Steel Cyclone.....underwhelming?

[Kitru]

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.

You're the one that brought up the pulls in WP speed runs as the fundamental basis of measuring the value of my Steel Cyclone change rather than any situation in which the AoEs are actually balanced around (not to mention actually being ignorant of what AoEs are actually based around in ARR rather than other MMOs). You furthermore decided that they should be balanced around the presence of buffs that do not have anything approaching 100% uptime. Going off of your math, Inner Beast should be measured as a 2-2.4k heal every time that you use it, not just the times that you've got Berserk and Internal Release prepped and ready to use because, according to you, you've always got those up whenever you need to use any of your Wrath attacks in an emergency situation (keep in mind, even if you use the "only when you have Infuriate" logic for Wrath consumption, you're *still* not going to have Berserk up for every single one because it's a 60 sec CD compared to a 90 sec). On top of that, you would *never* need to use one of your Wrath abilities outside of the first 25 seconds of a massive pull because, you know, you start every fight with Berserk active but you completely and totally ignore your tank CDs that would fade around the same time as Berserk when you would actually need the big burst of survivability you'd get from spending from the Wrath stacks you just built up.

Your entire logic path is based upon a massively specific case and then claiming that the idea is absurd because it's "redundant" to get an extra Cure II crit during a substantial pull (when your healer is spam healing you in order to keep you from dropping as opposed to just providing maintenance), which is exactly what you'd get out of an IB crit (apparently *that* is redundant just as well).

Overall, you missed the entire point of *my* suggestion. Steel Cyclone sucks as does the entire Wrath consumption construct at the moment. Any use that you might concoct for it at the moment is less effective than just using other the stuff at your disposal. The damage it provides isn't enough to justify it and providing a marginally sized self heal on it would only provide any degree of usefulness to it when you're in one of the oversized pulls that the devs pretty obviously don't balance anything around (because, if they did, AoEs would be a helluva lot weaker).

The only Wrath consumption ability that is actually justified at the moment is Inner Beast because it actually provides a survivability benefit to offset the cost to your survivability, which just so happens to be the most important aspect of the tanking role, and IB still suffers from being inefficient outside of multiple conditionality and specific incoming damage levels. As it stands, Unchained is, for all intents and purposes, a marginally more efficient Blood For Blood and Steel Cyclone is just pointless.

My idea would cause Inner Beast and Steel Cyclone to perform the same function (burst self healing) with the distinction that Steel Cyclone is for any situation where you've got multiple targets and Inner Beast is for single targets, which, going off of the fact that they both consume Wrath, would suggest that they're *supposed* to be used as such. Basically, Steel Cyclone for trash and Inner Beast for bosses. The damage they provide is tertiary to the survivability benefits and secondary to the enmity afforded by said damage. If it doesn't have an additional enmity modifier, a high base potency simply exists to fulfill the same purpose as the additional enmity modifier with a bit of additional damage attached as a bonus.

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.)

Let's go over it again: Steel Cyclone *is* useless because it is inferior to other options available to you. Saying that Steel Cyclone isn't useless is like saying that Savage Blade as an additional for WAR isn't useless.

In order for it to a staple rather than just a gimmick, a Wrath consuming ability needs to fulfill 3 qualities: it needs to provide a worthwhile survivability increase to offset the loss of Wrath stacks, it needs to fulfill a tactical niche that is not already fulfilled by *another* ability, and it needs to do all of this without having to rely upon CDs. The first is because WARs are *tanks* and survivability is the #1 concern. The second is because, if there is overlap, you're just giving them one ability to use instead of the other. The third is because having an ability rely upon a CD in order to be useful rather than to *augment* is creating an ability that is too conditional to be useful. The last is where we're getting the most disconnect and it is important because balancing an ability around having Berserk and Internal Release on whenever it is used would be like requiring Bloodbath to be up in order to use Thrill of Battle or Bulwark to be up to use Hallowed Ground. If an ability performs below the expected threshold just because a completely separate temporary effect isn't present, you're drastically diminishing the effect one or the other: you either don't use Berserk, save it for IB, and just take the hit to your damage and enmity or you use Berserk on CD and simply submit to the fact that you're going to end up with a terrible Inner Beast most of the time.

Synergy based upon temporary effects should be a *bonus* rather than a requirement. Based upon your logic, the synergistic combination should be what everything is balanced around. The devs should be *cognizant* of the combination, but only to prevent the synergy from providing *too much* of a bonus (which, given the fact that they're both percentage based increases to performance that have explicit caps based upon max hp, means that it's not really something that will really get out of hand). If you design something about having temporary effects with limited uptime active every time it's used, you're just saying that it simply shouldn't be used a vast majority of the time.