WAR Consolidated Feedback Thread

[AdamZ]

These are my issues with WAR, all of these might just be me sucking at the job. But hey did not SE say that they would make the jobs easier and not harder to play in SB, less punishing and so on?

Fully agree with your post. 2c seems like it would be even more punishing they the current version...

[Vejitta]

I never understand anyone who says "SE wants tanks in tanking stance". If this is at all true, then WAR design is the most messed up thing they have ever done. It has its abilities locked behind its stances, and has all its dps abilities locked to the dps stance.

That's exactly why WAR is in such a bad position now and why it was in such good position on 3.x.

[BluexBird]

Just wanna address some things I saw in this thread:

1. Onslaught is fine as it is. With Inner Release now having no cost, you can fit two of them inside the window, which is actually quite nice considering if you don't, you'll end up with an extra 20 points you can do nothing with anyway. And if you make it too strong, it'll be worth using as soon as it's up, which would make rotations a nightmare since you'll now have 2 skills delaying your next Fell Cleave. One thing they COULD do, however, is make it not have a cost when you're out of combat.

2. The new Steel Cyclone buff is a joke. Like are you serious? Anyone praising this change is either horrible at math, easily impressed OR hasn't bothered testing it to see just how INSIGNIFICANT this new change actually is. It might as well not be there at all. A real change would be making it heal for 88% like Inner Beast does. THAT would be significant. "OMG it would be so broken!" REALLY? Considering you only ever use it in dungeons when you're surrounded by lots of enemies? The only "broken" thing about this is that the healer won't have to cast 1 extra heal on you.

3. I understand that making our damage window as big as it is for a job that relies so heavily on it, is a bit problematic. However, trying to condense all of out Fell Cleaves into one huge Fell Cleave would make the playstyle incredibly boring. It'd be better in terms of efficiency, but it would take away from the skill, and therefore from the fun that is being a Warrior. Yes, it sucks how sometimes you aren't able to land all the Fell Cleaves you were expecting to, but I think that's part of the job. Figuring out the best time to use your skills is one of the things that makes Warriors fun, and sets the good ones from the bad. Or would you rather be summed up as a class who Infuriates at the start of fights, does an Eye combo, then a Path combo, and then pops Inner Release for a 75k Fell Cleave? And then goes back to just using Eye/Block for the next 2 minutes, with weaker Fell Cleaves every now and then? No. Those 20 seconds every 2 minutes is when we feel like we truly shine. Don't turn us into a 1-trick pony.

[Capn_Goggles]

Tank damage should be inversely proportional to their utility, but we have this bizarre scenario where WAR parses only barely higher (largely because built-in slashing debuff on dummies) despite having ZERO utility.

Outside of damage numbers, I'm still disappointed by the fact that the issues with Onslaught and Unchained haven't been addressed. I understand what BluexBird was saying about Onslaught having a use in the IR burst rotation, but I feel like that's a rather crappy way to justify the state of an ability that's supposed to be fun rather than just another OGCD to toss in. Unchained is still total garbage because it muscles in on WAR's burst rotation, which again is literally the only thing it brings to the table, and is yet another reason why IB is the only reason anyone would even *touch* WAR's abysmal tank stance.

Steel Cyclone's lifesteal is also a sad joke, and doesn't actually aid his self-sustain in any meaningful way.

[ScotchyScotch]

The primary issue here is just how much more reliant our total dps is on our burst windows when compared to DRK and PLD.

Top parses show WARs with ~33% of total damage coming from FC. Since FC is rarely used outside of Berserk windows, we can assume that most of FC damage is done during zerk windows. Now consider that FCs account for 75% of the potency during a 6 FC window (3000 out of 4000 pot), and 48% (1500 out of 3100 pot) of the non-IR zerk window. This means that FCs account for 62% of damage done during serk windows on average.

If FCs account for 33% of our overall damage and FCs account for 63% of the potency during zerk windows, then that means ~55% of our damage comes during Berserk windows.

This all adds up to make WAR's damage very brittle. WARs do fine when battling a damage wall without mechanics, but if anything messes up our Berserk windows, our damage suffers considerably more than the other two tanks.

[zipzo]

I never understand anyone who says "SE wants tanks in tanking stance". If this is at all true, then WAR design is the most messed up thing they have ever done. It has its abilities locked behind its stances, and has all its dps abilities locked to the dps stance.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Surely, locking DPS behind the DPS stance would be a surefire way to force tank stance Warriors to focus on tank abilities?

How is their design contradictory to that idea?

[Launched]

The 4.05 changes made WAR feel a lot better but they didn't really make it more viable/wanted. The DPS increase from the Path buff is incredibly small because we don't use it every single GCD unlike DRK with its Souleater buff. WAR might have the highest tank DPS now (I don't know, haven't bothered to check for myself), but it's an incredibly small lead and it's affected by mechanics/mistakes a lot more than DRK/PLD. The changes did nothing to fix WAR being so reliant on Berserk, or to change how you have to save almost all of your gauge between Berserks.

Right now WAR doesn't do anything for the group. It has great mitigation, but the other tanks can tank anything just fine. It has DPS, but the other tanks do nearly identical DPS with less effort/risk. It has no utility. Its self healing is bad. WAR needs to be noticeably better than the other tanks in at least one area I don't care which as long as I feel like I'm actually contributing something to my group. I just don't see how anyone can think WAR is actually fixed after those changes.

2. The new Steel Cyclone buff is a joke. Like are you serious? Anyone praising this change is either horrible at math, easily impressed OR hasn't bothered testing it to see just how INSIGNIFICANT this new change actually is. It might as well not be there at all.

This is exactly how I feel about Steel Cyclone. 22% healing on a skill that requires 50 gauge? You get to use it 3 times at most in a pull, and that's if you built up 100 gauge and didn't spend it on the previous pull. It's so insignificant, especially compared to 5x Clemency on PLD, or effectively a 20% heal on DRK every 15s plus more opportunities for DA+Abyssal Drain (which is 88% healing) thanks to the Quietus buff.

[FearShadow]

2. The new Steel Cyclone buff is a joke. Like are you serious? Anyone praising this change is either horrible at math, easily impressed OR hasn't bothered testing it to see just how INSIGNIFICANT this new change actually is. It might as well not be there at all. A real change would be making it heal for 88% like Inner Beast does.

I guess yeah if youre comparing it to IB, it doesnt really stand up to it at all in terms of damage or self sustain. In reality if youre dying and need to grab pulls then it make more sense to use IB and overpower instead. There will never be a time when a war will be relieved to have it the 22% from SC. It just seemed like a nice thing to add just for the sake of adding. They didnt have to and Im not one for having something like that taken away just cuz its small. Tbh we arent hurting for self healing abilities currently. But by all means an aoe inner beast would be incredibly sick too

[Soraki-Muppe]

Those 20 seconds every 2 minutes is when we feel like we truly shine. Don't turn us into a 1-trick pony.

That 20sec burst and how much of our dps it represent is why our dps will be below the other tanks in content that matters. Even when we do that insane rotation perfectly all we do are the same or just a little more then the others, since this rotation is so punishing we should do much more then the other tanks when getting it right and not just the same or a little more. In the last live letter the team said that a job being more complex and punishing did not warrant that job doing more dps, heck they even think it is okay that less complex, less punishing jobs do a ton more, they were talking about dps jobs but it does show their mentality when it comes to these things.
But to the 1-trick pony argument. PLD is currently the top tank dps and utility wise, its dps rotation is easy and not punishing without it being a 1-trick pony. DRK also brings good dps and more utility then WAR, yet again they have an easy dps rotation that is not punishing, they are not a 1-trick pony either. IR I would say does not only make our burst way to fragile it also turns us into a fell-cleave-spam pony.

[HyperiusUltima]

Well, time to make a list:

EVERYTHING WRONG WITH WAR

- Tank Stance is weak compared to other tanks, mainly due to SC in giant mob pulls not healing comparable damage to DRK's DA+AD sustain.
- FIX UNCHAINED.
- WAR cannot Shake It Off as easy as the other tanks do when it comes to new skill bloat. Change Shake It Off to something useful already instead of having it be a self-Esuna that isn't used for 90% of fights.
- IR+Zerk Window is difficult as hell to set up in some raid situations, and from what I've seen from others' posts I think that there's some good ideas there to fix this since WAR needs some much-needed utility or something to boost its Damage. One idea to make it work is to have IR free up the Beast Gauge costs for Fell Cleave for 12s. The CD could be increased for this, but 120s I feel is already enough. This would allow WAR to FC 6 times and get the same damage while also allowing WAR to move more freely than it is now since the current build-up is heavily susceptible to mechanics in raid compared to the other tanks' DPS rotations.
- RAID UTILITY OR DAMAGE. It's supposed to be considered the premiere 'Damage Tank' but if it's barely doing above what PLD can do(which is around 50-100 on an estimate) then its niche is not working.