idea for warrior improvements

[Fiosha_Maureiba]

I'm not a Warrior, but sometimes play one on the internet.

Getting a brief feel of the job, I would have liked to see at a minimum:

Unchained / Steel Cyclone / Inner Beast independent of the global cooldown.

And the rest is just wishlist kinda stuff:

Holmgang: Add a huge parry boost (or six second Stoneskin-like effect). If SE reduces the cooldown of Holmgang, adjust the parry boost accordingly. The risk of Holmgang is that if it used as a mitigation move, but cannot avoid an avoidable AoE. This may also build a synergy with a healer who uses Esuna / Leeches to remove the Bind effect.

Fracture: Adjust Warrior trait to have an Evasion Down effect. Less a mitigation move, more a "Warrior = high risk, high reward tank." There are some mitigation risks with a Warrior, but his/her presence may allow for other party members to trade out Accuracy for other stats.

Sometimes I think of the "cyclone" or "storm" as an obstacle to overcome. And in line of that thinking, think Steel Cyclone and Storm's Path.

Steel Cyclone: In addition to its current effect, adds a moderate Parry boost. If you're on top of your health and enmity, you won't need Inner Beast or Unchained, so you perhaps go for the mitigation chance that Steel Cyclone could provide (again, Steel Cyclone independent of the GCD). In AoE situations, this may help survival rate a little since most AoE fests involve melee attacking foes.

Storm's Path: Either adjust the self-healing or replace self-healing for a short duration, lesser "Stoneskin-like" effect. This may be "Absorbs damage equal to 100% potency, duration 15 seconds." If a Warrior is on top of their hate and prioritizes survival, they may be able to make the healer role easier by refreshing Storm Path as a buffer. In conjunction with Berserk, this would improve the absorption effect of the shield, making Berserk a choice between "do damage and gain enmity or self-heal with absorption."

Random bullet points
* This won't solve the problem of damage scaling. For that, it may require newer content to be designed that may place both tanks in similar positions of peril.
* I think content like Amdapor Keep end boss and Hydra have the healing debuff that affects incoming healing magic, but does not affect self-healing. This hurts the healing received from Wrath stacks, which is one of the Warrior's survival mechanisms. The Warrior, howe'er, can still take advantage of self-healing without penalty.
* The revised Storm Path may be useful in situations where max HP is reduced from debuffs.
* Berserk with Inner Beast and Storm's Path would be the mitigation flavor, on a Berserk length cooldown.
* Strength favors increased enmity generation, self-healing, and improved absorption from Storm's Path. With the enmity increase, may allow for more opportunities to use Storm's Path combo.
* Vitality does what it always does, still being attractive for its synergy with Defiance, Thrill of Battle, Stoneskin, and improved passive HP regeneration.

[Kitru]

* This won't solve the problem of damage scaling. For that, it may require newer content to be designed that may place both tanks in similar positions of peril.

You can't have content scale different for each tank. Right now, WAR is almost perfectly balanced with PLD for 4 man content, and *well* behind PLD on 8 man content. Your changes, since they are just flat increases rather than changes to scale, would make WAR better than PLD for 4 man content and *still* worse than PLD for 8 man content. Basically, unless you actually change how the WAR self healing scales, WAR will simply be the 4 man tank while PLD becomes the 8 man tank, which still has WAR getting excluded from all real end game content.

This is the problem with *every* suggestion by people that look at WAR, hear about how it's worse than PLD, and end up thinking that increasing self-healing is some kind of a WAR performance panacea. It's completely ignorant of the actual reasons that WAR has problems.

It's also important to keep in mind that self-healing is naturally inferior to straight up mitigation: WAR has to *survive* a hit to heal itself back up; PLD just takes less damage. So, for the big burst damage mechanics that the devs are so fond of, WAR becomes *way* more likely than a PLD to die because, while a PLD blows a CD and just takes less damage from the hit, the WAR has to survive the hit so that it can mitigate it after the fact. Because of *this*, the more of your mitigation that is derived from self-healing *the less effective of a tank you end up being*. Self-healing as a secondary mitigation mechanism works just fine but it can *never* be a significant portion of your total mitigation if you want said tank to actually be able to do upper level content. There's a reason why pretty much *every* self-healing-as-mitigation tank in games gets changed to rely less and less upon that self healing (either that or the devs just stop caring about balance altogether, like what happened in City of Heroes with Regeneration) and more and more upon properly scaling proactive mitigation mechanisms, like absorb shields that scale off of damage taken over the last X seconds and static damage reduction: you can't balance effectively across multiple styles of content (PvP, small group, large group) without doing so.

Also, the Holmgang change still doesn't do much to make it useful. Holmgang's problem isn't just in the fact that it binds you (which, btw, is likely the intended purpose: to make you immune to knockback and forced movement effects; Holmgang is supposed to be the WAR version of Tempered Will); it's also the fact that it's got a 6 second duration on a 180 second CD. Even if it *did* provide a massive mitigation buff while active, it still wouldn't do much because its got absolutely crappy uptime (3.33%). The only CD in the game with a *worse* uptime is Hallowed Ground (2.4%) and that's for a pretty obvious reason.

[SwordCoheir]

You can't have content scale different for each tank. Right now, WAR is almost perfectly balanced with PLD for 4 man content, and *well* behind PLD on 8 man content. Your changes, since they are just flat increases rather than changes to scale, would make WAR better than PLD for 4 man content and *still* worse than PLD for 8 man content. Basically, unless you actually change how the WAR self healing scales, WAR will simply be the 4 man tank while PLD becomes the 8 man tank, which still has WAR getting excluded from all real end game content.

Perhaps the first time I've ever truly agreed with Kitru with anything. Thing about WAR is it might be behind other jobs in terms of balance, it's not quite as far behind as people make it out to be. Even just changing the amount of incoming heals received, % healed from IB/BB/SE, or let Heavy Swing build Wraith is going to make a significant difference in WAR's performance and that change can make or break WAR to be OP if they're not careful. Hence why the devs are hesitant to do any significant changes to WAR.

[Kitru]

Hence why the devs are hesitant to do any significant changes to WAR.

I'm not entirely sure that the devs are hesitant to make any significant changes given the fact that they've said that they're reexamining WAR performance on 6 different fronts. Even if they're all comparatively small tweaks, they'll have to add up to some pretty big changes so that WAR can actually compete with PLD (causing healing to scale with incoming damage rather than damage is a significant change and the WAR CD suite would need to be made twice as effective as it is now to match the PLD suite). WAR has several areas where they match PLD or are close enough that it doesn't matter (damage, enmity, mitigation in 4 man content), but the areas that it *is* inferior (mitigation in 8 man content, spike mitigation, CD suite) need major revision.

[SwordCoheir]

I'm not entirely sure that the devs are hesitant to make any significant changes given the fact that they've said that they're reexamining WAR performance on 6 different fronts.

They probably meant they're trying WAR in different scenarios to see what they can strengthen w/o making it OP in solo/lower/4man content.