Balancing WAR: A Game of Graphs

[GoMagikarp]

so is it viable to stack a bit of +skill speed to make our rotations more efficient?

considering those complicated combos with all that ability weaving, and trying to pull it all off before pacification, it would seem like its something worth looking into right?

[Feilina]

Ok we have a long OP comparing the mitigation.
Now. Can we have an OP comparing self heal and as second (third), damage output?
Than we have a picture.

[Hachiko]

Your burst mitigation graphs seem a little confusing because they rely on monster DPS still, when it should be a large single hit or hit over a short period of time (i.e. just look at how proportionally Inner Beast fares against different levels of burst, 3k, 4k, 5k, 6k, 7k, etc.)

Also how did you get to ~31% healing load reduced? I did some testing today and Shield Block + Shield Oath had my WAR taking 27% more damage than my PLD which would be significantly more healing load reduction. Sort of preliminary testing though so I'd like to see how you got your numbers.

Also I think it would be worth testing the impact of Rage of Halone.

Ok we have a long OP comparing the mitigation.
Now. Can we have an OP comparing self heal and as second (third), damage output?
Than we have a picture.

So, you're saying you didn't read anything in the post?

[Gamemako]

Your burst mitigation graphs seem a little confusing because they rely on monster DPS still, when it should be a large single hit or hit over a short period of time (i.e. just look at how proportionally Inner Beast fares against different levels of burst, 3k, 4k, 5k, 6k, 7k, etc.)

That's really more about burst HP, though -- whether you survive the one big hit. My consideration is how much damage is mitigated; that is, I want to say how much healer MP is impacted over that period assuming you do survive. I chose 20 seconds as a scaling time due to Rampart, but perhaps I could do an additional case for 10 second scaling.

Also how did you get to ~31% healing load reduced? I did some testing today and Shield Block + Shield Oath had my WAR taking 27% more damage than my PLD which would be significantly more healing load reduction. Sort of preliminary testing though so I'd like to see how you got your numbers.

The one near 30% @ 1500DPS includes burst abilities over time and excludes blocking. If you look at the first chart, it's circa 34%. I was working on closer to 5% of all damage reduced with shield blocking -- but you're passively reducing 9% of all damage with shield blocking? That seems like quite a bit more than any other estimate I've seen. Even if I assume that an additional quarter of enemy crits are pushed off the table due to blocking, that should amount to around 0.5%, which isn't nearly the gap. Do you have data on blocking rate and blocking amount? I would be interested to see them.

[Hachiko]

That's really more about burst HP, though -- whether you survive the one big hit. My consideration is how much damage is mitigated; that is, I want to say how much healer MP is impacted over that period assuming you do survive. I chose 20 seconds as a scaling time due to Rampart, but perhaps I could do an additional case for 10 second scaling.

The one near 30% @ 1500DPS includes burst abilities over time and excludes blocking. If you look at the first chart, it's circa 34%. I was working on closer to 5% of all damage reduced with shield blocking -- but you're passively reducing 9% of all damage with shield blocking? That seems like quite a bit more than any other estimate I've seen. Even if I assume that an additional quarter of enemy crits are pushed off the table due to blocking, that should amount to around 0.5%, which isn't nearly the gap. Do you have data on blocking rate and blocking amount? I would be interested to see them.

With respect to Burst I dunno, I just don't feel 20 seconds is really a "burst" timeframe, maybe my issue is with the terminology.

I think I might have confused you with my relative words also. The WAR took 27% more damage than the PLD. But that's using the PLD as the "baseline." So Block didn't reduce overall damage taken passively by 9%. That would have been if PLD took 27% less damage than the WAR (which wasn't the case). The PLD took ~21.3% less damage than the WAR, which puts the shield block contribution really, too low in my numbers.

Or maybe I caused the problem by flipping it around from healing load reduced to WAR needing x% more heals which is the way I like to look at it, since it's the real world impact of going with a WAR over a PLD: how many more GCD's do you need to keep them up?

Now that I think about it, I really don't trust my FFXIV APP tracking very much at all in terms of damage taken, so maybe that's the biggest issue.

But my parse showed me blocking 21.9% of non-miss attacks, (202 Blocks of 869 hit, 45 crit attacks. Should be a contribution of ~5.5% damage reduction. This is with Holy Shield. +1 should probably take it up to 6% I think, between the rate and block value increases, though I may be wrong (if it doesn't then I don't think anyone should ever upgrade to Holy Shield +1...)

Also my testing with Rage of Halone had a contribution of ~8% damage reduction (19.94 damage taken v. 21.63 damage taken) though I suspect this to be wildly off because it's the APP parser and because of how hard it is to test halone. It's actually kind of hard to test this in a meaningful way, because even with the weakest weapon the mob dies before it can get a lot of attacks in, and mob damage seemed to drop off quite a bit once they were up for a long time (testing without halone was ~100 hits, w/ was ~30).

This was against the lvl 49 cohort Eques (lancers).

[Gamemako]

With respect to Burst I dunno, I just don't feel 20 seconds is really a "burst" timeframe, maybe my issue is with the terminology.

I will see if I can address that in an edit some time soon.

I think I might have confused you with my relative words also.

Ha, you're totally right, I read it wrong. I would have expected WAR to take 31.6% more damage at 5% blocking advantage. Your builds are identical for STR, though? Possible that you're comparing two different block/parry strength windows? That would increase WAR parry reduction.

But my parse showed me blocking 21.9% of non-miss attacks, (202 Blocks of 869 hit, 45 crit attacks. Should be a contribution of ~5.5% damage reduction.

About what I was expecting. I don't have any data for HS+1, either, though. I doubt the ilvl90 a huge departure from the ilvl80 shield.

Also my testing with Rage of Halone had a contribution of ~8% damage reduction

That's more than I was anticipating. I will have to find more data on that regardless.

[RapBreon]

Yay for math nerds!

[Ursok]

I like some of your proposed changes especially decoupling the healing % buff from wrath. as I believe this would be very beneficial.

Wrath stacks (Defiance Stance) Increases your Crit chance and parry rating for x% per warth stack (something that would balance out not having block), and restores HP for each critical hit you land (maybe only at wrath V). Effect fades over time and ends upon use of wrath consuming abilities.

IB would be encouraged to be used and the effect of loosing parry rate and crit rate would not be as bad as loosing the healing buff. Smart play will still be needed on the use of our burst mitigation tool.

[AppleGrocer]

I have a question, and forgive me if it's already been addressed in your OP or in a reply that I missed.

What happens if Wrath expenditure and IB were to be timed perfectly with incoming heals, e.g. Damage->Heals from healer->IB?

I ask because, I believe, that you normalized Wrath stacks to 3 across the board in an attempt to average out the fluctuating healing bonus. I can't tell if this averaging out of the healing buff was done in your burst mitigation section, if it wasn't... then disregrd the rest of this post. With the infamous "Yoshi says Warriors need to l2p" and the newest Dev letter in mind, it appears that the "correct" way to play warriors is to have 5 stacks of wrath up whenever a healer would need to heal you by timing Wrath expenditure after incoming heals.

I understand this is more of a technical question in regards to its affects on Warrior continuous mitigation because of the difficulties in synching with healers to the point where almost every heal benefits from the 5 Wrath bonus while using IB more than once a minute. But, in regards to foreseeable burst mitigation, this might be something to look into as the pattern of Titan Table Flip->Heals from healers->IB seems more than workable.

[Skull_Angel]

With the infamous "Yoshi says Warriors need to l2p" and the newest Dev letter in mind, it appears that the "correct" way to play warriors is to have 5 stacks of wrath up whenever a healer would need to heal you by timing Wrath expenditure after incoming heals.

The "correct" way of playing WAR is flawed because it requires close to perfect execution on healers' part and WAR simply doesn't have the preemptive cool-downs needed to survive more than "possibly" a few large spikes like PLD can (ToB is WAR's only worthwile preemptive CD; it has a 10 sec. duration and 2min. cool-down); timing is too crucial with this particular style and reduces the ability Inner Beast (IB) to an after-thought more than a reactive death-defying clutch.

I'm not sure whether IB was ever intended to be as strong as it is now, but this is how the community has viewed it (and understandably so with what it's capable of) and it is arguably WAR's strongest tanking ability. If increased healing (through Wrath) was supposed to be WAR's boon, it sure fell flat on it's face considering that with it active at full stacks it's still much weaker than PLD's passive Shield Oath (there's math everywhere showing how much healing one requires over the other).