End game WAR offensive and defensive combinations

[Zaythe]

Hey guys,

Well the thread says it all. While I'm not a fresh level 50, I am not geared at all and am looking to jump in on finishing the storyline and gearing up for end game. I absolutely love WAR's play style and I want to excel at the job and do the best job possible for my fellow party members.

Now, we have quite a lot of offensive and defensive cooldowns to which, I am curious if anyone can give me a heads up on which ones to use together for maximum effectiveness. I have heard of the simple defensive ones such as:

Foresight>Featherfoot
Berserk>IB>Infurtiate>IB etc etc

What I am mainly unsure about are a few abilities that I know I need to combine but, am unsure which ones to combine them with. These are the following moves;

Unchained, ToB, Bloodbath, Convalescence.

Bloodbath in particular because as a fresh 50 it does seem very lackluster by itself.

Also any help with Holmgang would be appreciated as well. I really am unsure of when this helps out. I could only think of if say the healer got hate and I popped it to stop he mob heading on over but, I am 1 level away from provoke so that kind of defeats its purpose there.

Any help and/or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Maelwys]

What I am mainly unsure about are a few abilities that I know I need to combine but, am unsure which ones to combine them with. These are the following moves;

Unchained, ToB, Bloodbath, Convalescence.

Bloodbath in particular because as a fresh 50 it does seem very lackluster by itself.

Also any help with Holmgang would be appreciated as well. I really am unsure of when this helps out. I could only think of if say the healer got hate and I popped it to stop he mob heading on over but, I am 1 level away from provoke so that kind of defeats its purpose there.

I'm not an endgame WAR, but I'm doing a lot of reading.

Concerning Holmgang: It's a bind, which means it locks mobs in place (and you as well!) Whilst using it to prevent a mob running over to thump a teammate is one obvious use... you could also use it as a makeshift mitigation cooldown. If you sidestep a nasty enemy's attack and then use Holmgang, you'll freeze it in place so that it's stuck looking sideways for several extra seconds.

For ability combinations, there's a lot of opinion out there regarding Skill Rotations, and I'll defer to more practiced players for their views However some good pointers I've noticed would be to combine Bloodbath with Vengence if at all possible (120s versus 90s cooldown might make that tricky, but the two abilities seem to compliment each other very well because every hit from Vengence will recover a little HP) and to try to be aware of how you're affecting the potency of any external healing on you.

I'll explain that second bit a little: It can be quite easy as a WAR/MDR to just rely on your own self-heals and ignore how you might be buffing/debuffing the effect of any external cures - but as long as you have a Healer in the party, using Convalescence has the potential to be rather good at keeping you alive - and is probably better at that than Foresight. Likewise, it can be worth understanding that using the IB>Infuriate combo is perfectly fine, but using the IB>Infuriate>IB combo is a bit more situational - because whilst you'll recover a large amount of HP with the second IB, you'll get much less benefit from any external heals until you can manage to build Wrath back up to 5 stacks again. In situations where you're pulling a lot of incoming damage and have a lot of external heals being thrown at you, this could actually result in you dieing more quickly...

[Zaythe]

Thanks for the reply mate, I appreciate it. Also, with Holmgang, I did not know it would cause the boss/mob to not turn even if I am standing right next to it, good to know.

Thought I might give this a bump for some more input.

I'd also be really interested in which abilities to use when while tanking end game bosses. I do have a vague idea however, I don't really want to jump into end game and do a bad job off the bat. I like to know dungeons/fights up front so and help with cool down management would be great