Endwalker Warrior Looks Great

[NyneSwordz]

Watched Rins YouTube vid on endwalker war, and you know, I really like it.

Primal Rend is better than I thought because it actually gap closes with 20 yard range. Looks fun as heck.

Orogenys animation is not as bad as the trailer makes it look. A top down isometric view of the move doesn't look so bad.

Ri/bloodwhetting and nf having a small window for bonus mitigation is pretty cool. Allows for better rewards for those who make the effort to time its use.

All the extra heals on shake it off, equilibrium is pretty cool. Makes those skills benefit even more from thrill.

Ri/nf heals based on potency may be good. Benefits from stats that increase health potency as well as skills that do the same, like thrill. I think this is a good change.

Onslaught on charges is great. I can write a novel on why there's no dps loss for not burning all charges all the time, but I'm tired of people just repeating things they've heard without reasoning it through. So I'll leave it there. People will realize the truth once they get the game in their hands.

Onslaught and upheaval not requiring beast gauge is also good for two reasons. One, it doesn't benefit from ir and there's no need to always cram it in the ir window (well talk about ir change in a bit). Imo this was neither hard to do nor engaging to pull off. That it's gone is fine - I prefer devs build up other aspects of tanking to make it engaging. Two, more rage for fell cleaves. Again, not sure why people hate on cleaves, but I love it. More rage to dump into fc is good to me.

Ir has 3 charges and a 30 sec duration. I really like this. It makes the ir window a lot more flexible. Less likely to lose a ton of dps because boss suddenly moved off platform or some kind of fight transition happened. You'd still want to dump all 3 cleaves plus primal Rend asap, but there's less of a punishment if you're not able to. Also allows for less optimal but fun things like primal Rend > infuriate > eye combo > fc x 3 > inner chaos. Wouldn't be possible without (1) ir having charges and (2) there being a 30 second duration for those charges. This is gonna be fun for dungeon runs. Can't wait to spinball into mob packs haha.

To wrap it up, I think most will have more fun with war. I hope everyone ends up liking their mains too.

[Absurdity]

We've explained multiple times why you dump all charges in raid buffs, not our fault that you keep ignoring it lol.

[Marxam]

All in all I would say its a net positive from 5.0, albeit a slight and very safe increase. Mostly QoL while moving the self heals around instead of just NF hard carrying it all. Another expansion of odd BiS is gonna be "great". I honestly hope they remove direct hits from tanks and maybe do something with Tenacity otherwise its just another stat on gear that no tanks want.

[MagiusNecros]

Inner Release will be ridiculous with the 30 seconds of status immunities if you choose to save your IR stacks. Which I think are only consumed through Beast actions, if true that's huge.

Realistically your charges of Onslaught are going to be dumped either on CD or during raid/party buff windows. And the fact Warrior is the only Tank with 4 gap closers is a bit ridiculous. Onslaught x3 and Primal Rend.

Any skill that has a potency attached to it is inherently going to be used for DPS. If it was pure utility it wouldn't have a Potency on it.

Warrior is looking pretty strong alongside Paladin this xpac.

[Absurdity]

Any skill that has a potency attached to it is inherently going to be used for DPS. If it was pure utility it wouldn't have a Potency on it.

Which is exactly why I didn't like the change. So far Onslaught has been a true gap closer outside of IR every 90 seconds, simply because it's dps wasn't worth the 20 gauge.

There are a bunch more gripes I have with the changes but at this point I don't care anymore, I moved on to GnB.

[ovIm]

Gonna have to disagree here, sadly. The new Warrior looks more and more like a shadow of its former self.

In terms of mobility, the new Onslaught is a massive downgrade. Instead of having it available once every 10s, only using it to actually close gaps or once in the 10s Burst Window, people are now more incentivized to keep the charges for the raidbuff window. You say 3 charges, 4 if you count Primal Rend, but really, with 30s cooldown per charge, we will not see it being used all that often anymore.

With all oGCD's now not costing rage anymore, the aspect of managing your gauge is completely gone. Sure, one could argue that it is a very shallow aspect in terms of depth, but it was there, making it so you could not completely turn of your brain in your rotation. Its completely unengaging.

The flat healing on Bloodwhetting and Nascent means that the optimization potential here, making sure you use it with high damage skills, is naught. Another bit of depth gone.

I doubt being able to delay your 3rd Fell Cleave in IR will be that engaging, but that is something I am willing to give a try once the changes are live.

Really, Square Enix keeps removing all kinds of gameplay elements from Warrior since mid Stormblood. First, we lost an engaging Burst Phase to the new IR. Then we lost crit on gauge. Now these things get removed. I am all for convenience to the player, but removing stuff without filling the gaps just leaves behind a void.

And before someone yells out, no, I don't need WAR to be absolutely top DPS of all tanks, this is not what this is about. I just want engaging, fun gameplay that goes beyond "push blinking button". I still love the axe, I think the animations on Warrior are absolutely splendid, it oozes raw power and aggressiveness. I'd just want to have a bit more meat on that ham sandwich please.

[Absurdity]

With all oGCD's now not costing rage anymore, the aspect of managing your gauge is completely gone. Sure, one could argue that it is a very shallow aspect in terms of depth, but it was there, making it so you could not completely turn of your brain in your rotation. Its completely unengaging.

The flat healing on Bloodwhetting and Nascent means that the optimization potential here, making sure you use it with high damage skills, is naught. Another bit of depth gone.

These are basically also all of my gripes with it. Warrior was already a very shallow job for the entirety of Shadowbringers but what little optimization it had left got completely flattened with the 6.0 changes.

No need to manage your gauge anymore, you literally can only spend it on Fellcleave/Decimate, no need to make sure Upheaval doesn't drift out of IR, no need to think about when you use Nascent Flash over Raw Intuition or how to get the most healing out of your next 3 GCDs under the Nascent buff.

We're at the point where you really just completely turn your brain off while spamming 1-2-3, occasionally do 1-2-4 and a 5, then when IR is up you press 5x3 and 6x1 before you go back to spamming 1-2-3.

Which is why I simply dropped the job.

[whiskeybravo]

The flat healing on Bloodwhetting and Nascent means that the optimization potential here, making sure you use it with high damage skills, is naught. Another bit of depth gone.

I haven't seen people say much about this, when I first saw the change to self-healing it made me wonder if it's a slight nerf compared to current sustain? It will be nice to be relieved of those situations where the self healing would help but you're not in a burst window at the moment, but it definitely takes something away from the decision making process.

Everything else with war seems pretty good to me. I don't particularly like the Onslaught change either, but at this point it's a "gap closers in general" concern that deserves it's own thread.

[ovIm]

I haven't seen people say much about this, when I first saw the change to self-healing it made me wonder if it's a slight nerf compared to current sustain?.

Eh, while I am sure the healing is a flat out nerf in dungeons, I don't think that is that much of a deal personally. My point is that this was something to consider while playing the class, and with this mechanic now being removed, using the skill will be less about possibly delaying a high damage skill like Inner Chaos for a burst heal when required. To me, that is a loss of class depth.

[Kabooa]

I haven't seen people say much about this, when I first saw the change to self-healing it made me wonder if it's a slight nerf compared to current sustain? It will be nice to be relieved of those situations where the self healing would help but you're not in a burst window at the moment, but it definitely takes something away from the decision making process.

Everything else with war seems pretty good to me. I don't particularly like the Onslaught change either, but at this point it's a "gap closers in general" concern that deserves it's own thread.

TLDR: The top end healing is lowered. The minimum healing is raised. The massive AoE healing nerfed is offset somewhat by the additional healing provided by Eq's hot and the raw healing from Shake it Off.

So, this is one of the more interesting changes, given that it tends to follow their tank balancing paradigm. One tank (Usually the warrior) has something far and away better than the other tanks, so the other tanks receive something similar, the Warrior's is nerfed, and they're all brought to this new baseline.

Baseline number to consider: At level 90 in AF gear at current (may change) potencies...

100 Tank healing potency = ~2% of tank HP restored, closer to 1.8% but 2% is easier to work with, or ~1200 HP.

With an 8 second duration, it is possible to fit up to 4 GCDs into the Blood/Nascent window. Expected ~.5 second animation delay leaving 7.5 seconds, so with some skill speed and good ping, you can squeeze theoretically 4 gcds in. The ability is likely balanced around 3 gcds with plenty of time. Add the 400 shield on top, and this mean Warrior has the following.

Blood: 400 shield, 12-1600 healing potency, or basically, ~32-36% of your maximum HP per use.
Nascent: 400 shield to target, 12-1600 healing to you and partner, or ~24-32% healing to you, and 24-32% of your maximum HP to an ally.

Comparatively speaking, currently you gain 50% of your damage and give 25% of your damage to your ally. Ignoring auto attacks, this means a strong Nascent window is ~50-60% of your HP and half of that to your ally, however, very weak nascent windows were instead closer to maybe 10% of your health and 5% to your target.

In AoE situations, current Nascent is stupid, as Warrior has no AoE fall off so every single enemy just adds more healing capacity and rarely adds any danger. A single Nascent window in AoE was basically just 10% * N where N is the number of enemies of your maximum health, where as now it's as bove - ~32-36% of your maximum HP.

Edit: The current media tour build actually shows every hit granting a 400 potency heal on AoE. Well then. This means the actual Nascent window is 24-32% * N per window.

Decoupling it from your active offensive cooldown use isn't really my cup of tea, but it's hard to argue with the raw baseline power floor being raised. The enhanced mitigation of Bloodwhetting and supplemental healing with Equilibrium should cover mass dungeon pulling well enough, without completely invalidating the healer. Their own abilities do that well enough.