Balancing WAR: A Game of Graphs

[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?

[RapBreon]

Yay for math nerds!

[ASaturnus]

I explained in the text, but suppose I should be more explicit about it. I will try to improve that.

You did indeed, totally overlooked that paragraph. Well, it was late when I wrote that.

Armor values are not included because they are identical. They do reduce damage, but there is no difference between the two jobs. Same with evasion. Most bonuses are actually multiplicative -- for example, Shield Oath, Sentinel, and Rampart combine to reduce damage by 61.6%. If it were additive, the three would add up to 80% -- this does not appear to be the case. I could include that detail, but it's a horribly long post without going into extreme detail about mechanics.

Still, other mitigating factors are not trivial for the comparison, especially when you say things like "WAR is half the tank of PLD". Because if mitigation from armor is, say, 50% and mitigation is multiplicative, then PLD has a mitigation of 67%. WAR would fair much better than half against this. Thus, a relevant question is, how do differences in armor compare against the difference between PLD and WAR.
A corollary of this is, with increasingly better equip, the difference in mitigation may become less relevant. Of course, PLD will always have better mitigation, but that may very well be the purpose.

You are conflating the group's overall goal (defeat opponents) with an individual role. A healer heals. It may often be efficient for the group for the healer to also deal damage, but if the healer cannot fill the role of healing, then the group is doomed to failure. This is the same with tank. If the tank did no damage at all, that would still fill the tanking role. It's a bit like VIT: if you don't have enough, you lose by default; if you do have enough, then it's you're free put efforts elsewhere in hopes of winning. The problem is that WAR is either incapable of filling the role or requires far more resources to do so.

The individual role cannot be seperated from group goal. If a healer heals very well but the group doesn't have enough damage, the group, and therefore also the healer, will fail. Thus, a healer who does more damage is better than a healer who does less, provided they both heal enough to keep the group alive.
Of course, currently in the hardest content, survivability of the tank is much more in question than his damage, thus it's rational to bring the tank with the highest mitigation. Again, that may be PLD's purpose alone.

Er... parses?

I said reliable measures. Current parses are proven to be unreliable. Besides, some people claim, according to parses WAR does about 50% more damage than PLD while tanking. Others say the parses show little difference. So I say it's unconclusive.

[Paikis]

Current parses are proven to be unreliable. Besides, some people claim, according to parses WAR does about 50% more damage than PLD while tanking. Others say the parses show little difference. So I say it's unconclusive.

Maths says that PLDs get about the same potency per GCD as Warriors... but only when the PLD is in Sword Oath (removes 20% penalty, adds 50 potency per) *and* is given the benefit of the Warrior's 10% slashing debuff *and* this requires the WAR to not be stance dancing. That is one VERY tilted playing field.

While tanking, and without the benefit of the Warrior's debuff, PLDs should be a good 30%+ behind WARs for both damage and threat.

[Hachiko]

While tanking, and without the benefit of the Warrior's debuff, PLDs should be a good 30%+ behind WARs for both damage and threat.

It's less than that, and it mostly depends on how often you use IB.

[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).

[AppleGrocer]

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.

Hence the "" around correct. It seems like this is the way they wanted Warrior to pan out, and it sounds nice. But, you're right, given the tools we have right now it's just impractical if not impossible in a lot of cases. It requires immense amounts of coordination and timing and just makes content artificially difficult for both Warrior tanks and healers.

That being said, my question is if it works in theory, i.e. if we had enough leeway through a larger HP buffer so that we didn't have to pull off clutch healing rotations in sync wit our healers, or by making the healing buff native to defiance rather than requiring wrath stacks.

It seems to me, that the devs are leaning towards this style of fix: reducing the execution required from warriors and healers in order to fully take advantage of the healing bonus while using IB. I just want to know if this will actually fix the problem, or if a theoretical Warrior using IB while maximizing the number of heals that benefit from the healing bonus of Wrath still falls woefully behind a Paladins survivability; in which case, this whole idea becomes pointless.

[Illya]

Well Yoshi specifically said he expected both tanks to die at only 3 stacks of Turn 1 and 4 (Caduceus and Dreadnaught), but PLD can live on past that. So he wants to buff WAR until it can live as long as PLD can. If that's not an explicit admission that he wants both tank classes to have the same survivability I don't know what is.