Balancing WAR: A Game of Graphs

As a continuation of my suggestions from the How to fix WAR thread, I thought I'd generate a complete report on what went wrong with WAR, and how to improve it without fundamentally redesigning the job.

SUMMARY: Warrior is an ineffective tank at endgame damage levels due to design issues with Wrath. Inner Beast is WAR's burst mitigation. It is mostly sufficient for the task, even in more difficult content. WAR's health pool is too small to take appropriate advantage of it in some situations. The primary cause of WAR's later tanking troubles are the design decision to tie continuous mitigation (i.e. healing bonus) to burst mitigation (Inner Beast). Solutions are suggested: place the healing bonus on Defiance rather than Wrath, increase the potency of the healing bonus, and increase the maximum health bonus on Defiance. Suggestions are supported with mathematical outcomes.


Part 1: Tanking for dummies; or, dummies for tanking

This is WAR at current in one graph.

http://img571.imageshack.us/img571/8522/uza2.png

This is a graph of the total unique mitigation between WAR and PLD as a function of the rate of damage delivered to a WAR. The x axis is the damage delivered to the tank after armor reduction and dodge chance; these two effects are identical between the two jobs. The y axis is the average portion of healing requirement reduced after blocking differences, damage reduction, self-healing, and healing bonuses. I have included 5 cases here. The first is PLD, which is fairly straightforward. It includes blocking, Rampart, Sentinel, Hallowed Ground, Convalescence, and Bloodbath. The second case, Wrath-only, is a case for WAR where the player does not use Inner Beast at all, instead sitting on Wrath stacks for the healing bonus. Other abilities are still used, including Thrill of Battle, Second Wind, Berserk, Bloodbath, and Convalescence. The next two cases, WAR-low and WAR-high, include repeated use of Inner Beast as well as all abilities from the Wrath-only case. Both of the two cases involve the use of 3 Inner Beast per minute buffed by Maim and Storm's Eye, with a 20% average overheal and 1/4 chance of being used in Berserk. Due to the use of Inner Beast, average Wrath stacks are 3, for an average bonus of 9% healing. The WAR-low case is a VIT-heavy ilvl70 setup with Garuda weapon (about 1133 heal per IB). The WAR-high case is effectively an all-strength setup with a Bravura+1 and ilvl90 gear (approximately 1600 average heal per IB). The final case, WAR-hold, is a hybrid between the Wrath-only and Wrath-high cases, where Inner Beast is only used in conjunction with Infuriate. This means that Wrath is always at 5 stacks, but the player still uses 1 Inner Beast per minute.

Right now, in terms of total unique mitigation, WAR is half the tank that PLD is. This culminates in an ideal endgame strategy which involves completely forgoing the burst abilities of the job to maintain a gimped healing bonus. As I will show, this is primarily the result of some dodgy design decisions related to Wrath as a resource.

First, a preface:

A tank has three important tasks:

1. Hold aggro, keeping squishies safe from slaughter
2. Reduce healing need so that healers don't end up out of mana MP.
3. Not die.

The first is easily accomplished by either tank. Any issues here are purely the fault of the player. I'm not going to get into the math here because it's not relevant and certainly doesn't need attention one way or the other. The second is exemplified by the opening chart: all told, WAR is just not getting the job done. The third is a question of total reserve, and the story is told about like this:

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/2430/zxyi.jpg

These are the effective HP pools of WAR and PLD, as well as when using their abilities. Hallowed Ground is not included because infinity is a really big number. A WAR has 85 more base HP than PLD. WAR's HP is increased by 25% from Defiance, while PLD's effective HP is also increased by 25% from Shield Oath (this is not a typo -- 1/(1-0.2) = 1.25). WAR has only Thrill of Battle to increase effective HP pool from there by 25%. However, PLD will use Rampart to increase effective HP pool by another multiplicative 25%, or Sentinel to increase it by 66.7%, or both together for a whopping 108.33%. In essence, a WAR goes down faster than PLD due to having a smaller effective health pool.

This is where we stand right with WAR right now. Doesn't take a doctorate to pick which tank is flat-out better. Let's look, then, at how we got here.

Part 2: Burst as a really bursty thing

When talking mitigation, there are three types of mitigation which are important to balance. The first is continuous mitigation. In normal functioning, you will reduce some portion of damage, either by preventing it, healing it, or handing it off to the next guy and letting him eat it (sucker). Continuous mitigation is the stuff you have all the time use all the time, and maintain regardless of the opponents you face. This is your block, parry, and continual bonuses like Shield Oath and Wrath's healing bonus. The second is burst mitigation, the stuff you use to get out of the bad spots like Mountain Busters. Burst mitigation are active abilities like Rampart and Thrill of Battle. The final is the sum of the first two: continuous mitigation plus the time-weighted effect of burst mitigation is total mitigation. Total mitigation tells you the net outcome of all effects. This is important because of discrepancies in individual timing.

Inner Beast is not continuous mitigation. It is not used to maintain WAR in normal functioning. Every time you compare Inner Beast to Shield Oath, Althyk kills a puppy. Please, think of the puppies. Inner Beast is your primary, secondary, and tertiary burst mitigation. Almost every ability WAR has will support use of Inner Beast for burst mitigation: Berserk rolls up damage for more drain, Thrill of Battle gives you more breathing room for healing hits, Maim and Storm's Eye increase damage for more drain. And all told, Inner Beast is actually not so bad. Let's look at the benefit given by burst mitigation abilities in a few cases. I have assumed 20% average overheal -- this will depend on player and healer as well as another issue I will address later.

http://img543.imageshack.us/img543/958/7zf3.png

This is a simple treatment of two burst abilities compared: WAR will use two Inner Beast, one under the effect of Berserk, while PLD will sit on Rampart. The effect of Inner Beast is averaged over the 20s interval. Note that I chose Berserk over Infuriate because it has an identical cooldown to Rampart. You could also use Infuriate here for similar results -- it really doesn't matter.

You could also compare peak burst ability between the two jobs.

http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/3370/tc45.png

In this case, we compare a WAR or PLD throwing everything they have up over 20 seconds. I have two cases here for PLD due to Hallowed Ground. The first considers using only Rampart, Sentinel, Convalescence, and Bloodbath, without use of Hallowed Ground. The second uses Hallowed Ground as well. This is due to the 7-minute cooldown on Hallowed Ground and general insanity of the ability. WAR will use a 7 cooldowns here to match up: Bloodbath, Berserk, Second Wind, Thrill of Battle, Infuriate, Convalescence, and Vengeance. These will support the use of 3 Inner Beast over 20 seconds, two under the effect of Berserk. Obviously, WAR cannot compete with Hallowed Ground, but that was never going to be a fair fight. Finally, you can compare the total time-weighted effect of burst mitigation:

http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/4016/7osg.png

In most cases, WAR ends up a bit shaky at the outer limits of damage. This is the messy effect of unscaled healing. You're always going to be more powerful when you have fewer healers, and that is unavoidable using unscaled drain setups. Nevertheless, this difference isn't the death of WAR. It's actually very little of it. Compared to using both Rampart and Sentinel at the same time, WAR keeps up all the way to 1000 enemy DPS. Imagine if WAR and PLD both had shield oath and nothing else. This is what they would look like over time:

http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/8458/npu5.png

At the very limits, PLD would be just 17-25% better at the edges of healing. Unfortunately, WAR doesn't have a comparable reduction to Shield Oath. Which leads us to where the breakdown occurs:

Part 3: Bringing an axe to a shield fight

Continuous mitigation is the lion's share of how WAR falls behind. There are three primary contributors: the coupling to Wrath, the bonus magnitude, and blocking. We will address each in turn.

Right now, WAR has a shared resource for continuous and burst mitigation. Using your Wrath stacks on burst mitigation (i.e. Inner Beast) reduces your continuous mitigation (Wrath healing bonus). This mechanic actively drags down burst mitigation. For that, consider the total mitigation of burst periods. WAR is clearly behind when you account for the impact of continuous mitigation on total burst mitigation.

http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/3841/1i3w.png

This should look pretty familiar now, because it's basically the same as the very first chart with blocking omitted. This is how the molehill becomes a mountain. As we saw in the very first chart, hammering Inner Beast falls behind just sitting on Wrath at high enemy damage rates. This is because healing rates scale with content while burst self-healing does not. [b]There is no way to balance this system of flat heals and dependent scaled recovery.[b] If you increase Wrath's healing bonus, then using WAR's burst mitigation becomes increasingly disadvantageous -- WAR will just be pressured even further to sit on Wrath and never use it. If you increase the burst mitigation to avoid this, then you further unbalance WAR in 4-player content with minimal impact on 8-player content. The healing bonus and Inner Beast must be decoupled. Simply adjusting numbers will invariably fail to balance WAR.

With that out of the way, the magnitude of the current healing bonus is also clearly too low. PLD has an effective healing bonus of 25%. This is easily shown by considering the effect of healing reduced damage. Consider this example: PLD is struck for 1000 damage. Shield Oath reduces this to 800 damage. A healer then heals PLD for 800, filling up the PLD's health bar. The healer healed enough to withstand another 1000 damage -- that is, the healer effectively healed 1000 damage. 1000 damage healed / 800 healing delivered = 1.25 HP healed per point of healing delivered -- a 25% bonus. WAR's bonus just works on top: if the WAR is hit for 1000 damage, a healer has to heal for 870 points with the 15% healing bonus to recover the full 1000 damage delivered. It's pretty obvious here that WAR's bonus is just wrong. If you believe that WAR's burst mitigation was making up the difference, you can scroll back to the previous section and completely dispel that notion in a hurry.

The third contributor here is blocking. This is a no-brainer. PLD has a shield. PLD blocks things. PLD takes less damage. This is only really applicable on a continuous basis, where you're getting hit often enough for the randomness to wash out. It also only applies to physical damage taken from the front or sides -- magical attacks and attacks from behind cannot be blocked. Still, blocking is rather powerful, adding an additional ~5% damage reduction in melee damage. This one is pretty tough to balance, though, because it both scales with enemy damage and has no reliable impact on burst survivability. Countering it is more a matter of applying comparable utility or reduction that is not reliable for burst situations.

Of course, there are a few other spots which have impact. Rage of Halone, on-demand stun, pacification, silence, plus the odd Stoneskin are also tipping the scales in PLD's favor. I'm not specifically going to address these here specifically -- the goal is to address the core issue.

Part 4: Cure is the cure for what ails you

This is the easiest section, because I've already shown the problems and touched on how to address them, plus given an example of what happens once the solutions are implemented. In the second section, I gave an example of what WAR would look like if it had Shield Oath. Here's what it looks like from a total standpoint:

http://img853.imageshack.us/img853/7255/bxi8.png

Now, remember that the effective healing bonus from Shield Oath is 25%. Place WAR's bonus from Defiance (no longer Wrath, as the two must be decoupled) and the chart above is the outcome. The great part about the healing bonus is that even when it's not coupled to Wrath, it's already at war with itself. Every amount you heal with your abilities is an amount not affected by the bonus. As usual, this is easily understood graphically:

http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/8375/ys8y.png

When you fall to lower damage levels, self-healing takes over and the healing bonus falls in value. The bonus affects a smaller portion of total incoming DPS -- you can't heal the same damage twice. This normalizing effect helps keep it from being overpowered in 4-man content, while adding maximum benefit to 8-man content. The net buff to mitigation ability across damage ranges looks like this:

http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/2803/ukhw.png

Where the WAR needs help most, this buff would give maximum effect. Where WAR doesn't need it, the effect is minimal. Since it does not increase self-healing at all, the buff would have no impact on solo balance.

Part 5: Glass ceilings and glass jaws

We've now covered how to address the weakness in the second duty of a tank: reducing healer load. Now, on to the third. Inner Beast is burst rather than continuous mitigation, there's a glaring design flaw with current design that is reflected in the second chart of the first section. When PLD uses burst mitigation, that effect occurs concurrent with damage. For WAR's effect to occur, it must be enacted after damage. WAR has to eat damage before it can be healed. Let's go back to the chart for an example.

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/2430/zxyi.jpg
(Note that blocking is omitted here. While blocking does have an impact, it is not a reliable eHP increase and cannot be counted without placing a job in a position of randomly dying. I have also omitted Stoneskin, which is an effective 10% increase for PLD, but which is not always usable.)

WAR's burst abilities (ToB excepted) do not extend the effective HP pool, while PLD's do. WAR and PLD at base have identical eHP pools, so they take hits just as well when using no abilities. In a nutshell, this means that WAR is simply easier to kill in every single case than PLD -- if a WAR can survive it, so necessarily can PLD. The problem that arises is that in burst situations, WAR still has a small eHP pool while PLD has a much larger one. This is where WAR goes wrong on the third role of a tank: not dying.

If WAR is to be able to use its burst mitigation ability, it must have the extended HP pool needed to take the hit before healing it. This is necessarily larger than PLD's base pool, because PLD has an HP pool for burst uses which is 25% larger. You can view the correct balance point in two ways, and they are almost identical in effect. The first is to key WAR's eHP to the bread-and-butter eHP of PLD in burst situations, which is Rampart. Rampart increases PLD's eHP pool by an additional 25%. For a comparable bonus on Defiance, this would give an HP bonus of approximately 54% compared to the current HP boost of 25%. The second way is to look at the base eHP value of PLD and add on top of that one use of Inner Beast (roughly 1600 HP). This would come to a bonus value of about 49.55%. Either way, the prescribed change is to move the HP boost on Defiance up to 50% from 25%. At that point, the comparative eHP pools would look a bit like this:

http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/9936/6wg8.jpg

This allows WAR to live long enough to use its mitigation abilities.

Part 6: Fixing what ain't broke

For the sake of completeness, let me hammer out a few of the common suggestions for WAR which will not fix WAR. First is buffing WAR's damage output in any way, such as via reducing Defiance penalty or buffing Unchained. This one is terribly obvious, because damage output has nothing to do with why WAR can't tank. Sure, Unchained sucks, but it's not why WAR sucks at tanking Dreadnoughts. Second is buffing Inner Beast's use rate or healing amount. This one should be obviously ineffective to anyone who realizes that Inner Beast is burst mitigation. Still, let's create a case where we buff Inner Beast to the point where it's competitive with PLD at 1000 DPS.

http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/7734/rbbr.png

WAR is still behind at endgame, just as much as with the recommended buffs. However, it's also rendered godlike in 4-man content. And for how silly-huge this buff would be, you could also replace the description with "restore HP to max", because that's what it's doing. 5650 average heal in the high case. Overheal alone makes this magnitude of buff totally impossible, and it's still behind. Hard though you may try, there is no way to fix WAR by buffing flat heals.

Another common suggestion is adding an overheal ability to Inner Beast, like Scholar's Adloquium. This is just effectively increasing flat heals again -- you've reduced overheal, but still just have flat healing. As described above, flat healing can't fix WAR. It isn't wrong, per se, but it can't be the solution WAR's problem. Similarly, swapping methods of flat healing from damage-based to percentage of max HP won't do any good either. You'd make one stat better, but you'd still just have flat heals with the same problem. To address WAR, you have no choice but to use some form of scaled mitigation.

Furthermore, not all scaled mitigation is created equal. Consider a case where WAR, instead of using a flat-healing 200% damage, heals 20% of damage received in the past 20 seconds. While this looks good on paper, it runs into the same problem as before: endgame opponents will deal more damage in 5 seconds than you can fit on your HP bar. Due to the damage rates encountered, you would have to couple any such scaled healing to an increase in Wrath generation, or the result will simply be a truckload of overheal. Worse, with that ability still coupled to Wrath, Shield Oath alone is an additional 12% mitigation on a constant basis. Add in blocking and you could drain 20% of all incoming damage and still be permanently behind.

Part 7: More than one way to skin a Coeurl

Buffing the healing bonus isn't the only way to balance WAR. As addressed in the previous section, all options based on flat healing are ineffective. However, a healing bonus is not the only way to improve WAR. I'll address a few genuine possibilities, as well as explain why I don't believe they are good for ARR:

Some players have suggested going full-WoW with WAR and just scaling Inner Beast. This is technically feasible: have Inner Beast heal ~30% of damage received in past ~5 seconds and cost only 1 Wrath stack. That would fall out to a 24% mitigation boost with an average 4 Wrath stacks. This would be a continuous 32% total mitigation, or around where PLD is now after. However, this solution would also ruin the use of Berserk as a mitigation boost and would make WAR pretty damn one-button-wonder with the spam of Inner Beast. You would actively mash Inner Beast 10 times per minute or more -- more than every third GCD would be hitting Inner Beast yet again. It would also be totally copying the hell out of Death Strike, right down to the numbers -- 30% (20% + 10% shield) of damage from the last 5 seconds is exactly what Death Strike is. :(

Others have suggested adding damage resistance to WAR in some form or fashion, either by adding a damage reduction buff to Inner Beast or by just dumping it on Defiance. The effect is the same: you give WAR damage resistance. It should be glaringly obvious that if a healing bonus works, a damage reduction will do the same job. However, there's a particular difference between WAR and PLD that I described in the fifth section: PLD acts before damage comes, reducing the damage taken; WAR acts after the damage comes, undoing it. This applies to both the burst and continuous mitigation for the two jobs. Applying a damage reduction to WAR would not only reduce the uniqueness of the two tanks, it would also make the class more difficult to balance. WAR's reactive burst mitigation requires a higher health pool, such that the mitigation can be enacted. Adding damage resistance would further extend the effective health pool as a function of damage received. You will also extend the value of flat heals (which are unaffected by healing bonuses), improving returns on strength and muddling the necessary HP pool for any new content. From a balance standpoint, it's unnecessary complexity; from a design standpoint, it's encroaching on PLD territory.

Part 8: The road not traveled

Yes, there are a lot of other issues with WAR's design right now. Steel Cyclone and Unchained totally suck. WAR doesn't have good CC/interrupts. WAR lacks comparable reduction tools like Flash's blind or Rage of Halone's debuff. WAR has to wear hideous tin can armor. Yes, all of these hurt WAR. However, they are not what has shoved WAR off the viability cliff. WAR needs, first and foremost, to have its core issues fixed. I'd love to take Unchained off Wrath and make Steel Cyclone a hardcore CC ability, but none of it will do any good until the job's scaling is fixed.

TL;DR Wrath mechanics suck.

You wrote way too much.

Most of your graphs are incomprehensible.

This doesn't help much.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sybreed

GJ OP.

Ignore the first two responses, some people have brain damage.

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Sorry, but reading the first post was like reading a scientific article where the results don't come with any explanations. The graphs are pretty, but they come with no explanation of how they were constructed, which makes them pretty useless if you're trying to be informative.

I don't have a problem seeing that Warrior's have a problem with endgame. Their damage mitigation evidently sucks when compared to the abilities that Paladins have. And it also doesn't help that Defiance's healing bonus is tied to Wrath. Whatever damage mitigation that Defiance comes with needs to be separated from Wrath. But like I said, if the objective of this topic is to be informative, I don't think its helping much.

Daily posting limit reached so time for some edits that no one will read:

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Originally Posted by Hundred

If the point were merely for you to do a number of attacks before hitting IB/CS/unchained then there wouldn't of been any benefit intrinsically attached to Wrath.

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Wrath would still give you a bonus to critical hit if that's the problem.

I haven't actually played endgame Warrior, so most of what I can do is just guesswork but I don't really see a problem with Wrath only being a resource to use other abilities.

I do see an enormous problem with Defiance giving WARs 25% bonus to HP when most healing in the game is static rather than percentage based. That's why Defiance should also give a static bonus to healing instead of tieing it to Wrath stacks.

I call bullshit on this anyways, you just cant play or dont get war.

GJ OP.

Ignore the first two responses, some people have brain damage.

Good Job, hopefully it will get some serious attention. If I may copy/paste some ideas I posted a bit ago on another thread on possible ideas on how to improve warrior.

Steel Cyclone: this used to be like our bread and butter back in the day in 1.0, now its pointless use of wrath, to make it more useful/engaging change it to the following options:

2 wrath stack: 150-200 aoe dmg like it is right now with an enmity modifier (our version of flash so to speak)
3 wrath stack: 200 aoe dmg with +5% crit or dmg bonus for a duration
4 wrath stack: 250 aoe dmg with a 50%? heal according to dmg
5 wrath stack: 250-300 aoe dmg & -20% dmg taken for a duration

Just a random idea and it may take some tweaks and/or reverse the orders or w/e but at least this way there's more options according to situation and steel cyclone is useful in current situation as Wrath is precious to us right now.

Or like someone mentioned:

Heavy Swing > Overpower > Steel Cyclone Combo would be great.

First a technical comment. You're graph descriptions are confusing and partly unexplained (what's WAR-low and WAR-high). You're y-axis says percentage, but it seems to be a ratio (a mitigation of 0.35% vs. 0.20% would be irrelevant). However, some of these ratios go over 1. More than 100% reduction?
The more general problem with all this numbercrunching I see on the forum is that no one explains basic game mechanics. Don't armor and resistances also provide mitigation? Is the PLDs mitigation additive or multiplicative? Is all damage mitigated?

My theoretical complaint with this kind of reasoning is that looks only a part of the role a WAR or a PLD has. Because contrary of what you claim, a tank's job is not to survive and keep others alive.
A tank is part of a group and only the group as a whole can fulfill a purpose. And a group's purpose in any MMO I know of is do damage. Damage is all what counts because only damage turns bosses into loot and progress. Other things like tanks and healers are only secundary functions in order to keep the group able to do damage.
Thus, any claim that it is not a tank's role to do damage is absurd, because it is the only role of any group. Therefore doing damage is integral part of tanking.
Of course, keeping the group alive is more important, because without that damage falls to 0. But if keeping the group alive is achieved, all what matters is damage.
And that's the problem, because contrary to what everybody says, we do not have the means to calculate or reliably measure the difference in damage between a PLD and a WAR. Thus, we can not conclusively compare both jobs.

tl;dr Numbercrunching alone proves nothing

1. Which area's are creating the DPS you are discussing.
For instance your graph has 250, 375 and 500 as DPS values which instances are generating 250, 375 and 500 DPS at level 50?

2.

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The healing bonus and Inner Beast must be decoupled. Simply adjusting numbers will invariably fail to balance WAR.

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That is the Warrior though. When you use Inner Beast, Steel Cyclone or Unchained, you trade sustain and crit rate for their effects, burst heal, aoe, DPS. If the point were merely for you to do a number of attacks before hitting IB/CS/unchained then there wouldn't of been any benefit intrinsically attached to Wrath.

3. You mention increasing the HP increase from 25% to 50%. Seems silly straight out. Because of below...

4. The thing is 50% HP to use what abilities? The only signficant heals are Mercy stroke (adds) and IB. Since ToB already increases your EHP anyways it doesnt overheal. IB is for mitigating burst, not for sustain and it can do that even with the 25% ehp increase. SP is something like 9x of an IB, and Bloodbath requires a bucketload of damage to equal 1 IB. Which is wonky because sustain should beat out a burst in a reasonable period of time but SP never beats out IB, let alone the 10% healing difference, and BL doesn't really do it either, let alone that PLD has access to it for half as long. You don't really have any abilities other than IB that heal anything to justify 50% increased HP just for the sake of more time to IB which is outdone overtime anyways (if we're giving more time before you need to use IB) by the 15% bonus.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ASaturnus

You're graph descriptions are confusing and partly unexplained (what's WAR-low and WAR-high).

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I explained in the text, but suppose I should be more explicit about it. I will try to improve that.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ASaturnus

You're x-axis says percentage, but it seems to be a ratio (a mitigation of 0.35% vs. 0.20% would be irrelevant). However, some of these ratios go over 1.

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Yes. I could multiply out by 100, but I thought that was pretty self-explanatory. Yes, some do go over 1, meaning you actively return health to the player faster than it can be delivered. PLD generally can't do this (unless you're a extremely low damage rates), but WAR sometimes can. Flat healing does that.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ASaturnus

The more general problem with all this numbercrunching I see on the forum is that no one explains basic game mechanics. Don't armor and resistances also provide mitigation? Is the PLDs mitigation additive or multiplicative? Is all damage mitigated?

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Armor values are not included because they are identical. They do reduce damage, but there is no difference between the two jobs. Same with evasion. Most bonuses are actually multiplicative -- for example, Shield Oath, Sentinel, and Rampart combine to reduce damage by 61.6%. If it were additive, the three would add up to 80% -- this does not appear to be the case. I could include that detail, but it's a horribly long post without going into extreme detail about mechanics.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ASaturnus

My theoretical complaint with this kind of reasoning is that looks only a part of the role a WAR or a PLD has. Because contrary of what you claim, a tank's job is not to survive and keep others alive. A tank is part of a group and only the group as a whole can fulfill a purpose. And a group's purpose in any MMO I know of is do damage. Damage is all what counts because only damage turns bosses into loot and progress. Other things like tanks and healers are only secundary functions in order to keep the group able to do damage.

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You are conflating the group's overall goal (defeat opponents) with an individual role. A healer heals. It may often be efficient for the group for the healer to also deal damage, but if the healer cannot fill the role of healing, then the group is doomed to failure. This is the same with tank. If the tank did no damage at all, that would still fill the tanking role. It's a bit like VIT: if you don't have enough, you lose by default; if you do have enough, then it's you're free put efforts elsewhere in hopes of winning. The problem is that WAR is either incapable of filling the role or requires far more resources to do so.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ASaturnus

And that's the problem, because contrary to what everybody says, we do not have the means to calculate or reliably measure the difference in damage between a PLD and a WAR.

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Er... parses?

//EDIT:

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Originally Posted by Hundred

1. Which area's are creating the DPS you are discussing.

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Not getting into that at all. You can often create situations for it by stacking mobs together if you really want. I'm just expressing the outcomes as a function of enemy damage output.

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Originally Posted by Hundred

That is the Warrior though.

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I'm not going to argue about your vision of how WAR should play. From a balance standpoint, WAR will always suck as long as this design is used. It may interest you, but it's not a viable path.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hundred

The thing is 50% HP to use what abilities?

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I'm not sure how I failed to communicate this. Inner Beast is WAR's burst mitigation ability, and it is a reactive ability. In order to make use of it, you must have taken damage. PLD does not have this weakness: its burst mitigation applies up front. PLD is therefore able to take a bigger punch than WAR in every case. WAR cannot out-think this; Inner Beast cannot be applied beforehand and WAR will always just die. This is a design flaw.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hundred

You don't really have any abilities other than IB that heal anything to justify 50% increased HP just for the sake of more time to IB which is outdone overtime anyways (if we're giving more time before you need to use IB) by the 15% bonus.

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I believe I addressed the end of the Wrath coupling mechanic already. If you are sitting on Wrath for a 15% healing bonus, you've already acknowledged that you are hopelessly gimped.

//EDIT 2:

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Originally Posted by Gilthas

You wrote way too much. Most of your graphs are incomprehensible. Sorry, but reading the first post was like reading a scientific article where the results don't come with any explanations.

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I will try to improve this.

I don't think it changes the conclusion, but if a WAR is using all their CD's for a big burst they should be getting 3 Inner Beast during Berserk. They should also be able to get two IB's off every other Berserk.

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Originally Posted by Telepathic

I don't think it changes the conclusion, but if a WAR is using all their CD's for a big burst they should be getting 3 Inner Beast during Berserk. They should also be able to get two IB's off every other Berserk.

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If you have a good skill speed bonus, you can. Without one, you will have 5 stacks and be ready for that last hit just as the effect ends and you get pacified, heh. That would give you an additional ~8% HP mitigated in that 20s interval. Regardless, it would just reinforce the conclusion that WAR's burst ability with Inner Beast is fine, and that the problem with WAR is elsewhere.

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Originally Posted by Gamemako

If you have a good skill speed bonus, you can. Without one, you will have 5 stacks and be ready for that last hit just as the effect ends and you get pacified, heh. That would give you an additional ~8% HP mitigated in that 20s interval. Regardless, it would just reinforce the conclusion that WAR's burst ability with Inner Beast is fine, and that the problem with WAR is elsewhere.

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Better WAR Rotations:

Triple Beast w/ Berserk
-HS,(Berserk)IB,(Infuriate)IB,(Vengeance)SS,BB,HS,MM,SE,IB~pacified
-HS,(BK)IB,(VG)SS,BB,HS,MM,SE,IB,(IF)IB~pacified

Double Beast w/ Berserk
-HS,(BK)IB,(VG)SS,BB,HS,MM,SE,Fracture,IB~pacified

Gamemako, nice write up. Very informative! I want to continue playing my warrior, but the more I keep seeing these threads I just feel hopeless about it. Especially when I hear how it was in XI.


Gilthas, please don't come to these threads complaining about how they are written up. If you do not understand what you are reading, then these are not for you. Especially when you're making other threads asking about unlocking the warrior class following with:

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Originally Posted by Gilthas

... does this mean that I'll be parking my Marauder forever and only using it for soloing from now on? Or is it better to use Marauder before endgame dungeons?

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You have some stones to complain about an incredibly well written post while asking things like what I quoted above.

Well written. Graphs could use a brief caption to describe each trendline( I know it's redundant, but it's a fail safe) I.e. Hold( no Inner beast, wrath only). Conclusion could use a recap of your suggested fix, which could work well. Also, the graphs could have clearer titles. Also, list any assumptions from the beginning, or again in a brief summary for each graph)

All said and done, great work. I agree with your view. Warriors are not set up to scale with incoming damage.

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Originally Posted by Telepathic

Better WAR Rotations:

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Thank you, I will look into addressing these further.

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Originally Posted by Zegreiart

Gilthas, please don't come to these threads complaining about how they are written up.

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Please understand that some of the issues he pointed out I have already improved. I intend to do further improvements, time permitting, to improve readability. I just added a summary to the top as well -- stopping shy of calling it an abstract, anyway. :p

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Originally Posted by Aegrus

Graphs could use a brief caption to describe each trendline( I know it's redundant, but it's a fail safe) I.e. Hold( no Inner beast, wrath only). Conclusion could use a recap of your suggested fix, which could work well. Also, the graphs could have clearer titles. Also, list any assumptions from the beginning, or again in a brief summary for each graph)

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Yes, I definitely should include titles and captions. I even confused myself at one point due to their absence. I ended up with too many, and the lack of titles was largely due to my habit of copying and inserting new data into the chart, so I didn't have to completely redo the formatting each time.

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Originally Posted by Telepathic

Better WAR Rotations:

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And here I thought we were keeping these secret from the "paldinsrbeter" forums for our own amusement. For shame, sir!

This is a good OP and I endorse it.

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Originally Posted by Telepathic

Better WAR Rotations:

Triple Beast w/ Berserk
-HS,(Berserk)IB,(Infuriate)IB,(Vengeance)SS,BB,HS,MM,SE,IB~pacified
-HS,(BK)IB,(VG)SS,BB,HS,MM,SE,IB,(IF)IB~pacified

Double Beast w/ Berserk
-HS,(BK)IB,(VG)SS,BB,HS,MM,SE,Fracture,IB~pacified

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Is IB a skill you pre-empt with, a skill you react with, or a skill you simply use everytime it lights up?

Good write-up. I've done some napkin math similar to what you're showing here, but it's good to see a more concise and thoroughly explained version of why WAR begins underperform starting around Titan HM.

so is it viable to stack a bit of +skill speed to make our rotations more efficient?

considering those complicated combos with all that ability weaving, and trying to pull it all off before pacification, it would seem like its something worth looking into right?

Ok we have a long OP comparing the mitigation.
Now. Can we have an OP comparing self heal and as second (third), damage output?
Than we have a picture.

Your burst mitigation graphs seem a little confusing because they rely on monster DPS still, when it should be a large single hit or hit over a short period of time (i.e. just look at how proportionally Inner Beast fares against different levels of burst, 3k, 4k, 5k, 6k, 7k, etc.)

Also how did you get to ~31% healing load reduced? I did some testing today and Shield Block + Shield Oath had my WAR taking 27% more damage than my PLD which would be significantly more healing load reduction. Sort of preliminary testing though so I'd like to see how you got your numbers.

Also I think it would be worth testing the impact of Rage of Halone.

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Originally Posted by Feilina

Ok we have a long OP comparing the mitigation.
Now. Can we have an OP comparing self heal and as second (third), damage output?
Than we have a picture.

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So, you're saying you didn't read anything in the post?

Yay for math nerds!

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Originally Posted by Gamemako

I explained in the text, but suppose I should be more explicit about it. I will try to improve that.

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You did indeed, totally overlooked that paragraph. Well, it was late when I wrote that.

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Armor values are not included because they are identical. They do reduce damage, but there is no difference between the two jobs. Same with evasion. Most bonuses are actually multiplicative -- for example, Shield Oath, Sentinel, and Rampart combine to reduce damage by 61.6%. If it were additive, the three would add up to 80% -- this does not appear to be the case. I could include that detail, but it's a horribly long post without going into extreme detail about mechanics.

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Still, other mitigating factors are not trivial for the comparison, especially when you say things like "WAR is half the tank of PLD". Because if mitigation from armor is, say, 50% and mitigation is multiplicative, then PLD has a mitigation of 67%. WAR would fair much better than half against this. Thus, a relevant question is, how do differences in armor compare against the difference between PLD and WAR.
A corollary of this is, with increasingly better equip, the difference in mitigation may become less relevant. Of course, PLD will always have better mitigation, but that may very well be the purpose.

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You are conflating the group's overall goal (defeat opponents) with an individual role. A healer heals. It may often be efficient for the group for the healer to also deal damage, but if the healer cannot fill the role of healing, then the group is doomed to failure. This is the same with tank. If the tank did no damage at all, that would still fill the tanking role. It's a bit like VIT: if you don't have enough, you lose by default; if you do have enough, then it's you're free put efforts elsewhere in hopes of winning. The problem is that WAR is either incapable of filling the role or requires far more resources to do so.

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The individual role cannot be seperated from group goal. If a healer heals very well but the group doesn't have enough damage, the group, and therefore also the healer, will fail. Thus, a healer who does more damage is better than a healer who does less, provided they both heal enough to keep the group alive.
Of course, currently in the hardest content, survivability of the tank is much more in question than his damage, thus it's rational to bring the tank with the highest mitigation. Again, that may be PLD's purpose alone.

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Er... parses?

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I said reliable measures. Current parses are proven to be unreliable. Besides, some people claim, according to parses WAR does about 50% more damage than PLD while tanking. Others say the parses show little difference. So I say it's unconclusive.

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Originally Posted by ASaturnus

Current parses are proven to be unreliable. Besides, some people claim, according to parses WAR does about 50% more damage than PLD while tanking. Others say the parses show little difference. So I say it's unconclusive.

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Maths says that PLDs get about the same potency per GCD as Warriors... but only when the PLD is in Sword Oath (removes 20% penalty, adds 50 potency per) *and* is given the benefit of the Warrior's 10% slashing debuff *and* this requires the WAR to not be stance dancing. That is one VERY tilted playing field.

While tanking, and without the benefit of the Warrior's debuff, PLDs should be a good 30%+ behind WARs for both damage and threat.

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Originally Posted by Paikis

While tanking, and without the benefit of the Warrior's debuff, PLDs should be a good 30%+ behind WARs for both damage and threat.

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It's less than that, and it mostly depends on how often you use IB.

I like some of your proposed changes especially decoupling the healing % buff from wrath. as I believe this would be very beneficial.

Wrath stacks (Defiance Stance) Increases your Crit chance and parry rating for x% per warth stack (something that would balance out not having block), and restores HP for each critical hit you land (maybe only at wrath V). Effect fades over time and ends upon use of wrath consuming abilities.

IB would be encouraged to be used and the effect of loosing parry rate and crit rate would not be as bad as loosing the healing buff. Smart play will still be needed on the use of our burst mitigation tool.

I have a question, and forgive me if it's already been addressed in your OP or in a reply that I missed.

What happens if Wrath expenditure and IB were to be timed perfectly with incoming heals, e.g. Damage->Heals from healer->IB?

I ask because, I believe, that you normalized Wrath stacks to 3 across the board in an attempt to average out the fluctuating healing bonus. I can't tell if this averaging out of the healing buff was done in your burst mitigation section, if it wasn't... then disregrd the rest of this post. With the infamous "Yoshi says Warriors need to l2p" and the newest Dev letter in mind, it appears that the "correct" way to play warriors is to have 5 stacks of wrath up whenever a healer would need to heal you by timing Wrath expenditure after incoming heals.

I understand this is more of a technical question in regards to its affects on Warrior continuous mitigation because of the difficulties in synching with healers to the point where almost every heal benefits from the 5 Wrath bonus while using IB more than once a minute. But, in regards to foreseeable burst mitigation, this might be something to look into as the pattern of Titan Table Flip->Heals from healers->IB seems more than workable.

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Originally Posted by AppleGrocer

With the infamous "Yoshi says Warriors need to l2p" and the newest Dev letter in mind, it appears that the "correct" way to play warriors is to have 5 stacks of wrath up whenever a healer would need to heal you by timing Wrath expenditure after incoming heals.

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The "correct" way of playing WAR is flawed because it requires close to perfect execution on healers' part and WAR simply doesn't have the preemptive cool-downs needed to survive more than "possibly" a few large spikes like PLD can (ToB is WAR's only worthwile preemptive CD; it has a 10 sec. duration and 2min. cool-down); timing is too crucial with this particular style and reduces the ability Inner Beast (IB) to an after-thought more than a reactive death-defying clutch.

I'm not sure whether IB was ever intended to be as strong as it is now, but this is how the community has viewed it (and understandably so with what it's capable of) and it is arguably WAR's strongest tanking ability. If increased healing (through Wrath) was supposed to be WAR's boon, it sure fell flat on it's face considering that with it active at full stacks it's still much weaker than PLD's passive Shield Oath (there's math everywhere showing how much healing one requires over the other).

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Originally Posted by Skull_Angel

The "correct" way of playing WAR is flawed because it requires close to perfect execution on healers' part and WAR simply doesn't have the preemptive cool-downs needed to survive more than "possibly" a few large spikes like PLD can (ToB is WAR's only worthwile preemptive CD; it has a 10 sec. duration and 2min. cool-down); timing is too crucial with this particular style and reduces the ability Inner Beast (IB) to an after-thought more than a reactive death-defying clutch.

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Hence the "" around correct. It seems like this is the way they wanted Warrior to pan out, and it sounds nice. But, you're right, given the tools we have right now it's just impractical if not impossible in a lot of cases. It requires immense amounts of coordination and timing and just makes content artificially difficult for both Warrior tanks and healers.

That being said, my question is if it works in theory, i.e. if we had enough leeway through a larger HP buffer so that we didn't have to pull off clutch healing rotations in sync wit our healers, or by making the healing buff native to defiance rather than requiring wrath stacks.

It seems to me, that the devs are leaning towards this style of fix: reducing the execution required from warriors and healers in order to fully take advantage of the healing bonus while using IB. I just want to know if this will actually fix the problem, or if a theoretical Warrior using IB while maximizing the number of heals that benefit from the healing bonus of Wrath still falls woefully behind a Paladins survivability; in which case, this whole idea becomes pointless.

Well Yoshi specifically said he expected both tanks to die at only 3 stacks of Turn 1 and 4 (Caduceus and Dreadnaught), but PLD can live on past that. So he wants to buff WAR until it can live as long as PLD can. If that's not an explicit admission that he wants both tank classes to have the same survivability I don't know what is.

Good job, just keep in mind a lot of ppl dont grasp the math side of MMOs very quickly so it comes off as gibberish to most.

With math like this, there's really no excuse if the upcoming war changes aren't right. Multiple great threads with factual evidence of why a class is numerically broken, and multiple ways to fix it are on the forums, so i hope some dev reads these.

Great job OP, always willing to bump a smart war thread.

Sadly this post will be ignored I believe, because it seems like many people are chalking the difference up solely to Paladins being able to avoid a mechanic in such a way as was unintended by the devs.

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Originally Posted by Hachiko

Your burst mitigation graphs seem a little confusing because they rely on monster DPS still, when it should be a large single hit or hit over a short period of time (i.e. just look at how proportionally Inner Beast fares against different levels of burst, 3k, 4k, 5k, 6k, 7k, etc.)

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That's really more about burst HP, though -- whether you survive the one big hit. My consideration is how much damage is mitigated; that is, I want to say how much healer MP is impacted over that period assuming you do survive. I chose 20 seconds as a scaling time due to Rampart, but perhaps I could do an additional case for 10 second scaling.

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Originally Posted by Hachiko

Also how did you get to ~31% healing load reduced? I did some testing today and Shield Block + Shield Oath had my WAR taking 27% more damage than my PLD which would be significantly more healing load reduction. Sort of preliminary testing though so I'd like to see how you got your numbers.

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The one near 30% @ 1500DPS includes burst abilities over time and excludes blocking. If you look at the first chart, it's circa 34%. I was working on closer to 5% of all damage reduced with shield blocking -- but you're passively reducing 9% of all damage with shield blocking? That seems like quite a bit more than any other estimate I've seen. Even if I assume that an additional quarter of enemy crits are pushed off the table due to blocking, that should amount to around 0.5%, which isn't nearly the gap. Do you have data on blocking rate and blocking amount? I would be interested to see them.

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Originally Posted by Gamemako

That's really more about burst HP, though -- whether you survive the one big hit. My consideration is how much damage is mitigated; that is, I want to say how much healer MP is impacted over that period assuming you do survive. I chose 20 seconds as a scaling time due to Rampart, but perhaps I could do an additional case for 10 second scaling.

The one near 30% @ 1500DPS includes burst abilities over time and excludes blocking. If you look at the first chart, it's circa 34%. I was working on closer to 5% of all damage reduced with shield blocking -- but you're passively reducing 9% of all damage with shield blocking? That seems like quite a bit more than any other estimate I've seen. Even if I assume that an additional quarter of enemy crits are pushed off the table due to blocking, that should amount to around 0.5%, which isn't nearly the gap. Do you have data on blocking rate and blocking amount? I would be interested to see them.

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With respect to Burst I dunno, I just don't feel 20 seconds is really a "burst" timeframe, maybe my issue is with the terminology.

I think I might have confused you with my relative words also. The WAR took 27% more damage than the PLD. But that's using the PLD as the "baseline." So Block didn't reduce overall damage taken passively by 9%. That would have been if PLD took 27% less damage than the WAR (which wasn't the case). The PLD took ~21.3% less damage than the WAR, which puts the shield block contribution really, too low in my numbers.

Or maybe I caused the problem by flipping it around from healing load reduced to WAR needing x% more heals which is the way I like to look at it, since it's the real world impact of going with a WAR over a PLD: how many more GCD's do you need to keep them up?

Now that I think about it, I really don't trust my FFXIV APP tracking very much at all in terms of damage taken, so maybe that's the biggest issue.

But my parse showed me blocking 21.9% of non-miss attacks, (202 Blocks of 869 hit, 45 crit attacks. Should be a contribution of ~5.5% damage reduction. This is with Holy Shield. +1 should probably take it up to 6% I think, between the rate and block value increases, though I may be wrong (if it doesn't then I don't think anyone should ever upgrade to Holy Shield +1...)

Also my testing with Rage of Halone had a contribution of ~8% damage reduction (19.94 damage taken v. 21.63 damage taken) though I suspect this to be wildly off because it's the APP parser and because of how hard it is to test halone. It's actually kind of hard to test this in a meaningful way, because even with the weakest weapon the mob dies before it can get a lot of attacks in, and mob damage seemed to drop off quite a bit once they were up for a long time (testing without halone was ~100 hits, w/ was ~30).

This was against the lvl 49 cohort Eques (lancers).

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Originally Posted by Hachiko

With respect to Burst I dunno, I just don't feel 20 seconds is really a "burst" timeframe, maybe my issue is with the terminology.

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I will see if I can address that in an edit some time soon.

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Originally Posted by Hachiko

I think I might have confused you with my relative words also.

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Ha, you're totally right, I read it wrong. I would have expected WAR to take 31.6% more damage at 5% blocking advantage. Your builds are identical for STR, though? Possible that you're comparing two different block/parry strength windows? That would increase WAR parry reduction.

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Originally Posted by Hachiko

But my parse showed me blocking 21.9% of non-miss attacks, (202 Blocks of 869 hit, 45 crit attacks. Should be a contribution of ~5.5% damage reduction.

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About what I was expecting. I don't have any data for HS+1, either, though. I doubt the ilvl90 a huge departure from the ilvl80 shield.

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Originally Posted by Hachiko

Also my testing with Rage of Halone had a contribution of ~8% damage reduction

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That's more than I was anticipating. I will have to find more data on that regardless.