Beast Gauge Cost: Numbers

[Quor]

I want to preface my comment by saying WAR needs and deserves a DPS buff and is doing entirely too little damage for how little utility it has.

Now that I've got that out of the way... holy banana donuts, when the WAR's see this thread and find out that their stance dancing penalty actually isn't the end of the world... the salt will corrode solid steel.

One thing that drives me nuts is that stance swapping for PLD and DRK is not stance swapping for WAR, yet people seem to think it is. They are not an apples-to-apples comparison. DRK goes into "dps" stance by dropping Grit (no cost) and using Blood Weapon (oGCD) while PLD goes "dps" by spending a GCD on SwO. WAR goes "dps" by, ideally, dumping all gauge so they don't lose any in the swap, or else accepting that you're tossing half your gauge away and just dealing with it.

And that isn't fun. I can't think of another job where you are prevented from using job-specific abilities by virtue of trying to play your job. The only thing that comes to mind is a RDM who blows all their MP on Verraise, but that's not a job design problem for the RDM, that's a "your group sucks" problem. But back to one of my points; it isn't fun. Does it work? Yeah, sure, we can make it work. We can make it work pretty well. But it's less fun than it was in HW. On top of this whole "less fun" thing, what little group utility we had as WAR's was removed, or is so ubiquitous that there's no longer anything niche about it. PLD is swimming in group utility. DRK doesn't have as much as PLD, but TBN is a solid skill I've seen used to perform all kinds of beautiful clutch saves. So not only did WAR lose a lot of the fun factor in this xpac, instead of getting some neat utility to justify it, we just got Meme Cleave. Thanks to the nature of the penalty incurred upon us now, we are incentivized to spend as little time changing stances as possible. And thanks to the advent of Shirk, aggro management is a joke with a pair of tanks who know what they are doing (backed by some on-the-ball healers of course). This brings even more incentive to stay in Deliverance outside of some very specific situations like the initial pull or Susano sword phase.

Sadly, this is really only one half of the equation though. Sure, a PLD and a DRK have to blow a GCD to go into tank stance while a WAR doesn't, but one thing a lot of people fail to realize is that tank stances for PLD and DRK are essentially permanent defensive CD's. Here's an example:

PLD has 40k HP while in SwO. He needs to go into ShO for a buster (all his other CD's are down, it's been a rough run), so he blows a GCD, goes into ShO, and is now taking 20% less damage. He tanks the buster for 30k damage, but thanks to ShO it's reduced down to 24k.
DRK has 40k HP while out of Grit. He needs to go into Grit for a buster (again, all his other CD's are down, it's been a really rough run), so he blows a GCD, goes into Grit and is now taking 20% less damage. He tanks the buster for 30k damage, but thanks to Grit it's reduced down to 24k.
WAR has 40k HP while in Deliverance. He needs to go into Defiance for a buster (once again, rough fight, all other CD's are down), so he uses his oGCD stance swap and goes into Defiance, which raises his HP by 25%. He now has 50k hp, but unfortunately he does not "heal" for the 10k he gained, so he's sitting at 40k/50k. He tanks the buster for 30k. It's not reduced by anything, and because WAR doesn't heal when they enter Defiance, the extra HP granted by Defiance is useless. Hence, to make the most out of Defiance, you need to coordinate, either with your healers or by proper use of Equilibrium/Thirll of Battle (which aren't always up of course, especially on rough fights) in order to make Defiance "work" and be effective as a tank stance.

This drawback to Defiance is something WAR's have worked around since 2.0; we're used to it, we've learned how to deal with it, and the addition of Equilibrium in 3.0 was great as it gave a smart WAR the tools necessary to actually make an on-the-fly swap to Defiance work properly. But, again, the nature of 4.0 punishes stance swapping, and even if WAR doesn't "lose" as much potency as PLD or DRK, they also don't gain any of the benefits PLD and DRK gain. Once PLD is in SwO, or once a DRK hit's BW, they instantly gain bonuses. The passives on Deliverance and Defiance grow weaker the lower your gauge is, and if you're swapping at zero gauge (like you are incentivized to do) then a WAR gains nothing from the passive bonuses of either stance (save the pittling 5% dmg boost from Deliverance). Going from 100 gauge in Defiance to 50 in Deliverance cuts the crit boost you would be getting in half. Sure, a PLD loses a GCD going to SwO, but they only gain benefits from it, and don't have to "build up" anything to get the most out of their DPS stance.