7 Ideas to Balance WAR

[Kitru]

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.

You may want to actually learn a lot more before you start saying anything, like perhaps reading any of the analysis that's been done concerning WARs and PLDs in comparison across every imaginable aspect of performance that can be quantified.

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.

Except that WAR doesn't actually have a stronger set of weapon skills. Maim and SE have to be used to make up for the fact that WAR suffers from a larger damage debuff in tank stance, not to mention the fact that PLD has a single high enmity combo that does everything for it. CoS is actually a lot *better* than Spirits Within because it doesn't depend upon being at max hp, not to mention that it's an AoE (also, CoS generates slightly more enmity than a single Overpower while being off the GCD and affecting a larger area and being easier to use) so I'm not even sure why you think that Spirits Within is somehow amazing.

It's been gone over numerous times: WAR does not have an appreciable offensive advantage over PLD. WAR has an *ever so slight* offensive advantage over PLD that is so small that it vanishes as soon as you get into a group while having *explicitly* atrocious utility and survivability compared to a PLD. Claiming that comparing CD suites is unfair because WAR gets fancier offensive toys just demonstrates how little you know about the subject.

[Seidaku]

My suggestion would be to make the healing bonus apply to defiance and change IB from a heal to a skill that increases the duration of thrill of battle to 60 seconds and grants a slightly weaker form of bloodbath so we can help keep those extra hps up. They should also change unchained to a skill that we can put up to increase our dps similar to sword oath since we should not be even close to a pally under that aspect, atm unchained is about completely worthless when compared to the viability of IB.

While we are at it they need to fix steel cyclone. This ability should only be available while infuriated and should not drop stacks but I think it should refresh the stack. How nice would it be to have an aoe ability that can work in conjunction with overpower and maintain our wrath. So rather than removing all our stacks it should build one to refresh the timer. Take the dmg down to 180 or something to compensate but then it would actually be useful.

[Hachiko]

I'm not even sure why you think that Spirits Within is somehow amazing.

Spirits Within IS amazing. If there is one thing the PLD weaponskill kit excels at it's utility. Spirits Within being a silence on a 30 second cooldown, shield Bash being a non-GCD stun, Rage of Halone reducing STR, and even Shield Swipe being a Pacify (of dubious value, admittedly) shows that the weaponskill set for PLD is objectively better.

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.

Not sure exactly what you're trying to say here. Of course they don't have to be the same and yes in some cases both will reap the benefit of the others' debuff, but they won't always, or even often. And the major issue that it comes down to is that the value of Storm's Eye debuff is much lower than the value of Rage of Halone debuff. Storm's Eye doesn't really make a WAR tank that much better, it just makes their self healing slightly more potent when they need it, while still maintaining single target enmity. In fact, you could attribute the damage difference between the tanks entirely to Storm's Eye.

But the issue is that when it comes to what matters - not dying - RoH is king. I agree they are allowed some degree of asymmetry, but I'm extremely sick of people saying WAR doesn't need more tools to reduce damage they take, or that giving them say Fists of Earth will suddenly make them imbalanced. And it is still over a 10% difference in damage taken even if WAR was to be given Fists of Earth, which is the point I was going to make.

[SwordCoheir]

I still think letting Heavy Swing Build Wraith and maybe lowering the recast of Unchained would probably have the biggest impact on WAR despite being relatively small changes. Why? Well allowing Wraith to build up on Butchers block cuts down the building time by about half, it allows us to use abilities like SC, Unchained, and IB with less downtime on without full stacks which means less stress on the healers, and overall increases our DPS and self healing capability by a wide margin. As for lowering Unchained's recast it just up's our chances to do some solid DPS in a fight, that's pretty self explanitory.

[Kitru]

Spirits Within IS amazing. If there is one thing the PLD weaponskill kit excels at it's utility. Spirits Within being a silence on a 30 second cooldown, shield Bash being a non-GCD stun, Rage of Halone reducing STR, and even Shield Swipe being a Pacify (of dubious value, admittedly) shows that the weaponskill set for PLD is objectively better.

What I was trying to say (which I think got lost in the post) was that Spirits Within isn't amazing when compared to CoS. CoS is the objectively *better* weaponskill. The poster I quoted was stating that Spirits Within was substantially better than CoS, which is just horribly wrong.

Personally, I think that the non-damage weaponskill suites of the two tanks are as mismatched as many people seem to think it is. The problem is less that the WAR or PLD weaponskill suite is stronger or weaker than the other but rather that the PLD weaponskill suite is much more defensively oriented and, as such, much more useful in the long run, mainly because the offensive contributions of a tank are tiny in comparison to the output of the group as a whole. Reducing the damage that a tank takes (and the damage the group takes on some raid damage) is a much larger proportionate increase to effectiveness than simply increasing the damage that the tank deals: tanks take a *monumental* majority of the damage for a group but only deal a fraction of the damage. A 5% decrease in damage taken is going to do *way* more than a 10% increase in damage dealt. Hell, a 5% decrease in damage taken is going to do more than a 20-30% increase in damage dealt thanks to the ratios of DPS to tanks and DPS damage to tank damage.

For SE to honestly be equivalent to Halone, it needs to reduce resistance to *all* damage by 10%, or, at the very least, all physical damage. Halone provides a proportionate increase to the survivability of the entire group; SE just provides a proportionate increase to the smallest damage contributors in the group.

[Kitru]

I still think letting Heavy Swing Build Wraith and maybe lowering the recast of Unchained would probably have the biggest impact on WAR despite being relatively small changes. Why? Well allowing Wraith to build up on Butchers block cuts down the building time by about half, it allows us to use abilities like SC, Unchained, and IB with less downtime on without full stacks which means less stress on the healers, and overall increases our DPS and self healing capability by a wide margin. As for lowering Unchained's recast it just up's our chances to do some solid DPS in a fight, that's pretty self explanitory.

The problem with this is that it still doesn't make those self heals scale with incoming damage. All you'd be doing is making WAR stronger (by a *crapton*) in easy content while making minor improvements to performance in difficult content. The self-healing needs to be made to scale, not just be made bigger or more common.

Also, the damage that a tank deals isn't part of their primary role. Increasing the damage dealt doesn't make a tank more effective at tanking. It provides a secondary advantage to bringing one along, but it's not what you bring a tank for. Increasing damage dealt is akin to increasing the utility of the class: it's a secondary concern. A tank that deals 50% more damage is still going to be left behind for a tank that takes 10% less damage for anything where you actually have to worry about a tank. All that your damage increase ideas would do would be make WARs more popular for 4 man dungeon speed runs; they'd still be horribly unpopular for anything that isn't a joke to survive through.

[SwordCoheir]

The problem with this.

Well it's a matter of perspective, allowing WAR's to build Wraith faster lowers the downtime spent rebuilding stacks and allows you more opportunities to self heal with IB reducing the stress on healers. Lowering Unchained's recast will increase opportunities for DPS for sure but it also increases opportunities for reactive healing because of higher hate thresholds (even if SE sucks) and lowers time spent fighting mobs.

But then again that's just my take on it, I'm not trying to scale everything to something that's stupid broken like SC was in 1.0, but having more opportunities for self healing does allow you to keep your own HP up and going more consistently instead of being forced to hold back all the time for "oh crap" moments seems kind of backwards progress to me.

[Nights87]

Here's my two cents:
Allow WAR to stack 7 wrath. Keep healing buff scale. Make IB use only 5 stacks instead of all wrath. That should help to close the EHP gap while keeping the panic button option available.
Also I second the idea to let WAR parry from any angle entirely because of the intro movie.

[Hachiko]

Well it's a matter of perspective, allowing WAR's to build Wraith faster lowers the downtime spent rebuilding stacks and allows you more opportunities to self heal with IB reducing the stress on healers. Lowering Unchained's recast will increase opportunities for DPS for sure but it also increases opportunities for reactive healing because of higher hate thresholds (even if SE sucks) and lowers time spent fighting mobs.

But then again that's just my take on it, I'm not trying to scale everything to something that's stupid broken like SC was in 1.0, but having more opportunities for self healing does allow you to keep your own HP up and going more consistently instead of being forced to hold back all the time for "oh crap" moments seems kind of backwards progress to me.

You miss the point. If 100% of WAR mitigation comes from self heals then they aren't scaling with content because Tank DPS doesn't scale as fast as monster DPS does.

For a WAR to currently be on the same level as PLD in terms of mitigation their self healing would need to increase by a factor of nearly 4. That would mean nonsense like Inner Beast healing for 1000% of the damage dealt which would be "stupid broken like SC was in 1.0."

And trading off tank survivability for DPS only matters if a) you have the throughput to heal them for the duration of the fight, and b) the tradeoff in DPS is high enough to offset the increased healing required to keep them up, i.e. if they take 20% more damage they end the fight 20% sooner. But for that to happen, WAR would need to have roughly the same damage as a DPS job tacked onto them while tanking, which would put them at a higher DPS level than any of the DPS jobs which, again, would be stupid broken.

As an aside, lowing Unchained's recast time does nothing to improve healing received because unchained doesn't increase the damage of Inner Beast for one, and for two actually getting off an inner beast in unchained requires the usage of a secondary cooldown (infuriate).

Neither would benefit the WAR and would just leave them as a sub par tank"

[Genesiser]

You miss the point. If 100% of WAR mitigation comes from self heals then they aren't scaling with content because Tank DPS doesn't scale as fast as monster DPS does.

For a WAR to currently be on the same level as PLD in terms of mitigation their self healing would need to increase by a factor of nearly 4. That would mean nonsense like Inner Beast healing for 1000% of the damage dealt which would be "stupid broken like SC was in 1.0."

And trading off tank survivability for DPS only matters if a) you have the throughput to heal them for the duration of the fight, and b) the tradeoff in DPS is high enough to offset the increased healing required to keep them up, i.e. if they take 20% more damage they end the fight 20% sooner.

If IB worked like this, then it would scale with your gear improvements along with the difficulty of the content. Why not get behind this idea? It seems to solve a lot of problems with warrior.

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.