Boycotting Warrior 4.0 (Let's do it!)

[Flarestar]

I appear to be one of the few here that doesn't actually view what they did as "ruining" anything.

We gained substantial mitigation, and the beast gauge + 66 trait actually give us a huge amount of uptime on Inner Beast when tanking. Assuming you're using it intelligently you'll be able to have 20% damage reduction, minimum, for literally every conceivable tankbuster and a huge chunk of the fight otherwise. We lost Bloodbath, but... eh. In most respects I feel like these changes put us pretty much on par with paladins for MT capability. Our OT DPS may have dropped some, although it's hard to tell. I don't really understand the doom and gloom.

[Ghald]

It's not the potency that made me started this thread, it's how WAR are played now. Let me paint a picture.

You have PLD tanking the main boss away, you are a WAR in Deliverance hitting away at the boss and suddenly the MT KOed, crap, you Provoke the boss that made a bee line toward the healer, switch to Defiance and at this stage that 3 stack you got saving up for a Fell Cleave on the boss now can be use for an Inner Beast instead because the boss is about to do a tank buster. You have 2 more full combo rotation to get your stack up to 5 but you think the boss is going to tank buster you before you have time to get to 5 stack through the 2 rotations of 3 GCD combo alone, what should the WAR do, pop infuriat? Welll that's 1 option but you'll be wasting all that stacks you've build up so you use 1 of the other 3 off GCD skills that give you stack namely Berserk/Vengeance/Raw Intuition instead. At this point you are building your stack away while Storm's Path the boss and you see the tank buster cast bar appeared, you are still 1 stack away from Inner Beast so you use Vengeance for its damage reduction and at the same time give you that 5th stack, you poped Inner Beast and now have both Inner Beast and Vengeance on but at this stage you are at 0 stack and you are thinking, 'you know what? This tank buster is a physical hit so I'll I'll pop Raw Intuition as well to get that 1 stack also and add Foresight for good measure. You now have Inner Beast + Vengeance + Raw Intuition + Foresight to eat that tank buster. Tank buster hit, you use your Equilibrium to counter for the HP lost with a well time press.

Oh the PLD is all up and healthy now and he want the boss back, no problem, he provoked the boss off you and you swap back to Deliverance and continue to DPSing the boss away still having that 1 stack from Raw Intuition to add to your next Fell Cleave.

That's the story of WAR 3.x, fast forward to the present day. WAR 4.x , in a similar situation, you have 30 beast gauge, MT KOed, you did what need to be done except as soon as you switched to Defiance from Deliverance you lost 50% of your beast gauge. So you are now sitting at 15 Beast gauge(BG), you have to build up at least 50 BG asap, your only sensible option now is Storm's Path which no longer reduce damage anymore but it give you 20 BG as oppose to 10 if yo use Stormseye but your Stormseye 20% dammage up buff is about to fall off, too bad you need that 50 BG. You need to do 2 Storm's Path to get your BG to 55 from 15 but tank buster is coming soon so you just pop Vengeance + Rampart and if you wish use Infuriate to get your BG from 15 to 65 instantly to add Inner Beast to mitigate the tank buster heck you can even pop Raw Intuition. Don't forget you are now left with a 5 BG left over.

At this point you might be asking me what the problem is then, WAR 4.x have better mitigation than 3.x and defensive skills are no longer tied to building stacks. Well, WAR is now a PLD with an axe. the strategic use of your skills to give you stacks while weighting their pro and con of using up said skills are gone, now we just wait for tank buster and pop off GCD skills instead of time the use of your off GCD for stacks or for their effect or both like we used to.

It's like the dev team gave up and turn all 3 tanks into PLD, while this is great news for those that like PLD game play, it's horrid news for us that have tasted what WAR 3.x can be.

For those that haven't play WAR 3.x you'll most likely wouldn't even know what the problem is, you'll be fine, play it, see it for yourself but for those of us that came to love how flexible WAR is and how fun it was in 3.x, WAR 4.0 will be very jarring to us.

This will probably be my final post on this thread, I haven't the energy or the motivation to try to move the development team anymore on this subject. I resigned to my fate, playing samurai now and while it's not as fun as WAR 3.x it is still way more fun than what WAR have became now.

[Reynhart]

You have PLD tanking the main boss away, you are a WAR in Deliverance hitting away at the boss and suddenly the MT KOed, crap, you Provoke the boss that made a bee line toward the healer, switch to Defiance and at this stage that 3 stack you got saving up for a Fell Cleave on the boss now can be use for an Inner Beast instead because the boss is about to do a tank buster.

And now, you have Rampart to immediately pop a -20% damage taken right after Defiance.

You have 2 more full combo rotation to get your stack up to 5 but you think the boss is going to tank buster you before you have time to get to 5 stack through the 2 rotations of 3 GCD combo alone, what should the WAR do, pop infuriat?

Now, he should simply use at least one path combo, allowing it to charge 50 Gauge in 6 GCD.

You now have Inner Beast + Vengeance + Raw Intuition + Foresight to eat that tank buster. Tank buster hit, you use your Equilibrium to counter for the HP lost with a well time press.

We need to wait for proper calculation, but I'm sure Tenacity compensate a good chunk of what Foresight reduced. And also, your OT, be it PLD or DRK, can actually help you mitigate the damage, creating more synergy than ever between the two tanks.

[drgnmstr44]

I like warrior at the moment. my only major complaints are 1) it's harder for me to pick up large pulls in dungeons due to the loss of flash which I used in dungeons a lot to keep big groups. now we got Ultimatum which is Basically an AoE provoke with 90 sec CD. that most likely a learning curve to adjust to. will see how that goes.

2) we lost our class stun for a role ability. DK lost their two but PLD gets the role ability and shield slam? That's kind of lame but then what would they use the shield for.

bottom line, saying we should boycot Warrior because of the changes this early in the expansion is rather lame. I don't think they screwed our class over royally (that was done white mage actually). You should wait it out, give it a fair shake, and hold out for the theory crafting to begin.

[HeroIgnis]

I'm right there with you man. Warrior used to be unique and have it's own identity and play style but now it feel so clunky. All the cool things about it has been removed and your right it feels like a down graded PLD. There nothing more cool than just popping those defensive cool down to build up stacks or to compensate for a bad situation, but now its just the same old one, two, three. Its so bland and boring please just give it some spice and seasoning jesus.

[Launched]

WAR just feels clunky, awkward and bad to play now. It's not brokenly bad, but it lost a lot of what made it feel good in ARR/HW. Losing half your gauge for swapping stances is a lot more noticeable than I thought it would be, especially after pulling a boss with Unchained. The change so that we have 10 "stacks" instead of 5 means that it takes a lot longer to build up to max for Berserk, and swapping after one or two Unchained combos makes it take even longer. Losing Bloodbath noticeably hurts in dungeons when I'm pulling multiple groups. Speaking of big pulls, swapping Maim and Eye means there's pretty much no time when you'd ever want to get your Eye buff going because it won't even break even. And one of the biggest things I miss in dungeons is Flash: trying to pick up groups with a cone is stupid.

The small DPS and mitigation gains we got are nowhere near worth losing how smooth WAR was, or losing all utility. Rampart is an upgrade to Foresight, sure, but we already had an amazing mitigation skillset. We don't need more personal mitigation, it's like selling something for 1k gil when you already have 10m. More frequent Infuriates are also a waste of a trait, because we want to hold off on it until Berserk which is every 60s anyway, and we have enough mitigation to not need to use it on Inner Beast. Upheaval is nice, but it really just feels unnoticeable and losing potency based on HP is also annoying. I would seriously prefer to keep my level 60 HW skillset and gain nothing in Stormblood than have this current one. I don't feel stronger at all.

[Nastumi]

I would seriously prefer to keep my level 60 HW skillset and gain nothing in Stormblood than have this current one. I don't feel stronger at all.

Amazing idea ! Can we get an option to choose between new moveset (and new abilities gained from leveling) and old moveset but nothing new past 60 ? I'll reactivate my account ASAP if they do that !

[Reynhart]

Amazing idea ! Can we get an option to choose between new moveset (and new abilities gained from leveling) and old moveset but nothing new past 60 ? I'll reactivate my account ASAP if they do that !

That way, you'll be less tanky and do less damage, great

[Baci]

They just need to change the Beast Gauge halving on stance switch and i´m ok. Maybe replace Shake it off with bloodbath, till now shake it off is pretty worthless.

[brosephhstalin]

I enjoyed WAR since 2.0 and even did some raiding with it, but now I just can't play it. They took everything away from WAR that made WAR WAR, and hid it behind "wowee, you can do six(6) Fell Cleaves!!!".

Fell Cleaves always felt great, but not at the cost of sustain and free role swapping. I have no idea what was going through the dev's team heads when they redid WAR for 4.0