Warrior rotational complexity?

[WhyAmIHere]

If the boss is giving openings for a swap, sure. I don't see the point of doing it otherwise. I've seen warriors swapping stances during boss casts that are under 10 sec and that is what fueled my comment. If a tank is taking regular direct hits from a boss he should be in tank stance.

maybe for the sake of prog, or if you doubt your own / your healers skill/gear.
but as a general blanket "you should remain in tank stance as long as possible?" Not really.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

If a tank is taking regular direct hits from a boss he should be in tank stance.

If only any boss in the game was actually even remotely threatening enough to make tanks want to use tank stance outside of aggro.

besides certain sections of Ultimate coil of course. Crits are super annoying.

[Booden]

If the boss is giving openings for a swap, sure. I don't see the point of doing it otherwise. I've seen warriors swapping stances during boss casts that are under 10 sec and that is what fueled my comment. If a tank is taking regular direct hits from a boss he should be in tank stance.

That's because you don't need any more mitigation than what you have without tank stance, outside of very specific scenarios, and aggro is super easy to manage in this game without needing to use aggro combo. A WAR opens a boss fight in defiance+unchained, and four GCDs later (tomahawk > heavy > maim > eye) can switch to deliverance and basically stay in that stance for the whole fight. You might want to switch back to tank stance for things like picking up adds, or when you need to heal yourself for some reason (usually you have a dead healer or someone screwed up a mechanic), but outside of that you want to be in dps stance as much as you can.

For anything that isn't ultimate/savage/extreme content, the extra dps usually isn't crucial, often casual players wouldn't even notice a tank pushing his dps in a dungeon.
Even some extreme trials don't actually need the tank to do much damage (Lakshmi for example) provided the dps players have decent gear. But for anything that is endgame content, the less you push your dps, the worse it is for your team. Fights like regular kefka in O8S simply wouldn't be clearable without the tanks pushing their damage as far as they can. The added dps from tanks lets you push through phases of the fight faster, which in a way, mitigates damage because the longer each phase lasts, the more damage you take.

Of course you still have to do the basic tank things you're expected to do (Hold aggro, mitigate properly through the use of cooldowns, proper boss positioning), but your raid team needs you to do damage for the sake of everyone there, and because the basic tank responsibilities are very easy to do to begin with. Holding aggro is a joke, cooldown and mitigation can be planned for the entire fight, and so can positioning be.

[Argyle_Darkheart]

There are no more decisions to be made or planning to be had.

On a training dummy, that's almost the case, but this is simply not true when considering the unique tempo of each fight and raid buff windows.

While 4.2 WAR certainly lost a degree of complexity (edit: more to the point, it became less strict), it's also far less awkward to play.

[Sandamar]

The best war game play was heavensward.
It was missing something in ARR.
It was slightly too much hassle at the beginning of SB
It is braindead nowadays.

[Alexalibur]

Can't bring myself to play WAR these days. Leveled it to 70 and was planning to stick to it as my only tank but realised that it's way too boring with how often Fell Cleave became. You can't just make the coolest skill in a class's kit come up SO OFTEN it becomes boring.

[Nedkel]

If i want to play something complex i would play DPS.

Tanks should be straight forward, not complex, their responsibility for the run/dungeon/trial/raid is too high to make it complicated to play, it will mess up anything below 75% percentile and there will be a fountain of complains about tanks not being able to do X and Y.

[Izsha]

If i want to play something complex i would play DPS.

Tanks should be straight forward, not complex, their responsibility for the run/dungeon/trial/raid is too high to make it complicated to play, it will mess up anything below 75% percentile and there will be a fountain of complains about tanks not being able to do X and Y.

Warrior didn't have to be played in a complex way. You could still sit in tank stance and spam IB and unchained/zerk for days if that's what you wanted to do. Even in offense you could do a lot of damage just using zerk and IR when they were up. But the ceiling for warrior was much higher. You could really get down to the nitty gritty and squeeze a lot out of War with good, precise play. And for the effort of doing that, there was a payoff. Managing your gauge to setup for strong zerk and IR windows was a goal to keep shooting for as you learned raid fights better and better. But at the same time you could still play casual dungeon warrior and never leave defiance and be very safe and reasonably effective spamming IB all day.

Now the floor has been raised (you don't need to do very much to be effective offensively), and the ceiling went down (once you do the basics theres really not a lot of room left to grow). Warrior used to represent the magical "easy to learn, hard to master" design that every game strives to achieve. War has always been a very safe, sturdy, non-punishing tank with good defence and enmiy generation. But it also had a lot of room to learn and grow offensively. Now its just "Easy to learn.......The End."

For people who never set foot outside of dungeons warrior suddenly got 'awesome', but it was entirely playable and always very effective at lower levels long before the IR change anyway. So you just got to enjoy big numbers for little effort you weren't seeing before, but it was always a sturdy safe tank for beginners anyway. For everyone else that wants to push the envelope, it became extremely limiting and restrictive on what you can do with the job.

[RLofOBFL]

One of the reasons they fixed WAR is the absurd damage difference related to the rng of berserk Fell Cleaves. You could go from 4k to 4.5k literally just from critting. No other non fed class had that disparity. Personally I like WAR a lot more now, it's actually fun to play in savage now and you don't wanna just wipe if you dont crit any FCs. And WAR was relatively hard to master I admit but ironically DRK was and still is the true most complex tank.

[Saeno]

And WAR was relatively hard to master I admit but ironically DRK was and still is the true most complex tank.

Care to elaborate?