7 Ideas to Balance WAR

[Nonohana]

If some how some miracle happens and SE make the changes I suggested, War would have viable Static 10% Damage Reduction Via Fist of Earth, 15% Constant Healing received via Defiance, +10% chance to parry with 5 wrath, +25% HP in Defiance, pretty much a 2nd Thrill of battle via "Second Wind" and a 15sec Absorb via damage dealt.

I think that would be enough to compete with PLD Shield with Chance to Block, Shield Oath (20% Constant DR), Rampart (20% DR) Sentinel (40% DR), Bulwark (Increase Shield block by 60%), Hallow Ground (Invincible for 10 sec) Rage of Halone (-10% STR on Target), 2 Stuns, and 1 Silences.

Fist of Earth make WAR EHP become x1.38 (PLD x1.25) and Effective Heal Bonus become x1.27(PLD x1.25).
This overwhelm PLD's Shield Oath.

We don't need WAR and PLD to mitigate same amount of damage, but at least 2 jobs needs to scale alike, and I don't think WAR should overwhelm PLD's Shield Oath.

Fist of Earth is way too strong.
Yes Rampart and Sentinel scale up by DR, but with Fist of Earth stable IB Heal looks do more for most situation include Bahamut.
1200 IB heal per 22.5 sec mitigates 53 dps and heal can be higher ... is a LOT of static mitigation.
We have Infuriate(60sec) this mitigate 20 dps with extra IB heal, berserk and Internal Release mitigates 10 dps or so and Fist of Earth make all of those efficiency multiply by 1.11...
so 53 + 20 + 10 = 83 * 1.11 = 92 dps mitigation without Foresight, Bloodbath, Thrill of Battle, and Featherfoot, ANNNND this is still STATIC.

even against 1000 DPS PLD do only (well this is huge mitigation)
Rampart do .2 * 20 * 1000 / 90 mitigates 44 dps.
Sentinel do .4 * 10 * 1000 / 180 mitigates 22 dps.
Those two most efficient actions doesn't reach to IB heal mitigation.
Leave Rage of Halone because it benefit both WAR and PLD.
Leave Shield Oath because it's overwhelmed by Defiance + Fist Of Earth.

I'm not math genius so I wonder if I've done this right but looks Defiance Fix + Fist Of Earth OP.

With Fist Of Earth WAR heal Bonus should be 10%. (3% behind on heal bonus) Then WAR still needs to nerf something else. ... and WAR still needs some actions to scale.

[Hundred]

Looking at Inner beast in terms of healing per second or mitigation per second is faulty relative to it's purpose. It's a burst heal, good for getting some breathing room after a burst hit. For sustained damage Wrath is better. That won't change with Fist of the Earth.

[Nonohana]

Looking at Inner beast in terms of healing per second or mitigation per second is faulty relative to it's purpose. It's a burst heal, good for getting some breathing room after a burst hit. For sustained damage Wrath is better. That won't change with Fist of the Earth.

4. Add 15% healing buff to Defiance and add 2% chance to parry per wrath instead

This totally changes Inner Beast. It make IB stable and we can calc IB heal as mitigation per second.

[Hachiko]

This totally changes Inner Beast. It make IB stable and we can calc IB heal as mitigation per second.

I think he was just proposing it, and if you lost 10% parry for using inner beast it would be iffy to use it every time you hit 5 wrath... but anyhow.

I think if you just look at IB + (Static 15%) Defiance + Fists of Earth vs. Shield Oath then yes, that combo will come out on top from a pure mitigation standpoint, but I think you are leaving off too much. Shield block still accounts for ~5-6% damage reduction, and in my testing it looks like it also moves some crits off of the table (relatively my WAR was crit ~20% more often than my PLD). In my testing without considering Rage of Halone, sheild oath + shield block just passively worked out to ~27% less damage taken for my PLD. So by leaving off the chance to block I think you're missing something critical.

Point two is that Rage of Halone is not something to dismiss. It is significant (though I haven't thoroughly tested it), and just because both tanks can benefit from it it is only very rarely that a PLD would be able to use it in a non-tanking situation. It would benefit on something like Cad before the split and turn 2, but it really is only benefitting the paladin on turn 4 and post split Cad.

Point three is that unless inner beast is dramatically changed you still have to worry about overheals making Inner Beast's usage less efficient. In fact, even if the stacks were static you would still only want to use it if you are down ~2x what you heal for, in case a cure 2 lands at the same time. So getting the perfect IB heal / 20 mitigation as a constant thing is not super likely.

Point four would be that PLD still would have a lot of advantages. You're comparing Inner Beast heals to their cooldowns but that's sort of a stilted comparison because their cooldowns pretty much blow WAR cooldowns out of the water. For example, PLD would still have more EHP for single hits under Sentinel and also still have the godly hallowed ground.

Ultimately it's unlikely that any change SE could make would put WAR in a place like PLD are in now unless they really just re-vamped warriors in a really dramatic way.

Just as some quick math, on a boss doing 1000 dps, assuming RoH is ~5% damage reduction:

Shield Oath cuts 20%, Block cuts ~6%, RoH cuts 5% (all multiplicative), which leaves ~714 HPS to be healed.

For a WAR with a static 15% and Fists of Earth cuts 10%. That would leave ~782 HPS to be healed Even under perfect conditions with IB you would still not catch up to PLD before they use their cooldowns.

[Shingi]

As most of you already know. SE will be buffing war to make them more on par to War. I pick 7 cause thats how much things they are considering to change

1. Make "Fist of Earth" Cross Class

2. Remove Haymaker off GCD. it interrupts combos as it is now

3. Make "Flash" Blind standard

4. Add 15% healing buff to Defiance and add 2% chance to parry per wrath instead

5. Change Second Wind back to the way it was in Beta. It use to recover 15% . In Full DL I have 7500 hp, i would recover 1125 every time instead of the 600-800 i do now.

6. Make Rampart Crossclass.
In exchange for Savage Blade...why the heck did they give us Savage Blade anyway ?

7. Lastly, Make Bloodbath recover 50%(100% traited) of damage dealt for 15secs.Increase CD If you think that sounds OP, PLD has a ability that makes him invincible for 10secs.

Please like if you think these are good ideas. So This can get SE attention. Thank you

of 7 suggestions i see 2 based purely on WAR skills, the rest are cross-class skills.

WAR was designed to mitigate via self-healing as opposed to PLD's mitigation. what needs buffing is WAR self healing, not taking stuff to "be more pld"

a Trait at level 50 to reduce bloodbath cooldown to half and increase its healing to 100% returned, along with storms path returning 150% and turning mercy stroke into a "heal when used in last 20%" rather than "heal on kill only" skill should give WAR all the self-healing assitance it needs at endgame, will still be more MP intensive for a WHM but we work better with SCH it seems anyway.

[Genesiser]

How about make inner beast give the heal like it does, but also put an absorb shield on you equal to 50% of the damage received during the last5 seconds from enemies?

That would make warriors scale with their gear in terms of the heal along with the content by getting a bubble equal to a percentage if damage recieved.

Also, when you take a big hit or a lot of damage, say 5k dmg, you heal yourself by a decent amount and the healers would have time to rescue you as opposed to having you potentially be 2 shotted in the span of 2 seconds.

EDIT....
How about this too? Leave warrior how it is, but make the warrior revolve around inner beast for real. What I mean is, let it be used with any amount of wrath stacks, but each stack makes it stronger. Kind of like this...

1 stack : heal for 60% of dmg dealt from move, get bubble equal to 5% of dmg received in last 5 seconds.
2 stacks : heal for 120% dmg dealt, bubble equal to 10% dmg received.
5 stacks: heal for 300% dmg dealt, bubble equal to 25% dmg received.

Of course, it would be better if healing bonus was tied to defiance instead of wrath stacks, but it would still be pretty good and it would add a bit more strategy to warrior tanking which is always a good thing.

[Fiosha_Maureiba]

Would like to see the enhanced trait for Fracture afflict Paralysis, also with the intent that Paralysis is something that bosses aren't immune to. Might balance out once diminishing returns comes into play.

May need to be balanced some if this occurs, e.g. non-trait duration, but slightly upping its damage to make it slightly DPS attractive for cross class.

[Ehayte]

You're comparing Inner Beast heals to their cooldowns but that's sort of a stilted comparison because their cooldowns pretty much blow WAR cooldowns out of the water

I'm just a beginner in the finer points of a WAR (lvl, like, 40 or something unimpressive), but I have a decently geared PLD. Comparing IB to PLD CDs is very fair. PLD does not have anything to compete with skills like IB and Maim (Spirits Within being the stand-out for PLD weapon skills. Circle of Scorn is OK, but OP beats the crap out of it in most useful aspects). A fair comparison is Infuriate Vs. Hallowed Ground (HG wins but A LOT, lol), ToBattle Vs. Rampart (Again, Ramp wins), Foresight vs. Bulwark, Featherfoot (MRD) vs Foresight (PLD). I'm not saying WAR wins ANY of those fights, but you can't make a blanket comparison between CDs only, because WAR has a weaker suite of CDs in exchange for a stronger set of Weaponskills.

They got totally screwed on the deal, but that's how I see it.

[Ehayte]

They actually specifically said that cross class abilities were getting looked at, because some classes have really useful ones, while others are completely useless.

I meant they aren't going to change the way another class's ability works for the benefit of WARs. And I don't think they would trait a cross-class.

[Hundred]

This totally changes Inner Beast. It make IB stable and we can calc IB heal as mitigation per second.

True if you make that change it would be, albeit parry isn't worth enough to be worth the choice imo, would just throw out IB then and that be slightly monotonous.

of 7 suggestions i see 2 based purely on WAR skills, the rest are cross-class skills.

WAR was designed to mitigate via self-healing as opposed to PLD's mitigation. what needs buffing is WAR self healing, not taking stuff to "be more pld"

a Trait at level 50 to reduce bloodbath cooldown to half and increase its healing to 100% returned, along with storms path returning 150% and turning mercy stroke into a "heal when used in last 20%" rather than "heal on kill only" skill should give WAR all the self-healing assitance it needs at endgame, will still be more MP intensive for a WHM but we work better with SCH it seems anyway.

100% absorb for 30 seconds on a 45 second cooldown would be absurd.
Mercy stroke is meant for multi-enemy situations as I see it which is why it works the way it does, a buffer like
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Assassin's_Promise would be some nice QoL for it.
I thought about Storm path at 150% before, its something like ~1/3rd of an IB right, would be good when you're up on Enmity for some sustain given you have the TP before it. I think it can work, but I've seen another suggestion to make storm path give a buff that makes your attacks absorb (like bloodbath) which I thought was cool. Either way the skill currently is pretty useless from day 1, so a buff can't hurt it.

For a WAR with a static 15% and Fists of Earth cuts 10%. That would leave ~782 HPS to be healed Even under perfect conditions with IB you would still not catch up to PLD before they use their cooldowns.

WAR doesn't necessarily have to be at the same state before CD's even though you included RoH. They are allowed some degree of assymetry, and in contrast to RoH, WAR is increasing his damage with eye, which I think is fair enough for a divide to be made in that particular comparison between defensive and offensive strength given that when the two come together they both reap the benefits of the others debuff.
I believe you said before it doesn't matter for balance, but the lack of relevance in Storm path and even Bloodbath is kind of off-putting. Defiance nerfs the healing of Bloodbath and Storm path 25%, kind of wonky given that mitigation vs health pool has an old problem of effective healing being increased in one, with the health pool taking longer to replenish itself making it fall behind. When you're nerfing the healing of bloodbath and Storm path 25% while increasing your health pool 25% it's really backwards in that respect, especially given that Storm path never healed for anything to begin with and Bloodbath was "eh" from the first run in Satasha.