Warrior rotational complexity?

[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.

[RLofOBFL]

snip

What? I am speaking of my personal experience. My WAR in my static has numbers varying to this degree depsite playing the exact same last raid tier. He'd do between 4.1-4.4 where PLD me would consistently be mid 4k to low 4.1k. Though I guess BRD and MNK are more rng dependant.

And WAR was never more complicated than DRK, people just never understood how to play it to its max. It has a sort of hidden complexity that most non pro drk dont(even now) really understand involving lining up BS, MP, DA and proper GCDs(not hard slash) for a buff window (usually Trick) that will only really affect that last few 300~ dps. Where as WAR it was always the same, you had strict 60/120 CD timers to adhere too, the only complexity was when to Fell Cleave vs Onslaughting. Even now it's exactly the same, only simplified, every 90 seconds burst, then decide when to onslaught or Fell Cleave(except that is almost dps negligible now).

[Izsha]

What? I am speaking of my personal experience. My WAR in my static has numbers varying to this degree depsite playing the exact same last raid tier. He'd do between 4.1-4.4 where PLD me would consistently be mid 4k to low 4.1k. Though I guess BRD and MNK are more rng dependant.

And WAR was never more complicated than DRK, people just never understood how to play it to its max. It has a sort of hidden complexity that most non pro drk dont(even now) really understand involving lining up BS, MP, DA and proper GCDs(not hard slash) for a buff window (usually Trick) that will only really affect that last few 300~ dps. Where as WAR it was always the same, you had strict 60/120 CD timers to adhere too, the only complexity was when to Fell Cleave vs Onslaughting. Even now it's exactly the same, only simplified, every 90 seconds burst, then decide when to onslaught or Fell Cleave(except that is almost dps negligible now).

The performance of 1 individual in a fight can vary for so many reasons besides crit. If you do the math, crit FCs have a very small impact. Don't want to believe me? Fine. Don't want to do the math yourself? Fine. Go look at FF logs. I just brought up the top war DPS list on Alex Prime and found the 1st set of 2 Wars with the same fight time and close DPS I found and looked at their damage.

War 1:
Fight time- 10:03. DPS 1961.

War 2:
Fight time - 10:05. DPS 1923.

War 2 is 2% behind the damage of war 1. So pretty darn close. Lets see what their crit rate is like.

AA crit rate (baseline crit)
War 1: 36.6% crit rate. Made up 20.72% of total damage.
War 2: 36.3% crit rate. Made up 19.8% of total damage.

OK. Seems they have virtually identical crit rates as their most common attacks (AAs) are virtually tied in both crit rate and % of total damage. So they should have similarly matched crit rates for FCs. They have nearly the same DPS and same base crit rate, and almost the same overall DPS and fight time.

FC Crit rate
War 1: 47.8%. FCs were 20.72% of total damage
War 2: 28%. FCs were 19.8% of total damage

War 1 crit nearly half of all his FCs. High rolled the shiz outta that. War 2 got boned. He got a lower crit rate than his AAs and the way deliverance stacks work, FCs naturally have a higher crit rate than your overall crit rate. He low rolled the shiz out of this fight.

Yet they are still within 2% DPS of each other.

FC Crits DONT MATTER in the grand scheme of things. They feel bad. But the numbers don't reflect that feeling. Its a placebo. In your head. If your static warrior is all over the map its because he is not a consistent player. Not Crits. Your pld is obviously a much more consistent player maintaining uptime and other fundamentals that affect your damage far greater than the smidge of effect crit FCs have.

The numbers don't lie. This is just 1 example, but if you run the numbers you will come to the same conclusion. You can easily break down how much damage FCs contribute and then adjust an imaginary crit rate. But the bottom line is that FCs are only about 20% of your damage (back in HW). The ones that are under Zerk windows and IR windows shrinks that more. Then theres the fact that you will do 20-30 FCs depending on fight length. The statistical probability of critting nearly all or nearly none of them when you will (on oaverage) have around a 40-45% crit rate on FCs is near zero. So the amount that 20% can vary in actual scenarios is very limited. High rolling a near 50% crit rate bumped that up to 20.72%. Low rollilng droped it to 19.8%. Crits are still spread out among all your other hits and actions. So if you have a normal crit rate and happen to land them on FCs, you get a TINY boost. If you get them all on other actions you still get damage anyway. The only way you would have a dramatic swing in damage would be if you had an OVERALL crap or high crit rate over ALL actions, not FCs. And the probability of that is winning the lottery levels of unlikely. a 35% crit rate over every action in a 10 min fight low rolling to 10% or high rolling to 50+ is virtually impossible. Go flip a coin fro every action and AA in a 10 minute fight and see how many heads/tails you get. You will get close to 50/50 after all those hundreds of flips. If you get 10% you should buy a lotto ticket too cuz you just had once in a generation luck. FCs that don't crit just shift to another lower potency action, but as long as they don't disappear leaving you with an abnormal overall crit rate it wont bump your damage any significant amount.

[whiskeybravo]

Is Alex Prime a good example to really be using? War didn't have Fell Cleave spam until SB, we basically doubled our amount of Fell Cleaves since Alexander, no? Actually at just a quick glance it looks like we've nearly tripled FC spam since HW. Alex prime around 20+ FCs, NeoExdeath around 40+ FCs, and God Kefka I'm seeing logs with around 60 FCs (prolly thanks to 90 sec spam intervals vs old 120 sec IR)

At any rate, it stands to reason crit FCs would've been a much larger chunk of DPS during Deltascape when it was being made a big deal because you had double the amount of them. You won't see it now since the majority of them are automatic DHC.

[Izsha]

Is Alex Prime a good example to really be using? War didn't have Fell Cleave spam until SB, we basically doubled our amount of Fell Cleaves since Alexander, no? Actually at just a quick glance it looks like we've nearly tripled FC spam since HW. Alex prime around 20+ FCs, NeoExdeath around 40+ FCs, and God Kefka I'm seeing logs with around 60 FCs (prolly thanks to 90 sec spam intervals vs old 120 sec IR)

At any rate, it stands to reason crit FCs would've been a much larger chunk of DPS during Deltascape when it was being made a big deal because you had double the amount of them. You won't see it now since the majority of them are automatic DHC.

Patch 4.1. 1st two random top wars with same fight time and similar DPS I found on catastrophe (basically a training dummy).

Fight time 7:03 for both.

DPS Near identical.
War 1: 4062.9
War 2: 4053.4

AA Crit/DH rates. (Similar uptimes)
War 1: 123 AAs. Crit 29.3%. DH 17.9%. 22.65% total damage.
War 2: 122 AAs. Crit 23.8%. DH 23.8% 22.32% total damage.

FC Crits/DH
War 1: Crit 39.4%. DH 27.3%. 32.14% Total damage.
War 2: Crit 50.0%. DH 25.0% 33.61% total damage.

Another War high rolls FCs by over 10% and within 2% the DH of the other. Doesn't make a dent.

Again, these are just individual examples that bear out what the math already tells us. You can take the damage of FCs and calculate what changes in crit rate do to the entire set. You have to do completely unrealistic things to move the needle like "War 1 Crits EVERY zerk FC and war 2 gets ZERO but instead moves all those crits to Heavy swing when not under zerk windows." To start to see any noticeable difference, but the fact is that doesn't happen. The probability of something that extreme happening is near zero.

You can look at logs all over the place, but the math already told us how this works. These are just examples that show that. I didn't go fishing. I just found the 1st set of similar parsed/timed wars in both cases.