Balancing WAR: A Game of Graphs

[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.