Balance analysis of 2.1 WAR proposed changes

[SwordCoheir]

Good to see someone took initiative and made a detailed outlook on things.

Note that a 20-second interval is particularly troublesome for WAR -- I had to create a rotation which had 6.5 seconds of downtime for Inner Beast. It is unavoidable, even in burst situations. Each of the situations includes both the baseline stance bonus in addition to the abilities themselves. For the sake of simplicity, I have neglected the time required to build Wrath for each initial use of Inner Beast -- because the ability is your burst mitigation, you should have it on hand for most situations. If you don't, it's because you're just entering an encounter or you're bad.

I kind of noticed that too when I was examining how well it would all play out in an actual combat scenario trying to keep IB up 100% of the time. At the start you can get a good 30 seconds of IB effect for about the first minute and a half and of course Vengeance for another 30 seconds. However, afterwards you start to get gaps due too Vengeance/Berserk's cooldowns, and then there's the unavoidable overlap with IB and Vengeance reducing the amount of uptime that your mitigation abilities can truly be up at any given point.

Anyways back to the shield thing, I see alot of folks overlook the Blind Effect on PLD's Flash. Overall it seems to be a solid % in accuracy reduction so you actually can evade things with some reliability, but like blocking it's all chance so it's impossible to predict it's mitigation prowess unless the mob is immune to it's effect.

Either way I see alot of potential for both PLD and WAR having a very symbiotic relationship in things like coil and primals.

PLD's support WAR's by pumping out Blind (Flash), Stoneskin, STR down (RoH), Cover.

WAR's support PLD's by Damage down (SP), Slash Dmg up (SE), Holmganging opponents away from PLD (IE moving them out or range/binding so no damage outside of ranged attacks).

And really nobody could tell me having STR down and Damage down 100% of the time together wouldn't be glorious for everyone? (Hell throw in Rain of Deaths effect and the occasional Virus too, all the possibilities are makin me jittery.)

Ahh, but I digress rather than looking at the black and white of which would be better, peeps should be looking at what they can do together.

What about class damage output and threat generation with the changes? Are these aspects going to be as potentially balanced as survivability?

Also, what about when cross class skills are thrown in the mix?

Examining both jobs they're pretty much on par as both take CC abilities from one another and none of the respective changes actually affect the CC abilities.

Now that Wraith stacks are more usable WAR will have a bit more flexibility damage wise, however this will have a double edged effect. Mainly you can use Unchained and not have that mitigation or use IB and not have that extra damage output forcing you to be a bit more decisive.

I thought IB was losing the heal aspect?

Just being reduced from 300% to 100%.

[TouchandFeel]

Examining both jobs they're pretty much on par as both take CC abilities from one another and none of the respective changes actually affect the CC abilities.

Now that Wraith stacks are more usable WAR will have a bit more flexibility damage wise, however this will have a double edged effect. Mainly you can use Unchained and not have that mitigation or use IB and not have that extra damage output forcing you to be a bit more decisive.
.

I'm sorry but I'm going to have to disagree here. Yes they do have some shared CC skills, however I feel that the ones that WAR gets from PLD are more useful overall, not to mention that the CC abilities from PGL are also more useful in combat than the ones from CNJ, at least imo. WAR get 10 CC, PLD get 9. For WAR 2 of 10 are attack abilities that will most likely not get used, for PLD 3 of 9 are these type of attack abilities. The PGL CC skills for WAR are mainly buffs that can provide more potential damage or more survivability via better heals, while the CNJ CC skills for PLD are good for solo but not useful in a group except maybe stoneskin.

This doesn't seem equal to me.

Also, in my experience WAR already had a bit of an edge damage wise against PLD and now with wrath being more useable attacks like Inner Beast could potentially be used more since the Healing buff isn't reliant on keeping wrath stacks. This could potentially increase their damage output, so what was already a marginal leg up could become more noticeable.

This again doesn't seem equal to me.

I am all for the classes being equally viable and equally good at main tanking, off-tanking, whatever, but you can't make them equal in one aspect and ignore the rest. Equality should be throughout to truly be equal.

[SwordCoheir]

This doesn't seem equal to me.

It's a matter of perspective with CC abilities really, I kind of consider the traits each job has as a factor as well, but even then the balance is hard to determine based on preference, playstyle, and category of the ability.

Like I said before though, WAR is going to be a bit more double edged and split down the middle on Mitigation, Enmity, and Damage. Instead of managing one rotation like PLD, you need to optimize using three WS tree's which if your not tanking it's not a big deal, but you might struggle a bit more with Enmity when you're trying to use SP/SE's effects, or forgo their effects for the sake of crowd control. The same can be said about using Unchained and IB you can pick DPS or Survivability but not both.

[Shingi]

I am all for the classes being equally viable and equally good at main tanking, off-tanking, whatever, but you can't make them equal in one aspect and ignore the rest. Equality should be throughout to truly be equal.

here's why those changes were made, emnity increase allows WAR to use the new debuff skills in rotation rather than having to constantly spam the butcher's block combo just to keep hate, TP reduction is so we dont run out in longer fights trying to keep hate (PLD has MP refresh to keep flash running for emnity)

there's no change in CC skills because there's no need for it, WAR was always designed to have a higher damage output over PLD as our emnity has to come from that, we can cross-class flash sure, but its not as effective as a PLD's version and we cant refresh our MP to keep using it.

with the changes bringing WAR eHP up to par with PLD, i'd say the original balance while keeping the difference in playstyle between the two jobs is restored.. and there SHOULD be a difference, or whats the point in having two tanking jobs?

[TouchandFeel]

Snip

Honestly, the majority of your points I understand and agree with.

I still feel that the choices that WAR have for CC skills are a bit better in group/boss content, but that is the only part of what you said that we might differ on.

[Gamemako]

with the changes bringing WAR eHP up to par with PLD, i'd say the original balance while keeping the difference in playstyle between the two jobs is restored.. and there SHOULD be a difference, or whats the point in having two tanking jobs?

I'm personally still disappointed that they didn't try to focus on reworking the self-healing aspect, but what they have suggested will more or less work where the old design simply didn't.

I am still leaning against the particular changes to Vengeance, though. From a design standpoint, I still feel it would better be placed on Unchained than Vengeance. Both are an effective damage increase, but Unchained would additionally reduce the ability to stack buffs too frequently, and would avoid potential design issues for the MRD second job.

//EDIT:

Why is war ahead on effective health baseline in the graph they are 5% behind pld. 20% more healing does not equal 20% less damage taken. You need 25% healing to equal that.

Effective HP is a function of total HP and guaranteed bonuses. It does not concern healing bonuses at all. WAR and PLD have nearly identical base HP, and WAR gets +25% HP while PLD gets a 20% damage reduction which is an effective increase of 25%. WAR is slightly ahead due to the 85 HP advantage the job gets at base.

Since you have requested, the example there is at 6000 HP for the PLD, which is 6085 HP for the WAR. After Defiance, WAR has 7606 and the PLD has an effective 7500.

[Vire]

Effective HP is a function of total HP and guaranteed bonuses. It does not concern healing bonuses at all. WAR and PLD have nearly identical base HP, and WAR gets +25% HP while PLD gets a 20% damage reduction which is an effective increase of 25%. WAR is slightly ahead due to the 85 HP advantage the job gets at base.

The problem is you are not taking into account that filling up that 25% extra hp on both tanks are not equal.
This is why you do effective health because this is not very clear unless you show how much actual hp a Pld and War have when it comes to healing and taking damage not just the total number when they are full.

edit:

This fine poster did the math already so instead of redoing it ill paste it.

Effective health:
Assuming both have 5500 HP before stances
Warrior: 5500 * 1.25 = 6875
Paladin: 5500 + 20% dmg reduction = HP/(1 – 0.2) -> HP = 5500/0.8 = 6875
So without heals the effective health is the same, but things change once healing is taken into account. Tanks take 5k dmg over time and need to healed.
Paladin: 5000 * 0.8 = 4000 dmg to be healed
Warrior: 5000 dmg to be healed
Even with the warrior buff it is still a bit harder to heal the warrior. Paladin requires 4k to be topped off, if the warrior got 4k heals, with its bonus it would get healed for 4800 hps , 200hp short to be back up max. For the warrior to be healed to full with the same heals the paladin requires it would need a 25% healing buff instead of 20.

[Gamemako]

The problem is you are not taking into account that filling up that 25% extra hp on both tanks are not equal.

You are talking about two different things, both of which are represented in the first post. The first is effective HP, which determines whether or not you survive the big hit, like a critical attack and Death Sentence. This does not concern healing at all, just whether you make it out the other side while still standing. The second is mitigation, which is represented in all of the graphs aside from the first one. Those describe how much your tank's abilities reduce the amount of healing the healers have to throw out to keep you alive over time. In each one of those graphs, the benefits of both Shield Oath and Defiance are properly represented (and yes, Shield Oath offers a larger effective bonus than Defiance).

[Shingi]

I'm personally still disappointed that they didn't try to focus on reworking the self-healing aspect, but what they have suggested will more or less work where the old design simply didn't.

I am still leaning against the particular changes to Vengeance, though. From a design standpoint, I still feel it would better be placed on Unchained than Vengeance. Both are an effective damage increase, but Unchained would additionally reduce the ability to stack buffs too frequently, and would avoid potential design issues for the MRD second job.

i'm in agreement that a change to the self-healing would have been the more "thematic" change, but scaling that so its effective at endgame and not overpowering for other content would require a level of fine-tuning that could take several months, and WAR needed a change quickly, and could very likely be "exploited" (or used in an unexpected/unpredicted-by-the-dev-team manner) much like taking 2 PLD's into coil was. of course any change to any class can produce that result,,

I'm unsure of a few of the changes also, mercy stroke's alteration makes little to no sense to me, as for me its issue wasnt about the cooldown, but the timing required to get an effective heal from it when you have 7 other people involved in combat. holmgang's change looks more like a provoke-replacer as well, and i'm unsure how that will effect dynamics in two-tank events. can only wait and see how the players take on these changes and how they effect balance though.

[Yunnie]

War Defiance will give +20% healing received .. Along with +25% HP... How does that affect eHP?
It looks like in your equation, your not listing it

My interpretation is your listing defiance as only +25% HP without taking into account healing received bonuses-
Edit:
Never mid - I re-read some other prior posts, and you don't consider healing received part of eHP. So ignore this post of mine