Yoshi P talks about Warriors- from Producer Letter Live @ TGS

[hola]

A PLD with Sword Oath hits as hard as a WAR without Defiance. Even when they're going DPS mode, WAR doesn't deal more damage.

if both in dd gear, warrior definitely do much more dmg than pld, pld's dmg dont scale.

[Ruminate]

I reckon the point was that going from freshly-dinged 50 to full Darklight nets you something like 30 defense, 700ish to 730ish. This does not make a noteworthy difference, and thus warrior damage mitigation pretty much doesn't scale with gear. Nor does anyone else's, but thay's irrelevant. Going from Darklight to the next tier will bump your defense up to 740. Some people have been insisting that getting endgame gear will somehow make warriors viable.

1 defense = 0.044% damage reduction
Full AF1 + accessories + protect = 799 defense = 35.15% damage reduction
Full Darklight + accessories + protect = 842 defense = 37.04% damage reduction

That is equivelent to a 6% increase in eHP. If that isn't a "noteworthy difference", then by that logic, the difference between WAR and PAL outside of cooldowns isn't noteworthy either. And the whole "a paladin's baseline mitigation is nearly twice as high as a warrior's" is gross exaggeration.

[Ruminate]

if both in dd gear, warrior definitely do much more dmg than pld, pld's dmg dont scale.

Where do you get the idea that PLD damage doesn't scale?

[Onisake]

PLDs were given huge buffs to their single-target damage between beta phases because the devs want them to be on par. The WAR was given buffs to their survivability between beta phases, too, for the same reasons. Its just that the survivability buffs to the WAR wasn't good enough.

Did we play the same game at beta? War/MRD wasn't even available to test until P3 of beta. Paladin was available at P1. so war being 'adjusted between phases' is utter nonsense. Furthermore no end-game content was available during either phase. any and all balancing attempts were done pre-30. and here I would agree. war/pld are easily interchangeable for this content.

with paladin, they were able to collect lots of data. it was the only tank available, so they were able to balance it more easily.

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Both classes can MT. but that doesn't mean they should MT. as a WAR main, i can say with confidence that the skill cap for WAR is so absurdly high compared to PLD I recommend any new players coming up through my FC to play paladin before warrior, simply because all the gear is also usable on WAR. they can have some fun on WAR once they have their real tank class completed.

War generates more single target enmity than paladin. but the advantage is only slight. I can consistently pull hate from PLD tanks when i'm trying. However, there is 0 point in doing this. and in fact, it's extremely dangerous.

anyone who thinks WAR is meant to be an AoE tank has not played WAR. Flash >>>>> overpower. overpower requires a coordinated group to help herd. the best a WAR can hope for is to be able to steel cyclone => infuriate => Steel Cyclone and pray that's enough hate to hold through 2-3 ticks of Regen on the group to herd for overpower spam. but doing this comes with risks as well. as a MT (on something big) you will not be spamming SC. simply because you need to save Infuriate for doing double IBs to recover from those big hits. on a good day, I can heal for ~3k with two IBs back to back. coupled with Thrill of Battle/second wind. as well as Berserk/Bloodbath. You can recover a lot of health very quickly. in a pinch, you can also take Convalesence and Mantra. with Infuriated status you increase your healing received by a large amount. Testing with a WHM in my FC, they were able to get ~4k-5k crit heals on my war.

PLD has two abilities to help generate enmity off of GCD. Spirits Within and Circle of Scorn. War gets Brutal swing. Brutal swing applies a stun, which means on some bosses you can't use it, otherwise you risk stuns being resisted when they are needed and wipe the group.

I have to agree with Faction's earlier posts. There is literally nothing (of importance) that war can do better than paladin. the only thing WAR can do better, is generate enmity on a single target. but paladin's don't regularly lose hate. so this is a wasted advantage.

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What War Needs:

Better/more intuitive stat allocation. War desperately needs both STR and VIT. Given there is a lot more VIT than STR on most tanking pieces, WAR loses a lot. the STR is needed to help with the reactionary heals. I recently respec from full STR to full VIT. I lost about 300 on my IB self heal.

Risk/reward adjustment. War has a high skill cap compared to paladin. we have to manage more rotations. keep debuffs up, self buffs on, know when to heal, know how to react, etc. the margin of error for a war vs a pld is much higher. But there is no reward for this. a great war is just as good as a mediocre paladin. there's no benefit, other than bragging rights, to being great at your job as a war.

More intuitive rotations. Every other combo rotation I use Storm's eye for the debuff. between that I need to make a decision. do I heal myself with Storm's Path? or do I use Butcher's block for more damage/enmity? Given the amount of overcure I typically recieve as a tank, I usually butcher's block.


Buffs I would like to see to war:

Enmity bonus + healing on Steel Cyclone.

SC used to be blatantly overpowered in 1.0. now it is situational at best. given you need Infuriated, I think this ability needs some love.

Increased Healing Capacity

A lot of time my self-healing is wasted. Storm's path heal is very nearly useless. IB is great, but given the amount of overcure I can't take full advantage of it.

Storm's path heal could use a buff. rather than give an up front heal, i'd rather it give us a self buff/regen. this would give more incentive to include it in rotations.

It would also be nice if IB applied a shield instead of a heal. this would allow us to use it even when we are at max health. this would just increase the number of situations it is usable in thus improving our viability by introducing more situations we can help out our healers.

Thrill of Battle=>Stoneskin=>IB would then generate roughly 3k damage mitigated. a double IB would bring us close to 5k. this would help tremendously. and honestly might be a little overpowered. but given how bad we are right now...i dont' see a problem with that.

[Ruminate]

WAR gained their 15% healing from Wrath stacks in the final release. So yes, they were adjusted.

[HiirNoivl]

And I'm just sitting here in my easy chair supping on a glass of Sweet Redemption.

I think the vintage is called "I Told You So"

[ZephyrK]

My take-away from this is, clearly the Devs are better at using Warriors, most likely because they aren't trying to use them like a PLD, and as far as they are concerned, they are a good class.

I tend to agree, I think all the whining about not being able to Main Tank coils is pointless because none of them have the level appropriate gear that they SHOULD have before even stepping foot into it. Once Crystal Tower is added and they have the appropriate gear, you'll see them MTing coils. They also have said that it is more difficult to be a good WAR, so "showing off" is if you're a WAR AND good, as an unskilled player will most likely not be a very good WAR.

I knew a very high level developer on the now defunct Star Wars: Galaxies. He was promoted from a pretty low position when they did the big purge after NGE. I'll never forget what he told me, and that is that most developers are blinded by how they expect players to play the game they designed vs the reality of the boundaries of the game at it stands.



If Yoshi thinks the current game is Hard Mode Ifrit or farming currency, it would stand to reason that they think Warriors are great. Hell, Paladins are stun bots there.

However, the high end player base (which I am not a part of) thinks the game is currently about Coil. They are probably further along than the devs think they should be for their gear level. But still, they progress, and as part of that progress, they only want to bring along a single class to tank for them because they need a class that can take hits. Big hits. Using long cool down abilities and innate mitigation.

Are they pushing too hard? Maybe. But that's what cutting edge content guilds do. Lesser players will, in general, look up to what those players are accomplishing and model their builds and configs based off of that so they can tackle much easier content with much more ease.

I guess all I am saying is that Yoshi can ignore the best players' perceptions at the game's own peril. In games like this, at some point, perception becomes reality. It takes too long to build a character, and once a class has been left out long enough it becomes hard to catch up.

The last thing I'd mention is that I don't believe for a minute that the Devs are better at playing this game than the best players are. That's just the natural order of things. You wouldn't expect a sports doctor to be better than an olympian at a foot race, and you wouldn't expect a mechanic to be the best race car driver. So no, I do not believe the devs are better at playing Warriors than people who have made an occupation at main tanking for hard mode guilds for a decade.

[Feathery]

Ýou can't make an effective tank that has practically no mitigation and gets all of its survivability from self-healing. People tend to point to WoW and Death Knights as an example of a self-sustaining tank, but WoW's tank classes are nowhere near as different as FFXIV's. Not even slightly. They all have baseline mitigation within ~10% of eachother, and they all have relatively equal defensive cooldowns. The difference is in minor mechanics; DK self-healing compensates for the lack of block, and Blizzard would never be so stupid as to try and make a class with the raw survivability of a fury warrior, throw in a bigger HP pool, and then attempt to give them self-healing as the only substitute for the enormous difference in survivability between this and other tanks. I like to think that no competent developer would be so thoughtless and out of touch with MMORPG basics.

While this might be true right now, I haven't play since WotLK it is however not completely accurate. In Vanilla WoW back in 2004 there were 3 tanks, Protection Warriors, Protection Paladins and Feral-bear Druids. However only protection warriors were viable tanks, it was a combination of bad mechanics (prot paladins had no snap aggro) and incredibly poor itemization (since feral druids could only wear leather and there was no tank-oriented leather gear) that would take them AN ENTIRE EXPANSION to fix. Yes as a matter of fact feral and protection tanks weren't viable until the release of TBC 2007 a whopping 3 years later, it took them that long to fix this.

[Faction]

if both in dd gear, warrior definitely do much more dmg than pld, pld's dmg dont scale.

Both classes have similar potency attacks. "Pld's dmg don't scale?" Um yes it does. There's nothing that would make it not scale. Especially since autoattacks scale tremendously and most of their damage comes from autoattacks.

[Reika]

y: some were asking isn't warrior weaker/harder than paladin?
y: in development environment devs are really strong with marauder
y: so I think you'l find them out soon
y: they are really strong
y: for those that really want to show off, i recommend warrior

Further translation of this is: For those that want to show others they managed to either get carried or did it unnecessarily hard, i recommend warrior.

Yoshida, I'm a paladin then when they sucked and I am a paladin now while they are beast, but seriously just balance the damn classes, for crying out loud! Do you need someone from blizzard to come give you balancing lessons? Like Wangstrong said, Warrior needs MITIGATION. All they are right now are lancers with too much damn HP. HP doesn't save the day.

I actually said this exact thing in every raid I went to in WoW: HP IS A CRUTCH. and it still is. I have less of it but am still way better for tanking purposes. You rely on having a lot of hp but fail on your avoidance, for ARR block and parry, and mitigation, you just become a healing liability, plain and simple. What you can also do is give a Base increase to healing recieve while in defiance, not just for each stack of wrath, because as soon as the warrior loses that wrath from a move, he becomes a squishy healer hell, and it isn't even enough to begin with.