XIV WAR Tanking - Baseline Mitigation and PLD comparison

[Kommunist]

Very decent post and analysis, hope that will put some senses into some people that just says 'l2p'. Play both like me, you tell the difference very EASILY.

[Hachiko]

Stuff

Some comments:

1) 6300 HP in full ilvl 90 gear is woefully low. Titan would be a stretch at that HP with 2 healers, and I'm pretty sure CAD and Turn 4 would be out of the question.
2) 1950 average inner beast w/ 4 inner beasts per minute (infuriate) works out to 130 Self Heals per Second (SHPS?), not 180. You can't get more than 4 inner beasts per minute, and even that is pushing it in reality.
3) adding Berserk, Internal Release, and Second Wind is unlikely to take you up 54 self heals per second. It seems like you're counting maybe 2 (or 3? But it's impossible) inner beasts per Berserk + Internal Release, and having both of those cooldowns up for second wind, and calculating the value of each skill despite the fact that their cooldowns don't line up perfectly, with each other or with Infuriate. I calculated this at ~35 self heals per second.
4) you left off Thrill of Battle for ~10 self heals per second @6300 hp.
5) you're counting infuriate twice. If you infuriate for double inner beasts, you don't benefit from the effective bonus healing of having 5 wrath stacks after an inner beast.

[Terabyt3]

Even if results aren't entirley accurate it might finally get into some peoples head that WAR's static mitigation doesn not run well in BC + Titan compared to PLD scaling mitigation.

I love my WAR. First job to 50. Most fun to play. Love the aesthetics and the idea of reactive tanking.

But anyone with an "onze" of common sense can see that once incoming dps becomes high enough % mitigation will overtake static any day.

It's not a question of "Can it be done" but a question of what is most effective. For BC currently it's PLD. Hands down.

[Casper]

Average Inner Beast - 1950 HP Recovered @ 650 Damage (Maim, Storm’s Eye)

Is this for real ? Honest question here, I am more on the daklight side of the gearing process, and i have a hard time seeing inner beast doing an average of 650 damage without berserk or internal release up. So is this legit ?

[coffeepotz]

This thread is disappointing, as now I pretty much should roll Pld, despite liking the look of war more...

[Terabyt3]

Is this for real ? Honest question here, I am more on the daklight side of the gearing process, and i have a hard time seeing inner beast doing an average of 650 damage without berserk or internal release up. So is this legit ?

Look at his STR, then yours. The compare your HP and his. He's STR stacked with really low HP pool. Awesome for speed runs. Sucks for being able to take a hit.

This thread is disappointing, as now I pretty much should roll Pld, despite liking the look of war more...

Roll both. WAR is viable for everything. Just not as efficient. PLD only really starts to outshine WAR in Titan HM and BC. Before that a DL WAR wins in AK and CM. (when incoming dps is low enough. AK you can almost go without healing!)

[Gamemako]

STR 451

Lol, nice. But calculations are pretty far off from what I'm seeing, and I'm not sure how you're getting them.

Valk's damage formula, which has been pretty good at estimating IB damage (e.g. Kunkka v. Faction), predicts 1.3756 crit-adjusted damage per potency. This is 1650.72 healed from IB after Maim and Storm's Eye. At 4 uses per minute (1 per 20s plus Infuriate), that's about 110 health per second excluding other cooldowns. If you get 2 of them off in Berserk per 90s, you'd be at less than 125 per second average (assuming 40% net damage boost from Berserk). Second Wind heals half as much as Inner Beast at 120-second intervals; it should be about 6.875 HP per second in over time. Thus, you're invariably less than 132 HP/s. That is the absolute limit, and thoroughly impractical. It also ignores overheal. Furthermore, if you look at the simplest no-off-GCD rotation, the average number of Wrath stacks is 2.33, or a 7% healing boost. If you compare to off-GCD rotations, you will vary between 6.0% (drop ability immediately before IB, which is exactly what you'll be doing with Berserk) and 7.7% (drop ability immediately after IB, thoroughly impractical). No matter how you slice it, Wrath's average bonus should be around 7% for a maximum-IB-spam setup. Now, that mitigation amount is tied to enemy damage input; you are healed as much as you are damaged. You adjust for amount recovered by self-healing, then divide by healing bonus according to this effective formula:

Wrath healing load relieved = [1 - 1/(1 + Wrathbonus)] * [damage taken rate - (self-healing rate * overheal ratio)]

Thus, at 1000 incoming DPS and 7% average Wrath bonus, you recover an effective 56.8 HP per second additional. This comes out to a total of around 188 mitigation per second at absolute max. Comparatively, if PLD is blocking 5% more incoming damage compared to WAR (which cannot block at all), then you expect a best-case comparison to be 240 passively mitigated by PLD compared to 188 actively mitigated by WAR. Just sitting on Wrath stacks gives you 130/s, which speaks about as ill of WAR's self-healing as could be imagined. If you want to include Rampart, Sentinel and Hallowed Ground as a rate, then PLD would be effectively just under 315 per second at 1000 incoming DPS. PLD will get all of that, of course, but if you want to look at what a WAR will realistically get, you can pretty much shave 20% off the top due to overheals and imperfect use. In any realistic endgame scenario, PLD will mitigate twice as much as WAR or more, plus superior burst reserve.

//EDIT: I realized that I forgot Inner Release and Thrill of Battle. IR will increase average self-healing rate by less than 1 per second (0.835). ToB at 6300 HP will give you 1260 back, or 10.5 per second when time-weighted. Still less than 200 in the very best case.

[Tronic]

Even if results aren't entirley accurate it might finally get into some peoples head that WAR's static mitigation doesn not run well in BC + Titan compared to PLD scaling mitigation.

I love my WAR. First job to 50. Most fun to play. Love the aesthetics and the idea of reactive tanking.

But anyone with an "onze" of common sense can see that once incoming dps becomes high enough % mitigation will overtake static any day.

It's not a question of "Can it be done" but a question of what is most effective. For BC currently it's PLD. Hands down.

So sad, but so true. I'm levelling my pld and switching to him as my main when he hits 50. I even have a garuda sword ready.

[Judge_Xero]

Some comments:

1) 6300 HP in full ilvl 90 gear is woefully low. Titan would be a stretch at that HP with 2 healers, and I'm pretty sure CAD and Turn 4 would be out of the question.
2) 1950 average inner beast w/ 4 inner beasts per minute (infuriate) works out to 130 Self Heals per Second (SHPS?), not 180. You can't get more than 4 inner beasts per minute, and even that is pushing it in reality.
3) adding Berserk, Internal Release, and Second Wind is unlikely to take you up 54 self heals per second. It seems like you're counting maybe 2 (or 3? But it's impossible) inner beasts per Berserk + Internal Release, and having both of those cooldowns up for second wind, and calculating the value of each skill despite the fact that their cooldowns don't line up perfectly, with each other or with Infuriate. I calculated this at ~35 self heals per second.
4) you left off Thrill of Battle for ~10 self heals per second @6300 hp.
5) you're counting infuriate twice. If you infuriate for double inner beasts, you don't benefit from the effective bonus healing of having 5 wrath stacks after an inner beast.

I wanted to use best case scenario so:

2) I used 4.5 IB per minute + factoring in ~20% Crit Chance

For the rest I used a 6 Minute (360s) scale in order to fit all the CD's within a timeframe and then scaled it back to per second.

The reason I went with a "best case scenario" is to compare it directly to PLD with it's automatic 20% damage reduction with Shield Oath which is always active.

I am not sure what kind of DPS a tank will be facing in BC in order to even compete with Paladin, but wanted to show what Warrior was capable of in "the best" endgame DPS to HP absorb gear as that seemed like the best comparison.

Lol, nice. But calculations are pretty far off from what I'm seeing, and I'm not sure how you're getting them.

Valk's damage formula, which has been pretty good at estimating IB damage (e.g. Kunkka v. Faction), predicts 1.3756 crit-adjusted damage per potency. This is 1650.72 healed from IB after Maim and Storm's Eye. At 4 uses per minute (1 per 20s plus Infuriate), that's about 110 health per second excluding other cooldowns. If you get 2 of them off in Berserk per 90s, you'd be at less than 125 per second average (assuming 40% net damage boost from Berserk). Second Wind heals half as much as Inner Beast at 120-second intervals; it should be about 6.875 HP per second in over time. Thus, you're invariably less than 132 HP/s. That is the absolute limit, and thoroughly impractical. It also ignores overheal. Furthermore, if you look at the simplest no-off-GCD rotation, the average number of Wrath stacks is 2.33, or a 7% healing boost. If you compare to off-GCD rotations, you will vary between 6.0% (drop ability immediately before IB, which is exactly what you'll be doing with Berserk) and 7.7% (drop ability immediately after IB, thoroughly impractical). No matter how you slice it, Wrath's average bonus should be around 7% for a maximum-IB-spam setup. Now, that mitigation amount is tied to enemy damage input; you are healed as much as you are damaged. You adjust for amount recovered by self-healing, then divide by healing bonus according to this effective formula:

Wrath healing load relieved = [1 - 1/(1 + Wrathbonus)] * [damage taken rate - (self-healing rate * overheal ratio)]

Thus, at 1000 incoming DPS and 7% average Wrath bonus, you recover an effective 56.8 HP per second additional. This comes out to a total of around 188 mitigation per second at absolute max. Comparatively, if PLD is blocking 5% more incoming damage compared to WAR (which cannot block at all), then you expect a best-case comparison to be 240 passively mitigated by PLD compared to 188 actively mitigated by WAR. Just sitting on Wrath stacks gives you 130/s, which speaks about as ill of WAR's self-healing as could be imagined. If you want to include Rampart, Sentinel and Hallowed Ground as a rate, then PLD would be effectively just under 315 per second at 1000 incoming DPS. PLD will get all of that, of course, but if you want to look at what a WAR will realistically get, you can pretty much shave 20% off the top due to overheals and imperfect use. In any realistic endgame scenario, PLD will mitigate twice as much as WAR or more, plus superior burst reserve.

//EDIT: I realized that I forgot Inner Release and Thrill of Battle. IR will increase average self-healing rate by less than 1 per second (0.835). ToB at 6300 HP will give you 1260 back, or 10.5 per second when time-weighted. Still less than 200 in the very best case.

That's a great tool. The reason my numbers are different is because I was getting different results as to the effectiveness of Weapon Physical Damage.
I did a comparison test using the Lominsan Bhuj (30 Physical Damage) and the LT Labyrs (38 Physical Damage) as it was a difference of 8 Physical Damage (LT Labyr vs Bravura + 1)

After testing to see if the Bhuj was hitting any STR stat caps (which it wasn't at my current STR rating) I compared it to the Labyrs at almost identical stats, which was a difference of ~ 70 Damage, compared to that tool's difference of 36 Damage.

[Gamemako]

2) I used 4.5 IB per minute + factoring in ~20% Crit Chance

Neither of those are possible. You cannot exceed 1 IB per 17.5s from 2*combo+off-GCD, and you lose 5 seconds per 90s due to Berserk and 2.5s per minute from the Infuriate IB. You have less than 1 GCD leeway per minute in achieving 4 IB per minute, and 4.5 is totally impossible. Absolute perfect use would theoretically allow 4 uses per minute, and as Hachiko rightfully pointed out, that is extremely shaky. The ratio you added for Berserk and IB is also huge. Split off the meager 7 HP per second from Second Wind and you have assumed waaaay too much power behind the two damage buffs. Sanity check -- do you really think Berserk and IR add 26% to your overall DPS?

That's a great tool. The reason my numbers are different is because I was getting different results as to the effectiveness of Weapon Physical Damage. I compared it to the Labyrs at almost identical stats, which was a difference of ~ 70 Damage, compared to that tool's difference of 36 Damage.

You're going to have to post your whole data on this. Regardless, the tool has been very accurate in predicting Inner Beast damage with the Bravura+1. Kunkka had 423 strength with a Bravura+1 and scored 1536, very close to the predicted 1505 from the formula. You aren't going to accelerate away very quickly here. No matter how you slice it, the average non-crit heal should be around 1600, not 1950.