Warrior has been one of the more interesting tanks in Endwalker. It’s suffered some low damage output, but has some amazing mitigation and self sustain. So, how does all of this play out in Savage?
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Warrior is dealing a pretty good amount of damage now, it’s also so popular kinda, since if your not that invested in tanking Warrior probably is the easiest to pick up. Since even tho Paladin is simple to play, u can still kinda optimize it more than Warrior, since you have the atonement adjustment for raid buffs etc. So based on difficulty Warrior is appealing since it’s ez to play. It might not be one of the best mitigation tanks out currently. But by far not as bad as DRK currently gets treated mitigation wise. While the healing aspects of Warriors are nice. It actually even doesn’t matter that much, since Paladin/Gunbreaker also get a insane amount of sustain out for high end raids. Which makes btw the best Main tanks currently Gunbreaker and Paladin, in my opinion . Also Paladin gets less auto atk dmg compared to other tanks. All in all Warrior is a pretty solid pick currently since it’s performents is well balanced.
Gunbreaker: broken currently.
Dark knight: still strong but squishy
Paladin: Walking bunker but lowest dmg
But Balance overall fine 🙂
Ah warrior, my sweet child, my precious baby, i could literally talk about WAR for hours, but here is my summary about WAR in EW.
WAR had really rough start in EW, even in ShB WAR was the lowest damage tank, but in ShB WAR was the only tank with insane self healing, GNB having only brutal shell and aurora for example, but WAR having storms path, nascent flash, thrill of battle and equilibrium, made it the tankiest tank in ShB so some groups did not mind having WAR, but oh boi when EW released…
PLD and GNB now having insane self healing, made WAR lose its only reason why it was mostly brought to raids since its damage was always lacking, and man did it lack it in EW aswell, EW launch balance was horrible, i think devs did not test the jobs enough, forgetting to change some crucial things and damage numbers being absurdly low, with EW release the 2 min burst meta became a thing, but quaranteed crit/DH did not work with crit/dh raid buffs, so WAR was the only job that had absolutely no synergy with SCH, DRG or BRD.
So numbers were low and the quaranteed crit dh made WAR terrible with some party comps, in DSR WAR was pretty good since it was still the most tanky tank but not as much as it was in ShB, its damage was still pretty bad but WAR is not horrible in ultimates because it has good cooldowns for bursts.
The reason why WAR took this long to do good damage was because SE refused to buff it properly, they just kept buffing storms path/eye and upheaval a little bit, but not buffing inner chaos or fell cleave meant that those buffs were incredibly minor.
But now, after 7-8 buffs in EW, its finally doing good damage when devs just accepted the fact that they needed to buff fell cleave and inner chaos for WAR to actually rise in damage charts.
The reason why DRK was so much ahead of other tanks in TOP was because absurd amount of downtime in the fight made its OGCD gameplay fit the best, especially how tight DPS check is in TOP, often relying on pure RNG to even clear some phases because crit and dh, but when they heavily buffed WAR and PLD in 6.4 it made them sky rocket in popularity in TOP.
WAR has its issues, but its in pretty good spot right now in terms of balance atleast, the job design is still old and has a lot of pointless stuff, but its simple job and extremely satisfying with animations and gameplay feeling (please bring back butchers block, that animation is just so much bettet than storms path)