Periodic Warrior complaint thread episode 2

[Umbeliel]

Hi, my name is Viola and I've been diagnosed with Warrior.

If you're like me and are suffering from Warrior, and are just patiently waiting to be deleted, this is a spot for you. Warriors anonymous.

Anyway, it's still relatively useless compared to Paladin or Dark Knight and we still have no utility or identity and the community rep said to make new threads to complain about it, so here we are lads.

[Felorr]

Shake it Off pls. I don't want an entire ability dedicated to be able to rarely cleanse myself. Lets be honest: the majority of cleanse-able debuffs are only applied when you make a mistake, like standing in something you shouldn't. This ability either needs to be changed, or they need to start having a lot more unavoidable debuffs I can cleanse in the future.

[Schrute]

All we need is minor potency buffs and have Inner Release (IR) and unchained not sharing the same timer. Honestly, just having unchained and IR off the same timer would make near perfect for my play style. It would mean that war would be tank pulling because it would allow for the most dmg from both tanks, and when ever you need to go into defiance you will not be suffering a larger DPS loss. Having war MT allows the other PLDs to use cover and intervention, DRKs to use TBN.

Sidenote, shake it off needs to be changed. There are so many directions they can take this ability but at as it stands it is pretty much useless.

[aqskerorokero]

It really is paradoxical, making warrior do more dps or have dps related utility means UNbalancing even more tank jobs. Because ppl will always bring moooooore dps in the party. But some defensive utility like: I shake my pain off and double the healing received and transform all overhealed hp in a barrier at the end of buff would nice..if timed right it can be a huge dps gain from healers, no useble outside of combat.

[aleph_null]

By popular (static) demands I cured my warrior condition by identifying myself as paladin. (nah not rly my co tank is a war lul)

I actually don't think that war is in a terrible spot atm, war/pld and drk/pld are very competitive. The problem is pld being very powerful with their toolkit. Intervention is really good for fights with a lot of busters like o4s, you can probably use intervention for every aero 3 and terminal antilight (around 10x?). Combined with sentinel or rampart intervention is very good for tank busters that hit both tanks (twin bolt, terminal antilight, double attack).

Cover having 20% dmg reduction makes it actually optimal for handling some mechanics. Covering the other tank for the back to back wyrm tails in o1s makes it possible for them to stack 2 cds for the next back to back wyrm tails. Covering the healer after grand cross delta almagest while popping sentinel and sheltron means 20% less dmg taken for the upcoming aero 3 and earth shaker, and the tanks won't struggle against healer aggro since they'll be doing some huge aoe heals for almagest. You can just provoke after the earth shakers. Covering the other tank for critical hits in o3s makes it easy to alternate awareness without actually doing tank swaps, and it even gives you a free rampart from cover. Of course you should still do the provoke-shirk combo for aggro padding though.

Divine veil is also a nice addition to the toolkit but I don't think it's anywhere near as powerful as intervention/cover in current content/meta. It's nice to have but its value will diminish greatly post progression. Clemency and passage are pretty meh. I wouldn't call them garbage but clemency is pretty much used only in emergencies, and passage is only used when you run out of aoe mitigation, so they'll be less and less valuable as we gear up (they'll become obsolete much faster than divine veil which doesn't carry a dps loss).

[Shurrikhan]

All we need is minor potency buffs and have Inner Release (IR) and unchained not sharing the same timer. Honestly, just having unchained and IR off the same timer would make near perfect for my play style. It would mean that war would be tank pulling because it would allow for the most dmg from both tanks, and when ever you need to go into defiance you will not be suffering a larger DPS loss. Having war MT allows the other PLDs to use cover and intervention, DRKs to use TBN.

Sidenote, shake it off needs to be changed. There are so many directions they can take this ability but at as it stands it is pretty much useless.

My main question is how much we want Warrior to revolve around specific windows and opportunities of play, each of which is painfully vulnerable to desync due to deaths or mechanics. Let's say Shake It Off were actually immensely useful in its current form, e.g. if Berserk still gave more burst but also a finishing debuff, or if rather than Defiance giving bonus health, it delayed 25% of damage taken to be dealt over the next 6 seconds, both purifiable by Shake It Off. Would we actually want to be using Shake It Off as a vital offensive/defensive CD? Do we want to be, say, using two Onslaught more between each Berserk because its CD would otherwise outpace our next Shake it Off?

In my opinion, Warrior damage and general output would be in a good spot right now if only they weren't so vulnerable to mechanics. Inner Release is quite possibly too strong. Yes, the 6-cleave, 2-Onslaught, 1 Upheaval Berserk is satisfying. But it's barely pulling any more over time than the simple FoF and Req alternations of a PLD, who at worst lose a buffed 2nd GB and more often simply lose a single buffed Holy Spirit. Their mechanical toll doesn't snowball. Warrior's does.

I don't yet have any concrete ideas on how to make Warrior less easily screwed, or better to hold its own thereafter, but I think that's actually the path of development that would be most beneficial to them.

The alternative is to allow for a different kind of near-gimmick utility, alike to Paladin's Cover or Passage of Arms, but distinctly Warrior, and likely based on what it already has. For instance, if it were the tank you want to swap in every Shirk (former MT shirking the Warrior OT) to boost enmity through an Unchained that has been decoupled from Inner Release, that'd be a bonus unique to Warrior. The issue, like the first idea, though, is that it's unnecessary. Even having made that CD essentially free, that's a Convalescence and Thrill of Battle in exchange for over 5% damage lost. Unless one would already have to use Defiance there anyways, it's not generally going to be worthwhile. To make it so, one would have to first decrease the gap between Defiance and Deliverance, at least while under the effect of Unchained. Now, that could be by increasing the potencies of Inner Beast and Steel Cyclone by 33% but making them no longer immune to the damage reduction of Defiance (except under Unchained, of course), or by removing the base 5% damage increase on Deliverance and raising all potencies to compensate, or something else, or any combination of them all. But regardless, there would have to be a way to make that bonus (Unchained decoupled from Inner Release) actually noticeable.

[Ekimmak]

I sort of feel like Unchained needs to give a buff to the skills that ignore the defiance penalty in the first place.

My biggest gripe with Warrior is that so much relies on Inner Release, but it does mesh with current Savage at all. Everybody is ready for their opening burst much faster than you are, so you have to sacrifice your hexacleave in order to match up with the dps cooldowns, and it just feels broken for doing so. O2S is timed just right that you can't go straight into your second Inner Release because mechanics will screw you over (either you do it just before the boss bursts you, which will likely kill you and waste it, you do it just after the tankswap and -100 Gs will force you away from the boss, wasting it, or you do it just after -100 Gs, and then you screw over the raid because Long Drop doesn't bypass knockback immunity)

O3S is just as WAR-hostile, because there's over a 50% chance she'll screw you over with Holy Spellblade (if she doesn't pick you, she can still cause grief by picking the MT), and you have to hold off on IR for a good 30 seconds or so after it comes off cooldown, because you have to pick up the dragon.

Haven't gotten into O4S. But I'll bet it's just as WAR unfriendly. About the only issue I have with O1S is that Clamp bypasses all knockback immunity, which is a rather cheap move, but minor in the grand scale of things.

[ovIm]

Currently, my biggest issue with WAR is still how much it changed for SB.

Please note that the following is a highly subjective opinion.

The introduction of inner release and the beast gauge to me is what hurt the Warrior the most. Coming from ARR to HW, warrior gameplay stayed mostly the same, except that we now got a dps stance and more skills to augment that.

With SB however, the entire gameplay changed drastically. The only thing that currently defines Warrior as a class is the IR window every 120s, which changed the Warrior from versatile Tank to "lol, check my fell cleave" meme machine. To me, the triple fell cleave rotation was not only more fun, but also more engaging, and missing the window due to mechanics did not hurt my own performance as much as missing IR does now.

A very good write up about the differences between the burst phases in HW and SB has been written by Phoenicia, which you can find here

I can understand and respect that other people dont mind or enjoy the new gameplay, but to me, it feels like a kick in the face after having played the class for over 3 years to now see that it was changed so much.

[Kothos]

That's why I just quit warrior. In my opinion there's no salvation. I hate the new Warrior playstyle. And I did all Alexander Savage as WAR.
IMO war 4.0 was designed with only one thing in mind. Nerf. Almost everything they done to it seems like it was intended to be a Nerf. The only new skill that's actually any good is Upheaval. Even the reduced cooldow on infuriate irritates me!

I'm pretty happy with drk and pld. Let warrior be forgotten. I will have Alexander raid in my memory.

[aleph_null]

Infuriate trait is definitely not a nerf if you only look at itself and not the rest of the kit. It just unnecessarily raises the skill ceiling of war by making it more difficult to optimize infuriate usage outside berserk, which is again, not really a bad thing in itself since it rewards players who plan and optimize things. The issue is that the other two tanks do similar amount of dps with much, much simpler rotations and lose a lot less from mistakes. Imagine if there's a dps job with a simple 123456 dps rotation that does similar raid dps contribution as other dps jobs, then obviously it'll be preferred over the other dps jobs.

Also I only looked at it from dps rotation pov. Once you take into account all the other utilities it becomes clear that pld is the new instant pick, while war and drk fight for the remaining slot. It's not that war/drk can't work, but it's just a lot worse than other combinations with pld. At least war/drk now isn't as bad as pld/drk back in 3.x though.