The Feast as WAR

[ChibiShinku]

I read a similar thread in Reddit about this, but I'd like to post this here for more visibility I guess. In his case, he's a Silver, I'm a Gold, but the issue is the same.

Asking fellow Feast folks as well if WAR is simply bad compared to the other two tanks in the Feast? Or rather your experience in it? It's incredibly hard to maintain being in top 100 in my Data Center (Gaia), and I may fall out of it completely soon. If there's any WAR out there in a higher placement, I'd really like to hear your advice. I know how to bait Cover, but even if you do that, the fact that they have Clemency makes it matter less. In addition, Inner Release's special effects makes it incredibly obvious someone will be bursted - it's easy to prep against, as my experience when fighting WARs.

Stop the PLD, and the healer has free reign, and vice versa. It's almost like having 2 healers. They also have a ranged attack with the potency of Inner Beast + silence is also crazy if you ask me; they can pretty much stay close to the one they've got Cover on while dishing out damage to a far target (say, the opposing healer), or with that 5-second cooldown stun can essentially disrupt bursters on their tracks.

At most though, I feel very frustrated that we have no direct way to defend our party members. Thrill of War is nice, but damn, many times have it failed me because they happen to run behind a wall while I try to stop pursuers; it didn't heal my intended target. Holmgang can be used to stop someone, but it's nothing a Purify can't solve, leaving a WAR simply stuck for a good few seconds - seconds that can mean death of a party member. As the guy said there (his name there is OldStuffUser), it doesn't matter how good Inner Beast is; all it's protecting is me - and who'd go for that when it's incredibly weak. Heck, a DRK's PvP Bloodspiller on Grit does more damage, and the silence is a crazy deterrent. Even if I see someone get targeted with an obvious Sole Survivor, burst incoming, there's nothing much I can do for the guy/girl - I don't have any means to protect him/her, other than trying to kill the attacker. It's even more hard to defend if the one targeted is our healer - the Silence status, along with Butcher's Block-level of damage taken increased (by Soul Survivor), have costed us a lot of games. It's an obviously good comeback tactic when there's like only a minute left, and we're all fat with medals. Not all the time though, and definitely not frustrating compared to against a PLD.

I got no issues with WAR vs WAR or vs DRK though - I don't win all of the time of course; that's just stupid to expect, but it feels less frustrating that your damage just disappears like that. Somehow it's like the trend since the ancient times, where a good defense, and persevering before retaliating, is better than those with nothing but damage.

It's just sad. Yeah, I may just be a bad Gold ranked WAR or simply unlucky, but that is why I'd be grateful for any advice. Thanks to OldStuffUser as well; I thought it was just me who feels the same about WAR in the Feast. I can't think of what good changes to implement though, because if say, they add a PvP version of Shake It Off, then we might as well play as a DRK.

[Canadane]

I use WAR in the feast because it's simply my favourite job and fun to play.
But yes, I feel as it's the worst of the tanks in pvp. You have so very little support, so you go long periods of being nothing but an extra dps. And honestly, being an extra dps is great, and even if you swap over to your tank stance, you're not exactly easy to kill. But if your team mate is being targeted, it feels as if you have the least support to stop that.

The support that's lacking is easily my biggest complaint about it.

[ChibiShinku]

Yeah, it's the reason I stick with WAR regardless; I know it's gonna bring out the best in me simply because I like it the most. It just feels bad though, since I really am aiming for that top 100 The Feast prize for this season. It's just a recolor of Season 7's but that's the reason; I dig the gold/blue colors. (*´▽｀*)

It's my first time actually partaking in Ranked after all these times of Training and other PvP modes, and did my best to get to top 100 because the reward is something I finally like lol. Little did I know there's nothing but PLDs up here (Gaia Data Center rankings). Currently juggling around the low 80's but I'm currently at 96th right now. I may be ousted altogether tomorrow...it's just sad.

For the record, I just did 19 Ranked Matches today, and won like 7 - I was against Gold/Platinum PLDs the whole time (with one odd silver DRK). It's an overall loss today and no improvement to rankings... (;ﾟ;Д;ﾟ; )

[Xenosan]

From healer POV I feel WAR suited to focus more on burst assist than investing too much time in healer CC, the good WARs I've faced give me a pace of spike dmg that I don't usually anticipate from pld/drk comps and make me look a baddie who can't turtle in non-culling window ; ; they do have to work harder tho

[ChibiShinku]

Yeah, that's true. As a trade though, we have to rely more on our healers compared to the other two tanks. A good DRK or PLD have means to supplement protection if a healer isn't as skilled as the opposition, but a WAR has a good 3,500~ heal or so - which isn't too bad, but completely useless when it's cull time compared to what Cover/Clemency and TBN can do.

Sad, really. As I've said, one good way to win against WAR is a battle of attrition - when I go against another WAR, I let them kill like 1-2 times then let them struggle, then acquire a comeback with 2 minutes or less remaining. Once the healer is down, they melt with the heavy medal and all - a PLD has a way to stop those even without a healer thanks to that goshdarned Clemency and Cover, and a DRK can go full defensive with proper TBNs and Unmends to deter, and getting the gauge they need while doing so. Not to mention, both have stuns that are only 5s cooldown and doesn't cost any bars.

A WAR? After a good 3,500~ heal and a lucky holding out someone with proper CC, hope that your DPS knows you're a WAR and try to get away as far as they can while the healer revives, since we have nothing to help them with. Makes you feel really guilty when your healer dies.

[Praesul]

Top 10 on Aether here, I've done like 90% of my games as WAR with a little sprinkling of PLD and DRK on the side.

Honestly, I think WAR is in a really good spot, both DRK and WAR are fairly well balanced, though I'd put DRK slightly behind just because I feel like the 3k potency shield on TBN is starting to show it's age now that the potencies on a lot of DPS job's skills have been buffed.

WAR has clear strengths in that it has arguably the highest damage output of the three tanks while also consistently boosting their own team's damage through butcher's block, and defensively it's not bad either. Inner beast is a very strong ability when you need to use, as is holmgang for survival. But using your defensive abilities as WAR comes at the cost of your offense, every inner beast is a fell cleave you can't use, and it's time spent in defiance that you'd ideally like to spend out of defiance. In the case of Holmgang, it's a very strong self survival tool AND really good for peeling melee off your team but it has a 60 second CD, and it comes at an opportunity cost. If you use it to save yourself or a teammate, that means you can't use it offensively to hold someone in place.

Interestingly if you want to play with just self defense in mind, I consider WAR to be the hardest tank to kill. DRK has no external cooldown other than TBN, and if they TBN themselves that leaves their party open. PLD has a stronger defensive CD but it makes sense considering they will often be taking damage for their team which is fair. It also means they put themselves at risk of dying more often than the other two tanks. If a WAR wanted to, they could pool gauge for inner beasts, use IR as a defensive CD, kite people with tomahawk or zoom away from the melee chasing them with Onslaught, and holmgang to stall for time to get a heal, or heal themselves up with IB, recuperate, thrill etc. The cost again, is their own personal offensive goes completely out the window if they choose to or are forced to play in this manner. But the option is still there, and your team will still benefit from butcher's block at least.

No, the real problem is PLD. Their existence means your team has to not only play differently, but work infinitely harder to get anything done. This can't be said of any other job in feast, you could argue that playing against a BLM requires a different play style but it's nowhere near as game changing as playing against a BLM was in 3.x. Playing against a PLD is always an uphill battle, and it always requires your own team to play way better than the enemy team. Cover is such a stupidly broken ability, it's mind boggling that its on a 3 second cooldown. It makes it so that every single party member has an EHP pool of about 18,000 depending on what traits the PLD takes. People will argue that it doesn't get rid of damage, it just transfers it to another target as a defense for Cover's current state but that's trash reasoning. Feast, and MMO pvp in general, values burst damage significantly more than sustained damage. This isn't pve where keeping high uptime and a perfect rotation is viable, and healers are also pretty powerful. When you deal damage, you want to coordinate with your team and make sure it's lethal damage, otherwise the enemy will be able to react. You can burn through TBN, it's not always easy but it's likely to happen. You can burn through Thrill of War, you can burn through safeguard....Again, difficult things to accomplish but it happens.

You CANNOT burn through Cover when it's used correctly. Let's assume you've picked your target, your tank and DPS are on the same board (I know I know this is completely unrealistic so far, but work with me here), your damage goes out and you manage to deal a high significant chunk of damage already in your single GCDs. If the PLD is slightly late, some damage goes through to the target and then Cover comes out, transferring the damage left to the PLD. In this instance, even a LATE cover is good and arguably BETTER than covering earlier because the covered target can be healed with no fear to the PLD since most of the damage has already gone out, the PLD has a higher health pool and will likely be in shield oath. So all healing can be concentrated on the cover target, with a small heal afterwards on the PLD if need be. And that's from a LATE COVER. If you cover earlier, all the damage goes to the PLD which is spikier and has a higher chance of resulting in a kill on the PLD, but they still have shield oath and their higher health pool, essentially forcing you to always plan to kill a PLD whenever you go for a kill.

Now you'll have people arguing that you can play around cover. you can stun the PLD, you can hard swap targets....And they'd be correct. You can totally outplay a PLD. But just the fact that you even have to outplay the stupid job in the first place is a strength! The fact that you even have to be concerned with cover at ALL is ridiculous. If you concentrate on stopping the PLD, that then gives the healer free reign to do whatever they want during burst opportunities. If you concentrate on ccing the healer, that then gives the PLD free reign to do whatever they want! It's lose/lose. You don't have to do anywhere near the amount of outplaying when you're against a WAR or DRK, their defensive tools are much easier to bait out and have significantly longer cooldowns in comparison to cover. Cover is up every THREE SECONDS, you rarely have to think about using because even if you cover the wrong target you still have tools to help your team in the 3 second gap before you can use cover again. You can still stun enemies, you can still toss out clemencies, now cover is back up again.

It's also BARELY gated by gauge cost. EVERY single GCD of theirs increases their gauge by 5. It's not something you have to work towards, it's something that builds automatically, both the Halone and Royal Authority combo build the same amount of gauge, even shield bash gives gauge! You can shield bash stun DR'd targets and still get something out of it if you really need gauge, you can also toggle cover off before you get a second tick of gauge cost so that it only uses 25 per use. It's completely ridiculous.

You would think that this would all come at the cost of offense, right? But no, not really. PLD is still capable of very high burst damage, higher in ONE GCD than even WAR can put out. Royal authority + Requiescat + shield bash 3750 potency in one GCD, and if we assume it's a worst case scenario with 0 MP, requiescat still does 1k potency so the combined potency is 2750. Fell Cleave + Onslaught + Tomahawk is 3250. Taking into account the Butcher's block bonus it's 3575 potency in total. THAT'S STILL LESS THAN A PLD'S SINGLE GCD BURST EVEN UNDER IDEAL SCENARIOS! There's no tradeoff for a PLD's defense, they're still very strong offensively.

So yeah, in conclusion the problem is not WAR, the problem is PLD. The job is completely busted and should have been tuned down ages ago.

[ChibiShinku]

I was trying to avoid saying PLD is overpowered, but man this reply of yours nailed everything including how frustrating it feels.

I hope they'd address this. I don't want to badmouth the devs, but sometimes I feel like this hasn't been tested properly.

Still, you being in the top 10 as a WAR means I should practice more; at least I know its possible, so thanks for that.