Warrior Rework to Balance the job

[Zairava]

Consistency, not homogenization.

So, homogenization. You tried performing mental gymnastics and landed on your arse. good job.

TBN really could just be better but that's just DRK in a nutshell.

This doesn't require TBN being homogenized into functioning the exact same as the other tank short cd's.

Hence why there's little satisfaction in it outside of a few people still clinging on to the idea...that Dark Mind is really useful.

It is useful, just only against magic damage. The literal only problem with Dark Mind is that it needs phys mit added on to it.

That'd be great if they weren't so good at eating the floor from casual content! Good thing I'm not playing DRK! Helps especially in higher tiered content where healers are needing any assistance they can get because things start actually hitting hard!

DRK actually mandating a role in the trinity be needed to survive is actually good trinity design. DRK properly played performs just fine. The actual only problem childs are Dark Mind and Dark Missionary not effecting physical damage.

Good, that would be great to have more interest on DRK. At this point it could use a rework in general, but I'll see what ends up happening. I'd love for it to just be more fun in general though but it's also just not my kind of job.

I mean at that point it's on the level of Damnation/Vengeance with the physical reflect, except even if that doesn't work in a magic fight, it works as a mitigation tool regardless so I find it desperate personally. I wouldn't even mind if it was as simple as 10% physical mit and 20% magic mit, just something, anything.

I've been on the DRK copium train since Shadowbringers launch. I got enough tanks to go around until it gets reworked finally.

[Shurrikhan]

Consistency, not homogenization.

Do you know what literally marks something having been homogenized, be it in games, earthwork, or dairy products? When it's consistent anywhere and everywhere, functioning the same and therefore carrying the same characteristics.

Consistency: The quality of being reliably steady and uniform, homogenized.
Homogenization: The process of making something uniform, unvarying, consistent.

but that's just DRK in a nutshell

"DRK just belongs on the bottom. That's only natural. Like WAR belongs on the top."

Good thing I'm not playing DRK!

You don't say?

I've tried enough MMO's for my liking and would rather stick with the one that managed to come back from 1.0.

I mean... Warrior was even more OP in 1.x, because it was only in 1.19 to 1.23 and they were still trying rapidly to get their shit together elsewhere and otherwise.

[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.

[Lyth]

Temporary HP effects aren't particularly hard to balance, and both Thrill of Battle and Great Nebula have them. The math works out similarly to barrier effects, except that any unused mitigation functions as a net heal. The one place where you can run into issues is when your maximum HP is used in a mechanic (i.e. heal-or-die effects). But I think the workaround to this is to allow the player's maximum HP to exceed their total HP, and leave the total HP unchanged. You could also display the temporary excess HP as a colored bar on the party chart, similar to how barriers are visually displayed.

To illustrate how a 'theme' can be used to create a divergent job design, consider a situation in which all of WAR's defensives augment your current HP above maximum in some way. You have your short recast, 20%, 40%, and raidwide mitigation. Have a base effect that is standard. Add in a job specific effect that is around bolstering the target's current HP above maximum. This opens up fresh possibilities for an ability like Thrill of Battle. What if, instead of giving a HP/healing boost, it simply allowed incoming overhealing to exceed your current HP total? That could create some interesting synergies between WAR and their healers. I think that HP manipulation approach is a lot more interesting than just having passive heal effects in the rotation.

If you wanted to differentiate barriers from this, you could have barriers proc bonus effects when they break, or have them regenerate over time. Could you 'overclock' a barrier, where you boost its absorption and reduce its duration? Could you consume a barrier to spread it to your teammates?

There are other unexplored avenues as well. It would be interesting to see a tank with placeable 'walls' that intercept damage in LOS from the source, in the same vein as the Ex 1 tankbuster.

You do need a consensus on a common defensive kit that every tank should be able to provide at a minimum. Then you diversify each design with unique gameplay concepts to make the gameplay diverge.

[Mapleine]

The majority of WAR players are happy

I bet lol, so were Game Shark owners back in the day

[whiskeybravo]

I bet lol, so were Game Shark owners back in the day

The comment you quoted was the first in response to the suggestion WAR needs some sort of "rework" to "balance" it. It does not need a rework to balance within the current meta, and the OP has long since abandoned this thread and their abysmal ideas.

Like, I have every reason to level the other tanks but absolutely 0 desire to do so. Now if in some timeline WAR was bottom tier for the last 5+ years would I feel the same? Hard to say. I've always played WAR, ever since 1st coil in ARR when I had to pop vitality potions as an extra CD lol. At the very least I've no desire for a "rework", and I don't get the impression any other WAR does either (with the exception of those who seem to want a rework to tank gameplay in general).

Regarding the actual conversation taking place..

TBH it sounds to me like this is largely just beating a dead horse. There are good suggestions here by many people but it ultimately boils down to the direction SE decides to take. If dungeons are just meant to be casual ~15 min encounters then there's little hope of implementing any interesting or substantial changes along these lines. Personally I get the impression this is the direction they lean towards.

Healers can complain about not having much to do if tanks heal too much, but what are they going to do otherwise? There's no additional layer of gameplay that exists, just dps or heal. AST at least has cards to play with, but even that's pretty shallow engagement. And it's not much different on the tank front. But I see a big difference in that a core responsibility of tanking is to alleviate the burden on a healer. Maybe BW is too strong right now, but it certainly fulfills that function and it's both rewarding and enjoyable to execute your role responsibilities (even if, yes, it too is a bit shallow). So healers can say we're taking away from their job but any change would take away an aspect of our role too.

It just circles back to what is the level of challenge, if any, SE intends for any given content to have. If the general direction is to keep things on the casual side for dungeons, and empower tanks to greatly alleviate the burden on a healer for efficient completion, then indeed they need to make sure each tank has equally viable and effective options for doing so. I mean, I for one would like a reason to finish leveling and maybe even occasionally play as another tank. Even if WAR was significantly nerfed I don't think I would switch, the other tanks would presumably still be lacking what they lack now so really there'd still be no point.

[AmiableApkallu]

But I see a big difference in that a core responsibility of tanking is to alleviate the burden on a healer.

The core responsibility of tanking is to hold aggro, to direct incoming damage towards yourself instead of letting it hit the party, or failing that, to try and reduce it.

Restoring HP to yourself or the party has nothing to do with that. That's for the healers to take care of. That's why they exist in the tank-healer-DPS trinity.

[Supersnow845]

The core responsibility of tanking is to hold aggro, to direct incoming damage towards yourself instead of letting it hit the party, or failing that, to try and reduce it.

Restoring HP to yourself or the party has nothing to do with that. That's for the healers to take care of. That's why they exist in the tank-healer-DPS trinity.

This is basically the core reason why tanks and healers will never agree on how to fix healers

Tanks think that being an off healer is part of their role design while healers believe that tanks should hold agro and allow them to heal

[Shurrikhan]

This is basically the core reason why tanks and healers will never agree on how to fix healers

Tanks think that being an off healer is part of their role design while healers believe that tanks should hold agro and allow them to heal

Meanwhile, I'd like tanks to be mostly about supporting the party through managing the targeting and indirectly/thereby the positioning and damage-efficiency of enemies while spreading out to thwarting/countering the effect of enemy offenses in varying ways and tanks to mostly be about supporting the party through almost any way possible outside of (to any degree more than dps) manipulating enemies through first and foremost manipulating their targeting, with uniquely few limitations on their ability to sustain the party against damage taken.

That is, to me, tanks should have a fairly narrow keel from which the task expands organically while healers should, as support, be supplementary to nearly every purpose and not necessarily even the primary source of healing but simply the one least limited in how and when they can heal.

But, even if you were to take a Priest-type job specializing in mind-cluckery, cloth armor or otherwise, if their output comes primarily through manipulating enemy targeting and includes at least a decent portion of actions that is naturally synergetic to that condition* (being able to lead them about, keep their attacks from striking allies unnecessarily, and use personals indirectly towards the whole raid's benefit, etc.), then yeah, that's a tank.

Granted, if it were just an unrelated debuff active whenever the enemy is targeting the player, rather than anything the player actively leverages, before even worrying about whether that'd be "tank"-like or not, we'd probably want to consider whether it's quite simply anti-fun...

I've never understood why it has to be a matter of proportioning capacities...

Heck, I wouldn't even mind the perfectly coordinated 8-DPS party being able to squeak by tank and heal checks or a Hemomancer DPS being able to out-burst-heal a Healer when sacrificing its damage, at cost and inflexibly, to that purpose, so long as overall, the traditional comp tends to be quicker or nearly as quick and at much lower stress, skill, and risk required.

...I just want to see roughly equal value overall. Both across the jobs of the given role and between those roles.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯