Gunbreaker gameplay hope and expectations

[Kalise]

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Quote-by-quote allows more ease of reference to specific points. As opposed to snipping an entire post and trying to figure out what the response is actually referring to through a block of text.

On the topic of self sustain:

You don't understand why, the tank that is focused around raw health and increased healing, has self sustain? It's because having fat stacks of health doesn't mitigate damage. Unlike actual damage mitigation. So in order to turn increased healing into mitigation they need to have healing. Unlike PLD whom has direct mitigation as well as block capabilities or DRK that has shields in addition to damage mitigation.

It actually makes more sense for WAR to have self healing than it does for DRK. PLD only makes sense because they typically use White Magic which often includes healing rather than being mechanically defined by it in their block focused mitigation playstyle (The fact that their only heal is Clemency means that in actual fact, PLD gaining a healing skill in HW is in fact eroding WAR's job identity whom had Inner Beast back in 2.0 not to mention Bloodbath and Mercy Stroke)

TBN as self sustain is not baffling. Self-sustain means to keep your health up. This is done by mitigation, shielding or healing. Self-sustain is not wholly dependent on self-HEALING. TBN puts up a shield that stops your health going down. It's the reverse of self-healing which aims to bring your health back up after it goes down.

For example: You're about to take 1000 damage. Player A puts up a shield for 500 before they take the damage, they end up 500 life down. Player B heals for 500 after taking the full damage, they also end up 500 life down. Player C does nothing and ends up 1000 life down.

Both Player A and Player B have sustained themselves to be at a better life point total.

At the end of the day, WAR, the tank whom should have the most life gain in their kit because that's literally the core of the class - To have high health and to have increased healing received - Ends up having lacklustre life gain because of the same problem that all tanks face, that it's tied to DPS losses and Tank Stance. Or is so pitifully minor to where it essentially doesn't exist (I.e. Storm's Path or Inner Beast when it doesn't crit)

As far as mobility is concerned, Onslaught exists, but it's also a significant DPS loss because it uses up Beast Gauge. Also, again, if it's mobility that's the issue, why not give PLD/DRK thematic mobility increases (Not necessarily a charge like Onslaught) or if it's just a case of it counters knockbacks (Some at least, because for example, Shiva EX doesn't care about your Onslaught because you're knocked back into the stun field) why not address that with unique things for them? Like adjusting Tempered Will's CD?

For DPS, it's not really a clear cut case of "Best burst should = lowest DPS" - Since, that inherently means that burst jobs necessitate buff stacking in order to function (Outside specifically designed fights where you can only ever achieve sporadic uptime). While sustained DPS jobs would get to work just fine and buff stacking would just amplify their damage rather than be a necessity.

Really, if burst is becoming too much of a problem, then the best solution is to address the burst jobs and distribute some of their damage away from their burst combos. I.e. WAR would seem like less of a problem if they didn't have so much damage pushed into Inner Release + Fell Cleave. Heck, when I gained Inner Release in SB I hated the skill, because it caused this dichotomy where I had brief periods of being really strong and then long periods where I felt more limited in my output (Not to mention, it was less fun than setting up Berserk combos where maximizing output would include getting up to 100 BG, having Storm's Path combo ready and having Infuriate up in order to push out 3x Fell Cleave + a guaranteed SP along with whatever normal combos I can fit in during the duration). I'd have much preferred something else so that I would still have burst from Berserk to capitalize on, but would also have more impact during the downtime of the CD.

That way you can continue to have jobs focused around periods of burst (Such as WAR with Berserk, PLD with Requiescat, RDM with Riposte combos, MCH with Wildfire etc) without them becoming too powerful because of force amplification of stacked buffs during their burst combos.

In regards to Mitigation:

Homogenization is a bad word. Yes, every healer needs to be able to keep people alive. Every tank needs to not die. But notice the how vague I am being about their core tenets. That's because it's homogenization that every healer needs to heal and every tank needs to mitigate.

We have healers like SCH that focus on Shielding rather than healing. This is fine. We have 2.0 WAR that had focus on self healing instead of raw mitigation/blocking. That is also fine.

There are often multiple ways to achieve a similar goal, which allows jobs to play differently and have different areas where they excel. The issue comes when you're trying to homogenize everything and you get to a point where Skill A is outright better than Skill B because you were trying to differentiate Skill B to make the job feel different while your intent was still to try and replicate Skill A.

The main damage reduction skill for Tanks comes to mind. Vengeance being 30% mitigation and reprisal damage (Also, 15 seconds duration which only makes sense if you think that the initial design for WAR was to have fewer means to actually mitigate damage so they should have slightly better uptime on the few CD's they do have) vs Sentinel that was trying to be different and fit into the design of PLD which is "Mitigate Damage" at 40% mitigation and then balanced to a higher CD because 40% mitigation is a LOT vs Shadow Wall which is simply 30% mitigation because what feels like "Oh, DRK needs a skill like Vengeance/Sentinel!" and so they got the bare bones version just because they were ticking a box rather than creating the skill to fit into the job design.

As such, if they didn't homogenize things and created unique skills for the jobs based around specific designs, there would be drastically different areas where the jobs excelled. Like, if WAR was still balanced around self-healing as opposed to mitigation, they would be weakest against burst damage they couldn't ignore with Holmgang because self-healing implies being able to survive the damage to start healing up. While PLD would be the best at reducing damage because they would be focused around having the high mitigation skills as well as block capabilities. Then leaving DRK to be able to mitigate frequent bursts due to things like repeated shields from TBN.

All 3 tanks in that situation still function as tanks. They still are all focused around staying alive. But they now have different niches but in a way that wouldn't preclude them from content unless specifically designed to (I.e. Holmgang would still let WAR beat Tankbuster skills even if PLD would have more tools that would let them do so)

[Phoenicia]

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Sorry for double posting..

Onslaught is actually DPS neutral. Not "massive" at all. If it retains up-time, then it is 100% DPS gain.

The math behind it involves Fell Cleave costing a GCD, while Onslaught doesn't. Both abilities have roughly the same potency/gauge conversion (FC slightly edges at 52/10 vs 50/10). Onslaught however has a CD, FC reduce the CD of Infuriate for more gauge.

This reminded me of something I wrote but lost and missed in my rewrite:

WAR's tools are trying to do too much for 1 press, then it ends up losing all those niche uses because we only care about the main purpose.

Inner Release wants to prevent stuns and forced movement, but in the end we only care about the free direct critical hit fell cleaves. Very rarely (never) would we delay it to stop a knockback or a stun.

Holmgang (oh my god lol), it pulls in the enemy, roots the WAR and enemy, prevents forced movement (result of root) and prevent death. We only use it for the death prevention and actually hate its clunk of requiring a target.

Vengeane counters attacks, added a wrath/abandon stack (which is gone thankfully), and reduces damage. 95 times out of 100 we use it for the mitigation with DPS gain as a bonus. The other 5% we take mitigation as a bonus.

Inner Beast trying to deal damage, heal and mitigate is probably the reason why it's locked behind a stance still. But IB is a minor thing.

Why am I bringing this? Well, in my earlier post I spoke of perception... It also brings up the matter of balance.

Inner Beast is "too good" (arguably the best non-invuln defensive option) for it to be removed from gauge or unlocked from Defiance.

People look at Vengeance and say "It increases DPS" even though we almost never use it for DPS.

It was mentioned more than once earlier, where WAR having knockback immunities, but 2 of those options are NEVER used for said immunities. And you end up left with Onslaught, which is touchy on its own. If forced in a timing close to IR your IR burst window is minus 200 potency. It can also throw off your gauge and if you fell cleaved out-of-habit and dropped below 20 gauge just before needing it (which you should never do but yeah), you end up being unable to use at all.

One quick note here, since this has already come up on the dps forums: the calculations that you've posted are theoretical. No fight in the game has 100% uptime. It's in non-perfect uptime fights that you see the differences between burst and non-burst jobs (i.e. actual content).

Also, looking at the very top results always yield massively skewed results. It's just a question of who has bothered to design the most catered run.

Yes, I DID say it is under 100% uptime where no fight is as such. It, however, is a very good indicative that WAR is not ahead in terms of DPS. Also the top results had mention of padding (Aka catering for) the mentioned tanks. I did not bother looking for non-padded results as I also already said in my post, but check the 25th highest tank overall in Omega as of today (Violent Destruction), he has VERY high numbers that are better than most (if not all) non-padded WARs on the same list.