New players - pick a knight if you aren't a boxer

Time Burner; Let me repeat for you again, of the 13 guilds that have completed the expansion: There are 103 active raiding Warriors, 48 active raiding Paladins, 43 active raiding Shadowknights. There is a reason why the top guilds are stacking so many warriors and "purposely" foregoing knights(hint: it has to do with title of your thread and warriors being far more desirable than you're making it out to be). The boost to mitigation knights received, will not change those numbers. Warriors will continue to be highly desired due to their current discipline/aa book of "many" powerful abilities. In the highest of end guilds(as evidenced by real, undebatable numbers), mid tier guilds, family guilds and groups. I know it's hard for the diva warriors to understand, must be tough, so many of you guys have become accustomed to getting free raid spots over Paladins/Shadowknights by simply being a Warrior.

Actually, SOE spoke to this question in several ways on numerous occasions:

1. Devs stated that they re-implemented existing Warrior abilities using the scheme employed to implement spells. This was NOT providing Warriors with spells but was instead a more elegant method to create Warrior abilities than they had used in the past and would allow them to be more creative in the future with Warrior abilities.

[BA: NOT spells.]

2. Mighty Strike, Fellstrike, Furious, etc. " Warriors are the masters of armed combat and defense..." "Warriors train themselves in the skills of combat, mastering the use of all weapons and tactics."

Taunt, Bazu Bellow, Insult, etc. "Warriors also learn to taunt their opponents..."
As in make rude gestures, show what's under their kilts, yell, "Your momma is so fat that..."

Mundane abilities appropriate to a non-magical fighter some of which require endurance to perform. Mundane - not magical. Endurance - not magic pixie dust.

Contrast this with healing others. THAT is not a warrior archetype ability. Paladins have access to such abilities through spellbooks.

When are Paladins going to concede that they were created to be part warrior and part very much not a warrior magic user? One can not claim Warriorly outcome through alternative means when healing is not self-healing, but clerical healing.

Knights have posted bunches of silliness over the years but "yellow mana" takes the cake.
-------------
"13 guilds that have completed the expansion: There are 103 active raiding Warriors..."

So kinda suggesting 103/13 ~ 8 Warriors per guild per raid.
Mine is:
4ish Warriors
3ish SK's
3ish Pallies
per raid.

I'll let you in on a big secret. It's adequate tanking, very good healing, DPS and the ability to analyze and perform. It is rarely 8 MT's in a tank lineup and a few secondary tanks. And on the rare occasion I've seen an event like that knights are in the tank lineup along with Warriors.
4ish Warriors
3ish SK's
3ish Pallies
= 10 "tanks". 8 in the Big Bad Boss tank line up and 2 attending to other duties. See how that works?

IMO IF you are going to play a Warrior or a hybrid (in contrast to boxing one), play the hybrid. They've been granted tank parity (and spellbook superiority) in group content and have a tanking role (and often a secondary non-tanking role) in raids.

We were told there would be no dual class TankMages in EQ. An honest person would admit TankCleric and TankNecro are pretty darn close.

The 10-15 % supposed mitigation advantage won't exist in most of the time
Under Def Proficiency, all tanks will benefit of it.
Under Defensive warrior disc and under knight defensive disc it will stack for both.
So it cannot be said that it's considered as a full time advantage.

The HP difference between the highest HP war and the highest HP knight is 20 k (War 183 K, Knight 163 K).
If we add the cleric aura which is 14%, we come with an added difference of 3 K HP.
So we the war has 23 K more HP than the knight.
Someone enough honest knows this is not "gigantic" difference on some raid bosses that quad for 30 k + dmg.
Also, knights (especially paladins) have "GIGANTIC" self healing advantage over warriors, in all content. Raid, Group, Molo.
Seldom a raid geared paladin can solo all mobs in TBM with his wiz merc. Of course, he will never speak of the invincible god mode he won in group content.

What advantage? Def prof + vie discs is already >= LS + shining + nerfed Brace for Impact (talking about raid bosses here, aka where NTTB/PDH is counter productive.)

For us to beat knights in mitigation we need to stack LS + Dichotomic Shield, and for us to really beat a knight MT for the first few minutes we need to burn Resplendent Glory / Hold the Line and Warlord's Tenacity -while- LS is going as well. In other words, warriors can either blow all their abilities at once and be a 2 minute hero, or spread abilities out over time and be on par with a knight.

Lets not forget that Repel is a thing too.

If warrior's bulwark hit limit wasn't an absolute joke, than -maybe- we could talk about a warrior mitigation advantage on raid bosses. Or if they made Dichotomic Shield last longer, but that'd be even less likely.

============

I also find it hilarious how in discussions about main tank survivability that heal effectiveness buffs aren't even mentioned. -THIS- is the primary reason why pals are > SK for boss tanking, as SK mitigation is actually slightly better if you consider Vizat's Skin, and self healing is less of a factor when you have 8 people healing you. Paladin's heal effectiveness buffs just blow Resplendent Glory / Hold the Line out of the water.

Here's the thing. Average damage isn't the primary killer of tanks. And tanks rarely get 1 rounded from 100% in recent expansions. What really kills tanks: A chain of bad rounds where the amount of healing between each round doesn't keep up with the damage of each round (ie, we usually get killed from 40%-0, not 100%-0.) Heal Effectiveness buffs are critical for the times where you only have 1-2 heals land on you between 2 given rounds.

You really don't understand how any of this works?

Giving completely bad numbers P2aa. Can't just pop up two magelos to figure hit point advantage of Knight + Warrior. Let's say your poor numbers were correct though and use them as a base point. Warrior is sitting at 20,000 more hitpoints as you claim at the 183,000. Now add 25% to that from dichotomic shielding. Now add 45,000 to that from Warlords Tenacity. Now throw cleric aura in. Kamea; Shadowknight > Paladin raid boss tank if running full abilities. Warrior > Paladin raid boss tank if running full abilities. Especially when you factor these heal boost you deem so powerful, can be shared with both of them. Warrior cannot share their "very" powerful abilities. Which would be why your guild has Nine . Hope to check your roster down the road and see more than three paladins/two shadowknights

I don't get it. Warriors can still do their role, better than any class. Do they want to do it WAY better?? Will that help them sleep at night?? Do they think it's cool to be an SK on a raid and you can't tank?? So ridiculous.

Don't lump together pal and SK demand.

SK population in guilds is a reflection of class balance. SKs fill a niche and you want ~2 of them on your roster.

Paladin population in guilds is a reflection of paladin population (and population of good paladins in particular, ie veteran mains with solid raiding experience as a paladin.)

Buds, thing is, Warriors still do their current role WAY better than anyone else. It's not enough for them to have a staggering 125,000 plus hit point advantage when stacking all abilities. It's not enough for them to have superior aggro by ridiculous amounts, single target and AE. It's not enough for them to have DI shift advantage, AC advantage. It's not enough for them that they can take these extreme advantages and combine them with a Paladins( Paladin 15% vie, paladin 1st spire and armor ). They want even more, while not wanting to provide any utility (hint: they don't want to be able to share their most powerful abilities). The reason for this is simple, looking at the guilds that have completed expansion, there are 103 active raiding Warriors, 48 active raiding paladins, 43 active raiding shadows. Balance for them, would be if those few remaining Knights were replaced by more Warriors. They do not care about health of game, or tank balance, they just want even more mitigation, even more hit points, even more aggro and definitely NO utility, it is beneath them. Too diva for such things of that nature. Many of them would even want to be able to out DPS Shadowknights once again if they had it their way. Kamea; I will continue to lump SK, Paladin and Warrrior population in guilds all together. All three are tanks. There is a reason only one of the Tanks is taking up most tank spots on raids and recruitment on the other two has mostly been closed (hint: this was not remotely always the case, it's what happens when you give 1 of 3 tanks vastly more aggro, hit points, AC advantages, DI shift, mitigation(this portion somewhat corrected recently).

Proving the exact point the Knights are making a terrible warrior was better than a moderately to well played knight for many years by virtue of LS and most recently LS plus dp. The reason guilds stack warriors is because no matter how bad they were if they had that one singular disc they could be put in a rotation and keep the guild moving through events. While the guild waited on their good warriors discs to refresh for the harder events. On these events if a knight was geared heavily and played exceptionally they could sub and with some extra healing the guild could get by.

Sk design by default suffered the most from this paradigm. Because outside of those conditions I listed they brought to a raid the ability to run in circles.

In this patch things were brought more in line. It doesn't mean the balancing is done it was a step where the devs felt the game needed to go. You can get mad at Knights all you want. You are just using them as scapegoats to place blame on. Direct your anger at the people making the design decisions.

This has been a long time in the making. It was inevitable.

Firstly. You're reading into my post things I didn't say.

Secondly. I find it funny you act as if playing a raid warrior is auto attack -> LS -> taunt -> afk -> win, when just a page ago you said:

So what is it. Do warriors have a large assortment of AA's/discs/clicks that equate to a real spellbook, or is it a 1 hotkey class? Both of your statements can't be true at the same time.

Warriors (or any tank for that matter) without quick reaction time, high situational awareness, understanding of raid mechanics/positioning/etc, and good decision making (re: ability use and timer management) don't make good raid tanks.

==========

How in the world was farming one of the most powerful abilities in the game to 'a' class (pal only, not SK) that most people considered powerful/very powerful before hand considered inevitable? (Not to count sprinkling on a nice DPS boost on top of that.)

Nevermind the fact 99% of raiders that aren't forum fanboys would consider pal-v-SK balance more out of whack than knight-war balance, and this change did nothing to address that.

'Design decision'????? To the contrary, it's quite clear not much 'decision' making was put into this 'design' choice. Even most non-fanboy knights already admitted in this thread that they thought the 30% figure was surprisngly high.

I also find it hilarious that a guy that hasn't even done a modern raid is lecturing me on what was possible in the raid game before the changes. Heck, I don't even know if you did a raid years ago when Guardian discs were added... which was at least when I'd start putting pals in assigned TO's on bosses (no, it wasn't every raid, but at the time I only viewed a pal tank as shorter due to guardian's 2 min duration, but def not as an impediment.)

Even before the changes, Triton would use knights to tank bosses. CT would use pals to tank bosses. Even the guild you were a member of back in the day, ROI, did:

Circa 2013, ROI tank officer at the time

I read this and I'm super happy I'm a warrior and have 125k more hp then knights, 5x the AC, am just all around better in every way. Right up till i stop reading this and come back to reality and the real world. Then I'm just a tank, not a healer tank, not a dps-tank, just a no frills better in no way tank. Oh well. Really glad DBG finally fixed EQ after its been broken for 15 years.

shiftie sure is something trying to use his personal opinion as fact. if that was true at all then guilds like mine whould also need to stack 9 warrs but hey guess what. we dont .

for more knights been tanking raid encounters b4 the buff they just recived and sucessfully might i add atleast in my guild . but if the argument is we need to buff knights cuz when they dont play well they couldent tank then im sorry thats not a valid excuse to buff any class warriors included.

problem still stands the buff you recived unbalanced paladins and Sks it was a bad buff however u wish to spin it

1) The warrior is stacking heroic stamina augs, while the SK is not. If you look at a war and SK with similar choices for the slot 5 augs, the hp difference is around 10k. And does Reaver's not count towards hp total? It gives an SK 40k hp after 0. That almost eliminates tenacity. So we get dichotomic + 10k + 5k.

Knight self buffs give an extra couple thousand HP over warrior buffs. The difference certainly isn't as much as people think. Especially not 12k like you throw out.

And if we didn't get 9k from AAs just a couple years ago, Knights would be dead even base hp.

DI shift? Your innate 5% is superior at higher DI roles, mitigating more damage on bigger hits. Your spikes are now less damage than ours.

And where's this vastly more aggro? Our best aggro pet is broken at the moment. Our fast abilities get out classed by knights. Ae aggro? Outside of wade which I can't control, we have garbage stuff. One works on 4 mobs. One hits mobs and both have long recasts.

I am sure they are going to balance the knight mitigation downwards to something like 15 or 20%. Though I haven't even got a chance to Test the stances outside of the 2hander one, but that's my guess.

Triconx, I realize the difference in Paladin and Warrior HP. Both my Paladin and Warrior are full current expansion raid geared. Same augs in all slots. Not hard for me to figure out what the "real" numbers are, no fake paper math or fluffed out magelos needed. Which would be why I said his numbers were incorrect, but still used them as a base point for his sake. Also, no, Reaver's Bargain does not eliminate the HP advantage of a warrior, especially in it's bugged state. And no, knight self buffs don't give a couple thousand hp over a warriors when all are raid buffed. Warrior self buff overwrites our self buff line and gives more HP. Most knights choose to block it due to it's duration. Also, no again, a paladin stacking everything does not have better damage spikes in comparison to a Warrior. A shadowknight can achieve comparable if they stack all, at a large price. Out of disc, Paladins also don't take less spikes. Feel free to share any parses showing otherwise and I'll put some of mine up in return. As for your aggro questions, I stopped reading when you claimed a Paladins aggro tool kit is outclassing Warriors. Kamea; are you really taking quotes from three years ago, pre paladin AE aggro nerf, pre paladin splash nerf, prior to Wars receiving large aggro boosts, hp boosts, shield prof, nttb, dichotomic etc. Wow lol. Needless to say, balance was completely different then, right when both Knights received guardian line.

These numbers are correct. Info can be found on magelo.

I give you the Dichotomic Shielding, + 45 K HP.
Warlord Tenacity is irrelevant, as his refresh is too long.
The impact of cleric aura has yet been done between the 2, it's + 3 K HP difference.
We come at + 68 K HP.
So we have more HP. But how are your chances to refill your HP faster ?
This is where your "GIGANTIC" self healing comes from.
Let's take your base heal spell
Burst of Daysbring = Increase HP by 13 K
All your AA Healing Adept, Healing Boon, Healing gift boost heal
Healing Adept at max rank increase this value by 70 %
Healing Gift increase the chance of a double heal by 50 % at max rank.
So your heal base comes first to 22 K after the 70 % stuff (and it's without this heal criting)
Also, the heal can be doubled 50% of the time, so it can go to 44 K. Let's say it adds on average as final heal 33 K
Now add too they can cast other heals on top of that, maybe 3 more other heals, and you come at a HP bar resplenished of : 33 * 3 = + 99 K HP.
Oh, the healing power is superior to our "said" HP advantage.

125 K, no, been proved.
Superior aggro ? No, your aggro has been doubled, and is as good as warriors, as our best hate disc is still not fixed. Your short recast aggro disc is at least as good as warriors. Paladins have np to climb the aggro meter way faster on mobs than before (hint : Use Crush instead of Stun if you have the choice in term of hate power)
DI Shift Advantage ? not anymore, Knight Sedulity provides at least the same
AC advantage ? Ah I like this one. Let's see :
Warrior Stout Defense rk III = + 1 388 AC increase.
Paladin Armor of the Inquisitor max rank self only buff = Increase Healing taken by 73 %, blows out water our 10 and 15 % ability, and comes add healing to the self healing power you have, and increase AC by 2 600. So an AC advantage of + 1 200 for knight.
That's right, your extreme self healing advantage as proved, with AA that do allow you to keep casting and not getting stunned by the mob, so it equals to insta casting.
Yes, I choose the warrior class, because I want to be the specialist of mitigation advantage in all situations, and didn't ask for utility. Knights are the ones that should have sacrificed some mitigation for utility boost.

You realize wrong thing.
Try again.

Giving poor numbers again P2aa, which aren't backed by any factual numbers/evidence. Much the same as Time Burners claims of four raid guilds on the "same" server, that have more Paladin/Shadowknights than Warriors. Sorry to break this to you yet again, but abilities without 100% uptime can still be extremely powerful. Warriors know this very well but pretend not to(hi LS). Paladin armor does indeed increase healing by 73. Guess what our group armor does, which Wars can get on a raid(if the raid actually decides to give a spot to a Paladin over another Warrior)? It increases healing by 60%, which stacks with your 15%'s. On top of all your other abilities, which you cannot share. When I start seeing warriors asking for abilities like a shared Warlord's Tenacity, dichotomic shielding etc. I'll take their complaints for supposed desired balance seriously. Shouldn't be much for you guys to ask for, since it's a 20 minute ability that shouldn't be included in class balance talks as per Wars on this forum. While at it, consider asking for some other things perhaps that won't completely skew tank balance again. I know it's tough to grasp, but you don't need moar hp, mitigation, aggro, ac in order to receive beneficial gains. Being able to boost your hp 125,000 + is cool stuff. Just like being able to boost heals on a Paladin is cool stuff(when we could do it only for ourselves AND when it got farmed out and givable to the other tanks). FYI: boosting heal effectiveness is "far" more powerful on a tank that has higher hit point pool, especially a gigantic one.

Inevitable because it was a mistake from inception. On a long enough time line you can see the mistake from a design standpoint. Given enough time it had to happen.

Personal opinion? In game experience. I raided for years under this paradigm.

Clicking LS was really all it took. Everything else was optional. That is not mutually exclusive to the now plethora of abilities wars possess. They have them in spite of the power of last stand. If you can remove the bias of the knight/war on going dramarama you can observe this phenomenon. I'm not even entangled in the raid position drama anymore. Nor do I care either way in how I get buffed or nerfed my in game playtime doesn't need any of it.

Anecdotally speaking it is the culmination of years of design flaws.