7 Ideas to Balance WAR

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Originally Posted by Ehayte

I'm just a beginner in the finer points of a WAR (lvl, like, 40 or something unimpressive), but I have a decently geared PLD.

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You may want to actually learn a lot more before you start saying anything, like perhaps reading any of the analysis that's been done concerning WARs and PLDs in comparison across every imaginable aspect of performance that can be quantified.

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I'm not saying WAR wins ANY of those fights, but you can't make a blanket comparison between CDs only, because WAR has a weaker suite of CDs in exchange for a stronger set of Weaponskills.

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Except that WAR doesn't actually have a stronger set of weapon skills. Maim and SE have to be used to make up for the fact that WAR suffers from a larger damage debuff in tank stance, not to mention the fact that PLD has a single high enmity combo that does everything for it. CoS is actually a lot *better* than Spirits Within because it doesn't depend upon being at max hp, not to mention that it's an AoE (also, CoS generates slightly more enmity than a single Overpower while being off the GCD and affecting a larger area and being easier to use) so I'm not even sure why you think that Spirits Within is somehow amazing.

It's been gone over numerous times: WAR does not have an appreciable offensive advantage over PLD. WAR has an *ever so slight* offensive advantage over PLD that is so small that it vanishes as soon as you get into a group while having *explicitly* atrocious utility and survivability compared to a PLD. Claiming that comparing CD suites is unfair because WAR gets fancier offensive toys just demonstrates how little you know about the subject.

My suggestion would be to make the healing bonus apply to defiance and change IB from a heal to a skill that increases the duration of thrill of battle to 60 seconds and grants a slightly weaker form of bloodbath so we can help keep those extra hps up. They should also change unchained to a skill that we can put up to increase our dps similar to sword oath since we should not be even close to a pally under that aspect, atm unchained is about completely worthless when compared to the viability of IB.

While we are at it they need to fix steel cyclone. This ability should only be available while infuriated and should not drop stacks but I think it should refresh the stack. How nice would it be to have an aoe ability that can work in conjunction with overpower and maintain our wrath. So rather than removing all our stacks it should build one to refresh the timer. Take the dmg down to 180 or something to compensate but then it would actually be useful.

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Originally Posted by Kitru

I'm not even sure why you think that Spirits Within is somehow amazing.

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Spirits Within IS amazing. If there is one thing the PLD weaponskill kit excels at it's utility. Spirits Within being a silence on a 30 second cooldown, shield Bash being a non-GCD stun, Rage of Halone reducing STR, and even Shield Swipe being a Pacify (of dubious value, admittedly) shows that the weaponskill set for PLD is objectively better.

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Originally Posted by Hundred

WAR doesn't necessarily have to be at the same state before CD's even though you included RoH. They are allowed some degree of assymetry, and in contrast to RoH, WAR is increasing his damage with eye, which I think is fair enough for a divide to be made in that particular comparison between defensive and offensive strength given that when the two come together they both reap the benefits of the others debuff.

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Not sure exactly what you're trying to say here. Of course they don't have to be the same and yes in some cases both will reap the benefit of the others' debuff, but they won't always, or even often. And the major issue that it comes down to is that the value of Storm's Eye debuff is much lower than the value of Rage of Halone debuff. Storm's Eye doesn't really make a WAR tank that much better, it just makes their self healing slightly more potent when they need it, while still maintaining single target enmity. In fact, you could attribute the damage difference between the tanks entirely to Storm's Eye.

But the issue is that when it comes to what matters - not dying - RoH is king. I agree they are allowed some degree of asymmetry, but I'm extremely sick of people saying WAR doesn't need more tools to reduce damage they take, or that giving them say Fists of Earth will suddenly make them imbalanced. And it is still over a 10% difference in damage taken even if WAR was to be given Fists of Earth, which is the point I was going to make.

I still think letting Heavy Swing Build Wraith and maybe lowering the recast of Unchained would probably have the biggest impact on WAR despite being relatively small changes. Why? Well allowing Wraith to build up on Butchers block cuts down the building time by about half, it allows us to use abilities like SC, Unchained, and IB with less downtime on without full stacks which means less stress on the healers, and overall increases our DPS and self healing capability by a wide margin. As for lowering Unchained's recast it just up's our chances to do some solid DPS in a fight, that's pretty self explanitory.

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Originally Posted by Hachiko

Spirits Within IS amazing. If there is one thing the PLD weaponskill kit excels at it's utility. Spirits Within being a silence on a 30 second cooldown, shield Bash being a non-GCD stun, Rage of Halone reducing STR, and even Shield Swipe being a Pacify (of dubious value, admittedly) shows that the weaponskill set for PLD is objectively better.

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What I was trying to say (which I think got lost in the post) was that Spirits Within isn't amazing when compared to CoS. CoS is the objectively *better* weaponskill. The poster I quoted was stating that Spirits Within was substantially better than CoS, which is just horribly wrong.

Personally, I think that the non-damage weaponskill suites of the two tanks are as mismatched as many people seem to think it is. The problem is less that the WAR or PLD weaponskill suite is stronger or weaker than the other but rather that the PLD weaponskill suite is much more defensively oriented and, as such, much more useful in the long run, mainly because the offensive contributions of a tank are tiny in comparison to the output of the group as a whole. Reducing the damage that a tank takes (and the damage the group takes on some raid damage) is a much larger proportionate increase to effectiveness than simply increasing the damage that the tank deals: tanks take a *monumental* majority of the damage for a group but only deal a fraction of the damage. A 5% decrease in damage taken is going to do *way* more than a 10% increase in damage dealt. Hell, a 5% decrease in damage taken is going to do more than a 20-30% increase in damage dealt thanks to the ratios of DPS to tanks and DPS damage to tank damage.

For SE to honestly be equivalent to Halone, it needs to reduce resistance to *all* damage by 10%, or, at the very least, all physical damage. Halone provides a proportionate increase to the survivability of the entire group; SE just provides a proportionate increase to the smallest damage contributors in the group.

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Originally Posted by SwordCoheir

I still think letting Heavy Swing Build Wraith and maybe lowering the recast of Unchained would probably have the biggest impact on WAR despite being relatively small changes. Why? Well allowing Wraith to build up on Butchers block cuts down the building time by about half, it allows us to use abilities like SC, Unchained, and IB with less downtime on without full stacks which means less stress on the healers, and overall increases our DPS and self healing capability by a wide margin. As for lowering Unchained's recast it just up's our chances to do some solid DPS in a fight, that's pretty self explanitory.

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The problem with this is that it still doesn't make those self heals scale with incoming damage. All you'd be doing is making WAR stronger (by a *crapton*) in easy content while making minor improvements to performance in difficult content. The self-healing needs to be made to scale, not just be made bigger or more common.

Also, the damage that a tank deals isn't part of their primary role. Increasing the damage dealt doesn't make a tank more effective at tanking. It provides a secondary advantage to bringing one along, but it's not what you bring a tank for. Increasing damage dealt is akin to increasing the utility of the class: it's a secondary concern. A tank that deals 50% more damage is still going to be left behind for a tank that takes 10% less damage for anything where you actually have to worry about a tank. All that your damage increase ideas would do would be make WARs more popular for 4 man dungeon speed runs; they'd still be horribly unpopular for anything that isn't a joke to survive through.

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Originally Posted by Kitru

The problem with this.

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Well it's a matter of perspective, allowing WAR's to build Wraith faster lowers the downtime spent rebuilding stacks and allows you more opportunities to self heal with IB reducing the stress on healers. Lowering Unchained's recast will increase opportunities for DPS for sure but it also increases opportunities for reactive healing because of higher hate thresholds (even if SE sucks) and lowers time spent fighting mobs.

But then again that's just my take on it, I'm not trying to scale everything to something that's stupid broken like SC was in 1.0, but having more opportunities for self healing does allow you to keep your own HP up and going more consistently instead of being forced to hold back all the time for "oh crap" moments seems kind of backwards progress to me.

Here's my two cents:
Allow WAR to stack 7 wrath. Keep healing buff scale. Make IB use only 5 stacks instead of all wrath. That should help to close the EHP gap while keeping the panic button option available.
Also I second the idea to let WAR parry from any angle entirely because of the intro movie.

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Originally Posted by SwordCoheir

Well it's a matter of perspective, allowing WAR's to build Wraith faster lowers the downtime spent rebuilding stacks and allows you more opportunities to self heal with IB reducing the stress on healers. Lowering Unchained's recast will increase opportunities for DPS for sure but it also increases opportunities for reactive healing because of higher hate thresholds (even if SE sucks) and lowers time spent fighting mobs.

But then again that's just my take on it, I'm not trying to scale everything to something that's stupid broken like SC was in 1.0, but having more opportunities for self healing does allow you to keep your own HP up and going more consistently instead of being forced to hold back all the time for "oh crap" moments seems kind of backwards progress to me.

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You miss the point. If 100% of WAR mitigation comes from self heals then they aren't scaling with content because Tank DPS doesn't scale as fast as monster DPS does.

For a WAR to currently be on the same level as PLD in terms of mitigation their self healing would need to increase by a factor of nearly 4. That would mean nonsense like Inner Beast healing for 1000% of the damage dealt which would be "stupid broken like SC was in 1.0."

And trading off tank survivability for DPS only matters if a) you have the throughput to heal them for the duration of the fight, and b) the tradeoff in DPS is high enough to offset the increased healing required to keep them up, i.e. if they take 20% more damage they end the fight 20% sooner. But for that to happen, WAR would need to have roughly the same damage as a DPS job tacked onto them while tanking, which would put them at a higher DPS level than any of the DPS jobs which, again, would be stupid broken.

As an aside, lowing Unchained's recast time does nothing to improve healing received because unchained doesn't increase the damage of Inner Beast for one, and for two actually getting off an inner beast in unchained requires the usage of a secondary cooldown (infuriate).

Neither would benefit the WAR and would just leave them as a sub par tank"

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Originally Posted by Hachiko

You miss the point. If 100% of WAR mitigation comes from self heals then they aren't scaling with content because Tank DPS doesn't scale as fast as monster DPS does.

For a WAR to currently be on the same level as PLD in terms of mitigation their self healing would need to increase by a factor of nearly 4. That would mean nonsense like Inner Beast healing for 1000% of the damage dealt which would be "stupid broken like SC was in 1.0."

And trading off tank survivability for DPS only matters if a) you have the throughput to heal them for the duration of the fight, and b) the tradeoff in DPS is high enough to offset the increased healing required to keep them up, i.e. if they take 20% more damage they end the fight 20% sooner.

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If IB worked like this, then it would scale with your gear improvements along with the difficulty of the content. Why not get behind this idea? It seems to solve a lot of problems with warrior.

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Originally Posted by Genesiser

How about make inner beast give the heal like it does, but also put an absorb shield on you equal to 50% of the damage received during the last5 seconds from enemies?

That would make warriors scale with their gear in terms of the heal along with the content by getting a bubble equal to a percentage if damage recieved.

Also, when you take a big hit or a lot of damage, say 5k dmg, you heal yourself by a decent amount and the healers would have time to rescue you as opposed to having you potentially be 2 shotted in the span of 2 seconds.

EDIT....
How about this too? Leave warrior how it is, but make the warrior revolve around inner beast for real. What I mean is, let it be used with any amount of wrath stacks, but each stack makes it stronger. Kind of like this...

1 stack : heal for 60% of dmg dealt from move, get bubble equal to 5% of dmg received in last 5 seconds.
2 stacks : heal for 120% dmg dealt, bubble equal to 10% dmg received.
5 stacks: heal for 300% dmg dealt, bubble equal to 25% dmg received.

Of course, it would be better if healing bonus was tied to defiance instead of wrath stacks, but it would still be pretty good and it would add a bit more strategy to warrior tanking which is always a good thing.

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Inner Beast is one flipping skill it doesn't need to do everything and the kitchen sink

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Originally Posted by Hundred

Inner Beast is one flipping skill it doesn't need to do everything and the kitchen sink

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True but In Their Defense, Warrior really got Shafted as far as Job Abilities go. Most Jobs got 3-5 New abilities that actually do something. We only Got 2, Inner Beast and Steel Cyclone (which is not worth wrath in most situations). Then we have Defiance, and The other 2 abilities are to counter the Gimp that comes with Defiance.

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Originally Posted by Hundred

100% absorb for 30 seconds on a 45 second cooldown would be absurd.
Mercy stroke is meant for multi-enemy situations as I see it which is why it works the way it does, a buffer like
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Assassin's_Promise would be some nice QoL for it.
I thought about Storm path at 150% before, its something like ~1/3rd of an IB right, would be good when you're up on Enmity for some sustain given you have the TP before it. I think it can work, but I've seen another suggestion to make storm path give a buff that makes your attacks absorb (like bloodbath) which I thought was cool. Either way the skill currently is pretty useless from day 1, so a buff can't hurt it.

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100% return for 30 of every 45 would be effectively a refresh-style buff. average damage output in defiance is approx 100-130 per hit, giving you an effective return of approx 3000hp per activation (more or less) and its pretty easy to lose more than than in 45 seconds. i'm ball-parking my figures here, so they could use some tweaking.

150% return on storm's path makes it a viable option in combo rotation and tops off your HP, again, average hit on that being approx 150, that would give you 225hp, enough to assist in not being such a drain to MP on your healers if you can throw it in every 25-30 seconds.

Mercy stroke, yeah, its meant for groups as a sustaining heal, but in a group of 8, how often can you get the timing EXACTLY right to be the final attack? i know for me its far more random chance than actual skill because i never know how much damage my DD are going to throw out. its also effectively useless in boss fights, when WAR takes far more damage than from a group (and overpower+bloodbath is more effective, taking healing from multiple hits). letting it heal (on WAR ONLY) when used in the last 20% would make it far more effective at performing its role in groups AND give it a purpose in boss fights.

all in all, giving WAR's more or more effective ways to self heal in post-50 instances shortens the gap between PLD mitigation and EHP and sticks more with the theme of the job, rather than making it a "semi PLD with an axe" simply by trying to increase mitigation. I've said my numbers here are ball park, approximates and could likely use some more looking in to and fine-tuning, but for me they are far more in-theme and effective than most other suggestions i've seen thus far.

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Originally Posted by Kitru

WAR does not have an appreciable offensive advantage over PLD.

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Uhg..I'm just, I'm so tired of you. I was not talking about DPS, I was talking about tanking utility.

- Maim gets WARs up to 90% DMG (75%x1.2 = 90%) 10% higher than PLDs in Shield Oath, add in SE and you are relatively higher. So you need to use Maim OR SE to make up AND OVERCOME the larger (5% lol) dmg debuff.
- OP is GCD, it may cost a lot of TP, but even with conical targeting (which is NOT that difficult to manage) it has much more enmity utility because it doesn't take 15s to build all the enmity, and its not a 30s CD (RE: CoS).
- SW has a silence....and its a 300 potency attack (maybe slightly less) at the start of a fight to add an enmity cushion. And it has a silence. And a silence....I'm not sure why you think Circle of Scorn is somehow amazing.

You are the Toby to my Michael.

PS I'd like to state, as always, that I am a strong advocate of a WAR buff - I was just trying to say that I think things like IB that a WAR have are better from a mitigation/utility standpoint than what I feel like PLD has. PLD obviously has a better overall deal right now, but comparing WAR CDs to PLD CDs isn't 100% fair.

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Originally Posted by Genesiser

If IB worked like this, then it would scale with your gear improvements along with the difficulty of the content. Why not get behind this idea? It seems to solve a lot of problems with warrior.

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I have a few hesitations about it.

First, it loads all of WAR survivability onto one active skill, which seems kind of questionable from a design standpoint. I think Inner Beast should be A tool for WAR survivability. Not the virtual only tool that WAR relies on. (also worth noting it would immediately make something like Thrill of Battle of questionable value).

Second, I'm not convinced it could be really well balanced. It still has big potential to be overpowered or underpowered.

Third, I'm not sure if it could be implemented in the current engine. I don't know the limitations of the game's combat log, but considering all the iffy things that happen in combat (i.e. not getting healed for killing blows inflicted by Mercy Stroke) I don't think I would want to let my char's survivability rely on such a thing.

Fourth, I'm not sure I like the way it would changed IB's usage. It would remove any strategy from using IB and IB would move simply to "use it whenever it's on up, and save Infuriate for emergencies." Not only that, but it would change WAR from a sort of anticipation and reaction based tank to a purely pre-emptive mitigation tank which is closer to being like paladins than people realize.

As a note, your second idea would make WAR obscenely overpowered without some fundamental reworks to Inner Beast. The rotation would be HS->SS->IB->BB->IB->HS->M->IB->SE->IB->HS->SS->IB->BB->IB etc. etc. etc. It would essentially triple WAR damage output, and suddenly WARs in tank stance would not only do more DPS than WAR outside of defiance but probably more than any other DPS in the game.

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Originally Posted by Ehayte

Uhg..I'm just, I'm so tired of you. I was not talking about DPS, I was talking about tanking utility.

- Maim gets WARs up to 90% DMG (75%x1.2 = 90%) 10% higher than PLDs in Shield Oath, add in SE and you are relatively higher. So you need to use Maim OR SE to make up AND OVERCOME the larger (5% lol) dmg debuff.
- OP is GCD, it may cost a lot of TP, but even with conical targeting (which is NOT that difficult to manage) it has much more enmity utility because it doesn't take 15s to build all the enmity, and its not a 30s CD (RE: CoS).
- SW has a silence....and its a 300 potency attack (maybe slightly less) at the start of a fight to add an enmity cushion. And it has a silence. And a silence....I'm not sure why you think Circle of Scorn is somehow amazing.

You are the Toby to my Michael.

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You are under-estimating the value of Spirit's Within and particularly Circle of Scorn. Having two off GCD abilities which function as essentially 10 Potency/second each is extremely high value. Once you consider that PLD has the best damage buffing skill in Fight or Flight, they really close the gap between the two jobs.

The entire "advantage" a WAR has is based on how often they use Inner Beast. At no usage a WAR is probably going to be ~3-4% higher DPS. At constant usage ~12-18% higher.

WAR will have more AOE damage though, that's a given, but it comes at a high cost.

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Originally Posted by Shingi

all in all, giving WAR's more or more effective ways to self heal in post-50 instances shortens the gap between PLD mitigation and EHP and sticks more with the theme of the job, rather than making it a "semi PLD with an axe" simply by trying to increase mitigation. I've said my numbers here are ball park, approximates and could likely use some more looking in to and fine-tuning, but for me they are far more in-theme and effective than most other suggestions i've seen thus far.

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That's mostly because you have no experience with endgame tanking or playing a WAR at the endgame. Just having additional mitigation doesn't make WAR a semi PLD with an Axe. It's actually necessary for WAR to be a balanced class in the long run, because there is no way to increase healing alone to make them viable at endgame without making them completely and obscenely imbalanced before that point.

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Originally Posted by Hachiko

That's mostly because you have no experience with endgame tanking or playing a WAR at the endgame. Just having additional mitigation doesn't make WAR a semi PLD with an Axe. It's actually necessary for WAR to be a balanced class in the long run, because there is no way to increase healing alone to make them viable at endgame without making them completely and obscenely imbalanced before that point.

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and just what are you basing my level of endgame experience on?

if you bother to read my original post in this thread, the point i was making was having a level 50 trait to bring those changes in, so they're not available like that as cross-class skills and not before needed to survive endgame content without being such a drain on MP.

just because mitigation "works" doesnt make it the only solution, and its not in the theme of how WAR was designed. all my suggestion does is provide an upscale in WAR self-healing potential thats only available at endgame when its needed.

I'd ask you to also refrain from making further comments about me personally and if you feel the need to rebuke my ideas, work purely on them rather than the person making them.

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Originally Posted by Shingi

I'd ask you to also refrain from making further comments about me personally and if you feel the need to rebuke my ideas, work purely on them rather than the person making them.

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Your ideas straight up wouldn't even work at endgame. There is no degree of buffing that would make Storm's Path a solution to WAR problems without completely reworking the skill. Your solutions simply wouldn't work no matter what you feel the "theme" of the class is, because relying entirely on self heals will never come close to being enough mitigation for WAR without being an absurd degree of mitigation for lower level or lower teir content. You honestly haven't thought it through.

There is no way to have WAR be balanced at endgame via only self heals for mitigation and also be balanced at early game.

EXAMPTION： SORRY FOR MY BAD ENGLISH!


My definition of balanced WAR and PLD is... "If we have both WAR and PLD in party, main tank become WAR. But comparing PLD and WAR solo, PLD's survivability come top." and this has to be done without Hallowed Ground. Because, We all know that if WAR handle same damage as PLD does including Hallowed Ground it's just broken. So, WAR still needs to give some value to party that replace Hallowed Ground. (Or maybe SE should remove Hallowed Ground. No other skill can compare with Hallowed Ground. My vote for additional new action is something to lower 20% damage dealt by enemy( or enemies) like Rain of Death does.)

well.. with Fixed Defiance and Fist Of Earth, in most situation WAR overwhelmed PLD and become viable tank. I don't know it's fair or not... (though, still PLD do better in Bahamut.)

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Originally Posted by Hachiko

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Three points. BTW, I change my side. Fist Of Earth is not too strong. (three reason, one, yes maybe I left too much, two, PLD still have scale damage mitigation CDs, and three, if Fist Of Earth become cross-class-skill we lose one additional skill.) But we need more consideration for both Fixed Defiance and Fist Of Earth on.

First, why did I remove RoH is that like, with Storm's Eye, Sword Oath PLD do better damage than off Defiance WAR. (we all know that.) So, in my head WAR should count RoH and should become better tank than PLD with RoH. My mistake is that I should both apply RoH(not leave RoH). So, under 1000 DPS, with RoH WAR now needs 743 hps, and with perfect IB war overwhelm PLD. (w/o ability, so, sorry, yes PLD CD work better with 700 mob-DPS. Finally PLD wins.) Anyhow, if SE balanced PLD and WAR than WAR should under effect of RoH.

Supposition of Perfect IB:
W/O Infuriate : 53
With Infuriate : 73

Second, We need to carefully consider about IB heal mitigation because the amount of mitigation is huge. 1000DPS vs 53 hps is nothing, but how about 700 vs 53 hps ~ 73 hps? This is extra 10% mitigation. We all know that stack up scale mitigation than efficiency become lower. We still don't count parry, Rain Of Death, and some other dps loose. First we stack up all scale mitigation, than deduct IB Heal from rest of damage. PLD always mitigates about 27% of damage, and WAR only does 22%, but amount of IB heal will take more than 5%(with 1000DPS.). In the past 100dps static mitigation is just nothing but Fist Of Earth or something work as Fist Of Earth bring back static mitigation into life.

Third, you said that constant IB heal are nearly impossible, but it should work fine. Because, our subject is to agaisnt massive DPS. While I'm doing PLD in Bahamut T1 Caduceus, I always have some room to heal(my HP always around 4000 with my 5400 hp maximum). In addition, with Fist Of Earth, WAR has 11% better EHP. Guess it's fair to count IB heal as constant mitigation.


BTW I agree with Hachiko that IB don't need dmg shield. That is just, not fun. Also, I wonder how much damage should we suppose to against. Yoshi-p said "will change WAR able to do something PLD does" but we still needs specific, (hypothetical) DPS level. I don't think 1000 DPS is appropriate. Any suggestions?

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Originally Posted by Hachiko

Your ideas straight up wouldn't even work at endgame. There is no degree of buffing that would make Storm's Path a solution to WAR problems without completely reworking the skill. Your solutions simply wouldn't work no matter what you feel the "theme" of the class is, because relying entirely on self heals will never come close to being enough mitigation for WAR without being an absurd degree of mitigation for lower level or lower teir content. You honestly haven't thought it through.

There is no way to have WAR be balanced at endgame via only self heals for mitigation and also be balanced at early game.

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yet you still are making no actual case against it, you're just going "no, wouldnt work", and you're still talking about "early game" even though i've said twice now about a trait to alter for endgame only. seems to me that you're just dismissing the idea because its not what you want or like.

Now, for completely off the wall idea. Defiance, with zero Wrath stacks grants +25% HP, -25% damage received, -25% damage dealt. As you gain stacks of wrath, damage reduction is lowered by 5% (+-0% at five Wrath), but you gain +3/5% healing received per Wrath. Now you have to balance between getting enough enmity and blowing your Wrath before big attacks from bosses (add +Wrath to Overpower + Flash, so that you cannot cheat too). Tadah, really dynamic tanking!

Imagine all the Infuriate / IB / Unchained shenanigans, also making your pocket healer frustrated as hell since the damage you receive would be wildly variating.

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Originally Posted by Shingi

yet you still are making no actual case against it, you're just going "no, wouldnt work", and you're still talking about "early game" even though i've said twice now about a trait to alter for endgame only. seems to me that you're just dismissing the idea because its not what you want or like.

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It doesn't matter if it's a trait or not. What, is it only going to be active in Binding Coil of Bahamut?


No. You said level 50. That means: Trivial AK. Trivial WP. Trivial Castrum / Prae. Trivial HM Ifrit. Trivial HM Garuda. Semi-Trivial Titan (though you would still be in the same place in terms of being burst down if your healers are unable to heal after the Rock Buster, which is a huge downside for WAR on Titan). What about when they release new level 50 4 man content? With your proposed solutions ALL of it is trivial. You wouldn't even need a scholar's fairy to heal you in 4 man content unless they scale the damage dealt to crazy degrees.

Point two - none of your solutions would help in Coil. So you've added a few HPS from Bloodbath and made storm's path not quite as bad. But relying on Storm's Path nerfs your enmity by at least 11%, it concedes any DPS advantage WAR has over a PLD entirely, and it drains your TP ridiculously fast. In any situation where a WAR is a MT they will probably not be able to hold threat against the higher enmity jobs (MNK) using a rotation that has Storm's Path in it. And even then you're still only able to use it once every 3 rotations. So who cares if you get an extra 225 heals per 22.5 seconds? 10 HP/S is trivial, and is already outdone by the Bloodbath that even YOU recognize as negligible. 10 HP/S is not something that keeps you "topped off" when you're taking regular attacks for 1000-1800 damage.

Finally there is the buff to bloodbath. The one that would actually have an impact. 100% conversion for 30 of 45 seconds would be great, but it isn't enough of a solution to make WAR MT viable. For one, because you are still likely to be burst down in coil. If you'd run coil you would understand that when you can take 5k damage in 1 global, a HOT that works out to 100 hp/s isn't going to keep you up. And what about when new raid content comes out with even more damage to tanks? Do you think WAR DPS will double or triple by then? But it would help with things like AK and WP, because most damage from those instances is under 100 DPS. WAR would be virtually unkillable on normal pulls or any of the bosses even without a healer and even in really poor gear.

You can't load 100% of WAR mitigation onto self heals, particularly ones that scale with the player damage, because tank damage doesn't scale nearly as quickly in this game as player health or monster damage. It leads to a multitude of problems.

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Originally Posted by konflikti

Now, for completely off the wall idea. Defiance, with zero Wrath stacks grants +25% HP, -25% damage received, -25% damage dealt. As you gain stacks of wrath, damage reduction is lowered by 5% (+-0% at five Wrath), but you gain +3/5% healing received per Wrath. Now you have to balance between getting enough enmity and blowing your Wrath before big attacks from bosses (add +Wrath to Overpower + Flash, so that you cannot cheat too). Tadah, really dynamic tanking!

Imagine all the Infuriate / IB / Unchained shenanigans, also making your pocket healer frustrated as hell since the damage you receive would be wildly variating.

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This is kind of an interesting idea. What if it went the other way though. With high stacks of wrath our dps goes up, healing received goes down, defense goes up. So we scale a little with normal attacks, point being to have high wrath when the big hit comes in and then we blow IB to give ourselves a self boost while removing wrath so healers can burst us back up.

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Originally Posted by Seidaku

This is kind of an interesting idea. What if it went the other way though. With high stacks of wrath our dps goes up, healing received goes down, defense goes up. So we scale a little with normal attacks, point being to have high wrath when the big hit comes in and then we blow IB to give ourselves a self boost while removing wrath so healers can burst us back up.

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Either way would be cool really, I just personally think getting more Wrath ie. getting more angrier would lower your defenses and raise your offense. I kinda forgot the crit bonus / damage bonus from the orginal post. It would also force you to blow you Wrath and not happily sit at max Wrath because you got maximum damage reduction then (maximum damage reduction would in practice also mean most EHP and most use out of heals, which would outclass +% to healing received).

I'd really want to keep the offensive tank concept and have our DPS being the key to our reactive mitigation.
How I'd fix WAR:
1 - Move the selfheal from Storm Path to BB. We absolutely need to have a constant selfheal rotation to close the gap with PLD CD.

2 - Make Steel Cyclone add shield equal to 300% of damage. Basically giving us tools to mitigate before burst (Steel Cyclone) and after burst (IB).

3 - Make Vengeance a skill that keeps track of incoming damage and applies a scaling dps factor to Steel Cyclone and IB while vengeance is active, thus scaling our Shield/Heal. Scaling factor should be a +% of dmg received/maxHP. The scaling factor and damage tracker is either reset after use of SC/IB (might be too powerful) or simply deactivates vengeance.

4 - Make Unchained be affect by Vengeance with the same dps scaling factor concept so that Bloodbath heals more.

These are just concepts that I think would make WAR more viable and interesting to play.
The key things I'm trying to address:
- we have 3 moves that costs all our wrath (which is a high price) so let's have real benefit from all of them.
- Vengeance should be about taking hits in order to hit back harder and improve the efficiency of our wrath draining moves.
- we need one tool to mitigate upfront. Steel Cyclone can be that tool and would work similar to IB but as a shield
- Scale shield/heal based on damage taken

Now you'd need to carefully define the cooldown and the scaling factor so it's not OP but overall, I find these changes would make WAR really interesting.

PS: how do you post long posts? I'm limited to 1000 char...

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Originally Posted by konflikti

Either way would be cool really, I just personally think getting more Wrath ie. getting more angrier would lower your defenses and raise your offense. I kinda forgot the crit bonus / damage bonus from the orginal post. It would also force you to blow you Wrath and not happily sit at max Wrath because you got maximum damage reduction then (maximum damage reduction would in practice also mean most EHP and most use out of heals, which would outclass +% to healing received).

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What if for each stack of wrath we gained the ability to sit at 0 hps for 2 seconds per stack. Essentially given an invulnerability buff similar to holy ground but under a very different mechanic. Healers could let us hit 0 while they heal the rest of the group and we would be relying on them to heal us back up from 0 before the timer ran out. Once the timer starts it would remove all our wrath and lock us out of wrath for 30 seconds. We would also gain a pacify type buff that stopped us from having the timer again for 180 or whatever the cooldown should be.

How about something like 15% static healing buff, IB that functions like ToB, and make bloodbath/storms path heal for more potency the lower % of total health you are at?

at 100% it does nothing - literally no healing, at 75% hp it will heal for 50% of damage done, at 50% HP it will heal for 100% of dmg done, at 25% it would heal for 150%, and at critical levels (below 10%) it could do like 300%, so if you are expecting a big spike in damage, pop BB and start queuing up SP. This way we keep the mitigation dependent on our DPS, while just allowing us the power to recover from a bad situation, instead of being super OPed by having our self heals be a buffed static potency or %.

I was thinking defiance should just do this normally (at 75% hp, incoming healing is increased by 25%, just an inverse relationship) - but I think that would be super OPed and make healing TOO easy. This way its all on us to manage our CDs in the right way.

PS By "our" I mean you guys and me in 4 weeks.

Didn't see this post. Adding from my post to this. Both suggestions to new and alterations to other.

I'm suggesting a non-shareable skill for MRD/WAR that harkens from FFXI, Full Break. Make it work similar to Virus (non-stacking). It'd be a defensive cooldown that can shore up the gap, but it'd be mechanically different in what the PLD offers.

Inner Beast should be off the GCD (as well as the other Wrath abilities). It already takes ~18 sec for that heal. Also, str/damage dealt does not scale as quickly as our Max HP. Inner Beast could heal instead for a % of Max HP instead.

Overpower needs to grant Wrath whenever it hits 3+ mobs. This will then feed into more uses for Steel Cyclone.

Steel Cyclone could also use a secondary effect, a threat mod, or a straight up potency buff. Though I like the idea that it adds a shield based on damage/targets hit.

I'm also loving the idea that BB gains the effect of SP. Improving the heal value as well will not cause a dramatic imbalance because of how potent the PLD cds are and that it takes 7.5 sec to get this heal off.

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Originally Posted by Genesiser

EDIT....
How about this too? Leave warrior how it is, but make the warrior revolve around inner beast for real. What I mean is, let it be used with any amount of wrath stacks, but each stack makes it stronger. Kind of like this...

1 stack : heal for 60% of dmg dealt from move, get bubble equal to 5% of dmg received in last 5 seconds.
2 stacks : heal for 120% dmg dealt, bubble equal to 10% dmg received.
5 stacks: heal for 300% dmg dealt, bubble equal to 25% dmg received.

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I like the make IB usable with any number of stacks, but I would make it so bubble amount is a percentage of damage dealt. The amount of incoming damage received could be used in "creative" ways to cheat game mechanics.

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Originally Posted by Shinkyo

3 - Make Vengeance a skill that keeps track of incoming damage and applies a scaling dps factor to Steel Cyclone and IB while vengeance is active, thus scaling our Shield/Heal. Scaling factor should be a +% of dmg received/maxHP. The scaling factor and damage tracker is either reset after use of SC/IB (might be too powerful) or simply deactivates vengeance.

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That sound Godly. But imagine if It absorbs all damage taken for 10secs and after the 10secs it returns all damage to the Target in 1 Blow. Ouch, imagine your dps against Titan. But we know this would never happen cuz it would be game breaking. For example, Titan hits 2-4k Per hit, lets say he hits u 6 times in that 10 secs. You'd hit for 12-24k in one hit lol.

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Originally Posted by Shinkyo

PS: how do you post long posts? I'm limited to 1000 char...

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There's no limit when editing. So write your reply in notepad or something else, than one, post something, two, go edit and paste your full-text.