Twinkage: Warrior Advice

[Tronjer]

Originally Posted by redghosthunter [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

As far as i know its not live here... so OGRES have Stun Resistance... Or maybe i was mislead.

Just to clarify some myths:

- Ogres have front melee stun immunity, what translates to a small aggro boost. Spell stun, however, won't get affected by this.

- Obsidian shards are indeed the better aggro weapon from 16-37. Forget about lariats.

- No sane warrior would put starting points into dex, but try to max stamina instead. Later in Kunark you're going to wield lamentation / crystalline short sword and by the time proc weapons matter again, one has access to shiny armor with higher stat modifiers already.

[purist]

Warrior that put 25 starting points in STA as opposed to DEX:

Pros:

- Come Kunark, dex will be obsolete if you have a Lamentation/Crystaline Short Sword
- You'll be ~200-250 HP better off than your Warrior counterpart at level 50 who put all 25 points into Dex

Cons:

- Who the fuck knows when RoK is going to come out anyway?
- The Warrior who put +25 in DEX will get that many more procs off than you when grinding 1 - 50 in groups, being able to hold aggro better than you, 'cause his DEX is approaching 140-150 due in large part to those +25 starting points

I fail to see how that is insane

[Noselacri]

Who the hell aims for Lammy and Crystaline Blade as their endgame Kunark tanking weapons? That's ridiculous. Without proccing weapons, you are not going to hold aggro. Anything that out-damages you will constantly take aggro, and noone will be able to slow the mobs until you've beaten them for twenty seconds. Warriors simply cannot tank well enough without high-aggro procs, it is a factual impossibility. You don't have to have your epics, but you have to have something. The most common aggro weapons in Kunark will probably be Sarnak Warhammer (9/20 stun) and Silken Whip of Ensnaring (14/28 snare). I would use SSoY over Lammy.

Stamina is so much easier to max than dex. Once that becomes possible, ogre base stats become far less valuable. That ogre with 150 base stamina and 75 base dex has no stat advantage when his gear puts him a hundred points above the stamina cap, so it becomes a huge waste. Until that point, the two stats are pretty much equal in value, and I say putting your points in dex is the sensible choice if you ever plan to become well-geared.

[Dantes]

There's also a patch post-kunark that allows Warriors to taunt mobs up to 5 levels higher than they are. Proc is not the only method of maintaining aggro at that point. If I weren't concerned about STA, I'd put points in AGI over DEX for more AC. There's tons of DEX increasing items in the game, and even with only 100 DEX the proc rate seems extremely high. 25 starting points in DEX just seems like a permanent solution to a temporary problem, you'll never get those back.

[Noselacri]

Originally Posted by Dantes [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

There's also a patch post-kunark that allows Warriors to taunt mobs up to 5 levels higher than they are. Proc is not the only method of maintaining aggro at that point. If I weren't concerned about STA, I'd put points in AGI over DEX for more AC. There's tons of DEX increasing items in the game, and even with only 100 DEX the proc rate seems extremely high. 25 starting points in DEX just seems like a permanent solution to a temporary problem, you'll never get those back.

Er... do you know how taunt works? It doesn't let you hold aggro, it simply allows you the possibility of taking it if someone else has it. Taunt does not build hate, using it while you have aggro does nothing, and it is in no way a substitute for proccing weapons. I'll say it again: you cannot tank effectively without aggro-proc weapons. Taunt is almost worthless on its own, and if someone has taken aggro from you by doing higher DPS (as any DPS class will consistently do) you cannot get by with taunt. Even if it succeeds, you will have aggro for one second until their superior DPS catches up again. The only way for a warrior to tank with non-proccing weapons is to allow him such a long build-up time where noone else engages that he actually builds up enough hate to make up for the superior hate generation of all the other classes throughout the rest of the fight. Needless to say, this will take so long that it barely works, the warrior would have to stand there and wail on the mob for dozens of seconds before anyone else can engage. Not all classes have aggro dump abilities, and even those that do cannot rely on them consistently, especially not with a tank whose sole means of hate generation is his physical DPS. The only thing taunt does is place you one point above the highest person on the mob's hate list, and it doesn't succeed very reliably against reds (and not at all until level 60).

As for agility, the stat is useless as long as it's not under 75. Agility returns 1 AC per 4 stat points, so those 25 points in agility will yield you a single-digit amount of AC. Putting points in this stat is only marginally less wasteful than putting them in the caster stats. The only sensible choices are stam and dex, and if you have any intentions of getting high-end gear, dex becomes much better in the end as stam is completely maxable in the two expansions whereas dex is far more difficulty if not impossible to max. It affects both proc rate and crit chance, so it's very important to warriors. Stamina is slightly better until it maxes out and then becomes a complete waste of stats unless you made a wood elf warrior or something ridiculous like that. The fact of the matter is that going the stam way means you'll effectively have lost 25 points in the end, while going dex does not. It's simple logic that dex is superior in the long run, and perfectly adequate even before then. I ultimately depends on your goals, but arguing that stamina is always better is silly.

[Thulghor]

Was going to post a big long spiel on this, but decided against it. As it stands, you need procs to hold aggro as a warrior here, and procs are more frequent with higher dex. Weapons that do stuns or ability/armor drains also help that much more with threat.

[purist]

Originally Posted by Noselacri [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Er... do you know how taunt works? It doesn't let you hold aggro, it simply allows you the possibility of taking it if someone else has it. Taunt does not build hate, using it while you have aggro does nothing, and it is in no way a substitute for proccing weapons. I'll say it again: you cannot tank effectively without aggro-proc weapons. Taunt is almost worthless on its own, and if someone has taken aggro from you by doing higher DPS (as any DPS class will consistently do) you cannot get by with taunt. Even if it succeeds, you will have aggro for one second until their superior DPS catches up again. The only way for a warrior to tank with non-proccing weapons is to allow him such a long build-up time where noone else engages that he actually builds up enough hate to make up for the superior hate generation of all the other classes throughout the rest of the fight. Needless to say, this will take so long that it barely works, the warrior would have to stand there and wail on the mob for dozens of seconds before anyone else can engage. Not all classes have aggro dump abilities, and even those that do cannot rely on them consistently, especially not with a tank whose sole means of hate generation is his physical DPS. The only thing taunt does is place you one point above the highest person on the mob's hate list, and it doesn't succeed very reliably against reds (and not at all until level 60).

As for agility, the stat is useless as long as it's not under 75. Agility returns 1 AC per 4 stat points, so those 25 points in agility will yield you a single-digit amount of AC. Putting points in this stat is only marginally less wasteful than putting them in the caster stats. The only sensible choices are stam and dex, and if you have any intentions of getting high-end gear, dex becomes much better in the end as stam is completely maxable in the two expansions whereas dex is far more difficulty if not impossible to max. It affects both proc rate and crit chance, so it's very important to warriors. Stamina is slightly better until it maxes out and then becomes a complete waste of stats unless you made a wood elf warrior or something ridiculous like that. The fact of the matter is that going the stam way means you'll effectively have lost 25 points in the end, while going dex does not. It's simple logic that dex is superior in the long run, and perfectly adequate even before then. I ultimately depends on your goals, but arguing that stamina is always better is silly.

This man speaks the truth.

[Thulghor]

I could have sworn that this whole "need procs to gain any threat on a mob" thing wasn't that bad in classic and Kunark...

[Noleafclover]

Originally Posted by Noselacri [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Procs have a % chance per swing that amounts to a theoretical average number of procs per minute

If you mean hasting yourself would amount to more procs - I can't say first-hand, but almost everyone I've spoken with disagrees with this; and people earlier in the thread responded how slowing yourself would increase your procs per swing.

Unless I'm wildly off-base, you should edit this to avoid confusion. They probably do have a percent chance per swing but that percent chance is altered by your being hasted or slowed so that the procs per minute is fixed.

The mantra on procs I've always heard is: procs per minute is fixed (with the only variable being dex).

[Noselacri]

That's exactly what I wrote.

Originally Posted by Noselacri

PPM is independent of attack speed because it adjusts the actual % chance to proc per swing according to your speed, so that a fast weapon will have a low chance and a slow weapon will have a high. (...) Equipping an FBSS actually reduces an SSoY's proc%, but since you swing more often, you won't see less (or more) procs.

Originally Posted by Thulghor

I could have sworn that this whole "need procs to gain any threat on a mob" thing wasn't that bad in classic and Kunark...

Well, it's a simple matter: warriors do not have some innate bonus hate generation. You build the amount of hate that corresponds to your damage output, and since you don't out-damage actual DPS classes (except maybe rangers) you simply won't generate as much hate as they will. This makes it mathematically impossible to hold aggro over a DPS class unless your weapons proc something that pisses off the mob. Plain DD procs will rarely do the job because unless the weapons proc for so much damage that you end up out-damaging the DPS, which tends not to be the case, it still won't suffice. Thus you need things like stun, debuffs, or straight up +hate from enraging blow.

It's a fairly simple theory: consider for the sake of this argument that 1 damage = 1 hate. Whoever has the most hate is the one the mob is going to hit. There's no way a warrior out-damages a rogue or wizard or whatever, so they will automatically take aggro unless they refrain from doing damage, in which case their presence is sort of pointless. To allow damage-dealers to deal enough damage to warrant their existence, debuffers to debuff the mob early enough to matter, and healers to heal you before you're dead, you have to generate more hate than them, and it is factually impossible to do this with just DPS.

It does feel a little more extreme here than I remember it on Live. There were certain minor mechanics in place that slightly assisted the tank in holding aggro, such as the fact that you actually had a small hate buffer that meant that othes had to generate a bit of extra hate beyond your value before the mob would turn on them. If you were tanking with, say, 1000 current hate, others would have to generate 1100 before they would get aggro; something along those lines. I suspect this might not be in effect here. It didn't do much for long-term aggro maintenance, but it meant the warrior had a little leeway in getting off that first proc without the mob turning away the instant a rogue enables auto-attack. It feels slightly less forgiving here than it ought to be, but the general functionality of aggro and procs is the same.