How would you fix Warrior?

[Bondy]

In my opinion, I dont see a massive problem with warrior as a tank, so to speak (though i think some skills should be changed, like storm's path haha, ill never use it, maybe if it did the same as skull sunder+heal and combo'd like HS>SP>BB), what i see is a synergy problem with healing and mp.

So, maybe if say, Defiance gave a +% permanent healing recieved increase, or each stack of wrath gave a +% healing recieved increase. Dunno what number% would be not OP, maybe 25% defiance and 5% each stack of wrath? who knows haha. But again, in my opinion, i just see a synergy problem between healers and their mp used to cure warrriors, and think if a healing received bonus can be balanced with paladins damage reduction, everything may be alright =P

[Akeldma]

1. Defiance no longer reduces damage done and has a permanent 15% increase to healing received from curing magic instead of being based off wrath stacks.
2. Maim no longer increases our damage by 20% instead debuffs enemy target lowering their physical damage done by 10%. (With Defiance not reducing damage done we don't need a damage buff ability)
3. Storm's Path now heals for 100% of damage done up from 50%.
4. Bloodshower makes Bloodbath a permanent ability instead of extending it to a 30 sec duration.
5. Steel Cyclone heals for 200% of damage done.
6. Unchained increases all warrior self heals by 100% for its duration.

The changes to the Wrath abilities would let the Warrior use all the abilities for self healing depending on the situation. Inner Beast for single target quick heal, Steel Cyclone when tanking groups of adds and Unchained when a quick pick up isn't needed but you want to help the healers out some.

[mcfuzzi]

Blood Bath: Deal attack with potency of 250, Grant 100% of damage delt as hot over the next 20sec. The lower the war health the more damage done. Off Global Cool down.
Beserk: Increase damage done by 50% for 20 sec. (More powerful that fight or flight, shorter duration with a negative effect at the end)

Just for some extra flavor.

[Gamemako]

OK, let me get this off my chest.

Things which will not address WAR's problems:

1. Increasing Inner Beast's use rate. You'd have to basically dump IB after every single combo before it catches up with PLD, and you'd be comically-overpowered for non-endgame content by that point. Boosting flat heals is a losing proposition.
2. Adding a shield to Inner Beast. WAR cannot take a hit to heal it in the first place. Even assuming that no overheal occurs, WAR is hugely behind. Furthermore, unless you'd be reducing overall heal amount, you'd run into the same problems as above.
3. Make Steel Cyclone or x other ability drain health. You're boosting self-heals as a function of time again, plus failing to address WAR's inability to tank single opponents. You'd boost the ability to off-tank adds, but that is already simple enough that WAR in its gimpy state can do it.
4. Increasing WAR's DPS (e.g. removing Defiance penalty, boosting Steel Cyclone damage). WAR's problem is not that it cannot hold aggro; WAR's problem is that it cannot survive hits. Boosting damage is just not relevant at all.
5. Boosting Storm's Path heal. It's never going to be worth using. You don't have room for it in a rotation even if it did heal a significant amount.

If you want WAR to be decent, fix WAR's problems. Here's WAR's burst survival problem in one chart:


(Assumes 6000 base HP for PLD -- chart will look pretty much identical regardless of what base HP you choose, because WAR has just a flat 85 HP advantage over PLD. Note also that Rampart and Sentinel are multiplicative with each other and with Shield Oath. I did not include Hallowed Ground for obvious reasons.)

Until this is addressed, WAR will continue to die to damage spikes while PLD will not. This is neglecting that the boosts PLD receives also come with an effective healing boost for the duration. The changes required to address this are quite large. If you increased the HP boost on Defiance to 50% instead of 25%, you'd look like so:



This is a rather large buff -- sufficiently large that I doubt the dev team would dare implement simply because it would look really, really bad. And yet, even with that kind of large buff, WAR would still lag behind in terms of burst reserve. Still I propose this as the change that needs to be made for WAR to be competitive.

Now let's look at continuous mitigation and the scaling problem. We'll look at the least-viable way of playing WAR: dump IB as soon as you can. You will have no burst mitigation left here and will pretty well die to the simplest of opponents. We'll assume IB used 4 times per minute (1 per 20s plus 1 Infuriate use). Heal per shot is dependent upon build and gear and will vary between 850 and 1200 per shot -- we'll look at both cases, assume 100% use of Maim & Storm's Eye, plus zero overheal. This is the absolute best-case scenario for WAR.



In this best-case scenario, and a good look at the scaling problem for WAR. By the time you reach any endgame content, WAR is left behind in the best case by PLD's passive mitigation alone. Each Turn4 Dreadnought delivers 1000 pre-mitigation DPS, and two of them will make poor WAR utterly hopeless at best. Nothing can go wrong for PLD, and WAR would have to have insane skill and fortune to reach this. Here's the killer, though: more realistic case would be this:



This is a better view of the problem. This is 3 IB per minute, 20% average overheal. I adjusted to add an additional stack of Wrath on average as well to account for reduced IB use rate. When things aren't perfect for WAR, WAR might as well not even use IB -- sitting on Wrath is better. Again, this is not compared to Rampart or Sentinel, this is just compared to PLD sitting around in Shield Oath, and does not consider the blocking (and possible crit reduction) advantage that PLD has. In any case, WAR is horribly behind. It's worth asking here why sitting on Wrath looks better here compared to the perfect case. This is purely due to the overheal assumption. Because you are not healing as much per shot, using IB becomes a negative -- this happens much earlier with the ilvl70 case. However, the difference isn't really that huge because the amount healed by Wrath has crept in and quite nearly taken over with respect to overall mitigation.

What would it take to fix it? Well, tying continuous mitigation to burst mitigation isn't a good mechanic in the first place. So let's decouple them, giving Defiance a flat 20% healing bonus regardless of Wrath stacks. Without changing anything with respect to self-healing rate, this is what your reasonable-case situation looks like:



Now, let me remind the reader that this neglects the blocking advantage enjoyed by PLD. Including that blocking advantage, you'll see that PLD would still be passively superior to WAR at high damage rates, while still enjoying superior burst abilities. However, a change like this would go a long way toward making WAR at least viable at endgame.

//EDIT:

If I assume that Paladin blocks an additional 5% of all damage over WAR, then this is how PLD compares passively to my buffed case:



This is neglecting the impact of Rampart and Sentinel as well, comparing just passive PLD reduction. I will need to get better data on PLD and WAR blocking and parrying rates and amounts, however; right now, this is just ballpark.

[Duelle]

* Increasing Inner Beast's use rate. You'd have to basically dump IB after every single combo before it catches up with PLD, and you'd be comically-overpowered for non-endgame content by that point.
* Adding a shield to Inner Beast. WAR cannot take a hit to heal it in the first place.

These two would actually take place at the same time, one because of the other. Adding gained mitigation as well as a self-heal through Inner Beast would inherently increase the use of Inner Beast over the course of a battle, and depending on the conditions for the shield would still require knowledge and skill on the part of the player to maximize gains and survivability.

Furthermore, unless you'd be reducing overall heal amount, you'd run into the same problems as above.

I don't think a damage shield would call for a nerf to the amount healed by Inner Beast as much as a change in the conditions for the self heal.

[Leiron]

A shield would work if it acted as follows.

Inner bast: Creates a shield that blocks 10% of incoming damage on up to 300% of the Warrior's maximum health.

So if you have 7.5k health, your shield would last over 22k worth of damage.
This would make upt he 10% difference between pally/warrior in terms of passive mitigation.

Then cooldowns can be addressed afterwards.

[Faction]

What is this BS "WAR can't survive hits?"

WAR can survive hits. WAR just isn't as good as Paladin at it. Things like making inner beast a shield WOULD be a big improvement because it means that you could use inner beast BEFORE BURST DAMAGE instead of after it for the same effect, but much less risky, and there is 0 risk of it ever being overhealing.

Plz play the game before posting =)

[Vire]

What is this BS "WAR can't survive hits?"

WAR can survive hits. WAR just isn't as good as Paladin at it. Things like making inner beast a shield WOULD be a big improvement because it means that you could use inner beast BEFORE BURST DAMAGE instead of after it for the same effect, but much less risky, and there is 0 risk of it ever being overhealing.

Plz play the game before posting =)

The only fight in the game war is not viable on is turn 5 is BECAUSE we can't survive hits. How about you play the game before posting. A warrior can survive 1 death sentence with thrill of battle. That is literally the only move that will let us survive a death sentence followed by an auto attack. PLD can survive 4 of them with cooldowns no problem and even without cooldowns are way ahead because they reduce 20% damage passively.

[Faction]

The only fight in the game war is not viable on is turn 5 is BECAUSE we can't survive hits. How about you play the game before posting. A warrior can survive 1 death sentence with thrill of battle. That is literally the only move that will let us survive a death sentence followed by an auto attack. PLD can survive 4 of them with cooldowns no problem and even without cooldowns are way ahead because they reduce 20% damage passively.

WAR can survive hits. WAR just isn't as good as Paladin at it.

Wow thanks so much for your insightful post!!!

[Vire]

Wow thanks so much for your insightful post!!!

Good luck war tanking twintania you special snowflake! Let me know how that works out for you after you take a dirt nap 2 minutes into the fight.