Warrior Abilitiy - Red Mist

Healing/Mitigation wise WAR already has a great concept that just needs to be improved upon. Self-overhealing mitigation is the way to go I think.

Allow ALL self imposed healing (except potions) to create a pool of additional HP in the form of a buff. All incoming damage passes through this first before making the pass through SS and Adloq. Do not allow SS/Adloq to take this additional health into consideration when being applied.

Something like Red Mist would be an appropriate title. This can be an additional benefit of Defiance.

Other abilities should stay/change as follows.

Bloodbath - it is fine as it is. Yes it may not look like a lot at first, but 25% over 30s does add up, and for AoE tanking is actually viable (especially coupled with vengeance).

Storm's Path - Maybe change this to 100%, considering the fact you are using this skill instead of increasing enmity or increasing damage output - I feel that 100% isn't overpowered.

Thrill of Battle - Allow the increased HP after the 10s to add to Red Mist. (Perhaps add an additional 20% damage reduction by and on user whilst active - to bring it closer to Hallowed Ground)

Defiance - All critical hits whilst in Defiance heal 50% of damage dealt and can add to Red Mist.

Holmgang - Whilst target is Bound all incoming damage taken by target is critical (and if this is considered too OP, perhaps 50% chance of all actions on user being critical)

New Abilities

Blood of Thine Enemies - Duration 15s, Recast 90-120s. Allows all over kill damage on foes you are holding enmity on to heal/add to Red Mist (by anyone, be it tank, healer or DPS)

Ancestral Rage - Duration 30s, Recast 180s. Allows a stacking of an additional 5 wrath, and therefore increases the potency of any wrath consuming ability proportional to the wrath stacks available. Upon excecuting, AR will increase current wrath by one stack. Infuriate still only increases wrath by 5. (Not only does this increase the potency of wrath related skills, but it also increases the potency of incoming healing)

Also, is there a reason why I have seen people write extremely long posts, where mine are limited to 1000 characters?

Just edit your original Post, this is a work around for the initial 1000 character limit

Actually the Red Mist idea would work very well.

The design concept behind Warrior's "mitigation" is that they "undo" damage by healing themselves after being hit. However this does not work well in endgame content when you have someone madly spamming heals on you.
By changing these healing attacks into a Stoneskin-like absorb, a Warrior's mitigation is no longer rendered obsolete by the simple presence of a dedicated healer. This also makes "healing" attacks more viable, because you would never have to worry about it being "wasted"...
A PLD never thinks "Oh, I shouldnt pop Sentinel cause it might be wasted"... no we just pop Sentinel and keep on chugging along. With this passive ability, it would become the same-ish thing for WAR, where if you feel that you'd benefit from basically "per-emptively undoing" some damage at this moment... well then you can just go do that.

In my opinion-Merge Storm's Eye and Storm's Path and change the vacated ability slot to a provoke, simply because every tank should have one. Take provoke off the list of abils war can have and put Rampart or Sentinel on the list.

Honestly, while this might fix overhealing, it still doesn't fix that Warrior self-healing sounds pretty subpar and not enough for effective damage mitigation.

When you look at Paladin, you see that they have a lot of "nice" debuffs that they can apply with their attacks and that helps with damage mitigation. Warrior's get Stun on a longer timer (but this one has already been confirmed to be looked into) and Holmgang that can be used to avoid attacks but I hear most (all?) endgame bosses resist this.

And lets not even go into how Paladin defensive cooldowns are a world apart from what Warrior's get.

Warrior overhealing really sounds like the least of a Warrior's problems.

adding an overheal/shield mechanic takes away from the warrior class. it makes inner beast and other self heals just another part of the rotation. rather than reacting to a huge hit with an appropriately timed IB, you'll simply be hitting it over and over again whenever its up to mitigate some damage. this sort of thing just makes us more and more like PLD, something that we dont want.

Not really. Say a shield-IB worked on the same exact formula, non-crit, my IBs (without CD's) do about 1100, the most effective time to use it would still be when you expect a big hit. You wouldn't make it part of the rotation because constantly losing wrath would do more against your survivability than for it.

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Originally Posted by Tzukuma

adding an overheal/shield mechanic takes away from the warrior class. it makes inner beast and other self heals just another part of the rotation. rather than reacting to a huge hit with an appropriately timed IB, you'll simply be hitting it over and over again whenever its up to mitigate some damage. this sort of thing just makes us more and more like PLD, something that we dont want.

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Because being effective throughout content, rather than needing a band aid patch every time is what we don't want.

One of the problems they have, is they locked themselves to a silly limit of how many abilties/traits a class has, and how many abilities a job has. It leads to some classes being deprived of things they seem to need, like warrior, and other classes having filler abilities.

Not to mention, most the traits are filler and pretty boring. Enhanced Stat [1,2,3], really?

Yes, to change it, they merely need to add abilities how they see fit.

Make shield IB be mirror the actual amount healed by IB.

-Warrior at 6000/8000 hp
-Warrior uses IB and heals himself for 1000 hp, gain 1000 hp shield
-Warrior is now at 7000/8000 hp with 1000 hp in reserve

-Warrior at 7700/8000 hp
-Warrior uses IB and wasted it by healing only 300 hp with it, only gain 300 hp shield
-Warrior is now at 8000/8000 hp with 300 hp in reserve

No. It's got to be scaled based on incoming damage, otherwise it further trivializes 4 man content. This is the only way it won't be an issue every new tier of content.

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Originally Posted by Steeled

Not really. Say a shield-IB worked on the same exact formula, non-crit, my IBs (without CD's) do about 1100, the most effective time to use it would still be when you expect a big hit. You wouldn't make it part of the rotation because constantly losing wrath would do more against your survivability than for it.

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how is this exactly ANY different than playing a paladin? "i know a big hit is going to come, so im gonna press this button before it hits me so i dont take as much damage" thats the paladin play style, a proactive tanking style.

warrior is supposed to be reactive, you react to a big hit by healing yourself, using IB after the attack. Thats how it should be. the solution is to make warrior self-heals scale with incoming damage, so we can heal back what we took, rather than healing back a flat amount based on our dismal damage output.

Making IB always a benefit to use, rather than "if you time it right" doesn't make warrior "more like paladin", it just makes it "more practical".

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Originally Posted by Steeled

Making IB always a benefit to use, rather than "if you time it right" doesn't make warrior "more like paladin", it just makes it "more practical".

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you obviously dont understand. PLD = PROACTIVE. WAR = REACTIVE. There. I put it in nice big letters for you. making IB always beneficial to use takes away from the warrior playstyle. Warriors are supposed to keep their wrath stacks up, and use them up for IB to REACT to a big hit. simply adding a shielding mechanic just makes IB part of a rotation, used every time its up so you're always mitigating damage, like a paladin. Warriors are supposed to "time it right" and this suggestion does, in fact, make warriors "more like paladin". it is indeed "more practical", if we wanted to be practical, then everybody would be a paladin.

Again, if Warrior functioned exactly the same, and IB was shield rather than a heal, it would still be perfectly fine to use it reactively. Other than healers perhaps not seeing that you used it, vs a healing-IB, it still would give you the same amount of health-post action. It just means that if 2 cure IIs hit you at the same time and cap you off, or near it, you get more out of a IB-shield than an IB-heal.

To be honest, you'd probably still want to use it reactively, rather than rotationally, because the loss of wrath stacks counts for something.

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Originally Posted by Steeled

Again, if Warrior functioned exactly the same, and IB was shield rather than a heal, it would still be perfectly fine to use it reactively. Other than healers perhaps not seeing that you used it, vs a healing-IB, it still would give you the same amount of health-post action. It just means that if 2 cure IIs hit you at the same time and cap you off, or near it, you get more out of a IB-shield than an IB-heal.

To be honest, you'd probably still want to use it reactively, rather than rotationally, because the loss of wrath stacks counts for something.

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I know where you're going with this, and i know where the OP is going with this. it is in fact, a solid idea. many others, including myself, have proposed this shielding mechanic. However, it doesnt solve the problem at hand. i wasnt clear in my last post, and i admit that was kind of silly. The current problem is the fact that Warriors take too much damage for our non-scaling self heals to mitigate. Giving IB a shielding mechanic only solves a very small portion of the problem, which is the over-healing issue. It does not however, solve the big issue, the damage that we take. Warriors take much, much more damage than paladins, they can mitigate much more damage than we could ever even imagine to mitigate with IB. We need IB to scale with incoming damage in order to solve the problem. Im not entirely sure where i was going in my last post, sorry for confusion. Just pointless ranting while i was talking to my guild.

Have you ever seen scaling really work well? Honest question, because I haven't. The primary example would be wow's death knights, and druids, and both had periods of "please don't invite one" to "why aren't both our tanks [x], heck, let's make the whole raid [x]".

Frankly, I don't want to be rude to SE but I don't think they have the dedication to balance to nail scaling. I'm also not sure, with the latency in combat (not reds n sh*t, but like abilities going off and having no effect--like Benediction and HG) that it could work very well. And then there's the bug of abilities being used and not registering at all, but still going on cooldown (like Bloodbath, very easy to see when it's active).

The combat system has a lot of flaws before they take up something as complex as rolling absorbs, and scaling in the way you're talking about. I don't disagree, I just don't think 14 is ready for it. Maybe when she's older =p

A good inroad to fixing warriors, a start, would be to give them rampart as options, merge storm's path and eye (the combined effect would not be OP), double the effective heal (heals for 100% damage), use the extra ability slot to give them a provoke so that they neither feel like they need paladin's, nor feel the need to constantly switch what they have set, and kick themselves if they should forget.

I'd say give them sentinel too, but I can appreciate the difference in tanking style (proactive vs reactive). While both are reduction cooldowns, it just makes sense to have rampart available. It's not especially potent (whereas, sentinel is).

By the way, by "Time it right", I don't mean waiting to use it after big damage. I mean managing to use it so that the heal is neither wasted nor do the healers waste mp on big cures. A shield, even in sluggish combat models, allows this aspect of warrior to always be maximum efficiency.

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Originally Posted by Steeled

Again, if Warrior functioned exactly the same, and IB was shield rather than a heal, it would still be perfectly fine to use it reactively. Other than healers perhaps not seeing that you used it, vs a healing-IB, it still would give you the same amount of health-post action. It just means that if 2 cure IIs hit you at the same time and cap you off, or near it, you get more out of a IB-shield than an IB-heal.

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There's a *really* easy compromise between the "it needs to be used reactively" and "it needs to not get wasted when your healers top you off" camps while also fixing the most often mentioned fundamental balance problem with Inner Beast (improper scaling): have it heal you for 20% of the damage taken over the last 5-7.5 seconds and provide you with an absorb shield equal to the amount you healed yourself for that lasts 20 seconds (assuming that IB needs to be twice as effective as it currently is in 8 man content, Rock Buster>auto-attack>Mountain Buster hits my WAR for about 6k and my IB heals for ~1.2k; 20% of 6k is 1.2k).

You would *still* have to use it reactively to get any value out of it, at least half of it would be useful even if you were topped off while the animation is resolving, and it would cause the effect to actually scale with incoming damage as is needed, not to mention that it would remove IB's reliance upon Berserk and Internal Release to generate appreciable healing numbers. It could even be used rotationally for fights without discrete burst damage phases, though it wouldn't be nearly as potent. As long as the devs also reevalutated the WAR CD suite so that it wasn't completely and utterly abysmal, it would gives WARs a nice niche compared to PLD: WAR would excel at tanking intense bursts arising from 1-2 hits (i.e. Mountain Buster) whereas PLD would be excel at tanking constant high damage phases (i.e. Caduceus).