WAR Abilities and Traits in the June 2010 patchFollow

Abilities:

Restraint: (WAR Lv.77 Ability Delay: 10 min. Effect Duration: 5 min.)
Enhances your weapon skill power with each normal attack you land, but prevents you from dealing critical hits.

Traits:

Critical Attack Bonus: (WAR Lv.78) Improves power of critical hits.

Shield Defense Bonus: (WAR Lv.80) Reduces damage taken when blocking an attack with a shield.

Fencer: (WAR Lv.45) Increases rate of critical hits when wielding with the main hand only.
Grants a TP bonus to weapon skills.

My thoughts:

Restraint sounds like it could potentially be useful. Kind of odd though that we're getting both a native trait that boosts damage of critical hits, and yet an ability that prevents us from getting any at all. I guess it all depends on whether or not the loss of criticals is outweighed by the boost in weaponskill power. I can see this being most useful when superbuffed with tons of attack. I wonder what will happen if Mighty Strikes is stacked with Restraint.

Critical Attack Bonus is a nice addition. This will only help to increase our damage, and makes Mighty Strikes even better than before.

Shield Defense Bonus finally gives us a reason to use our AF hands! WAR/PLD gogogogo.

Fencer looks more useful for jobs that will sub WAR at 90, like Paladin in particular. I guess Fencer + Shield Defense Bonus were what SE was talking about when they said they wanted to increase Warrior's ability to tank.

Discuss.

I'll admit, its a bit perplexing. The increase to critical hit damage makes Mighty Strikes Full Buff Mode™ pretty freaking sweet. Restraint, on the other hand is odd. I guess you can use it for those rare instances where you build TP before a fight, like on Sky Gods and Ground Kings, but does it count all the hits, or does it end per mob? Guess time will tell. It definitely favors multi hit builds, so /NIN might make a comeback if the bonus is decent. Just turn it off and use Rampage/Vorpal Blade I guess. That thought intrigues me.

The shield bonus is still pretty useless, unless its a good chunk of reduction. And even then, Warrior philosophy is to take less damage by making the thing you're fighting dead faster. I guess a mixture of the Critical Hit Bonus + Fencer would be interesting to shield with, I guess.

Want to know just how much Restraint enhances Weapon Skill damage, if it even means damage. Is it extra attack like Berserk, or more fTP or what? That would be kind of hot. Every hit adds another 0.1 fTP to your weapon skill.

It was fTP, right? Its been a while since I thought in depth with this stuff.

Edit: It just dawned on me. If you turn off Restraint to use Rampage/Vorpal Blade, you'd probably lose that damage bonus, making it absolutely pointless. That just kind of dropped it's functionality.

Edited, Jun 17th 2010 9:16am by lolgaxe

it is odd that they give a crit dmg bonus and a ja that takes it away.

if restraint ends up accumulating the crit damage of a given hit and transferring it onto ws it could get obscene. think about the jt adds dmg to every crit hit but the ja negates crit hits and adds em to ws. pop 2hr, pop restraint, drop 5k ws at end of 30sec, im sure im exaggerating but it could be a plausibility depending on how they work the ability.

I covered that in this thread. That thread is for stuff that subs will give us. I made this one just to discuss WAR stuff and keep it separate.

I think there might be a place for Restraint for KJ. As I understand it, KJ doesn't crit without 2hr but still slightly outdoes RR (which crits). For a DoT loss you can seemingly get some serious KJ numbers. Most anything you'd use Steel Cyclone on would have higher def anyway and you'd want the crits in DoT. Maybe, I'm missing something there.


If shield somehow does become viable, WAR/MNK blood-tanking looks like it might actually work. Trading some damage taken for more retaliation DoT and WS. Full time acc bonus for 1h between aggressor/focus. Fencer buffing 1h DoT and Rampage.

Interesting ideas but WAR/SAM is just such a powerhouse, it would really take a lot to make other styles competitive again.

WAR update looks awesome. mix of different little useful things, and some bonuses for dual wielding.

caps lock key poster hopefully banned soon.

When I saw restraint, the first and only use that came to mind was "Closing Skill Chains with Steel Cyclone" (or the new WS?) Other than that, I won't be touching it unless testing, proof and data come out to say I should be.

What's the ratio of Pahn Points to Schrute bucks and Stanley nickels?

would be awesome if WAR80/DRG40 with ridill turned out to be a contender due to new traits (would actually use wyvern targe). highly doubt it, but would be cool.

I actually ran a comparison a while back on WAR/SAM(hasso + 19% gear haste) vs WAR/DRG(ridill + 25% gear haste) and they came out pretty close with /SAM winning by a few %. I never gave it a second thought after that, but now seems like it could be viable after the update.

yes, by about 2%~, 75% of the time, and about 0% 25% of the time. forgot that item.

Any word on how much the percentage increase is?

Just hit 80, and gunna pass the hell out.
Gunna play with full cleave tomorrow.

Blaming Allakhazam for being loltarded is like blaming an ape for throwing it's feces.

Fell Cleave is in fact AOE. Seems to be averaging 500-1000 in my merit party.
Also stacks with War Charge, so this leads me to beleive, that restraint + War Charge + Fell Cleave can help kill some of the massive crabs in Walk of Echoes I did earlier?

Personally... I feel it's garbage.

In the 5 minutes it was active, I didn't see a single WS that stood out from any others I had done.
Better testing would need to be done, preferable on a single hit WS, on consistent mobs. But for the time being, you won't see me using it. The other 80 War in my ls pt last night had the same results. I watched him use it, and also didn't see any WS numbers differ from the rest of the party. Maybe it's boRked?

The only 2 uses I can come up with, is where you build 300tp, and close a Skillchain, but... it only last's 5 minutes. I don't know about you guys, but it takes my shell more than 5 minutes to build TP, port up, and actually pop a sky god. So that use is gone. The only other use, that I see being a possibility now, is Fell Cleave in dynamis or Walk of Echoes. Then you're only sacrificing crit's on 1 mob, to boost your damage on multiple mobs for the WS. That's the only scenario I can currently come up with. This isn't to say there aren't more, I just personally can't think of any.

Keleon did a Steel Cyclone tester with Restraint on a DI and tested Mighty Strikes use with it as well.

He TPd on chaff mobs as WAR/SAM and used the WS on Dark Ixion.

http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/2568/img20100622202932.png

Mighty Strikes will override the inability to crit on Restraint.

Played with restraint during some MMM exp as war/sam synced to lv77. Used a mixture of RR and KJ, though more KJ for potential sc with a drg. Just not noticeable at all for this application (tp burn w/6hit)... Dmg looked pretty similar with and without it up, both RR and KJ. Unfortunately I didn't have my axes with me, but I was more concerned with skilling up gaxe anyway.

Reminds me, my previously all-capped combat skills on war are no longer capped... Must regain blue numbers...

Well, more power to /DNC and an OAx weapon that way. Still can't think of any practical applications beyond solo~trio situations for using a shield on Warrior, though. Even then I still believe that, as Warrior, its more efficient to just kill things faster. Nice bonus, though. Good discovery.

So, now that a lot of us have gotten Restraint, I'm wondering how exactly it's enhancing WS power since it seems entirely useless. I'm wondering if it's some sort of fTP bonus or something to that effect.

I played with Restraint a little bit in Einherjar earlier, Not much due to everything dying so fast and not getting to do it consistantly on mobs, but numbers were mostly if not all lower by 100-150 with Restraint on. I use Manny/Ridill Build, I'll have to play with it on Lesser Birds sometime this weekend

if you want to test restraint, do it vs lv1 mobs first. if you need help on what your max damage should be w/o it, post your stats and ask here. such tests may have already been done on bg; i haven't checked.

Edited, Jul 4th 2010 6:24am by milich