Thread: Warrior 4.0 Concerns

Since the devs claim to be listening to the WHM feedback, I figure I'll throw in my 2¢ about the WAR changes as a career WAR and endgame raider since 2.5.

DISCLAIMER: I'm posting this in chunks a) because it's taking so long to articulate all of my thoughts on WAR so far, and b) to make it more digestible.

Also, since Stormblood isn't out yet, everything is still subject to change™.

Massive walls of text incoming! You have been warned!

The Good:
1. Combos
First off, I'm glad they reworked Storm's Path into its current iteration. WAR will no longer be mandatory for progression with its free 10% blanket damage reduction. While I will miss the old Path, I found it hit and miss: it was overly strong during progression, and then mostly useless for farming and speedkills.

I'm very happy with the upcoming changes to combos on WAR! Butcher's Block is still technically our highest potency combo, and will remain great for MTing and tank swaps. Maim will now provide our famous slashing debuff, so it now goes up earlier, and lasts longer. Storm's Eye remains our highest potency non-enmity combo, giving us the damage buff we used to receive from Maim, now with a longer duration. Storm's Path will come into its own in Stormblood as a third combo that can always be useful, giving us an extra 10 beast gauge over the other two combo finishers in exchange for its lower potency (still unchanged at 250), and still providing the small self-heal effect.

With the increased buff durations, we now have the option to go BB > Eye > Path while main-tanking, and Eye > Path > Path after establishing aggro or off-tanking!

We now have always have good reason to alternate Eye and Path combos, and inexperienced, innattentive, or greedy off-tank WARs should no longer be threatening to rip hate off the MT by using Butcher's Block.

I consider this a win.

2. Inner Release
By and large, this skill looks fantastic!

The animation looks awesome, it renders us immune to a number of crowd control effects while active (hopefully this isn't ignored by certain mechanics sporadically), it's powerful, and it feels like a level 70 capstone ability.

Six Fell Cleaves Decimates? Ohhhh yeaaaaaah~

My main concern with this ability is the fact that it shares a cooldown with Unchained.

Personally, my raid group will still have a NIN in 4.0. Coupled with the addition of Shirk (AKA Shadewalker) as a tank role skill, and I rarely if ever see myself using Unchained again come Stormblood, because of the opportunity cost of losing an Inner Release.

I understand the thematic tie of having counterpart abilities between Defiance and Deliverance, but please reconsider its shared cooldown with Unchained.

3. Berserk Changes
Reduced cooldown to 60s means we can Berserk more often, resulting in a net potency gain. Its cooldown now synergizes perfectly with Inner Release, which would have been awkward on its previous 90s cooldown.

Also, no more pacification!!! Good riddance to the chat macros, farewell to our reliance on bards and healers - you won't be missed!

The Mediocre
Speaking of the pacification changes...

1. Shake It Off
Removes most detrimental status effects. First of all, what's included in this list of status effects? TBD. Also, why did they have to wait until Stormblood to give us this ability, after removing pacification from Berserk? This would have been fantastic in Heavensward, but will likely be mediocre to unnoticeable in Stormblood.

Since WAR is the only tank right now with an ability like this, I predict that either:
a) the devs will add lots of nasty statuses to encounters and endgame raids to warrant its usefulness, which will give WAR an advantage over the other tanks (creative asymmetry by encounter design), since healers and bards won't have to babysit WARs for status effects as often. I personally doubt this will be the avenue the team takes in Stormblood and Omega.

OR

b) (Much more likely IMO) status effects will remain avoidable or mostly irrelevant in fights, in which case this does very little for WAR now that Berserk pacification is no more.

The best use I saw for this ability upon its preview is in PVP...except that we now know that jobs will only have a small handful of abilities in PVP, which are completely separated from their PVE kits.

I suspect that SiO will be occasionally useful in dungeons or perhaps 24 player raids, but most likely won't do much for WARs.

A filler ability with some potential - not great, but could be worse. Not every new ability will be gold, so SiO doesn't bother me too much.

2. Upheaval
Okay, so we get another oGCD damage ability. 300 potency every 30s. Seems decent.

The cost of 20 beast gauge is bearable. I imagine there will be situations where we might otherwise cap out on gauge while holding it for the next Berserk window.

My beef with Upheaval is that it's a complete rip-off of Spirits Within. Except while it costs PLDs nothing, it costs WARs some beast gauge.

The HP scaling is both uninspired and completely unnecessary, and acts as a small detriment to WARs as MTs, because you'll be losing out on some damage each time compared to OTing.

It doesn't help that we don't even know how the damage on this ability scales.

While I like the idea of having relevant oGCD attacks to use, especially after the loss of Brutal Swing and Mercy Stroke - our only oGCD damage prior to 4.0, I think this ability could be reworked slightly to be more interesting and flavourful for WAR, rather than simply copying PLD.

3. Enhanced Infuriate
At first glance this sounds interesting. Reduced Infuriate cooldown when you use your staple beast gauge moves that you're going to be using anyway? Sweet!

My concern with this is that Infuriate as-is lines up perfectly with the new Berserk, as well as Inner Release.

I could be wrong, but I suspect that reducing its cooldown in increments of 5 seconds (to a max of -30s during an Inner Release window) might not be all that useful because you want to save it for Berserk windows. If you use it early, you'll likely delay your next Berserk, which will be a potency loss.

I hope this ends up being more useful than it looks on paper.

4. Cooldowns no longer providing beast gauge (stacks)
One of the unique and fun things I enjoy about WAR pre-4.0 is its ability to mix and match offensive and defensive abilities together.

Right now, Berserk, Vengeance, and Raw Intuition each give you one stack of Wrath/Abandon and refresh the duration of your stacks.

I love being able to use a well-timed Vengeance or Raw Intuition mid Berserk for the triple Fell Cleave rotation while still reaping the rewards of the defensive cooldown.

It's also useful for maintaining your stacks mid-fight or mid-dungeon. Stacks about to fall off? Pop Vengeance or RI and you have another 30s!

Thankfully, stack duration appears to be a thing of the past in Stormblood, so this last point is moot.

Another use case was pre-pull popping Infuriate, using RI to refresh stacks at 0-1s, then pulling a boss with full stacks + Infuriate off cooldown.

Similarly with Berserk, switching into Defiance to pop Equilibrium with the attack power boost gives you a massive self-heal when you need it. This is particular combination is going to be both weaker (Berserk giving 30% down from 50%) and punished more strongly (with stance dance cost) in Stormblood.

I understand that these changes were likely made for two reasons:
1. To lower the skill floor of the job. Players who didn't realize that these defensive abilities could be used to increase their damage were missing out.
2. To separate defensive cooldowns from offense, so that WARs no longer waste their cooldowns for some extra damage in a risky manner, only to not have any cooldowns for the next tankbuster.

While this does remove some of the complexity (and IMO fun) of playing WAR currently, I'm willing to cede this point to make WAR more accessible to play.

5. Inability to generate beast gauge outside of combat
This change seems to be part of the team's design philosophy regarding how to lower the skill floor of jobs across the board.

By removing everyone's ability to perform their burst openers immediately on the pull, there's less burden of knowledge and memorization required to play a job well in Stormblood.

For WAR, this includes the changes to Vengeance, Berserk, and Raw Intuition no longer granting beast gauge, as well as Infuriate not being available outside of combat.

Personally, I'm not happy with the Infuriate change because it renders Onslaught, our new gap closer, useless on the pull - which is one of the main times you would want to use it, especially since it has an added enmity boost.

If Onslaught were reworked such that it could be used from out of combat, I would be a lot more okay with these changes to WAR, even though the loss of pre-pull Infuriate hurts.

6. Loss of Foresight, Fracture, Mercy Stroke, and Flash
With the combat system rework, WAR is losing a few of its original abilities, as well as access to some of its current cross-class skills.

Most of these changes aren't too bad.

Losing Foresight is largely irrelevant, because we can now take Rampart as a role skill! Plus, Inner Beast was actually buffed slightly (I was expecting it to be gutted with access to Rampart), so WAR will have even stronger mitigation pre-61 compared to now.

Fracture is an interesting beast (heh), in that it has an opportunity cost of not generating Wrath/Abandon stacks, while also only being worthwhile when it lasted its full duration of 30s. This made it largely situational to use, and as such, I personally won't miss it much in Stormblood.

Gone are the days of being able to easily pick up enemies in a radius around you with Flash during dungeons runs, while pacified, and/or TP floored from spamming Overpower. While pacification will no longer an issue, and WAR still has access to Steel Cyclone, the stance dancing changes coupled with the loss of Flash will make WAR more awkward and more difficult to play in dungeons runs, with your Overpowers having to be on point moving forward.

RIP Mercy Stroke. While it was a largely niche ability, it was one of our only two oGCD damage abilities, and high-skill high-reward move with a massive self-heal when successful, and very satisfying to pull off. I can understand why it was trimmed in Stormblood, but I'm going to miss those highs and the satisfaction of landing the finishing blow on bosses with it!

The Bad
1. Loss of Brutal Swing, Bloodbath, and Internal Release
On the note of class skills and cross-class abilities lost, a few of these really hurt.

While WAR will have the option to take stun and silence as role skills, WAR is losing 300 potency per minute from Brutal Swing, which makes the additions of Upheaval and Onslaught more of a catch-up, rather than a straight damage boost. We are losing Internal Release as a cross-class skills while gaining Inner Release, but only at level 70.

Finally, WAR is losing one of its iconic self-healing skills in Bloodbath, and gaining...nothing in return. This hurts, especially for dungeon runs. DRK is able to spam Abyssal Drain with DA to quickly gain health while AoEing trash packs, while WAR currently pops Bloodbath and goes to town with Decimate and Overpower. We will be losing that ability in Stormblood. In the context of trials or endgame raids, it's not a massive loss outside of large AoE phases (e.g. Sephirot EX adds, A12S first adds).

However, one thing that I don't see enough people paying attention to is how the combat system changes and ability reworks impact old content (pre-SB). Not everyone wants to run old content undersized, or with The Echo. Personally, I find it both fun and challenging running trials and raids at minimum iLvl and level synced with echo turned off, and I doubt I'm alone here.

Granted, all jobs are affected by these changes, not just WAR, but the loss of WAR Brutal Swing's potency, Internal Release's damage boost (however random), and Bloodbath's self-heals all negatively impact WAR, more so in pre-4.0 level synced content.

This is especially egregious when trying to solo old fights, such as Extreme primals or Coil of Bahamut, where Bloodbath was one of the linchpins of WAR's ability to do so!

While I imagine this last past point won't affect too many players, for those of us who do enjoy soloing old content on WAR (e.g. Urth's Fount, Titan EX, Binding Coil Turns 4 and 5, etc.), this method to relive and revitalize old content will likely disappear with the removal of Bloodbath.

2. Changes to Stance Dancing
PLD and DRK each suffer a penalty for swapping stances.

PLD loses some mana and a GCD each time they switch, while DRK loses some mana and only loses a GCD when activating Grit.

As WAR was left out of this party with free oGCD stance swapping every 10 seconds, I imagine the devs wanted to even the playing field to make WARs think more carefully about switching stances back and forth.

In Stormblood, WAR will lose half of its beast gauge every time it switches from Defiance to Deliverance, and vice versa.

My qualm with this change is that it goes too far. The penalties PLD and DRK face for swapping stances are fixed and predictable. WAR, on the other hand, has a scaling penalty that gets worse the higher your beast gauge is.

"But if you're already close to 100, why not just spend 50 before switching?"

I imagine this is much more likely when going from Deliverance to Defiance, i.e. needing to tank swap or emergency Inner Beast. Assuming this is the case, spending 50 on a Fell Cleave / Decimate before switching means you now have to spend 3 GCDs which have to be on Path combo just to be able to use Inner Beast (100 - 50 = 50 / 2 = 25 after swap, requiring a full Path combo for +30 = 55 gauge so you can Inner Beast). Alternatively, if WAR just swaps from 100 gauge, they straight up lose 50 gauge, which is 6(!) GCDs worth, in exchange for being able use Inner Beast or Steel Cyclone immediately rather than four GCDs out.

Compared with PLD and DRK, who only give up 1 GCD each time with some mana (a naturally restoring resource, unlike beast gauge - with Darkside being a caveat), this is overly harsh at the top end.

Furthermore, this change adds needless complexity in an expansion where changes are being made to lower the skill floor, rather than arbitrarily raise the skill ceiling for existing abilities.

Granted, yes the cost is rather minimal when the beast gauge is low, but free/cheap stance dancing has always been a staple of WAR's gameplay and identity.

Also, if you happen to switch stances at certain thresholds, you'll be left with an odd and unusable amount of rage until your next Inner Release, which is awkward, creates unneeded complexity, while also triggering my OCD.

I would like to see WAR's penalty for switching stances in Stormblood changed as follows (ditto for Defiance):
"If Defiance is executed while under the effect of Deliverance, the Wrath Gauge is halved to the nearest 10, to a maximum cost of 20 (30?) beast gauge." (proposed changes underlined)

My proposed change would prevent you from having an extra 5 gauge floating around from stance dancing alone, while also capping the loss for stance dancing at one full combo's worth of gauge (3 GCDs: 30 for Path combo, 20 for the other combos). While I would prefer stance dancing cost no more than 20 gauge, I would still be okay with it costing a max of 30 gauge per swap.

3. Onslaught
After seeing DRK in Heavensward, the only thing I felt like WAR was really missing was a gap closer.

Enter the Stormblood previews. I was super excited for Onslaught after spotting it in the Stormblood benchmark!

...until the media tour embargo dropped, and we saw the tooltip for it (changes still pending™).

I'm not sure what Onslaught is supposed to do or when it's supposed to be useful, because it seems rather confused about its purpose.

a) Use it when pulling bosses or bouncing between trash packs in dungeons
-> Sounds great in theory, until you realize it costs beast gauge, which you can no longer generate outside of combat. Meaning it's only useful if you already have some leftover beast gauge going into battle, likely making it useless in raids (outside of another A6S type fight), and still situational in dungeons. Why waste 20 gauge on this, when I could just save for another Decimate on the next trash pack? It's not like our stacks will be falling off anymore, so there's no real rush or urgency.

b) Use it whenever it's on cooldown for some extra damage and enmity
-> I have a sneaking suspicion if we just use it on cooldown like we generally do with Brutal Swing right now, it will delay our Berserk windows (not good). Also, I don't see why we need an enmity boost with this if we can't always engage an enemy with this, nor if we're off-tanking.

c) Use it whenever you would otherwise cap on beast gauge without ruining your next Berserk while Upheaval is still on cooldown
-> I'm not sure how often this will come up, since I haven't mathcrafted any full rotations yet, but this seems like the most likely scenario for Onslaught. Which just so happens to be very niche and highly situational. Usable, but still not the type of new ability I would want to be getting in an expansion.

I'm not sure what to do with this skill, since this seems like our new (SB content only, poor man's replacement for) Brutal Swing mixed with Plunge, while simultaneously failing to succeed at mimicking either.

Personally, I think I would be placated if it cost 0 gauge and lost the enmity boost, still on its 30s timer. This way, it would at least be a half-decent hybrid of Brutal Swing meets Plunge, while fulfilling the use of a gap closer like Plunge (also, it remains to be seen how bad Onslaught's animation lock is).

The Ugly

Loss of Identity
The biggest problem I have with WAR moving into Stormblood is the lack of a unique identity.

The battle system changes have shoehorned WAR into a Fell Cleave / Decimate bot that brings nothing unique to parties anymore.

While I'm glad that Storm's Path was changed and that SAM and NIN can each easily apply their own slashing buffs now, these changes in conjunction with the battle system rework leave WAR in an awkward position.

PLD and DRK are each getting their own high damage burst abilities (Requiescat with Holy Spirit for PLD, Bloodspiller and Quietus for DRK - although the latter look like they could use some help), so while WAR will be able to land six Fell Cleaves or Decimates, our burst is no longer a unique selling point outside of AoE situations.

Furthermore, many of WAR's new abilities are largely muddled clones of existing abilities. Onslaught is a confused version of Plunge. Upheaval is a copy-paste of Spirits Within. Shake It Off is a better version of Tempered Will, a very situational PLD cooldown.

Finally, with the changes to Path and Eye, and the addition of Intervention for PLD and The Blackest Night for DRK, WAR no longer offers any unique utility to groups that other jobs don't already have access to. When coupled with the loss of Bloodbath and penalties to stance dancing, the only thing WAR seems to have going for it compared with the other tanks is higher AoE burst damage.

~~~~~

Conclusion

Having said all of this, I think tank balance is in a much better place right now (albeit with PLDs looking like they'll be riding a wave of overtuned potencies for a while. They're overdue some much needed love, so go nuts! ).

I expect that WAR will still be competitive in Stormblood and Omega, it just won't be an auto-include in statics anymore.

No, the sky is not falling, but WAR could use some unique touches to make it stand out from PLD and DRK in 4.0.

Barring any drastic changes between now and the launch of Stormblood, I'm still going to be maining WAR.