. That's how they operate. As it stands, WARs have lower survivability because they do not receive enough incoming healing because of the known mathematical disparity.

On top of that, it's not as if the *only* things that the tanks bring is damage and survivability. The interview essentially states that PALs are supposed to have better support capability (positional skills), whether through being able to additional in CON spells or through better control on their own abilities. *That* is intended to be the offset for WAR's higher damage, not a decrease in survivability.

Nowhere has it been stated by someone who actually has an influence over the design of the game that WAR is an offtank class or that PAL is the main tank class; those are *purely* player assumptions about the given state of affairs. All of the developer commentary, on the other hand, indicates that it's not supposed to be like that at all. WAR and PAL are both "tanks". There is no differentiation between the two.

As to there being content made that emphasizes WARs over PAL, I'd be curious to see you concoct a scenario that actually does so without it being horribly contrived. Any case where higher WAR's damage (AoE *or* ST) might help isn't a case where having a WAR is better: it's a case where you need better DPS, since difference between a WAR and a PAL is smaller than the difference between a good DPS and a great DPS. Any case where a WAR's self healing might help would be predicated upon not having healers for an *extended* period of time (i.e. long enough for a PAL to have died with a WAR actually staying alive because of said healing) while having said incoming damage below a given threshold.

Just claiming that "well, they'll make content that has WARs be awesome!" doesn't mean anything when it's effectively impossible to come up with anything that isn't so horribly contrived and designed to within a *tiny* degree with WARs in mind. In a group context, the benefits that WARs bring are so small that they're overwhelmed by everything else whereas the benefits that a PAL brings are explicitly felt because *they bring what tanks are actually brought for*. Behaving as if anyone would ever choose between two tank classes based upon their damage rather than survivability is simply naive. Choosing between *utility* and damage, on the other hand, is an entirely appropriate, which is likely what the devs intend the distinction to be: do you value a more comprehensive tool box or more damage? At that point, it's a balanced state. Until such time, it's not going to be.

[Sephirah]

The trinity refers to roles, not group composition. They *are* designing content with an explicit ratio though: 25% tank, 25% healer, and 50% DPS.

Assuming they plan on keeping the same ratio as 4 mans for 24 is not that likely, that would be 6 tanks, 6 healers, and 12 dps. I've never played a game in existence that required 6 tanks for a fight. (could be interesting to see though lol)

As to there being content made that emphasizes WARs over PAL, I'd be curious to see you concoct a scenario that actually does so without it being horribly contrived.

First scenario I could think of off the top of my head is a boss mechanic that targets the tank and deals a set amount of unmitigatable damage. Something like that may require the HP pool of a WAR to absorb the hit, an HP pool that is just impossible for a paladin to reach.