Ideas for Warrior Skill Changes

[Gamemako]

If you train in the ways of a marauder, being able learn the ways of a lancer seems more in line than learning how to be fluid enough to dodge in heavy plate armor with a giant axe. May just be the roleplayer in me.

Given the release-the-beast mantra of the WAR story, I think PGL abilities actually make a lot more sense. It's not just about swinging an axe.

Also you do not spend 100% of your time as a warrior tanking. Skills like Blood for Blood and invigorate would add some utility.

Long story short, WAR and PLD do nearly identical damage when not tanking (non-Defiance vs. Sword Oath). This is how the game was designed. Adding more non-tank damage to WAR in the form of Blood for Blood and reducing tanking damage by taking away Inner Beast would actually cut mitigation slightly and unbalance PLD and WAR. All tanking jobs need to have similar utility and damage when not tanking so that none are preferred and none are pushed into non-tanking role due to relative ability. This is also part of why Brutal Swing is being changed.

I am under the impression after Yoshi-P live letter that the +healing bonus of Wrath will be rolled into the passive bonus of Defiance in 2.1

It definitely did seem that way based on his comments about Inner Beast. That will help but not fix the scaling problem alone -- remember that Shield Oath is at least 25% effective healing increase and it scales with all healing. Regardless, the goal should be to push as much scaled healing as possible to limit the effect of content scaling. If Crystal Tower affords any situation where 3 healers are on one tank, then WAR is certain to be hopeless with its reliance on flat healing.

As for the heal portion, what if we changed it to being a heal spell equal to the % of max the skill provides? You attack and gain a heal = 5/10/20% of your max health, this heal could be crit'ed as if it were a cure. This would add in the synergy with +crit and +healing received.

% heals also aren't boosted by +healing bonuses. Doing a mechanic on crit would be possible (e.g. base 20%, additional 10% on ability crit), but I'm not sure what the benefit is except making one stat build preferred over another.

My thoughts here were with Wrath up you would receive small heals through out a fight effectively being a block in line with our class self healing mechanic.

It's still a flat heal that doesn't scale to enemy damage, though. Inner Beast isn't so bad in that it's burst mitigation -- it should (theoretically) at least give you what you need to survive in all but the most extreme of cases. Focusing more on flat healing for continuous mitigation doesn't make much sense. WAR needs more scaled healing.

Secondly I feel the trade off of spending wrath is what makes our class so fun. With wrath up you get sustainability or you can spend it on Inner Beast for Burst Mitigation (reactive), Unchained burst mitigation (proactive), Steel Cyclone (+threat).

Steel Cyclone as a threat gen just feels out-of-place. Most of us aren't hurting for enmity, so it generally feels superfluous. Since you're trading Inner Beast, I still think all Wrath abilities need to be defensive in nature. Steel Cyclone could (in theory) be a better choice for AoE situations. At the very least, it should be comparable to Inner Beast (say, 100% of damage absorbed -- need 4 targets before it's advantageous there), but I think a unique mechanic would be preferable (AoE damage debuff, paralysis, silence, whatever).

From what I have been able to read most people are only doing 1000-1500 healing from Inner Beast so the 20% should be pretty close to existing numbers.

That's about right -- 1100 is pretty much where you'd be for a Garuda-equipped WAR (assuming 320 strength) after Maim and Storm's Eye.

The other idea I see floating around Would be to make the heal based on damage taken. What are your thoughts on turning our skills from what we put out to what we take in? Something like *Inner beats: You rage and receive 25% of the damaged received in the Last 5s as healing*

While it works, you'd have to spam the heck out of it to match as continuous mitigation (compare to Shield Oath, blocking) -- you may take as much as 100% of your HP pool per 5s or so, so if you can only use it every 20s, you're going to run into your max HP as a limiter. As burst mitigation (compare to Rampart, Sentinel), it would help scaling to scale it to enemy damage, but burst mitigation isn't really the problem to begin with.

Yeah basically. Unchained is very lackluster. It cost 5 wrath and is essentially a 25% damage buff with a 180s cool down.

Yeah, it's terrible. I made the suggestion of removing it from Wrath just as an off-hand sort of comment on the nature of the ability -- it's not really a solution, just a point that it has no place on Wrath if it's not boosting your tanking ability. Like I said, your idea would work, it's just a bit PLD-like.

My first though was to make it Increase damage taken, seems more inline with the name of the skill.

Shield Swipe now is what Fracture in 1.0 was. Pacification effect from a parry proc, hence the name.

My idea with foresight was to boost another lackluster skill and keep the class flavor. Our armor comes with a lot of +parry, and I wanted to promote that form of mitigation.

That's because WAR and PLD gear is identical. When you compare all 3 ilvl90 chestpieces, they have the same VIT, STR, and Parry bonuses.

Blood Bath is another lackluster traited skill. I assumed each tick of a DoT it not a successful attack, and it would have an internal cool down (2s?), that's something I'm used to from other games.

Right now, it ticks all DoTs and has no time limitations. It's entirely based on DPS. Player time limitations don't work well in ARR because various weapons have different autoattack speeds, so there's no reliable interval. You could probably disable DoT ticks from it, but you'd still have multi-target focus if it is scaled to max HP (i.e. per-hit healing) and not damage.

What if we scrapped the Heal and added a damage shield akin to Stoneskin?

Functionally no different -- flat heal for X amount (scaled to player damage or player health rather than enemy damage). At least amount-healed ones can lose overheal amounts.

I personally view Storm's Path as a lost cause. It's hard to work into a proper rotation -- it has to replace Storm's Eye in a rotation to be used at all, and if any changes are made to Fracture, you'd have one more reason not to use it. I still think Storm's Path may be more about the second MRD job.

I don't think you understand where we are coming from? Same eHP yes, same mitigation not quite. Granting a % life gain on some abilities helps scaling, since as a tank we will always want more HP, paladins too.

It's not about how it scales to the player, it's about scaling to the player at all. When there are two healers on one tank, there is twice as much damage coming to the tank. A PLD's reduction effectively doubles -- 20% of 500 DPS is 100 DPS reduced; 20% of 1000 DPS is 200 DPS reduced. A WAR's reduction doesn't scale with content, so if it's balanced with PLD in single-healer content (in this example, 100 DPS reduced), it's half as effective in two-healer content (still only 100 DPS reduced, or effectively 10%).

[Ryock]

besides i think that WAR is fine as it i don't have any issues with it at end game stuff, i think you guys just don't play that class right, i'm a lv 50 WAR AND HAVE NO ISSUES END GAME.

I am not trying to be antagonistic here, this is an honest question. Have you main tanked coil?

As for warrior changes. I always thought it was kinda weird that we lose damage in defiance, when I thought warrior was supposed to be a more offensively oriented tank. While it wouldn't fix our problem, I felt that the damage reduction shouldn't even exist on defiance to begin with, and that unchained should do something... well... more useful.

[Stonie]

not quite yet, but i have faired better then pld with the same gear most the time. i don't feel like i am geared enough yet and don't want to hop into an instance like a d-bag lol. i'll let you know how the works out but i fly through the rest of hte end game stuff.