Balancing WAR: A Game of Graphs

[Kyp]

Good job, just keep in mind a lot of ppl dont grasp the math side of MMOs very quickly so it comes off as gibberish to most.

[Beurling]

With math like this, there's really no excuse if the upcoming war changes aren't right. Multiple great threads with factual evidence of why a class is numerically broken, and multiple ways to fix it are on the forums, so i hope some dev reads these.

Great job OP, always willing to bump a smart war thread.

[Sybreed]

Sadly this post will be ignored I believe, because it seems like many people are chalking the difference up solely to Paladins being able to avoid a mechanic in such a way as was unintended by the devs.

[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.