Steel Cyclone.....underwhelming?

[Sybreed]

Yes, I realize that multiple abilities we have are meh, like Holmgang, but Steel Cyclone strikes me as one of those iconic moves that you get excited for when you read about it. Brings to mind, for example, Whirlwind from D2...... And yet it's just meh.

Holmgang at least has niche uses, such as using it on an enemies back for 6 seconds of them being unable to hit you, and I'm sure it'll function well in pvp; but Steel Cyclone seemingly has no redeeming feature. When I first got it, I ran out and gathered up 5 level 42 enemies, built up 5 stacks of Wrath, got the Maim buff, popped Berserk and Inner Release -> Steel Cyclone. Surely blowing 10 stacks of Wrath and all of those cooldowns would produce amazing damage (I then thought about being level 50 and having Infuriate to immediately Steel Cyclone again)? Right?

It didn't. It didn't produce amazing damage, and with no bonus enmity baked in, I'm sure it wouldn't have produced all that much more aggro than 2-3 Flash usages, if at all (this is just a feeling/guesstimate, I didn't do any estimations/math so don't hang me), so what the hell is the point of this skill? Maybe I'm wrong because I'm dense or too much of a noob, but I think the skill needs help. Perhaps have it generate insane extra enmity, or bump up the damage to 300% or something, but those are boring buffs. What if they made it so that any enemy hit by Steel Cyclone has the duration of Fracture on that enemy reset? That way we could tab Fracture, and then use the occasional SC to reset the duration? It would make both abilities more useful and would provide more synergy between skills.

What does everyone else think?

[Ryock]

If the damage were brought up to 300, then it'd be as strong as our single target attack(our inner beast), which is... odd. Honestly? I think the damage itself is fine, the wrath system itself is to blame imo. If it only blew say, 2 stacks of wrath to use, then I think we'd see a lot more use for it. It has some pretty neat uses if you speed run Wanderer's Palace and some Amdapor Keep, but yeah. I don't use this very often, either.

[Sybreed]

If the damage were brought up to 300, then it'd be as strong as our single target attack(our inner beast), which is... odd. Honestly? I think the damage itself is fine, the wrath system itself is to blame imo. If it only blew say, 2 stacks of wrath to use, then I think we'd see a lot more use for it. It has some pretty neat uses if you speed run Wanderer's Palace and some Amdapor Keep, but yeah. I don't use this very often, either.

I thought of that as well, having it only use 2 wrath stacks instead of all, but I didn't suggest it because I'm betting they either don't want to set that precedent, or will claim that it can't be done due to some coding quirk.

[Xikaz]

I think they're hesitant to buff it very much because it used to be so incredibly OP in 1.0. It used to be part of a normal combo, have increased enmity, and a heal component as well. The whole current paladin and warrior dynamic was completely reversed.

It makes me sad looking at what it became in 2.0. It doesn't need to be as good as it used to, but it definitely needs some love.

[TowerDeschain]

Why shouldn't it do 300 potency? It doesn't heal, after all. It would be brutal in PvP, but players should punished for bunching up (and it's not spammable).

[Kitru]

Why shouldn't it do 300 potency?

It should do a lot more than 300 potency to make it worthwhile. Remember, to use it, you're dropping your survivability for the next 20 seconds or so. Honestly, in most cases, WARs still wouldn't want to use it even with massively high potency because we're not here for high potency attacks; we're here to tank. To really make it worthwhile, it needs to provide a survivability benefit. You could make it the AoE version of Inner Beast by having it provide 150% of damage dealt as heal (or, better yet, absorb shield) so that it's as efficient as IB on 2 targets but more efficient on anything more than 2 (it would still be better than IB on anything except for a single target because of the increased damage, though).

[SofiyaGlaston]

It should do a lot more than 300 potency to make it worthwhile. Remember, to use it, you're dropping your survivability for the next 20 seconds or so. Honestly, in most cases, WARs still wouldn't want to use it even with massively high potency because we're not here for high potency attacks; we're here to tank. To really make it worthwhile, it needs to provide a survivability benefit. You could make it the AoE version of Inner Beast by having it provide 150% of damage dealt as heal (or, better yet, absorb shield) so that it's as efficient as IB on 2 targets but more efficient on anything more than 2 (it would still be better than IB on anything except for a single target because of the increased damage, though).

With basic math.. this is the most RIDICULOUS suggestion ever. SC has uses already. I for one, use it in pretty much every pull in WP speed runs. Clever use of cooldowns makes useful you just need to find the situation, like many other abilities.

Let's play with your idea a little bit. (P.S. I'm going to play around with averaged numbers based on a relic and darklight+ geared warrior)

Let's just imply that it gets the 150% heal. We'll use 4 targets for this point.
The average hit of a steel cyclone with just berserk active is ~350-400. For the sake of ease let's use 400.

400x4 = 1600
1.5(1600)=2400. Using 1 Steel Cyclone on a group of mobs that isn't even threatening is giving yourself a free Cure II crit from an equally geared White Mage. Redundant.

Lets use 7 mobs (the pull in WP between the room after the first boss and the next door).

400x7=2800
1.5(2800)=4200.

This is a little less redundant because you'll already be taking a lot of damage in this pull.. but when you can throw 2 of at any point in the fight for emergency heals.. either you're overhealing and wasting wrath or just making the whm overheal. OR you were already almost dead and used it properly (thumbs up). How about we add another cooldown into the mix. Internal Release. 30% for 15s. Let's say 1/3 of the hits crit (rounded down). You now have 5 hits and 2 crits. It'll look like this:

1.5(400x5)(600x2)=4800

A free 600 more healing for popping 1 short CD outside of the GCD.. quite strong. But now lets add 1 more cooldown.. for more overkill on how much this skill could heal. Bloodbath. 25% MORE raw healing on those hits.

0.25(400x5)(600x2)=800.
4800+800=5600.

That's over half of any warrior HP pool (and most of them could even have Thrill for Battle popped and still have that statement be true). in 1 GCD...And with infuriate you can throw another on the very next GCD. This isn't even putting in the extra damage you want the ability to do. Needless to say it doesn't need near as much love as you're suggesting. I personally think it's already relatively useful as is. Using it with Bloodbath during an AoE pull provides a lot of self healing and still pours some solid damage over the group (and has the built in defiance modifier of 2x enmity plus the healing agro). It's certainly not something to be spammed about, but with proper timing its still rather useful.

P.S. The idea of an AoE ability isn't to be as effective as the strongest single target ability when only 1 more mob is added. The golden number I've seen other games use for equal effectiveness is between 3-5. A fair suggestion for giving it a healing effect would be say.. 75% damage as healing? That way it's equal to IB on 4 mobs, and more efficient on 5 and greater without changing the damage modifier as we're "not here for high potency attacks"

P.P.S. Usage of Wrath attacks outside of being able to Infuriate the Wrath back immediately is generally not a great idea as is. So to use Steel Cyclone/Inner Beast at any point, you should be ready to Infuriate so you -don't- lose the Wrath benefit. The exceptions are of course emergency self-heals or the cases where healing is not needed and you want to pump out more damage.

[Kitru]

I for one, use it in pretty much every pull in WP speed runs. Clever use of cooldowns makes useful you just need to find the situation, like many other abilities.

You'll get more out of Unchained while you're spamming Overpower than you will out of using SC on those WP speed runs. Basic math will tell you that. It's 200 potency and ignores the 25% damage penalty of Defiance, which means that it's effectively 266.67 potency. Overpower is 120, so Steel Cyclone provides an extra 146.67 potency. Unchained lasts 20 seconds, which is 8 Overpowers, and nets you an extra 33% potency from each of your attacks thanks to the removal of the Defiance penalty, which adds up to an extra 316.8 potency (with the added bonus of it being "high enmity" potency). For WP, you get more than twice as much out of Unchained as you do Steel Cyclone, which is especially nice when you factor in how low tank DPS is compared to actual DPS and the higher enmity allows the BLMs, BRDs, and SMNs that tend to be brought along for WP speed runs to nuke harder and longer because they're not going to be enmity limited.

The problem with Steel Cyclone is that it doesn't really *have* any situations where it's really useful. For AoE damage/enmity, which is kind of what it's supposed to be there for, Unchained is way more effective because it's a buff to an ability that already does the job really well. If all that WAR had was Flash, there might be *some* usefulness, but, since WAR has Overpower, there's not really much point.

Let's play with your idea a little bit.

Your "play with it" is "let's tack on a bunch of 90 second CDs and see how screwed up we can make it". That's like talking about IB and only calculating with Berserk, IR, and critting to arrive at your "average" value. For the Wrath consumer abilities to actually be useful, they should be justified *outside* of a 20 second window every 90 seconds, which is half of the problem with IB.

Using 1 Steel Cyclone on a group of mobs that isn't even threatening is giving yourself a free Cure II crit from an equally geared White Mage. Redundant.

And using IB would give you half as much and I'm curious as to how you're somehow going to say that a Cure II crit from an equally geared WHM is somehow completely and utterly wasted. You're not supposed to use it while you're sitting at 90% hp. You use it when you're below the threshold of your healer being able to top you off with the next cast (which means that you're at 50% of max hp or so) at which point, even if your healer had a Cure II lined up, it would still be entirely useful.

Lets use 7 mobs

If you really wanted to throw math at my face, rather than acting as if all of your CDs are up at all times, you'd probably want to actually look at a *real* WP speed run pull, which is more likely to consist of 10-15 enemies at one time (more, if you're talking about pulling the beetles). Of course, by doing this, all you're doing is pointing out how AoE effects that aren't target limited become massively powerful when you increase group size, which is, you know, kind of self evident.

when you can throw 2 of at any point in the fight for emergency heals..

Unless you're somehow keeping up Berserk at all times, you're not going to be using these numbers as "emergency heals", which is a huge problem with factoring in IR and Berserk into these numbers. "Emergencies" are emergencies explicitly because you can't predict them. You can factor in Berserk + IR for using IB on one out of every 3-4 Mountain Busters because you *know* when that damage is coming because it's programmed. That's not emergency damage; that's burst damage. For an emergency, you're more likely to not have anything except for Wrath V up because it's an *emergency*.

Bloodbath. 25% MORE raw healing on those hits.

I'm still not entirely sure what bringing up Bloodbath has to do with anything. You can use Bloodbath *as it stands* with Steel Cyclone. You can do it with Overpower as well. Bloodbath isn't really a factor, especially since it's not like it's a proc that you have no control over when it's up. If you're worried about overheal, you could elect to *not* use it when you're going to be throwing out Steel Cyclone.

Needless to say it doesn't need near as much love as you're suggesting. I personally think it's already relatively useful as is.

And I've already shown that your "useful" is actually about half as useful as the other ability that WARs get that is designed explicitly for DPS rather than tanking that is considered by many to be largely redundant since damage isn't really a tank's actual job.

(and has the built in defiance modifier of 2x enmity plus the healing agro).

Self-healing generates no aggro and *everything* gets the Defiance enmity buff. Talking about the Defiance enmity buff is like talking about a person who's amazing because they breath air and eat food.

It's certainly not something to be spammed about, but with proper timing its still rather useful.

The only time it's going to be useful is when you don't need to be an efficient tank (since it consumes Wrath stacks) and you're out of TP (which is the only real "advantage" that it has over Overpower). The damage it provides over Overpower compared to what a DPS can throw out is negligible, especially when you factor in the whole "20 seconds between unless you really plan on burning Infuriate on this" (though, reading this, I would expect that you always assume that all of your CDs are up at all times, rather than, you know, when your CDs are up). The enmity it provides is effectively the same as what you'll get out of Overpower.

P.S. The idea of an AoE ability isn't to be as effective as the strongest single target ability when only 1 more mob is added. The golden number I've seen other games use for equal effectiveness is between 3-5. A fair suggestion for giving it a healing effect would be say.. 75% damage as healing? That way it's equal to IB on 4 mobs, and more efficient on 5 and greater without changing the damage modifier as we're "not here for high potency attacks"

Actually, if you look at the AoEs in ARR rather than just saying "well, this is what I feel about *other* games", AoE attacks become more efficient per GCD at 2 targets: Overpower has a potency of 120; the BB combo has an average potency of 210. 120 * 2 > 210. Go ahead and look to BLM, BRD, and everyone else with an AoE. It's exactly the same. AoEs provide better damage per GCD when you have more than one target. This is a pretty obvious design choice since the devs obviously designed the game around 1-3 target trash packs. If AoEs were only ever effective when you've had 4+ targets (which means a special case trash pack, like the super squishy beetles in WP, or pulling multiple packs at a time, which isn't really something they're going to design around), there wouldn't be much use to them; they would exist as abilities that just sit on your bar, waiting for some extremely marginal situations (like Holmgang and half of the Wrath abilities do now, which is what needs to be *fixed* about them).

P.P.S. Usage of Wrath attacks outside of being able to Infuriate the Wrath back immediately is generally not a great idea as is.

And this is one of the things that needs to be *fixed* about them. The Wrath abilities shouldn't exist as a series of abilities that all share the same 60 second cooldown. They should have *purpose* and use for situations outside of "well, the healer is dead" without needing to rely upon CDs. A tank should *want* to use Steel Cyclone and Inner Beast without having Infuriate up without hurting themself. If not, why not just put SC and IB on a 60 sec CD and be done with Infuriate completely. Have them apply a 60 sec debuff that causes them to apply a 15% reduction in healing received if you use them while the debuff is up. Infuriate should be a *benefit*, not a crutch that you have to rely upon to actually use half of the abilities your job provides. Improving SC and IB so that they serve a purpose outside of the confluence of a bunch of your CDs is exactly what needs to happen.

You're operating under the idea that the way they're used now is fine. They're not. The way they're used now is the problem with them. Change how they're used so that Infuriate allows you to use them back to back one per minute rather than just once per minute outright and improve those effects so that using them is actually justified when you don't have Berserk and Internal Release active and they'll actually *get* used, which is the point. They are *attacks* that should actually get *used*. They *shouldn't* be situational and conditional. They should have *purpose*. An ability that you can remove from your bar without ever noticing it's gone is an ability that needs to be revamped. Otherwise, it's just taking up space to make it look like you've actually got options when you really don't.

[SofiyaGlaston]

You're missing the point of my post and turning it into a "What's better for speed runs" and "vs Overpower" response. All I was doing was showing how overboard most of the people suggesting fixes for this skill are.

And to touch on "though, reading this, I would expect that you always assume that all of your CDs are up at all times, rather than, you know, when your CDs are up" I was doing the math BASED ON THE COOLDOWNS BEING ACTIVE. Of course they're all going to factor them in. and for most of the pulls in WP you will have Berserk active and only a couple more wont have Bloodbath. So.. covering that, you can throw all of those statements right out the window. Kitru, I see you all over these forums throwing contradictions and "my numbers are better" posts and tantruming any time someone says you aren't right... Might want to ease up on tossing idle insults a bit. (My thoughts go back to the Fracture thread where you were calling people clueless and other things of the like).

I'll continue this debate elsewhere with you if you'd like, but for now, let's stay on topic with possible tweaks to Steel Cyclone to make it more of a staple AoE skill instead of a minor use skill. (No. It's not useless.)