I don't see any issue with warriors having short term big dps boosts that have a negative to tanking. Why not? They are supposed to be the masters of weapons and gives them something to do when they aren't tanking. I am not sure why anyone would argue that. Something that every 10 mins or so, they get a big boost for 1 min or so but with a mitigation hit so they cant use it while tanking. That way it could be tuned that sk are top sustained, war are top burst and pallys are tops against undead. In the end, its not going to be huge anyway, because we are tanks, not dps and will never match dps classes by any stretch.
That is as short sighted as can be. Under your conditions, if you are picking a raid roster, it would be foolish to pick SKs because Warriors would provide more of the best tanks in the game that would then dps better than any tank when not tanking (exactly what an SK is suppose to be). It is so amazing to always see the same ole argument for warriors to be the best dps tanks too - 'give them something else to do' - well what the hell do the sks do? So many are concerned about what else a specialty class can do but don't care one bit about the exact design of another class (sks). Here's a revelation to those - specialty classes like a cleric, rogue, or warrior, are meant to be specialists, and like the cleric (whom doesn't tank & only does meaningful dps on undead) and the rogue (who doesn't tank or heal), the warrior is designed for one role, period. In the tank archtype, dps is the SK role. The continued campaigning to make it otherwise is foolish.
This is exactly why I'd hoped to keep these kind of discussions about DPS out of this thread. It's like watching three year olds fighting over a toy. "No, MINE!" The only way forward is to agree neither of us can have it, or to share.
I don't know about Kamea, but I can answer for me - I honestly believe Warriors should have the unmatched ability to survive the most brutal battles. THAT's a characteristic that distinguishes Warriors from other classes. While the primary function of members of the Tank Archetype is to tank there is more than one kind of tanking/more than one kind of opponent needing to be tanked. I honestly believe that Warriors should be able to taunt (Jeer, Bellow, Insult,...) their opponents making themselves the focus of attacks and keeping frailer players safe from harm. As fate would have it Warriors have superior built up over time aggro and knights superior fast refresh aggro. (There is more then one kind of opponent needing tanking). I honestly believe Warriors should have heavy armor and be far hardier than any other class. Since Warriors wear heavy armor, are far hardier than any other class, are the masters of defense with excellent defensive skills, and lack meaningful combat self-healing I honestly believe Warriors should require less healing than other classes. While knights should require more healing one should keep in mind that they can supply a portion of that healing themselves resulting in them requiring less healing from others (one of their distinguishing characteristics). We should also keep in mind that most Warrior measures used to limit damage tanken is melee damage only. Combat self-healing doesn't care how you got hurt - it's more versatile. Finally I believe greater pure melee DPS is a consequence of hybrids having a spellbook and outside of the tank archetype abilities. IF an SK focuses all of their effort in DPS production IMO they should approach Warrior DPS. However if they divert assets into survival their DPS should be more negatively affected than a fighter who uses mundane skills. If the above seems attractive to you and SOE/DBG doesn't break faith with Warriors you should roll a Warrior. If finger waggling, tank parity (and spellbook superiority) in group content, and tankiing duties (but not most brutal mob tanking duties) in raids sounds better you should roll a knight.
Long story short Warriors should be most efficient to heal when main tanking - Duh Knights should take more effort to keep up on the boss mob when tanking - Duh Then you went here and the bottom fell out. SOE is a non factor now. Daybreak nor SOE made your class any promises. All three classes have evolved to their own entity. The real question really is who should DPS better if at all between Warriors and SK.
I've been looking at all of this stuff, and I think I may see things a little bit differently. Warriors - They never split their training. They aren't Warrior/Cleric, or Warrior/Necromancer. This means they've devoted ample time to mastery of weapons and how best to fight in armor, and how best to use a shield. This isn't to say that a Knight is bad at it. Far from it. But a warrior is just...better at it. This should translate to higher AC Softcap (they make less mistakes in body positioning so blows that come in are more of glancing hits off the armor), and when it comes to straight up melee damage, they should be very, very strong. They can't heal themselves, and their crowd control consists almost entirely of 'hey, HIT ME!!!' So yes, I'm say a tank should have some real damage. Not like a dedicated DPS class, but also not single-subject like Slay Undead, or worthy of mockery like anti-plant attacks. Paladin - They gave up some of their mastery of arms and armor to learn to channel clerical powers, and eventually learned to use it in ways clerics can't. They should /not/ be inherently grossly less sturdy than Warriors on a pure 'mitigating the hit taken' scale. Less sturdy, yes, but not by a large amount. Why? Because their compensating feature, the self-healing, is vulnerable to interrupts and silences. They also can provide useful buffs to other classes, which neither War nor SK gets to do. You know what silencing a warrior does? It means you don't hear him laughing at you when he cuts through your armor's jointing *again*. Don't up them, but don't downgrade either. Shadow Knight - They gave up some of the master of arms and armor to learn to wield necromantic magic, and eventually learned to use it in ways necromancers can't. Here's a big thing with SKs. While a paladin or war taking hits from the rear or sides can still use their inherent abilities to shrug it off, an SK's offense /and/ survival comes partially from all those lifetaps flying off their attacks and ripostes. When outflanked, they have serious problems, and if the mobs are summon-happy, it can be very hard to get them in front of you...without flopping them onto the rest of the party. For an SK to operate most effectively, they need to be on offense /and/ defense at once, against whatever their fighting. Wars don't lose durability by going no-riposte, or turning off attack. Paladins barely lose any from not using their healprocs, and can still cast heals and their various LoHs. SKs, when they have to do that, lose most of their significance. Sure, they can still taunt everything and it's dog (and all the dog's friends) for that matter over to them, and have solid base mitigation, but they're going to be a real drain on the healers if they aren't swinging. In short - Warrior class description talks about how, in addition to tanking, wars deal heavy damage in melee. Since melee is mitigated by armor and phys mitigation, not Magic Resistance, Disease Resist, Poison Resist, or Corruption Resist, like a large bit of an SK's output, there's room for /two/ tanks with real offence. Just different styles. Make it so wars can deal that heavy damage more often than 'when below 25% HP' and 'When using the disc for crippling blows', with the rest of their DPS requiring high end raid weapons to not be a joke. Make them match their description, and things will be dandy.
Take your much vaunted class description. Wad it up into a ball. And throw it out the window at 75 miles an hour like a cigarette butt. Hybrids got their last hand me down spells pre-OOW. Any spells received OOW and later are purely our own. Doing the math on that.....thats 40 levels. Thats 15 expansions. Thats 12 years. That hybrid crap? Do the same thing with it that you did with your class description.
After giving this some thought again and all I think what I'd like for all three tanks are well... Some more ranks of bukwark/bravery/mark of mage hunter/imperator's AA wise Disc wise/other wise I'd like our ghetto no time to bleed/pain doesn't hurt bp clicky to last as close to two minutes as possible along with our dicho so that two minutes that pain doesn't hurt isn't up I have something up, I usually use pain doesn't hurt and combine the cotf t2 bp with our dicho when in groups and cycle it. And next time pain doesn't hurt is down I'll use coa bp/spire/lifetap clicky along with dicho and cyle all them so I always have something going. Other wise all I'd ask for is some long distance zero dmg hate disc something similar to bellow that bards get that we can tag/get mobs out of our taunt range. I know we have bows but bows do damage and take time to travel and if one has to swap range items. I'd just like something like bellow for long distance. For when I play my paladin/sk I'd really like their hp stance buff to become a long duration buff, I find it extremely annoying to recast this every few minutes when it should just be a self buff that last two hours plus. Anyone that has a spellbook spell slots are at a premium already, and I don't see a reason for these buffs to become long duration for knights at least since they're self buffs. It would free up a spell slot and trying to hard cast these buffs every few minutes while multiple mobs are on me annoys the hell out of me. Shoot if warrior's could get their own version of the hp stance that's long duration as knight they can have our three ranks of mass affected as far as I'm concerned. I'm just a grouper and when I do pickup/open raids even if I ask a druid/shaman for their hp buff I'd be lucky to get it let alone have it kept up the entire time I'm tanking. I will happily trade knights their large self hp buff for our mass affected. The same for preservation line for paladin's and horror line for sk's. Seriously make some AA's like they did for shaman's puma line to extend these so knights have two more spell slots to use. Sk's need their taps upgraded, heroic stats/mana/end dumps/over resist/something. Tyl's needs to work like manaburn for melee or something. They need to help at least group paladins with mana consumption, let there be a mana return on the fury line or something paladin's get. Each time it procs the paladin gets some mana from it too. Lastly for all classes upgrade all the spells/disc they for some reason stopped upgrading from older xpacs. Seriously, some of these lines I want to use or have to use older expansion versions of them. It can't be hard to upgrades to the current xpac. Just some ideas from what I feel when I play either of the three tanks I play, granted I'm a group tank on all three.
Of course it is easy for you to say that when you want to take it from the class that should have it and 'share' it with yours. If you really wanted to avoid such a 'distraction' you would have done so in your OP; instead, you used it to as an agenda. SKs should be every bit ahead of Warriors in dps as Warriors are ahead of them in tanking; be that sustained, disc'd, etc. Considering the hp, ac, soft caps, discs, etc, that should be a measurable difference. Not some of the time and not shared - it certainly isn't in reverse.
I don't think you understand class design. Berserker only have DPS. They don't have any utility. But who am I kidding? You know this and somehow want to justify warriors being the best tank at actually tanking......and have more Dps than the other tanks as well. I'm sorry, but that's not how class design works. To be the best at something you cannot also be the best at something else as well.
Sounds honestly like most knights really should have just rolled warriors. But since they didn't, they've convinced themselves and the developers that they should get warrior level tanking and keep all their knight stuff instead of just rerolling as warrior. So, right now we just have 3 classes of warrior and 2 of them have spells lol. It is so broken at this point i don't even know if its fixable. I can't even tell if all the warrior-knights honestly believe this "wonderful change to the game" is a legit thing to do, or they just don't care cuz it helps them. You may as well just give warriors some heals, slay undead, FD, life taps, and add their name to the knight weapons. If the devs wanted to keep 3 tanking classes they botched it big time already, grats on full tank parity, you can now just make 1 class called "tank" and give it all spells and max mitigation. And, I dont feel im exagerating, they literally just took the warrior stances and copy pasted them onto knights and changed nothing else, it's almost mind boggleing that someone thought this was a good idea from a game design stand point. Anyhow, as a person free to play any class I want and any game I want, I'm not terribly concerned that this game is going down the drain. But all you knights who think its christmas because you have warrior tanking plus kept all your spells and abilities, over the long term you aren't really going to gain anything, everyone will just play on knights and devs will see this and nerf it a few years down the road if anyone is still playing by then.
I don't think you understand class design. Warriors only have tanking. They don't have any utility. But who am I kidding? You know this and somehow want to justify Shadowknights being equally good tanking - plus have both invis spells, FD, best AE agro, and powerful self healing ....... and have more Dps than the other tanks as well. I'm sorry, but that's not how class design works.
Go figure still crying and offering nothing besides nerf Knights. How about Warriors just admit 30% DP was way over powered when they received it. Now its shared with the other tanks and wow what a difference it makes. Knights tank to good, nerf their DP. Really that's childish because if your saying Knights are tanking to good what do you think your saying about how Warriors tank with DP? Good for Warriors but not the other tanks? Skip the spell book garbage and just focus on DP, yes its that good. Warriors already had that and would tell everyone , oh the content isn't that hard, oh the mobs don't hit that hard all the while with an extra 30% mitigation no one else had....lol. Now its shared and you hear a bunch of you should never received that...game breaking. Go look in the mirror.
Well, your intentionaly ignoring everything that was said, but thats fine, ill say it again. Yes, now knights got warrior stances, but they also retained all their previous knight spells and abilities. They are effectively both now, warrior and knight, which is completely absurd. Like take me for example, right now this disgusts me, ive got a little bit of time to be online, so im going to go play a different game that im not disgusted with. If everyone else thinks it is wonderful to have warrior-knights with full spell books and abilities plus warrior tanking stances, great, enjoy it. I think 100% of knights feel it is an early christmas, and 100% of warriors feel they got shafted. So, whatever. I think its bad for the game, its bad for class balance, there is pretty much nothing good about it. Since im honest, unlike knights, i can say things like, they needed a big boost, but not a copy/paste of warrior stances. Thats honesty. What knights can say is things like, well warriors are still the gods of tanking in every way so stop crying warriors. Thats meaningless dribble. This as absurd as if you just gave warriors knight spells. As a warrior i dont want knight spells, if i wanted to be a knight i would have rolled one originally. If you wanted the absolute max raid mitigation, you should have rolled a warrior not a knight and passed up your spells. ANYWAY GRATS NOW YOU GOT BOTH, THE SPELLBOOK AND THE MAX MITIGATION.
I think what you might be suggesting is a sort of choice like, "Offense, Defense, Casting.... pick two". This would result in SK/Pal having the flexibility to dynamically choose between offense+casting and defense+casting. While I think this perfectly describes the situation they are in today, I think you'll find most tanks would take issue with that. Knights would say their offense/defense is largely fueled by the casting portion. And no tanks - even Warriors are able to meaningfully choose both Offense and Defense simultaneously. But I think there's a way forward here. We'll start with Proficiencies. Removal of any penalties from 2H proficiency helps move Knights and Warriors closer to their baseline defense. DPS and mitigation boosts to Dual Wield Proficiency can help Warriors better straddle the O/D line. And finally we look to the Guardian disciplines: Removal of restrictions there (and to 2h prof) enables Knights to equip 2handers and perform all three roles simultaneously during the duration of that discipline. The 30% DP/Phalanx combo is still way over powered. We already had a bunch of tanking power coming from an inconvenient shield slot, and DP (post phalanx nerf) compounded the issue rather than addressing it.
