How would you fix Warrior?

[Ursok]

I believe there needs to be some adjustments made to the job. It is underperforming and there are people who are defending it but these are also people that are quite geared but having a full iLVL 90 gearset with gryphonskin accesories with 5 meld should not be required for me to tank like a Paladin in ILVL 70 gear.

It is simply a question of if it's broken how would you fix it? I think just giving us defensive cooldowns would be boring so im making this post for sujestions on how to fix warriors.

• Leave the healing buff on for defiance and not wrath V (this would make us not dread using our wrath abilities).
• Take away the damage penalty for defiance (Define the roll of the DPS tank further, we take more damage but we deal more damage) (turn unchained into DPS boost).
• Turn bloodbath for warriors into something better maybe allways on or more return.
• Make steel Cyclone heal on crit or at least do more damage.
• Make wrath V abilities better

[ChriskoOnAnotherLevel]

add % damage reduction to defiance....

[Ruminate]

Less copying Blood DKs from that other MMO, more copying Warrior from the later era FF games. Thats how I'd fix it.

Later era WARs utilized Breaks. Breaks were debuffs, similar to Rage of Halone and Flash.
Hmm... maybe thats why PLD is more effective than WARs? They're more like WARs than WARs!

[Brutallyn]

make our selfheals damage absorbs shields. that way it contributes to mitigation.
simple and effective.

Brut

[Giantbane]

Personally I would:

Get rid of storm's path and give the healing component to either Butcher's Block or Storm's Eye. It's a very small heal, has an unnecessarily high TP cost, and has too little benefit to justify not doing storm's eye or butcher's block combo.
Turn steel cyclone into a useful ability. Possibly as a combo finisher to replace storm's path. Make it default to MRD and not WAR specific (I don't understand the rationale behind making it WAR only).
Replace steel cyclone with some kind of temp damage reduction on par with Sentinel. Have it cost 5 wrath to make it more of a WAR ability.

[Gamemako]

Here are my fixes, complete with rationale:

1. Increased HP recovery from Wrath to match Shield Oath. On an equivalent basis, this is 25%, so you have to go from 3% per stack to 5%. The only alternative to this would be to buff WAR's drain to match, but doing so is not reasonable due to the solo and 4-man strength that would provide.
2. Increased HP bonus on Defiance. Self-explanatory. WAR has to HP tank everything, and the fact that WAR's HP is effectively identical to PLD's is just plain silly (effective HP is about 1.5% different -- WTF?). Needs to go to 30% at least, probably 35%. Give WAR enough HP to take a punch so it has a chance to drain the HP back. That, as I understand, is one of the principle weaknesses of WAR currently, and why people have gone to VIT builds.
3. Slice cooldown on Thrill of Battle in half. 60 seconds. I cannot for the life of me guess why this ability has such a stupendously-bad cooldown for as weak as it is.
4. Add something useful to Steel Cyclone. Stun, paralysis, slow, whatever. The ability really needs to justify its existence.
5. Take Unchained off Infuriated. It boosts DPS, but compared to Steel Cyclone, you'd need to plow through 1000 TP worth of Overpower to get a boost out of it, and you could never compare in terms of drain to just using Inner Beast.

That should give WAR the HP to take a hit and bring it up to speed with PLD. It's still riskier, still requires much more skill to operate, etc, but it wouldn't be a total mess. The changes would also maintain differentiation between the two tanks, which the "give damage reduction!" solutions miss.

[Hachiko]

So many things:

• Butcher's Block and Storm's Eye now give 2 stacks of wrath
• Inner Beast now applies a shield instead of healing.
• Inner Beast is now Off of the GCD.
• Increased Storm's Eye debuff duration to 18 seconds.
• Reduce Butcher's Block Potency to 260.
• Add an Effect to Butcher's Block - Reduces target's damage by 3% for 12 seconds
• Set Maim duration to 24 seconds baseline.
• Replace Improved Maim with Improved Butcher's Block - Increases the damage reduction to 7%
• Storm's Eye - Reworked. Now a 100 Potency AOE attack. Combo Action - Overpower, 200 Combo Potency, Heals for 33% of damage dealt. Generates 1 Wrath stack.
• Vengeance - Reworked - Increases parry rate by 50%, you deal a 100 potency attack to any enemy you parry during the duration.
• Steel Cyclone - Adds a Debuff - reduces damage dealt by enemies damaged by
  Steel Cyclone by 20% for 15 seconds.
• Defiance - Increases healing received by 20%. Wrath Stacks now longer grant increased healing. You now gain 2% crit and 2% parry chance per Wrath.
• Thrill of Battle - Increased to 15% baseline, 25% with Enhanced Thrill of Battle. Now lasts 20 seconds.
• Infuriate - Cooldown Reduced to 45 seconds.
• Mercy Stroke - Reworked. 150 Potency Attack off the global usable any time on a 60 second CD. If the target is below 20% health, Mercy Stroke deals 450 potency. If Mercy Stroke kills the target, the user is healed for 20% of their max health.
• Bloodbath - Base CD increased to 120 seconds. Base duration increased to 30 seconds. Bloodshower now reduces the cooldown to 60 seconds.

This would be good. I don't know if any of this would be overpowered, but I think it would be a good start to closing the gap between WAR and PLD, without changing how either job plays overall, and without really eliminating the WAR's role as the one best able to mitigate big hits and big damage, while also giving WAR some ways to deal with it.

On a second look some of this might be overpowered in 4 man content so it would require adjusting. Still.

Another idea I was toying around with was modifying Inner Beast:

Inner Beast does up to 400 Potency attack, unaffected by the Defiance Damage Reduction, depending on how much health the Warrior is missing (maximum 400 at 30% health or below). Heals for 300% of the damage dealt.

There are a lot of neat things SE could do with the WAR and probably 1000 ways they could close the gap though.

[Ninjiitstu]

I agree with most of these posts. The biggest one for me, being one of those i90 gryphonskin chaps, is having Inner Beast and Steel Cyclone off cooldown. That alone would significantly increase my opinion of them.

[Rhad]

Defiance should have a selfheal component based on damage dealt.
Unchained should have a 40 sec cooldown.
Cyclone should have an enmity component.
Mercy Stroke should heal for 10 percent of health when used, 20 if it kills the enemy.
They need to introduce a new ability that heals you for x amount of the damage taken over the last x seconds. Don't know how long the cool down should be.

[Genesiser]

Make every self heal from the warrior (blood bath, inner beast, storm path) also add an absorption shield worth 150% of the amount healed. This would not only make the self heals worth while, but also smooth out the damage warriors take and not make warriors so spikey. In essence, this would make up for the lack of a shield.

For example, you figure a pally has a ~25% chance to block ~25% of the damage taken. So 1 in every 4 hits are blocked, you figure a raid boss hits for what, 1k dmg? So every ~10 seconds (4 atks x 2.5 sec/1 atk) that is 250 damage reduced. (25 damage/sec reduced)

For a warrior, if you used storms path every other 3 hit combo (I would assume you can hold aggro if you did that) then every 15 seconds a warrior would heal himself for 150 damage and get an absorption shield for 225 damage. (total of 25 damage/sec reduced)

Also, every ~20 seconds a warrior could then use inner beast to heal for 1k and get an absoorption shield for 1,500 damage. This would go a long ways into making warriors damage taken much more steady and more viable.

Finally, move the 15% heal modifier from wrath stacks to defiance baseline and just have wrath stacks add crit. That way if you use a move that takes away wrath stacks, it doesn't reduce your tanking ability.