WAR ideasFollow

As much as I would like to see the cost of IB lowered, I think I would prefer it if they increased the number of Wraths we can stack.

As it is now, a Warrior with full wrath gets 15% more incoming healing than a Paladin, but takes 25% more damage (not counting the PLD cooldowns and shield). Increasing the healing buff would go a long way to helping the WAR catch up.

Yeah, it is the sheer damage we take that is the issue. The extra HP is great but it is just a higher cost on the healer. So our self heals (IB is the only one worth mentioning) is on such a long cool down because of building wrath stacks it is hardly worth mentioning.

Lets use Titan HM as an example since I haven't been to Coil yet. Your healers top you off and you have about 7k HP. He does a MB for about 4500 or so (I know that is the high end) then you get an unlucky crit right after for about 1500 or so. So that means instantly you are from 7k to about 1k in health. You use your IB to try to get some back quick but that takes away your wrath stacks and lowers the healing you have coming in from the healers.

I would love to say that we need something like pumping up TOB or the such but that doesn't do much for normal hits. Just look how much less damage PLD takes on Titan's normal hits versus what we do.

I personally think they need to change the mechanics like Death Knight in WOW has. That was one fun tank to play.

While these wrath suggestions people keep making are good it would still not put War on Plds level for harder content.

The best solution to Wars problem in my eyes is a straight -dmg% taken reduction to defiance, much like shield oath. It doesnt have to be as good as Pld but 10-15% would go a long way.

But see what you are talking about is making a PLD "clone" (not really but close enough) I think the Dev's intent with WAR was to take more damage but compensate with healing itself and higher HP pool to take the bigger hits.

Either they need to decide to break away from that or increase the ability for us to do so. If I take a 4500 Mountain Buster with no way to mitigate it but all I can do is self heal myself for 1500 back, then I need to be able to do that more often to make it worth while. In the current setup there is no way I am losing my wrath stacks for a 1500 heal when I will take a TON more excess damage by losing the healing buffs over the next 30 sec before I can do it again. In higher content we just can't get it back fast enough. Changing the wrath stacking mechanisms would allow us to heal ourselves without sacrificing our healing buffs.

This is the way I look at it. Lets just use Titan as the example again:

Lets say its a 12 min fight, give or take. A PLD with takes "X" damage and require "Y" healing (and by healing I mean required MP to do so). The only way you will ever get WAR to be a competitive tank is to make it where we would take "X plus" damage (more than PLD) so we would need "Y plus" healing but at the same MP cost from the healers.

As it stands I don't think we require much less than PLD do to heal the damage back up. So lets say in a 12 min fight the PLD might take 50k damage (all these numbers are fictional so calm down) and require 800 MP to heal that back. So the WAR might take 75k damage but would still need to only require 800 MP to heal that back (where as now I would imagine we would require much more than that). But WAR has a healing buff and PLD has a healing buff, PLD is on all the time and ours is only when we have wrath stacks. So the small increase of bonus healing we receive is taken away from our small amount of down time of not having either 1) full wrath stacks 2) blowing wrath and infuriate for IB in emergencies.

Ok, now my head hurts and I am mad. But I got my new wireless headset in the mail yesterday so that makes me happy.

The math between Defiance and Shield Oath comes out with both basically doing the same thing. The 20% reduced damage from SO creates nearly the same effective HP gain as the 25% increased HP on Defiance.

So, in that sense, WAR and PLD are spot on The issue comes with cooldowns. WAR gains a native 15% increase to healing with 5 stacks of Wrath, and the heal gained from sitting on those stacks is always going to be better than the heal gained from Inner Beast, unless you have Infuriate available. At that point, feel free to IB, because you can pop back into 5 stacks instantly.

This reduces IB to what is basically a 60s CD skill. To further complicate the issue, ensuring maximum IB gain requires four things to occur;

Berserk needs to be up.
Maim has to be active.
The enemy needs to have Storm's Eye debuff active.
Inner Beast needs to crit.

Taking all of that with a relic weapon will get you a heal of ~2400 or so on Titan. If none if that happens, then IB will heal for 800-900, which isn't even half of a Rock Buster.

So when Titan Final phase comes along, and he's RBin'g for 1800ish, then normal attacking for another 600, followed by a 4700 Mountain Buster, all in the span of about 6 seconds, you're looking at over 7k damage to soak. With relic, two pieces of AF2, and the rest darklight (and hoplite ring) I've got 7495 health in Defiance with party vit buff. The *only* reliable cooldowns I can use to deal with that are Thrill of Battle and Foresight. ToB works fine, assuming I'm at max HP when I use it, and Foresight does what it advertises, which translates to a ~5% damage decrease while it's up (but only for physical attacks). And that's it. And one of those (Foresight) may as well be a placebo effect for how well it works!

What really determines whether or not I live or die on Titan has almost nothing to do with what I, as a WAR, do. It is entirely on the backs of our healers and dps. The dps need to not take any damage ideally, except from unavoidable sources. The healers need to know that, following a Landslide, the WAR tank needs to be full, with Adloquim, Succor an Stoneskin on him. Titan needs to be debuffed with Virus or Rain of Death or Eye for an Eye (or ideally all three) so that when the attack comes his damage is cut in half, if not more.

Meanwhile, a PLD has a LOT they can do. Rampart just flat lowers the damage they take. Sentinel too. They can Blind Titan and up the chances of a miss happening (yes, WAR has Featherfoot, but the cooldown on FF is so long you'll use it once every 3 MB's, while Flash Blind can be up every time). They can also pop Foresight, which has a slightly stronger effect on PLD due to higher defense. And if all of this fails, and they're sitting at 1k HP right as the final hit is about to come in, they can hit Hallowed Ground and just /laugh in Titan's face.

Which is fine. That's what PLD's do, it's their job. But WAR lacks that. Up until Titan, it's not an issue. Past Titan, it becomes an issue. Healers have to work that much harder to get a WAR tank to work, simply because WAR lacks the same ability to "take care" of themselves compared to a PLD. Inner Beast is great, but it's not preventative, it's reactive. We need to survive to use it in order for the heal to matter, and the fact that it's on the GCD further complicates things.

Overall, WAR isn't in a bad place, but it needs some tweaks. Being a reactive tank means you count on your healers to always be babysitting your HP bar, because you need to survive the big hit to use your big mitigation ability. Lots of ideas have been floated, such as making IB provide a shield for excess HP healer, so that you can use it at full hp, get a crit for 2500 and get a shield for that much. What it will end up being, I don't know, but WAR needs something.

Am I the only one that pops my Infuriate CD everytime I use IB, or at the start of every fight (when available)? I never see anybody ever talk about following up their wrath dumps with this move. Is it just because it's so obvious that no feels the need to mention it?

Nevermind, thought shield had Defense stat, but it doesn't.

Edited, Nov 3rd 2013 9:59pm by wadus