Help with WAR

Hello all,

A member in my static switched to WAR recently.
It feel to me that he is still trying to figure things out.

He does less than me the PLD on both A5S and A6S.
Please look at the log below and tell me what he can do to adjust.

A5S kill

I noticed some Tomahawks and Storm's Path later on.
(Tomahawks has more % usage than fracture)
But i quess it was used on adds?

Storm's Eye was used almost perfectly (too much maybe?), however Butcher's Block quite chaotically.
But bad BB use may be a cause of a game itself. It's not a striking dummy, making chain combo is hard.

Inner beast was used 5 times, but i quess it was used as mitigation. thou thats a waste. RI, Vengeance, Thrill + Fore maybe?

Anyway, Butchers Block seems to be used almost twice less than Storm's eye. That's bad.
Plus Heavy Swing has more participation % than Butchers Block or anything else from GCD...
Which is even worse.

Brutal Swing used only 6 times. 20 sec recast x 6 times gives 120 sec. 2 min. Until you needed a stun, it was either a very short fight or Brutal Swing cooldowns is not placed in visible place on hotbar.

Conclusion:
First you use Eye, then BB. Chart is showing a good Eye spam, then Eye again, then BB spam, then Eye spam again and then again BB spam.
More fracture and Brutal swings.
I don't see triple Fell Cleave, but i may be wrong. I don't see double FC as well.
Not sure if Auto-attack should so heavily exceed in participation percent, but it may be normal.
Also i would avoid using inner beast and storms path.

Hope i helped.

With Fracture be careful it "CAN" be a dps increas but only if the WAR has something like "Berserk" running / "Trick Attack" on the Boss etc. and u cannot fit in another Fell Cleave in that particular window. If you have to decide between "Fracture" or "Fell Cleave" of course you pick "Fell Cleave" caus the overall potency is way higher.

About "Storms path", it can be usefull in Certain situations but yeah.. only then.. Unless the Boss hits like a Truck or Heavy "Mechanic Damage" is Coming it is not really worth keeping it up nonestop. Rather go onto "Storms Eye" and "Butchers Block" DPS Rotation.

And about spammign too much "Storms Eye" . well If you are close of getting aggro of the MT it does not hurt doing one or two extra "Storms Eye" Combos to make sure that the MT can regenerate a bit more Aggro so you can throw in "Butchers Block" again.

Oh right, i forgot they might have been close to stealing aggro. didn;t take that under consideration.
But whole fight lol?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by RamothElggur

With Fracture be careful it "CAN" be a dps increas but only if the WAR has something like "Berserk" running / "Trick Attack" on the Boss etc. and u cannot fit in another Fell Cleave in that particular window. If you have to decide between "Fracture" or "Fell Cleave" of course you pick "Fell Cleave" caus the overall potency is way higher.

---

Fracture is always a DPS increase as long as it ticks for the full duration, buffs or otherwise.

@ At SpookyGhost it has been Tested from others and i did it myself aswell, overall the dmg nd dps difference is not that Big , HOWEVER it is actually slightly better to almost ignore the fracture DoT and rather build up the "fell cleaves" faster.

As i said, if u have somethign like "berserk" running or "trick attack" is on the target and so on.... and u cannot get in "fell cleave" u want to use fracture.. One thing i did forgot to mentions is when u have to go to a different Target then u can use it on the Boss too and then start attacking the other target, at least that is something taht u can do and came into my mind though.

overall it has been discussed alot by thousends of people if keeping up fracture all teh time is a DPS boost or not... My Personal Experience is that almost ignoring it and only using it in those certain moments can be or will be a dmg boost.

and yeah @ Yuni_ Queen: Going full Storms eye spam is no so great i agree on thatXD

A few things I see when looking at the log:

1 - He only uses IB/FC 15 times over the course of the fight. This should be closer to the 20-25 range.
2 - He only used Berserk 3 times, should be used almost right off CD so should have been up 5 times.
3 - His casts per minute are low. He's doing fewer skills / minute than your casters, and if you take defensive cds out hes only doing about 19 gcds per minute. This last point is indicative of learning the job and the fight though, should go up with more experience.

edit: Going to add my 2 cents to the fracture thing; If you look at the top 50 wars for any raid tier, you'll see that fracture use is all over the place. Some use it religiously, some might only cast it 3-4 times over an entire raid. For a new Warrior, basically ignoring it and focusing on getting the most out of his stacks and maximizing fell cleaves is probably the better bet, as any time you clip fracture, or cause your slashing debuff to drop because of applying it you've lost dps. At optimal usage Fracture is less than a 1% dps gain, most warriors have much bigger things to focus on that could improve their dps before they worry about that last .7%

edit2: 1 more thing to add, he spent over a third of the fight in defiance, but his hp never dropped below 25%, he could probably easily get away with full time deliverance.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SpookyGhost

Fracture is always a DPS increase as long as it ticks for the full duration, buffs or otherwise.

---

Isn't fracture total potency 300?

100 initial, 20 potency for 30 seconds = 10 ticks, so 100 + (20x10) = 100 + 200 = 300?

How is that better then a 500 Fell Cleave?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lethallin

Isn't fracture total potency 300?

100 initial, 20 potency for 30 seconds = 10 ticks, so 100 + (20x10) = 100 + 200 = 300?

How is that better then a 500 Fell Cleave?

---

You're comparing it to 1 hit, not to the average gcd. a wars maximum avg gcd pre-buffs at maximum stack usage is (5*248{avg pot of 2 combos} + 500)/6 or 1740/6=290. In reality it's going to be lower than this on anything but dummy fights as you can't just use all your defensive cds for stack whenever they come off cd.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by RamothElggur

@ At SpookyGhost it has been Tested from others and i did it myself aswell, overall the dmg nd dps difference is not that Big. Overall it has been discussed alot by thousends of people if keeping up fracture all teh time is a DPS boost or not...

HOWEVER it is actually slightly better to almost ignore the fracture DoT and rather build up the "fell cleaves" faster. My Personal Experience is that almost ignoring it and only using it in those certain moments can be or will be a dmg boost.

---

you are kind of contradicting what you said in the bold since what you described IS a dps increase. What spooky said is actually what "test" have concluded about using fracture: that you should be using it when its safe to do so. Its not a dps loss like its cross classed counter-part (except for monk). Yes when you need burst in that situation there is no point in using it, but thats not what we are talking about. On a complete dummy fight, or fights/parts that allow full ticks, there is absolutely no reason not to do it.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lethallin

Isn't fracture total potency 300?

100 initial, 20 potency for 30 seconds = 10 ticks, so 100 + (20x10) = 100 + 200 = 300?

How is that better then a 500 Fell Cleave?

---

nowhere was that implied that he was saying fracture>fell cleave. Its common knowledge that if your fracture is going to mess with a fell cleave don't do it.

Fracture delays your FC by 1 GCD every ~30 seconds.

1 GCD is worth roughly .67 wrath stacks due to heavy swing not generating any stacks.

Fracture costs you a FC once every ~4 minutes.

Over ~4 minutes, proper Fracture use will gain more potency than a lost FC. This gap only widens when the use of Fracture doesn't cost you an FC because of the cut-off in fight duration. For example, if a fight cuts off at 10 minutes, Fracture will have more value because the last ~2 minutes of Fracture up-time is purely a DPS gain.

But, like i've said here multiple times, there are conditions where Fracture is not a DPS gain.

1.) It forces an eye --> eye rotation instead of eye --> block multiple times. One instance of this happening is SE > Fracture > HS > FC > FC > SS > BB > HS > Maim > SE. Eye will fall off before reapplication in this rotation so you will need to swap SS > BB for Maim > SE instead. There are other content based instances where you might need to leave a boss for a GCD.

2.) You do not get the full duration out of Fracture for whatever reason.

3.) It costs you an FC in some very specific scenarios. For example, if you are Berserking near the end of a phase or fight and lose a Berserked FC as the result of an earlier Fracture.

As for advice, this is what I generally post on the matter --

Quote:

---

The biggest determining factors for WAR DPS comes down to 4 things. When I compare parses these are the key things that I look at when trying to improve.

The first and biggest influence on WAR DPS is Deliverance up-time. You want to be in Deliverance as much as possible. You should be relying on your dCDs for mitigation and Defiance as a last option. If you use Defiance, you want to pair it with Unchained to negate the DPS penalty so that it functions more like ToB + Conva.

The second is general up-time. Lost GCDs are a big hit to your DPS so your goal is to maximize up-time. Up-time optimization is fight specific -- in a fight like Sephirot, there is some nuance to this like lost GCDs during p1 movement for re-positioning and green / purple, timing pacification to correspond with orange if you are not using green stacking for melee, add management, etc. Look at a top parse and compare their aDPS up-time to yours. You should rarely need to Tomahawk to deal with down-time.

The third is your stack management. Find a comparable clear-time parse with better DPS and look at how many FC / IB / Decimate / Steel Cyclone uses they are getting. If you are lower, chances are you are holding stacks or messing something else up. You ideally want to use stacks with close to 100% efficiency.

The fourth is your buff management. The biggest contributing aspect of buff management is your Berserk up-time. For Sephirot EX, you can use 2 full 9GCD Berserks every p3 cycle on the same rotation but most WARs mess this up. An earlier poster gave the advice to hold Berserk for small phases in A5S. This is bad advice because you will lose a Berserk unless your party has a specific clear time. Even a gimped Berserk is better than no Berserk. When judging a fight, pay attention to the duration of phases, the timing of down-time and maximize your Berserk uses. There are some exceptions to this like Hummel (where there is an actual downside to getting 2 Berserks vs. 1) but generally you want to keep Berserk as close to off CD as possible while not sacrificing its up-time or buff synergy (using it on 4-5 stacks with Infuriate or syncing with buffs like Balance, IR, TA, BL, etc.).

---

Ok guys - new warrior here. Level 60 - just getting into Midas (not savage because I don't have a static) and that sort of thing. I had originally been almost exclusively defense mode, but I guess from what I read here that I would really want to mainly stay in Deliverance as OT. Makes sense. As MT though, I want to maintain the Defiance stance, no? I can see the exception being when getting to 5 stacks and stance swapping for FC and then jumping back to defiance, right? Also - should I fire off berserk every time it's available?