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

[HiirNoivl]

This is a huge thread but I hope you see this, I was just reading a heated discussion about someone saying that you can't have Inner Beast + Infuriate up every time Titan does his big move. So can you tell me if the crit would actually help with this, as all you need to have would be an Inner Beast that crits, rather than IB + Inf + IB?

If you have your Crit Rate up where it needs to be, yeah. Your Inner Beast should be critting over 2k Which is about 1/3rd your HP. If you use it with Berserk it can be close to 3k. Still, if your healers are good, hold Wrath V until after Mountain Buster and let your healers cure you for that phase unless you see they need help then use Inner Beast if you think they're struggling. The 15% cure buff should be enough unless they are slow or gaoled. Use Vengeance + Bloodbath (Vengeance does Crit) When the stomps start to become an issue before Mountain Buster.

IB + Infuriate + IB is just a huge, holy cow I'm going to die move... Where are your healers? Why do you feel the need to do this? Mitigating damage is what you need to be doing. Wrath V 15% is fine when your DPS doesn't suffer for holding it. I used to be anti-holding but now I'm doing so much better with the Critical Hit Rate Buff I suddenly like it.

It's possible to self cure away a Mountain Buster, but you shouldn't have to.

************

My answer is boiling down to: Quit wearing PLD gear on WAR and saying WAR sucks.

There is a difference between PLD gear on WAR. It's like wearing WHM gear on BLM and complaining that you're not doing any damage.

Quit begging for an easy button. It just looks bad.

[Xariann]

If you have your Crit Rate up where it needs to be, yeah. Your Inner Beast should be critting over 2k Which is about 1/3rd your HP. If you use it with Berserk it can be close to 3k. Still, if your healers are good, hold Wrath V until after Mountain Buster and let your healers cure you for that phase unless you see they need help then use Inner Beast if you think they're struggling. The 15% cure buff should be enough unless they are slow or gaoled. Use Vengeance + Bloodbath (Vengeance does Crit) When the stomps start to become an issue before Mountain Buster.

IB + Infuriate + IB is just a huge, holy cow I'm going to die move... Where are your healers? Why do you feel the need to do this? Mitigating damage is what you need to be doing. Wrath V 15% is fine when your DPS doesn't suffer for holding it. I used to be anti-holding but now I'm doing so much better with the Critical Hit Rate Buff I suddenly like it.

It's possible to self cure away a Mountain Buster, but you shouldn't have to.

My answer is boiling down to: Quit wearing PLD gear on WAR and saying WAR sucks.

There is a difference between PLD gear on WAR. It's like wearing WHM gear on BLM and complaining that you're not doing any damage.

Not using Inner Beast unless your healers struggle doesn't make you easier to heal though. If I am doing more damage through crit and then I am not using that crit with Inner Beast, what's the point of having more damage? Blood Bath I guess, but the CD on Blood Bath is longer than Infuriate, so from this response, I can't see how Crit makes me a better TANK, for Titan at least. It makes me a better damage dealer.

[HiirNoivl]

Not using Inner Beast unless your healers struggle doesn't make you easier to heal though.

Actually it does.


I made a post about it on my blog and it's been posted all over this thread and all over this forum. If you don't have a strong enough Inner Beast, if you use your Inner Beast it will result in a LOSS of potential HP every time. I thought that this was the wrong way to view things, and I posted as such. Why did I feel this way? Because I was concerned about the loss of DPS that occurs when you don't use your Wrath. I felt that if you held Wrath V, you lost so much DPS that you were nothing more than a worse PLD.

In one way I was right, but in another away I was wrong. Dead wrong.

While it's true that Wrath V holds the key to some of our hardest hitting moves, it also holds the key to our mitigation as WARs. That 15% curing potency upgrade is nothing to sniff at. Even if you hit a 1500 Inner Beast, you result in a loss of -96 HP as posted in an eye opening thread. In my blog, and on my twitter I said, "Guys, we as WARs have to overcome this threshold. If your DPS does not rise to the level of making that Inner Beast a positive GAIN on HP, you will never be good at your Job."

That's why I started looking into Crit. The ONLY WAY to make that Inner Beast worth it is to Crit that thing (Or use Berserk). Little did I know that my Crit Rate would receive such an extreme lift by Wrath V as well. To the point where my Crit Rate effectively Doubles without even using Internal Release.

I've changed my tune about Wrath V in a complete 180. You do more DPS (far more) when you hold Wrath, than when you release it. Granted, when you think about how much a crit is (1.5x normal damage) You're essentially hitting a Berserk hit, without using Berserk. That's why you can see on my parse screenie that I'm hitting so hard.

Don't think it's RNG. Parsing Averages and DPs numbers are not Random. Far from it.

[Onisake]

That's why I started looking into Crit. The ONLY WAY to make that Inner Beast worth it is to Crit that thing (Or use Berserk). Little did I know that my Crit Rate would receive such an extreme lift by Wrath V as well. To the point where my Crit Rate effectively Doubles without even using Internal Release.

This is a basic lack of understanding of game mechanics.


Base crit rate is 10%. Wrath gives 2% crit per stack. so Wrath V gives 10% crit. which is *gasp* twice the default.

really? you make it sound like this is some kind of epiphany. it's not. any WAR with half a brain already knew this. you NEED to keep wrath V up to be worth anything. that means you only use IB when infuriated is up, or it is a DIRE emergency.

this isn't new research. this is you finally realizing how to play your job ~_~

This doesn't change the fact that WAR is weaker than pld. it doesn't change the fact, as you so kindly pointed out, that WAR doesn't recieve the tools it needs from the gear that is provided.

Crit rate isn't the deciding factor. there are too many other things 'wrong' with war to make 5% crit bridge the entire divide between pld and war.

[Xariann]

Actually it does.


I made a post about it on my blog and it's been posted all over this thread and all over this forum. If you don't have a strong enough Inner Beast, if you use your Inner Beast it will result in a LOSS of potential HP every time. I thought that this was the wrong way to view things, and I posted as such. Why did I feel this way? Because I was concerned about the loss of DPS that occurs when you don't use your Wrath. I felt that if you held Wrath V, you lost so much DPS that you were nothing more than a worse PLD.

In one way I was right, but in another away I was wrong. Dead wrong.

While it's true that Wrath V holds the key to some of our hardest hitting moves, it also holds the key to our mitigation as WARs. That 15% curing potency upgrade is nothing to sniff at. Even if you hit a 1500 Inner Beast, you result in a loss of -96 HP as posted in an eye opening thread. In my blog, and on my twitter I said, "Guys, we as WARs have to overcome this threshold. If your DPS does not rise to the level of making that Inner Beast a positive GAIN on HP, you will never be good at your Job."

That's why I started looking into Crit. The ONLY WAY to make that Inner Beast worth it is to Crit that thing (Or use Berserk). Little did I know that my Crit Rate would receive such an extreme lift by Wrath V as well. To the point where my Crit Rate effectively Doubles without even using Internal Release.

I've changed my tune about Wrath V in a complete 180. You do more DPS (far more) when you hold Wrath, than when you release it. Granted, when you think about how much a crit is (1.5x normal damage) You're essentially hitting a Berserk hit, without using Berserk. That's why you can see on my parse screenie that I'm hitting so hard.

Don't think it's RNG. Parsing Averages and DPs numbers are not Random. Far from it.

You are not getting my point though.

First you say use crit to buff Inner Beast. Which is what I thought you wanted Crit for, and I understand that.

Then you say, "Don't ever use Inner Beast until absolutely necessary."

That means that you are stacking crit to have better Inner Beasts, but then you don't use it. So during the time where you are not using it, you are still not more effective defense wise than you were before you had crit, because whether you had crit or not, you still have that 15% healing buff.

So if you stack crit and then hold onto that skill that benefits from it (Inner Beast) then you are not better than you were before stacking crit. You only are those rare times where you use Inner Beast because you don't use it whenever you can.

What I am getting from you is:

1. If you don't have enough crit there is no point in using Inner Beast because you are actually losing out on your hp.

2. If you have enough crit, STILL don't use it until absolutely necessary, don't use it on each of Titan's big moves, but only when healers struggle with healing you after it. So when I DON'T use it after the big move, I will still have been worse than a Paladin who did mitigate that hit. Do you understand what I mean?

Plus I get it that you do more DPS with crit. I really get it. I don't care. I want to know that I have better defensive abilities. And if you read above, I don't see that extra defensive threshold if then you just don't use Inner Beast unless you are in dire need. I am not disputing that keeping the Wrath stacks is good. I am saying that stacking that crit isn't such a HUGE improvement DEFENSIVELY because you don't utilise the crit in a defensive manner often enough.

If the problem is surpassing that negative HPS threshold, then lots of crit should equal to lots of Inner Beast usage. Not to "Lots of crit, but STILL don't use Inner Beast" which is what threw me off in your replies. If the extra crit doesn't make you want to use Inner Beast more often, then no point in stacking it if you are after a better way to stay alive. You might as well stack strenght and keep your Inner Beast for emergency as you are doing already.

Also the maths on that thread don't take into consideration your normal crit, with use of Inner Release throughout the Chimera encounter, it's 15%ish for me without any crit stacking gear wise.

Someone also showed me some numbers from a reddit thread. He said,

"Taking an example of a Bard in full Darklight gear with Relic weapon, they received these results:

1 Determination/Crit rate = 0.033% damage increase
1 Dexterity = 0.2% damage increase
1 Weapon damage = 1.55% damage increase

As we can see, WD is beyond the best increase, so getting a +1 on your weapon is worth about 8 primary stats (str/dex/vit/int/mnd) and one primary stat is worth about 6 secondary stats.

A single WD is worth almost 50 secondary stats, so yes, it's really worth upgrading from Relic to Relic +1.

But also, apparently the WD scales off your primary stats, so the higher your primary stat is, the less damage increase you will get from WD. At the current level of this game, this is a non-issue, but it might pose a problem in the future when max level is perhaps 70+."

If those numbers are true and if strength contributes the same amount of damage to a melee than dex does to a ranged, then you wouldn't care about crit because:

1. You actually do less damage than with stacking strength
2. You need a lot more points in crit to get the same amount of damage increase as strength, therefore needing a lot more materia slots, and you only have a finite number of those so your damage caps a lot earlier than it does with strength
3. If by stacking Strength, your Inner Beasts are consistently better, even if they don't crit as often, the overall HPS might still increase and surpass the negative threshold because strength means more damage than crit overall

On top of that you don't know:

1. How much strength the person who posted your "eye opening thread" has
2. How he gets 2.0 skill speed
3. Can you, by stacking crit, surpass the HPS of him using 2.0 skill speed? Because of course, if you are stacking skill speed, you are out of Materia slots for crit

[HiirNoivl]

You are not getting my point though.

First you say use crit to buff Inner Beast. Which is what I thought you wanted Crit for, and I understand that.

Then you say, "Don't ever use Inner Beast until absolutely necessary."

That means that you are stacking crit to have better Inner Beasts, but then you don't use it. So during the time where you are not using it, you are still not more effective defense wise than you were before you had crit, because whether you had crit or not, you still have that 15% healing buff.

So if you stack crit and then hold onto that skill that benefits from it (Inner Beast) then you are not better than you were before stacking crit. You only are those rare times where you use Inner Beast because you don't use it whenever you can.

What I am getting from you is:

1. If you don't have enough crit there is no point in using Inner Beast because you are actually losing out on your hp.

2. If you have enough crit, STILL don't use it until absolutely necessary, don't use it on each of Titan's big moves, but only when healers struggle with healing you after it. So when I DON'T use it after the big move, I will still have been worse than a Paladin who did mitigate that hit. Do you understand what I mean?

Plus I get it that you do more DPS with crit. I really get it. I don't care. I want to know that I have better defensive abilities. And if you read above, I don't see that extra defensive threshold if then you just don't use Inner Beast unless you are in dire need. I am not disputing that keeping the Wrath stacks is good. I am saying that stacking that crit isn't such a HUGE improvement DEFENSIVELY because you don't utilise the crit in a defensive manner often enough.

If the problem is surpassing that negative HPS threshold, then lots of crit should equal to lots of Inner Beast usage. Not to "Lots of crit, but STILL don't use Inner Beast" which is what threw me off in your replies. If the extra crit doesn't make you want to use Inner Beast more often, then no point in stacking it if you are after a better way to stay alive. You might as well stack strenght and keep your Inner Beast for emergency as you are doing already.

Also the maths on that thread don't take into consideration your normal crit, with use of Inner Release throughout the Chimera encounter, it's 15%ish for me without any crit stacking gear wise.

Someone also showed me some numbers from a reddit thread. He said,

"Taking an example of a Bard in full Darklight gear with Relic weapon, they received these results:

1 Determination/Crit rate = 0.033% damage increase
1 Dexterity = 0.2% damage increase
1 Weapon damage = 1.55% damage increase

As we can see, WD is beyond the best increase, so getting a +1 on your weapon is worth about 8 primary stats (str/dex/vit/int/mnd) and one primary stat is worth about 6 secondary stats.

A single WD is worth almost 50 secondary stats, so yes, it's really worth upgrading from Relic to Relic +1.

But also, apparently the WD scales off your primary stats, so the higher your primary stat is, the less damage increase you will get from WD. At the current level of this game, this is a non-issue, but it might pose a problem in the future when max level is perhaps 70+."

If those numbers are true and if strength contributes the same amount of damage to a melee than dex does to a ranged, then you wouldn't care about crit because:

1. You actually do less damage than with stacking strength
2. You need a lot more points in crit to get the same amount of damage increase as strength, therefore needing a lot more materia slots, and you only have a finite number of those so your damage caps a lot earlier than it does with strength
3. If by stacking Strength, your Inner Beasts are consistently better, even if they don't crit as often, the overall HPS might still increase and surpass the negative threshold because strength means more damage than crit overall

On top of that you don't know:

1. How much strength the person who posted your "eye opening thread" has
2. How he gets 2.0 skill speed
3. Can you, by stacking crit, surpass the HPS of him using 2.0 skill speed? Because of course, if you are stacking skill speed, you are out of Materia slots for crit

Thank you for your Detailed Reply.

For a better explanation let's look at what a Critical Hit actually is.



When you hit a Critical you'll see it say Critical! You hit Xmob for XXX damage (50%).

A critical hit is 50% more than a normal hit. Now, As a WAR, your mitigation depends highly on how much damage you deal. So you say you don't care, you'd better care. Inner Beast, Bloodbath, and even the cross class Second Wind are actually offensive skills because they scale with attack power and your ability to do damage.

The more damage you do, the more damage you can take. It's that simple.

When I first started stacking Critical Rate Materia, the goal was to increase the amount of times I used Critical Inner Beast to a level where I was comfortable using it. The result was a host more benefits that actually allowed me to use Inner Beast less.

For example. Before I started stacking Crit, when I was pulling multiple monsters, I would single target DPS one monster because I wanted to kill it faster as well as use Inner Beast to mitigate all the damage I was taking. There so no way I could use Bloodbath effectively because Bloodbath was ineffective in handling all the damage I was taking to any meaningfull extent. Why? Because my damage was so low.

After I raised my Crit Rate Considerably, I suddenly realized that using Vengeance and Bloodbath allong with Steel Cyclone healed me more than an Inner beast could while at the same time, dealing AoE damage and killing the enemies faster. It was a win win.

But I wasn't using Inner Beast. In this case, Steel Cyclone had more benefits.

So there are cases where Inner Beast will not be your heal of choice.

In the case of Titan, you still want to stack Crit so that when you use your Vengeance and Bloodbath Combo, you can gain more HP after Rock Busters and Stomps. And when you use Inner Beast you have a greater chance of Crit. But when you get Mountain Bustered in the face, and your Healer is distracted/out of commission you need more than a "chance" of crit. You need a Guaranteed Crit.

That's what takes me to Berserk, Berserk is raising your attack power 50%, Berserk is a guaranteed Critical hit. You want to use Berserk when you use Inner Beast in this case because if you do, you get enough Healing to over come the threshold of negative HP healed Guaranteed.. And if you crit that you get 50 percent more than that.

But again, this is when you're in a pinch or a bind. You dont' do this for every Mountain Buster. If you're not in a serious need of healing (such as the death/gaoling of your mages) your 15% heal buff will always be better ALWAYS. It took me a while to get this too. But you'll get it really quickly when you see how much Wrath V actually increase your HP regen and decreases the strain on your healers. You'll really get it more when you see how much Wrath V actually increases your damage dealt, which increases your HP regained from Bloodbath.

Do you understand why Wrath V is such a powerful mitigation and DPS tool?

What stacking Critical hit does, besides raising your DPS to crazy levels, you start unlocking the strength of the cooldowns you rarely, barely, and never-ly used before this allowing to regen more HP and closes that gap between PLD and WAR when it comes to EHP.

Regarding STR: You cannot "stack STR" in this game. STR is capped according to item level. I quite literally can add no more strength to my gear.

I've noticed that even the expert Websites are underestimating the gains to Crit Rate granted by abilities like Internal Release when they are used in connection with Wrath V. On the Psychflayer yesterday, I managed to achieve a sustained 33.3 Crit Rate, that fight is not a short one.

According to people's calculations I should have only been able to achieve 22.something percent before dropping off again to a 12.something percent.

There has got to be something else happening. I'm not sure what it is. But my DPS has gone up by 40 since I stacked Crit. And a good portion of that gets translated into mitigation.

One more EDIT: When you use Crit Rate you really increase your damage dealt far more than with STR on WAR. (It doesn't work that way on other classes.)

[Xariann]

Thank you for your Detailed Reply.

For a better explanation let's look at what a Critical Hit actually is.



When you hit a Critical you'll see it say Critical! You hit Xmob for XXX damage (50%).

A critical hit is 50% more than a normal hit. Now, As a WAR, your mitigation depends highly on how much damage you deal. So you say you don't care, you'd better care. Inner Beast, Bloodbath, and even the cross class Second Wind are actually offensive skills because they scale with attack power and your ability to do damage.

The more damage you do, the more damage you can take. It's that simple.

When I first started stacking Critical Rate Materia, the goal was to increase the amount of times I used Critical Inner Beast to a level where I was comfortable using it. The result was a host more benefits that actually allowed me to use Inner Beast less.

For example. Before I started stacking Crit, when I was pulling multiple monsters, I would single target DPS one monster because I wanted to kill it faster as well as use Inner Beast to mitigate all the damage I was taking. There so no way I could use Bloodbath effectively because Bloodbath was ineffective in handling all the damage I was taking to any meaningfull extent. Why? Because my damage was so low.

After I raised my Crit Rate Considerably, I suddenly realized that using Vengeance and Bloodbath allong with Steel Cyclone healed me more than an Inner beast could while at the same time, dealing AoE damage and killing the enemies faster. It was a win win.

But I wasn't using Inner Beast. In this case, Steel Cyclone had more benefits.

So there are cases where Inner Beast will not be your heal of choice.

In the case of Titan, you still want to stack Crit so that when you use your Vengeance and Bloodbath Combo, you can gain more HP after Rock Busters and Stomps. And when you use Inner Beast you have a greater chance of Crit. But when you get Mountain Bustered in the face, and your Healer is distracted/out of commission you need more than a "chance" of crit. You need a Guaranteed Crit.

That's what takes me to Berserk, Berserk is raising your attack power 50%, Berserk is a guaranteed Critical hit. You want to use Berserk when you use Inner Beast in this case because if you do, you get enough Healing to over come the threshold of negative HP healed Guaranteed.. And if you crit that you get 50 percent more than that.

But again, this is when you're in a pinch or a bind. You dont' do this for every Mountain Buster. If you're not in a serious need of healing (such as the death/gaoling of your mages) your 15% heal buff will always be better ALWAYS. It took me a while to get this too. But you'll get it really quickly when you see how much Wrath V actually increase your HP regen and decreases the strain on your healers. You'll really get it more when you see how much Wrath V actually increases your damage dealt, which increases your HP regained from Bloodbath.

Do you understand why Wrath V is such a powerful mitigation and DPS tool?

What stacking Critical hit does, besides raising your DPS to crazy levels, you start unlocking the strength of the cooldowns you rarely, barely, and never-ly used before this allowing to regen more HP and closes that gap between PLD and WAR when it comes to EHP.

Regarding STR: You cannot "stack STR" in this game. STR is capped according to item level. I quite literally can add no more strength to my gear.

I've noticed that even the expert Websites are underestimating the gains to Crit Rate granted by abilities like Internal Release when they are used in connection with Wrath V. On the Psychflayer yesterday, I managed to achieve a sustained 33.3 Crit Rate, that fight is not a short one.

According to people's calculations I should have only been able to achieve 22.something percent before dropping off again to a 12.something percent.

There has got to be something else happening. I'm not sure what it is. But my DPS has gone up by 40 since I stacked Crit. And a good portion of that gets translated into mitigation.

One more EDIT: When you use Crit Rate you really increase your damage dealt far more than with STR on WAR. (It doesn't work that way on other classes.)

I don't think I am making myself clear.

I am not saying that keeping Wrath stacks is bad. I am saying that it still doesn't compete with Paladin even if you stack Crit. And I can see Crit being THAT good for you only if you use Inner Beast. Every time you don't use the new and improved Critting Inner Beast (TM) you are not doing better than Paladin. And we don't know if by using Inner Beast we are doing better anyhow.

Also Blood Bath doesn't benefit from Wrath. Your raised crit will benefit Blood Bath however.

Please show me numbers of your self healing with crit and the sources of that self healing and post them here. I would like to see a parse from Titan and what your parser says about your crit rate during the encounter.

I checked my parser and noticed that the average heal tick from Blood Bath is about 25 with my current gear and Ifrit weapon. Every 90 seconds, with your alleged 33ish% crit, I would get 12.5 HP heal on top of it. So one every three Blood Bath ticks I get that extra. I still don't see that making much difference.

Vengeance reflects 50 every time you get attacked. I don't know if that can crit. Can you show me a parse that shows that it can crit? Blood Bath, applied to Vengeance will heal for 25% of that damage, and considering that's small damage, it's also a small heal.

Steel Cyclone: you advocate keeping Wrath stacks but then you drop them for Storm Cyclone. I guess you use it only when Infuriate is up, otherwise you are dropping your Wrath and receiving less healing from others while AOEing, and Overpower could do the job instead. It's also spammable. I never felt the need to kill targets one by one, I felt overpower + Bloodbath kept me alive, but this is not something I can honestly say will be true for adds on hard battles because I haven't done hard modes that have adds.

In the mean time Strength has buffed every single of those Blood Bath ticks, as well as Steel Cyclone, as well as Inner Beast, as well as Second Wind etc.

I still don't see how stacking crit is king vs stacking strength.

If you are capped on an item and can't meld any more strength into it, by ALL MEANS go crit. Otherwise strength.

Vengeance