[GUIDE] Warrior: Skill Intensive Tanking

[Exrage]

I wouldn't trade either of those for Mantra, but I would definitely trade out Flash in some cases.



What is the other bleed? I don't see any other PoT ability accessible by WARs other than Fracture.

Again, if your party doesn't consist of a monk and you're doing 4 man content I would agree- but burning free MP for higher enmity at zero TP cost is golden during long boss fights at end game where every TP counts.

"Vengeance" is our second technical "bleed," while it doesn't apply a debuff to a specific target it applies a buff to you that impacts anything attacking you with a similar effect to a bleed with higher enmity/damage than fracture alone. Plus it isn't on GCD, which is always a bonus.

[Exrage]

Edit: It's Awareness that is gained @ lvl 34 GLA also another useful CD that isn't mentioned her.

As you've edited to mention another ability let's go into the why I didn't bother to bring it up:

Awareness reduces chance of critical hits against you by 25%, sounds like an awesome ability until you realize the bosses won't crit on their static massive attacks. Then we go into Bahamut, as it's the hardest hitting fight, and look at the crit values- between 7-9%, where HM Garuda with the largest crit values 11-13%.

In short it's far better to add the dodge to your dex rating, gain an MP enmity ability that happens to also be AOE, improve healing done on you, a free 22-31% self heal, or an ability that automatically places you at the top of the aggro meter for those "oh shit" moments than it is to negate a boss's critical hit rating for 15 seconds in which you are mathematically likely to only take one hit of 50% more damage if any at all.

[Exrage]

Buffs also obey the ANIMATION cool down, I.E. You can not simultaneously cast buffs, while they are outside the WEAPON SKILL cool down, you must wait for the first buff's animation to begin before being able to apply the next one and so on.

This is correct and was put into the game strictly to prevent macros from simultaneously activating abilities not on the GCD/WSC per the developers.

[Bobrangi]

Can I just ask a question / make a comment on the macros here. i.e;

/ac "Inner Beast" <t>
/ac "Heavy Swing" <t>
/ac "Tomahawk" <t>

with the GCD being 2.5s (skill speed aside) would you not need to put a /wait 2.5 in between each action?

One of my current macros looks like this;

/ac "Skull Sunder" <t>
/wait 2.5
/ac "Butcher's Block" <t>

I tried editing this to compensate for skill speed but when i changed it to /wait 2.46 it wouldn't trigger Butcher's Block;which indicates the wait action is required. I'm at work at the moment so can't test your macros out but I'm sure i had previously tried this without success.

My defensive macro looks like this;

/ac "Thrill of battle" <me>
/wait 1.0
/ac "Foresight" <me>
/wait 1.0
/ac "Convalescence" <me>

and without the waits in between I know it doesn't trigger all 3 consecutively. With this particular macro if i'm lagging, or am moving around too much at the time it doesn't trigger the whole macro either.

[James1213]

While a lot of your guide has some useful stuff for when I decide to finish leveling mrd I thought I would point out that using provoke at the start of a fight is a really bad thing to do since it only generates one threat because here is how the ability works. It matches your threat to the top person+1. So using it at the start of a fight just nets you one threat someone buffing themselves will cause the mob to chase them and in turn have you chase the mob around. The only times I can see provoke pulling being useful is during ak when you are pulling the sucubuses solo or getting a giant from a cross the way instead of waiting for it to finish its patrol.

[Exrage]

would you not need to put a /wait 2.5 in between each action?

No, if an ability is unavailable (on CD or GCD) when you click the macro button it will skip to the next line of code.

it wouldn't trigger Butcher's Block;

Look at the "Macro logic" post in the guide, what your macro is saying it will do is "If "Skull Sunder" is available use it, if not "wait 2.5 seconds", (error here) if "Butcher's Block" is available use it. The problem is that you can cast them both simultaneously despite wanting to cast them in an order. The macro you want to right requires an action order, which I will go over in the post after my next.

and without the waits in between I know it doesn't trigger all 3 consecutively.

You're right it won't, a macro will only trigger one ability each time it's pressed, and the logic dictates it will trigger whichever ability is first unless it's unavailable.

[Exrage]

I would point out that using provoke at the start of a fight is a really bad thing to do since it only generates one threat because here is how the ability works.

This is absolutely correct and thank you for catching it, originally I had "Tomahawk/Provoke" as the first move used but the first part I deleted for whatever stupid reason.

[Exrage]

Okay, so since Bobrangi touched on queuing multiple actions together (Skull Sunder and Butcher's Block) I figured I would go into why I didn't include it in a guide: 1 button macros ruin any sort of challenge. If you want to make them, I'll give you the tools but won't post them here.

Action Queuing: /aq[on] and /aq[off]
This triggers a queue per line that, even if the first ability in the macro logic is available it WILL NOT TRIGGER until the queue is turned off and turned back on again.

Equipping Actions To Your Bar: /eaction[slot] [actionname]
Another macro ability for the lazy, add it to your macro after your action and equip another macro into same button you just pushed, meaning you can keep tapping 1 and execute any combination you wish without fail.

There you have it, the secret to the laziest tank macro revealed. Now all it needs is one of you schmucks to post it for everyone to copy and paste, but not from my guide.

[eek711]

*Snip*

In FFXIV, what you're referring to as a GCD is actually what's termed a Weaponskill Cooldown. Similar concept, all "Weaponskills" trigger this Cooldown, while "Abilities" do not. However, all Actions (both Weaponskills and Abilities) have an animation, that cannot be cancelled, and must go complete before another Action is performed. If you have a macro that has Brutal Swing, Featherfoot, Vengeance, etc. only one will go off on a single button press. You will have to spam the button to get the others to go off as soon as the animations finish. This is why Brutal Swing being off the "Weaponskill Cooldown" isn't as useful as it would seem since it still requires whatever animation you're currently performing to finish before it starts up. You can see which Actions are Weaponskills or Abilities by looking at the mouse-over info panel for each of them.

Hope this clears things up.

[Exrage]

In FFXIV, what you're referring to as a GCD is actually what's termed a Weaponskill Cooldown.

WSC = GCD/Global Cooldown is just how most MMO guys understand it and thank you for pointing it out. On the note of the animation cooldown- it was implemented to ensure macros can't simultaneously queue abilities and that's per the developers. If you were referencing to my response toward Bobrangi's Skull Sunder/Butcher's Block macro, the problem with his macro is that it's referencing two abilities that share the same WSC/GCD and become available simultaneously- so the macro will only ever execute it's first line and second line.

Using wait every other line is horrendously wasteful to the 10 lines you get per macro should you be executing a queue, ergo my deliberately quick touch on the action queue (/aq[on] /aq[off]) macro as it turns a max 5 ability wait macro into a max 8 ability action queue macro.