[GUIDE] Warrior: Skill Intensive Tanking

[curespoge]

What about haymaker? It seems that would go nicely with featherfoot. And it hits for a ton.

[Exrage]

What about haymaker? It seems that would go nicely with featherfoot. And it hits for a ton.

While the additional DPS is always a nice thought, what cross class skill would you give up for it? Inner release raises your already nice crit rate, provoke will instantly put you at the top of the aggro should MT go down/someone pull unintended, Second Wind is that clutch self-heal, Flash is the AOE that uses MP to let you build up TP during longer fights, and Featherfoot increases the dodge rate. You can custom build a more DPS warrior, but it's important to remember that at the end of the day you're a tank and your DPS will not be as high as legitimate DPS classes.

[Braver]

First off i wanted to thank you for making this guide. Secondly I play the ps3 and just started creating marcos. I was just curious what would be in the aoe marco. Also when using marcos it eliminates the use for regular abilities correct? Sorry I really need a dumbers guide for this.

[Taz]

War some times is the tank so vitality needs to be number one then strength - if you look at the majority of guides etc you will see that same recommendation -

[Exrage]

Edit: It's Awareness that is gained @ lvl 34 GLA also another useful CD that isn't mentioned her.

As you've edited to mention another ability let's go into the why I didn't bother to bring it up:

Awareness reduces chance of critical hits against you by 25%, sounds like an awesome ability until you realize the bosses won't crit on their static massive attacks. Then we go into Bahamut, as it's the hardest hitting fight, and look at the crit values- between 7-9%, where HM Garuda with the largest crit values 11-13%.

In short it's far better to add the dodge to your dex rating, gain an MP enmity ability that happens to also be AOE, improve healing done on you, a free 22-31% self heal, or an ability that automatically places you at the top of the aggro meter for those "oh shit" moments than it is to negate a boss's critical hit rating for 15 seconds in which you are mathematically likely to only take one hit of 50% more damage if any at all.

[Exrage]

Buffs also obey the ANIMATION cool down, I.E. You can not simultaneously cast buffs, while they are outside the WEAPON SKILL cool down, you must wait for the first buff's animation to begin before being able to apply the next one and so on.

This is correct and was put into the game strictly to prevent macros from simultaneously activating abilities not on the GCD/WSC per the developers.

[eek711]

*Snip*

In FFXIV, what you're referring to as a GCD is actually what's termed a Weaponskill Cooldown. Similar concept, all "Weaponskills" trigger this Cooldown, while "Abilities" do not. However, all Actions (both Weaponskills and Abilities) have an animation, that cannot be cancelled, and must go complete before another Action is performed. If you have a macro that has Brutal Swing, Featherfoot, Vengeance, etc. only one will go off on a single button press. You will have to spam the button to get the others to go off as soon as the animations finish. This is why Brutal Swing being off the "Weaponskill Cooldown" isn't as useful as it would seem since it still requires whatever animation you're currently performing to finish before it starts up. You can see which Actions are Weaponskills or Abilities by looking at the mouse-over info panel for each of them.

Hope this clears things up.

[Exrage]

In FFXIV, what you're referring to as a GCD is actually what's termed a Weaponskill Cooldown.

WSC = GCD/Global Cooldown is just how most MMO guys understand it and thank you for pointing it out. On the note of the animation cooldown- it was implemented to ensure macros can't simultaneously queue abilities and that's per the developers. If you were referencing to my response toward Bobrangi's Skull Sunder/Butcher's Block macro, the problem with his macro is that it's referencing two abilities that share the same WSC/GCD and become available simultaneously- so the macro will only ever execute it's first line and second line.

Using wait every other line is horrendously wasteful to the 10 lines you get per macro should you be executing a queue, ergo my deliberately quick touch on the action queue (/aq[on] /aq[off]) macro as it turns a max 5 ability wait macro into a max 8 ability action queue macro.

[Exrage]

Oh, I see Eek you were referencing my response to Phreak earlier- he went back and editted his post- sorry for the confusion. I'll go back and edit mine to correct the apparent mistake.

[Exrage]

Note on End-Game:
As I'm tired of hearing the excuse "gladiators are better," I'm simply going to fix that statement and point out "gladiators are simpler to use." Less combo dances, less choices in terms of enmity generation or damage boosts, and block value buffs make the warrior's parry rate a joke when compared. Fact of the matter is simple, warriors don't get picked for Coils of Bahamut runs simply because 90% of the warriors out there don't play their class properly. Most warriors I end-game with outside my company fail to use defensive or self-healing properly, their rotations are shoddy/half-assed at best, and most don't understand they have another bleed that isn't Fracture which their rotation doesn't even use because the see the small damage value and shrug it off.

It's called a "target dummy," use it.