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.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[Izsha]

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.

Xeno made 1 comment about critting FCs feeling bad and suddenly the forums Wars all think that Crit RNG was some crazy burden that Wars had to carry. Crit RNG during any 1 window has an utterly miniscule effect on total DPS for a 10+ minute fight. And once you start to look at multiple Zerk/IR windows (1 per minute) during that entire 10 minutes and the handful of FCs scattered throughout the fight, regular distribution takes over and the variance starts to plummet quickly to the actual crit rate average. It FEELS bad to see no pretty numbers when you just popped your potion, but the actual effect over the duration of an encounter is completely inconsequential. No greater than the crit variance of most any job, and we don't even have Crit procs to worry about. Mnk and Brd have far greater swings based on RNG crit rate than war ever did.

Drk is probably harder to play optimally than war is now, but that's because war got thrown back into dark ages of complexity. Before that, the things that made each challenging to play optimally were very different skill sets. If your personal skill set aligned with the skills needed on war, it seemed easy-ish and drk would seem daunting and vice versa. Difficulty is both subjective and based on your own strengths.