Warriors Thoughts

[Layla-chan]

So.... 5.0 you had issues with warrior... but with 5.3 it's better?

It literally didn't change at all. You just have an additional 15s of eye with IR every 90s... it doesn't add dps or change the looping rotation that WAR has of Eye path path path eye path path gauge dump eye path path IR eye....

"Gimmicky nascent" Nascent is LITERALLY the exact same thing. You just can use it in solo pleb content now... like, okay? It's the same thing. It's LITERALLY the same thing. How is it so bad in 5.x but now it's magically better?

This folks, is what the placebo effect is. Thinking something is different, when it is the same thing but just looks different.

Like. TBN is "gimmicky" then, because you can use it on self or on a person in raid, Heart of Stone is gimmicky, same reason, intervention is gimmicky... like for real man I just don't even understand this logic as it applies to LITERALLY all of the tanks with their person CD.

Raw Intuition is the personal, solo version of Nascent.

I actually I feel the same way, and no I don't think it's placebo. I didn't want to play WAR on 5.0, but now in my alt I am having a blast as a WAR. Could just be more than the Nascent Flash though, the QoL change of longer Storm's Eye adds to it too. It's way more comfy now.

[Leiron]

War didn't change, it just means you gain a slight DPS boost over the course of...several minutes?
It plays the exact same before, the only real change is nascent glint being solo used now.

[Absurdity]

War didn't change, it just means you gain a slight DPS boost over the course of...several minutes?

You gain "a fellcleave" after like 10 minutes, we probably gained slightly more dps from Eye not falling off anymore in our opener and during phase changes but that's about it.
The Nascent changes are nice for doing stuff solo but it basically has no influence on party content.

[Shurrikhan]

There have only been two times where Warrior really felt to me like its own, fleshed out job (or, on a direction that could quickly lead there): pre-rework ARR and early SB.

I still wish they had gone "the other way" so to speak with the ARR revisions, and instead allowed PLD more non-CD based active mitigation instead of copying PLD's dependence on percentile mitigation over to Warrior. I wish they'd made Storm's Path actually impactful as a self-heal and worked Bloodbath into a resource system and moved Defiance beyond a simple meat tank stance, etc., etc., such that it remained focus on that "My life is damage(-dealing), but more importantly, damage is my (means to) life" (a damage-based tank with more flexible burst than its competition, sure, but also one for which the timing of said damage makes the difference between its life and death).

That being said, though similarly underpowered, early SB WAR had some really fun and unique vision, too. Complete with a few different ways to quickly purge excess Beast Gauge, the stance-swap gauge cost actually felt like a limitation that offered more decision making than it took away and really fit the core idea the job. Had Berserk retained some sort of detriment, Shake it Off been given a second charge and actually worked on most things, Unchained retained Defiance's benefits even upon swapping to Deliverance and Inner Release its benefits in swapping to Defiance, Inner Beast offered enough healing to be a decent use for Inner Release, etc., that could have made for a seriously solid design.

[Absurdity]

The gauge cost to stance dancing gave you about as much "decision making" as having to shoot yourself in the foot at the command of someone else. Switching from Defiance to Deliverance wouldn't have been the big problem but being forced back into Defiance and ending up with the most useless uneven number of beast gauge because some random dps doesn't know what diversion is or because of boss mechanics is probably the worst design I've seen. I would not call losing 50% of your gauge with no benefit a "good way to purge excess beast gauge".


As for berserk, the detriment would've been fine if they didn't cut the attack power buff down by 20%.



Pre-4.2 Warrior was probably a nice idea on paper but it was simply too complex and too much of a hassle to play optimally for way too little gain when PLD had an even simpler basic rotation than it does nowadays and the same, if not even superior, performance.

[Shurrikhan]

Pre-4.2 Warrior was probably a nice idea on paper but it was simply too complex and too much of a hassle to play optimally for way too little gain when PLD had an even simpler basic rotation than it does nowadays and the same, if not even superior, performance.

So a tuning issue means the devs were right to gut it down to the shallow vestige we have now?

The gauge cost to stance dancing gave you about as much "decision making" as having to shoot yourself in the foot at the command of someone else. Switching from Defiance to Deliverance wouldn't have been the big problem but being forced back into Defiance and ending up with the most useless uneven number of beast gauge because some random dps doesn't know what diversion is or because of boss mechanics is probably the worst design I've seen. I would not call losing 50% of your gauge with no benefit a "good way to purge excess beast gauge".

Nor would I. I would, however, call Onslaught one. You use IB or FC at 70 BG. You've got 20 left over. You purge the excess, stacking enmity modifiers for nearly 3k effective enmity-potency or, prior to Enhanced Infuriate, actually eek out a bit more potency than if it had been spent on Fell Cleave. And voila, you've lost nothing to the swap. That said, Onslaught should have been the only cooldown holding back stance swaps, and should have scaled with GCD speed.

In all other cases, the issues with the gauge cost were ones directly linked only to poor enmity management and/or DPS idiocy, neither of which were unique to WAR. Heck, even then it was more punishing for PLD or DRK to have to deal with an unexpectedly ignorant DPS than it was for a WAR to do so. And short of that, establishing an insufficient enmity margin is on you, not the kit.

[Absurdity]

So a tuning issue means the devs were right to gut it down to the shallow vestige we have now?

I never said it was the correct choice to make warrior the "smooth brain" job it is now but that already started in Stormblood and 4.0 WAR was simply too clunky to play. It wasn't just a "tuning issue" but setting up that 6 fellcleave burst and then executing it was just a massive pain in basically any fight that isn't a target dummy. A middleground would've been nice but I highly doubt SE ever wants to go in that direction again unless a majority of warriors complain about it's current iteration.

In all other cases, the issues with the gauge cost were ones directly linked only to poor enmity management and/or DPS idiocy, neither of which were unique to WAR. Heck, even then it was more punishing for PLD or DRK to have to deal with an unexpectedly ignorant DPS than it was for a WAR to do so. And short of that, establishing an insufficient enmity margin is on you, not the kit.

Except for cases where it was neither on you nor the dps, Neo Exdeath sends his regards. And both PLD and DRK lost a GCD due to having to switch to tank stance, not anything between 0-50 gauge.



Heck, PLD had a higher enmity generation than warrior while tanking the boss, once you got past the opener, due to shield swipes, it just had terrible initial enmity generation. The way Sword Oath functioned and PLD's opener made you not want to be in Shield Oath ever, just as much of a design flaw as warrior stances in 4.0 but we're talking about switching mid-fight so it's not quite as bad as having to pull in Shield Oath.



I can't say much about 4.0 DRK but by the time 4.3 rolled around it had the highest enmity generating ability in the form of DA+Power Slash and DA+Dark Passanger was a high enmity oGCD.

[Shurrikhan]

I've not defended the value of those tank stances relative to their counterparts. I certainly haven't defended the GCD costs of Oaths or Grit. I've only pointed out that WAR's gauge cost (no GCD cost attached, and with further room for improvement in the surrounding mechanics) was a reasonably sensible limiting system, given that it had tools by which to rapidly consume its gauge before swapping. I'd far rather have worked to correct the stances each into enjoyable playflows, with perhaps the exception of Grit, which I'd rehaul to something more interesting in the first place, than have axed those systems entirely -- especially WAR's take on it.

I can't say much about 4.0 DRK but by the time 4.3 rolled around it had the highest enmity generating ability in the form of DA+Power Slash and DA+Dark Passanger was a high enmity oGCD.

DP was a 1-minute CD with a 3x modifier, iirc. Compare that to Onslaught's 10x modifier on a 10s CD. DA-Power Slash was pretty decent, admittedly, but unless you were using it in Grit, you were wasting some nearly 2k potency of enmity. You were far better off creating a massive margin in the first place and then never touching Power Slash again. Given that swapping to Grit cost both a GCD and more than half a Dark Arts cast (140 potency), yes, Warrior was less affected by unexpected excess threat from DPS than were PLD or DRK.

[Absurdity]

Stance dancing should've never had a cost attached to it besides the dps loss from the -20%, for none of the tanks. They should've all funtioned like warrior's stances but instead of fixing that and making mechanics with the provided mitigation in mind they just scrapped the entire thing so eh, whatever.


And sure, you could dumb your gauge before switching but depending on how fast you needed to switch and what your current gauge was you would either not have time to dump gauge at all or you might end up with some bullshit number like 5 gauge. This was made even worse by IR's design back then where you needed a very specific amount of gauge and needed to be at a very specific point in your rotation to execute it correctly, no room for suddenly losing/dumping gauge or you would utterly gimp your dps.

[Marxam]

Stance dancing should've never had a cost attached to it besides the dps loss from the -20%, for none of the tanks. They should've all funtioned like warrior's stances but instead of fixing that and making mechanics with the provided mitigation in mind they just scrapped the entire thing so eh, whatever.


And sure, you could dumb your gauge before switching but depending on how fast you needed to switch and what your current gauge was you would either not have time to dump gauge at all or you might end up with some bullshit number like 5 gauge. This was made even worse by IR's design back then where you needed a very specific amount of gauge and needed to be at a very specific point in your rotation to execute it correctly, no room for suddenly losing/dumping gauge or you would utterly gimp your dps.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who saw it this way. Honestly if they just implemented the ogcd stance dance to the other classes before gutting it entirely this thread won't be filled with 'bring back tank identity' posts. Speaking on WAR in 4.0, it was punishing and clunky but if Berserk was still at 50% atk power there might have been some forgiveness since the pay off for pulling such a stunt was high dmg, high heals (bloodbath) and high enmity but the initial 30% (nerfed to 20% then changed to DH cirts) was just low enough where it seemed unnecessary to have such a clunky job only to perform mediocre among the tanks.

Personally 4.2 WAR is probably the peak of perfection for the job and all other tanks should have been modeled after that.