Thoughts on tweaks for WAR.

[Hachiko]

First off, are you REALLY doing 190 DPS against a training dummy with Defiance up? That seems incredibly high to me.

I also disagree that WAR are even with PLD up until BC. They are behind them as soon as Ifrit, but it really doesn't show until Titan.

I think they are all pretty good ideas. I think Bloodbath needs to have more uptime, and having Berserk be cross class would be interesting (but it would mean PLD would have an even bigger DPS advantage while off tanking!) but it would definitely help out MNK and DRG.

I agree with the wrath stacks, but I think there might be a better way to do it than lowering it to 4.

IMO, some skills should give more than others. Butcher's Block, Storm's Eye should both give 2 wrath stacks, rather than 1. This would add more strategy, I think, and it would have the same effect roughly, but timing it right you would only need 4 globals sometimes, and 6 at other times. It would add depth but that may be too much. Alternatively, Butcher's Block could be the only one to add 2 stacks, which would also make it 6 globals to cap, usually.

I also think that 20% healing at 5 stacks still wouldn't be enough, because you are not averaging max stacks, you are averaging far less, and 20% is still less effective than the effective 25% boost to cure effectiveness PLD get. I don't know if you intended this or not.

Anyhow, I think your ideas are on the right track. But I feel a little gimped as it is, personally.

With that said, I think they need to do something about the following skills:

• Mercy Stroke - Such a minimal skill. The fact that this contributes so little to DPS for WAR or cross class is one of the reasons that MNK and DRG are in the place they are. Should be changed into a real execute. Usable any time for maybe 150 potency off the global, but have that triple to 450 if the target is below 20%, something like that.
• Foresight - This is such a minimal buff. This should be our most effective defensive cooldown as it's our class one that is buffed by our class trait, yet some how it manages to be our worst, and is honestly the worst defensive cooldown in the game.
• Storm's Path - This is effectively a wasted skill. It's theoretically neat to have an alternative to Storm's Eye, but what is given up (11% damage increase, 20TP) is not even remotely worth what is gained (50% of 1 hit converted to health). It would be interesting to see this rolled into Butcher's Block, i.e. turning it into a trait: Enhanced Butcher's Block - Butcher's Block absorbs 50% of the damage dealt as HP.
• Steel Cyclone - This should be more along the lines of Inner Beast - it should heal you for some portion of the damage dealt, probably 100%, this would mean for it to be more efficient heal than Inner Beast you would need more than 4 enemies. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me, and it still has an effective 20 second cooldown (less if Wath Stacks are modified though).
• Inner Beast - This skill doesn't really need buffing, but, IMO taking it off the global, and/or turning it into a shield instead of healing would be reasonable modifications.

Anyhow, there are a ton of things SE could do that would be really interesting. For example, they could make Defiance an anti-burst mechanic, something like "attacks which deal more than 50% of your total HP deal 50% of their damage over 6 seconds." Thus, it would make WAR less prone to simply being burst down, but you will still take the same amount of healing to stay alive.

I don't know, there are a lot of things SE could do to help WARs out. I just hope they realize they should do something.