Originally Posted by greatdane
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Whoever wrote that should be taken with a grain of salt. That quote is a severe misrepresentation of reality. The reason to consider warrior over paladin is because warriors are important for raiding while paladins aren't, so investing your time in a character that has very little place in the endgame is unappealing to most players. For general gameplay (grouping), warrior is by no means better. Way worse, really.
There's no such thing as people just "understanding how to mitigate aggro." That doesn't make the warrior problem go away. It means other group members have to do less DPS than they could, or debuff later and less efficiently. It means rogues taking aggro on every other mob because no amount of "understanding aggro" will help when their evade just happens to fail several times in a row, and this costs the healer more mana than what miniscule amount they save due to the tank having a warrior's marginally better mitigation and HP than a knight's.
As a rogue, warriors (even with proper proccing weapons) in group content don't have a hope in hell of holding aggro reliably unless they get a proc right off the bat and my evades don't fail. And that's just with an epic and a Winters Fury, which is pretty much the bottom standard for 50+ rogues. Imagine if I had a Vyemm or Vulak dagger. Assuming average rates of procs for the warrior and evasion success for the rogue, it is mathematically impossible for the warrior to hold steady aggro unless the rogue just doesn't DPS until 10-20 seconds into the fight, in which case having a warrior tank is terrible for XP/hour. That's fine on a raid boss that takes minutes to kill, but not in a chain-pulling group. The warrior only holds aggro if he procs more than statistically expected, or the rogue has no evasion fails during the fight. And it fails like 40% of the time, so...
On the other hand, when the tank is a paladin, people can just go all in from the moment the mob arrives in the camp. Debuff instantly, DPS 100% from the first second of the fight, break mezzes without concern, etc. On top of that, the paladin brings situationally useful buffs, root/stun control, emergency heals, saves a life every 72 minutes, even has the ability to help with pulling if necessary. And he's, what, 5% less tanky than the warrior outside of defensive disc? It's laughable to suggest that you're better off with a warrior tank in any content that doesn't require defensive. It's a ridiculous, nonsensical view spread by warrior mains who don't like the idea.
There's a number of elitist warrior players on P99 who work very hard to convince people that it's the ideal tank class for all aspects of the game. It's not. It's obviously the ideal tank class for raid bosses, but for literally anything else you can do in Everquest, it's the worst. Under no conceivable circumstances is being marginally tankier more important than having the ability to actually perform your job 100% of the time, i.e. holding aggro and letting other people perform to the full extent that their classes are capable. Warriors simply cannot do that unless the other players intentionally reduce their performance to the point where the warrior is a handicap, not an asset.
However, everyone thinks they're gonna be a bigshot raider on P99, so even though almost none of them actually end up in a serious raid guild, they feel weird about maining a paladin because what if some day! That's why it's one of the least played classes. For anyone who knows that they're never gonna be a raider, it's by far the best tank class to choose, especially now that shadowknights have been nerfed and it costs tons of mana for them to hold aggro, making it awkward in a chain-pulling group.
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