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

[Ehayte]

Why do so many people keep saying this?
All percentage multipliers inherently scale. Doesn't matter if the percentage multiplier is vitality or damage reduction, both scale.

I was asking a question, but wouldn't it work like this?

Better gear = better defense/vit for each class (scaling identically all else held constant)
Better weapon = higher attack damage for each. For the WAR this means greater damage and this means greater self-heals, while the PLD gets, what, a small increase to block/block%?
Better weap/gear = PLD keeps the same 20% mitigation

Wouldn't WARs have more to gain from a higher damage weapon at the exact same level? I could be wrong, I was more searching for answers than making a statement though. Thanks for straw-manning me though : D

[ZephyrK]

I know that some people are less than satisfied with Yoshi’s response, but how can we( the players) question what the creators( group of people that created the classes/jobs with a direct vision of how it should be played) are saying? I am more interested in what the developers know about warriors that we do not. Maybe we could get a response on how to correctly play the class and see where it goes from there?

No one else has really said it, so I'll say it. His thoughts on warriors were without substance. He said something very polite about a class that feels like it may be floundering, which is exactly as his culture tends to act. He did not truly address anything except to be a cheerleader... I think he acted as he saw appropriate, but there is a cultural divide at work here. That wasn't even remotely what the NA player base was looking for.

If there really WAS something in the works, like (as an odd example) an add on to our soul stone that would convert our self heals into stacking shields or something, it would have been great if he'd have mentioned that.

[Leiron]

saving characters

You're going under a different context.
If you have 25% more health, its roughly the same as having 25% mitigation.
If you have a 15% heal buff, its about the same as having a 20% damage mitigation on top of it.
This does assume, however, that the healer has enough mana and healing power to top you off.
Otherwise, if its a war of attrition, mitigation becomes better.
I genuinely think SE didn't consider healing power/mana, and also did not factor the rest of the mitigation that Paladin receives which gives it much more effective HP in the end.

So while Warrior has greater health, its total eHP is lesser.

[Addonex]

Wouldn't WARs have more to gain from a higher damage weapon at the exact same level?

This is true for warriors. Better gear > more damage > more self-healing = more tanking viability. So tank survival scaling through gear is in warrior's favor.

The problem is, as you already noted, paladins keep their 20% mitigation. Therefore, both classes' survival improves similarly through gear upgrades prior to incorporating their skill set, but what ends up happening is warrior survival scales with gear/damage, while paladin survival scales with mob damage. And generally speaking for MMOs, mob damage tends to ramp up faster than player damage, particularly for tanks.

There could be a point that, during the same content level, as gear is acquired, warriors surpass paladins, but I don't think that's entirely likely at this point with the current content/mechanics/scaling of our heals to damage. And even if it were, that relegates one class to progression and the other to farm status, which is not good class balance design when both classes are meant to fulfill the same role.

Addonex

[Rios-Drakoon]

I was asking a question, but wouldn't it work like this?

Better gear = better defense/vit for each class (scaling identically all else held constant)
Better weapon = higher attack damage for each. For the WAR this means greater damage and this means greater self-heals, while the PLD gets, what, a small increase to block/block%?
Better weap/gear = PLD keeps the same 20% mitigation
Wouldn't WARs have more to gain from a higher damage weapon at the exact same level? I could be wrong, I was more searching for answers than making a statement though. Thanks for straw-manning me though : D

yes you are wrong,Ifrit Axe, almost full Draklight, Bloodbath gives you abou 40-100HP per hit, StormsPath also bout 100-130 Heal... so, you think a better weapon gives you a better selfheal? Forget it.
Bloodbath Need to be increased to 150%+ StormsPath to 300% and Innerbeast should be even more pushed. and the 15% + Heal on Defiance and increse it to 20%, then Healer maybee feel a diffrence, cuz, right now, Healer feels a shit about our Selfheal.

[Tanaya]

P.S.S.S Holy crap, all of that math was fun.

I will say even as a Paladin, I do enjoy reading your theorycraft and mathematical posts.

[Ehayte]

Snip

Right - so my point would be, with the missing Crystal Tower gear isn't it possible WARs become more viable, as the mob damage has scaled up in Coil, but the player gear hasn't? This gives PLDs the stated edge, as incoming damage has scaled up, but outgoing damage has not which would give WARs a little bit back against PLDs?

I agree that it probably doesn't bridge the whole gap, but it seems like this may mathematically tip the scales a little? Kitru, can you do a quick number crunch? lmao.

[Ghostagent151]

Hey guys, I'm pretty new to the game and have no desire discussing the technical aspects of each class. My question is, is yoshi referring to the current state of warriors or a future patched version? I rolled a warrior but after all the talk I see on how inferior they are to paladins for end game tanking, I'm considering a re-roll. I love playing as war but don't wanna waste my time if no one wants them end game.

[Addonex]

The problem still lies with the existing % healing values we get through our abilities. Even going from ilvl 70 to full ilvl 90, you're still only netting a very miniscule amount of increased self healing through damage. Further, IB is the only life-tap attack we have that produces healing numbers meaningful to the way most content is designed (that is, needing to recover a lot of health in a short time frame). Bloodbath and Storm's Path just don't do enough to be relevant even if our current damage output doubled (although that'd make IB awesome :P).

Even AE tanking under ideal circumstances isn't all that impressive. In AK, I'll pull 6-9 mobs in certain situations and have our group AE everything down. I'll get Maim up during the train then pop Unchained + Internal Release + Berserk and just go to town Overpowering with Bloodbath up. With 9 mobs I'd be lifetapping for ~500-800 hps every GCD (which I obviously can't keep up forever). But, with 9 mobs wailing on me, I'm requiring constant healing due to the damage. My Overpower spam under these utmost ideal conditions is only helping account for the healing of the damage of maybe 2 of those mobs.

Have a paladin do the same thing, and while they won't be helping kill the pack any faster (Flash no dmg vs. Overpower), they're already taking similar damage as I am using nothing more than their passive stance. Pop any cooldown (I've already used 4, likely 5 or 6 with defensives) and they're now doing double the work mitigating damage compared to my self healing with every cooldown and buff in my arsenal. And they got 4 more oh shit buttons left to spare.

So not only do our self heals need to be brought up (assuming they don't grant us more passive +% incoming heals), but they would then also need to strike a balance between mob damage scaling and player damage scaling for it to not just be a broken balance further down the line.

Addonex

[Kitru]

Kitru, can you do a quick number crunch? lmao.

I don't have any numbers available to crunch, but I can tell you what it *would* crunch as.

The supposition that WARs scale better with gear is predilected upon one major concept: that weapon damage scales faster than incoming damage. If weapon damage scales slower, WARs actually end up getting *worse* over time because the comparative size of their heals diminishes. If weapon damage scales faster, then, yes, WAR gets better as gear gets better. If it stays the same, there's no advantage whatsoever.

As it stands, in my experiences doing endgame content (which, I'll admit, is limited), damage scales up a *lot* faster than tank damage does. This tends to bear out in other games as well. Much of this is to counteract growing healer resource pools (forcing healers to use less efficient but better throughput heals) because, thanks to the combination of Piety and Mind, there are 2 stats that make healers more effective. If healers were forced to behave in less efficient ways as gear got stronger, healers would have a laughable time (this happened in WoW every time pre-MoP, where the devs standardized resource pools rather than having them be gear dependent; at the end of an expansion, healers could just spam their least cost efficient heals ad nauseum because their resource pools had outstripped the costs of their abilities to such an extent).

As such, I feel safe saying that WAR is going to get *worse* as gear gets stronger. Self heals just don't scale as quickly as everything else. Beyond that, there's nothing gear dependent that WAR gets that PLD doesn't get just as much of. In fact, it's reasonably safe to say that PLD will get stronger as gear gets stronger because Shields are going to get progressively higher Block Rates and Values (which means that they more and more out of Shield mitigation, which means that it's a growing percentage of incoming damage).