Warrior rotational complexity?

I took some time off of FFXIV, and when I came back I decided to finish leveling the tanks up to 70 instead of just grinding tomestones. I've mained Warrior for a long time (since around 2.2-2.3), and that's continued up through Stormblood.

But now that I'm playing DRK (or even PLD), I'm finding WAR super unengaging to play. Don't get me wrong - I don't think WAR needs buffs, and I understand it's a very strong tank. But at the same time, in Stormblood we have a total of two oGCD damage abilities. When I'm OTing, I find myself pressing nonsense ogcds just so I can do SOMETHING. The removal of Low Blow (and Mercy Stroke) and the fact that WAR, again, pretty much only pushes a single ogcd every twenty seconds makes it feel pretty unengaging. Even the IR window is only two ogcds despite being like 40 percent of our damage.

Is it just me? Or does anyone else feel like the rotation is a little boring?

I personally found PLD's rotation is more boring, but again have been playing PLD since release, so Warrior is the "new" tank for me, which I guess their rotation is also more... "refreshing".

Honestly it was a bit more interesting at the start of SB, even after they somewhat fixed gauge halving/Shake it Off. After the last update to IR though it definitely feels a bit flat. Level synced content is terrible (leveling up an alt War) because Berserk is nearly useless until you have the full kit. IMO they should've left Berserk like it was until 70 and then applied the newer IR trait. But that's neither here nor there.

But the other thing about War, the base rotation hasn't really changed at all since ARR. I took nearly 2 years off and when I came back shortly before SB it was like nothing changed and that was kinda nice, so I stuck with it. I wouldn't focus so much on there being only 2 oGCDs. Especially if you played Drk because they have a lot, so much so that people are asking to reduce them because of all the double-weaving that's required. Definitely 2 sides of the coin. But if that's what you're looking for then perhaps Drk or Pld would be more to your liking. Don't forget that War is doing just fine without an excessive amount of oGCDs in their rotation

It's not any more boring than PLD or DRK. Tanks have always been simple to play.

The zerk/inner release redesign really killed a lot of the class complexity. There are no more decisions to be made or planning to be had. Hit button. Spam FC until you cant anymore. Then 80 seconds of just Eye>Path>Path and shove as many upheavals and FC up a monsters butt every chance you get. I really resent the change the longer it goes on. The two window zerk IR War was much more rewarding and satisfying to actually play correctly. Now its just dumb. Its effective, but stupid.

I actually like the lack of complexity. I primarily use inner release as another defensive cooldown during large mass pulls to spam steel cyclone. Stance swapping during a boss fight is overoptimizing, in my opinion. We're their to hold aggro. Any damage we deal above and beyond basic rotation stuff is a bonus.

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Originally Posted by Fendred

I actually like the lack of complexity. I primarily use inner release as another defensive cooldown during large mass pulls to spam steel cyclone. Stance swapping during a boss fight is overoptimizing, in my opinion. We're their to hold aggro. Any damage we deal above and beyond basic rotation stuff is a bonus.

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This only applies in dungeons. In raids this is simply untrue. Holding and sitting on ~40% of your damage for a defensive opportunity and then using it on IB instead of FC just wont cut it in savage. You can take the lowered complexity and then lower it even further by not using the offensive half of your kit, but sheesh that's the least engaging way to play one of the least engaging classes in the game. Even if that did work in savage, the idea of playing that mind numbing level of play practicing savage for hours and hours every week is terrifying.

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Originally Posted by Izsha

This only applies in dungeons. In raids this is simply untrue. Holding and sitting on ~40% of your damage for a defensive opportunity and then using it on IB instead of FC just wont cut it in savage. You can take the lowered complexity and then lower it even further by not using the offensive half of your kit, but sheesh that's the least engaging way to play one of the least engaging classes in the game. Even if that did work in savage, the idea of playing that mind numbing level of play practicing savage for hours and hours every week is terrifying.

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If the boss is giving openings for a swap, sure. I don't see the point of doing it otherwise. I've seen warriors swapping stances during boss casts that are under 10 sec and that is what fueled my comment. If a tank is taking regular direct hits from a boss he should be in tank stance.

*GRABS POPCORN*

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Originally Posted by Fendred

If the boss is giving openings for a swap, sure. I don't see the point of doing it otherwise. I've seen warriors swapping stances during boss casts that are under 10 sec and that is what fueled my comment. If a tank is taking regular direct hits from a boss he should be in tank stance.

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maybe for the sake of prog, or if you doubt your own / your healers skill/gear.
but as a general blanket "you should remain in tank stance as long as possible?" Not really.

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Originally Posted by Izsha

There are no more decisions to be made or planning to be had.

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On a training dummy, that's almost the case, but this is simply not true when considering the unique tempo of each fight and raid buff windows.

While 4.2 WAR certainly lost a degree of complexity (edit: more to the point, it became less strict), it's also far less awkward to play.

The best war game play was heavensward.
It was missing something in ARR.
It was slightly too much hassle at the beginning of SB
It is braindead nowadays.

Can't bring myself to play WAR these days. Leveled it to 70 and was planning to stick to it as my only tank but realised that it's way too boring with how often Fell Cleave became. You can't just make the coolest skill in a class's kit come up SO OFTEN it becomes boring.

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Originally Posted by Fendred

If a tank is taking regular direct hits from a boss he should be in tank stance.

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If only any boss in the game was actually even remotely threatening enough to make tanks want to use tank stance outside of aggro.

besides certain sections of Ultimate coil of course. Crits are super annoying.

If i want to play something complex i would play DPS.

Tanks should be straight forward, not complex, their responsibility for the run/dungeon/trial/raid is too high to make it complicated to play, it will mess up anything below 75% percentile and there will be a fountain of complains about tanks not being able to do X and Y.

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Originally Posted by Nedkel

If i want to play something complex i would play DPS.

Tanks should be straight forward, not complex, their responsibility for the run/dungeon/trial/raid is too high to make it complicated to play, it will mess up anything below 75% percentile and there will be a fountain of complains about tanks not being able to do X and Y.

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Warrior didn't have to be played in a complex way. You could still sit in tank stance and spam IB and unchained/zerk for days if that's what you wanted to do. Even in offense you could do a lot of damage just using zerk and IR when they were up. But the ceiling for warrior was much higher. You could really get down to the nitty gritty and squeeze a lot out of War with good, precise play. And for the effort of doing that, there was a payoff. Managing your gauge to setup for strong zerk and IR windows was a goal to keep shooting for as you learned raid fights better and better. But at the same time you could still play casual dungeon warrior and never leave defiance and be very safe and reasonably effective spamming IB all day.

Now the floor has been raised (you don't need to do very much to be effective offensively), and the ceiling went down (once you do the basics theres really not a lot of room left to grow). Warrior used to represent the magical "easy to learn, hard to master" design that every game strives to achieve. War has always been a very safe, sturdy, non-punishing tank with good defence and enmiy generation. But it also had a lot of room to learn and grow offensively. Now its just "Easy to learn.......The End."

For people who never set foot outside of dungeons warrior suddenly got 'awesome', but it was entirely playable and always very effective at lower levels long before the IR change anyway. So you just got to enjoy big numbers for little effort you weren't seeing before, but it was always a sturdy safe tank for beginners anyway. For everyone else that wants to push the envelope, it became extremely limiting and restrictive on what you can do with the job.

One of the reasons they fixed WAR is the absurd damage difference related to the rng of berserk Fell Cleaves. You could go from 4k to 4.5k literally just from critting. No other non fed class had that disparity. Personally I like WAR a lot more now, it's actually fun to play in savage now and you don't wanna just wipe if you dont crit any FCs. And WAR was relatively hard to master I admit but ironically DRK was and still is the true most complex tank.

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Originally Posted by RLofOBFL

And WAR was relatively hard to master I admit but ironically DRK was and still is the true most complex tank.

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Care to elaborate?

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Originally Posted by RLofOBFL

One of the reasons they fixed WAR is the absurd damage difference related to the rng of berserk Fell Cleaves. You could go from 4k to 4.5k literally just from critting. No other non fed class had that disparity. Personally I like WAR a lot more now, it's actually fun to play in savage now and you don't wanna just wipe if you dont crit any FCs. And WAR was relatively hard to master I admit but ironically DRK was and still is the true most complex tank.

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Xeno made 1 comment about critting FCs feeling bad and suddenly the forums Wars all think that Crit RNG was some crazy burden that Wars had to carry. Crit RNG during any 1 window has an utterly miniscule effect on total DPS for a 10+ minute fight. And once you start to look at multiple Zerk/IR windows (1 per minute) during that entire 10 minutes and the handful of FCs scattered throughout the fight, regular distribution takes over and the variance starts to plummet quickly to the actual crit rate average. It FEELS bad to see no pretty numbers when you just popped your potion, but the actual effect over the duration of an encounter is completely inconsequential. No greater than the crit variance of most any job, and we don't even have Crit procs to worry about. Mnk and Brd have far greater swings based on RNG crit rate than war ever did.

Drk is probably harder to play optimally than war is now, but that's because war got thrown back into dark ages of complexity. Before that, the things that made each challenging to play optimally were very different skill sets. If your personal skill set aligned with the skills needed on war, it seemed easy-ish and drk would seem daunting and vice versa. Difficulty is both subjective and based on your own strengths.

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Originally Posted by Fendred

If the boss is giving openings for a swap, sure. I don't see the point of doing it otherwise. I've seen warriors swapping stances during boss casts that are under 10 sec and that is what fueled my comment. If a tank is taking regular direct hits from a boss he should be in tank stance.

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That's because you don't need any more mitigation than what you have without tank stance, outside of very specific scenarios, and aggro is super easy to manage in this game without needing to use aggro combo. A WAR opens a boss fight in defiance+unchained, and four GCDs later (tomahawk > heavy > maim > eye) can switch to deliverance and basically stay in that stance for the whole fight. You might want to switch back to tank stance for things like picking up adds, or when you need to heal yourself for some reason (usually you have a dead healer or someone screwed up a mechanic), but outside of that you want to be in dps stance as much as you can.

For anything that isn't ultimate/savage/extreme content, the extra dps usually isn't crucial, often casual players wouldn't even notice a tank pushing his dps in a dungeon.
Even some extreme trials don't actually need the tank to do much damage (Lakshmi for example) provided the dps players have decent gear. But for anything that is endgame content, the less you push your dps, the worse it is for your team. Fights like regular kefka in O8S simply wouldn't be clearable without the tanks pushing their damage as far as they can. The added dps from tanks lets you push through phases of the fight faster, which in a way, mitigates damage because the longer each phase lasts, the more damage you take.

Of course you still have to do the basic tank things you're expected to do (Hold aggro, mitigate properly through the use of cooldowns, proper boss positioning), but your raid team needs you to do damage for the sake of everyone there, and because the basic tank responsibilities are very easy to do to begin with. Holding aggro is a joke, cooldown and mitigation can be planned for the entire fight, and so can positioning be.

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Originally Posted by Izsha

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What? I am speaking of my personal experience. My WAR in my static has numbers varying to this degree depsite playing the exact same last raid tier. He'd do between 4.1-4.4 where PLD me would consistently be mid 4k to low 4.1k. Though I guess BRD and MNK are more rng dependant.

And WAR was never more complicated than DRK, people just never understood how to play it to its max. It has a sort of hidden complexity that most non pro drk dont(even now) really understand involving lining up BS, MP, DA and proper GCDs(not hard slash) for a buff window (usually Trick) that will only really affect that last few 300~ dps. Where as WAR it was always the same, you had strict 60/120 CD timers to adhere too, the only complexity was when to Fell Cleave vs Onslaughting. Even now it's exactly the same, only simplified, every 90 seconds burst, then decide when to onslaught or Fell Cleave(except that is almost dps negligible now).

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Originally Posted by RLofOBFL

What? I am speaking of my personal experience. My WAR in my static has numbers varying to this degree depsite playing the exact same last raid tier. He'd do between 4.1-4.4 where PLD me would consistently be mid 4k to low 4.1k. Though I guess BRD and MNK are more rng dependant.

And WAR was never more complicated than DRK, people just never understood how to play it to its max. It has a sort of hidden complexity that most non pro drk dont(even now) really understand involving lining up BS, MP, DA and proper GCDs(not hard slash) for a buff window (usually Trick) that will only really affect that last few 300~ dps. Where as WAR it was always the same, you had strict 60/120 CD timers to adhere too, the only complexity was when to Fell Cleave vs Onslaughting. Even now it's exactly the same, only simplified, every 90 seconds burst, then decide when to onslaught or Fell Cleave(except that is almost dps negligible now).

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The performance of 1 individual in a fight can vary for so many reasons besides crit. If you do the math, crit FCs have a very small impact. Don't want to believe me? Fine. Don't want to do the math yourself? Fine. Go look at FF logs. I just brought up the top war DPS list on Alex Prime and found the 1st set of 2 Wars with the same fight time and close DPS I found and looked at their damage.

War 1:
Fight time- 10:03. DPS 1961.

War 2:
Fight time - 10:05. DPS 1923.

War 2 is 2% behind the damage of war 1. So pretty darn close. Lets see what their crit rate is like.

AA crit rate (baseline crit)
War 1: 36.6% crit rate. Made up 20.72% of total damage.
War 2: 36.3% crit rate. Made up 19.8% of total damage.

OK. Seems they have virtually identical crit rates as their most common attacks (AAs) are virtually tied in both crit rate and % of total damage. So they should have similarly matched crit rates for FCs. They have nearly the same DPS and same base crit rate, and almost the same overall DPS and fight time.

FC Crit rate
War 1: 47.8%. FCs were 20.72% of total damage
War 2: 28%. FCs were 19.8% of total damage

War 1 crit nearly half of all his FCs. High rolled the shiz outta that. War 2 got boned. He got a lower crit rate than his AAs and the way deliverance stacks work, FCs naturally have a higher crit rate than your overall crit rate. He low rolled the shiz out of this fight.

Yet they are still within 2% DPS of each other.

FC Crits DONT MATTER in the grand scheme of things. They feel bad. But the numbers don't reflect that feeling. Its a placebo. In your head. If your static warrior is all over the map its because he is not a consistent player. Not Crits. Your pld is obviously a much more consistent player maintaining uptime and other fundamentals that affect your damage far greater than the smidge of effect crit FCs have.

The numbers don't lie. This is just 1 example, but if you run the numbers you will come to the same conclusion. You can easily break down how much damage FCs contribute and then adjust an imaginary crit rate. But the bottom line is that FCs are only about 20% of your damage (back in HW). The ones that are under Zerk windows and IR windows shrinks that more. Then theres the fact that you will do 20-30 FCs depending on fight length. The statistical probability of critting nearly all or nearly none of them when you will (on oaverage) have around a 40-45% crit rate on FCs is near zero. So the amount that 20% can vary in actual scenarios is very limited. High rolling a near 50% crit rate bumped that up to 20.72%. Low rollilng droped it to 19.8%. Crits are still spread out among all your other hits and actions. So if you have a normal crit rate and happen to land them on FCs, you get a TINY boost. If you get them all on other actions you still get damage anyway. The only way you would have a dramatic swing in damage would be if you had an OVERALL crap or high crit rate over ALL actions, not FCs. And the probability of that is winning the lottery levels of unlikely. a 35% crit rate over every action in a 10 min fight low rolling to 10% or high rolling to 50+ is virtually impossible. Go flip a coin fro every action and AA in a 10 minute fight and see how many heads/tails you get. You will get close to 50/50 after all those hundreds of flips. If you get 10% you should buy a lotto ticket too cuz you just had once in a generation luck. FCs that don't crit just shift to another lower potency action, but as long as they don't disappear leaving you with an abnormal overall crit rate it wont bump your damage any significant amount.

Is Alex Prime a good example to really be using? War didn't have Fell Cleave spam until SB, we basically doubled our amount of Fell Cleaves since Alexander, no? Actually at just a quick glance it looks like we've nearly tripled FC spam since HW. Alex prime around 20+ FCs, NeoExdeath around 40+ FCs, and God Kefka I'm seeing logs with around 60 FCs (prolly thanks to 90 sec spam intervals vs old 120 sec IR)

At any rate, it stands to reason crit FCs would've been a much larger chunk of DPS during Deltascape when it was being made a big deal because you had double the amount of them. You won't see it now since the majority of them are automatic DHC.

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Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

Is Alex Prime a good example to really be using? War didn't have Fell Cleave spam until SB, we basically doubled our amount of Fell Cleaves since Alexander, no? Actually at just a quick glance it looks like we've nearly tripled FC spam since HW. Alex prime around 20+ FCs, NeoExdeath around 40+ FCs, and God Kefka I'm seeing logs with around 60 FCs (prolly thanks to 90 sec spam intervals vs old 120 sec IR)

At any rate, it stands to reason crit FCs would've been a much larger chunk of DPS during Deltascape when it was being made a big deal because you had double the amount of them. You won't see it now since the majority of them are automatic DHC.

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Patch 4.1. 1st two random top wars with same fight time and similar DPS I found on catastrophe (basically a training dummy).

Fight time 7:03 for both.

DPS Near identical.
War 1: 4062.9
War 2: 4053.4

AA Crit/DH rates. (Similar uptimes)
War 1: 123 AAs. Crit 29.3%. DH 17.9%. 22.65% total damage.
War 2: 122 AAs. Crit 23.8%. DH 23.8% 22.32% total damage.

FC Crits/DH
War 1: Crit 39.4%. DH 27.3%. 32.14% Total damage.
War 2: Crit 50.0%. DH 25.0% 33.61% total damage.

Another War high rolls FCs by over 10% and within 2% the DH of the other. Doesn't make a dent.

Again, these are just individual examples that bear out what the math already tells us. You can take the damage of FCs and calculate what changes in crit rate do to the entire set. You have to do completely unrealistic things to move the needle like "War 1 Crits EVERY zerk FC and war 2 gets ZERO but instead moves all those crits to Heavy swing when not under zerk windows." To start to see any noticeable difference, but the fact is that doesn't happen. The probability of something that extreme happening is near zero.

You can look at logs all over the place, but the math already told us how this works. These are just examples that show that. I didn't go fishing. I just found the 1st set of similar parsed/timed wars in both cases.