A challenge to Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida

[Wintersandman]

Ok I worked out the first two minutes of game play without ever touching berserk. However, I included mp and blood gains for dark knight at generous values to assume we could quietus every time we needed to equal out out mp.

Dark Knight Self healing: 1440n where n is the number of targets over a 2 minute interval.

Warrior Self Healing: 2160n where n is the number of targets over a 2 minute interval.

Warrior notes and assumptions: Now the warrior rotation as noted is not optimal for personal dps, though it may be optimal for party dps. The healing factor DOES NOT include healing from path, equilibrium, or Thrill of Battle or additional effects from berserk, for this purpose I pretend they don't exist on my hot bar and start my encounter at 0 gauge. These are the least friendly assumptions to warrior self heal I felt I could make while be extremely friendly to dark knight starting them at maximum MP and guage.

Once again what is very clear using excel is that Dark Knight can use abyssal drain about twice for every steel cyclone, but even at base potency warrior gets extra uses from infuriate and the heal factor from steel cyclone is a bit more than twice abyssal drain.

But you can get two AD with in one SC. It is also fair to include blood gauge since it is the equivalent of beast guage. It takes 7 GCD to get off an SC. 6 GCD to get off two AD. If you want it to be balanced you could say that it takes 7 GCD to get off two AD and include weaving in a Quietus. In a 120 Second span you will be able to execute ~ 48 GCD's devided If you move up to 49 GCD's so a 122.5 second span for easier math. Every two AD I return about 50 Blood guage.

You get WAR 1,680N (200 x 1.2 for Storm's Eye = 240) 240 x 7 = 1,680

Get get DRK 115 x 2 = 230 over 7 GCD's 230 x 7 = 1,610

[Chrono_Rising]

But you can get two AD with in one SC. It is also fair to include blood gauge since it is the equivalent of beast guage. It takes 7 GCD to get off an SC. 6 GCD to get off two AD. If you want it to be balanced you could say that it takes 7 GCD to get off two AD and include weaving in a Quietus. In a 120 Second span you will be able to execute ~ 48 GCD's devided If you move up to 49 GCD's so a 122.5 second span for easier math. Every two AD I return about 50 Blood guage.

You get WAR 1,680N (200 x 1.2 for Storm's Eye = 240) 240 x 7 = 1,680

Get get DRK 115 x 2 = 230 over 7 GCD's 230 x 7 = 1,610

Use excel and map out the entire two minutes like I did, then doubt the results.

You aren't taking into account that you don't always go path to eye or that infuriate is a free Steel Cyclone. There are remainders of beast gauge they add up and you end up getting an extra one or two steel cyclones.

For Dark Knight, the 3 GCD rotations needs a 4rth step every once in a while to refill mp (you lose an abyssal drain each 3 GCD abyssal drain) so you end up spacing out some of those in two minutes. The result is in warrior's favor, WITHOUT including 1 minute buffs to healing like berserk and equilibrium, or two minute buffs like ToB or the rotation to build guage giving you some HP back that doesn't exist on Dark Knight.

[Wintersandman]

Use excel and map out the entire two minutes like I did, then doubt the results.

Why not just create a Google Doc and share? Then I can see your results.

[Chrono_Rising]

Why not just create a Google Doc and share? Then I can see your results.

Because I don't want to put my real life identity on the forums and it is very easy to make the excel spreadsheet.

Here are the rules I used:

Warrior: Don't cap on gauge and end at 0 for next pull or as close as possible, spend on Steel Cyclone.

Dark Knight: Don't bottom out on mana, have 100% for next pull. Did not balance gauge end at whatever value you want I assumed it would just refill naturally with blood price (a very bad assumption).

The end result clearly shows warrior will out self-sustain a dark knight and do more damage, personally it isn't "optimal" for their own damage, but they still do more damage doing this than if they were a dark knight filling the same role, and the healer will likely enjoy this as well being able to AOE far more than normal (especially when paired with warrior mitigation).

Reasoning Confirmed by Excel Spreadsheet: Warrior can Steel Cyclone about half as much as Dark Knight can Abyssal Drain, but it heals for more than twice as much. Infuriate also gives two free Steel Cyclones in that two minutes which is what puts warrior a head. This does not include Berserk, ToB or Equilibrium or the self heals from the warrior's gauge building rotation. Conclusion: Warrior has better self-sustain. The excel spread sheet over 2 minutes just confirms this reasoning.

[Wintersandman]

Because I don't want to put my real life identity on the forums and it is very easy to make the excel spreadsheet.

Understood. I just wanted to more see/hear your logic as we could have different results instead of it is X.

[Aana]

Yall are overcomplicating this.

*Single target war has more self heal via path/equal easily.

*AOE out of tank stance, Drk for obvious reasons.

*AOE in tank stance highly variable. Drk has reliable sustain as part of optimal play. War requires doing single target combos to do an AOE cyclone instead of just spamming OP.

When unchained/zerk is up I highly doubt 1-2 more cyclones in a pack allows healer to do more than 120pot x 1.2 maim x 1.3 zerk= 187 pot/gcd. With just zerk/maim its 149. Maim only 115. Each additional cyclone requires (almost) 6 GCDs to get 240 pot (with maim) for the 7th. Those same (Maim only) 7 gcds of OP is 806 pot to all enemies vs 2 single target path combos+240 cyclone. That's with just maim. Zerk (1048), unchained+Zerk (1310) potency per target. This all even assumes your random scrubby healer is DPSing and further more that they are leveraging your additional healing to get and extra GCD or 2 instead of just overcuring you. The safe bet (in a pug anyway) is just use more overpowers. You will practically always have zerk up for every big pull and unchained every other. Also worth noting, cyclone gets no unchained bonus so it doesn't scale for those mega pulls with zerk+unchained as much.

TLDR: Theres going to be some magic number of enemies where single target+Cyclone looses out to overpower+fewer cyclone. N will vary if your healer leverages your cyclone heals and has powerful aoe of their own (like holy) and your current buffs up. What the exact N is, im not personally interested enough to math out as I do about 1 dungeon every 2 weeks these days lol.

But the bottom line why war 'feels' like it has more sustain is because it mitigates more damage on giant mob pulls of physical damage. No because it has some obscene aoe level of sustain. If every mob pack were elementals drk would feel 'sturdier' than war. Dungeon survival is Mitigation x Sustain. War has more physical fluff mitigation on lower timers with longer duration so their sustain goes farther on higher defenses. This plays out extremely in war's favor with a near constant stream of fluff damage for 15-20 min in dungeons.

[Chrono_Rising]

I spent the last week running level 70 dungeons on my warrior. It has been a good experience on the whole. I have one or two notes of value to this discussion:

(1) The idea that Warrior should spend its time spamming overpower throughout the entire encounter with trash will drain your TP extremely quickly. And if you are the type of tank who sprints between pulls, you don't have a lot of time to regenerate TP for the next pull without an input of TP from your party (some type of TP regen and in all of the runs I never got one). I found it best to overpower a few times with unchained and Berserk (maim assumed) and use infuriate at the start to make sure I can have a steel cyclone in a pinch. To stay sustainable for the next pull I frequently found myself going into warriors self sustain combo to stabilize and even regenerate TP.

Despite underplaying the role self-sustain combo of warrior, it is really good in practice.

(2) Equilibrium is really great, both as initial snap aggro while pulling between mobs, and during pull for return HP.

(3) Warrior Cooldowns and the synergy between its tank stance, Convalescence, and Largesse lead to extremely high regens. When you do get that DPSing healer who works with their cooldowns the regen HP is significantly higher than the other tanks, and they can really capitalize on this.

Having experimented with how much HP I can restore to myself it definitely appears that warrior is ahead in my experiments.

(4) Running with a friend who is a healer and almost only DPS's the optimal group damage appears to favor healers.

[Aana]

I never find myself running out of TP in dungeons spamming OP constantly with rare exceptions like multi-wave sections like the goblins+bombs in that Yojimbo dungeon where adds spawn after you kill the pulled set extending the encounter. But I will often (towards the end of a pull when there isn't much left) drop defiance and pop equal for TP. There are really only 2 pulls between bosses in most cases and the equal for TP between pulls works well for that. Non-issue if someone gives you TP though. Maybe I just don't often get very aggressive healers. I cant remember the last time a healer out DPSed me in a dungeon, but I usually just solo cue instead of cueing with my FC healers or whatever.

I didn't mean to dispute that war CANT restore more HP than drk for AOEs in tank stance. Its more of a question of if that defensive style of play is optimal in the DPS>all world, but that seems to mostly depend on how much damage your healer does. If pugging, I don't really have high expectations lol.

[Chrono_Rising]

... depend on how much damage your healer does. If pugging, I don't really have high expectations lol.

100% agree. I generally don't assume I'll get a dpsing healer in pugs. I had to rely on healers I know personally to get that data, only 1 or 2 runs had a healer who would spam their holy and dots.