Changes I'd like to see for MRD/WAR

I'm pleased to say that there's not a lot I would fix at the moment. My experience thus far has been that WAR and MRD are both good at what they do.

There are, however, a few things I'd like to see addressed:

First off, Mercy Stroke. It's a sound idea, but it needs some tweaking. For something that is a 60s CD it needs to hit harder. As it stands now it's an extra combo'd Skull Sunder. Up the potency to say, 250, and maybe have it ignore 20% of the Defiance damage debuff per stack of Wrath (so at 5/5 stacks it hits for full damage), but as it stands now, I can't count how many times I've tried to kill a boss add with MS only to find the add survived with a pixel of health only to die to a 12-damage dot half a second later.

Holmgang. Awesome idea. Neat skill too, when you use it right (it locks both movement and turning, so Brutal Swing + get behind move + Holmgang means ~11s of no incoming damage for most mobs) it just has such a long CD and, for whatever reason, tends to mis-time it's duration, by which I mean it lasts half a second longer on you than it does on the target (sometimes). I can see it being very strong in pvp when used right, but at a 3 minute cooldown it's prohibitive. Two minutes would be a good place for it.

Unchained. I get that animations are awesome, and I've come to terms with them interrupting quick-use of more than one off-GCD skill, but for something like Unchained, which has a decent cooldown and high usage cost, it's particularly noticeable. Adding another two seconds to the duration would be a great way to deal with this issue that doesn't involve messing with character animations. This way you can stack Unchained with Berserk and actually get the full 20s out of Berserk instead of clipping an attack at the end of the duration because of the Pacification debuff.

Any other WARs out there have suggestions? From what I've gleaned from the forums, either things are pretty good or things are terrible. I'm not at the level cap yet, so I won't speak to anything regarding that area of the game.

I feel like mercy stroke should have a chance to proc and give you the healing effect since warriors rely on a decent amount of self healing

Also both classes should have an actual taunt, provoke just doesn't do it all the time

My only suggestion is that war/mar gets a shorter cooldown on brutal swing 30 sec is way too long when compared to the gld/pld 6 sec sheid bash. We like to stun things too lol

Make the 15% +healing from Wrath a standard benefit on Defiance. As it stands, you have to choose between maintaining your external healing and maximizing self healing, which isn't really a fair exchange considering that the self healing is supposed to be what makes up for the difference between the ~10% +healing we're short to be equivalent to the 20% damage reduction that PAL gets.

On top of that, there should be some mechanism to make up for the fact that, while PAL has a shield for further mitigation, we don't. Self healing either makes up for the discrepancy between our +hp and +healing to reach equivalence with the flat 20% reduction in damage that PALs get *or* the lack of a shield. It can't do both, at least at the values that we get it.

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Originally Posted by Crabcore

Also both classes should have an actual taunt, provoke just doesn't do it all the time

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Disagree. Lack of a taunt makes threat management challenging and by extension fun.

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Originally Posted by Kerrath

Disagree. Lack of a taunt makes threat management challenging and by extension fun.

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Problem is, having tanked in eight different MMOs over the years, end-game DPS generally isn't always interested in threat management. They focus on their DPS meters, biggest hits/crits and the bosses health bar. Not at any point do they end up thinking about aggro management, and stopping DPS on a boss whose enmity is all over the shop.

This is primarily why taunts are there; they're an anti-idiot mechanic for the most part, because hey, I assure you there will ALWAYS be one. And worrying about a loose mob isn't much fun; especially when the DPS aren't interested in CC. "Must... burn... faster..."

tbc

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Originally Posted by Kerrath

Disagree. Lack of a taunt makes threat management challenging and by extension fun.

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All that lack of a taunt does is really drive home how unresponsive/slow the combat is. When you need to get snap aggro on multiple adds at once and healers already have 5 seconds of threat from healing 8 people before you even get into melee range, the slow build up of threat really becomes apparent. It's not more challenging, you simply don't have the gcds you need to keep threat on everything at the same time. A challenge is something that can be overcome.

No mobility abilities, no taunt, no effective ranged threat generation, no snap aggro period (aside from butchers block, which is a 3 move chain and requires maim to be up, lol), etc etc. There's just some things that feel missing from the tanks in this game. Something like Holmgang is so out of a place when there's no mobility ability or taunt.

Taunts are a necessary evil; and Provoke, for its long cooldown, provides very, very little benefit or enmity for the effort. Changing it;

* Make it provide a large, temporary amount of enmity, a/r 10 seconds. This gives a tank the chance to regain some base enmity.

* Make it give a larger base amount of enmity, making it more a part of a tanks life, not something to ignore.

* Set it to attack the provoker for X amount of time. This may also help later, when you may want a boss in a dungeon/fate that requires two or more tanks.

* Do away with Provoke altogether and look towards Flash.

I think tanking is very well thought out; but it's lacking on some of the finer details, Provoke and Mercy Stroke both feel like afterthoughts than a meaningful part of a tanks repertoire, and that's not good enough. Hopefully it'll be thought out a little more now; we're a week in, and threat at this stage wasn't really tested that much.

It's a new frontier. Welcome to the pitfalls.

I would love to see Bloodbath changed. Its 25% leech is terrible. It has a great cooldown and length. The leech is just terrible. My non-crit butcher block averages about 200 damage right now. That's a 50hp heal at the end of my combo. If they made it 75% or 100% leech it would be amazing for both tanking and solo. Also same thing with storms path. a 350 crit storms path heals 175hp of my 5.6k health pool.

Bloodbath is kind of crappy, it was good for a few levels and then just stopped being so great. I'm not sure if Fracture even does anything/is worth having on your action bar. I agree that Mercy Stroke's damage is paltry and pathetic, but you probably shouldn't be scoring a killing blow on a Boss with it.

I don't really have a problem with holding aggro unless dps are braindead and splitting targets. Which even still, is not impossible to get a hold on but puts more strain on the healer.

I'd like to see Flash or Overpower off GCD. Maybe Steel Cyclone could cost less Wrath.

Also concerning abilities off GCD, I have to hit them a couple times to get them to work and that is pretty frustrating. Games doing better than it was in p3, but still has responsiveness issues that need to be addressed.

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Originally Posted by Djblakblak

I would love to see Bloodbath changed. Its 25% leech is terrible. It has a great cooldown and length. The leech is just terrible. My non-crit butcher block averages about 200 damage right now. That's a 50hp heal at the end of my combo. If they made it 75% or 100% leech it would be amazing for both tanking and solo. Also same thing with storms path. a 350 crit storms path heals 175hp of my 5.6k health pool.

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You shouldn't be looking at the contributions of Bloodbath from a single attack. The buff lasts for a full 30 seconds and has only a 90 second CD. While it's not *burst* healing, so that you need to use it *before* you get hit super friggin' hard, the healing it provides stacks up, assuming you're actually using it. It's best to not think of it so much as a real tank CD but rather as a regularly used ability to counteract our lack of a shield.

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Originally Posted by Quor

Unchained. I get that animations are awesome, and I've come to terms with them interrupting quick-use of more than one off-GCD skill, but for something like Unchained, which has a decent cooldown and high usage cost, it's particularly noticeable. Adding another two seconds to the duration would be a great way to deal with this issue that doesn't involve messing with character animations. This way you can stack Unchained with Berserk and actually get the full 20s out of Berserk instead of clipping an attack at the end of the duration because of the Pacification debuff.

Any other WARs out there have suggestions? From what I've gleaned from the forums, either things are pretty good or things are terrible. I'm not at the level cap yet, so I won't speak to anything regarding that area of the game.

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it is necessary for unchained to require 5stacks of wrath to use, but it should not use up the 5 stacks of wrath.

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Originally Posted by Kitru

You shouldn't be looking at the contributions of Bloodbath from a single attack. The buff lasts for a full 30 seconds and has only a 90 second CD. While it's not *burst* healing, so that you need to use it *before* you get hit super friggin' hard, the healing it provides stacks up, assuming you're actually using it. It's best to not think of it so much as a real tank CD but rather as a regularly used ability to counteract our lack of a shield.

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not it doesnt, i might help when you are solo or killing some lv 30mobs, but in endgame situation, 50~100 heal per hit is just pathetic, and its purely unless its comboed with berserk then double inner beast.

I think the Warrior is in a good spot, but there needs to be more cross-class abilities, specifically Defensive Cooldowns. I'm currently using Featherfoot from the Pugilist class, but the 15% evasion bonus honestly does not do much. I would like to see the Lancer's Keen Flurry ability cross over into the Warrior job, rather than just Gladiator and Marauder classes.

And seeing as how the Warrior is a Parry Tank (whereas the Paladin is a Block Tank), Keen Flurry just makes complete sense to have as a Warrior who is tanking in any situation.

Changes I'd like to see, part 1:

Change: Defiance's 15% incoming heal potency should be on all the time.
Reason: The PLD's Shield Oath works in all situations.

Change: Allow Steel Cyclone to absorb 300% of damage into health.
Reason: The PLD's shield block scales with multiple targets. Inner Beast and Storm's Path does not scale with multiple targets. The WAR needs an AoE ability that scales with multiple targets. Did I mention multiple targets?

Change: Give targets struck by Mercy Stroke a 10s debuff. When the target dies while under the debuff, the user gains 20% health.
Reason: Mercy Stroke isn't going to kill anything in dungeons if it only hurts 1-2% of a target's health. Teammates would have killed the target before its health is low enough.

Change: Give Inner Beast a stun effect.
Reason: PLDs can interrupt a lot more often with Shield Bash and Spirits Within.

Changes I'd like to see, part 2:
Change: Allow Vengeance to absorb 300% of the damage into health.
Reason: This gives the Warrior another minor defensive cooldown. And unlike our other healing skills, this one scales with multiple targets.

Change: Allow Unchained to also restore 400 TP.
Reason: Our abilities cost more TP than PLD abilities. We need a way to restore our TP for emergencies.

Change: Increase Bloodbath's base duration to 30s. Change the trait to allow Bloodbath to heal the entire raid everytime you deal damage.
Reason: We need a cooldown to help out the party. Its no where near as powerful as the PLD's Cover, but unlike Cover, it also helps the user.

inner beast has to give a 300% dmg absorbing shield as well as the heal.

or hell, 300% dmg shield alone is better than the heal.

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Originally Posted by Kerrath

Disagree. Lack of a taunt makes threat management challenging and by extension fun.

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Except that leads to a lack of interesting encounter mechanics that require multiple tanks. If both tanks don't have a taunt, that means you can't implement the plethora of mechanics that require tank swaps (debuffs that force tank swaps, abilities that temporarily remove one tank from the fight and require the second tank to take over), you can't use actual hate resets, much less target swapping in encounters with multiple boss-level targets.

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Originally Posted by hola

inner beast has to give a 300% dmg absorbing shield as well as the heal.

or hell, 300% dmg shield alone is better than the heal.

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THIS.

Agree with most of what Ruminate is saying, good stuff.

Warriors having to cross spec into taunt instead of another defensive CD is BS though ;P

Only being able to interrupt every 30s is also BS.

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Originally Posted by Arukai

Taunts are a necessary evil; and Provoke, for its long cooldown, provides very, very little benefit or enmity for the effort.

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I have a feeling you fail to understand the way provoke works. Provoke only raises your enmity to the current highest enmity holder+1, so you should NEVER use this skill unless someone pulls threat from you.

Provoke + shield lob or tomahawk is usually enough to peel from the person you're provoking off of, and from there a basic rotation SHOULD secure the hate and allow you to figure out what you want to do with threat management from there.

Heres an example, say main tank dies for what ever reason and someone off tanks it while your healer is getting a resurrection on you. The only thing on your mind as soon as you get up from raise is getting back into the fight and tanking that boss as soon as possible. Instead of wasting a lot of time having to rebuild that enmity, provoke will allow you to get back to where you left off and allow you to get back to doing your job THAT much faster.

Its also off GCD and has an insane amount of range, I fail to see what is wrong with this skill.

Enhanced Maim: This skill is amazing from 48-49, as it lets you get in a second Butcher's Block combo at maximum efficiency. At level 50 when you get Storn's Path, it loses its usefulness because you basically want to keep that up also, and doing so means enhanced Maim is completely pointless.

Vengeance: Needs some defensive benefit (heal or bonus parry would be great). Right now it's in the awkward place of being a really weird offensive CD which only works when you're tanking. Even a TP regen effect would move it from junk to useful.

Steel Cyclone: It's not going to be worth it to drop your Fury stacks for a decent power AOE skill. As it is it's never worth using this over Inner Beast. Maybe have it only consume 1 stack of vengenace?

Not even sure what I would do with holmgang. Does it even work on large bosses?

Unfortunately, the problem is DPS tends to not stop. Provoke doesn't account for that. I think you perhaps misunderstood what I meant.

Provoke needs a little MORE on the firm aggro thing; trusting DPS to stop attacking a target that's chasing after then is like asking a ranged DPS to run to the tank when they get aggro; this stuff is MMO 101, but evidently a lot of people skipped class that day. The end result, for me anyway, tends to be DPS running away and blowing more cooldowns, making it more complicated. Provoke, really, should be a taunt. It's off the GCD but it has a long cooldown as well. If it was 15sec or so, I'd actually think the Enmity +1 thing was kind of nice. At 40sec, I want something MORE to it. Hence the suggestions I made; it's not that provoke is bad, it's that in practice making it work efficiently and effectively is a team effort. And team effort is often sorely lacking in random groups in particular.

to be continued...

There's nothing WRONG with Provoke; it's a nice base to work with. But it's just not quite fleshed out fully yet. As I said, we're now past lvl 20; we're all tanking harder dungeons now, and DPS and tanks are min-maxing the best they can. This means some abilities are a bit too strong; and others need a little work - welcome to a launch MMO! Woo!

Provoke just needs tinkering; made more efficient (especially in certain groups and fates). It's not about going easy; but 40sec is a long time to wait too. Either the cooldown needs cutting in half, or it needs increasing with a more tangible benefit to using it.

Either way, nice as it is, it's just not quite there yet. Easier for me to rotate a combo and overpower/flash, hoping/insisting DPS attacks the marked target... and even then, truth is, you can take a horse to water but you can't always make it drink.

*sigh*

Wow, lots of great feedback here folks.

I don't have time to comment on them all, so I'll just say I'm thrilled with the response so far. I also believe WAR is in a pretty good place overall, with a few outliers that need tweaking. So keep it comin' folks!

provoke is not a MRD skill, so STOP please.

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Originally Posted by hola

provoke is not a MRD skill, so STOP please.

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It's one of the options for an additional ability, so it's effectively a WAR/MAR ability. That's one of the wonky things about the was FFXIV was designed: just because it's not part of your class doesn't mean it's not one of your abilities and some classes get a lot more out of their additionals than other classes do (WAR is a good example, compared to PAL).

As to whether Provoke needs fixing, I like the current threat game. It's actually a challenge unlike so many other games out there. Improving Provoke would make the threat game simpler and, if improved too much, turn it into a complete joke. As it stands, the only times you'd need anything like it is for tank swap mechanics (which could *still* be done by forcing tanks to pay attention to each others' threat and preventing one from outpacing the other) and for fight recovery after dying in combat and getting a rez. Unless they add said tank swap mechanics (wherein WAR could still feasibly be considered to have Provoke as it stands now), it's really just a minor benefit. Personally, I only have it as a placeholder until such time that I get Awareness and Mantra.

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Originally Posted by Kitru

Improving Provoke would make the threat game simpler and, if improved too much, turn it into a complete joke. As it stands, the only times you'd need anything like it is for tank swap mechanics (which could *still* be done by forcing tanks to pay attention to each others' threat and preventing one from outpacing the other) and for fight recovery after dying in combat and getting a rez.

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Barring mechanics that require taunts, they're there for emergencies. Taunts are also part of the standard tank kit because a tank having a way to regain threat without the offending DPS dying is a good thing.

As for the second sentence there, it'd work only if you made every boss with a tank swap similar to Gorthak the Impaler (swap tanks after they've been impaled 5 times). Which means you can't have bosses where the targets have to be swapped and kept apart, or where the bosses are stationary and literally juggle the tanks.

Reduce DMG Penalty on Defiance from 20% > %10
Remove Holmung and attach it to Steel Cyclone
Brutal Swing NEEDS TO BE SAME AS PLD... please
Reduce Foresight and Bloodbath to 30 secs and increase Foresight to 35%
Change Unchained to the following "Gain the Ability Unchained which ignores Dmg Penalty of Defience for 1 min. Can not rebuild Unchained until the effect wears off"
Something like that or simply remove it cause its pretty pointless

More changes I'd like to see on the WAR:

Change: Untie animation times from abilities that don't have a GCD

Reason: Lets say Foresight and Thrill of Battle are down and the healers are unable to heal for various reasons. Your only other "oh shit" button is Inner Beast(MNK cooldowns are laughable). In order to make Inner Beast work as an "oh shit" button, you need to wait 1 second for your current animation to end, then use Berserk, then wait another 1 second for the animation to end, then use Convalescence, then wait another 1 second for the animation to end then finally use Inner Be-oh wait, you're dead.

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Originally Posted by Ruminate

(MNK cooldowns are laughable)

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Lolwut? Featherfoot is *awesome*.

Yea, so awesome that you didn't dodge the next 2 hits and died anyways. 15% evasion is a joke.

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Originally Posted by Ruminate

Yea, so awesome that you didn't dodge the next 2 hits and died anyways. 15% evasion is a joke.

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You don't burn the WAR CDs when you're already sub-25%. You use them when you're about to get rocked in the face. Any RNG based tank CD is going to suck if you only ever use it to avoid a single attack.

Attacks that rock you in the face can't be dodged.

You use featherfoot. You get rocked in the face. You don't dodge the next two attacks. You die. Whats the difference?

Featherfoot should be used once off CD and not when you're expecting a big hit. The extra dodges, if any, helps more than you think.