A video showcasing all of Warrior's removed job actions. Thoughts?

A video was posted that shows all skills that have been purged from a Warrior's skill list, including a few that people seem to sorely miss. Reddit didn't seem to care much for some reason.

You can watch the video in the following link:
- https://youtu.be/SG_q-IG9ZAE (shows name of skills and tooltipis)

I never got to see any of these skills live in the actual client, so I'm curious to see what people have to say or think about any of these; or if there's any you'd like to see brought back to the game. Some look pretty cool, but I can see why SE ended up cutting most of them.

It's interesting how "Bloodbath" started off as a Warrior skill but got moved on to DPS roles instead. Did SE ever explain as to why?

Can't comment much since I started in ShB but the Butcher's Block and Unchained animations look sick. Also is Mercy Stroke the same animation as Confiteor?

Just my personal thoughts playing WAR until SHB:

Brutal Swing - not much thoughts, 99% of the time you just used it as an OGCD for the damage and the remaining 1% of the time to actually stun an enemy that could be stunned in a raid. Upheaval & the role action low blow are basically the evolutionary decoupling of Brutal swing into two separate skills. it's 20-30s CD (can't remember exactly) though made early ifrit hard mode runs amusing, since most parties wanted a PLD for their on demand shield bash since dodging eruption was too hard, and having 2 random DF WARs co-ordinate stuns was 2hard for most parties lol.

Butcher's block - just bread & butter aggro capskill combo. Though it was actually super annoying to use as snap aggro since the animation was super long and the server didn't register the aggro until near the end, making many WARs opt to pick up adds that moved immediately like the Meracydia adds in T13 phase 2 with Skull Sunder instead. Also had niche use as a dps gain over storm's path which was super annoying if you were OT since you'd eventually catch up to the MT and overtake them since they'd be using their dps combo and not their aggro one.

Fracture: An extremely forgetable skill that had more use as a cross class skill on MNk than it did on WAR. Got even worse in HW when it required something like the entire duration in order to be a dps gain over your normal rotation due to Fell Cleave's massive potency, meaning if an enemy died or a boss jumped and went invincible, it was a dps loss. You could effectively ignore the skill and you'd lose such a tiny amount of dps. Also had another huge problem in that it was a massive TP hog.


Mercy stroke: very forgetable OGCD you just used on CD. I guess if you defeated an enemy with it, it had some use. But by the time the healing effect from the skill would be useful, the pack would generally be dead or about to be dead since you'd normally be AOEing everything, meaning the heal was borderline useless, even if you timed it right.

Mythril tempest - PVP exclusive ability, was useful on top of tomeliths or if everyone was dogpiled.

Overpower w/long animation: Super annoying since it suffered from BB's issue of long animation + aggro registration near end. The animation speed up was a giant QoL.

Foresight: garbage. translated to something like 7-8% damage reduction on physical only since it affected your defense stat and not incoming damage. Rampart was better in every way shape and form, and was part of the reason WAR was so bad at tanking T5 until 2.1. Even after the WAR overhaul, the skill was more of a fluff CD you'd pair with vengeance, thrill or IB than one used on its own, due to how weak it was.

Bloodbath: godly on HW WAR for massive pulls, and great for ARR WAR large/massive pulls. Not to mention 30s timer making you just hear that lifesteal sound for days as your HP just kept going back up. To answer your question, likely because at 30s, it was insanely strong. While they gave it back to WAR in the form of Nascent, Nascent & Bloodwhetting are more limited by their 8s duration. (Though they have their own problems in just how low the CDs are vs how strong the lifesteal potency is making them immortal in dungeons)

Thrill of War: another pvp action, was alright to help save your allies.

Unchained: basically the one skill that made WAR the undisputed puller tank, especially once gauge cost was removed. Skill was insanely strong for aggro generation or preserving dps for the few times you had to enter defiance in a fight.

Did you get to experience Skull Sunder?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Maulclaw

Did you get to experience Skull Sunder?

---

Skull Sunder is Maim but with Threat.

Despite how much the dev team gets meme'd on, almost all of the removed actions are removed because they contribute little to the package, not because they hate us.

It's less about what the old skills did, atleast in warrior's case, and more about the effects. Why anyone would choose to keep Storm's Path over Butcher's Block when it comes to animation and VFX is baffling to me.


This becomes even worse when we get to dark knight where they removed all the good animations and vfx but kept the absolutely boring ones, like keeping Soul Eater instead of Power Slash and just changing what it does.

Bloodbath was removed when they did away with the cross class system. They wanted to reduce the amount of self healing tanks were doing at lower levels, PLD also lost cross class cure, stoneskin and bloodbath. These were then made up for with later level abilities like clemency and equilibrium and later, after WARs complained about losing their self heal identity, nascent flash.

War ultimately has mostly gained rather than lost throughout the years, even Bloodbath was mostly repurposed as Raw Intuition/Nascent/Bloodwhetting for WAR, stuff like Brutal Swing and Mercy Stroke didn't add much to the job and the former mostly got a replacement in Upheaval, I miss Fracture but even I knew it was mostly a waste of a skill on WAR itself and they didn't seem keen to buff it so it got cut. Finally stuff like Butchers Block were lost when they removed aggro combo chains, so it was ultimately unneeded.

All that said, I'd happily replace the animation for Storm's Eye with Butchers Block, they are adding in the ability to change animations for upgraded skills soon, if they expand on that to include old cut animations, I'd love that, I'd kill to replace stuff like Souleater with Power Slash and so on.

Brutal Swing - Fluff damage oGCD primarily. Dual function as a stun wasn't all bad, but the complications were a fairly common annoyance. Short recast was nice, but Upheaval fills its void.

Butcher's Block - Nice animation, but noticeably too long for snap aggro.

Fracture - Okay idea, but tuned horribly. Of all the deprecated WAR ideas, this has the most potential were it to be reintroduced with more nuance.

Mercy Stroke - I kind of miss execute abilities like this, but they weren't particularly interesting unless given many opportunities to use them (e.g. adds, multiple bosses/health bars).

Mythril Tempest - PvP ability with a distinctly PvP-minded function. Not relevant, especially since the animation and name were repurposed.

Overpower - Weird entry since this wasn't really removed, just sped up due to snap aggro issues.

Skull Sunder - Snap aggro skill of choice due to the fast animation. It's worth noting that PLD had this same distinction with Savage Blade versus Rage of Halone.

Bloodbath - Had some interesting optimization at 30s duration with 90s recast. Nascent Flash and then Bloodwhetting/Raw Intuition were far superior replacements that came later, but in Stormblood WAR lacked a self-sustain tool with little to no opportunity cost. Inner Release Inner Beast spam existed and was insanely powerful, but you gave up A LOT if you were to do it. Defiance Equilibrium wasn't nearly as much of a loss, but still significant if not paired with Unchained Upheaval.

Deliverance - Removed for obvious reasons, but Critical Hit Rate scaling with Beast Gauge didn't have to go.

Foresight - Fluff defensive cooldown masquerading as a major defensive cooldown. That is, you wouldn't know how bad Foresight is just by reading the tooltip. Abilities of this magnitude are fine when turned properly (they also need to be communicated properly), but have little place in the game right now.

Thrill of War - Another PvP ability, but with a function that could easily be applied to PvE. We have Shake it Off now, so who cares?

Unchained - Fairly unique ability that was, in practice, either a defensive cooldown or an offensive cooldown depending on one's perspective. In high end content where Deliverance was the expected default state of WAR, it was largely the former. There was a Stormblood opener that took advantage of the somewhat weird interaction between Defiance, Unchained, and Upheaval, but it wasn't the norm. Outside of prog or emergencies, Unchained was mostly used to pull or to access Equilibrium healing relatively guilt-free.

In ARR, Unchained was even weirder as there was no DPS stance, making Unchained a minor DPS gain since you needed to be in Defiance in order to use Inner Beast. Defiance was still used fairly regularly at the time, however, so using Unchained strictly for an Inner Beast cast was rather niche.

Of all the removed WAR abilities, I miss Unchained the most, but it understandably has no place in the game right now. I don't see any obvious merit to reintroducing it with a new effect, but I do miss the animation.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cabalabob

Bloodbath was removed when they did away with the cross class system. They wanted to reduce the amount of self healing tanks were doing at lower levels, PLD also lost cross class cure, stoneskin and bloodbath. These were then made up for with later level abilities like clemency and equilibrium and later, after WARs complained about losing their self heal identity, nascent flash.

---

I miss cross skills.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Oizen

I miss cross skills.

---

I really liked the idea of cross class skills, the execution however was an issue. Leveling in ARR and HW still took quite a bit, so having to level 5 different jobs just to play your main job the way it's supposed to be played was a pain.

Or in warrior's case to be able to tank in the first place.

Takes me back

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Absurdity

Or in warrior's case to be able to tank in the first place.

---

Boy did I love the several times me & friends would random queue extreme trials back in the day for funsies and my co-tank would be a WAR or DRK without voke, thus dooming the run instantly before it even began.

"You gotta (provoke) when i get <x> stacks"
"What's provoke? / sorry, don't have it"

eats 30min penalty

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Absurdity

I really liked the idea of cross class skills, the execution however was an issue. Leveling in ARR and HW still took quite a bit, so having to level 5 different jobs just to play your main job the way it's supposed to be played was a pain.

Or in warrior's case to be able to tank in the first place.

---

I mean yeah the skills they picked were questionable. But I would have much rather seen the system reworked rather than removed entirely.
Dont know I'm just kinda in to the idea of being able to progress your job beyond just hitting lv 90.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Oizen

I mean yeah the skills they picked were questionable. But I would have much rather seen the system reworked rather than removed entirely.
Dont know I'm just kinda in to the idea of being able to progress your job beyond just hitting lv 90.

---

I agree with this very much. Our main progression currently is gearing different jobs and gearing is, let's be honest, really really boring.
Sure seeing numbers get bigger is nice but the gear does nothing interesting besides that.

So some horizontal progression would be great, Cross Class skills however were not that.
Half of the skills you could get were basically useless fluff and the other skills were mandatory for your job, so you weren't really progression your job beyond max level as much as you were making your job kit not feel incomplete.

I would've liked them to keep it as well but it would've needed a massive overhaul.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Absurdity

I agree with this very much. Our main progression currently is gearing different jobs and gearing is, let's be honest, really really boring.
Sure seeing numbers get bigger is nice but the gear does nothing interesting besides that.

So some horizontal progression would be great, Cross Class skills however were not that.
Half of the skills you could get were basically useless fluff and the other skills were mandatory for your job, so you weren't really progression your job beyond max level as much as you were making your job kit not feel incomplete.

I would've liked them to keep it as well but it would've needed a massive overhaul.

---

You might be interested in EverQuest 2's Alternative Advancement system, which in large part provides what you seem to want.

Let me try to elaborate. In EQ2 you advanced along two tracks: your class level and your AA level.

Your class level gave you your core job skills and did what class level generally does in MMO (unlock new areas, questchains,... the works)
The AA "level" (which went much, *much* higher, but also slower and slower the higher you got) allowed players to customize existing class or tradecraft skills, or even gain additional skills. There were multiple AA trees, most of which, but not all, were non-linear (iow. it's a pick-and-choose deal, rather than a "skill tree"). Barring the tradecraft skills these were mostly job-specific too.

Now, some of these were practically mandatory for your class' role, depending on the content you wanted to tackle (eg. certain AA were basically required for raiding), but the general idea was to be able to tune your character in meaningful ways, and to make XP valuable to max level characters (note that EQ2 already had the ability for the player to "scale down" for lower level content, so encouraging running old content with newer players was rather important. Getting actually useful XP out of it was one such way)

The way AA XP worked was mostly by siphoning off of your "regular" XP (there were other, additional, ways, but those are not really relevant to the discussion): there was a slider where you could set how large of a percentage of XP gained went to AA. Thus it was possible to level really fast, but have barely any AA, or level really, really slowly (not sure if 0% class XP was possible) but have a large amount of AA skills unlocked.

It was an interesting system and I'm rather surprised something similar isn't used more often. Then again most MMOs have been doing away with situational utility skills, so there's that I guess...

Note that I am using the past tense above, despite EQ2 still being live, because I don't know the current state of the game after it got sold by SOE to some company that has a "portfolio" of old MMOs...

Man, Warrior was my first job when I started in HW.
It's really a job I don't miss at all. It went from a job with 1 Dopamine button and very annoying mechanics that depended on teammates (enmity&pacification) to a simply boring job with 1 dopamine button.


Stance dance, while a cool idea, was barely used at all.
I'm glad Fracture is gone, HW job design was "slap a 30s dot on all job, slap a damage buff to maintain on some and voila".

Those "Execution skills" were really weird too.
Boss under 20% HP? Spam that oGCD on cooldown! Don't care about the rotation you must fit as many as you can. The regen side was very difficult to hit.
I believe it was on MCH and BRD and cross classed on DRG and PLD?

In comparison, Sole Survivor from DRK was a cool skill, I wish they kept it while still granting HP if the target survived.

Reminds me back then Warriors spamming Butcher's Block and only BB as a base attack as tank, since the additional emnity was apparently tasty enough to do so.

Not gonna lie. I'd love to have Fracture back. A lot of people hated it due to how weak it was, but it had some pretty nice niche applications. At this point though, I just kinda wish WAR had some kind of dot at all.

I miss the free OCD 20% or less HP moves (like Mercy Stroke). Other classes had it too... Ninja, Bard. I think. I thought it was a good concept. However, we have so many buttons now for all jobs. So I see why it had to go.

seeing these skills again... man I love animation of Deliverance, Unchained, Skullsunder and Butchers Block.
I also liked the Crossclass Skill System, because I also had a reason to play the other classes xD still remembering that WAR had MNK and PLD skills. Was a pain though to play PLD up to lvl 27 I believe to get provoke, so I also understand why people don't like it. But then again: you had at least 3 flash uses for WAR when you ran out of TP because of overpower spam (still missing the cone version, but that's another topic)