Will Warriors ever get any LOVE?

[Gamemako]

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.

That is not correct. WAR receives 25% more damage compared to Shield Oath alone, and Gladiators have an additional passive mitigation bonus in terms of shield blocking. Estimates typically put this advantage at 4-5%. You will therefore take about 30% more damage than PLD ignoring cooldowns. Furthermore, you cannot sustain that 15% healing bonus; even using the common don't-use-IB-until-you-have-to setup, you're averaging around 13%. At this time, WAR has 85 HP more base HP than PLD. This is nearly negligible at endgame, comprising less than 2% advantage. In terms of core reserve, PLD's effective HP (i.e. HP adjusted for passive mitigation) is greater than WAR's after accounting for shield block.

All you gotta do is look at the stats on some endgame Japanese warrior. There is nothing wrong with war.

This can be done with a PLD as well. As I stated above, WAR gets only 85 HP more than PLD. What you have there is someone who dumped points into VIT -- which isn't necessarily wrong, given how utterly gimped HP drain is right now.

PARRY is your damage mitigation. it can be over 20% sometimes. DEX and PAR affect the RATE at which you parry - you will see this in the damage popup.

DEX will never increase parry rate sufficiently to improve durability in a meaningful way. If ever there were ever any justification for doing so, PLD would get more benefit from it due to stronger blocking strength -- it would necessarily increase the durability gap between WAR and PLD. Fortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.

[Sargon]

give WAR a passive that turns all their self heals into a shield if they end up over healing themselves

What we need is Mordekaiser!

[BadRNG]

Why do people keep bringing up AK or mid level stuff? The very first sentence of the thread says endgame. That is when the disparity starts to become noticeable.

And it should be further noted that being able to clear endgame stuff (viability) is not the same as being as effective at doing it. Pretty much every endgame guild is saying PLDs are far safer/more reliable at that level.

[Naelle]

I think the problem with Warrior lies in the the eyes of 1.0 players. Steel Cyclone was just ridiculously good and they may have heavy handed it a bit. I agree with most people here in that Warrior can tank anything that Paladin can, sometimes better. At the same time however, Paladin will be better at some fights also.

[ShinTofu]

As of now I prefer a well geared warrior tank over same gear pld for everything except for binding coil. They tank everything fine with far better dps too. Now I personally can't say anything about coil yet since our fc just finished getting Titan for the last 3 members of our coil group and we will be running it for the first time tonight. I've heard they have some problems but we'll see. Whatever the case we have only 1 true endgame location and not even the first true patch yet so will be holding off judgment calls.

[Makeda]

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.

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:

If that is what you believe, you need to convince SE of it, not me. And that first means unlocking the secret of the meta they use in their own testing - which I suspect is radically different from that of the players not having good results on warriors.

I suspect, based on reading the people who claim it is fine, that the meta involves dropping your mitigation and boosting your strength and critical so as to spike up your self-healing. Maybe not...

But whatever it is... until we find it, and can point back to SE and say "We did what you do, and it still doesn't work" - they'll keep coming back with "it works for us, what is your problem?"

Everyone is doing all this math, and I think SE is just saying "you folks are using the wrong formula." Look at what I quoted, from Yoshi. He's the one you need to convince. But first you have to suss out his formulas...

Im just gonna ignore all the threads about how warrior is bad and try it out for myself. I think ill get WHM 50 first but it just seems theres already so many healers out there.

My plan is to level scholar as soon as I finish warrior - its one thing to read all this theory from different sides, I want to try it, and see if I can unlock the 'meta' for healing warriors. If Yoshi is actually right - we need to find it. If he's wrong, we're stuck proving him wrong on his terms...

That said, roughly 1 in 4 toons are tanks, and roughly 1 in 5 are healers. The game needs more healers. Especially PUG healers.

its all about position in that fight if ppl just stand anywhere your gonna have cracks under everyone and wiping the team.

I've begun "training" my FC-mates from my first dungeon on about mobility.

I know everyone says 'tank stand still so the DPS can flank and backpoke' but I don't. Lessons from having to learn how to move as a healer at level 70 in WoW, circa 2007, when suddenly the effects were too big to stand in and I was the sole person causing my entire raid to wipe over and over for many weeks... I soldiered through and taught myself how to handle any role while moving like a cartoon tasmanian devil.

So I move all the time when tanking, DPSing, or Healing. And If I'm tanking - it means you learn to move with me, or you stand there wondering where the enemy just went. BUT I move in ways to lesson the impact of those red patterns on the ground - and if you learn my waltz, you'll be pretty safe. Because I intentionally position to get the effect off of both me and my DPS whenever possible.

One of our rising healers had been doing pug groups to help him learn his healing role, he ran with this particular WAR and his comment was please don't try to teach healers the runs with him as tank because they will suck with everyone else because a run with him is such a cake walk. I don't know what he's doing but he's sure as hell is doing it just right.

This really must come down to preference and skill... Nothing wrong with the job in my eyes even as a healer.

I've been saying for a while that as long as the red arrow of a mob isn't facing you, it wastes time turning to you, and MAYBE can't auto-attack hit you...

I think I self-proved that, or something else last night. My keybinds were messed up last night after I moved them a little to what I thought would be better... Result was that my usually pattern of circle-strafing when solo became stand in front of them and move through or back...

Suddenly mobs that I used to finish off while at near full health were dropping me to 25% per pull in my 'GC leve' soloing... At first I though "this must be because my gear is getting old" but then I recalled that the same leve's a few night earlier were a breeze. Adjusted my keybinds back, and my near immunity returned...

That's not very much of a 'why warrior works' comment - the same gimmick should work for a paladin too. And its really a marauder that I'm on in this one - and soloing. So my point is really that: how you play and position is very important. Maybe more than your gear and your rotation.

[Gamemako]

If that is what you believe, you need to convince SE of it, not me. And that first means unlocking the secret of the meta they use in their own testing - which I suspect is radically different from that of the players not having good results on warriors.

Ha, if only I could get Yoshi's ear! Regardless, I be interested to see any suggestion of how WAR would close the gap, because I don't see anything which would suggest a remote chance of meeting PLD. Anyway, just to clear out the self-healing method...

Seeking only survival (note that you'd lose aggro, lose your defensive cooldowns, and lose your interrupts all if you did this -- this is just dumping cooldowns for building Wrath in a 90s Berserk/Bloodbath cycle), a WAR can push about 11,500 post-crit healing potency per 90 seconds (based on a spreadsheet I set up some time ago). Endgame WAR built for STR should push near 1 damage per potency. 11,500 heal per 90s is 127.78 per second. In addition, you'd have around 7% average healing boost. At 1000 damage per second, that's 65.42 more from the healing bonus, or a total of 193.2 HP/s from increased heal and self-heals. We know that PLD has already won, because the extra mitigation from Shield Oath alone is 200 HP/s, then shield block advantage and PLD use of Bloodbath. After all that, you'd have PLD who is more durable, still has interrupts, and has superior survival cooldowns (Rampart and Bulwark). And if you didn't gather from the first sentence, this strategy is completely untenable for a Warrior -- you would put both yourself and your team in jeopardy by attempting it. A more realistic rotation is around 9500 healed per 90s, which is weaker but doesn't involve hanging your squishy arse on the line by abandoning all of your defensive CDs sans Foresight.

If I want to be more thorough, I can look at the available skills and tell you that none of them will make the difference. Mantra is 5% healing for 15 seconds per 120, which is hilariously bad. Featherfoot is roughly equivalent to Bulwark over the duration -- this is why I never mention Bulwark as an advantage for PLD. Haymaker provides an effect (Slow) which several party members already have, which can only be used on rare occasion due to reduced evasion rates in endgame dungeons, to which opponents build resistance, and to which many opponents are immune. Internal Release is good for boosting damage and drain, but is only a boost of 10% of base damage for 1/4 of the time -- I used it in the spreadsheet estimate.

Full-STR self-healing is actually how I recommended people play the job back when the 300/300% setup first leaked -- it seemed the mathematically-superior route. It thought it would make a lovely tank and and only a little bit weaker at the absolute limits of healing capacity. However, at the time, healing was half as effective as it is now, and that proffered a limit on enemy damage which was not unfair to WAR. I assumed that the design would be more focused on skillful evasion and teamwork rather than raw tank-and-spank efficiency, that neither tank would withstand a bout standing in one place with whatever enraged demigod showed up. Alas, that never came to pass. With that boost to HP healed and associated dungeon design which involves incredible damage rates, WAR cannot keep up -- we knew that to be WAR's weakness before Phase 4 began. Basically, WAR's design made good sense as a berserking monster with P3 healing. At the limits of healing, WAR would require more skilled play than PLD, but could go toe-to-toe any time. PLD would be preferred, but WAR would still work out with some adjustments. The new healing formula makes WAR comparatively weaker, and that's pretty much all there is to it. Again, WAR might have made up the difference with other interrupts or similar means of decreasing enemy damage output, but it's PLD who has these advantages over WAR, putting a few more nails in the coffin.

[Maddox]

You know I've been wondering this since release but:

PLD has Shield Oath and Sword Oath, and these skills are pretty typical of PLD's. Look at other MMO's and you'll see that most PLD classes have some sort of Oath, Aura , Blessing that allows them to take less damage and so on.

WAR in other games often has shouts that are basically the same equivalent to a PLD's Oath, Aura, and Blessings except they're for WARS.

So why don't WARS have some sort of shout for them in this game that works like PLD's Oaths?

[Firon]

snip

I agree with most of what u said except feather foot being on par with bulwark cause its not reducing dmg taken by 25-27% 60% of the time is tons better than feather foot.

[Vmage]

All you gotta do is look at the stats on some endgame Japanese warrior. There is nothing wrong with war.

that's a pretty poorly geared war tbh (why a strength ring? 1 darklight 1 hoplite is better)

my war is ~5600 without party buff, pld is ~5400 (stupidly bought af2 gloves for war)

it's not that people are going wrong and gearing incorrectly.

people are comparing a full darklight warrior with his relic+1, to a full darklight paladin with his relic+1

the paladin lives, the warrior dies

if you're running around in af and can't even imagine content where you could die if you were full darklight, most of the conversation here is over your head.