[Guide] Warrior Tanking Compendium 2.0 (Lvl 50)

[Judge_Xero]

Due to the design of Warrior it is recommended to always keep the Infuriate Buff active. Not only will you be increasing your Crit Rate by 10%, but you will also increase HP recovery by curing Magic by 15%.

Bonus Stat Allocation
STR is recommended.

Stats Priorities
STR, Skill Speed and Accuracy

STR - Increases party DPS and self heals.
Accuracy so you don't miss
Skill Speed will allow you to get more HP Recovery hit in and build Wrath Stacks faster.

How useful is Parry and/or DEX
From testing it is possible to reach a Parry rate of ~25% by stacking Parry at ~480 and DEX ~244 keep in mind though that only some skills and ino magic is possible to Parry. So what you would end up with is 25% Chance to Parry 24% Damage of ~40% of damage which comes out to about 2.4% Mitigation.
What you would see on normal gear without trying to add more Parry or DEX is ~15% chance to Parry 24% of 40% of Damage or 1.4% Mitigation. So by adding around 55 DEX and 40 Parry you can hope to increase your overall Mitigation by 1%.
On some fights were there is multiple mobs and tons of AA damage the results will be a bit higher, but overall DEX and Parry is useless to gear for.

Recommended Cross Class Skills (You can only use 5)

• Flash - Gladiator Lvl 8 - Increases Enmity in all nearby enemies. - GCD
• Convalescence - Gladiator Lvl 10 Increases HP restored by spells or actions by 20% - 120s CD
• Provoke - Gladiator Lvl 22 - Gesture threateningly, increasing enmity in target. (puts you to the top of the Enmity List) - 40s CD
• Featherfoot - Puglist Lvl 4 - Increases Evasion by 15% for 15s - 90s CD
• Second Wind - Puglist Lvl 8 - Instantly restores own HP. Cure potency varies with current attack power. - 120s CD
• Internal Release - Puglist Lvl 12 - Increases critical hit rate by 20% - 60s CD

Brutal Swing

Notes on BRUTAL SWING - Keep an eye open on bosses, most bosses only use an unavoidable skill or their most potent skill once every 30 seconds (same as the Brutal Swing CD). If the boss is stunnable, then make sure you use this tool. If you miss your chance to stun and blow the cooldown on Brutal Swing, then it wont be ready in time for the next stun. So just take the hit and get back on track with the next one.

MACROS

DEFENSE
/macroicon "Bloodbath"
/ac "Foresight
/wait
/ac "Bloodbath"
/wait
/ac "Vengeance"


HP Recovery/Spike Damage Setup
/macroicon "Berserk"
/ac "Internal Release"
/wait
/ac "Berserk"
/wait
/ac "Second Wind"

As you can see from the macro, this is HP recovery from a large hit. The order does matter as Second Wind is effected by the Attack Power buff from Berserk and has a better chance to crit from Inner Release.

*** Use Macro's at your own Risk. Due to the limitation of the current Macro system, if a skill Errors, due to "out of range" "status ailment" or similar, you will need to manually activate the next skill as the Macro will begin from the first skill.
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Second Wind, Inner Beast, Berserk and Critical damage testing (HP Absorb)

Second Wind Scales with Attack Power
Second Wind Scales with Weapon Physical Damage

Weathered War Axe Physical Damage 5 - Averages
119 Healed @ 213 ATK
138 Healed @ 298 ATK
166 Healed @ 319 ATK (Berserk)
218 Healed @ 447 ATK (Berserk)
Storm LT Labyrs Physical Damage 38 - Averages
298 Healed @ 228 ATK
387 Healed @ 318 ATK
399 Healed @ 342 ATK (Berserk)
536 Healed @ 469 ATK (Berserk)
597 CRIT @ 342 ATK (Berserk) - Low Sample Average
806 Crit @ 469 ATK (Berserk)

400 STR + Bravura (Maim, SE, Berserk)

War Party Composition vs Paladin - and Endgame

For each STR Warrior there should be 2 x Healers - Healers should Heal 60% of the time and apply DOTs/Damage 40% of the time + Cleric Stance swap.

War (170 DPS, 2X Healers 140 DPS + 120% Healing) 310 DPS

Typical VIT Paladin party consists of 1 Healer and 1 DD.

PLD (110 DPS, DD 200 DPS) Total 310 DPS


STR War 2x Healers VS VIT PLD 1x Healer

Damage to Tank

1000 DPS to WAR
800 DPS to PLD

Heals to Tank

Healers x 2 960 (120%) HPS to War (Defiance Buff + 15% Heals) 1104 HPS
Healers 800 HPS to PLD

So, that setup would put Warrior in a bit better situation than Paladin in just Shield Oath. Paladin still has it's CD's Rampart and Sentinel which will reduce the damage from 800 DPS to 747 DPS in 180 Second Intervals.

So since both will be taking less damage than heals that's good. What if they were taking 1200 DPS

1200 DPS to WAR **excess of 96 DPS
960 DPS to PLD (Reduced to 896 on 180s Intervals) **excess of 96 DPS

So given a STR War vs VIT PLD they have nearly the same HP in the same tier of gear. So in that scenario, they would die at the same time.

I don't include Convalescence because they both have it. PLD's is 30% compared to WAR 20%, but with the Buff from Defiance and 120% more heals with two healers it's really splitting hairs. Also, Bulwark is about as effective as Bloodbath.
What Warrior is missing over Paladin is they Hallowed Ground type Skill.

Thrill of Battle, while absorbing damage outside of Max HP, it's not quite the invincibility that Paladin gets, but it's on a 120s CD vs 420s

WAR VS Duty Finder

Because Duty Finder uses premade parties (2Tanks, 2Healers, 4DD's) you will not end up with a party composition that is best for playing Warrior. Luckily in any of the 4 man content, none of the damage scales high enough to make your self heals useless, except Titan.
In the case of Titan, if you have your own premade group of 3 healers 1 War, 4 DD's then it will be fine. But what if you want to Duty Finder it? In the case of Two Warriors, two healers should be fine to bring you past the heart phase, at which point you will be best to swap out with the other Warrior after each set of Mountain Rush's.
Warrior has enough CD's to easily survive a full phase with two Mountain Rush's. Inner Beast + Infuriate on the first and Thrill of Battle on the second. Then the next Warrior can sub in (Provoke). By the next round, both Infuriate and Thrill of Battle will be off CD before you need it.
If you DF and there is a Paladin in the party, well....good thing you went full STR. Outside of Defiance you should be able to hit between 180-200 DPS depending on gear. You will also have a great HP pool and, you will be raising the Paladin's Enmity and Damage by ~11% because of Storm's Eye so in total, you will be one of the top DPSers.

[Marxam]

Good stuff and very useful information. I didn't know about the bloodbath stacking with vengeance. And now I know...

[Ihm]

I personally prefer Featherfoot over Second Wind because the HP healed isn't that great, I also like to take Flash as it's good for crowd control when positioning isn't perfect for Overpower.

[Kaalan]

Vengeance is 15 sec, not 30.
And the health returned from is ridiculous, the only decent use of vengeance is as a wrath manager.

[Wangstrong]

30 strength gives about 3.8% DPS. I really don't get why people keep thinking it's worthwhile, let alone ''key'' to warrior success.

[Judge_Xero]

Vengeance is 15 sec, not 30.
And the health returned from is ridiculous, the only decent use of vengeance is as a wrath manager.

Thanks. I must have mixed the time up with the Wrath buff. I'll double check, and then make the change.

While the health returned from Vengeance stacked with Bloodbath is very small, it is consistant (always 25% of a 50 Potency hit). So if you have 6 mobs doing light damage, then it's a great health buffer, that also adds enmity to those mobs hitting you.

30 strength gives about 3.8% DPS. I really don't get why people keep thinking it's worthwhile, let alone ''key'' to warrior success.

Here is a list of benefits with a comparision as to why I think STR is important for Warrior. This deals mainly with "Spike Damage" that Warrior will receive.

STR 308 vs 360

Berserk - "Increase Attack Power by 50%"

Attack Power 462 vs 540

Second Wind "Heal Potency based on Attack Power"
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While you don't want to neglect your HP Pool (VIT) you also want to be able to reduce your overall spike damage received through self heals. So there definitely is a balancing act there.

I personally prefer Featherfoot over Second Wind because the HP healed isn't that great, I also like to take Flash as it's good for crowd control when positioning isn't perfect for Overpower.

More information on Featherfoot's utility would be greatly appreciated. I like it too, but because Second Wind has a guaranteed return effect I decided to go with it.

Flash is also a very useful skill. I have been working Infuriate + Steel Cyclone into my own rotation to open a spot for the other cross class skills, but Flash is an invaluable back-up until it's perfected.

[HiirNoivl]

I have a question. You use Convalencence and then IB>Infuriate>IB. Would it be better to stack Convalence with the 15% cure buff providing by Infuriate?

[Kaalan]

And Conva doesn't work for our self heal btw, only heal that are casted on us.

[Judge_Xero]

I have a question. You use Convalencence and then IB>Infuriate>IB. Would it be better to stack Convalence with the 15% cure buff providing by Infuriate?

I will have to double check, but I think that Convalescence increases healing by both spells and abilities. Second Wind is a static heal so I will test it a bit more using Convalescence to confirm. If that checks out then I will doubly confirm it stacks with the 300% healed from Inner Beast.

Sorry that it seems a bit unprofessional to not have confirmed 100% with data backed testing, but I wanted to get the idea out for others to play with. From what I could eyeball during boss fights etc there was a difference. Which doesn't exactly mean squat. I'll try and get some hard numbers this weekend.

[HiirNoivl]

So far that I and other people can see, Inner beast heals your damage dealt x3 and is never effected by anything outside damage dealt. The modifier for Second Wind is attack power only.