Overview and Analysis of Warriors
So I've been playing Warrior since release and find them to be extremely fun. I think as it stands they aren't a terrible tank, but when compared to their counter parts, the Paladins, they certainly aren't as good. This is fine, because both tanks work in very different ways and the way the Warrior works is perfectly fine with me, I just see some ways they could work a little better.
First I'll go over what the themes of the tanks are. Paladins revolve around reducing and preventing damage (flat % or invisibility) and Warrior manipulate their health pool (increasing total health, healing, and increased healing). What I don't want is for Warriors to become paladins and have their tanking build around damage reduction, but rather further build on their already established theme of health.
Defiance
The idea that Warriors have more health and receive more healing is a perfectly valid concept, except that it was balanced incorrectly.
- - - - - DAMAGE - HEALING
RAW - - - 100 - - -100
WARRIOR -100 - - - 87
PALADIN- - 80 - - - 80
Shown above is the damage done, and the amount of healing it takes to undo said damage. As you can see with a raw 100 damage being dealt, it takes a healing amount of 87 to heal a warrior and 80 to heal a paladin (amusing Shield Oath and Defiance with 5 stacks of Wraith). In reality, the increased healing of Warriors would have to be 25% as 125% of 80 is 100.
Healing Increase of Wraith
The Wraith mechanic is a very nice one, I actually very much enjoy it. The main problem with Wraith is Warriors can only really use their stacks every minute with Infuriate, or they give up their bonus healing. By including the self healing into the Defiance buff itself, and leaving the crit increase within Wraith, Warriors can now more freely use Inner Beast and Steel Cyclone while tanking.
Steel Cyclone
On the topic of Steel Cyclone, I absolutely love this ability, but I find it's more fun that it is useful. The threat it generates is so bad you're almost always better off using a Flash or Overpower at any giving point over it. The solution? Increased enmity. By simply giving this ability a boost in enmity it would give it a real purpose when tanking multiple targets.
Foresight
Everyone knows this ability is laughable compared to Rampart and Sentinel, but that's because its trying to the same thing but worse. It's very hard for me to come up with a Warrior themed solution for this ability, since the only easy change that could be made is giving Warriors a trait that gives it a magic defense increase as well.
Alternatively the ability the ability could just be giving a much shorter CD (30 seconds or less) with a much shorter duration, making it more of a quick guard than a bad Rampart/Sentinel. This would make tanking as a Warrior stay as an active and reaction based tank roll, rather than a buff up and reduce damage roll like Paladins.
Thrill of Battle
This ability is perfect for Warriors, it is everything a Warrior should be. It keeps true to the theme of health pool based tanking while having interesting interactions with % based healing (like from scholars). The problem is it doesn't really do very much for what it is (and its cool down). Even at 7500 Health the ability is really only a 1500 heal when it comes down to it. Having access to this only every two minutes feels like a bit too long, but with a change to Wraith (noted earlier) it might not be necessary to buff this skill since we would have access to the healing of Inner Beast now. As it stands now, its a life line that does too little too infrequently.
Thank you for reading my thoughts on this. I love the Warrior class and would like to see it match up a bit better with Paladins. Any input is welcome as well as any other ideas or skills that should be looked at. I'm really not looking for Warriors to get over buffed and become unreasonably good, I'm just looking to give ideas to think about and areas to improve on.