Warrior Rework to Balance the job

[Shurrikhan]

Simply because the nerf is pointless and unnaceptable. Compromise isn't always the solution, you're proposing a false compromise.
"I will cut both your legs!"
"I refuse to have my legs cut!"
"Fine then, let's make a compromise, I'll only cut one of your legs."

Then tell me you tried to have a discussion.
I will not compromise for a nerf, it's pointless and closes the door to future abilities that could steps out of the lines.

Mate, "Warrior players" (not necessarily mains or veterans, but "Warrior players" nonetheless) have been the largest community driver for the removal or homogenization of most things to step out of line among tanks:

• Hallowed Ground stepped out of line. What happened? Holmgang was changed from a CC skill with bundled knock back immunity into an invuln. Now we're stuck with invulns for everyone.
  
  
• Cover stepped out of line. What happened? Warriors demanded the transfered damage not benefit from PLD's mitigation. (Ironically, once NIN was introduced, this replaced Cover-Hallowed strats only in that you ended up with double Hallowed.)
  
  
• Sword Oath stepped out of line. What happened? It was made inferior to Deliverance for both AoE (as PLD literally had none besides CoS) and ST both, reducing it from PLD at least having a small max ST damage in exchange for its lower combined sustain+damage in practice to PLD mostly being permitted only for fights with hard-hitting but singular physical tank busters and little to no magical damage. Tbf, good riddance to that balancing approach, as simply rotated which off-Warriors, err, co-tanks, were allowed for which fights.
  
  
• Divine Veil stepped out of line. What happened? Instead of building around high burst followed by a period of pacification or a damage-stagger mechanic that Warrior could purge, Shake it Off was made a Divine Veil knockoff that was just higher ceiling and more responsive than the original. Because the voices of those who wanted an easy time via Warrior counter for more than those of actual Warrior mains.
  
  
• Inner Release stepped out of line. What happened? Oonga bungas didn't like the gap in effort required between optimal and skilled use (i.e., that split them from Warrior mains), so instead of merely dealing with its clunkiness in dungeons specifically, they gutted its core mechanic in favor of {X free uses}.
  
  
• Original Nascent Flash/Raw Intuition stepped out of line. What happened? Once the oonga bungas (mostly JP, iirc) has apparently had enough of banking gauge and syncing buffs because the highest-output-by-far external on-demands was "too hard" to optimize, we lost our choice in defensive output and that element of skill expression per the Endwalker version of BW/NF.

It's literally the need to favor ease of output or categorical advantage that has cost us differentiation where it mattered far more -- the actual playflow.

I'm sorry, but acting like any loss to ease of power, let alone from a source as obviously a broken scalar and as simplifying/degrading to the skill's gameplay as has been the case for EW BW/NF-- as an attempt to cut both one's legs off can't help but sound so damn entitled. It's the usual EW "screw you, veteran SMNs (and all other casters); SMN is how we like it now, so that's that," or ShB "tough luck, healer veterans, I like being able to spend 94% of spell casts on a single key" and it sucks when people pretend it's a matter of identity that even the slightest balancing of its performance is refuted no matter its favorable impact on the job's playflow or the broader health of the game as it stands now or could be added to.

Now, a lot of changes have happened without community support, yes, but if your complaint here is on how community discourse/action in this thread seems to be trending, I suggest you look back, too.

[Launched]

Mate, "Warrior players" (not necessarily mains or veterans, but "Warrior players" nonetheless) have been the largest community driver for the removal or homogenization of most things to step out of line among tanks:

A lot of what you said is exaggerated, false, or was a result of the devs making changes that no one asked for.

• Holmgang wasn't changed because Hallowed "stepped out of line", it was because 2.0 WAR had basically no mitigation skills and was useless in Coil compared to PLD. It got its own unique mitigations in 2.1- IB on the GCD, Vengeance with a lower % and lower cooldown than Sentinel, Holmgang with a target requirement, 6s duration, root and no true invuln.

• I don't think Cover ever worked with Hallowed, but it does work with other mitigation skills.

• All jobs got new DPS skills going into HW. WAR getting Deliverance to have dps versions of Inner Beast and Steel Cyclone was a reasonable addition, your point about PLD not having a slight DPS lead just comes down to how the devs decided to balance the jobs. It's not even homogenisation, stances on PLD/DRK and WAR were pretty different (which led to lots of complaints because PLD/DRK were on the GCD).

• The pacification on Berserk was removed in 4.0, at the same time Shake it Off was added, so SiO was useless from the start. I think the only thing you could use it on was Exdeath's Doom, and you weren't always going to get that. A self-Esuna isn't a viable skill, so the devs chose to change it to a shield.

• People were pretty happy with Raw Intuition/Nascent Flash after NF got changed to be usable on yourself. I doubt many people, if any, asked for it to be changed to flat healing.

So, if everything else I've suggested is so unacceptable to you, how do we balance normal content around WAR levels of self sustain? Assuming even that we boost all the other tanks to the same level.

Leave sustain how it is, increase damage done/frequency by trash and bosses in dungeons. WAR will require healing between Bloodwhettings, and healers will have a reason to cast more than 3 oGCDs per trash pack/1 oGCD every time a boss does a raidwide.
There's already a few trash packs in DT that do a bit more damage, like the horses after the first boss of Strayborough. They can autoattack and do a named attack at the same time for a big chunk of damage, add more of that.
I wouldn't really care if Bloodwhetting went back to being a % of damage dealt, but I do think it needs to keep the healing on multiple targets. WAR has had that since Bloodbath in ARR.

[Alice_Rivers]

Leave sustain how it is, increase damage done/frequency by trash and bosses in dungeons. WAR will require healing between Bloodwhettings, and healers will have a reason to cast more than 3 oGCDs per trash pack/1 oGCD every time a boss does a raidwide.
There's already a few trash packs in DT that do a bit more damage, like the horses after the first boss of Strayborough. They can autoattack and do a named attack at the same time for a big chunk of damage, add more of that.

I'm glad someone is willing to engage with one of my suggestions, what say you to taking that a step further by throwing around more interrupts and esuna effects for good measure?

[Launched]

I'm glad someone is willing to engage with one of my suggestions, what say you to taking that a step further by throwing around more interrupts and esuna effects for good measure?

Sure, might as well give us a reason to use those skills more than a couple of times per expansion.

The lack of mitigation, or more importantly any sustain that scales with incoming damage, explains the addition of sustain that scales with incoming damage. Holmgang didn't do so even after its change. They were just as free, however, to have damage taken increase its self healing instead of copying over %DR if not for the devs following (perhaps coincidentally) the minimalist requests to just make WAR more like PLD directly.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean. 2.0 WAR's issue was that it couldn't survive hits that PLD could without Stoneskin/Adloquium from healers. Increasing WAR's self healing wouldn't change that. They could have chosen to make WAR's skills increase max HP like Defiance and Thrill did, but I assume the devs chose % mitigation because it's easier for them to balance.

That's not relevant to WAR's copying PLD's double-stance, though. Note that DRK did not get one, instead simply toggling their defensive/enmity stance off, just as Warrior had done before. Deliverance itself, as compared to just amping Warrior's base damage and toggling Defiance on and off while allowing Wrath to be generated regardless, came from (A) seeking job action trailer flare and (B) some Warriors making a big deal out of the second (first acquired, but the one in excess of what WAR had) stance rather than just job action access.

I'm not going to pretend like I remember what people were asking for 10 years ago, I assume people wanted a use for Wrath outside of Defiance and didn't want to have less skills when not in tank stance. I don't think swapping between Defiance and Deliverance is functionally any different to turning Defiance on or off, and the jobs weren't any more similar because of it. I don't think this is a valid case of homogenisation at all. DRK getting Grit with % mitigation is more homogenisation than that.

I didn't say otherwise. My point was that with 4.0 you had many who wanted to see either a passive damage stagger DR that could be purged or a return to the burst and break utility previously held. Others would be satisfied with no less than a Divine Veil equivalent. We got the latter.

Like you said, people had different ideas for what Shake it Off could be. The devs chose to make it a party shield, but WAR players aren't at fault for complaining about a useless skill. Slightly related, the devs are also to blame for Berserk/Inner Release becoming a Requiescat clone. There are so many things they could have done (including let people get used to 4.1 WAR with no gauge loss), but I doubt a single person asked for it to give 5 Fell Cleaves in a row. I know I saw people complain that old IR made WAR do 6 Fell Cleaves every 120s.

And then you require that much more from everyone else as well, now meaning that taking a WAR is a (further) rDPS gain if we should ever develop more challenging content with frequent opportunity for multi-target attacks.

Making all tanks require more healing doesn't mean forcing healers to spam Cure II on them, it just encourages healers to use more of their kit than just using a couple of Tetras and Benison. Balancing groups of enemies in harder content is a different topic anyway, I wouldn't assume it would just be the same as aoeing in a dungeon when there's things like A2S's vuln stacks and buff goblins as examples to stop you having a WAR tank and heal through everything.

[Shurrikhan]

2.0 WAR's issue was that it couldn't survive hits that PLD could without Stoneskin/Adloquium from healers.

It could. I tanked T1-5 before patch 2.1 (released 112 days after the first tier of Coils). Even Death Sentence did not require a prior Stoneskin or Adloquiem to survive if holding Wrath stacks, and our healing from damage dealt (300% off Inner Beast at the time, or up to ~1415 relative potency) bypassed Infirmity, just as Lustrate did at the time (by healing for %HP).

They could have chosen to make WAR's skills increase max HP like Defiance and Thrill did...

Or literally any other approach that would let the Warrior's sustain scale to a roughly similar degree with incoming damage instead of solely with the Warrior's own stats.

I don't think swapping between Defiance and Deliverance is functionally any different to turning Defiance on or off, and the jobs weren't any more similar because of it.

I never said they were, only that Sword Oath was, as CK put it, a matter of "stepping out of line" (to the same degree Bloodwhetting does), since it offered a clear output advantage for single-target after a certain degree of gearing. That was then turned into WAR being advantaged at all gear levels, from all positions, for all fights. What "stepped out of line" (again, I'd just borrowed CK's term here) was just subsumed into "WAR does the same, but better".

but WAR players aren't at fault for complaining about a useless skill.

Fully agreed. For most of us, it was an unfortunate Monkey's Paw response. But it is, again, an example of "Now WAR gets it, too, but better." A solid opportunity to do something uniquely WAR-like... was turned into another case of scavenging others' actions with a small advantage placed atop it. And with each case it did that and ended up the best tank accordingly, others then said "Well why do they get X" and the contagion spread, leading to the homogeneity we have now. WAR was the most frequent Ground Zero for that shit.

As someone who's loved WAR thematically only to see it shorted with "here, take capacity (in place of gameplay -- or, just more oonga bunga as your gameplay)", that's what has annoyed me, and annoys me still when any request for deeper gameplay is met by "But I like <my ease of capacity>!"

Making all tanks require more healing doesn't mean forcing healers to spam Cure II on them, it just encourages healers to use more of their kit than just using a couple of Tetras and Benison.

Until badly overgeared, they already do that for all but WAR though. Assuming we ever get more of the treatment used to fix EW final boss fight, etc., that does it make it likely that adding enough damage for one to use their whole kit on Warrior would mean needing to use GCDs on everyone else, because the difference really is big enough.

[Shurrikhan]

Holmgang wasn't changed because Hallowed "stepped out of line", it was because 2.0 WAR had basically no mitigation skills and was useless in Coil compared to PLD. It got its own unique mitigations in 2.1- IB on the GCD, Vengeance with a lower % and lower cooldown than Sentinel, Holmgang with a target requirement, 6s duration, root and no true invuln.

The lack of mitigation, or more importantly any sustain that scales with incoming damage, explains the addition of sustain that scales with incoming damage. Holmgang didn't do so even after its change. They were just as free, however, to have damage taken increase its self healing instead of copying over %DR if not for the devs following (perhaps coincidentally) the minimalist requests to just make WAR more like PLD directly.

All jobs got new DPS skills going into HW.

That's not relevant to WAR's copying PLD's double-stance, though. Note that DRK did not get one, instead simply toggling their defensive/enmity stance off, just as Warrior had done before. Deliverance itself, as compared to just amping Warrior's base damage and toggling Defiance on and off while allowing Wrath to be generated regardless, came from (A) seeking job action trailer flare and (B) some Warriors making a big deal out of the second (first acquired, but the one in excess of what WAR had) stance rather than just job action access.

The pacification on Berserk was removed in 4.0, at the same time Shake it Off was added, so SiO was useless from the start.

I didn't say otherwise. My point was that with 4.0 you had many who wanted to see either a passive damage stagger DR that could be purged or a return to the burst and break utility previously held. Others would be satisfied with no less than a Divine Veil equivalent. We got the latter.

People were pretty happy with Raw Intuition/Nascent Flash after NF got changed to be usable on yourself. I doubt many people, if any, asked for it to be changed to flat healing.

I was more active on the JP threads at the time, so --as I already said in what you replied to-- I could be recalling posts more from there, tbf. And again, simply reverting it is exactly what I was asking for.

Leave sustain how it is, increase damage done/frequency by trash and bosses in dungeons. WAR will require healing between Bloodwhettings, and healers will have a reason to cast more than 3 oGCDs per trash pack/1 oGCD every time a boss does a raidwide.

And then you require that much more from everyone else as well, now meaning that taking a WAR is a (further) rDPS gain if we should ever develop more challenging content with frequent opportunity for multi-target attacks.

I wouldn't really care if Bloodwhetting went back to being a % of damage dealt, but I do think it needs to keep the healing on multiple targets. WAR has had that since Bloodbath in ARR.

Agreed.