SE: if it aint broke, dont fix it (War)

[Aana]

Well......seems the war changes were COMPLETELY outta left field. I don't know how to feel about these. They chose such a strange direction to go in.

*IR/Zerk Merged into 1
Recast 90sec.
Duration 10.
Removes Gauge costs
All hits Crit/DR 100%.

*IR/Unchained timers split.
IR usable in defiance.
Unchained 90sec recast

*Drg treatment: Eye buffs 20 to 10%. Every damage action up 5-10% potency.

The only thing that was expected was the Drg thing. The rest of this.....I don't even know.

[whiskeybravo]

Nah, I totally saw that coming tbh. We were gonna get less but stronger fell cleaves, and automatic DH crits because reasons. *cough* Xeno *cough*

[DaulBan]

It's less than 10% increases on GCDs so the change to eye is just a straight nerf. Unfortunately, while DRG got a net buff from more nastrond usage WAR is probably not going to see much benefit from the change to how zerk/ir work. Realistically makes the job easier but the overall potency loss is going to be too big from the regular GCDs.

Man do I hate playing tanks. PLD got buffed because it was garbage in HW and I enjoyed it, now they're just whittling it down because they think balance is everyone being unhappy. WAR gets its fun zerk/irzerk management completely destroyed for what I can only assume are reasons related to 'complete gibbering idiots can't maintain a buff and press fell cleave', which these changes don't fix. And DRK which has been wanting some changes for a while gets nothing.

Man, I should play BRD, NIN, or DRG. SE would never hurt one of their darlings :^)

[AdamZ]

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Destroy WAR play style in 4.0, destroy WAR play style in 4.2....

[whiskeybravo]

Man, I should play BRD, NIN, or DRG. SE would never hurt one of their darlings :^)

A bit off-topic, but an old raid buddy and I were talking and he convinced me this game would be better without brd/mch. I was lamenting about how difficult it's always been to find them (which is why I leveled mch recently), and despite all the changes SE has made to homogenize roles they are still necessary to a degree. Same goes for NIN tbh, if Kefka has silly aggro resets like Neo it just shoehorns them in to a raid spot automatically.

[DaulBan]

SE couldn't let SMN be decent for more than one patch. The amount of faith I have in their ability to maintain anything other than piercing Meta + NIN is pretty low at this point.

A bit off-topic, but an old raid buddy and I were talking and he convinced me this game would be better without brd/mch. I was lamenting about how difficult it's always been to find them (which is why I leveled mch recently), and despite all the changes SE has made to homogenize roles they are still necessary to a degree. Same goes for NIN tbh, if Kefka has silly aggro resets like Neo it just shoehorns them in to a raid spot automatically.

Refresh is flatly overpowered and has no reason to exist with both an aggro reset and roughly 9 times (hard low-ball) the mana gain of mana shift. That alone makes them way too valuable for prog where healers are going to be wasting a lot of MP raising and over-healing.

[TouchandFeel]

The thing that really has me scratching my head and going "wait ... wtf?" is the WAR change at the very bottom as a trait.

lvl70 Berserk Mastery
Upgrades Berserk to Inner Release.

Seriously ... lining up Berserk and IR was just too hard for people so they had to just mash Zerk and IR into one ability?

[DaulBan]

Seriously ... lining up Berserk and IR was just too hard for people so they had to just mash Zerk and IR into one ability?

this is the same company that thinks that TA is balanced because there's a rear positional requirement so... Yes, they do think that aligning two buffs is too hard.

[TouchandFeel]

this is the same company that thinks that TA is balanced because there's a rear positional requirement so... Yes, they do think that aligning two buffs is too hard.

Well to be fair, a good number of WAR players as well as a certain online personality liked to both extol and lament constantly about how much "skill" was required to line up said two buffs, not to mention the rhetoric of "omg if you don't crit on everything when doing Fell Cleave spam the world will end" and look at what happened in the changes.

*Sigh*

This is such a perfect karmic example of "be careful what you wish for" and now those who had the foresight to know not to bandwagon those complaints have to suffer too.

[DaulBan]

Lining up buffs and keeping with raid buffs [I]was/is[/I/ more difficult than on the other jobs where you either hold mana (DRK) or are locked in a rotation anyways (PLD), but not hugely so. I think it's kind of hasty to throw Xeno under the bus for his comments about DHcrit and the opener though, because what he was talking about in regards to FC and how it is now vs Heavensward was true.