Warrior; Inner Release and Tank Meld Dilemma

With the addition of Gunbreaker, we now have three tanks which prefer Direct Hit as their secondary (or even primary) meld stat. And one who gains almost nothing from it. This is all due to how Warrior burst is baked into Inner Release, which guarantees Direct Hit, Crits. Making the former completely worthless for the most point.

What I purpose is a simple change to make IR increase your damage to the same equivalent without the guaranteed aspect. Perhaps the damage would need to be lowered slightly or make it so you cannot Direct Hit, Crit under the affects of IR. Either keeps the damage identical but allows Warrior to meld Direct Hit without sacrificing damage. In turn, all four tanks can have roughly the same build; a few gear pieces notwithstanding.

Wow its almost like war was EXACTLY like this until people whined about how it 'feels bad' to do a zerk/ir window and not get any crits. Now we have all these limitations and started the lame train spamming 5 cleaves then doing nothing for 80 seconds instead of nuanced, interesting gameplay.

Second the Op. Return war back to 4.1 design.

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Originally Posted by Izsha

Second the Op. Return war back to 4.1 design.

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This. Though I wouldn't mind seeing Beast Gauge generation increased by the CD, too, to make it about as snappy in dungeons as current Inner Release. That or put some other limitation on Infuriate than "in combat only" so we can precast it a bit...

A major change to the class identity is unlikely (though i agree that fell cleave spam and do nothing for 80 seconds is boring), so there are two alternate solutions for people that want to use the same gear set for all tanks.

Stack crit/det instead - Yes, it is slightly sub-optimal compared to DH for PLD, GNB, and DRK; however, we are talking an incredibly minor amount of difference (0.5% of your total DPS output, at a 7k average DPS this amounts to 35 DPS). You will see significantly greater variations in DPS due to RNG. It won't be long before crit scaling on gear makes crit better than DH anyways, so if you are wanting to play WAR and use the same gear, stack these instead of DH. The difference in DPS is negligible.

Stack tenacity - I would personally never do this because I think tenacity is a sub-par skill due to how bosses are designed, but it does benefit all tanks equally.

To be completely honest, I find it hard to believe that the vast majority that play all 4 tanks play all 4 of them at a 99.9% level where that 0.01% increase from DH is going to make a difference. But that's just me. (then again, after looking back through our runs I apparently don't DH at all, ever, outside of IR.)

Other than that, I agree that SE should spend some time re-thinking the WAR damage kit. I don't think resting hopes on crit scaling with gear a year down the road is a helpful solution.

Yeah the 'practical' sution is to just meld crit for all tanks. It works for me as a war main. I may be 1% off when i ay drk, but having 3500 crit is pretty darn good on any tank right now, so its good enough. People do tend to overhype the power of secondary stats in general though. Were talking about a couple % at most from worst to best builds. Ilvl is far more weighted and actual good play does 90% of the work (uptime, managing buffs, nit sitting on cds, etc)

The last smidgeon is secondaries, which is why i have contented myself with crit builds since 4.2. Though its helpful to primarily play war so i dont feel the pinch much. And crit ends up taking over in time for everyone eventually. I just start a little early.

It's not even only the matter of melds which, while annoying, don't make that much of a difference. The most cancerous part of the auto direct-crit design, is how it makes multiple raid buffs completely worthless to you during your hardest hitting phases. Not only makes it WAR's damage potential very dependent on a limited amount of job compositions, but it kills a lot of fun of interacting with these buffs.

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Originally Posted by Izsha

Second the Op. Return war back to 4.1 design.

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^^^^^^

I might have agreed in the past, but the situation is far more complicated now with the addition of Inner Chaos/Chaotic Cyclone. Do you want to remove WAR's intermittent burst in favor of cramming even more of it into a 10 second window every 90 seconds? If not, then you'll need to consider how exactly you maintain the current paradigm with the proposed changes in mind.

I would also argue that the damage consistency of forced Critical Direct Hits is tactically significant when considering Nascent Flash healing, but the loss of this would be tolerable.

That said, the lack of synergy between WAR and Critical Hit Rate and Direct Hit Rate raid buffs remains a problem to be solved, as far as I'm concerned.

I wouldn't necessarily if they kept Warrior entirely the same despite preferring the 4.1 version. That being said, I hadn't considered Inner Chaos/Chaotic Cyclone. If I were to hypothesize potential changes, it could be to simply remove Direct Hit from them but increase their base potency to compensate for the loss. If they did just make everything straight damage, Warrior would actually benefit from Litany, Chain and Battle Voice.

At the end of the day, I'll admit, this is far from an important change but just one that irks me.