Warrior skills commentary

Not bothering with the basic skills like Heavy Strike and Tomahawk, nothing needs to be said about them.

Foresight: very hard to tell how good this actually is without knowing any numbers behind the defense stat.

Fracture: shouldn't reset the combo rotation of your main attacks.

Bloodbath: severely underwhelming. It looks neat on paper, but 25% of your attacks turns out to be such small numbers that the healing is almost irrelevant. We're talking like 30 health per attack even at higher levels. This is utterly irrelevant when tanking anything remotely difficult and could easily be doubled without becoming too strong. I'd take it even further and suggest increasing the healing to 100% but reducing the duration. As it is, this skill is a horrible HoT that matters so little that you forget to use it.

Overpower: skill is fine by itself, but the complete lack of TP management is a huge problem for the class when its main purpose - tanking groups of mobs - requires you to spend your entire TP pool in seconds. It's kind of retarded that the warrior, who is suppsoed to be the AoE tank, struggles to maintain sustained AoE threat while paladin, who is supposed to be the single-target tank, has spammable AoE aggro that uses a resource which they pretty much don't use on anything else and can be replenished easily throughout the fight. Bit of a mystery, really. Exactly what is the warrior's niche in the endgame when paladins have more than enough AoE enmity to tank groups of mobs? Flash doesn't even have a directional requirment.

Mercy Stroke: garbage skill. Insanely long cooldown and nearly impossible to get a finishing blow with. Straight up cannot be used in groups, and it's difficult to get the finishing blow even when soloing since it does like 150 damage. This skill is complete trash, it needs to be redesigned entirely so that you don't need to actually get the killing blow in order to receive the healing or so that it does 5x damage if the target is <10% HP so you can actually get the killing blow with it.

Defiance: you don't get Wrath when the damage from a Wrath-generating attack is absorbed, such as when hitting a target with Stoneskin. That's pretty weird and not in line with the tooltips. Also, there's a problem with the way most skills that spend Wrath aren't actually worth using because it's not worth giving up the +15% healing received from Wrath, so that should probably be inherent to Defiance instead of the Wrath buff.

Storm's Path: the healing is too little to matter. You get about a fifth of one hit from a mob, what's the point? Like with Bloodbath, the healing needs to be increased or there's no point using this skill, especially since there's a better attack (Storm's Eye) for the same slot in the rotation. It's crap when you get it and it only gets worse the further you move into the endgame. The only reason to ever use this is if you aren't level 50 yet and thus have no other option for a Maim combo.

Unchained: almost never worth using, like most of the other lose-all-Wrath skills. It should simply be a cooldown that ignores the Defiance penalty without losing your Wrath stacks. It would still be merely average that way.

Holmgang: just gets you raped by red circles. I guess it's a PvP skill.

Steel Cyclone: when am I ever sacrificing my Wrath stack for small amount of AoE damage? This skill is completely useless, your Wrath charges are worth way more than this. It doesn't even have increased enmity, so is pointless for tanking, yet isn't spammable so is also pointless for DPSing.

Vengeance: not really terrible, just very meh for a level 46 skill. Seems like it should have been a level 10 marauder skill.

The rest of the skills seem fine.

you should combo unchained with infuriate, bloodbath to get the best result.


but i agree unchained should not require 5 stacks of wrath to use.

I tend to agree with you but being only lvl 33 I was hoping it would get a bit better endgame.

Bloodbath = 30 damage heals at this level. Just ran an instance and bosses were hitting for 300+
Overpower Im ok with - Hit it a few times to establish aggro and then rely on flash and tab+ fracture.
Mercy Stroke = worthless
A. Make it heal regardless killing the target.
B. Make it do more damage and do AOE damage atleast I can use it on trash and hope to get a proc.
C. Make it a buff that if a target dies in the next 5 seconds you receive the heal. (Atleast it could be used reliably at this point, take away the damage I dont care)
Defiance = Extra health which is good, basically a stance.

Thats pretty much all I have exp with at this point. Debating making Pally my next Class but I shall see how this turns out at 50 first.

For TP management use Bloodbath together with Berserk and Overpower. Only worth it with 3+ mobs. That way you heal more to make it actually worth it and recover TP at Pacem.

Mercy stroke is good on trash stuff like the Garuda adds. Buy yea dont rely on it.

The rest are also pretty good imo.

I do agree on Storm's path tho.

Inregards to overpower if you are not using it with flash you are doing something wrong, we dont use mana so it doesnt hurt us to use it (apart from GCD) but it generates enough threat for it to be usefull.

best thing is if you are sleeping a bunch of mobs run in and flash and it wont break the sleep. the only crappy thing is it has a cast time animation and it will only flash the the monsters of where you iniate the cast not when it finish's

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Originally Posted by Wangstrong

Overpower: skill is fine by itself, but the complete lack of TP management is a huge problem for the class when its main purpose - tanking groups of mobs - requires you to spend your entire TP pool in seconds. It's kind of retarded that the warrior, who is suppsoed to be the AoE tank, struggles to maintain sustained AoE threat while paladin, who is supposed to be the single-target tank, has spammable AoE aggro that uses a resource which they pretty much don't use on anything else and can be replenished easily throughout the fight. Bit of a mystery, really. Exactly what is the warrior's niche in the endgame when paladins have more than enough AoE enmity to tank groups of mobs? Flash doesn't even have a directional requirment.

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Warriors can use Flash too o.O

are you stacking bloodbath with convalescence and berserk? because i don't know why you wouldn't, and it greatly increases the potency of bloodbath. particularly if you're aoeing lots of mobs with overpower--it can get a little retarded.

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Originally Posted by Glazed

Warriors can use Flash too o.O

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Yeah, three times per year...

It's nothing compared to being able to spam it nearly indefinitely. Plus it applies blind for paladins.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Wangstrong

Yeah, three times per year...

It's nothing compared to being able to spam it nearly indefinitely. Plus it applies blind for paladins.

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why would you particularly NEED to cast it more than once per add spawn when overpower is more useful after initial aggro is set? and why do you need to cast overpower more than 3-5 times in a row?

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Originally Posted by Kerrath

why would you particularly NEED to cast it more than once per add spawn when overpower is more useful after initial aggro is set? and why do you need to cast overpower more than 3-5 times in a row?

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Because most tanks are lazy and want the easy way out. Tab targeting accomplishes so much more.

Anyway, I do agree that WAR skills pales in comparison to that of a PLD :( But Infuriate does help a lot. Oh yeah, and Bloodbath should always be coupled with other abilities to bring out it's true potential.

A few thoughts on Warrior/Marauder skills:

Inner Beast: This skill is well-defined and designed for a reactive tank. A solid burst damage + heal that spends the 15% increased healing received. The other Warrior skills should feel this good when you spend your Wrath stacks and at the same time make you think before just using a skill whenever its ready.

Defiance: Defiance feels like a homogenization of the two tank classes. The paradigm for tanks now are aggro-holding meleers who hit like a wet noodle. This doesnt need to be the case for EVERY tank out there. Let's go with removing the damage penalty for Defiance. Yes, the WAR will hit harder, but no it cannot/will replace a pure dps. The dps can dedicate their stats towards doing damage. A tanking WAR would have to split their stats to more survivability and enmity generation stats. They'd just have to adjust the enmity generated by Defiance to offset this change.

As a consequence to removing the damage penalty, Unchained would have to be scrapped/reworked to something different.

A smaller change to Defiance would be to allow Overpower to generate stacks of Wrath in certain conditions. Seems silly relying on single-target abilities to perform an AOE Wrath spender, Steel Cyclone. When Overpower hits at least 3 targets, it should generate 1 Wrath. The cost of Overpower would prevent using this tactic for too long.

Steel Cyclone: This feels like it needs only a minor tweak to get it over the hill. A 25-50 potency boost perhaps?

Mercy Stroke: Mercy Stroke with Defiance up is so underwhelming. It does not justify having to wait for the target to be at 20% and the damage penalty hurts its chance to score the heal. Even with 60s enhanced cooldown, you rarely get a chance to use this skill twice in a fight and that means you'll only get the heal off once. Please have Mercy Stroke ignore Defiance.