Endgame Warrior MT: Titan

[HiirNoivl]

Playing Titan as WAR is all about maximizing your self heals. Up until this point, many WAR tanks have self healed casually,and often wastefully, relying on the WHM or SCH to keep them up when they screw up the rotation, or run out of cooldowns. However, Titan is here to teach you how to really work with your cooldowns. He's a good and unforgiving teacher, gaoling your WHMs and SCHs, and making sure they're good and distracted healing the party during stomps. Leaving you to fend for yourself at some of the worst of times.

Most WARs will be familiar with the following Combos

Heavy Swing to Butcher's Block --> Enmity and Damage

Heavy Swing to Maim to Storm's Eye --> Damage Buffing (You ARE damage buffing... right?)

But then there are your most important of other cool downs.

Inner Beast, Foresight, Bloodbath, Infuriate, Thrill of Battle, Vengeance, Berserk, Unchained and Steel Cyclone

There are also your cross class skills: Featherfoot, Second Wind, Internal Release, Awareness and Convalescence to help, but I'm just going to assume that there are no cross class skills on your bar and deal only with WAR skills.

There are two stages where WAR Tanks tend to fail and both come right after the Heart Phase. There's a stage before Mountain Buster, where I all the "Topping Off Phase" and then after Mountain Buster, that I call the "Recovery Phase."

As a WAR tank, please keep in mind that you cannot expect to hold the attention of both (or even three) healers. There are other people in the party who need healing. And one healer could be gaoled. If you want to survive those big hits, let's go first to the topping off phase.

The first one comes right after Earthen Fury, which really shouldn't hit you hard enough to be an issue, but this will give you an idea about how on the ball your healers are. If your healers can't top you up after Earthen Fury, you may be in for a rough ride. You should have your damage buffs up and ready, so use your Storms Path ability to absorb some HP as a helpful tick until your healers find their feet after Earthen Fury.

Mountain Buster comes right after Earth Fury. Since you know that big hit is coming, why not go ahead and use Foresight now (that's what it means after all). Make sure you're at Wrath V before the big hit comes and your Infuriate skill is off cool down (NOTE: You shouldn't have even used it before this, anyway. I see WARs using Infuriate right at the start of fights and I tried it myself and decided that it was not necessary for Titan.)

Always prepare to heal yourself quickly by setting up your damage buffs/debuffs with a Maim to Storm's Eye combo which will increase your damage dealt by 20% and decrease Titan's Slashing resist by 10%. (Though this should never fall off.) Then use Berserk before Inner Beast if it's up.

At this point after Earthen Fury, Mountain Buster is just seconds away, you'll get hit by a Rock Buster first, which is easily healed by a mage and then Mountain buster for around 4500. Use your buffed Inner Beast which should allow to you absorb over 2k HP. Use Infuriate and you're back at Wrath V. One heal and a regen should be all you need to recover.

Titan will be distracted for a while, Tumulting and Weight of the Land-ing, Gaoling and Landsliding, and occasionally throwing a punch your way. By the time the second Mountain Buster comes along, you may have a lot less help during Recovery, depending on how unskilled or unlucky your party is. Be sure you've kept your Maim and Storm's Eye buff up. If you're down a healer, or your party is in trouble, this is where you want to use Thrill of Battle, the closest thing to Hallowed Ground that you have. Thrill of Battle will give you more HP to work with allowing you to survive the Gaoling or distracting of your WHM/SCHs. You should be at or close to 8k HP on the second Mountain Buster. You should absorb the entire hits of Rock Buster and Mountain Buster. Then use your Inner Beast for around and probably a little less than 2k. But your recovery is not complete until you're back at Wrath V. So you want to throw in a Vengeance. I don't think of Vengeance as a DPS thing, most of the time, though I'm sure it adds up. But what Vengeance is in this case 1 Free Wrath to give you a little boost back up to Wrath V. Once Thrill of Battle wears off you'll be back to full HP or close to it.

If no one has screwed up and you're still up, good for you! At this point, you can use Bloodbath to help absorb HP lost from increasing Stomps and ease the Topping of Phase. But other than that all you need to do is repeat this self heal rotation until the end. This rotation uses skills that are "Instant" meaning they will not interrupt your combos, so you should be using your cooldowns in between your Skull Sunder - Butcher's Block and Maim - Storm's Eye Combos. You should not be unbuffed in your damage and you should not be losing any hate. Once you get really good at it, you'll throw in Fractures and add Unchained and Storm's Path to your Bloodbath. All these will increase your DPS and make the fight go even faster and with greater success!

Best of luck!

[hola]

i believe only crit inner beast could heal you for over 2k, then you must also save Internal Release and pop it during Earth Fury.

[HiirNoivl]

i believe only crit inner beast could heal you for over 2k, then you must also save Internal Release and pop it during Earth Fury.

That may be your belief. But my record non-crit inner Beast is 2565. This is using Berserk which is a 50% increase to damage as well as Maim (20%) and Storm's Eye debuff (Slashing resist down 10%) Please keep in mind that Inner Beast ignores the damage nerf by Defiance.

EDIT: Also, this is with Bravura +1.

My first win on Titan as a WAR Main Tank was with Garuda's Scream, level 70 Axe. Also, I wasn't nearly as effective at self-heals back then. x.X So a lot of credit for that win goes to my party. Nowadays, I'm usually still alive quite some time when the rest of the party is dead. Without Berserk, my Inner Beasts are around 1700-1900

[hola]

EDIT: Also, this is with Bravura +1.

i dont think any war with bravura+1 would care much about this thread.

with garuda weapon, and full DL with AF2 head and AK body, with berserk on and everything else, maim, slashing debuff, the highest inner beast heal ive done is 2000 and its crit, if it doesnt crit, it only heals for 1200~1500

[Conna]

The problem that we have with warrior isn't that its not "technically" possible to main tank endgame (though from what I hear of b.coil it is there) its more over that both tanks are supposed to be roughly equal and its definitely not optimal. For a heal intensive fight I would never bring a warrior sorry. The heals generated require foresight, because there is no way you're going to be able to survive an oh sh** situation. Basically it boils down to having almost "no" emergency cds on a war imo.

[HiirNoivl]

The heals generated require foresight, because there is no way you're going to be able to survive an oh sh** situation. Basically it boils down to having almost "no" emergency cds on a war imo.

I have not found this to be the case. However, I haven't even been able to attempt Binding Coil more than once due to the sheer anti-WAR bias. On that one attempt, I had no issues staying upright. I couldn't say the same for the rest of my PT, though.

In Endgame, you can't point to WAR and say "The tanks job is wrong" when you have folks getting hit by stuff they shouldn't get hit by, dying to things they shouldn't die to, and not dealing enough damage. Yet, when I die as tank it's usually these problems I'm running into and I outlive the rest of the party.

if it doesnt crit, it only heals for 1200~1500

That's me without buffs at all. The reason I'm addressing primarily self-heals is because this is where WARs are falling short. It's giving WAR a bad name. Months from now, we'll be using WAR a lot more, when WARs have more practice, more experience and their parties have more understanding.

[Conna]

I'm both a 50 war and 50 sch (technically mrd and arc but whatever) and I can say that its harder to notice if youre hard to heal as a tank, but its damn easy to notice as a healer. Trust me i've had well geared warriors and paladins and a pld is ALWAYS twice as easy and allows for me to triage the party. A war currently requires 100% of one of the healers focus, because if things to rough things get "really" rough for you.

[Sebastien]

The reason I'm addressing primarily self-heals is because this is where WARs are falling short. It's giving WAR a bad name. Months from now, we'll be using WAR a lot more, when WARs have more practice, more experience and their parties have more understanding.

I have a feeling that WAR does need a bit of love, but that for the most part you are correct. SqEnx has shown that they can put forward a game that's remarkably well-balanced right out of the box. So I have to believe their combat team is good at math. It seems that one concern with WAR is that they just don't have a healing / recovery button that they can press often enough. In your post, it seems like you went into significant detail about one combo that you can only use once per 90s. Don't you feel a bit naked the rest of the time?

My raid experience in WoW taught me that balancing a self-healing tank is an incredibly difficult thing. DK's went through radical swings of being overpowered or underpowered. But experienced players would always find ways to leverage the concept of a self-healing tank and make certain mechanics of certain raid bosses trivialized as a result. I expect something similar to evolve with WAR here, once players get more experience. But I can imagine that right now the combination of forum chatter, inexperienced players, and anti-warrior bias makes it challenging for a good WAR to prove himself at all. :/

[HiirNoivl]

In your post, it seems like you went into significant detail about one combo that you can only use once per 90s. Don't you feel a bit naked the rest of the time?

That's a good question. I assume that "Every 90 secs" is referring to Berserk + Inner Beast for that really big heal. I wouldn't complain about having that shaved down to 60 seconds for sure... but is it needed?


Starting out with Berserk + Inner Beast after the first Mountain Buster starts the Timer following by Infuriate and you're back at Wrath V and it's self healing Buff. At this point you've already recovered for the next set of Mountain Busters.

You might need to use Thrill of Battle after the second one, if your party is suboptimal or if you're just unlucky. Otherwise, your next Inner Beast is fine with just a regular Inner Beast (buffed with your usual Storm's Eye) and a speedy work up to Wrath V Heal Buff again using Vengeance as a Wrath booster. By the next Mountain Buster Recovery, your Infuriate Skill should be back up again or close to it. Interestingly, Berserk is also a Wrath booster, so you only need IV Wrath to go into your Berserk + Inner Beast Combo the next go around. So I'm not entirely naked. That said there is little margin for error the deeper you get into endgame.

But the same can be said for PLD.

Panic can set in for parties that are inexperienced with WAR tanks. This can lead to overcuring and mana issues. If I have half my HP gone and I'm at Wrath V, I really don't need two healers cure bombing me to get me back up to full again. I run out of cool downs only when things are going wrong with the battle in general. I can only do my best as tank to hold hate and maintain my HP. Other than that, I have no control over what the Mages and DPS do.

It's not incredibly difficult, but it does require practice, timing and communication. I'm putting this post out there just to help people see that Titan is a great training simulator for WAR and hopefully get more people into understanding the job.

[Conna]

[QUOTE=HiirNoivl;1275816]there is little margin for error the deeper you get into endgame.

But the same can be said for PLD.





Hate to burst your bubble, but when a paladin uses a defensive to counter a big hit hes countering a big hit and then the rest of the hits for 10 seconds.. you're countering that singular hit by blowing all dps cooldowns and using IB which means you're "always" behind what the paladin is pulling off.