7 Ideas to Balance WAR

[Hachiko]

yet you still are making no actual case against it, you're just going "no, wouldnt work", and you're still talking about "early game" even though i've said twice now about a trait to alter for endgame only. seems to me that you're just dismissing the idea because its not what you want or like.

It doesn't matter if it's a trait or not. What, is it only going to be active in Binding Coil of Bahamut?


No. You said level 50. That means: Trivial AK. Trivial WP. Trivial Castrum / Prae. Trivial HM Ifrit. Trivial HM Garuda. Semi-Trivial Titan (though you would still be in the same place in terms of being burst down if your healers are unable to heal after the Rock Buster, which is a huge downside for WAR on Titan). What about when they release new level 50 4 man content? With your proposed solutions ALL of it is trivial. You wouldn't even need a scholar's fairy to heal you in 4 man content unless they scale the damage dealt to crazy degrees.

Point two - none of your solutions would help in Coil. So you've added a few HPS from Bloodbath and made storm's path not quite as bad. But relying on Storm's Path nerfs your enmity by at least 11%, it concedes any DPS advantage WAR has over a PLD entirely, and it drains your TP ridiculously fast. In any situation where a WAR is a MT they will probably not be able to hold threat against the higher enmity jobs (MNK) using a rotation that has Storm's Path in it. And even then you're still only able to use it once every 3 rotations. So who cares if you get an extra 225 heals per 22.5 seconds? 10 HP/S is trivial, and is already outdone by the Bloodbath that even YOU recognize as negligible. 10 HP/S is not something that keeps you "topped off" when you're taking regular attacks for 1000-1800 damage.

Finally there is the buff to bloodbath. The one that would actually have an impact. 100% conversion for 30 of 45 seconds would be great, but it isn't enough of a solution to make WAR MT viable. For one, because you are still likely to be burst down in coil. If you'd run coil you would understand that when you can take 5k damage in 1 global, a HOT that works out to 100 hp/s isn't going to keep you up. And what about when new raid content comes out with even more damage to tanks? Do you think WAR DPS will double or triple by then? But it would help with things like AK and WP, because most damage from those instances is under 100 DPS. WAR would be virtually unkillable on normal pulls or any of the bosses even without a healer and even in really poor gear.

You can't load 100% of WAR mitigation onto self heals, particularly ones that scale with the player damage, because tank damage doesn't scale nearly as quickly in this game as player health or monster damage. It leads to a multitude of problems.

[Seidaku]

Now, for completely off the wall idea. Defiance, with zero Wrath stacks grants +25% HP, -25% damage received, -25% damage dealt. As you gain stacks of wrath, damage reduction is lowered by 5% (+-0% at five Wrath), but you gain +3/5% healing received per Wrath. Now you have to balance between getting enough enmity and blowing your Wrath before big attacks from bosses (add +Wrath to Overpower + Flash, so that you cannot cheat too). Tadah, really dynamic tanking!

Imagine all the Infuriate / IB / Unchained shenanigans, also making your pocket healer frustrated as hell since the damage you receive would be wildly variating.

This is kind of an interesting idea. What if it went the other way though. With high stacks of wrath our dps goes up, healing received goes down, defense goes up. So we scale a little with normal attacks, point being to have high wrath when the big hit comes in and then we blow IB to give ourselves a self boost while removing wrath so healers can burst us back up.

[konflikti]

This is kind of an interesting idea. What if it went the other way though. With high stacks of wrath our dps goes up, healing received goes down, defense goes up. So we scale a little with normal attacks, point being to have high wrath when the big hit comes in and then we blow IB to give ourselves a self boost while removing wrath so healers can burst us back up.

Either way would be cool really, I just personally think getting more Wrath ie. getting more angrier would lower your defenses and raise your offense. I kinda forgot the crit bonus / damage bonus from the orginal post. It would also force you to blow you Wrath and not happily sit at max Wrath because you got maximum damage reduction then (maximum damage reduction would in practice also mean most EHP and most use out of heals, which would outclass +% to healing received).

[Shinkyo]

I'd really want to keep the offensive tank concept and have our DPS being the key to our reactive mitigation.
How I'd fix WAR:
1 - Move the selfheal from Storm Path to BB. We absolutely need to have a constant selfheal rotation to close the gap with PLD CD.

2 - Make Steel Cyclone add shield equal to 300% of damage. Basically giving us tools to mitigate before burst (Steel Cyclone) and after burst (IB).

3 - Make Vengeance a skill that keeps track of incoming damage and applies a scaling dps factor to Steel Cyclone and IB while vengeance is active, thus scaling our Shield/Heal. Scaling factor should be a +% of dmg received/maxHP. The scaling factor and damage tracker is either reset after use of SC/IB (might be too powerful) or simply deactivates vengeance.

4 - Make Unchained be affect by Vengeance with the same dps scaling factor concept so that Bloodbath heals more.

[Shinkyo]

These are just concepts that I think would make WAR more viable and interesting to play.
The key things I'm trying to address:
- we have 3 moves that costs all our wrath (which is a high price) so let's have real benefit from all of them.
- Vengeance should be about taking hits in order to hit back harder and improve the efficiency of our wrath draining moves.
- we need one tool to mitigate upfront. Steel Cyclone can be that tool and would work similar to IB but as a shield
- Scale shield/heal based on damage taken

Now you'd need to carefully define the cooldown and the scaling factor so it's not OP but overall, I find these changes would make WAR really interesting.

PS: how do you post long posts? I'm limited to 1000 char...

[Seidaku]

Either way would be cool really, I just personally think getting more Wrath ie. getting more angrier would lower your defenses and raise your offense. I kinda forgot the crit bonus / damage bonus from the orginal post. It would also force you to blow you Wrath and not happily sit at max Wrath because you got maximum damage reduction then (maximum damage reduction would in practice also mean most EHP and most use out of heals, which would outclass +% to healing received).

What if for each stack of wrath we gained the ability to sit at 0 hps for 2 seconds per stack. Essentially given an invulnerability buff similar to holy ground but under a very different mechanic. Healers could let us hit 0 while they heal the rest of the group and we would be relying on them to heal us back up from 0 before the timer ran out. Once the timer starts it would remove all our wrath and lock us out of wrath for 30 seconds. We would also gain a pacify type buff that stopped us from having the timer again for 180 or whatever the cooldown should be.

[Ehayte]

How about something like 15% static healing buff, IB that functions like ToB, and make bloodbath/storms path heal for more potency the lower % of total health you are at?

at 100% it does nothing - literally no healing, at 75% hp it will heal for 50% of damage done, at 50% HP it will heal for 100% of dmg done, at 25% it would heal for 150%, and at critical levels (below 10%) it could do like 300%, so if you are expecting a big spike in damage, pop BB and start queuing up SP. This way we keep the mitigation dependent on our DPS, while just allowing us the power to recover from a bad situation, instead of being super OPed by having our self heals be a buffed static potency or %.

I was thinking defiance should just do this normally (at 75% hp, incoming healing is increased by 25%, just an inverse relationship) - but I think that would be super OPed and make healing TOO easy. This way its all on us to manage our CDs in the right way.

PS By "our" I mean you guys and me in 4 weeks.

[Carnifex]

Didn't see this post. Adding from my post to this. Both suggestions to new and alterations to other.

I'm suggesting a non-shareable skill for MRD/WAR that harkens from FFXI, Full Break. Make it work similar to Virus (non-stacking). It'd be a defensive cooldown that can shore up the gap, but it'd be mechanically different in what the PLD offers.

Inner Beast should be off the GCD (as well as the other Wrath abilities). It already takes ~18 sec for that heal. Also, str/damage dealt does not scale as quickly as our Max HP. Inner Beast could heal instead for a % of Max HP instead.

Overpower needs to grant Wrath whenever it hits 3+ mobs. This will then feed into more uses for Steel Cyclone.

Steel Cyclone could also use a secondary effect, a threat mod, or a straight up potency buff. Though I like the idea that it adds a shield based on damage/targets hit.

I'm also loving the idea that BB gains the effect of SP. Improving the heal value as well will not cause a dramatic imbalance because of how potent the PLD cds are and that it takes 7.5 sec to get this heal off.

[Outtkast]

EDIT....
How about this too? Leave warrior how it is, but make the warrior revolve around inner beast for real. What I mean is, let it be used with any amount of wrath stacks, but each stack makes it stronger. Kind of like this...

1 stack : heal for 60% of dmg dealt from move, get bubble equal to 5% of dmg received in last 5 seconds.
2 stacks : heal for 120% dmg dealt, bubble equal to 10% dmg received.
5 stacks: heal for 300% dmg dealt, bubble equal to 25% dmg received.

I like the make IB usable with any number of stacks, but I would make it so bubble amount is a percentage of damage dealt. The amount of incoming damage received could be used in "creative" ways to cheat game mechanics.

[OmegaSinX]

3 - Make Vengeance a skill that keeps track of incoming damage and applies a scaling dps factor to Steel Cyclone and IB while vengeance is active, thus scaling our Shield/Heal. Scaling factor should be a +% of dmg received/maxHP. The scaling factor and damage tracker is either reset after use of SC/IB (might be too powerful) or simply deactivates vengeance.

That sound Godly. But imagine if It absorbs all damage taken for 10secs and after the 10secs it returns all damage to the Target in 1 Blow. Ouch, imagine your dps against Titan. But we know this would never happen cuz it would be game breaking. For example, Titan hits 2-4k Per hit, lets say he hits u 6 times in that 10 secs. You'd hit for 12-24k in one hit lol.