Warriors - How to fix our damage mitigation

[javid]

one shotted?? which boss you fight hit for more than 5k?? LET ALONE 8K HP vs a warrior??! With enough HP you can't get one shotted....EHP matters with numbers guy.... Just saying EHP doesn't matter until you put numbers into work. Now you suggest a paladin CAN hold out 40% mitigation all fight....well.... unless that paladin has 5001 HP....that's NOT more EHP... 5k HP @ 40%= 8k HP..... WE HAVE 8K HP.... SAME Effective Health Points.


Inner Beast has no cool down. You can get infuriated at the very slowest time possible 40 seconds. I LIED!! If you use NO skills that give you wrath and you just hit hit hit; it will take you 8 HITS to get 5 wrath ... that's 8x2.5 sec= 20 seconds buddy... lets say 30 for kicks.... EACH 30 SEC YOU CAN HEAL YOURSELF FOR AT LEAST 900 hp... that is NOT a long cool down.... not to mention you get a free infuriated every minute...

just on those two steps alone you can heal yourself every 30 seconds & an extra heal every minute

[Kitru]

SAME Effective Health Points.

First off, lemme throw down with some math, since that's apparently what you want.

Your own math is flawed (and the numbers themselves are wrong, but I'll move on to that later). A target with 40% DR and 5k hp has an effective hp of 8333, not 8000, which mean that you're wrong, unless you want to claim a margin of error of 300 hp (which is pretty damned big).

Secondly, for individual burst hits without any CDs factored in, a WAR and a PAL *do* have the exact same eHP. WAR gets 25% additional hp and PAL gets 20% DR, which increased eHP by 25%. The issue is not about these circumstances, however. The issue is in long term healing required and in individual burst mitigation with CDs factored in.

For long term healing required, PAL still has the 20% DR going for it, which is a 25% effective increase in incoming heals (the same amount of healing is acting upon 125% of the amount of incoming damage that another person would take; this is why tanks are tank and not just enmity machines). WAR only manages 15% at best. This means that WAR requires 8.7% more external healing than a PAL does. As to WAR self heals, PAL has a shield, which provides additional mitigation because they can block and reduce incoming damage by 20+% a helluva lot more often than a WAR can, which more than makes up for the self heals that WAR brings to the table (Inner Beast is the only really sizeable self heal and it comes at a very steep cost that actually makes it benefit neutral outside of immediate Infuriate use).

Now, when you look at eHP with CDs active, WARs also get the short stick. All of the PAL CDs are dramatic, effectively guaranteed, increases to eHP: Rampart and Sentinel are DR (20% and 40%, respectively), Convalescence is increased healing received (30%), and Bulwark is a massive increase to shield chance such that it's dramatically more common to block than it is to not (block = 20% mitigation; ~80% chance while active equates to 10% mitigation). WAR CDs are either not guaranteed, only useful over long periods of time, and/or pathetically weak: Bloodbath provides 25% of outgoing damage as self healing (only useful if used on CD since it only provides appreciable benefits over the entire 30 second duration), Foresight's increase in Defense is so marginal thanks to defense's DR that you can pretty much ignore it (20% defense = ~5% physical DR), Convalescence is smaller (WAR goes from 1.15x healing to 1.35x, which is a 17% increase, so it's nearly half of what a PAL gets), and Fleetfoot is unreliable (15% miss chance is nice, but it's nowhere near guaranteed). The only really good tank CD that WARs get is Thrill of Battle, which increases eHP without reducing healing required so it's only effective for the incredibly short term, and, even then, it's weaker than the weakest of the PAL DR CDs (20% increased hp is 16.7% effective DR) while also having a shorter duration.

The only advantage that the WAR CD suite has is that it is almost universally on a shorter CD or has a higher effective uptime, which is useful if you know how to use it. The problem is that the comparative weakness of the WAR CDs is generally heavily overshadowed by the dramatically decreased effectiveness of the CDs. Bloodbath is decent and Fleetfoot is useful if you keep it on CD, but Thrill of Battle and Foresight, the only "true" tank CDs that WARs get, are woefully underpowered compared to a PAL's. The only time that a WAR's will stack well against a PAL is if the PAL doesn't use their CDs (which I'll admit is generally true; most of the PALs I know of barely touch their CDs whereas I abuse the living crap out of my tank CDs, keeping half of them on CD at all times).

just on those two steps alone you can heal yourself every 30 seconds & an extra heal every minute

Inner Beast has an *effective* cooldown of 20 seconds, which is the time it takes to generate 5 stacks of Wrath again. On top of that, it comes at a *very* steep cost: it removes all of your Wrath stacks and, as such, reduces your healing received. Using Inner Beast on CD ends up having Wrath provide you with a mere 7% +healing instead of the +15% that is pretty much always assumed, which means that, for it to be beneficial, it needs to provide 180% of the healing you'd receive from your healer(s) in a single GCD. At 900 hp, unless your healer is only hitting you with 500 point Cures (mine are hitting for 800-900+), Inner Beast on CD is actually going to make it *harder* to heal you. The only time it gets better is if you have multiple major DPS CDs active, which isn't possible all the time since none of those have 100% uptimes and unreliable to boot (Berserk is the only one that is guaranteed so you *have* to crit, which is a coin flip, to make it effective).

The only really effective way to use Inner Beast, using it before immediately using Infuriate to get your stacks back, *is* on a CD: 60 seconds. Getting ~900 hp every 60 seconds is a pittance: when big hits are for in excess of 2k, you're talking about, effectively, 2.5 seconds of 45% or less DR every 60 seconds. You get more out of Convalescence.

[Coramac]

Secondly, for individual burst hits without any CDs factored in, a WAR and a PAL *do* have the exact same eHP. WAR gets 25% additional hp and PAL gets 20% DR, which increased eHP by 25%. The issue is not about these circumstances, however. The issue is in long term healing required and in individual burst mitigation with CDs factored in.

This is individual burst hits only. There are few instances in any MMOs where burst is limited to a single hit rather than a combination of autoattacks with a special that happen in a short time span. Usually, the healers will be bombing the tank for this which will give the EHP edge to the Pal.

[Kitru]

This is individual burst hits only. There are few instances in any MMOs where burst is limited to a single hit rather than a combination of autoattacks with a special that happen in a short time span. Usually, the healers will be bombing the tank for this which will give the EHP edge to the Pal.

It's not individual burst hits explicitly. It's damage taken within a single GCD (which, admittedly, is how most big hits work), since that's the healing rate capability of a healer. A majority of the burst damage that tanks take end up being taken within a single GCD or a small number of GCDs where a healer is incapable of throwing out heals thanks to moving or other preventative methods.

When you start increasing the number of GCDs, you're not talking about eHP but instead healing required, which, as previously mentioned, is a different construct.

[Coramac]

When you start increasing the number of GCDs, you're not talking about eHP but instead healing required, which, as previously mentioned, is a different construct.

No, it is not a different construct. The problem is you are looking at static EHP which is insufficient and putting too much emphasis on "the burst." They're is no difference between Pal and War here. Typical fights throughout the past decade of MMOs have boss damage outputs that can be categorized roughly in terms of linear, small spike, and large spike. The large spike is not the real problem- by numbers posted on the forums, War can handle this. It is much more likely, as has almost always been the case, it is small and large spikes occurring in close proximity. The tank HP is never enough to sustain both. You need healing to get through these burst phases. It is more appropriate to approach HP in dynamic terms rather than simply claim it is a different issue.

[javid]

First off, lemme throw down with some math, since that's apparently what you want.

Your own math is flawed (and the numbers themselves are wrong, but I'll move on to that later). A target with 40% DR and 5k hp has an effective hp of 8333, not 8000, which mean that you're wrong, unless you want to claim a margin of error of 300 hp (which is pretty damned big).


Getting ~900 hp every 60 seconds is a pittance: .

you're correct it's 8.33k EHP (4% error is a huge deal...)

I can tell if we sit down break this down one skill at a time; we'll get somewhere. but trying to debate every skills' potential against another all at once won't be done fairly.

So since you ended with Inner Beast lets revisit that one.

[Zanther]

one shotted?? which boss you fight hit for more than 5k?? LET ALONE 8K HP vs a warrior??!

Half the bosses in BC. Our FC (currently on turn 5) straight up refuses to take warrior tanks now and they all rerolled paladins. The fights are now 10x easier with 2 paladin tanks vs 1 paladin and 1 warrior. Warriors are terrible tanks at the moment and need to be looked at. Having more hp = wasting more mana for healers to restore that extra hp (that is draining at a faster rate).

Tanks are also not for damage. We dont care what you do for damage. Our tanks could do 1 damage a swing and we could give two shits. We have non shitty dps for damage. We want our tanks to survive "oh shit" moments....