My thoughts on WAR and how it could change

Greetings.

I thought I could give my personal feedback, in a more or less concise manner, to help ensure that the WAR adjustments next week are as helpful as possible.

My experience with WAR as I used it on dungeons, Extreme Primals, and the new Omega raid, is that it slowly became evident that it lost a lot of what I used to like about it. Even after attempting to adjust to what seemed like the designed way to play WAR, I found a few aspects of the job a little too complicated or not effective enough, especially when compared to the other jobs as well as what made WAR unique; Not to mention that I feel like some of the changes did the opposite of raising the skill floor, which was the dev’s main goal for these changes.

There is also glaring issue with WAR and it’s that it doesn’t bring anything to the table that the other two tanks don’t already. One would think that this means that WAR would be the tank with obvious greater damage output (similar to how Samurai has no utility but makes up for it with high damage), but this isn’t the case.

Having said that, the main point of this post is to help make WAR fun to play again. Even though I’ll also give some thoughts that might increase their damage output along the way, that won’t be what I’ll be focusing on. I believe that making it fun should be priority, and then afterwards any further adjustments for damage can be more easily implemented.



Damage scaling off STR

This is the most critical problem tanks have right now and it is my sincerest hope this is addressed correctly in 4.05.

The best solution I can think of is giving tank accessories at least the same or more STR as the 270 slaying accessories. It’s okay to do this because accessories are role-locked now, so you don’t have to worry about DPS taking fending accessories. I can assure you, this will make most tanks go back to wearing their role-locked accessories, and not only does it save you the trouble of having to go back to old gear and changing it, but you also don’t have to worry about scaling VIT for damage.



Stance Dancing and Beast Gauge

One of the things that made WAR a very fun job to play with in 3.x was being able to stay on one stance for a little while, build up stacks, and then change to the other stance and use those stacks immediately. Right now, however, it’s just very unfun to have to plan around my beast gauge getting cut down in half, every time I swap. This is not only hands down the biggest nerf WAR got this expansion, but it also made WARs harder to play, lowering it’s skill floor by quite a bit.

I understand this expansion wants the tanks to stay in their tank stance longer. PLDs are given Oath Gauge points when casting Holy Spirit in Shield Oath. DRKs’ Bloodspiller deals more damage when in Grit. This encourages tanks to stay in their tank stance longer.

WARs on the other hand, don’t have anything like this. There is no real encouragement to stay in Defiance longer. They are instead punished for stance dancing by having their gauge cut in half; PLDs’ Oath Gauge is similar, but they only have two abilities that use it, of which they only either use one or the other depending on whether they’re MT or OT. WAR on the other hand, have 8 abilities, of which they need to use most of them (ideally) in any given fight. I often feel like I need to restrain myself when playing a WAR when I thought the flavor of the job is to thrive in the thrill of battle.

My opinion: The Beast Gauge should not change when swapping stances, or at least, it should not drop below 50 when doing so; It sucks, for example, to be in deliverance and not be able to swap to get that Inner Beast in for the tank buster that’s coming. If you want to encourage WARs to stay in Defiance, I make a suggestion in the next point.




Warrior HP sustainability (Storm’s Path and Inner Beast’s nerfs)

The second biggest nerf WAR got this expansion (IMO) was the hit on their survivability. During Heavensward, unless the boss had several hard hitting moves back-to-back, Bloodbath, Storm’s Path and Inner Beast (along with equilibrium) allowed a WAR keep themselves up forever if they wanted. Now, not only is PLD fitting that role, but they can also keep the rest of the party up for a little while! That’s completely fine, but then why did WAR have lose their sustainability?

This is an issue because not only does it make WAR less tanky, but also less desirable to bring to dungeons and the like. A PLD can keep themselves up for a dungeon boss if the healer is new and/or dies. A WAR used to be able to do so, but can’t anymore.

My suggestion is the following: Allow for Storm’s Path and Inner Beast to recover 100% of their damage in HP while in Defiance. I would go further and suggest either Butcher’s Block or Inner Beast grant an additional HP regenerating buff that works like Bloodbath used to. With these changes I can guarantee that WAR will go back to feeling like a ONE MAN ARMY again.



Enhanced Infuriate

I want to point out that this trait is pretty amazing and that it further establishes WAR as the “DPS tank” (faster access to Inner Beast just makes it a better tank in general). I don’t think it gets mentioned enough, and I believe this trait is so important that maybe Infuriate’s CD should be added to the WAR HUD, in order to emphasize how it’s reduced for every Fell Cleave/Inner Beast/Decimate/Steel Cyclone done.

Thanks to this trait, WARs should have infuriate up around every 4 (sometimes 3) Fell Cleaves. A 6-Fell Cleave burst lowers Infuriate’s CD by half. This trait is supposed to be as critical to WAR as PLDs Divine Magic Mastery and DRKs Enhanced Blackblood, but the new skills don’t really play along with this trait and only undermine it, making it fall short of it’s true potential. I believe putting this trait in the fore of WAR adjustments (as well as the Beast Gauge adjustments) will go a long way into making WAR great again.



Upheaval

When used on defiance with Thrill of Battle on, Upheaval is very strong and very much worth the 20 Beast Gauge cost; Kind of.

Before I begin, I need to point out something; Upheaval is similar to PLDs’ Spirit Within, in that it’s potency decreases as your HP decreases. Given how you probably won’t be 100% topped off most of the time in a fight (When MT), chances are that Upheaval will barely ever go off at full potency. On it’s own, Upheaval is barely a little more than half a Fell Cleave’s potency at 40% of the cost. This means that you’ll have to be careful to make sure you at least get your Beast Gauge’s worth in potency by watching your HP.

Having said that, there’s another big issue with Upheaval, and it’s the fact that it doesn’t trigger the Enhanced Infuriate Trait. So not only do you use up Beast Gauge to potentially deal your potency’s worth (or possibly less), you also cripple yourself a little from doing more Fell Cleaves in the end by using up your Beast Gauge on stuff that isn’t making Infuriate recharge faster..

Having said all this, I’d say my only suggestion for Upheaval is to let it trigger the Enhanced Infuriate trait.It’s fine if it’s potency adjusts with our HP, but please make it worth spending our Beast Gauge.



Onslaught

Onslaught is fun to use. I get a rush out of it when I’m gathering skins, hairs and other crafting mats from overworld monsters. When I use it in dungeons, however, I know deep down that I’m not being very efficient, and Onslaught barely sees a use from me in any trials or raids.

Onslaught has one big problem; It costs Beast Gauge.

Costing Beast Gauge means that I’m getting less Fell Cleaves because of it. And unlike Upheaval, it’s never worth the cost.

Costing Beast Gauge also means that I can’t use it to rush to an enemy at the start of a fight (when I’m at 0 Beast Gauge). I personally think this removes a big part of the fun from the skill. Right now, it’s really just there as a guilty pleasure.

Finally, it doesn’t trigger the Enhanced Infuriate trait. If the devs are adamant on having Onslaught cause Beast Gauge, it should trigger this trait for the same reasons I stated for Upheaval.

My suggestion for this skill is to just remove any Beast Gauge cost from it. That’s it. Just make it work like DRK’s plunge if you have to.



Shake it Off

Initially, it seems very strange for WAR to finally have an esuna-like skill for themselves, right after the real need for them is gone with the removal of Berserk pacification. However, this emphasizes the real use for this skill: This should be their “tank priviledge” button.

WAR wants to stay on the boss and ignore mechanics? This skill should enable them to do so. However, as it is, the number of debuffs this applies to is too limited.

This should remove the same debuffs that you can ignore if, for example, the Paladin had Hallowed Ground for that mechanic. I can assure you that not only this skill, but WAR in general will be more appealing with this change.



Warrior AOE

In the past, WAR’s AoE consisted of them setting their buffs up (Berserk, Unchained, Maim) and going ham on Overpower, using Flash to let their TP recover while also using the stacks they gained from Vengeance and Raw Intuition along with others to do the occasional Steel Cyclone or Decimate. WAR AoE used to be tons of fun.

Currently, however, WAR AoE consists of only using Overpower a few times before having to use our single target combos to conserve our TP. Not to mention, when tanking a dungeon, we have to go into deliverance in order to use equilibrium (which is fine), yet we are punished for doing so because our gauge is cut in half for it (which is not fine).

Compared to PLDs who only need to exchange between Flash and Total Eclipse to balance their resources to AoE with (MP and TP), and DRKs who also have two fairly easily renewable resources to AoE with (MP and Blackblood), WARs have been left in the dust when it comes to AoE.

Here are my suggestions. Since using MP is out of the window, and simply lowering Overpower’s TP cost isn’t going to solve the issue (unless it’s lowered to half what it is now), I’m going to get creative:

Option A: Overpower charges your Beast Gauge by 10 per use

Option B: Overpower having a 30% chance to proc a free use of Steel Cyclone/Decimate. If this use triggers the Enhanced Infuriate trait then it’d make WAR AoE way more fun

These options encourage WARs to switch things up with their AoEs by using the occasional Steel Cyclone. This alone won’t completely solve WARs TP issue in AoE situations (Ovepower might still need it’s TP cost reduced a little), but it helps a lot in terms of allowing WARs to stay active and engaged in dungeons.



Closing thoughts

Just like Curious Gorge does every expansion, it seems like this time the WAR job in general has lost it’s “Inner Beast”. No longer are they the job that made the player feel unstoppable by allowing them to stay on the offensive while being able to be as defensive as they needed when necessary. Even though many ideas, like removing Vengeance’s and Raw Intuition ability to grant stacks, work wonders to improve the skill floor and improve the job, the end result turned out be less fun than was hoped for. With everyone’s feedback, I trust that the devs will make the proper adjustments.