Warrior Rework to Balance the job

[PyurBlue]

How does diminishing one job's ability all of a sudden make an entirely different job more enjoyable?

It's very straightforward. Healers are supposed to heal. WAR requires no healer. WAR makes healers boring to play. It literally breaks the design of the game.

It seems to me the more enjoyable solution would be to give all the tanks equally effective sustain options. Flavored in their own likeness. Because, you know, it's enjoyable to play.

This would be the worst possible thing to do as it would make all tanks as bad as WAR. Buffs aren't always good and nerfs aren't always bad. Buffs in this case only make things worse.

Imagine wanting to remove fun stuff from a video game, some people are truly baffling.

It turns out it's not fun and that's why people are upset. Challenge is a component of fun, how are you supposed to be challenged when playing a heal focused class when the target that you're supposed to heal outheals you?

[ThorinG]

A simple question on the core issue:

"Compared to other tanks, is the self sustainability of WAR balanced in dungeons or not?"

If yes, then please explain in the context of "tanks sustainability in dungeons"

If no, then limit BW heal scalibilty per target,which seems to be the solution requested by dissatisfied players, and a nerf which will only impact dungeons and no other content.

[MikoRemi]

It's never really been a discussion, just a continuous dogpiling of complaints against WAR made by mostly non-WAR players.

The only thing that will actually settle any discussion is fixing DRK so they can go back to playing the game instead of spending all day here rationalizing their misfortunes upon WAR.

Indeed. It’s the most braindead option to try to hurt whats doing good for itself instead of trying to come up with actual ways to fix a bad job. Sadly these are the same people that want to keep the “uniqueness” of Dark Mind only blocking magic damage. Yikes.

[Shurrikhan]

Mate, I never suggested capping the heal to a single target. Multiple of my posts here speak directly against that approach.

And were the advantage mild (instead of huge) and was compensated for by a weakness outside of its conditions in which it's advantaged (instead of it and the job as a whole still being in the lead regardless), I'd be fine with Bloodwhetting/Nascent and Warrior overall outperforming other on-demands and their jobs in multi-target. That's why I suggested it do so -- just to a reasonable degree. But instead, we've got something like if Dark Mind were already as good as Thrill/Camo generally and then got triple that value against magic as a "favored job" perk.

Some niche advantages are fine, but when you base them on broad categories (multi-target or single-target, magic or physical), you needlessly constrain either competitive job choice or encounter characteristics far more than you add to job flavor. Those capacities should be near to each other, with the differences being primarily in HOW one reaches those capacities.

[CKNovel]

Mate, I never suggested capping the heal to a single target. Multiple of my posts here speak directly against that approach.

One way or another it's a nerf that won't fix anything, neither it is a bandaid.
I want the real solution before we even consider nerfing.

The day healers will make full use of their kit in "aoe situations", then I'll agree for a nerf. But we're far from there.

[Shurrikhan]

One way or another it's a nerf that won't fix anything, neither it is a bandaid.
I want the real solution before we even consider nerfing.

The day healers will make full use of their kit in "aoe situations", then I'll agree for a nerf. But we're far from there.

Leaving outliers around due to which we cannot simultaneously balance truly difficult AoE content for tank A and for tanks B, C, and D makes it that much harder and/or worthwhile to introduce that content.

Yes, what we have right now barely scratches the surface of what all is theoretically possible, but we don't get nearer those potential additions by adding or, later, bastioning uninteresting balance fetters like being, by nature of a skill's procedure, straight up overpowered in category X (nor by being blatantly neutered relative to others in category Y).

We can have more nuance in differentiation than just "best sustain in AoE situations", "best mit in purely physical fights", "best mit in purely magical fights" IF people obsessed less over their broad performance advantages. Small advantages can be flavorful little perks, certainly, but we shouldn't be content with them alone, and certainly shouldn't parade greater or lesser capacity (however we might veil it before dropping bombs to the effect of "but I like being the tank best able to solo dungeons", etc.) as "uniqueness".

Warrior shouldn't be "unique" primarily through historically being the overall best tank, but when people refuse any changes (especially, to a so frequently best-in-role job) based on capacity, that is the main kind of "uniqueness" they protect -- often at cost to anything more, be that through kit or context.

[Shurrikhan]

Tangent for CKNovel:

Let me be clear here that I don't want to see tanks further homogenized. My issue is simply when "specific" advantages are given so straightforwardly from basic categories that they become simply differences in broad performance for the given type of content.

We saw Warrior and Paladin suffer from this in 1.9 and 2.0:

• In 1.9, Warrior self-healed for so much in dungeons that any disadvantage in heal-efficiency or eHP was moot, since there was nothing Paladin could survive that Warrior could not yet Warrior required far less due to being able to Benediction itself with each Steel Cyclone.
  
  
• In 2.0, those self-heals were neutered when the healing from damage dealt was moved from Steel Cyclone to solely Inner Beast and Warrior's damage was reduced in general. That said, it could still be the more efficient tank... so long as someone else could kite mobs between Bloodbaths and one was hugely overgeared. Resultantly, before the 2.1 changes, we were on a path for Warrior to end up weak until overgeared and preferable thereafter -- broad categorical differences that left no competitive tank choice except at mid-high gear progression unless there was an AoE DPS check (since Paladin's only AoE damage at the time was Circle of Scorn, its only spammable AoE a suppressive debuff).

And for the last few expansions, we've see that among Dark Mind*, Dark Missionary, and Heart of Light. (*Dark Arts could have aided against this but almost never made room for enough healer offensive relative potency through its extra sustain generated to make up for the loss to the DRK's own relative potency otherwise spent augmenting Souleater's damage [and therefore its healing, too, as it healed for damage dealt back then].)

Now, apart from being almost wholly self-scaled vs. scaling with incoming damage, almost all of these can theoretically be fixed through context, yes. You can ensure that each fight has magic damage at amounts and spacing just enough for Dark Mind, for instance, to feel useful and for it and DRK as a whole to provide merely even performance. You can give each fight something to Cover with just enough value to make up for its gauge cost. You can give just the right amount of adds at just the right times for Bloodwhetting to compete on the whole even if its per-hit value were tuned to better fit its AoE potential (instead of just scaling like any other AoE in the game). All of that is theoretically doable.

But doing so would also add a burden to content creation and fetter to its available creativity.

That's not to say that content shouldn't give a damn about individual jobs kits or that it should just leave it a happy coincidence for iconic skills to see good use, of course. They should, likely far, far more than they do now, but that's a lot easier to do in varying ways if the skills themselves do not scale so wildly across broad categories (AoE vs ST, magic vs. physical, single hit vs. many, etc.) or there are at least counterweights across the kits that have those more variedly performing abilities. Such allows those interactions to focus more on utilities instead of just broad summative power likely from a given context.

For instance, Bloodwhetting's healing might scale with damage/hits dealt and therefore primarily with one's own stats, but maybe Warrior would take less damage and heal for more through its vampirics as its health decreases, which allows it to leverage higher amounts of incoming damage. And while Warrior could put out additional healing and damage in AoE via Raw Intuition/Bloodwhetting and Vengeance/Damnation, perhaps Paladin could debuff enemies that strike its shield during Shelltron or Bulwark with a slowing DoT, which would likewise scale better with single-target, while Camouflage might offer something through parry scored, etc.

That is, the means can still be different enough for tanks to feel different even if no tank is advantaged noticeably for a whole content type in its typical form or overall across a specific instance. Mixing up content types (having more adds in raids, more and less scripted damage to non-tanks in dungeons, etc., etc.) would still do a ton of good in that regard, but mixing up who's good at what by allowing them similar capacities in highly differing ways both does not homogenize what really matters (the gameplay) and better allows for freedom in design among each existing and potential future content types.

Sidenote:
If it sounds like I'm overly obsessed with future-proofing for potentially difficult dungeons that are not merely the (imo) barebone implementations that are Criterion Dungeons... I probably am. I very much want something along the lines of amped up Mythic dungeons in this game, with significant environmental mechanics, unique challenges, more cross-role (rather than role-less, as per mere stacking and dancing) responsibilities. I also want some changes to how tanking and healing work that others might fairly call massive (e.g., to make the first more about actively thwarting enemy offenses and making room or ideal access for their raid's own offenses and the second actually see meaningful use of mana beyond rez-charges and a per-60s auto-clickable Lucid). Now, one step at a time, of course. But I'd rather such content design not get blocked on the pebble of outlier abilities around which people confuse excess strength with uniqueness itself.

That being said, I would not suggest the changes to Warrior's on-demands, or anything else, if I thought they could do a net harm to the job. A large part of my interest in the change to Warrior's 25s is specifically because the change from Raw Intuition / Nascent Flash in Shadowbringers (choose between %DR and healing for 50% of damage dealt) to Bloodwhetting / Nascent (identical, but the latter gives double the total healing) made Warrior feel much less engaging to me (all atop, of course, creating a large issue in that skill's balancibility across AoE-heavy vs. ST-only content). The change into the Endwalker/Dawntrail OP and balance-problematic version of our on-demands gave us less interaction (and therefore, to me, less engagement) and less choice (and therefore less versatility, replaced by simple excessive power). In short, imho, the current especially OP version has made the job feel worse to play.

Since getting any sort of truly (imo) interesting dungeon content is such a scant possibility, for now, that gameplay is the larger portion of why I want Warrior's 25s defensives reverted.

[Duskane]

WAR fixes
enhanced tomahawk grants 10s of surging tempest
Chaotic cyclone and Inner chaos are separate buttons
Can gain wrath stacks outside of Inner release

[Lyth]

It's really not about losing your 'toys'. If 8.0 is to be a systemic review of individual job designs, we need to ask ourselves whether tanking has been going in the right design direction. If not, it's important to identify where things have gone wrong.

Self-sustain is a lot of fun. But the amount of satisfaction that you get out it depends on how well it is implemented. Personally, I want to see clutch saves on tanks where they can create photo-finish victories for their teams. I recently linked an example of what this looks like on PLD. I think sustain, when done correctly, can open up similar opportunities for clutch saves on WAR. Those are the best moments to be a tank.

To create these moments, you need a credible threat. When you become completely self-sustaining, in the absence of a healer, then there is no credible threat. You're just at max HP. That's why the balance of self-sustain is so critical, and why it needs to be an active rather than a passive process (and why healers and tanks need to be interdependent, as they were in the past). No tank should ever be completely self-sustaining.

I think another problem is that the amount of sustain available is having a convergent effect on tank design. An isolated burst heal that is context dependent and resource-gated can create flavor on a single tank. But once you start baking in 'Additional Effect: heal' into your base combo, your personal defensives, and your raidwide defensives, then every tank has to start seeing that in their designs.

I remember in ARR and HW, WAR's traditional design philosophy was around their HP totals. You used to see people stack buffs like Defiance, Thrill of Battle, and even Vitality potions to see how high of a total they could get. I was really shocked to see Great Nebula end up with a 20% HP boost, of all things. But that's the current state of tanking. Everyone is protective of their 'toys', the result being progressive mitigation inflation and homogenization all around.

If you toned back the self-sustain across all tanks, made it more focused, deliberate, and judicious, then perhaps you can start giving each tank their own identity and start taking them in different directions. That's what I'd like to see going forward into 8.0. Because what I see right now is a formless mess, and it's been driven by this obsession with making WAR into a completely self-sustaining tank. That in turn warps the entire role around trying to keep up with a broken design direction.

[MikoRemi]

Try job consistency instead of "homogenization", a much better term instead of the lameduck term that keeps coming up.

Tankings pretty fine, were sturdy, we do our job, DPS speed it up so its not unbearable and healers help when things are down or stuff gets heavy. More noticeable in extreme and higher but yeah, if dungeons were as much of a slog to get through as the SB era where nobody wants to use their buttons at all, yeah nah thanks.

Credible threats; DF and PF healers trolling by barely healing or dying repeatedly, and slow DPS making runs unbearably slow, and cotanks doing really bad jobs with tanking. The amount of runs I have to try to salvage in roulettes would add up real fast. Not to mention how nice it is in Eureka/Bozja to be able to self heal for various reasons, let alone deep dungeons or how handy it is in the higher tiered content where things actually hurt. I'm not part of any 0.1% speedkill group so we can safely rule that out given the general state of DF/PF at any given time. I don't need a snapshot moment of sustain, I just want to get the job done. Best moment as a tank is when everything goes smooth even after I greed and alternatively min/max my Damnation for that physical reflect.

Given the state as is where tanks didn't go through much of a rework from EW, it's a pretty solid ground especially with how PLD got a giant shield on Guardian, and as you mentioned the Thrill of Battle effect on Great Nebula for GNB, shoot even DRK got an excog on Shadowed Vigil. Clearly were doing fine, Healers just need to be more fun which is a whole other issue to work on, and DRK just needs to become consistent with the rest of the tanks. Dying is not a benefit, and Dark Mind is not a great cooldown, let's be real.

PLD is the tank with some nice range and really fun burst, GNB is the gas gas fast combo action tank, WAR is the slow man mode tank, DRK is the tank that needs help. DT didn't change the self sustain despite people complaining for months, I'd rather see the topic move on. Nerfing WAR isn't going to make other jobs automatically better, it's just going to make WAR's unhappy.