Warrior Rework to Balance the job

[CKNovel]

Mate, I never suggested capping the heal to a single target. Multiple of my posts here speak directly against that approach.

One way or another it's a nerf that won't fix anything, neither it is a bandaid.
I want the real solution before we even consider nerfing.

The day healers will make full use of their kit in "aoe situations", then I'll agree for a nerf. But we're far from there.

[Shurrikhan]

One way or another it's a nerf that won't fix anything, neither it is a bandaid.
I want the real solution before we even consider nerfing.

The day healers will make full use of their kit in "aoe situations", then I'll agree for a nerf. But we're far from there.

Leaving outliers around due to which we cannot simultaneously balance truly difficult AoE content for tank A and for tanks B, C, and D makes it that much harder and/or worthwhile to introduce that content.

Yes, what we have right now barely scratches the surface of what all is theoretically possible, but we don't get nearer those potential additions by adding or, later, bastioning uninteresting balance fetters like being, by nature of a skill's procedure, straight up overpowered in category X (nor by being blatantly neutered relative to others in category Y).

We can have more nuance in differentiation than just "best sustain in AoE situations", "best mit in purely physical fights", "best mit in purely magical fights" IF people obsessed less over their broad performance advantages. Small advantages can be flavorful little perks, certainly, but we shouldn't be content with them alone, and certainly shouldn't parade greater or lesser capacity (however we might veil it before dropping bombs to the effect of "but I like being the tank best able to solo dungeons", etc.) as "uniqueness".

Warrior shouldn't be "unique" primarily through historically being the overall best tank, but when people refuse any changes (especially, to a so frequently best-in-role job) based on capacity, that is the main kind of "uniqueness" they protect -- often at cost to anything more, be that through kit or context.

[Shurrikhan]

Tangent for CKNovel:

Let me be clear here that I don't want to see tanks further homogenized. My issue is simply when "specific" advantages are given so straightforwardly from basic categories that they become simply differences in broad performance for the given type of content.

We saw Warrior and Paladin suffer from this in 1.9 and 2.0:

• In 1.9, Warrior self-healed for so much in dungeons that any disadvantage in heal-efficiency or eHP was moot, since there was nothing Paladin could survive that Warrior could not yet Warrior required far less due to being able to Benediction itself with each Steel Cyclone.
  
  
• In 2.0, those self-heals were neutered when the healing from damage dealt was moved from Steel Cyclone to solely Inner Beast and Warrior's damage was reduced in general. That said, it could still be the more efficient tank... so long as someone else could kite mobs between Bloodbaths and one was hugely overgeared. Resultantly, before the 2.1 changes, we were on a path for Warrior to end up weak until overgeared and preferable thereafter -- broad categorical differences that left no competitive tank choice except at mid-high gear progression unless there was an AoE DPS check (since Paladin's only AoE damage at the time was Circle of Scorn, its only spammable AoE a suppressive debuff).

And for the last few expansions, we've see that among Dark Mind*, Dark Missionary, and Heart of Light. (*Dark Arts could have aided against this but almost never made room for enough healer offensive relative potency through its extra sustain generated to make up for the loss to the DRK's own relative potency otherwise spent augmenting Souleater's damage [and therefore its healing, too, as it healed for damage dealt back then].)

Now, apart from being almost wholly self-scaled vs. scaling with incoming damage, almost all of these can theoretically be fixed through context, yes. You can ensure that each fight has magic damage at amounts and spacing just enough for Dark Mind, for instance, to feel useful and for it and DRK as a whole to provide merely even performance. You can give each fight something to Cover with just enough value to make up for its gauge cost. You can give just the right amount of adds at just the right times for Bloodwhetting to compete on the whole even if its per-hit value were tuned to better fit its AoE potential (instead of just scaling like any other AoE in the game). All of that is theoretically doable.

But doing so would also add a burden to content creation and fetter to its available creativity.

That's not to say that content shouldn't give a damn about individual jobs kits or that it should just leave it a happy coincidence for iconic skills to see good use, of course. They should, likely far, far more than they do now, but that's a lot easier to do in varying ways if the skills themselves do not scale so wildly across broad categories (AoE vs ST, magic vs. physical, single hit vs. many, etc.) or there are at least counterweights across the kits that have those more variedly performing abilities. Such allows those interactions to focus more on utilities instead of just broad summative power likely from a given context.

For instance, Bloodwhetting's healing might scale with damage/hits dealt and therefore primarily with one's own stats, but maybe Warrior would take less damage and heal for more through its vampirics as its health decreases, which allows it to leverage higher amounts of incoming damage. And while Warrior could put out additional healing and damage in AoE via Raw Intuition/Bloodwhetting and Vengeance/Damnation, perhaps Paladin could debuff enemies that strike its shield during Shelltron or Bulwark with a slowing DoT, which would likewise scale better with single-target, while Camouflage might offer something through parry scored, etc.

That is, the means can still be different enough for tanks to feel different even if no tank is advantaged noticeably for a whole content type in its typical form or overall across a specific instance. Mixing up content types (having more adds in raids, more and less scripted damage to non-tanks in dungeons, etc., etc.) would still do a ton of good in that regard, but mixing up who's good at what by allowing them similar capacities in highly differing ways both does not homogenize what really matters (the gameplay) and better allows for freedom in design among each existing and potential future content types.

Sidenote:
If it sounds like I'm overly obsessed with future-proofing for potentially difficult dungeons that are not merely the (imo) barebone implementations that are Criterion Dungeons... I probably am. I very much want something along the lines of amped up Mythic dungeons in this game, with significant environmental mechanics, unique challenges, more cross-role (rather than role-less, as per mere stacking and dancing) responsibilities. I also want some changes to how tanking and healing work that others might fairly call massive (e.g., to make the first more about actively thwarting enemy offenses and making room or ideal access for their raid's own offenses and the second actually see meaningful use of mana beyond rez-charges and a per-60s auto-clickable Lucid). Now, one step at a time, of course. But I'd rather such content design not get blocked on the pebble of outlier abilities around which people confuse excess strength with uniqueness itself.

That being said, I would not suggest the changes to Warrior's on-demands, or anything else, if I thought they could do a net harm to the job. A large part of my interest in the change to Warrior's 25s is specifically because the change from Raw Intuition / Nascent Flash in Shadowbringers (choose between %DR and healing for 50% of damage dealt) to Bloodwhetting / Nascent (identical, but the latter gives double the total healing) made Warrior feel much less engaging to me (all atop, of course, creating a large issue in that skill's balancibility across AoE-heavy vs. ST-only content). The change into the Endwalker/Dawntrail OP and balance-problematic version of our on-demands gave us less interaction (and therefore, to me, less engagement) and less choice (and therefore less versatility, replaced by simple excessive power). In short, imho, the current especially OP version has made the job feel worse to play.

Since getting any sort of truly (imo) interesting dungeon content is such a scant possibility, for now, that gameplay is the larger portion of why I want Warrior's 25s defensives reverted.

[Magikazam]

It's okay to have Warrior performing better against multiple target, at least that's a win against homogenizing the game.

Except Warrior don't perform worst than other tank when in a single target situation. They still have 25 sec cd that mitigate and heal as much as Paladin clemency, on top of not having any meters or mana cost tied to it.

Also if they care about homogenisation, they wouldn't be giving every unique think other have to Warrior.

My suggestion is to make Bloodwhetting less stronger by shifting the damage spread & increasing damages.

That not gonna make Bloodwhetting weaker. even if you would make it so mob deal 30% of a tank hp per auto attack, it wouldn't change the fact BW let you overheal yourself each tiem you hit 3+ mobs.

Making Bloodwhetting capped on 1 target is only going to make Warrior similar to heal as PLD or GNB. Healing in AoE situation will remain the same boring mess .

Maybe Tank shouldn't have AOE Heal, like at all.

[Duskane]

WAR fixes
enhanced tomahawk grants 10s of surging tempest
Chaotic cyclone and Inner chaos are separate buttons
Can gain wrath stacks outside of Inner release

[whiskeybravo]

Give Bloodwhetting diminished healing per target after the first enemy struck (more use cases for 2-3 targets, more engaging in terms of broader decisions) or heal for a portion of damage dealt (more engaging in terms of banking and bursting). (This brings it in check without costing it its flavor.)

I'm not suggesting I'm against a nerf like this, although honestly unless it's nerfed to a point it becomes irrelevant to use I don't think it really matters. If it heals any significant amount at all it will likely remain the best ability of it's kind. What I question is the notion that this sort of solution does anything to actually address comments like these:

WAR is problematic to the enjoyments of others..

Non-WAR players are going to complain when WAR as it is takes away from their enjoyment

How does diminishing one job's ability all of a sudden make an entirely different job more enjoyable? It doesn't. Don't be delusional. It's gonna be the same pile of dog s*** it was before. Only you won't have anything to compare it to to realize it's dog s*** anymore.

It seems to me the more enjoyable solution would be to give all the tanks equally effective sustain options. Flavored in their own likeness. Because, you know, it's enjoyable to play.

[*]Bring Holmgang's CD up roughly to everyone else's. (E.g., 7 minute Hallowed, 5 minute Holmgang, 6 minutes for the rest, at greatest spread.)

Again, I don't really see how it makes that much of a difference. Even if WAR gets an extra 1 or 2 uses per timeline there may not always be something to use it on. And it's still pretty useless for anything other than TB cheeses. IMHO the most interesting change they could make is to remove invulns altogether.

[*]Have Dark Missionary and Heart of Light (and Dark Mind) grant some degree of general (not just magic-specific) mitigation, by whatever means, as to be a decent bit better against magic than purely general skills and a decent bit worse but not crippled against physical damage OR remove the categorical mitigation entirely and find another way to differentiate them.

I kind of agree, party stuff should for sure at least be somewhat universal in general effectiveness. It doesn't make a lot of sense to cling to the few fragments of phys/mag distinction when all the accompanying aspects that made it interesting got yeeted after HW.

As a Tank player, WAR is problematic ... due to the fact it known to canibalise on other tank unique stuff.

I think it's fair to say War has contributed as at least much as it's borrowed. Auto CDH burst windows being a prime example. And quite honestly, it could contribute a lot more if people were focused on job elements that are popular/fun to play/enjoyable instead of trying to suggest these elements be removed from the game.

Imagine wanting to remove fun stuff from a video game, some people are truly baffling.

[MikoRemi]

Imagine wanting to remove fun stuff from a video game, some people are truly baffling.

Sums it up pretty perfectly. Nerfing a good job won't change the fact that the bad jobs are bad. Just like how if DRK had its DPS buffed super high it still wouldn't fix how cursed it is. Always simpler for people to just nerf things though then to figure out how to make bad jobs good. That requires proper thinking, but unfortunately there's no convincing the true cope going around. Even after so many of these complaints back in EW, DT came around and somehow still hasn't been convincing enough to drop that particular line of attack.

If people want a particular thing to get fixed, maybe don't try to take away the fun toys others have. One, it ain't gonna happen, and two, it just means things like DRK's bad design will take that much longer to fix.

[Terhix]

Sums it up pretty perfectly. Nerfing a good job won't change the fact that the bad jobs are bad. Just like how if DRK had its DPS buffed super high it still wouldn't fix how cursed it is. Always simpler for people to just nerf things though then to figure out how to make bad jobs good. That requires proper thinking, but unfortunately there's no convincing the true cope going around. Even after so many of these complaints back in EW, DT came around and somehow still hasn't been convincing enough to drop that particular line of attack.

If people want a particular thing to get fixed, maybe don't try to take away the fun toys others have. One, it ain't gonna happen, and two, it just means things like DRK's bad design will take that much longer to fix.

If you want a study on why never nerfing anything ever is a bad idea look no further than Diablo 3 that adopted that as a design principle, which over time lead them to buffing set bonuses on different classes to absurd heights (such as increasing a damage of a skill by 17500%, no I'm not making this up, this is an actual number) as new sets got released ended up outperforming older sets. That game still functions thanks to the infinite scaling endgame it has.

It's also not like SE is averse to nerfs in general, it's happened multiple times to multiple jobs as they got reworked.

[MikoRemi]

If you want a study on why never nerfing anything ever is a bad idea look no further than Diablo 3 that adopted that as a design principle, which over time lead them to buffing set bonuses on different classes to absurd heights (such as increasing a damage of a skill by 17500%, no I'm not making this up, this is an actual number) as new sets got released ended up outperforming older sets. That game still functions thanks to the infinite scaling endgame it has.

It's also not like SE is averse to nerfs in general, it's happened multiple times to multiple jobs as they got reworked.

Meanwhile look at Diablo 4 and how much nerfs have been "improving" things. I can tell you from Elsword and most KRMMO's as well that nerfing is also pretty unenjoyable, especially when I was unlucky enough to play a particular character and path that got nerfed for an entire year straight, and I wasn't going to pay up just to enhance my stuff to break through the nerfs which still made the jobs feel bad.

At most, if they nerf something they usually give a buff elsewhere, off the top of my head I only recall something like Reaper getting their Arcane Crest regen lowered a bit, in the grand scheme of things it really didn't change all that much though. As a main sentiment though, SE are known to buff more than nerf, just look at the recent patch notes alone despite how many people figured Pictomancer was going to get nerfed. Also imagine even bringing up Blizzard of all companies in the conversation. They're meme'd on for a reason and thrive only off of legacy. Irrelevant.

It's a known thing that nerfs are twice as noticeable as buffs, so unless there's plenty of compensation it's no good and it's a pretty whatever approach. In extreme and higher content, it's fine anyway, it becomes a part of your set of tools. That's what they're there for.

Regardless of anyone's feelings on the matter anyway, forums tried crying about it in EW to nerf the self sustain, and SE gave us even more tools and Damnation is so beautiful with the regen. Just like how some people want to return back to the HW days for whatever reason, it ain't happening. Just fix the unfun things to be fun, it takes some thought but if you bring the fun up to everyone else having fun, it's so much nicer.

[Lyth]

It's really not about losing your 'toys'. If 8.0 is to be a systemic review of individual job designs, we need to ask ourselves whether tanking has been going in the right design direction. If not, it's important to identify where things have gone wrong.

Self-sustain is a lot of fun. But the amount of satisfaction that you get out it depends on how well it is implemented. Personally, I want to see clutch saves on tanks where they can create photo-finish victories for their teams. I recently linked an example of what this looks like on PLD. I think sustain, when done correctly, can open up similar opportunities for clutch saves on WAR. Those are the best moments to be a tank.

To create these moments, you need a credible threat. When you become completely self-sustaining, in the absence of a healer, then there is no credible threat. You're just at max HP. That's why the balance of self-sustain is so critical, and why it needs to be an active rather than a passive process (and why healers and tanks need to be interdependent, as they were in the past). No tank should ever be completely self-sustaining.

I think another problem is that the amount of sustain available is having a convergent effect on tank design. An isolated burst heal that is context dependent and resource-gated can create flavor on a single tank. But once you start baking in 'Additional Effect: heal' into your base combo, your personal defensives, and your raidwide defensives, then every tank has to start seeing that in their designs.

I remember in ARR and HW, WAR's traditional design philosophy was around their HP totals. You used to see people stack buffs like Defiance, Thrill of Battle, and even Vitality potions to see how high of a total they could get. I was really shocked to see Great Nebula end up with a 20% HP boost, of all things. But that's the current state of tanking. Everyone is protective of their 'toys', the result being progressive mitigation inflation and homogenization all around.

If you toned back the self-sustain across all tanks, made it more focused, deliberate, and judicious, then perhaps you can start giving each tank their own identity and start taking them in different directions. That's what I'd like to see going forward into 8.0. Because what I see right now is a formless mess, and it's been driven by this obsession with making WAR into a completely self-sustaining tank. That in turn warps the entire role around trying to keep up with a broken design direction.