Warrior Mitigation, and how to do it

[Mugly]

Hello everyone! I'm a pretty long time Warrior player, and I feel like I've gotten a pretty good grasp on how to mitigate as a warrior. I see a lot of warriors who don't seem to understand how to do it, or worse yet, don't even bother and just DPS in Deliverance. There are plenty of guides on how to be aggressive for max DPS on Warrior, but what I'm going to do in this guide is explain how Warrior's mitigation works, and how you can use your tools to help your healer have an easier time. Remember, the less time the healer spends healing you, the more time they can be DPSing.

Let's begin.


Aggressive Mitigation

Warrior is a soak tank with self healing. What does this mean? Firstly, it means you have a surplus of health in comparison to the other tanks. You do not generally reduce the amount of damage you take; instead, you have increased healing and self healing skills to mitigate the overall loss easier. Part of this mechanic is that Bloodbath and Inner Beast scale off your damage (And Equilibrium as well) so having high attack power is vital to self sustain.

However, you do have two amazing mitigation tools: Inner beast, and Vengeance. Inner beast gives a 20% reduction for 6 seconds after it's used. Vengeance gives 30% and does a 50 potency reflective attack for 15 seconds.

Inner Beast

Inner Beast is the crux of the Warrior mitigation toolset. It heals 100% of all damage it does, and with the 20% reduction bonus, it's a great skill to use right before a tank buster. By itself it's simply okay, but it synergizes wonderfully with the other mitigation tools the Warrior has, offering a robust mitigation toolkit even when you're on the ropes.

In order to use Inner Beast, you need 5 stacks of wrath. To get these stacks, you need to play very aggressively; If you're not hitting your combos fast enough you won't mitigate well enough in endgame content. To help you along, Raw Intuition, Berserk, and Vengeance all give a single stack; and you can use Infuriate for a full stack in a pinch, or if you need more than just 6 seconds of Inner Beast. Berserk's 50% damage increase applies to Inner Beast as well, so if you need to help the healer with some healing, it's a very useful buff.

Inner Beast also compliments skills like Thrill of Battle nicely, since the increased HP you receive from Thrill of Battle will help soak the 20% damage reduced hit. Inner Beast doesn't work too well with Vengeance due to multiplicative scaling and not additive, but considering that Inner Beast can be primed quickly, it's not much of a loss if you decide to use them together. Foresight is sort of the odd egg of the mitigation tools; If you really need to use it, pop Bloodbath and Inner Beast + Infuriate + Inner beast to just handle the health loss. Foresight will help soften the auto attacks, if anything. As for Raw Intuition, since Parry and 20% reduction from Inner beast are calculated separately, it's still good to use them together, but beware that it won't apply to magic busters.

Vengeance

Vengeance is the unsung hero of Warrior, and makes Warrior shine when handling adds or large groups of enemies. The 30% reduction is excellent, but the best part is the 50 potency attack, which can be buffed with Bloodbath, Berserk, and Deliverance.

Big pulls become a complete joke with this combo. The insane damage paired with 25% of your damage in healing, plus overpower and Decimate spam, result in amazing aoe hate, damage, and intense self healing. Additionally, since the timer on it is quite short, you can space it out throughout the dungeon for a very quick run. When it's on cooldown, I like to use Defiance + Thrill of Battle + Convalescence, as that makes healing me easy and gives the healer a lot of time to DPS and do what they need to do. In the even that both combos are on cooldown, you will need to use Raw Intuition and Awareness, however this will not work against magic enemies, so try to save it for an all physical pull.

Vengeance is an amazing skill, not just for a little more damage, but the assisted self healing and damage reduction makes it a star player. Use it as often as you can, as the cooldown is relatively short compared to the other two tanks, allowing you to be very aggressive with it. Remember that it becomes better in Deliverance and with Bloodbath; the increased damage means increased healing, offering better mitigation than in Defiance save for single target scenarios.

Thrill of Battle + Convalescence

I never use Thrill of Battle without Convalescence. Firstly, the increased healing offsets the increased health, allowing healers to not work twice as hard. Secondly, Thrill of Battle is a pure Soak mitigation skill, so all the actual mitigation comes from actively healing, either via equilibrium, inner beast, or the healer healing you. The bonus of this combo, though, is that it will work regardless of what type of damage you take, be it physical or magical. Remember that Warrior is not a PLD or DRK, they don't reduce the damage they take, but improve the healing they receive.

Raw Intuition + Awareness

You don't necessarily need Awareness with Raw Intuition (particularly for single target stuff), but for large groups it's definitely nice to have to keep from getting surrounded and busted down quickly. Keep in mind that their durations are not the same, so hopefully mobs die before awareness wears off and you can gather the enemies together in front of you. Other than that it's just a nice skill for the wrath stack and 20% parry mitigation. Doesn't work on Magic.

Foresight + Bloodbath

Well, this one is sort of a joke, but if for whatever reason you've used all your other cooldowns and all you've got left is Foresight, you will want to pop bloodbath on it and try to get an Inner Beast up. If you rotate your cooldowns, however, this should almost never happen.

Cooldown Rotation

Generally speaking, you will want to try to use Inner beast with each combo, but for certain things like big pulls you may just want to use the next combo to keep yourself beefy. The overall DPS determines how often you will need to use the combos, in those cases. For single target, however, you'll do:

Vengeance > Thrill of Battle + Convalescence > Raw Intuition

In most boss fight scenarios, your cooldowns should be cycled through for the next buster if you time them right. Remember that Inner Beast will enhance each combo, and Equilibrium will go a long way in helping your healers. The less time the healer needs to spend on you, the more time they can do mechanics, DPS, and helping the other tank. Warrior has a variety of tools to keep themselves somewhat independent, including great TP management and healing, and if the healer needs to spend time on you handling the adds instead of the other tank dealing with the boss then you need to be mitigating better.

In dungeon runs the setup is largely the same, except I do this for each big pull:

Deliverance + Vengeance + Bloodbath + Berserk (Spam aoe damage for more heals!) > Defiance + Thrill of Battle + Convalescence > Raw Intuition + Awareness

Most dungeons you can reach the boss in just a couple pulls but sometimes you'll need all three, and sometimes you'll need four (very rarely). But the skills come back up quickly so it will be easy to handle.

Conclusion

I hope this guide was helpful. I know that Warrior is quite different from other tanks, and their high damage is key to their mitigation toolkit. If you understand how to mitigate through higher damage, then you will be a much better Warrior!

Feel free to ask questions or offer commentary on what you do for mitigation, if there's anything I may have missed or you think I should touch on. I didn't talk about storms eye or path, but I feel that's a discussion for another time.

[ArdorGrey]

You should really have bloodbath tied to berserk and deliverance or at the bare minimum unchained. Using it without other offensive CDs is just gimpy healing and not really helping anyone do anything.

I think you might be missing a large part of the bigger picture of warrior. A lot of fresh warriors do this as you mentioned, but usually on the offensive side. You're doing it on the defensive side. Warrior should ebb and flow throughout the course of a battle, like a tidal wave of manliness. They're at their best when they're using defensive cd's to push dps and pushing dps to maximize self healing, thus further bolstering survivability. It's all interconnected like a web of violence, not two separate sides.


I appreciate what your intent is and the time and effort you put into this, and its a great loose guideline or basic advice for very fresh tanks, I just think that someone who follows this too strictly will end up developing bad play habits and turtling far too much, which results in greatly hampering group dps without even really impacting group survivability once you understand when it's safe to push dps and how to sustain yourself while pushing said dps. it also seems like you're already somewhat familiar with it as the tactics you outline toward the end of the guide cater to this, but this isn't the impression you open with. Cheers!

edit: Also, while this is definitely helpful to the community whether you try to build it out into a full guide or just keep stressing the defensive side of things, I do think that Xeno's (non-text, video only) guide does do a good job at covering how everything interconnects and how to use all your abilities in an intelligent manner. Just mentioning that in case you aren't aware of it.

[Jpec07]

Warrior should ebb and flow throughout the course of a battle, like a tidal wave of badassery.

Fixed that for you. My little Auri Warrior lady don't need no 'manliness'.

[Kietsu]

edit: Also, while this is definitely helpful to the community whether you try to build it out into a full guide or just keep stressing the defensive side of things, I do think that Xeno's (non-text, video only) guide does do a good job at covering how everything interconnects and how to use all your abilities in an intelligent manner. Just mentioning that in case you aren't aware of it.

Xeno's guide is great and I'd definitely recommend it, although I think it contains some comments on gear that are about to be outdated.

Fixed that for you. My little Auri Warrior lady don't need no 'manliness'.

Are you sure about that? If a Raen Au Ra changes to a manlier race like an ogre Sea Wolf Roegadame, they'll see a VIT increase of a whole 5 points! And a STR incraese of 6! And they'll be the only female Sea Wolf on your server!
(Xaela actually have fantastic tanking attributes though.)