Hello I got notified of this so I’ll explain my thought process here. Note that this might be more significant for people that are pushing top leaderboard times and scores.
Refreshing move is just absolutely broken for SnS for 2 big reasons.
1: Taunting: Taunts are able to be used more often. This makes it less likely that any DPS or healer will pull aggro from you. As you play with more DPS that are pumping with like 5 con and BIS gear, they might pull mobs from you at a much higher rate than you’d expect. Especially if they aren’t running evasive/beloved. God forbid you aren’t running despised either.
2: Survivability: Defender’s Resolve gives you 50% flat damage reduction ON TOP of all your fortifies, ward potions, aversions, passives, etc. You can basically reach 100% mitigation against some damage types with the right combination of things. (In current patch. This is not the case after the update. Lots of this is no longer the case after the update) If you watch some of the high end tank videos, you’ll see sometimes they take 0 damage and the mitigation number is max integer value. You’ll think “How is he mitigating 2.1 billion damage?” the answer is stacking all of the available mitigations effectively. They are reaching 100% mitigation and the game doesn’t know what to do with that. With RM as it is pre-nerf, in big enough clumps you can maintain the defender’s resolve damage mitigation almost 100% of the time.
Now lets talk about this for post-patch. For starters, .2 seconds is HUGE because it means you only get 1 proc per swing. Nowadays you proc it on every enemy hit with light/heavy attacks. After patch it will be 1 proc per swing. This is a pretty big nerf for SnS tanking.
Sword and shield will no longer have grit on light attacks at 300 str. Now you might say “Just use 300 con” and sure that is an option. Might even be the best option for pugs. But if you are trying to push leaderboards then that’s not going to be a viable option. 300 con will give you grit, but you’re also doing waaaayyy less damage. This means you generate way less threat. To get around generating less threat, the normal solution would be to TAUNT. but wait… RM got nerfed and defender’s resolve has the longest CD in the entire game. So now you can taunt once every like 15 seconds (maybe?) and you also do way less damage if you want grit.
Okay so now lets say you go 300 str like you do pre-patch. Your light attacks will do more damage than having 300 con, of course. But you don’t have grit. This means like none of your attacks will even land because you’ll just get staggered. SnS has no built in grit in the SnS tree so you can’t rely on that like you can for other melee weapons like hatchet, GA, WH, GS, etc. So how do you go about fixing that? I honestly am not sure what the solution will be yet. In my head SnS tanking will be incredibly difficult to pull off but I have yet to try it out on PTR myself.
I know other people will say go 300 con and use another despised/hated. And yeah that’s fair. but haven’t we been complaining as a community about making certain perks required for success? Like people have been hating on resilient being a requirement on every pvp piece for a long time. Forcing tanks to run despised and 2x hated just seems like the same thing. Let us be versatile in our builds if we want to be.
To me this is a pvp change that has had a severe affect on pve in a way that they probably didn’t imagine. SnS needs grit in PvE. It’s going to be very interesting to see how people SnS tank without it going forward.
Also the dude replying to you in this post doesn’t PvE so their opinion on it is based purely on pvp. They also seem to think PvE shouldn’t be factored into balancing at all because it’s worthless which is just such an incredibly ignorant take. The top companies in NW are probably like at most… 5% of the active player base? If that even? like what are we doing here… catering the balance of New World to strictly war logging PvP companies? That is just nuts. They are right about one thing though, GS tanking will probably be waaaaay more common.