7 Ideas to Balance WAR

[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.

[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.

[Hachiko]

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.

I have a few hesitations about it.

First, it loads all of WAR survivability onto one active skill, which seems kind of questionable from a design standpoint. I think Inner Beast should be A tool for WAR survivability. Not the virtual only tool that WAR relies on. (also worth noting it would immediately make something like Thrill of Battle of questionable value).

Second, I'm not convinced it could be really well balanced. It still has big potential to be overpowered or underpowered.

Third, I'm not sure if it could be implemented in the current engine. I don't know the limitations of the game's combat log, but considering all the iffy things that happen in combat (i.e. not getting healed for killing blows inflicted by Mercy Stroke) I don't think I would want to let my char's survivability rely on such a thing.

Fourth, I'm not sure I like the way it would changed IB's usage. It would remove any strategy from using IB and IB would move simply to "use it whenever it's on up, and save Infuriate for emergencies." Not only that, but it would change WAR from a sort of anticipation and reaction based tank to a purely pre-emptive mitigation tank which is closer to being like paladins than people realize.

As a note, your second idea would make WAR obscenely overpowered without some fundamental reworks to Inner Beast. The rotation would be HS->SS->IB->BB->IB->HS->M->IB->SE->IB->HS->SS->IB->BB->IB etc. etc. etc. It would essentially triple WAR damage output, and suddenly WARs in tank stance would not only do more DPS than WAR outside of defiance but probably more than any other DPS in the game.

Uhg..I'm just, I'm so tired of you. I was not talking about DPS, I was talking about tanking utility.

- Maim gets WARs up to 90% DMG (75%x1.2 = 90%) 10% higher than PLDs in Shield Oath, add in SE and you are relatively higher. So you need to use Maim OR SE to make up AND OVERCOME the larger (5% lol) dmg debuff.
- OP is GCD, it may cost a lot of TP, but even with conical targeting (which is NOT that difficult to manage) it has much more enmity utility because it doesn't take 15s to build all the enmity, and its not a 30s CD (RE: CoS).
- SW has a silence....and its a 300 potency attack (maybe slightly less) at the start of a fight to add an enmity cushion. And it has a silence. And a silence....I'm not sure why you think Circle of Scorn is somehow amazing.

You are the Toby to my Michael.

You are under-estimating the value of Spirit's Within and particularly Circle of Scorn. Having two off GCD abilities which function as essentially 10 Potency/second each is extremely high value. Once you consider that PLD has the best damage buffing skill in Fight or Flight, they really close the gap between the two jobs.

The entire "advantage" a WAR has is based on how often they use Inner Beast. At no usage a WAR is probably going to be ~3-4% higher DPS. At constant usage ~12-18% higher.

WAR will have more AOE damage though, that's a given, but it comes at a high cost.

all in all, giving WAR's more or more effective ways to self heal in post-50 instances shortens the gap between PLD mitigation and EHP and sticks more with the theme of the job, rather than making it a "semi PLD with an axe" simply by trying to increase mitigation. I've said my numbers here are ball park, approximates and could likely use some more looking in to and fine-tuning, but for me they are far more in-theme and effective than most other suggestions i've seen thus far.

That's mostly because you have no experience with endgame tanking or playing a WAR at the endgame. Just having additional mitigation doesn't make WAR a semi PLD with an Axe. It's actually necessary for WAR to be a balanced class in the long run, because there is no way to increase healing alone to make them viable at endgame without making them completely and obscenely imbalanced before that point.

[Shingi]

That's mostly because you have no experience with endgame tanking or playing a WAR at the endgame. Just having additional mitigation doesn't make WAR a semi PLD with an Axe. It's actually necessary for WAR to be a balanced class in the long run, because there is no way to increase healing alone to make them viable at endgame without making them completely and obscenely imbalanced before that point.

and just what are you basing my level of endgame experience on?

if you bother to read my original post in this thread, the point i was making was having a level 50 trait to bring those changes in, so they're not available like that as cross-class skills and not before needed to survive endgame content without being such a drain on MP.

just because mitigation "works" doesnt make it the only solution, and its not in the theme of how WAR was designed. all my suggestion does is provide an upscale in WAR self-healing potential thats only available at endgame when its needed.

I'd ask you to also refrain from making further comments about me personally and if you feel the need to rebuke my ideas, work purely on them rather than the person making them.

[Hachiko]

I'd ask you to also refrain from making further comments about me personally and if you feel the need to rebuke my ideas, work purely on them rather than the person making them.

Your ideas straight up wouldn't even work at endgame. There is no degree of buffing that would make Storm's Path a solution to WAR problems without completely reworking the skill. Your solutions simply wouldn't work no matter what you feel the "theme" of the class is, because relying entirely on self heals will never come close to being enough mitigation for WAR without being an absurd degree of mitigation for lower level or lower teir content. You honestly haven't thought it through.

There is no way to have WAR be balanced at endgame via only self heals for mitigation and also be balanced at early game.