Beast Gauge Cost: Numbers

[Poison_Rose]

You want your 100 bg to line up perfectly with your third berserk and 2nd ir coming off cd, and you want to put them on cd asap obviously to optimize dps. say u do this and he stuns you, well gg you just lost your biggest burst phase, same with any fight transition.

This can happen to drk during bw delirium or pld during requiscat but not nearly as punishing to their overall dps as it is to war.

That's more or less the same conclusion I came to. Glad to see I wasn't wrong.

For the record, I would be interested in your opener. I'm still trying to get the finer points of 4.0 WAR down, since my group is going to start raiding soon.

[Dizzy_Derp]

Onslaught is used if your going to cap on gauge bust still need to wait on zero of have to get eye up. And yes I agree it needs to be based off of what a job is capable of when played at the max. The skill gap is insanely high, its the most complex tank they have ever made by a long shot and it needs something, if they dont want to give us any totality thats fine as long as it does substantially more dps that the other two cause its the same as a samurai just without the doing more damage part.

[P4X0R10N]

I think that's the crux of the issue for me. Having to rebuild my beast gauge after swapping to prepare for a damage phase isn't fun. Meanwhile on PLD I can simply swap stances, hit the cooldown when it's up and keep going as if nothing happened.

Maybe this is an issue with me not having an in-depth knowledge of the fight, but SE did say that they wanted to raise the skill floor.

Yes rebuilding guage sucks

[P4X0R10N]

Always start a fight with eye combo for that 20% damage buff.

Eye combo -> Path combo -> BB combo -> Path Combo -> Heavy Cleave -> Berserk -> Inner Release -> Maim -> SE -> FC -> FC -> Infuriate -> FC -> FC -> FC -> FC.

Infuriate after 2 FC's so the following four will drop Infuriate's CD timer to about 30-31 seconds.

Likewise, when you're coming up on a 3 FC combo: FC -> Infuriate -> FC -> FC.

Minimizes Infuriate downtime.

That's bad. You should infuriate after the first so you can have 5 fc drop infuriate timer.

Hs, ir, berserk, fc, upheaval, INFURIATE, fc, maim, path, fc x4

[Eir_Z]

Hs, ir, berserk, fc, upheaval, INFURIATE, fc, maim, path, fc x4

Thanks! I'm not sure why I didn't see that before, but it's good to be wrong sometimes.

[Quor]

Thanks! I'm not sure why I didn't see that before, but it's good to be wrong sometimes.

Personally I disagree with P4x. I think hitting more FC's at higher gauge is better than shaving another 5s off of Infuriate. First of all because of the crit chance bonus; more FC's at higher gauge = more crit FC's. Secondly, shaving time off of Infuriate doesn't really do that much since you want to make sure it's up for your next Berserk phase. Whether you shave 20s or 25s off it doesn't matter; you're not going to touch Infuriate again until Berserk is up, otherwise you're going to disrupt the timing of your cooldowns. The extra FC you would get from using Infuriate earlier is offset (and then surpassed) by the bonus damage you get by holding Infuriate for Berserk.

Expanding on this, the end-all be-all of WAR damage right now focuses around Berserk or Berserk + IR. Since Berserk is up every 60s, and IR up every 120, this makes for a nice easy meshing of cooldowns. Infuriate also has a natural 60s CD, and Upheaval has a nice handy 30s CD, meaning you can toss it in during "cool" periods and still have it available during Berserk and Zerk/IR. However, using Infuriate to get an extra FC in between Berserks does you no good, since you want to maximize gauge usage during Berserk uptime while also ensuring you enter your Berserk phases with full or near-full gauge.

To that end, blowing Infuriate on cooldown gains you nothing. Of course this means that our trait is largely useless outside of some niche applications (like burning a boss to beat enrage and you need every last bit of dps RIGHT NOW). Thanks to the fact that we essentially have a dps cycle that works in 60s segments, lowering the CD of a 60s CD skill does us no good; we're just going to sit on it until Berserk is up anyway.

[eagledorf]

I think hitting more FC's at higher gauge is better than shaving another 5s off of Infuriate

Ok, then move Onslaught slightly later in your rotation so it's at the tail of every Berserk instead. You can have both can't you?

[Quor]

Ok, then move Onslaught slightly later in your rotation so it's at the tail of every Berserk instead. You can have both can't you?

I never said you couldn't. I'm not even talking about Onslaught. Did you read my post at all? Or just that one part?

[Felorr]

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)

This makes a lot of sense and I hadn't thought of that situation (stance swapping and not immediately gaining part of the defensive capability [HP increase]).I know that in this thought experiment you're saying defensive CD's have already been used. However. A warrior in Deliverance is likely going to have Equilibrium ready at any time. They can use this after stance swapping.

And I'm referring to 8man static content. Not irrelevant 4-man content. It's possible in dungeons you would have used Equi to restore TP on trash pulls so your point stands there. But there's literally no point in discussing viability in 4man content.

[Quor]

This makes a lot of sense and I hadn't thought of that situation (stance swapping and not immediately gaining part of the defensive capability [HP increase]).I know that in this thought experiment you're saying defensive CD's have already been used. However. A warrior in Deliverance is likely going to have Equilibrium ready at any time. They can use this after stance swapping.

And I'm referring to 8man static content. Not irrelevant 4-man content. It's possible in dungeons you would have used Equi to restore TP on trash pulls so your point stands there. But there's literally no point in discussing viability in 4man content.

True, you probably will have Equilibrium ready, but that doesn't change the fact that WAR defensive stance only works with A.) a separate cooldown, and B.) using that cooldown means you can't use it later should the need arise (until it's ready of course).

And that's ok, cause it's a balance you have to walk, and it adds a level of choice and skill to the class. Can I trust my healers to get me to full in time so my defensive stance is actually defensive? If yes, then you can save your self-heal for a bad situation later on down the line. But maybe you can't trust them, or maybe you can but they're just busy dealing with other triage situations right now. So you blow your self-heal and go from there.

The point still remains however; WAR's have always had this "cost" when going defensive. The addition of Deliverance sorta closed the gap though, since damage for a DRK was drop Grit, push BW, then receive damage, while damage for a PLD took a GCD to get into SwO and then involved hitting FoF. With Deliverance, a WAR could swap to dps and be at full steam from the get go with what amounts to the press of a button. Now we're punished for doing this with a halving of our gauge (and subsequent reduction in power from our passive stance bonuses) with the additional hurdle of pushing back usage of job-defining abilities by anywhere from 1 to 5 GCD's. As I said before, this is patently unfun.

In fact, I think anything along the same lines is unfun. I don't like that, as my DRK, I can't cleverly use Blood Price to get extra MP to fool around with while DPSing. As a PLD I don't like losing half my gauge either, even if building it back up is comparatively easier than it is for WAR (barring the use of Infuriate anyway). As far as I'm concerned, the established penalties that have been in play since the advent of these classes were enough. DRK's had to be wise about managing mana in case they needed to Grit on the fly, not to mention blow a GCD, PLD had a similar situation but it affected both tank and dps stances, and WAR had a pain-free transition to DPS at the cost of needing a cooldown or team coordination to make their defensive stance work properly. I find all this stance change punishment to be unfun and counterintuitive.