Changes I'd like to see for MRD/WAR

I'm pleased to say that there's not a lot I would fix at the moment. My experience thus far has been that WAR and MRD are both good at what they do.

There are, however, a few things I'd like to see addressed:

First off, Mercy Stroke. It's a sound idea, but it needs some tweaking. For something that is a 60s CD it needs to hit harder. As it stands now it's an extra combo'd Skull Sunder. Up the potency to say, 250, and maybe have it ignore 20% of the Defiance damage debuff per stack of Wrath (so at 5/5 stacks it hits for full damage), but as it stands now, I can't count how many times I've tried to kill a boss add with MS only to find the add survived with a pixel of health only to die to a 12-damage dot half a second later.

Holmgang. Awesome idea. Neat skill too, when you use it right (it locks both movement and turning, so Brutal Swing + get behind move + Holmgang means ~11s of no incoming damage for most mobs) it just has such a long CD and, for whatever reason, tends to mis-time it's duration, by which I mean it lasts half a second longer on you than it does on the target (sometimes). I can see it being very strong in pvp when used right, but at a 3 minute cooldown it's prohibitive. Two minutes would be a good place for it.

Unchained. I get that animations are awesome, and I've come to terms with them interrupting quick-use of more than one off-GCD skill, but for something like Unchained, which has a decent cooldown and high usage cost, it's particularly noticeable. Adding another two seconds to the duration would be a great way to deal with this issue that doesn't involve messing with character animations. This way you can stack Unchained with Berserk and actually get the full 20s out of Berserk instead of clipping an attack at the end of the duration because of the Pacification debuff.

Any other WARs out there have suggestions? From what I've gleaned from the forums, either things are pretty good or things are terrible. I'm not at the level cap yet, so I won't speak to anything regarding that area of the game.

I feel like mercy stroke should have a chance to proc and give you the healing effect since warriors rely on a decent amount of self healing

Also both classes should have an actual taunt, provoke just doesn't do it all the time

My only suggestion is that war/mar gets a shorter cooldown on brutal swing 30 sec is way too long when compared to the gld/pld 6 sec sheid bash. We like to stun things too lol

Make the 15% +healing from Wrath a standard benefit on Defiance. As it stands, you have to choose between maintaining your external healing and maximizing self healing, which isn't really a fair exchange considering that the self healing is supposed to be what makes up for the difference between the ~10% +healing we're short to be equivalent to the 20% damage reduction that PAL gets.

On top of that, there should be some mechanism to make up for the fact that, while PAL has a shield for further mitigation, we don't. Self healing either makes up for the discrepancy between our +hp and +healing to reach equivalence with the flat 20% reduction in damage that PALs get *or* the lack of a shield. It can't do both, at least at the values that we get it.

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Originally Posted by Crabcore

Also both classes should have an actual taunt, provoke just doesn't do it all the time

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Disagree. Lack of a taunt makes threat management challenging and by extension fun.

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Originally Posted by Kerrath

Disagree. Lack of a taunt makes threat management challenging and by extension fun.

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Problem is, having tanked in eight different MMOs over the years, end-game DPS generally isn't always interested in threat management. They focus on their DPS meters, biggest hits/crits and the bosses health bar. Not at any point do they end up thinking about aggro management, and stopping DPS on a boss whose enmity is all over the shop.

This is primarily why taunts are there; they're an anti-idiot mechanic for the most part, because hey, I assure you there will ALWAYS be one. And worrying about a loose mob isn't much fun; especially when the DPS aren't interested in CC. "Must... burn... faster..."

tbc

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Originally Posted by Kerrath

Disagree. Lack of a taunt makes threat management challenging and by extension fun.

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All that lack of a taunt does is really drive home how unresponsive/slow the combat is. When you need to get snap aggro on multiple adds at once and healers already have 5 seconds of threat from healing 8 people before you even get into melee range, the slow build up of threat really becomes apparent. It's not more challenging, you simply don't have the gcds you need to keep threat on everything at the same time. A challenge is something that can be overcome.

No mobility abilities, no taunt, no effective ranged threat generation, no snap aggro period (aside from butchers block, which is a 3 move chain and requires maim to be up, lol), etc etc. There's just some things that feel missing from the tanks in this game. Something like Holmgang is so out of a place when there's no mobility ability or taunt.

Taunts are a necessary evil; and Provoke, for its long cooldown, provides very, very little benefit or enmity for the effort. Changing it;

* Make it provide a large, temporary amount of enmity, a/r 10 seconds. This gives a tank the chance to regain some base enmity.

* Make it give a larger base amount of enmity, making it more a part of a tanks life, not something to ignore.

* Set it to attack the provoker for X amount of time. This may also help later, when you may want a boss in a dungeon/fate that requires two or more tanks.

* Do away with Provoke altogether and look towards Flash.

I think tanking is very well thought out; but it's lacking on some of the finer details, Provoke and Mercy Stroke both feel like afterthoughts than a meaningful part of a tanks repertoire, and that's not good enough. Hopefully it'll be thought out a little more now; we're a week in, and threat at this stage wasn't really tested that much.

It's a new frontier. Welcome to the pitfalls.