Removing Auto Crits and Direct Hits from WAR

[BarretOblivion]

War is slowly crawling up in dps because of how well it works with crit, should get pretty close to the other tanks late in 5.X. Also yeah... wish it had a bit more healing to it, nascent is just so late in level, running low level stuff definitely isnt how it use to be. Tbh all tanks could use a heal, shield, or something, with their aoes.

No. Not really. All other tanks will also go up with crit, right now WAR is just pretty dec at progging, which is where we are right now. Optimization and higher damage more players who care about that will use other jobs. Plus, some want to think the buff to Shake it Off made a difference.

[Shurrikhan]

How was WAR's identity since inception "big honking crits"?

1.x Warrior was about "big honking crits" to instantly heal you to full HP along with doing some of the best AoE in the game.

2.0 Warrior was about "big honking crits", largely as your only real means of survival.

2.1-2.5 Warrior still had strong Inner Beast hits, even if that damage meant almost nothing and people mostly avoided using Defiance after Infuriate or particular tankbusters.

3.x-4.18 Warrior was about "big honking crits", but merely insofar as damage, apart from Equilibrium critting. This was mostly a result of comparatively massive potencies, stacking Crit (and later DHit), and staying out of Defiance.

...It's never not been a major part of its identity. That was originally tied hand-in-hand with self-healing/lifesteal, but even if Warrior's mostly lost the first there's no reason to claim that the other shouldn't be considered a core component.

[BluexBird]

For me, the warrior's main identity was having more HP than the other tanks. Then they went ahead and got rid of that in Shadowbringers...


Like yeah, I'll still play it. But not a day goes by that I'm not still sad about it.

[Cabalabob]

My idea for inner release was to change it from 100% direct crit rate to increase direct hit and critical hit rates by 50% and doubles the damage of critical and direct hits.

On paper this would work out to be the same as the current IR (a crit/direct every other hit at double damage vs a crit/direct hit at normal damage every hit). But it would also get rid of a few of the drawbacks of IR. direct hit as a stat wouldn’t be entirely bad for WAR anymore as even with IR on you would have room to further increase your direct hit rate as well as still increasing it outside of IR. It would also mean using infuriate during IR wouldn’t be inherently bad, you’d still be increasing your crit/direct hit rate further than what it was even with IR and the double damage that you wouldn’t get without IR would be pretty beefy.

[KDSilver]

2 years ago, they made IR do crit/dh because people were complaining that war's total damage output through its burst window was significally tied to this rng factor and made it frustrating and non consistent.

Just a reminder.

[ReviaInfantry]

Ain't the introduction of Chaotic Cyclone and Inner Chaos are to let Warrior actually do something outside of IR window?

Nascent self target is always non-argue issue, me sad when we got like 4k shields (solo) to 20k shields (full party) improvements.

Also DoT. War need some sort of DoT or new oGCD, which does not cost beast gauge and not really a defensive cooldown.

[shao32]

Ain't the introduction of Chaotic Cyclone and Inner Chaos are to let Warrior actually do something outside of IR window?

Not really, both skills are just direct upgrades of fell cleave and decimate, they even use the same button, gameplay wise they added nothing since is like using buffed regular fell cleaves, more like they did give you reasons to never ever use infuriate under inner release.

[BluexBird]

I think the main reason behind Infuriate now having charges was to help reapply Storm's Eye as late as possible. If your Storm's Eye is running out in 5 seconds and you just used Maim, there's no time to use Storm's Path and get to Storm's Eye again before the buff runs out. But there's enough time to fit in a Fell Cleave or two and then use Storm's Eye just before it runs out as opposed to refreshing it 5 seconds too early.

What bothers me is that this is the only level of complexity that gets offered to the Warrior, and it doesn't even have that much of an impact. You could literally just alternate between Storm's Eye and Storm's path and use Fell Cleave when your gauge is about to overflow, while making sure you used IR and Upheaval as soon as they're up. This is as mediocre of a way to play Warrior and you still end up doing tons of damage. There's just not much of a difference separating this playstyle from one that carefully monitors their Storm's Eye buff to make sure it's applied as late as possible.

What I'm saying is, I just wish there was more complexity to our playstyle. One idea I have is that, the closer Storm's Eye is to running out, the more damage you do. Capping out at like 10% more damage when it's at 5 seconds before it's gone. Don't even really care if potencies get adjusted. At least this would give us something else to focus on while waiting for our Inner Release to come back up.

[TouchandFeel]

My idea for inner release was to change it from 100% direct crit rate to increase direct hit and critical hit rates by 50% and doubles the damage of critical and direct hits.

On paper this would work out to be the same as the current IR (a crit/direct every other hit at double damage vs a crit/direct hit at normal damage every hit). But it would also get rid of a few of the drawbacks of IR. direct hit as a stat wouldn’t be entirely bad for WAR anymore as even with IR on you would have room to further increase your direct hit rate as well as still increasing it outside of IR. It would also mean using infuriate during IR wouldn’t be inherently bad, you’d still be increasing your crit/direct hit rate further than what it was even with IR and the double damage that you wouldn’t get without IR would be pretty beefy.

In a vacuum it would appear to look good on paper, but it doesn't account for some very relevant factors and in practice it would not work out that way and would result in a distinct dps increase.

All players have an existing crit% and dh% level that is based on their Crit and DH stats, of which looking at stats right about now a player is likely sitting between an ~15% chance to potentially over 20% chance for landing a dh, crit, dhcrit. Add an additional 50% to that and you are now sitting at ~65% to over 70% with the potential to go much higher pretty quickly as we get into this patch and stats jump up with the new gear that people are getting, not even considering farther into this expansion.

If you then double the damage done by a dh/crit/dhcrit under the assumption that it will compensate for supposedly getting those half as often, you are basing that assumption on the wrong numbers. If it was a static 50% chance for dh/crit/dhcrit and then you doubled the damage, that conceptually would balance out like you described, dh/crit/dhcrit half as often but each hit does the damage of two hits. It would result in some potentially extremely high damage spikes sometimes with very low damage troughs other times, which was sort of a big complaint with IR before, but statistically over time it should be about equitable overall.

However, as pointed out, you won't be working with a static 50% chance, and instead would be working with a decently higher percentage and so you will be landing dh/crit/dhcrit attacks in that window far more frequent than half of the time and so the doubled damage to compensate is now overcompensating and results in a hefty overall dps increase. If we are looking at 65%-70% chance, that still would potentially equate to 3 to 4 out of your 5 hits under IR being a dh/crit/dhcrit which with doubled damage would be equal to landing 6 to 8 regular dh/crit/dhcrits.

In fact, because the crit% and dh% chances are fluid since they are determined by ever changing and increasing stats, using an approach like this where you add to the %chance and then increase the damage to compensate will always be problematic since the %chance that you are trying to compensate for will always be in flux making the compensation amount never truly able to match up correctly.

If you locked the % chances at a number like the aforementioned 50% and then compensated with increased damage, you are still stuck with the same issue that we have now of it being locked at 100% as well as introducing the problems that I alluded to earlier of your burst period being at the mercy of rng.

I know that many players dislike the automatic DHCrits with IR, but to be honest it is the most consistent and functional "fix" to this issue, at least that I can come up with off the top of my head, outside of removing them entirely and rebalancing damage elsewhere in WAR's kit to compensate or a more drastic redesign.