Beast Gauge Cost: Numbers

[eagledorf]

I want to just put the numbers out there for informed discussion. A lot of people seem to have the wrong idea of the cost and potency of each Beast Gauge ability when discussing WAR.

Let's break it down:

Upheaval is 300 potency for 20 gauge. That means it is 18 potency per gauge after factoring in Storm's Eye.

Onslaught is 100 potency for 20 gauge. That means it is 6 potency per gauge after factoring in Storm's Eye.

Fell Cleave is 500 potency for 50 gauge; however, you have to factor into your calculation that Fell Cleave is on the GCD so it has an opportunity cost. This is where a lot of people fail to see the entire picture. The calculation for Fell Cleave is as follows:

If you are doing Eye-Path-Path, you gain about 9 gauge per GCD and are doing an average of 198 potency per GCD. That means Fell Cleave's real potency is only 302 with a cost of 59 gauge for about 6.1 potency per gauge after adding in Storm's Eye.

In other words, Onslaught and Fell Cleave are almost exactly the same potency/gauge. Fell Cleave is simply a faster gauge dump so it's more optimal to use, especially under the effect of IR where it does overtake Onslaught for potency/gauge. When you've factored in the 5% buff from Deliverance, one gauge is roughly 6.3 potency in Deliverance assuming you always keep Upheaval on cooldown.

This is actually important because it can change the optimal rotation. If you have low SkS it's possible Butcher's Block has a place in an OT rotation, but everybody is caught up in the Fell Cleave meme (including SE, because I think that's unintended).

(There's actually another aspect to this in Enhanced Infuriate, but I'm leaving that out because as long as you use your 6x FC you should get the extra Infuriate for your non-IR Berserks)

In Defiance, Inner Beast replaces Fell Cleave. IB is 350 potency and ignores Defiance's damage penalty. SE/SP/SP has an average potency of 158 in Defiance so Inner Beast is 3.9 potency per Beast Gauge after factoring in SE. Onslaught is 4.8 potency and Upheaval is unchanged as it also ignores Defiance. In Defiance, therefore, Onslaught is actually a potency gain over Inner Beast (though IB has other benefits!).

[eagledorf]

Incidentally, this also has implications for the stance dancing discussion. Let's run the numbers for that as well:

On PLD:

You lose one GCD changing stances each way. Assuming you are only losing Royal Authority filler, that means you lose an average 253 potency each way or 506 potency total on average to stance dance. I'm going to assume that you get enough MP from Sheltron that this doesn't throw off your Holy Spirit phase for simplicity.

On DRK:

It's slightly more complicated. You lose one GCD for turning on Grit. Assuming you are losing Souleater filler, you are losing 226 potency and 400 MP on average from that GCD.

Grit also has a MP cost of 1800 for a total MP loss of 2200. Because Dark Arts has a cost of 2400 and is a 140 potency gain on your Souleater combo, the MP loss is equivalent to a 128 potency loss. Multiplied by the 20% buff from Darkside, it costs 425 potency to stance dance on DRK .

On WAR:

Because Onslaught is the same potency per gauge as Fell Cleave, you should always use it to dump gauge before a swap. Therefore, the maximum gauge you should ever lose is 40 even if you have full gauge before your swap.

Inner Beast is your lowest potency/gauge in Defiance so turning on Defiance should cost a maximum of 156 potency. It will cost less if you have less than 100 gauge when you need to swap, which should be most of the time as you will dump gauge on Upheaval on cooldown.

Turning back on Deliverance should cost a maximum of 252 potency by the same reasoning.

Therefore, generally the total cost of a stance dance on WAR will be less than 408. In the absolutely worst case scenario where both swaps happen such that FC/IB are lost during Berserk and you start with a full 100 gauge both times, the loss is still only 518. (If you throw in a BB under Berserk to make up for it, I think you can make up some of the potency so it's actually less, but I haven't worked that detail out. That depends on if you can generate enough Beast for Upheaval+FC+100 gauge in time for your next Berserk or not.) In other words if everything goes totally wrong, a WAR basically suffers the same as PLD for stance dancing and 99% of the time they will have a vastly lower penalty than either other tank.

Obviously the situation on WAR is different if you need IB to mitigate and are not able to dump gauge before the swap, but then we need to rework PLD and DRK since MP and gauge are involved in their mitigation as well. This is purely from a DPS point of view.

[SyzzleSpark]

I want to preface my comment by saying WAR needs and deserves a DPS buff and is doing entirely too little damage for how little utility it has.

Now that I've got that out of the way... holy banana donuts, when the WAR's see this thread and find out that their stance dancing penalty actually isn't the end of the world... the salt will corrode solid steel.

[FallenWings]

Tfw comparing Onslaught and FC for potency per IB and you forget that one is oGCD and the other is GCD.

Blinded by my own seething rage of tank changes.





Buff Fell Cleave kthx.

[eagledorf]

I agree that WAR needs some kind of a buff, I just want to point out that stance-dancing isn't necessarily one of them and especially want to get people to stop trashing Onslaught when it's not nearly as bad as it's made out to be.

I think the anger over the drop in gauge is more psychological than about balance. IR can't be used in Defiance so chances are good you'll shed gauge with IR off cooldown and popping IB right after turning Defiance requires shedding a lot of gauge so it feels bad going both ways, but that's a separate problem from balance. WAR's real problem with balance is their only utility is the slashing debuff and NIN/SAM, two of the most powerful DPS jobs in the game, both already bring that to a min-maxing group.

I'm afraid that SE has made a situation where they need to substantially rework some skill to get WAR right. Just buffing numbers is not going to cut it, it will either not be enough or WAR will be God-King of tanks again because DPS is so important in these scripted fights. It's been well over 2 years and they promised us balanced tanks in 4.0, I'd like for them to invest the resources and actually give WAR a support skill comparable to TBK or Intervention instead of a band-aid numbers tweak that is likely to just break something else. It sounds like I'm being unreasonable, but this is actually a much smaller fix than all the changes WAR got in 2.1 so they should be able to do it right.

I'd also like for them to give DRK/PLD the slashing debuff. That's their excuse for why WAR doesn't have other utility, but it's BS that WAR has this "utility" that becomes worthless as soon as you have a NIN or SAM in the party and that the other tanks can't access their full DPS potential without outside help as a result. Give WAR actual tank utility and then even the playing field on slashing debuff, stop making one an excuse not to do the other.

[Ragology]

Ahh that's neat. I've mostly been playing PVP since stormblood launched so I haven't had a lot of time to test the costs of using WARs skills on the beast gauge just yet, but its good to know that using onslaught isn't such a huge loss like I had been reading about.

[eagledorf]

If you use Onslaught and it messes up your IR Berserk that would be bad, but otherwise it's not nearly as bad as the community freak-out would lead you to believe.

For example, if you miss hits that you could have had if you use Onslaught to close the gap after a mechanic you're losing gauge that way too (9 gauge per GCD) so you have to factor that in. If you can close the gap right away with Onslaught by spam-clicking your focus target and the Onslaught button, drop a FC in one of your non-IR rotations, and swap a SP for a BB isn't that better than losing 18 gauge and 400 potency outright by panning around for the boss and running in slow so that you can be a FC-bot?

When you consider that and the equal gauge cost per potency, Onslaught is good for what it's intended, closing largish gaps and dumping gauge before stance dancing. It's not intended to be spammed on CD or for small gaps and that's fine. The only time it's not good for even its intended purpose is before IR-Berserk, but you can just use Sprint for that.

[Quor]

I want to preface my comment by saying WAR needs and deserves a DPS buff and is doing entirely too little damage for how little utility it has.

Now that I've got that out of the way... holy banana donuts, when the WAR's see this thread and find out that their stance dancing penalty actually isn't the end of the world... the salt will corrode solid steel.

One thing that drives me nuts is that stance swapping for PLD and DRK is not stance swapping for WAR, yet people seem to think it is. They are not an apples-to-apples comparison. DRK goes into "dps" stance by dropping Grit (no cost) and using Blood Weapon (oGCD) while PLD goes "dps" by spending a GCD on SwO. WAR goes "dps" by, ideally, dumping all gauge so they don't lose any in the swap, or else accepting that you're tossing half your gauge away and just dealing with it.

And that isn't fun. I can't think of another job where you are prevented from using job-specific abilities by virtue of trying to play your job. The only thing that comes to mind is a RDM who blows all their MP on Verraise, but that's not a job design problem for the RDM, that's a "your group sucks" problem. But back to one of my points; it isn't fun. Does it work? Yeah, sure, we can make it work. We can make it work pretty well. But it's less fun than it was in HW. On top of this whole "less fun" thing, what little group utility we had as WAR's was removed, or is so ubiquitous that there's no longer anything niche about it. PLD is swimming in group utility. DRK doesn't have as much as PLD, but TBN is a solid skill I've seen used to perform all kinds of beautiful clutch saves. So not only did WAR lose a lot of the fun factor in this xpac, instead of getting some neat utility to justify it, we just got Meme Cleave. Thanks to the nature of the penalty incurred upon us now, we are incentivized to spend as little time changing stances as possible. And thanks to the advent of Shirk, aggro management is a joke with a pair of tanks who know what they are doing (backed by some on-the-ball healers of course). This brings even more incentive to stay in Deliverance outside of some very specific situations like the initial pull or Susano sword phase.

Sadly, this is really only one half of the equation though. Sure, a PLD and a DRK have to blow a GCD to go into tank stance while a WAR doesn't, but one thing a lot of people fail to realize is that tank stances for PLD and DRK are essentially permanent defensive CD's. Here's an example:

PLD has 40k HP while in SwO. He needs to go into ShO for a buster (all his other CD's are down, it's been a rough run), so he blows a GCD, goes into ShO, and is now taking 20% less damage. He tanks the buster for 30k damage, but thanks to ShO it's reduced down to 24k.
DRK has 40k HP while out of Grit. He needs to go into Grit for a buster (again, all his other CD's are down, it's been a really rough run), so he blows a GCD, goes into Grit and is now taking 20% less damage. He tanks the buster for 30k damage, but thanks to Grit it's reduced down to 24k.
WAR has 40k HP while in Deliverance. He needs to go into Defiance for a buster (once again, rough fight, all other CD's are down), so he uses his oGCD stance swap and goes into Defiance, which raises his HP by 25%. He now has 50k hp, but unfortunately he does not "heal" for the 10k he gained, so he's sitting at 40k/50k. He tanks the buster for 30k. It's not reduced by anything, and because WAR doesn't heal when they enter Defiance, the extra HP granted by Defiance is useless. Hence, to make the most out of Defiance, you need to coordinate, either with your healers or by proper use of Equilibrium/Thirll of Battle (which aren't always up of course, especially on rough fights) in order to make Defiance "work" and be effective as a tank stance.

This drawback to Defiance is something WAR's have worked around since 2.0; we're used to it, we've learned how to deal with it, and the addition of Equilibrium in 3.0 was great as it gave a smart WAR the tools necessary to actually make an on-the-fly swap to Defiance work properly. But, again, the nature of 4.0 punishes stance swapping, and even if WAR doesn't "lose" as much potency as PLD or DRK, they also don't gain any of the benefits PLD and DRK gain. Once PLD is in SwO, or once a DRK hit's BW, they instantly gain bonuses. The passives on Deliverance and Defiance grow weaker the lower your gauge is, and if you're swapping at zero gauge (like you are incentivized to do) then a WAR gains nothing from the passive bonuses of either stance (save the pittling 5% dmg boost from Deliverance). Going from 100 gauge in Defiance to 50 in Deliverance cuts the crit boost you would be getting in half. Sure, a PLD loses a GCD going to SwO, but they only gain benefits from it, and don't have to "build up" anything to get the most out of their DPS stance.

[Poison_Rose]

and don't have to "build up" anything to get the most out of their DPS stance.

I think that's the crux of the issue for me. Having to rebuild my beast gauge after swapping to prepare for a damage phase isn't fun. Meanwhile on PLD I can simply swap stances, hit the cooldown when it's up and keep going as if nothing happened.

Maybe this is an issue with me not having an in-depth knowledge of the fight, but SE did say that they wanted to raise the skill floor.

[Tankstuff]

yea what Quor said, on paper it doenst seem that bad, but in reality you usually pull in tank stance then swap, and only swap back to tank stance if all your cds are expended. Im liking drk the most for this because dropping grit is literally free, so after the first powerslash combo in grit im golden. And if I have to use grit as a last second ditch effort cd, it costs some mana sure, but if im on war and have to swap i lose half my gauge, or dumping gauge messes heavily with your berserk ir timings, etc. And if you do dump before swapping to defiance, you dont have rage to IB the buster that you were trying to swap for in the first place. Darks only timing really is bw delirium, and even when u swap to grit you can still get full potency out of bloodspiller for the short duration you have to keep grit on, and the increased mana from ss can be saved for da after you drop grit again.

I believe paladin should be able to switch from shield to sword oath free of cost like drk does, and war should only lose a flat 20 gauge. Just my opinion to improve the fluidity of swapping on the tanks, I have all 3 at 70 and i cry the most when I have to swap on war