Thread: Warrior 4.0 Concerns

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).