Thread: Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

Originally Posted by Brannigan

Allows you to delete Shield Lob from paladin, freeing up a space. Shield Lob/Tomahawk/Unmend are all basically the same and worthless outside of pulls and add pickups. A targeted/ranged AOE flash could serve the dual purpose of AOE enmity and a pulling/add pickup tool. Doesn't necessarily have to be used by all tanks, but it's an example of what could be done. Really, there's not enough info on what the changes are going to be, so it's all just kinda blind speculation atm.

Also I wouldn't have even mentioned scourge/fracture if they hadn't brought up fracture in the powerpoint. I guess Scourge probably isn't going anywhere considering how bland the drk rotation already is.

And in doing so it would remove choice in the same way that collapsing Unmend and Abyssal Drain into a single option would. Why not just actually make the skill itself more interesting and relevant? Why make the fewest buttons used the goal, instead of the highest ratio of choices to button strokes? The goal is interesting, intuitive gameplay, right? But if you set SE off on that direction, do not be surprised if you end up with 12 skills total, each viable only in one particular circumstance. It's partly because this is still largely in the air that community opinion (less so NA's) could have an effect. While reducing button bloat can be important, I'd just recommend that you consider whether you want it to be the top priority, at cost even of opportunities for more interesting abilities and gameplay.

The main reason Fracture came up is that it's awkward in two ways: (1) on Warrior itself, rather than being something you can use strategically to maximize the skill's own potential, you actually have to hold off on Fracture frequently to keep from losing dps—which really isn't how any skill should work—and (2) although TP-inefficient, it's a much larger dps gain overall on a Monk than on its native class, and then an absolute waste on all other jobs. Scourge is solely a native skill, is the strongest per-execute skill in the DRK toolkit, and determines a large portion of their typical-play cleave damage and all of their by-choice cleave damage.

________________________________________________________

Originally Posted by Duelle

I admit that my comment is based on what I already know about DRK and what is associated with it, which is why drains feel more natural to DRK than WAR. I'm not alone on that one, because a lot of people were speculating DRK would be a job branching off MRD because it had Bloodbath.

If you want a tough combatant feel, I'd still go the ignore pain route. Refine the idea behind it, or turn it into active mitigation that costs wrath stacks (you'd need to redesign inner beast for this) and it would still feel relatively the same. Your WAR instead of magically recovering HP from attacks is now gritting his teeth and is so tough parts of certain attacks don't hurt him at all.

Considering fracture is rarely used as is, increasing the damage won't really help. The reason I suggest turning it into a skill that reduces the damage the mob deals to you is to give WAR an additional mitigation tool that still has some opportunity cost due to Fracture's relatively low damage. If you truly want to take WAR in the direction of using more skills to build up their mitigation, such a version of Fracture would easily fit as part of that.

(1) And I don't see why Souleater's drain is considered as identity overlap with Bloodbath's. They feel very, very distinct to me. That said, if I had to remove either the drain on either Bloodbath and Inner Beast or Souleater, I'd remove Souleater's for sure (albeit with great confusion and regret for having a groundless ultimatum thrown upon me). In my experience, it doesn't fit the surrounding play as well as the other two do for Warrior.

(2) I have no interest in simply copying WoW's Protection Warrior's Ignore Pain over to our Warrior. The two are thematically different beasts. The 'Bulwark of a tank' theme that a Prot Warrior has better fits a Paladin if anything, and poorly even then. Balancing aside, the original 2.0 Warrior's means of survival seemed about the closest to all the lore says the Warrior is. (Yes, we're thoroughly into the subjective by now.) The changes done later were helpful but plain, and moved partly away from that. For me a Warrior is more likely to revel in the dynamics of his health bar, and when left alone may drop low before springing back until out of time or strength enough to do so, but never is his demise an inevitable slow descent like that of death by Ignore Pain's 10% remaining damage taken. That is... pretty near the opposite of what I imagine. I have all the tanks at 110, save for two I've tested over a friend's PTR copies extensively, and none of them quite feel like what a Warrior is alleged to be.

(3) It is rarely used because it has a long duration and it deals little damage. I did not attach a duration in that example, and specifically said "high damage" for that first possible take on Fracture. I don't see anything wrong in and of itself with adding another possible mitigation tool (which will come at some cost to the rest of its mitigation toolkit, minus only what portion SE imagines that Fracture won't typically be used due to said damage cost), but it certainly wouldn't be unique in being an exchange between mitigation and damage. Warrior is pretty well the icon of that concept, the poster-child for its meta. Tuning is the only thing that decides whether we more commonly see damage "actively" sacrificed for mitigation (really just that we think about it in those terms, rather than the tank stance as the default and the rest as sacrificing mitigation), instead of the usual, opposite perspective.