Will Warriors ever get any LOVE?

[TheWitcher]

Both PLD and WAR should have teh base 20% damage reduction, PLD already has far superior mitigation tools, you can remove the stupid 15% extra healing and HP from Defiance, but the tanks will never be on par if one has 20% mitigation its just to good

[Nanaya]

The tank with superior mitigation is the preferred one for endgame, color me surprised.

I will definitely agree Warrior needs tweaking. The only time I go on Warrior anymore is to farm. If it is actual content, Paladin is just easier on everyone, at least in my experiences. AK is not nearly a good enough dungeon to warrant paying close attention to my rotations for the 50th run, PLD on primals is less effort on the healers, especially when you are getting Mountain Buster'd, etc.

I am curious to see what they will try to make the class more enticing. It will never be allowed to mitigate as much damage, because that's the Paladin thing, but clearly they need to be able to take less damage to be wanted.

[RedEyeDeath]

I have only hit 42 warrior and I love the tank. Its a lot of fun to play. Defiance is beautiful for enmity and inner beast is an awesome move. Defiance makes bloodbath useless though.

I have heard about healers having a hard time keeping their mp up whilst healing a warrior tank.
Is a high ether or a mega ether or elixer out of the question or something? I know they have a 60 second cool down and you can hotbar an item.

[Hachiko]

I have only hit 42 warrior and I love the tank. Its a lot of fun to play. Defiance is beautiful for enmity and inner beast is an awesome move. Defiance makes bloodbath useless though.

I have heard about healers having a hard time keeping their mp up whilst healing a warrior tank.
Is a high ether or a mega ether or elixer out of the question or something? I know they have a 60 second cool down and you can hotbar an item.

It's not just MP problems, though that's part of it. It's also the number of GCD's required to heal someone. Warriors require ~9% more healing, baseline, under optimal situations (holding on to 5 stacks of wrath). So even if MP wasn't an issue, you're talking at least 9% more GCD's to keep a WAR healed. This means to heal a WAR in the same amount of time as a PLD would be healed either a) they have to rely more heavily on Cure II (significantly more MP) or b) they need 10% more GCD's to heal the tank.

Under situations with high, constant damage it just becomes much more taxing for healers to keep up, because once you get to situations where the tank is taking a ton of damage, their self healing from Inner Beast is dwarfed by the 15% bonus healing from Wrath, which makes it only usable on a 1 minute CD. And since WAR mitigation scales with WAR dmg, it simply wont scale as fast as PLD mitigation which scales with Monster damage.

[Makeda]

What are talking about? I love my Warrior plenty!

Joking aside, what exactly is wrong with Warriors?

When people said the class was weak, Yoshi, in more polite words, told them to "L2P":

y; Earlier today, I was told by a player that Warriors are weaker than Paladins
y; They are harder to play
f; It’s more technical
y; You need to bring in a lot of the the additional (skills?) to get it fully out
y; But really, in development team, warrior are really strong, and it’s more stable
y; So right now it looks like Paladins can hold the enmity and tank, however
y; honestly Warriors are really strong.
y; Players haven’t researched enough so I would like players who are up for a challenge to stand up and play.
y; We the development team really recommend Warriors

http://gamerescape.com/2013/09/20/tg...h-translation/

I suspect that the devs feel the current crop of warriors and those healing them are doing it all wrong. Probably because too many people are trying to boost mitigation instead of self-healing.

To get attention on it, folks will have to figure out how the devs are playing the class, how dev healers are healing it, copy that, and then still end up weak. Folks need to stop trying to play a shieldless paladin, and go play a warrior - IF after doing that it stil comes back weak, Yoshi might pay more attention.

[RedEyeDeath]

Hachiko, that makes a lot of sense. I have been leveling up gladiator(fell in <3 with it when I leveled it for warrior) as well and through that journey I really have noticed that gladiators can just last longer. I solo'd a 23 fate at 21(with 17 green gear) with nothing but myself and my chocobo. Could I have done the same as marauder of that level..im not so sure.

Sounds like the problem is in your very last sentence.

"And since WAR mitigation scales with WAR dmg, it simply wont scale as fast as PLD mitigation which scales with Monster damage. " So why doesn't warriors mitigation scale with monster damage as well?

This is just an observation but I noticed a buckler on Curious George's AF gear. Im guessing for aesthetics only. lmao

I have noticed that pairing the ability berserk with Inner Beast will make you heal much much more.

A rotation I pulled off: I was able to hit the 40 Job move takes off the damage limiter, (can't remember name at moment ><) , then hit em with the Storms Path (1 Wrath) Berserk(2 Wrath) Enmity Combo (4 Wrath) Maim(5 Wrath) Inner Beast-- healed me almost 1K damage. I also popped featherfoot for the whole thing.

[Artamie]

I can't say I have much experience tanking on warrior but lore-wise the warrior excels at what they do with the aid of a scholar right? From what I've seen, people have been saying that PLD + Sword Oath will put out as much if not more damage than a warrior with defiance on using their auto-attacks. The scholar's Selene fairy is able to increase skill speed up to 30% so how does the damage field look with that factored in?

[Gamemako]

I suspect that the devs feel the current crop of warriors and those healing them are doing it all wrong. Probably because too many people are trying to boost mitigation instead of self-healing.

Please understand that I haven't gotten to endgame WAR. However, I can see a glaring mathematical disadvantage for WAR based on damage output observed in videos. In these videos, tanks are taking no-joke 1000 post-defense damage per second (this is 800 damage per second on a PLD after Shield Oath). WAR's self-healing compared to PLD's Shield Oath, nevermind Rampart and Sentinel, is pathetic in these cases. Let's consider a case where PLD has a 5% mitigation advantage from blocking. WAR will have an average of 7% healing bonus from Wrath over 17.5 seconds (requires use of 1 off-GCD move, which isn't always feasible, but we'll be generous). Over 17.5 seconds at 1000 DPS, PLD mitigates about 4166.67 damage. WAR heals around 1000 from IB and heals an additional 1144.86 through DPS-matched healing bonus (quick note: 15% healed is less than 15% reduced -- it's 1-1/1.15, or ~13% damage reduction equivalent). That puts WAR behind by 2021.8 per 17.5 seconds, or around 115.5 per second. That's before you consider Rampart and Sentinel, for which WAR has no equivalent. Basically, if you try to spam IB as WAR, you're necessarily going to suck. Everybody knows that by now, of course.

If you hold 5 stacks of Wrath as long as you can, you'll alternate between Infuriate and building 5 stacks over 15 seconds. You could just as easily laugh at this, because you're obviously doing the PLD-but-not-PLD setup which is obviously weaker. Still, it's worth demonstrating that in endgame scenarios, this is the most efficient way of playing WAR. Over 75 seconds, you'll have 5 stacks of Wrath for 60 seconds and around 7-8% for 5 seconds (we'll assume 7% as for). You'll get roughly 981.3 additional healing during alternate building phase (15s) and 7826.1 additional healing over waiting phase (60s), plus two shots of Inner Beast (~2000 more). That's a total of 10807.4 per 75s, or 144.1 more per second. For IB spam, we had 122.56 healing per second. Now, to be fair, you should include Infuriate in the IB spam method. If you assume you hit it straight away, it's 1000 HP per 60s, or 16.667 per second. On top of the previous number, it's 139.23 per second for IB spam method, but you've now got an extremely unreliable setup for IB spam. Oh, and it's still weaker in this scenario than just sitting on Wrath stacks and being a gimped PLD.

This is just the math. WAR is inferior in this scenario by a lot, and playing WAR as a gimped PLD is the most efficient way to do it. You could make a case for other elements making up the difference, but the opposite is true: PLD has equivalents for everything WAR uses (or just cross-classes the skill), plus has its own advantage in the form of Rampart and Sentinel as well as superior Stun and the all-important Silence (which WAR outright lacks). Even if someone figures out a way for WAR to survive better, PLD will copy the strategy and still be the superior tank. With damage rates as high as they are right now, WAR will necessarily be weaker.

WAR cannot win here, and I believe there is a fundamental part of design (mob damage rate relative to player HP) which prevents WAR from being able to keep up in any current endgame scenario. Worse, SE cannot just buff WAR's healing; it would just become even more overpowered solo. There are only two viable countermeasures: to provide WAR with party-specific mitigation or healing boosts, or to reduce healing and damage rates. Since GLA/PLD already has Convalesce, there are limited options here without just duplicating skills. Buffing Wrath's healing rate bonus would do it, but the change would make the class more PLD-like (i.e. would increase the advantage of the sit-around-and-not-use-your-abilities setup). Buffing IB's use rate would make WAR unstoppable outside of endgame parties. Neither of these would address the gulf created by the lack of burst mitigation, which would still mean that WAR would die first. The one solution which would address the problem up and down is to reduce healing and damage rates (maintaining the same healing-to-damage ratio, but effectively boosting net HP reserve and relative advantage for WAR's self-healing), but that has one right up and huge disadvantage -- it makes the game easier, and that isn't acceptable. And finally, none of these would address the skill weaknesses of WAR.

So yeah, I think SE is just about painted into a corner here. I expect WAR to suck intil level cap increases at least, simply because the changes required to be competitive are far too great. Let me give you an example of how you'd address it by changes, and you'll see why it won't happen:

Net reserve durability changes:

Wrath
-> HP bonus increased from 25% to 33%

Thrill of Battle
-> HP bonus increased from 20% to 30%
-> Cooldown reduced from 120s to 60s.

Sustained mitigation changes:

Wrath
-> HP healing bonus increased from 3% per stack to 5%

Core ability weakness changes:

Steel Cyclone
->Added Stun effect

//EDIT: That post turned out a lot longer than I had intended.

[Roaran]

Warrior is different. I have cleared up to turn 4 in bahamut's coil and not once have I felt inferior to our paladins. We take 20% more dmg, but we receive 15% more in healing. We have much much more HP, and we have the ability to do some significant healing in a pinch. Almost all damage in ARR is predictable... Titan's mountain buster, and in the bahamut coil the boss's stacking buffs/debuffs are all mechanics that you can plan your skills around. If you use your heals correctly, you are very very hard to kill.

[Ninix]

Glorious Yoship-sama say warrior is fine

git gud