should war get something.... defensive?Follow

no one can deny that war is force to be reckoned with. its an amazing DD. what i have noticed, though, is that SE keeps giving more defensive traits to the DD jobs.

third eye was pretty meh before seigan was invented, now its awesome. drk got dread spikes, mnk has counter, thf has evasion, drg has /mage and super jumps. warrior basically has to depend on their subjob for any defensive needs. while that isn't necessarily a priority in changes that need to be made, i do find it quite odd that the original 'tank' of the game doesnt have any way to defend itself.

now i know what you are thinking 'dumbass, war has defender'. yeaaaah, about that. defender is probably the crappiest JA in the game. the only time i personally use it is if i pull hate with berserk on and have no protection, i pop defender to basically turn off berserk without having to turn off berserk. once hate is gone, i turn defender off. i never notice a difference with defender up other than my dmg goes down. the hits i take still seem to be the same amount, so whats the point?

so i was thinking, without trying to give war something amazing it would be kinda cool if they made a minor change to defender. my idea is that when defender is active, all retaliation counters will count as a full counter with no dmg taken.

while that may be stepping on the toes of mnk's counter trait, i do believe it would be balanced seeing as its a 25% att reduction. if retaliation is 25% proc rate, then thats -25% dmg taken to give up 25% attack.

it probably wont help kill NMs faster or make you parse any higher in a merit party, but it sounds good to me on paper. idk, maybe it would break the game.

a. help out war defensive skills? or b. leave war the @#%^ alone, its fine the way it is?

If they make Defender better, then you'll have dumb retired PLDs from 2004 preach how awesome PLD/WAR is.

OHGODPLEASENOIDON'TWANNATANKNONONONONONONONONO

mmmm, i could do some nice things with that MNK/WAR. as for OP, i don't know.

And we'd never tank again!

Just made?

Easy solution; make it a trait gained at 65 or something, kind of like assassin, that modifies a sub level ability, duh.

It actually reduces the damage dealt by less than Defender currently does. (It effectively cuts level correction by 25%. Do the math. :-D)

War should have some kind of native damage mitigation, in all honesty seigan/third eye should have been given to warrior under another name instead of Sam. But alas, s-e doesn't see things my way.

I say make shield break a friggin JA instead of a WS, with a chance of stun just for the hell of it!!!!!!!!!! Well drk gets weapon bash, and pld shield bash, just a thought......

A lot of things are common between DRK and PLD while not with WAR. But there are also many things common among the three. One odd ball I thought of a long time ago was WAR gets AOE buff (warcry) for 30s on a 5min recast, PLD gets AOE buff (rampart) for 30s on a 5min recast and drk gets... nothing? Always found that one weird.

And we want that becaaaaauuuuuuse ...?

Wouldn't it be a bit silly to have warrior - one of the best DDs in the game on all levels of mobs - also be one of the best tanks on all levels of mobs? Sure, let us tank, whatever. But to have warrior do it just as well as paladin seems a bit silly.

No, its a serious question. Why would we want Warrior to tank as well as Paladin? If that were the case, then we'd have to also up Paladin's damage dealing abilities so they could be as good as damage dealers as Warriors. Its job distinctions. What's the point of jobs being just as good as other jobs? The differences are what make them interesting.

So seriously. Let Paladin have it's role, and Warrior have it's as well. Low man and exp Warrior is already an exceptional tank. Yes, it takes more backline support than Paladin, but the damage output to shorten the fight's length kind of makes up for that. Now, if we upgrade Warrior's tanking to be as good as Paladin's on high end mobs, then why the hell would we need Paladins?

Yeah, a little more reliable self mitigation for Warrior would be nice, but not to the point that it stomps on another job's role.

Yes, yes, War Corsair's Gallant's Roll should be fixed to allow better tanking by War.

Ya but that's like saying why use the car that you've just put an extra 200 horsepower into and tuned it up a bunch. Just you have another car that will get you from point A to B it won't get you there as fast or reliably.

Which is exactly the same conclusion i came to, S-E won't get around to fixing it in XI but i still hold out hope that in IXV blood tanking in general will be workable.

No, we simply moved on. Yes, a defensive ability would be awesome, but eh. Doesn't really matter, I'd be willing to bet that Square is just about done with job updates for the most part. No point crying about it now, and just deal with what we do have. Its not like you can't tank, Warrior has tanked pretty much every mob in the game already. You just have to be smart about it. And not get whiny that another job can do it better.

Yes, it is. Especially on ballista. And against THFs.

Truth be told, i think the best thing they could do defensively for warrior is to up the proc rate of retaliation. I am certainly not expecting or wanting Defender II

Smash Axe.

If it was a GA WS, MAYBE you'd have a point! But axe WS? No cigar

EDIT: For some reason, seconds after posting, I thought THF should get something called Cripple and seriously lowers mob AGI (for more crits to everyone)

Edited, Jun 10th 2009 8:52pm by RedshiftOnPandy

Who said anything about WS? I meant a JA. SAM, DRK, PLD, even DRG have a way to avoid -GA magic or interrupt it.

No, you said stun move. In my book, "move" rather encompasses anything special that people can do outside of simply swinging. This includes WS, JA, and spells.