For Warrior: Mantra or Awareness?

[SuburbanLion]

So I'm trying to decide on which additional skills to use as a WAR. Flash, Provoke, Featherfoot and Convalescence seem like the obvious choices, but I'm not so sure about the last slot. The only other tanky skills are Mantra (42 PGL) and Awareness (34 GLA). Both have the same cooldown (120s) and duration (15s), so the choice is between a 5% healing increase for myself and nearby allies or nullifying critical chance for myself only. If the number of allies benefitting from Mantra times 5% is greater than the mobs critical hit rate, Mantra would be the better option. Otherwise Awareness would be better for surviving large hits. So I find myself faced with the following questions:

How many allies on average will benefit from Mantra?
How often do mobs critically hit in end game content?
Are there any specific fights where Awareness would be necessary to avoid being one-shot by an attack?

[Kiteless]

I'd go against both of those options. Mantra's 5% benefit is made completely obsolete by simply having a monk with the skill in the party, and Awareness is active for far too short a window to defend against something that is completely random.

[James1213]

So Kiteless what would you choose in place of these skills? You shoot em down but offer no solution.

Not left with many options I say it would depend on the fight. Some bosses or even mobs have a crit up ability and that's where awareness would come in. Heavy aoe fights might see better use of mantra.

[Quor]

Honestly, Internal Release.

Pop it with Berserk and Inner Beast if you need it. 15% greater chance for an Inner Beast, on top of the native 10% greater chance from 5x Wrath is pretty huge. Crit IB's are always worthwhile.

[Hachiko]

So Kiteless what would you choose in place of these skills? You shoot em down but offer no solution.

Not left with many options I say it would depend on the fight. Some bosses or even mobs have a crit up ability and that's where awareness would come in. Heavy aoe fights might see better use of mantra.

For trash / instances:

Flash
Provoke
Featherfoot
Convalesence
Internal Release

For bosses, swap Flash for Haymaker if the boss isn't slow immune, or possibly second wind if they are.

Honestly the choice between second wind, mantra, or awareness really is pretty much a wash.

[Rust_]

Second Wind.

[SuburbanLion]

From what I've read in other threads, 2000HP seems to be the average heal from IB+Berserk on geared out WARs (I'm not quite there yet myself). On average, Internal Release would increase this by 20% for 400HP. To get the equivalent HP from Mantra, you'd need 8000HP in healing. This may look high on paper, but isn't an unreasonable amount. You'd also get 2 Berserks for every Mantra, but in situations where AoE healing is needed it seems quite possible for Mantra to win out.

Here's another way to look at it:
The effectiveness of Internal Release scales with your damage.
The effectiveness of Mantra scales with your healers' throughput.
The effectiveness of Awareness scales with the mobs' damage.

At low levels I can see IR being the best option. At higher levels the other two begin to look a little more appealing.

[Wangstrong]

I don't use Mantra or Awareness at all. Mantra's healing bonus is simply too small to matter, and getting critted is not that big of a deal in this game because most of the dangerous damage comes from stuff like Mountain Buster which can't crit. A mob's auto-attack damage is usually fairly negligible, it's the proverbial breath attack that kills you.

[Kitru]

The effectiveness of Internal Release scales with your damage.
The effectiveness of Mantra scales with your healers' throughput.
The effectiveness of Awareness scales with the mobs' damage.

Internal Release helps you with enmity generation and damage. Any potential burst healing on Inner Beast that it provides is unreliable at best. Remember, it provides increased crit rate; not a guaranteed crit.
Mantra provides raid healing utility. The personal contributions that it provides are small enough that you wouldn't want to burn it unless more than just you are taking damage or you have absolutely nothing else to use.
Awareness allows you to stabilize your incoming damage. It won't reliably mitigate incoming damage but it will make it easier for your healers to predict how much damage you're going to take over the time interval because you've, effectively, placed a cap on the damage variability.

Personally, I plan on using all 3 once I level up PGL high enough. My loadout is going to be Convalescence, Featherfoot, Internal Release, Awareness, and Mantra. Right now, I've got Provoke and Second Wind in place of Inner Release and Mantra, but only because they're the least bad of the remaining options.

Flash is rubbish for a WAR because we've got an mp pool so small that it can only be used 3-4 times before you run out of mp and WARs don't have Riot Blade to build that resource back up. It's, effectively, a mediocre threat generator with a limited number of charges over the course of an entire fight. Provoke is only useful as a tool to regain threat after you've died and been rezzed, which, in my experience, doesn't generally work out well *anyways* because it's pretty much always easier to just let the OT take over tanking duties. Either that or a tank death is effectively a wipe even *if* you could get aggro back immediately (since it takes 8 seconds to cast Raise, which is more than enough time for a raid boss to chew through a whole slew of DPS). Haymaker is a waste thanks to the DR on the slow (which is the only good thing about it), and I'm pretty sure that Second Wind's heal scales with Mind rather than anything WAR gets so it's, for all intents and purposes, a static ~600 point heal on a 2 minute CD no matter what gear you're wearing (it's unaffected by Berserk and the effect is labeled as "Cure potency", of which every *other* ability labeled as such uses Mind); once you've hit your mid-30s, Second Wind is effectively pointless to keep around.

[Veldridge]

and I'm pretty sure that Second Wind's heal scales with Mind rather than anything WAR gets so it's, for all intents and purposes, a static ~600 point heal on a 2 minute CD no matter what gear you're wearing (it's unaffected by Berserk and the effect is labeled as "Cure potency", of which every *other* ability labeled as such uses Mind); once you've hit your mid-30s, Second Wind is effectively pointless to keep around.

actually, it says that it varies with current attack power.