How would you fix Warrior?

[Gamemako]

OK, let me get this off my chest.

Things which will not address WAR's problems:

1. Increasing Inner Beast's use rate. You'd have to basically dump IB after every single combo before it catches up with PLD, and you'd be comically-overpowered for non-endgame content by that point. Boosting flat heals is a losing proposition.
2. Adding a shield to Inner Beast. WAR cannot take a hit to heal it in the first place. Even assuming that no overheal occurs, WAR is hugely behind. Furthermore, unless you'd be reducing overall heal amount, you'd run into the same problems as above.
3. Make Steel Cyclone or x other ability drain health. You're boosting self-heals as a function of time again, plus failing to address WAR's inability to tank single opponents. You'd boost the ability to off-tank adds, but that is already simple enough that WAR in its gimpy state can do it.
4. Increasing WAR's DPS (e.g. removing Defiance penalty, boosting Steel Cyclone damage). WAR's problem is not that it cannot hold aggro; WAR's problem is that it cannot survive hits. Boosting damage is just not relevant at all.
5. Boosting Storm's Path heal. It's never going to be worth using. You don't have room for it in a rotation even if it did heal a significant amount.

If you want WAR to be decent, fix WAR's problems. Here's WAR's burst survival problem in one chart:


(Assumes 6000 base HP for PLD -- chart will look pretty much identical regardless of what base HP you choose, because WAR has just a flat 85 HP advantage over PLD. Note also that Rampart and Sentinel are multiplicative with each other and with Shield Oath. I did not include Hallowed Ground for obvious reasons.)

Until this is addressed, WAR will continue to die to damage spikes while PLD will not. This is neglecting that the boosts PLD receives also come with an effective healing boost for the duration. The changes required to address this are quite large. If you increased the HP boost on Defiance to 50% instead of 25%, you'd look like so:



This is a rather large buff -- sufficiently large that I doubt the dev team would dare implement simply because it would look really, really bad. And yet, even with that kind of large buff, WAR would still lag behind in terms of burst reserve. Still I propose this as the change that needs to be made for WAR to be competitive.

Now let's look at continuous mitigation and the scaling problem. We'll look at the least-viable way of playing WAR: dump IB as soon as you can. You will have no burst mitigation left here and will pretty well die to the simplest of opponents. We'll assume IB used 4 times per minute (1 per 20s plus 1 Infuriate use). Heal per shot is dependent upon build and gear and will vary between 850 and 1200 per shot -- we'll look at both cases, assume 100% use of Maim & Storm's Eye, plus zero overheal. This is the absolute best-case scenario for WAR.



In this best-case scenario, and a good look at the scaling problem for WAR. By the time you reach any endgame content, WAR is left behind in the best case by PLD's passive mitigation alone. Each Turn4 Dreadnought delivers 1000 pre-mitigation DPS, and two of them will make poor WAR utterly hopeless at best. Nothing can go wrong for PLD, and WAR would have to have insane skill and fortune to reach this. Here's the killer, though: more realistic case would be this:



This is a better view of the problem. This is 3 IB per minute, 20% average overheal. I adjusted to add an additional stack of Wrath on average as well to account for reduced IB use rate. When things aren't perfect for WAR, WAR might as well not even use IB -- sitting on Wrath is better. Again, this is not compared to Rampart or Sentinel, this is just compared to PLD sitting around in Shield Oath, and does not consider the blocking (and possible crit reduction) advantage that PLD has. In any case, WAR is horribly behind. It's worth asking here why sitting on Wrath looks better here compared to the perfect case. This is purely due to the overheal assumption. Because you are not healing as much per shot, using IB becomes a negative -- this happens much earlier with the ilvl70 case. However, the difference isn't really that huge because the amount healed by Wrath has crept in and quite nearly taken over with respect to overall mitigation.

What would it take to fix it? Well, tying continuous mitigation to burst mitigation isn't a good mechanic in the first place. So let's decouple them, giving Defiance a flat 20% healing bonus regardless of Wrath stacks. Without changing anything with respect to self-healing rate, this is what your reasonable-case situation looks like:



Now, let me remind the reader that this neglects the blocking advantage enjoyed by PLD. Including that blocking advantage, you'll see that PLD would still be passively superior to WAR at high damage rates, while still enjoying superior burst abilities. However, a change like this would go a long way toward making WAR at least viable at endgame.

//EDIT:

If I assume that Paladin blocks an additional 5% of all damage over WAR, then this is how PLD compares passively to my buffed case:



This is neglecting the impact of Rampart and Sentinel as well, comparing just passive PLD reduction. I will need to get better data on PLD and WAR blocking and parrying rates and amounts, however; right now, this is just ballpark.