Consolidating Warrior 4.0 Feedback Thread

[jojarth]

My thoughts on why warriors are broken. Warning and applogies: War and Peace levels of text.

First off, they still feel like a decent tank. But when I say tank, I mean brick wall. We seem to have a very powerful cooldown in the form of Inner Beast. If SQEX’s goal was to have warriors be a brick wall tank, they did a good job.

I really feel like warriors are broken for a different reason. The “spirit” or “feel” of the warrior just isn’t as good as it was. I don’t mean “it’s not the best tank anymore, so it doesn’t feel right”. But I mean just the raw feeling of the warrior isn’t there anymore. Here is what I mean:

One of the things we all loved as warriors was the Offensive tank. We have these hulking huge battle axes, we must tame our Inner Beast to keep from decimating armies, we temper our anger with our desire to protect our allies to calm the beast inside. But these days, that feeling is gone. Warrior had that feeling captured by being the undisputed champion of tank DPS in the last expansion through various means. We used offensive cooldowns to buff our defense, such as hitting Berserk to improve our HP gain through Bloodbath and inner beast and\or Unchained (if in Defiance), or using vengeance to counter attack multiple adds with bloodbath and berserk. We also used defensive cooldowns to aggressively improve our offense, such as using raw intuition to boost our Wrath stacks for more Fel Cleaves or Decimates. This was engaging gameplay, but more importantly, it fit with the warriors Aggressive Tank theme.

One of the biggest problems with the warrior as it exists now, is that you must choose to be offensive or defensive, and once you’ve made your choice, you’re stuck with it for a while. It used to be so fluid to switch between the two, it really felt like a choice. Now, with the way beast gauge works, it feels like you must be stuck with your choice for a while longer, even beyond the cooldown for stance swapping. Before if you made 5 stacks, but knew a big hit was coming, swap to Defiance, turtle up, take the hit, swap back to deliverance ASAP. Need to stay in defiance for a while? Hit Unchained, and keep going! That choice isn’t there anymore. The resource loss is almost never worth stance dancing for a small bit of time, leading to more boring game play.

I feel that warriors should be the king of tank DPS again. SQEX has shown that they don’t have a problem making one DPS class higher than the rest by sacrificing utility (looking at you SAM), and I feel they could bring this to the Warrior too. I don’t mean far and away the best, and I don’t mean the “Best when you consider 6 fel cleaves” either. The 6 fel cleave dream feels like it artificially increases our DPS, and the conditions for use must be perfect. I feel that we should have consistent, even DPS most of the time, then get some good Fel Cleave usage during the berserk window, but not relying on 6 Fel Cleave Dreams to keep us in the running. The Warrior needs to be powerful, but not so powerful that the utility of the paladin or dark knight are forgotten.

Now we come to the part where I make suggestions. Many of them have been suggested before, and many of them are good. But we should go through why they are good too (in case SQEX reads this!). As I make suggestions, please remember that my goal is the following:

1. Preserve the aggressive tank feel. We are a tank first and foremost, and many of our skills should reflect that. But we also are aggressive, and many of our skills should reflect that as well. The goal is defensive cooldowns that have offensive use, and offensive cooldowns that have defensive use.
2. I’m trying to avoid 6 fel cleaves being the crux of our rotation. It’s dumb, especially when we can’t line it up perfectly. Instead, I focused on smoothing gauge generation, but removing the ability to get in 6 Fel Cleaves. You should still be able to get several Fel Cleaves in a berserk window, for burst damage, however, but not 6.
3. I’ve tried to bring the feeling of the aggressive warrior around. Making it so that tanking in Deliverance is easier by allowing some threat increases in Deliverance, etc… You should still feel far sturdier in Defiance (between Inner beast and other skills), but you should be able to make the choice of which stance to utilize for any situation.
4. Do not give the warrior any utility. IMO, the Paladin should be 3rd on damage, but 1st on utility. The Dark Knight should be 2nd on damage and utility. The Warrior should be 1st on damage, and provide little utility. Slashing Debuff is enough.

First off, change how much gauge we lose when changing stances. Since our Defiance doesn’t really kick in until we are healed, I think a 0 gauge cost is appropriate, but when you consider all the other changes I’m about to suggest, I believe that it would also be over powered. Maybe a 10 or 20 gauge cost, based on current gauge.

Inner Release: This skill is twofold, it’s exciting to get, but it also makes me angry. This skill is responsible for the “6 Fel Cleaves” thing, which is amazing but should NOT be the cornerstone of our DPS. If I was trying to balance this, I would make this skill a little different. Like many people suggested, I think it should no longer share a cooldown with Unchained. I think the effect needs to be different too. I would make it so that either the next Gauge spending attack recovers gauge equal to what it would have spent, instead of halves it, or that the next gauge spending attack doesn’t use gauge. Then add an HP recovery on attacks (like the old bloodbath) for the duration as well. Again, the goal here would be to make warriors DPS higher, but also rely less on the 6 fel cleave dream.

Shake it Off: This skill would be amazing with a shorter\no cooldown, and it worked on more things. As it is, the effect is nice, but unused in so many cases, that it feels like an empty skill. In light of my inner release re-adding a bloodbath like effect, I would change Shake it Off down to 30 seconds, and change it so that our next Gauge spending attack restored HP equal to 100% of the damage done. Use this skill to double Inner Beast’s healing, or tack on Healing to Fel Cleave. Decimate for a lot of healing, or Steel Cyclone for Healing and threat.

Onslaught: There are many people talking about this skill and I can see why. Honestly, Onslaught needs to either cost no gauge, or it needs to generate a minimum amount of gauge, but do no damage. Both are viable options. The extra threat on Onslaught is almost forgotten, and could probably be removed. If the warrior is going to be aggressive, he needs to move around the battlefield to where he is needed.

Raw Intuition, Berserk, and Vengeance should generate gauge on use again. Keeping with the theme of using offensive cooldowns for defense, and defensive for offense. It allows us to use these skills offensively, and helps normalize our gauge with the changes to inner release above.

Unchained should gain a special effect in Deliverance (again, when you consider unpairing Unchained from Inner Release). In my opinion, this should be the increase threat while in Deliverance to Defiance like levels. Again, this would be considering we are the aggressive tank.

Inner Beast and Storm’s Path should have their HP regen portion brought back up to 100%\50% at higher levels. Additionally, if you use Inner Beast while Inner Beast is still active, you should increase the healing done by Inner Beast to 200%, while refreshing the timer. Maybe even lower the damage back down to 300 potency for this change, to keep things from getting out of hand.

I feel Butcher’s Block should not generate additional Beast Gauge. Leave that on Storm’s Path. However, choice is always good. I would make Butcher’s Block ignore the damage penalty in Defiance, and generate extra threat in Deliverance. This allows people to have a choice on what combo to use (Do I want the extra DPS in Defiance over gauge generation? Do I need the extra threat in Deliverance over gauge generation?).

Next up is accessories. Many tanks are angered by the current state of our right side. I just want to put my vote in for adding STR to Fending Accessories, but if they just added VIT to the damage calculation, that would be fine too. Just something. Right now, as other classes have their damage scale from a full 11 pieces of armor (not including weapon\shield), tanks only get a damage increase from 6. This means that every gear jump, the damage disparity between the two roles will increase. This is something that SQEX needs to resolve before too long, but it sounds like they have ideas for the next patch. I won’t lie, the fact that they said we are gearing with strength for enmity does worry me that the devs are out of touch. So let me make it as clear as I can.

All classes are more fun with bigger numbers. Tanks DPS should not be insignificant. Doing a lot of damage as a tank is a lot of fun, just as fun as protecting your allies from danger. We don’t need to be the top of the DPS charts, but doing more DPS is a lot of fun. I hate to use “that” example, but another popular MMO has completely removed damage penalties from their tanking stances (in some cases, tanking stances all together), and it has been met with great success. That MMO has the damage intake set differently than FF14, so we can’t do the same thing as they did, but we can make it so that tanks still enjoy the feeling of HUGE numbers (just not as huge as DPS classes). Increasing our damage is fun, engaging, and it keeps us competing with threat without having to keep adjusting threat.

My final thoughts are this: We need something for low level dungeons. The threat increase for Overpower in 4.01 was great, but it’s not enough. Right now, Paladins and Dark Knights spend Mana to hold AoE threat in lower levels. They can also regen mana at those levels. Warriors need to spend TP, but have no way to restore TP during this. The only solution I can think of this is to have Berserk half the cost of TP spending moves, and double the TP regen while it’s active, but this might be too powerful. However, it would fix our reliance on TP, but lessen the value of the TP restore from Equilibrium. I’m sure there is something else that could be done, but I can’t think of it right now.

Thanks for reading, sorry for spelling\grammar mistakes and the length of the post.