Warrior – Gamerstips

FFXIV Warrior Guide

alext96 — Sun, 25 Aug 2019 21:06:19 +0000

Warrior: The Berserkless Berserker

An advanced guide to the class

Latest Update: 3/14/19 (Patch 4.55)

Greetings fellow cleavers, I’m Ny Cro (usually just Nycro) from Adamantoise and I’ve been inspired by The Balance Discord to write a guide on the various topics I’ve discussed with other Warriors there. I will give general tips and tricks to utilizing Warrior at a basic level as well as advanced optimization techniques for those seeking to master Warrior. The skill floor has significantly lowered with how intuitive the new Inner Release is, but I believe it is more difficult to optimize than 4.1 since you no longer follow a strict rotation. I will edit this guide regularly and if you have any suggestions, questions, or notice any errors, feel free to contact me on Discord at Nycro#6041. If you’re wondering why a lot of this looks familiar, you’ve likely seen Emiin’s guide which he encouraged me to copy. Thanks m8.

Several parts of this guide are now outdated, use this guide by Mox.

Disclaimer

This guide will talk about Warrior at raiding (Level 70, 8-man) level. Some topics will be addressed that will spread towards other avenues of play within FFXIV, but raiding will be the primary focus.
Tooltips and basic skill potencies will not be addressed unless mathematically necessary. I expect anyone reading this guide to be able to understand how to read tooltips.
Initialisms used throughout this guide:
1. GCD – Global Cooldown: Weapon Skills, Spells
2. OGCD – Abilities
3. FC – Fell Cleave
4. HS, SS, BB – Heavy Swing, Skull Sunder, Butcher’s Block – Threat combo
5. Eye/Path – Storm’s Eye/Storm’s Path – Gauge combo finishers
6. IR – Inner Release
7. IB – Inner Beast
Potencies listed do not include slashing damage or Storm’s Eye modifier, to simplify the math therein.

The Basics

General rundown for anyone somewhat new to Warrior:

It is much better for you to pull the boss. Warriors have absolutely insane enmity generation in the first 20 seconds of the fight without having to sacrifice DPS, don’t let it go to waste. If the other tank wants to main tank you can swap after by using Shirk.
When using Inner Release, you want to always land 5 FCs and fit your Upheaval and Onslaught in it as well. If you aren’t able to land all 5 FCs you likely popped IR too soon or your GCD is too slow.
Avoid using Defiance when you are comfortable with a fight and not in danger of dying, you can still go into Defiance with minimal penalty if you use Unchained.
Maintain Storm’s Eye at all times.
Avoid using Butcher’s Block combo unless it is required for threat generation.
Use Inner Release, Upheaval, and Infuriate on cooldown.
Onslaught to get back to the boss when you get knocked back or have to move out for a mechanic.
Never allow your Beast Gauge to overcap. If your next GCD will put your Beast Gauge above 100, spend it on Upheaval, FC/IB, Decimate/Cyclone, or Onslaught. Make sure Infuriate is used at 50 gauge or below to ensure you don’t overcap when using it.
AoE Priority (3+ targets)
1. If mobs will survive for a while longer ensure Storm’s Eye is up. When dealing with mobs that have very low health you can ignore Storm’s Eye as they die quickly and doing 3 more AoE attacks will outweigh the 10% damage bonus from Eye.
2. Use Inner Release and spam Decimate
  1. Can use Steel Cyclone instead for increased safety, but lower damage.
3. Continue using Decimate until you run out of gauge
4. Spam Overpower
5. Deliverance Equilibrium to recover TP if needed
6. Use Vengeance for the 55 potency counterattacks if available

Note that this list is a generic quick-list guide, and is not meant for optimization. This list will simply pump your numbers to a somewhat respectable level. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the basics, we’ll go into specifics.

Part 1: Defense and Defiance

Defense

Defensive cooldowns can be interestingly utilized, and for the most part, are completely variable based on the fight, your co-tank, and what is best for your raid group. One static progressing through a fight will have a completely different skill rotation used compared to yours, and it may be just as viable. Work with your team in order to find out what works best for you.

In an optimal raid setting, Convalescence loses its effectiveness as healers will be using less heal spells, and more abilities. By all means, use Convalescence if it is effective for your raid team, but understanding how your healers are healing you is more important. 2500 health gained on a single cast of cure 2 within 20 seconds may not be an efficient use of a cooldown.
Map. Your. Cooldowns. If you want to shoot for high parses and ignore Defiance you need to understand the damage that is incoming in a fight, when to use cooldowns, tank swap, and what cooldowns are best utilized where. A good tank uses their cooldowns effectively so that their healers never notice they were out of Tank stance.
Tank Swapping both utilizes Shirk to its full effectiveness, as well as enables your co-tank to use his mitigation tools effectively. Your raid group has two tanks worth of cooldowns, use them to both make the fight easier, and give your healers a helping hand. Delete the thought of always Main Tank and Off Tank. Both tanks in an optimized setting will share equal burden. Main Tank and Off Tank terms should be used as a “Who is currently tanking the boss,” similar to how other languages use “First Tank” and “Second Tank.”
Your DPS have mitigation abilities as well. All Melees have Feint (-10% phys), Ranged have Palisade(-20% phys), Bards have Nature’s Minne(+20% healing)/Troubadour(variable 10/15% buffs), Machinist has Dismantle (-10%), Casters have Addle(-10% magic) and Apocatastasis(-20% magic). Discuss mitigation options with your raid group for optimal play.

Holmgang

Holmgang is regarded as one of the best tank cooldowns in the game due to its extremely low CD compared to other Invulns. Holmgang sits on a 3 minute CD while Living Dead is 5 minutes and Hallowed Ground is 7 minutes. In many fights, you can do things like using Vengeance + Thrill on one half the tankbusters and Holmgang on the other half, freeing up Rampart and Raw Intuition to be used on auto attacks. In short fights with infrequent busters (Exdeath, Kefka) you can even use Holmgang as your only tankbuster CD.

Make sure your healers know that you’ll be using Holmgang so they save their healing for after you get hit rather than topping you off before.

Time your Holmgang well and be careful when using Holmgang for multi-hit tankbusters. It’s duration is only 6 seconds which typically isn’t enough to cover multiple busters in a row like Hallowed Ground can. Since the duration is short, to get the most out of it you want to use it at the very end of the tankbuster cast. It activates much faster than Living Dead and Hallowed Ground so don’t worry about animation delay screwing you over.

But isn’t it worse for the healers to use Holmgang? In many cases, especially if you have a WHM, it’s actually better for your healers for you to use Holmgang than other CDs. When taking a tankbuster normally, your healers spend resources healing you both before and after the buster. If using cooldowns, they would have to top you off, shield you, then heal the damage that you take from the hit. With Holmgang, your healers can completely ignore you until the buster hits then wait until Holmgang is about to fall off before burst healing you with OGCDs like Benediction and Essential Dignity. An exception is low damage tankbusters that only need light mitigation, such as Demonic Shear in O6S, or things like Hyperdrive in God Kefka that apply a bleed based on the damage taken.

If you don’t need Holmgang for tankbusters, you can also use it to nullify knockbacks since it binds you to the target you use it on. This is mostly useful in O5S.

Defiance

Defiance has become a lot less punishing in 4.2 due to Unchained being separated from IR. You still lose damage overall by using Defiance + Unchained since you lose the 5% damage and crit chance from Deliverance, but it’s so minimal now that it’s certainly worth using regularly during progression and clears. Inner Beast is also significantly better in 4.2 due to the new IR, during which your spenders no longer require any gauge. If you think you might need extra mitigation and/or healing, quickly swapping to Defiance and using Inner Beast + Equilibrium into Unchained makes a great safety net at the cost of a very small amount of damage.

Is Unchained + Defiance a DPS gain?

Sometimes due to a bugged interaction with Defiance buffing Upheaval far more than it should. This will be covered in detail later in Optimization and the Memeheaval opener.

Cross Role Actions

A majority of the cross-class actions have obvious uses, but I’ll spend a moment to discuss the ones that are less obvious to most upon first inspection.

Ultimatum – AoE Provoke, but typically taken as a secondary provoke in a few scenarios. If your group can use it, then more power to you. It can be used as a pinch in saving wipe scenarios in longer fights, such as Ultimate Coil. Use this at your discretion.
Low Blow – Raid bosses can’t be stunned, typically.
Interject – If you have a Ninja, they can do this without sacrificing a cross-role. Bards and Machinists would sacrifice either Second Wind or Invigorate.

You can now take every cross role ability and do not need to choose between which ones you want to get.

Sample Timeline + Defensive Cooldown Spreadsheets

These are the sheets I use to plan my cooldowns for each fight. This is not always going to be the best way to do these fights and you should adjust depending on your group’s composition and your co-tank’s and healers’ preferences. If you wish to change anything, select File -> Make a Copy and move around/add/remove cooldowns as you desire.

O8S – Kefka and God Kefka

O9-12S (WIP probably never going to finish)

Ultimate Coil

UWU

Part 2: Opener and Optimization

Openers

Main tank

Off tank

Memeheaval

Q: Why use a single FC before IR?

A: Using a FC before starting IR lines it up with Trick Attack, if you go straight into IR you’ll lose a FC inside Trick and will need to delay your Upheaval and Onslaught to your 2nd FC to fit them in trick.

Q: Why Thrill of Battle?

A: Upheaval’s damage scales off your current HP, using Thrill will make Upheaval hit harder. If you want to save Thrill of Battle for a tankbuster that will happen within the first 2 minutes you can avoid using it, but many bosses such as O6S and O7S do their tankbusters within the first 20 seconds of the fight anyway.

Q: Why Unchained in the standard main tank opener?

A: Using Unchained just to buff Tomahawk/Heavy is very minor. If you’re in prog you should be using Unchained as a defensive cooldown in order to enter Defiance regularly without punishment. You can toss it in if you won’t be using it at all later in the fight, otherwise don’t bother. You should definitely use it with the Memeheaval opener though.

Main-tank Opener

Standard opener for Warrior when you have a ninja and you will be pulling the boss, which you should be. You can swap Deliverance and Infuriate depending on your preference, either option is pretty much the same dps but with slightly different Infuriate timings. I personally prefer doing Infuriate after Tomahawk since it will come up right as you do your third Heavy Swing. If your ping sucks and you can’t double weave Equilibrium + Infuriate without clipping Heavy Swing, delay Equilibrium to after Heavy Swing before Deliverance. Same applies to Upheaval + Onslaught, just move your Onslaught to the next FC.

Off-tank Opener

Standard opener for Warrior when you have double Warrior in your group and you aren’t the one pulling. I still recommend using the main-tank opener then swapping with Provoke + Shirk after Inner Release if you want your co-tank to have the boss instead.

Memeheaval Opener

Due to the broken scaling of Upheaval, it becomes optimal to use this as your opener if you intend to skip the buffer FC at the start. You should use this opener in any fight where you need to skip the initial FC to fit all of your IR FCs before the boss jumps away, such as Midgardsormr (O10S) and Omega M+F (O12S). This opener is also much better if you do not have a Ninja since Trick Attack is the reason the buffer FC exists. If your ping is too high to double weave Upheaval + Deliverance without losing your last FC do the regular opener but skip the initial FC before IR. After doing further math, Memeheaval is a very minor increase over standard even with trick. Equilibrium is delayed to ensure completely full HP for Upheaval, if you have CDs you want to weave there for upcoming busters instead you can use Equilibrium earlier.

“Rotation”

Optimization

4.2 WAR has no defined, strict rotation like it did in 4.1 and follows a priority system now. You no longer need to pool 100 gauge for IR or save your Infuriate for Berserk, which opens up a lot more room for optimization.

Uptime

Uptime is by far the most important aspect of optimizing any job. Uptime refers to hitting the boss as often as you possibly can. You lose uptime when you run back from a knockback, fail to press your GCD as soon as it comes up, run out too early for an AoE, and many other situations. Save Onslaught for knockbacks, mash your GCD as soon as its coming up, figure out how long you can stay on the boss before doing a mechanic. Doing these things will boost your damage tremendously and is what truly makes the difference between an average and skilled player.

Let’s take a look at Guardian in O7S as it’s a perfect example of a fight where uptime is key. Running away from Load/Paste: Air Force as soon as you see Load will leave you sitting outside the boss for several GCDs. Instead, wait until you see him perform the animation where his arms twirl and he glows red to run out just before it hits. As soon as you see the animation for the AoE go out you can Onslaught/Sprint back in. In the final phase when he does the “stop moving” radar combined with books you can Onslaught back to the boss just before the Radar hits if you did books fast enough. Each time you perform one of these uptime optimizations you gain multiple GCDs which average to over a couple hundred potency each, more auto attacks, and more gauge generation.

Timing Inner Release

Make sure that you are never popping IR at the beginning of your GCD cooldown. You want to be using IR once your GCD cooldown reaches the bottom left corner on your GCD icons to ensure it doesn’t clip your GCD and you don’t lose any time on it. There may be situations where you want to delay your IR. For example, on Guardian, if your IR comes up during the Air Force AoE it will cost you at least 1 FC, it’s better to save your IR for when these mechanics finish. If delaying your IR makes it more powerful, either by lining up with raid buffs or gaining more FCs, and does not cost you a use later in the fight, it is worth doing.

Maintaining and Minimizing Storm’s Eye

This is one of the most important but also the most simple. Apply Storm’s Eye whenever it’s about to fall off while trying to fit in as many Paths as possible. Make sure you have around 18s left on Storm’s Eye before going into IR since you won’t be able to do your normal combos for 10 seconds. While you always want Eye up, you also want to be using Path over Eye as often as you possibly can. Note that it’s worth it to drop Eye just before you reapply it if it gains you a Path. Storm’s Eye is 280 potency, so a 10% loss on Eye is 28 potency, but you gain 10 gauge which is effectively 50 potency. Ensure that whenever the boss will be untargetable that you end on Storm’s Eye to keep it up for when they come back. One exception is if the downtime exceeds the duration of Eye, in which case you should end on Path instead. Eye’s damage is calculated immediately upon using the skill despite it not showing up until the end of the animation, I have tested it with sub 1s on Eye remaining. As long as it does not fall off before you use Eye, the buff will still apply to Eye’s damage.

Manipulating your GCD

This is mainly something you want to consider for IR. You always want to use IR after you finished a combo as soon as it comes off CD, never mid combo or delayed to finish your combo. You often want to pop IR after using a FC to dump gauge for when Infuriate comes back up during it. GCD manipulation is also a concern in fights with extended downtime where you can’t finish your combo after, such as Guardian or Kefka. Make sure that when the boss becomes untargetable you finished your combo rather than ending on Heavy Swing or Maim.

You can do this by changing the number of Fell Cleaves that you use in the fight. If you have enough gauge to spare and you would end on Heavy Swing, use a FC instead even if you’re not going to overcap gauge. If you end on Maim, try cutting a FC and using more Onslaughts to gain another GCD. If you get 100 gauge before IR you can double FC instead of Heavy Swing + Maim, being at 0 gauge shouldn’t matter since Infuriate will almost certainly be up after IR finishes. Having a single Onslaught between your first and second IR (assuming 2.37/2.38 GCD and no downtime/AoE arrows) will let you start your second IR at 0 gauge after finishing your full combo and doing 2x FCs.

Gauge Management

Do Not Overcap Beast Gauge

Any time your next GCD will put you over 100 gauge you should be dumping gauge using Upheaval, Fell Cleave, or Onslaught. Based on Onslaught every 10 gauge is worth approximately 50 potency.

Fell Cleave vs. Onslaught

A lot of people assume FC beats Onslaught significantly, while in reality they’re very close and the real answer is what GCD you gain using Onslaught. When considering what FC is worth, you also have to consider that it costs you a GCD on top of 50 gauge. The potency difference between the two is completely dependent on what GCD you gain with Onslaught, which is covered more in my GCD manipulation section from earlier. For now, here’s a bunch of numbers.

3x Onslaught = 300 potency / 60 gauge = 5 PPG (Potency Per Gauge)

FC – Heavy Swing = 360 potency / 50 gauge = 7.2 PPG -2.2 PPG x 50 = 110 potency loss

FC – Maim = 320 potency / 60 gauge = 5.3333 PPG -0.3333 PPG x 60 = 20 potency loss

FC – Eye = 240 potency / 60 gauge = 4 PPG 1 PPG x 60 = 60 potency gain

FC – Path = 240 potency / 70 gauge = 3.4286 PPG 1.5714 PPG x 70 = 110 potency gain

5x Onslaught = 500 potency / 100 gauge = 5 PPG

FCx2 – Heavy Swing – Maim = 680 potency / 110 gauge = 6.181818 PPG 130 potency loss

FCx2 – Maim – Path = 560 potency / 130 gauge = 4.3077 PPG 90 potency gain

FCx2 – Path – Heavy Swing = 600 potency / 120 gauge = 5 PPG 0 potency difference

FCx2 – Maim – Eye = 560 potency / 120 gauge = 4.6666 PPG 40 potency gain

FCx2 – Eye – Heavy Swing = 600 potency / 110 gauge = 5.454545 PPG 50 potency loss

If you gain a Path Onslaught becomes a significant gain over FC. If you gain an Eye it’s a small gain. If you gain a Maim it’s a very minor loss, if you gain a Heavy Swing it’s a large loss. These are the near exact potency gains/losses you’ll experience in the GCD Manipulation section. Value of lower Infuriate CD with FC and higher average crit with Onslaught are approximately the same.

Keep Beast Gauge as High as Possible

While you never want to overcap, you also want to keep your gauge near cap as long as you can. Every 10 gauge is worth 1% crit chance. If you average 70 gauge you’ll have a 4% higher crit chance than someone who averages 30 gauge. Make sure that you only dump gauge if you will overcap, need to be below 60 for Infuriate, or there’s raid buffs up that make the lowered crit chance worth it. Ensuring you stay at high gauge not only gives more crit, but also gives you more gauge to blow at once if raid buffs come up.

Use Infuriate on Cooldown and Gain Full Gauge

Now that IR has been changed to not spend gauge, you no longer need to save your Infuriate for Berserk/IR windows and should be using it as often as possible. Keep in mind that Enhanced Infuriate drops the CD of Infuriate by 5 seconds every time you use Fell Cleave, meaning IR will drop the Infuriate cooldown by 25 seconds on top of the 10 seconds you spend in IR already.

If Infuriate is at 35s on CD or less, try to go into IR with 50 or less gauge to ensure you can Infuriate if it comes back up without overcapping. If you’re at a high amount of gauge and Infuriate has 5-6s on cooldown, you can use a FC to both drop your gauge and pop Infuriate immediately by lowering the CD.

Issues with Infuriate and How to Deal With It

Sometimes you might come across a small problem. Your IR just came off cooldown and your Infuriate is coming off cooldown within the next 30s and you’re at 60-100 gauge. Is it better to hold infuriate and use IR immediately, use both IR and Infuriate and overcap, or delay IR to use a FC for dumping gauge? Ideally this situation never happens because you manipulate your GCD properly, but in case it does let’s take a look at your options here.

Holding Infuriate: During IR you will use 5 FCs (25s off Infuriate CD) and spend 10 seconds in IR for 35s total. Add on another 7.4 seconds from using a FC after IR to dump gauge before Infuriate and you get 42.4 seconds total shaved off Infuriate’s cooldown. Infuriate grants 50 gauge on a 60 second cooldown. Each point of gauge is worth approximately 5 potency using Onslaught as a reference, so a full Infuriate is worth 250 potency. This comes out to 4.1667 potency lost per second of Infuriate sitting off cooldown, roughly 21 potency per 5 seconds. 10s – 42 potency loss, 20s – 83 potency loss, 30s – 125 potency loss, 40s – 167 potency loss.

Overcapping with Infuriate: Onslaught is 100 potency for 20 gauge, so every 10 gauge is effectively 50 potency. 50 potency lost per 10 gauge overcapped.

Delaying IR to dump gauge: Another option is to delay your IR 1 GCD to use a FC to drop your gauge. How much potency you lose from delaying your IR depends on future IR timings and raid buffs. If you have no raid buffs and your next IR will be delayed anyway it’s always better, if you always use IR immediately and lose IR FCs under raid buffs it becomes an issue. IR FCs are worth 520 (base) x 1.58 (crit multi with 2412 crit) x 1.25 (DH multi) = 1,027 potency. If you want to figure out how much you lose on missing 1 IR FC during Trick subtract the replacement GCD from 1,027 and multiply it by the raid buff.

If you use a normal FC in Trick instead (which is what you’ll be doing here) it’s:

(1,027 – 520) = 507 less potency in Trick, a 50.7 potency loss

If that FC crits, its:

(1,027 – 520 x 1.58) = 205 less potency in trick, a 20.5 potency loss

Find out your average crit rate to find out the average loss:

2412 crit = (2412 – 364 / 109) = 18.8% crit chance + 5% base crit + 8% crit (80 gauge) = 31.8% crit

Now apply both the crit rate and crit damage to FC:

0.58 (crit damage) x 0.318 (crit rate) = 0.184, 18.4% more damage on average

520 x 1.184 = 616. 1,027 – 616 = 411. 411 x 0.10 (Trick) = 41 avg potency lost per IR FC outside Trick

Which option is best depends on each individual situation, keep these numbers in mind when trying to figure out what you should do.

Dump Gauge into Raid Buffs

If you see buffs like Chain Stratagem, Trick Attack, Hypercharge, Balance, etc. up it becomes worth it to ignore keeping high gauge and blow everything you can. Ensure that while you’re dumping gauge into FC/Onslaught you keep at least 20 for Upheaval if its coming off cooldown. If you know Trick will come up soon and you’re going to overcap on gauge before it hits try to Onslaught rather than FC in order to have higher gauge when Trick goes up. If you have 50-60 gauge left at the last GCD of Trick it’s not worth it to FC unless there’s several buffs up other than Trick since the bonus potency from FC over a different GCD doesn’t outweigh the loss of crit rate over the next couple combos and autos.

Raid Buffs

Multiple raid buffs will affect your personal DPS, and in order to optimize effectively, you must be aware of both how much you will gain with them, as well as when your raid members are casting them – this guide will list skills that directly affect damage multipliers or rates.

All Damage –

Balance(AST) – 5% damage AoE, 10% personal, 15% full buffed – 30-60s duration
Trick Attack(NIN) – 10% Damage, 10s duration, 60s CD
Hypercharge(MCH) – 5% damage, 27-30s duration, 2m CD
Foe Requiem(BRD) – 3% damage, 15-20~s duration, CD dependant on mana
Devotion(SMN) – 2% Damage, 15s duration, 2m CD

Critical/DH Rates –

Spear(AST) – 5% Crit rate AoE, 10% personal, 15% buffed – 30-60s duration
Chain Stratagem(SCH) – 15% Crit rate on target, 15s duration, 2m CD
Battle Litany(DRG) – 15% Crit rate, 20s duration, 3m CD
Battle Voice(BRD) – 15% DH rate, 20s duration, 3m CD
Song buff(BRD) – 2% Crit rate, constant.

Physical Damage –

Embolden(RDM) – 10%-2% Physical damage (drops by 2% per stack), 20s duration, 2m CD
Brotherhood(MNK) – 5% Physical Damage, 15s duration, 90s CD
Radiant Shield(SMN) – 2% Physical damage, 16-20s duration, 60s CD

Your goal for optimizing raid buffs is to dump as much gauge as possible in them and ensure that your Inner Release lines up with raid buffs when it can. As you can tell, not everything will line up perfectly, but there are some windows you can focus on to increase damage output.

Opener (10-15s)
(60s) Trick Attack window – Flat 10% increase 10s, every minute. This should land 4 GCDs at a minimum.
(90s) Brotherhood – Should always line up with IR as they share the same cooldown.
(2m) “Second” opener – Trick, Embolden, and Stratagem will be active for this window.
(3m) – Trick, Battle Voice, Battle Litany, Brotherhood. IR should always be back up here to line up with Trick.
Repeat ad infinitum

Upheaval

Upheaval (usually) on Cooldown

Using Upheaval on cooldown makes sure it’s always aligned with raid buffs as well as your IR window. However, there are some situations where you might not want to pop Upheaval immediately. For example, if you come back from downtime, your Eye dropped, and both IR and Upheaval are up you’ll want to do your Eye combo and save your Upheaval for IR since it greatly boosts the damage.

You may end up in a weird situation where your Upheaval and IR become misaligned. In this case, look at the CD of your Inner Release. My general rules are if IR is at or below 20 seconds hold your Upheaval for IR, if IR is at 21-29s it’s still safe to Upheaval since you have a 10s window to hit it during IR. Also be aware that if your Upheaval doesn’t line up with your next IR, it won’t line up with any future IRs and it might not line up with Trick and other raid buffs anymore.

Using Thrill for Upheaval

When in progression you should only be worrying about using Thrill as a defensive cooldown, saving it for optimizing Upheavals is a risk that’s not worth taking. If you’re well geared, have everything on farm, and want to pump out a tiny bit more damage you can start pairing Thrill with specific Upheavals. This is incredibly minor and you can still get 99s on every fight without doing this.

Now the question is: Thrill on cooldown or delay Thrill until your next IR? You should normally be using Thrill on cooldown, every third Thrill used on cooldown will line up again with your IR naturally. You’ll lose uses of Thrill over the course of a fight if you save them for IR. However, if delaying your last Thrill in the fight will line it up with IR it won’t cost you a use and becomes worth doing.

Save for IR	Opener	3 mins	6 mins	9 mins
Use on CD, save last	Opener	2 mins	4 mins	6 mins	9 mins

By saving Thrill for IR, you gain 1 IR Thrill at the cost of 2 non-IR Thrills. Somewhat close due to the boost to crit and direct hit, but not worth it even if neither non-IR Upheavals crit. Crit DH multi is 1.58 x 1.25 = 1.975 at BiS gear, barely below 2x damage compared to non-crit Upheavals. Keep in mind that these Upheavals at 2 mins and 4 mins line up with Chain Stratagem, significantly boosting their odds to crit and increasing the gap between saving Thrill and using Thrill on CD.

Using Defiance + Unchained for Upheaval

There is currently a major issue with Defiance buffing Upheaval by absurd amounts. Testing damage on a dummy with Deliverance Upheavals vs. Defiance Upheavals across samples collected by several players has found Defiance to be approximately a 45% damage boost over Deliverance. According to Upheaval’s tooltip, it should not ignore Defiance and should end up at base damage. 1 (base) x 0.8 (tank stance penalty) x 1.25 (hp bonus) = 1. Deliverance should be 5% higher. Even if Upheaval ignored Defiance, it would only come out to 1.25x damage, 19% higher damage than Deliverance (1.05x), meaning there’s a bug with Upheaval or Defiance causing it to deal abnormally high damage. For some reason, Unchained also further boosts the damage as well, upping it to around 81% higher than Deliverance Upheaval.

Potency (Deliverance)	Deliverance + Thrill	Defiance	Defiance + Unchained	Defiance + Thrill	Defiance + Unchained + Thrill
300	360	435	543	522	652

Deliverance Upheaval is scaled down to 300 as the baseline to make the numbers more simple, if you want exact potency multiply all values by 1.05x. Defiance + Unchained results in a 243 potency gain over Deliverance. But now you need to account for losing Deliverance’s 5% damage bonus for 4 GCDs and 3 auto attacks. Ideally those 4 GCDs are Heavy Swing x2 (160 x 2 potency), Maim (200 potency), and Eye/Path (280 potency), combine these with 3 auto attacks (123 potency each) for 1,169 potency. 5% of 1,169 is 58.45 potency lost. This is an overall 184.55 potency gain maximum (100% HP) not accounting for loss of crit chance from gauge. Potency gain will be less depending on your current health, but the minimum potency gain is approximately 120 potency even if your HP is the exact same in Unchained or Deliverance due to Unchained and Defiance having damage up modifiers not based on health. Take away the 58.45 for 61.55 potency gained minimum (Same HP).

Now add in an approximate loss for crit. Assuming you would have 70 gauge (7% crit) average, you would do (0.07 x 0.58 = 0.0406) roughly 4% more damage. This also applies to the 300 potency of Deliverance Upheaval since the table does not account for crit. 1,169 (GCDs + autos) + 300 (Upheaval) = 1,469, 0.04 x 1,469 = 58.76 potency lost on average. This takes the average maximum gain down to 126 potency and the average minimum gain down to 3 potency. Maximum gain will hardly ever happen, minimum gain would be without use of Equilibrium to heal. These amounts are the average you’ll have over hundreds of runs and not the amount for individual uses. If you would gain no crits from gauge it would be a gain of the previously listed pre-crit potency values, if you would have gained crits it would likely turn out to a loss.

I would not advise ever doing this during Trick Attack windows. Your Upheaval naturally drifts later into your Trick windows since it’s often delayed slightly to avoid clipping, so Upheaval typically doesn’t come up until multiple GCDs into Trick later in a fight. This forces you to be in Defiance for much of Trick Attack which is very bad since it both penalizes your damage and stops you from using Fell Cleaves.

Also make sure that you will not overcap on gauge during your combo since you are no longer able to dump gauge into FC. You can dump 40 gauge with Onslaught and Upheaval and build 20-30 gauge on your combo, so this should only be a problem if Infuriate is coming up during it. If Infuriate will come up, use a FC before entering Defiance to dump your gauge.

Again, do not try to do this for IR or Trick Upheavals. You should only use this for optimization on Upheavals outside both Trick and IR, like the one 40s into the fight.

It is not better to save Thrill for these, you want Thrill on your Trick and IR Upheavals listed earlier.

This is an extremely minor optimization that can often end up in much less damage if done improperly, so I wouldn’t recommend doing it for optimization unless using Unchained + Equilibrium will also help your healers do more or you’re doing the Memeheaval opener.

Vengeance

On top of being a very strong defensive cooldown, Vengeance also deals 55 potency counter attacks every time you suffer physical damage. Counters will not happen if you are hit by magic damage. This is fairly insignificant on bosses since boss autos are infrequent and many have magical autos, but it is extremely potent on physical adds.

Vengeance can give you a big boost if there’s add phases where you’re picking up several mobs (i.e. Putrid Passengers in O5S). Getting hit by 8 mobs would deal a total of 440 potency each time they all hit you. Vengeance can also direct hit and crit, which means IR nearly doubles the effectiveness of the counters, upping the potency per hit on 8 mobs to 869 potency.

You can gain a bit of potency on bosses by ensuring you get as many Vengeance uses as possible in a fight and trying to line up Vengeance with IR if possible, but the potency gain on bosses is definitely not worth messing up your tankbuster cooldowns for and you should only do this if it won’t be a detriment to your survival.

Opener and Optimization Demonstration

Part 3: Stats and Gearing

4.55 BiS Sets

According to calculations done by the Math Wizards on The Balance discord, these are the current BiS lists for Warrior.

Full BiS list for all tanks (including UCOB/UWU)

2.37 GCD (x4 crafted 1 tome acc)

2.38 GCD (x3 crafted 1 raid 1 tome acc)

No Crafted Accessories

Alternate WAR UWU BiS (same pentamelds as Sigma BiS so you don’t need to remeld sks)

Hydatos gear BiS

Skill Speed

There are two levels of Skill Speed that are considered optimal, 2.38 GCD and 2.43 GCD. Most Warriors as well as myself prefer the 2.38 GCD. 2.38 gives you a very small amount of time on IR that you can lose and still get 5 FCs while 2.43 is extremely tight and will not allow lost time. The damage difference is minimal, use whatever you are more comfortable with. If you have a slightly faster or slower GCD than these two don’t worry about it too much, as long as you aren’t stacking skill speed like a maniac or losing your 5th IR FC it won’t be a significant loss. Current BiS sets force you into around 2.38 GCD since the axe is loaded with SkS. 2.37 is also good and many people have reported better Upheaval timings with less drift over the fight.

Stats and Reasoning

Warrior values substats a bit differently from PLD and DRK. Crit is roughly equal to Direct Hit on DRK while Direct Hit is a bit better than Crit on PLD. Crit has a higher value on WAR while Direct Hit is much worse. This is due to how the new Inner Release works. Critical Hit raises both crit chance and crit damage while Direct Hit only increases your direct hit chance. Since IR is roughly 35% of your overall DPS and guarantees crits and direct hits, it increases the value of Critical Hit and severely devalues Direct Hit. Substat focus for WAR is currently: SkS until desired GCD > Crit > Det > Tenacity = Direct Hit. Yes, Direct Hit is actually that bad now. Do not meld Direct Hit if you plan to play Warrior as your main. If possible, you should put your SkS melds in pieces that are already crit capped, as it’s slightly better to replace a det meld than a crit meld.

Crit is the best substat, but it is not the end-all be-all god stat. Sacrificing a large amount of one stat to gain a small amount of Crit will never be worth doing.

Part 4: Utilizing FFLogs for Self Improvement

XIV Analysis

Newly developed tool which analyzes your log and tells you what mistakes you might have made such as missing FCs/Upheavals in IR, applying Eye too early, wasting gauge, etc. Highly recommend using this if you want to know where you went wrong in a fight.

Comparing Yourself to Other Warriors

Credits to Mox Xinmagar

First off, use the COMPARE in top-right of a log, compare reports with URL!
Compare your log to a log of similar duration – don’t be shy, pick a monster log from the top 50!

Example
(no monster logs were used in this example)

Duration: 11:57 vs 12:10 (close enough)

Choose both X-jobs (WARs in this one) on the left-hand side

Check the buffs and casts!

Eye uptime: 85.67% VS 97.15%
Inner Releases: 7 vs 8
Infuriates: 15 vs 18
Upheavals: 19 vs 23
Onslaughts: 33 vs 17 (not a bad thing, just gauge used elsewhere)
=> Lost potency through Eye, missed IRs/Infuriates/Upheavals

Check the combos (and for broken combos)!

Parse #1 combos:
68 Heavy Swing
57 Maim + 7 Sunders => 64 continued combos
31 Path + 24 Eye + 7 Blocks => 62 finished combos

=> plenty more BB combos (lost gauge = lost crit% and potency in oGCDs/FCs)
=> 4 Heavy Swings extra
=> Lost gauge by not finishing combos

Parse #2 combos:
67 Heavy Swing
64 Maim + 2 Sunder => 66 cont’d combos
36 Path + 28 Eye + 2 BB => 66 finished combos

=> 1 Heavy Swing filler used
=> No broken combos apart from the filler Heavy Swing

Summarize it!

Things to improve on:
Less messed up combos
Less missed IRs
Less missed Infuriates
Keep Gauge higher, dump only when necessary
Upheaval should stay in IR window

Check their lodestone!

Gear makes a big difference. Don’t feel sad if you lost to
someone with +10 item levels over you!

Nycro’s Additional Tip;

If you go into Timelines under Casts you can see every GCD and cooldown used at any point in the fight. This can help you identify the specific areas where you messed up and how the other Warrior’s rotation and cooldown usage differs from yours.

Frequently Asked Questions and Fight Optimization

F.A.Q.

Q: How many Fell Cleaves should I get in Inner Release?

A: You should use 5 Fell Cleaves, Upheaval, and Onslaught inside every IR.

Q: Fell Cleave or Onslaught for dumping gauge?

A: Potency-wise they’re nearly even. Most people assume FC is stronger because the large potency value, but it also costs a GCD while Onslaught does not. This is covered in depth in “Manipulating your GCD” and “Fell Cleave vs Onslaught” under Optimization.

Q: Should I Upheaval on CD?

A: Almost always yes, some rare situations you want to delay it which is covered in the Optimization section.

Q: Is Unchained a DPS gain?

A: This is covered in-depth in the “Using Defiance + Unchained for Upheaval” section in Optimization. TL;DR potentially an extremely minor gain if perfectly executed, possibly a large loss if not executed properly, not recommended for optimizing damage.

Q: What GCD is best?

A: Current BiS lists are 2.37 and 2.38 GCD. If you’re lacking a lot of SkS pieces and have low SkS 2.43 is also good.

Q: What do I meld?

A: SkS until desired GCD, then Crit, then Det. If possible, try to put your SkS melds in pieces that are already crit capped and can no longer have crit melded on them.

Fight Specific Optimization and Tips

Most of these tips are a work in progress, and fairly incomplete. Major cooldown usage is dependant on yourself, your co-tank, and your group. Learn the fights and do what is best for your team. Refer to full strategy videos for timelines, group mechanics, and how to do the bulk of the fights. These tips are relegated to tanking and Warrior specifically, and are meant to be complementary to those guides.

Omega – Alphascape

O9S – Chaos

Auto attacks and tankbuster are physical, tankbuster always forces a swap. Tank tethers are magical.
Tanks and Healers will always have Headwind and be facing outwards from the center.
DO NOT use Inner Release when you have Headwind, it will prevent the debuff from resolving and knock you up later. You can still do IR during this phase if you’ve been using it as soon as its available since it will expire right before the knockback, if it was delayed at all or you want to play safe do not use it here.

O10S – Midgardsormr

Auto attacks are physical when on the ground and magical when in the air. Tail End is physical. Dragon add’s ice breath is magical.
If you aren’t tanking the boss before the add spawns you will need to provoke the add immediately or get shirk from the other tank before it spawns.
There is potentially several tank swaps depending on Time Immemorial debuffs and a guaranteed tank swap late in the fight where he doesn’t cast Time Immemorial.
You can barely squeeze in a 4-5 FC IR at the end of phase 1 if IR is used immediately off CD. Likely worth it to skip the buffer FC in opener but I haven’t cleared this fight enough times to know if the skip is necessary yet.

O11S – Omega

Auto attacks are physical, tankbusters are magical.
You can get Cover from PLD for Mustard Bombs without the OT tether so the main tank isn’t taking the DoT and autos at the same time.
Use Tank LB3 at around 60% of the cast bar during the phase transition.
Ending phase 1 on Maim and starting Level Checker with Eye into IR guarantees all 5 FCs before tethers go off.
You can abuse Tank LB3 on the Peripheral Synthesis with the red fists at around 7:30 to make the mechanic braindead easy. Have the entire party stack up and pop LB3 as soon as you see the fists spawn then run out.

O12S – Omega M+F

This fight is nearly entirely tank mechanics, so brace yourself and study up.
Male auto attacks are physical, Female auto attacks are magical. Sagittarius Arrow and Optimized Blade Dance are physical, Solar Ray and Meteor are magical.
Positioning of the bosses is incredibly important, make sure you’re constantly paying attention to where your boss is, where the giant eye is, and where you need to move your boss next.
Suppression is a straight line AoE from eye, Advanced Suppression is a frontal cone AoE from eye which comes close to hitting the middle. Make sure you and your boss are never positioned on the same half of the arena as the eye when the eye cleaves are coming, it’s ok to be directly at cardinals since the cone won’t reach.
Local Resonance will require the bosses to be on opposite ends of the arena, Remote Resonance will require the bosses to be grouped together. Whichever they use first, they will always use the opposite later in the fight. Make sure you react quickly if they have Remote Resonance and you will be the one moving, pop Sprint and don’t attempt to get any GCDs in while moving the boss.
Before Fundamental Synergy is casted, one of the bosses will need to be brought slightly further out than the other to avoid overlapping dashes. We have the tank who has Male move it further out while the Female stays directly at the cardinal. Make sure you move the boss away from the eye or you’ll get cleaved.
Both bosses should be brought together and placed at a cardinal that is adjacent to the giant eye during Sagittarius Arrow + Meteor. It’s also good to have them slightly away from the middle away from the eye so that the tank with Sagittarius Arrow can move down without being cleaved.
Ultimatum can be used to get aggro for tank swaps even if the other boss is immune since it doesn’t actually target the boss. You can also use Ultimatum and have the other tank Shirk to have both bosses at once, this is especially useful for the double Optimized Blade Dance. Make sure you provoke your boss back after Optimized Blade Dance.
Make sure you’re standing towards the middle for the start of each Sagittarius Arrow + Meteor so you can take the Meteor out as fast as possible. Pop sprint if you have Meteor.
Holmgang can be used near the start where M is swapping to F to nullify the knockback. I use it right when the liquid puddle turns into the female shape and it runs out right after it hits so I can still reposition immediately.

O12S – Final Omega

Auto attacks are physical, tankbusters are magical.
Cover can be abused heavily in this fight on Target Analysis. If you get targeted by the magic vuln you can get covered after and the PLD will barely take damage since he doesn’t have the vuln debuff.
During Archive All you can use Onslaught to immediately get to the hand you need to be on.
Save Sprint for before Oversampled Wave Cannon during Patch, there can be a lot of movement depending on which side the tankbuster is on and which tether you have.
Make use of stance dancing and use Inner Beast when cooldowns are low. I personally use Inner Beast on all of the Patch Oversampled Wave Cannons.
You can solo tank Target Analysis with Holmgang if you’re targeted by the vuln hit, try to do this when you and your co-tank are low on cooldowns. If the other tank is targeted and you’re both low on cooldowns, have them use their Invuln instead.

Credits

Ny Cro – Lodestone || FFLogs || Twitch || Discord – Nycro#6041
Feel free to message me for any questions on this guide, or things you’d like added.

Mox Xinmagar – entirety of part 4, Unchained Upheaval testing, reviewed the guide

Emiin Vanih – layout and several general sections of the guide that I left unchanged, helped with several calculations, reviewed the guide

Damelia Lhea – “rotation” picture

Berke – brought up the bug with Defiance + Upheaval being abnormal

The Balance – Tank Guide Trifecta

Emiin Vanih – Paladin Guide
Emiin Vanih – Dark Knight Guide

Again, thanks to The Balance Discord Server for all help maintaining and building this guide.

Change/Edit Log

3/13/18 – Created/Published.
10/3/18 – Changed gearing sections to 4.4 BiS sets.
10/8/18 – Removed outdated boss fight tips and added current ones. Also changed my character photo to a Lalafell.
10/11/18 – Added Memeheaval opener and explanations for when to use each opener.
10/17/18 – Added a section on XIV Analysis
10/28/18 – Various minor changes
1/24/19 – More dumb memeheaval math, UCOB/UWU BiS, and minor edits for clarification
2/8/19 – Fixed a minor issue with the standard MT opener and added more to both openers. Alternate UWU BiS added.
2/12/19 – Added Hydatos gear BiS if you actually want to do Eureka
2/20/19 – Added UWU sheet
3/14/19 – Fixed minor issue with memeheaval math.

FFXIV A Warrior's Way – An advanced guide to Warrior

alext96 — Sun, 25 Aug 2019 21:00:17 +0000

A Warrior’s Way

An advanced guide to Warrior
By Yuki Hellscythe

Last Updated: Guide out of date, new guide on the way soon. This one will be archived.

In this guide I will be talking a bit on how to play Warrior, and why it is played in this way. Warrior at first glance is a difficult class when compared to other tanks, but with a bit of understanding and practice, it can be the most potent tank both offensively and defensively in the game. With the help of the Balance Discord, I hope to be able to effectively teach you to play Warrior. I am Yuki Hellscythe of Leviathan and welcome to my guide, A Warrior’s Way.

Disclaimer

This guide is aimed at 8 man content and will either rarely or not at all mention situations that can be applicable for 4-man and 24-man content
Tooltips, basic skill potencies and basic tanking skills will not be addressed. Everyone skips those sections anyway and it’s just padding the guide. If you need tooltips, refer to: https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/jobguide/warrior/
Initialisms used throughout this guide:
1. GCD – Global Cooldown: Weapon Skills, Spells
2. oGCD – Abilities
3. IB – Inner Beast
4. BB Combo – Heavy Swing, Skull Sunder, Butcher’s Block – Threat combo
5. SP Combo – Heavy Swing, Maim, Storm’s Path – Damage combo +30 gauge
6. SE Combo – Heavy Swing, Maim, Storm’s Eye – Buff combo +20% damage for 30s
7. FC – Fell Cleave
8. IRzerk – Berserk paired with Inner release
9. Mildzerk – Berserk with no Inner release
10. All further initialisms will be explained when they appear.
Certain parts of this guide, notably the layout, format, Tenacity, and Raid Buffs section are credited to Emiin Vanih[Lamia]. Please go check out his Dark knight guide!
This guide will be continually updated until the end of 4.x and Stormblood

The tl;dr Basics/Faq – I need to be good. Now.

This is a Tl;dr to the guide. You can read the following for a relative idea of what to do, and look at the specific sections for explanations.

Avoid using Defiance if you’re not on progression. Inner Beast makes Warriors gods at tanking sustained damage but should be saved for progression purposes as the damage loss is pretty significant. Others learning the fight can also count as progression.
Use Berserk on cooldown, even if you are forced to Defiance, have no gauge, or on bad GCDs. Your goal is the hit Berserk every minute and line it up with Infuriate, Inner release, and raid buffs (Trick Attack, Chain Stratagem) as much as possible. Misaligning Berserk once means you’re misaligning for the rest of the fight. Berserk is used preferably on the GCD you hit Storm’s Eye, or the Heavy Swing after that.
Optimally, you want to start at 100 Beast Gauge before any Berserk(other than opener). At minimum, Mildzerk can start at 60 Beast Gauge and IRzerk can start at 80 Beast Gauge without issues to your rotation.
Infuriate is to be used alongside Berserk. The enhanced Infuriate trait is only taken advantage of after an opener, and should be ignored otherwise.
The opener uses 4 FCs instead of 6. It’s better for aligning with opener and future Raid buffs : http://ffxivrotations.com/1430 (Pulling with Ninja)
4 FC Mildzerk and 7 FC IRzerk is bad. Don’t do it.
Your general GCD rotation is to start with an SE Combo, Berserk rotation, SE Combo, 3x any combo (Preferably SP Combo), SE Combo, Berserk Rotation, Repeat. Rotation map.
Try very hard not to let your Beast gauge overcap. Using Upheaval on cooldown and 1 FC every 2 minutes will prevent capping. Using Onslaught to dump gauge should be reserved for faster builds (2.39 and under). Max gauge for higher crit rate won’t outweigh the damage gained from actually spending the gauge. You can use a BB combo instead of SP combo for extra potency if you can’t spend the gauge.
How to AoE – Do I Overpower or build gauge? (3+ targets)
1. Keep SE Combo buff up for +20% damage
2. If IRzerk (not Mildzerk) is coming up, build gauge and Decimate once both buffs are available
3. Save Infuriate and Gauge for Berserk use only
4. Using Overpower is better than building gauge if IRzerk is not available soon.
5. If you are forced into Defiance, building gauge is not worthwhile at all unless the healing/defensive aspects of IB or Steel Cyclone is needed.
Other tidbits
1. Warriors are the best tank to pull with in the game and loses almost no damage compared to the other two tanks. (Defiance is only used for Tomahawk + Equilibrium as opposed to a full combo)
2. Gauge should be spent in the following manner(more details later):
  Upheaval > Fell Cleave > Onslaught
3. Thrill of battle can and should be used with IRzerk to make Upheaval stronger
4. Onslaught generates 10x aggro (more than Tomahawk, less than Overpower) and can be used to help with adds
5. In most cases, try to Sprint rather than Onslaught unless a full GCD is gained.

Part 1: Defiance, Inner Beast, and other Defensive cooldowns.

Probably the most important job of any tank is how they map out their defensive cooldowns. It is important for not only the tank to find a way to handle every single tank buster that comes their way, but also any possible high sustaIned damage scenario. Below are some of the defensive options of a Warrior and how you can utilize them

Defiance and Tank stance

Note that Defiance, and Tank stance in general should be treated as a progression tool and only progression tool. There are almost no situations in the history of FF14 raiding where sitting in Defiance was the best way to handle a fight so try to avoid Defiance once you start to understand where cooldowns can be applied.

Defiance on paper will mitigate nearly the same amount of damage as Grit or Shield Oath. For an example, let’s compare a 1k damage hit on two tank stances at 1k hp followed by a 500 cure.

1000 x 0.8 (Grit) = 800
1000hp – 800 + 500(cure) = 700hp/1000hp = 70% HP

1000hp x 1.25 (Defiance) = 1250hp | 500(cure) x 1.2 (Defiance) = 600(cure)
1250hp – 1000 + 600(cure) = 850hp/1250hp = 68% HP

So Defiance by itself is nearly as strong as any other tank stance as long as you are being healed, at least on paper. Defiance is still a weaker tank stance than Grit/Shield oath due to the fact that healing received buffs are not affected by abilities such as Lustrate, Indomitability, or Assize, so the effectiveness of such abilities plummet once more gear is obtained and abilities start doing the majority of healing rather than hard casted Cures.

An advantage of Defiance is that the ability is on an oGCD unlike the other two tank stances. However because you are locked to Defiance for 10 seconds after switching, you are forced to lose 20% damage on 4 GCDs. So while the penalty is not as great as the other two tank stances where you lose a full GCD, it still exists and is the equivalent of losing 80% of a GCD at minimum.

Inner Beast

Inner Beast is an ability that is only available to you when in Defiance. Just like the tank stance itself, IB should be preferably used as a progression tool. IB is 350 potency and costs 175 raw potency upfront from the warrior in exchange for a FC, and will cost additional potency from being forced into tank stance for 10+ seconds. There is also the high possibility of losing FCs in Berserk, which can be up to an additional 157.5 potency loss.

In exchange for the enormous cost, IB gives a tremendous benefit. Using IB will give you both a 20% mitigation for 6s, and a self-heal to keep your hp up for the incoming hit. The ability to constantly mitigate, heal yourself, and fill gaps in between cooldowns makes Warrior the best tank to take sustained damage, regardless of the damage type.

A way to look at IB’s mitigation ability is to look at how it allows us to chain our cooldowns. For example:

Inner Beast (6 seconds)
Rampart (20 seconds)
Inner Beast (6 seconds)
Raw Intuition (20 seconds)
Inner Beast (6 seconds)
Thrill of battle + Convalescence (20 seconds)
Inner beast (6 seconds)
Vengeance ( 15 seconds)
Inner beast (6 seconds)
Rampart (20 seconds)
Inner beast (6 seconds)
Raw Intuition (20 seconds)
Inner beast (6 seconds)

This is 157 seconds of cooldowns that is equivalent to at least 20% mitigation. No other tank is capable of the constant, uninterrupted mitigation Warrior brings in progression, and this makes Warrior the undisputed king in this scenario.

Unchained

Unchained is another ability that is once again tied to Defiance. Unchained, just like tank stance, is considered a progression tool, and mostly used for aggro purposes. It also shares a cooldown with Inner Release, one of our strongest offensive cooldowns. To make matters worse, Unchained/Inner release lines up perfectly with Berserk, meaning any damage you lose from not using Inner release is boosted by Berserk. For example we will take a look at how much damage we lose from using Unchained instead of Inner Release in a rotation:

Unchained w/all relevant buffs:

HS (257.4) + Maim ( 326.04) + Storm’s Path (463.32) + HS (257.4) + Skull Sunder ( 343.2) + Butcher’s Block (480.48) + Upheaval (1206.56) + Fell Cleave (900.9) + Fell Cleave (900.9) + Fell Cleave (900.9) = 6037.1 Potency

Inner Release w/all relevant buffs:

HS (270.27) + Maim (342.34) + Storm’s Path (486.49) + Fell Cleave (900.9) + Fell Cleave (900.9) + Fell Cleave (900.9) + Fell Cleave (900.9) + Fell Cleave (900.9) + Fell Cleave (900.9) + Upheaval (648.65) + Onslaught (180.18) + Onslaught (180.18) = 7513.51 Potency

Calculations are done with Slashing, Storm’s Eye, Berserk, Deliverance buffs. Upheaval done swith Thrill of Battle, Unchained, and Defiance.

So Inner release is roughly a 1480.62 potency gain, or 24.4% extra damage. You give up +24.4% damage over 20 seconds in exchange for 20s of +25% HP, +20% healing and increased aggro. +25% damage in exchange for what is essentially the same as Thrill of battle + Convalescence is understandably undesirable.

In short, Unchained is an ability that should not be used in place of Inner Release unless high aggro generation and Inner beast usage is greatly desired, which can be a majority of progression situations.

~~Note that Unchained may or may not be currently bugged, and will increase the damage of Upheaval by 25%, or the same amount that Defiance would have reduced.~~ Not a bug

Holmgang

Holmgang deserves a mention in the guide as it is likely the best defensive cooldown in the game. Although the immediate effects are not as strong as the other two invulnerability skills, the short cooldown of Holmgang (180s) allows you to use it multiple times per fight. By abusing Holmgang’s short cooldown, a Warrior is allowed to use their cooldowns more creatively, stacking extra options for tank busters, or giving yourself extra mitigation for heavy raid wide damage where healers are too busy with the party to single target the tank.

Cross Role Actions

As Tank, our Cross Role choices are actually fairly limited. There are four high priority options:

Rampart – 20% mitigation for 20 seconds – necessary for obvious reasons
Provoke – Gives the player 1 point of aggro higher than the current highest player – Obvious for Tank swaps. Accidental deaths can also happen and can be used to recover. Even with no Tank swaps or deaths, it can be utilized to give free aggro when utilized with Shirk and therefore damage.
Shirk – Gives the target 25% of your aggro – Even with no tank swaps, gives free aggro when utilized with Provoke and therefore necessary.
Reprisal – Boss deals 10% less damage for 6 seconds – flexible, short cooldown, and can be used for mitigation on tank busters and raid wide aoe. Can even be used on adds.

The final slot has few key choices for us to take depending on the fight:

Awareness – Prevents receiving critical hits – Some bosses have high critical hit rate mechanics (O3s, A3s, A7s), and the ability pairs extremely well with Raw Intuition
Convalescence – Increases healing received by 20% – Good for 1 HP mechanics and Holmgang abuse. Not great as a general cooldown since it doesn’t affect healing abilities or let you live tank busters.
Anticipation – Increases Parry rate by 30% – has a high uptime (25s/60s), good for bosses that auto attack constantly although overlaps badly with Raw Intuition

And then we have some extremely situational choices:

Ultimatum – AoE provoke – Currently worthless outside of dungeons and even then it is questionable. Boss mechanics in FF14 have been designed around a single-target Provoke so it is currently unnecessary. Unknown if this ability will be useful in the future or not. Currently has some use in UCoB as a backup provoke or solo tanking adds.
Low Blow – 5s Single target stun – Raid bosses occasionally have mechanics that require you to stun them. Pld/Drg/Mnk all carry natural stuns however while other melee tend to have available slots for a stun. May be useful if long chain stuns are required
Interject – 1s Single target Silence – Same reasoning as Low blows, silence mechanics happen only occasionally and there are jobs with natural silences (Mnk/Nin) or have available slots (Brd/Mch)

General tips

Mapping your cooldowns is probably the most defining part of playing a tank. It is important to look at each specific fight and find the most efficient way to mitigate incoming damage on each situation. Remember that raiding is a group effort, and the goal is to mitigate properly so neither the tank, nor the healer comes out on the bottom from dps. Any monkey can hold hate on a boss and survive with tank stance, you should aim to do better.
Don’t always be the Main Tank. Don’t always be the Off tank either. When I refer to MT/OT I only mean who is currently tanking at the moment. Designating a single tank to handle the entirety of a fight is stupid. Utilize tank swaps for more cooldown options rather than just dealing with tank swap mechanics. If you sit there as an OT for an entire fight never using any of your cooldowns, then thats a lot of wasted mitigation that could’ve helped your healers do more damage. Tank swaps also give you an excellent reason to use Shirk more for better aggro control.
Your DPS have mitigation abilities as well. All Melees have Feint (-10% phys), Ranged have Palisade(-20% phys), Bards have Nature’s Minne(+20% healing)/Troubadour(variable 10/15% buffs), Machinist has Dismantle (-10%), Casters have Addle(-10% magic) and Apocatastasis(-20% magic). Don’t be afraid to ask for mitigation options from your dps.
Uptime is the key to high dps. Just like any job, constantly hitting the boss is the key to doing good dps. This is especially pronounced on Warrior as it is very obvious when you find yourself not having enough gauge when you’re about to Berserk. Hit the boss, deal damage, get orange FFlogs, easy game.

Part 2: Berserk

The Warrior in effect, revolves around the ability Berserk. Learning to play a Warrior is the same as learning to use Berserk. Berserk is a +30% attack power for 20s every 60s, and as a result, is responsible for the majority of a Warrior’s damage.

Playing Warrior at a high level revolves around getting as much damage as possible out of Berserk. Your goal as a Warrior is to hit Berserk every minute, on the minute, so you not only get the maximum possible Berserk uses out, but also to line up with Raid buffs that happen on minute intervals.

Note that Berserk is best used on the GCD that you use a Storm’s Eye, or the Heavy Swing after a Storm’s eye.

Inner Release and Mildzerk

As a Warrior, you have two types of Berserk that we call “IRzerk” and “Mildzerk”. IRzerk is the Berserk you pair with Inner Release, and Mildzerk is the one one without an Inner Release to go with.

Your IRzerk will look something like this starting at 80-100 gauge: http://ffxivrotations.com/143b

Alternative IRzerk example: http://ffxivrotations.com/14hw

You do not necessarily need to follow this exact way of execution. The idea is to have Berserk, Inner Release, Infuriate, and Thrill of Battle to all be up at the same time. Onslaught early so it can be used a second time in the rotation, Fell Cleave 6 times total and Upheaval whenever convenient. Try to get Upheaval and 4 FCs into Trick Attack, but do not FC more than 3 times in a row if you are still in the middle of a combo or it will likely break. Start Berserk after a Storm’s Eye combo, and follow the end of Berserk with a Storm’s Eye combo. Each 10 Gauge lost is a loss of an Onslaught until under 80 gauge which you should try your best to avoid.

Your Mildzerk should look something like this starting at 100 gauge: http://ffxivrotations.com/14gv

Again, you do not necessarily need to follow this exact way of execution. The idea is for you to have 2 combos, 3 FC’s, and an Upheaval in your Mildzerk. You can add an Onslaught as well if you’re skipping the naked Fell Cleave later on. Start Berserk at the end of a Storm’s eye combo, and the combo after Berserk should be another Storm’s Eye combo. It is possible to execute Mildzerk with only 60 gauge as long as both combos are Storm’s Path, just be aware of how it affects your next Berserk and Rotation.

4 and 7 Fell Cleaves or Upheaval for our Berserks?

This is a pretty common question that many people ask, and can be easily solved through a little math. Let’s start by comparing 7 Fell Cleaves to the standard IRzerk. Remember that using 7 Fell Cleaves means we can not use Upheaval or Onslaughts. Note that all the calculations in this section will be done with Berserk potencies:

7 FC vs. 6 FC + Upheaval:
5148 7 FC potency
Vs.
5343 6 FC + Upheaval potency

So this is pretty simple to grasp. You can spend 25 gauge on Fell Cleave which is 500 raw potency, or you can spend 30 gauge on Upheaval + 2 Onslaughts which is also raw 500 potency. The difference between the two is that Upheaval and Onslaughts are oGCD while Fell Cleave is GCD, meaning you have to give up a GCD, specifically Heavy swing during Berserk for that extra Fell Cleave. Upheaval also has the virtue of being able to go into Trick Attack windows and being buffed by other factors such as Thrill of Battle, so the 7 FC option is clearly worse.

Now let’s compare 4 FCs and 3 FCs + Upheaval:

4 FC vs. 3 FC + Upheaval
3991 4 FC potency
Vs.
3926 3 FC + Upheaval potency

In this case, the 4 FC option was actually superior!… or is it? Because you don’t hit Upheaval in the Mildzerk, you can’t hit Upheaval on any Berserk anymore at all without losing a usage due to the misalignment. What seems to be a 65 potency gain ends up to being a 130 potency loss. The difference then gets larger when we consider that 4 FCs will leave us with 0 gauge while 3 FCs + Upheaval will leave us with 40. With this extra gauge, we could have gained either 2 Onslaughts (+260 potency) or an unbuffed Fell Cleave later down the rotation (+350 potency).

It is then apparent that even though 4 FCs will do more damage within the Berserk window itself, it will cause a damage loss further down into the Warrior’s rotation and should be avoided.

Berserk and 9 GCDs

A fresh Warrior player may have issues with hitting the 9 GCDs of Berserk consistently. There are two factors to hitting the 9 GCD Berserk: Skill Speed, and Activation delay.

The GCD that you need to be at to consistently hit a 9 GCD Berserk is 2.44, or 715+ Skill Speed. As our gear choices are loaded with Skill Speed it is generally not an issue hitting this amount.

In order to do a 9 GCD Berserk effectively, you want to hit Berserk at the last possible moment before your GCD comes up. The timing which you want to hit Berserk is illustrated in the following picture:

Waiting until your GCD is about 2/3rds of the way and then using Berserk will help ensure you get the last GCD needed for a 9-hit Berserk. This is important as there will often be cases where that last hit is a Fell Cleave, and losing a Berserk hit on Fell Cleave is quite a large damage loss.

Although 2.44 GCD is the minimum that we need for a 9 hit Berserk, this does not mean you have to use that specific amount of Skill speed. A lot of players will opt for higher Skill speed amounts due to latency, or just comfort. Play at the GCD that feels good to you, regardless of what the BiS might suggest for Skill speed.

Raid Buffs

Your goal for optimal raid buff usage is to have the majority of Berserk within as many raid buffs as possible. As Berserk is on a minute cooldown, you will be able to take easily take advantage of every raid buff excluding Brotherhood. Inner Release being on a 2 minute cooldown will often miss the 3 minute buffs unfortunately. A Warrior’s damage is almost entirely defined by their Berserk windows, and how you handle raid buff usage can easily move you up several FFlogs rankings! The list below are most of the raid buffs in the game that you can take advantage of with Berserk in no particular order.

Balance(AST) – 5% damage AoE, 10% personal, 15% full buffed – 30-60s duration
Spear(AST) – 5% Crit rate AoE, 10% personal, 15% buffed – 20-40s duration
Chain Stratagem(SCH) – 15% Crit rate on target, 15s duration, 2m CD
Trick Attack(NIN) – 10% damage, 10s duration, 60s CD
Brotherhood(MNK) – 5% damage, 15s duration, 90s CD
Battle Litany(DRG) – 15% Crit rate, 20s duration, 3m CD
Embolden(RDM) – 10% physical damage (drops by 2% every 4s), 20s duration, 2m CD
Hypercharge(MCH) – 5% damage, 27-30s duration, 2m CD
Foe Requiem(BRD) – 3% damage, 15-20~s duration, CD dependant on mana
Battle Voice(BRD) – 15% DH rate, 20s duration, 3m CD
Song buff(BRD) – 2% Crit rate, constant.
Radiant Shield(SMN) – 2% damage, 20-24s duration, 60s CD

In a regular fight, you should expect to use raid buffs and Berserk on these intervals:

Opener (11s-15s) – Openers, and the reason we use the 4 FC opener rather than 6 is designed to take advantage of raid buffs.
(60s) Trick Attack window – Flat 10% increase 10s, every minute. This should be your main focus when looking to align with raid buffs. Always attempt to Berserk here
(90s) Brotherhood – Upheaval should hit every Brotherhood, a Fell Cleave can fit here
(2m) “Second” opener – Trick, Embolden, and Stratagem will be active for this window. IRzerk is abused here
(3m) – Trick, Battle Voice, Battle Litany, Brotherhood. IRzerk can be held once for one of the 3 minute alignments if the fight will end on an odd numbered minute
Repeat ad infinitum

If you are ever forced to Defiance during a Berserk window, simply hit Berserk as per usual. The misalignment of raid buffs will lose a lot more damage than using Berserk in Defiance would.

Trick Attack Optimization

Trick Attack lines up with most cooldown windows, has the largest consistent damage increase, and is the most regularly applied buff to focus on for maximizing damage output.

Trick attack has a 10 second duration, meaning that we can land at least Four GCDs within its window.
Berserk shares the same cooldown as Trick Attack – Hitting them together will improve damage output to 1.43x during the window
For Mildzerk, you want at least 2 FCs and Upheaval during this window
For IRzerk, you will want to use 4 FCs + Upheaval
The easiest way to time Trick Attack with Fell Cleaves is to wait until you see the debuff before using Infuriate for the extra Fell Cleave(s)
Always take 2 FCs + Upheaval over 3 FCs, otherwise Upheaval will not fit into Trick Attack again in future Berserks barring some mistake from the Ninja or mechanic/fight related delays

Part 3: Rotation and other specifics

The Warrior rotation and Gauge has been a heavy topic of discussion since Stormblood due to the increase in difficulty. Here we will talk about the Warrior rotation, and how to keep track of or simplify it.

Openers

1. First let’s take a look at the openers (Potion potencies not included in total)
Warrior pulling with Ninja: http://ffxivrotations.com/1430 8366.74 Potency:
Warrior pulling without Ninja/DPS don’t diversion : http://ffxivrotations.com/1434
8222.6 Potency:
Warrior OT(Tomahawk optional) : http://ffxivrotations.com/14hh – 8399.24 Potency:

Heavy Aggro Unchained opener (Neo Exdeath, no NIN + WHM) : http://ffxivrotations.com/1435
6959.63 Potency

So there are a few observations we can make with all the openers:

1. Equilibrium on pull

Equilibrium counts as a casted heal ability and will actually generate aggro based on how much it heals. The amount of aggro generated is also boosted by Defiance and it’s purpose is to allow you to start with a SE combo and very often straight up ignore BB combos

2. There are only 4 Fell Cleaves, not 6

Building up to 6 Fell cleaves before IRzerk would indeed make it stronger, however, you must delay your opener by 22 seconds in order to make it possible (+3 combos). By delaying your opener for 22 seconds, all of your Berserks will not line up with opening raid buffs nor will they ever line up with raid buffs properly again excluding mistakes from others or holding buffs for burst windows. You will never again have Berserk at the same time as Trick Attack, Battle Litany, Chain Stratagem, Embolden, Battle Voice, any raid wide cooldown that come at minute intervals. They will all end right as Berserk comes up again, which is a far larger damage loss than the 2 Fell cleaves.

3. They’re actually all the same

With the exception of the Unchained opener, both the MT and OT openers are the same post Tomahawk. Even with the no ninja opener, there is only an Onslaught lost. This is thanks to Onslaught and Equilibrium giving us so much aggro that we can straight up ignore BB Combo in many situations, and this is the reason why Warriors are so much more desirable for pulling the boss.

4. Infuriate is used extremely early

This is the one time that we take advantage of the Enhanced Infuriate trait. By hitting Infuriate early, we can use Infuriate again when it’s off cooldown thanks to the trait allowing us to have an extra fell cleave in the first minute of the fight. Generally when Infuriate is up and Berserk is 28s+ away you may hit it for an extra Fell cleave. You are required to hit 4 Fell Cleaves in the opener for this to work.

5. The placement of abilities are to take advantage of Raid buffs

Trick Attack fits exactly in the window where 3 FC’s, Upheaval, Onslaught, and Storm’s Path all land. All other raid buffs should fit into this exact window as well.

Rotation explained

With all the openers, we end on a SE combo and 20 Gauge. Thanks to the infuriate trait, we can use it once in order to receive a free FC. After this you have approximately 4 combos depending on Skill Speed before the next Berserk comes up.

2. For these 4 combos post the opener, we will be doing:
2x SP combo > BB Combo > SE Combo = +100 Beast Gauge
Including the 20 gauge from the opener, we now have a total of 120 gauge, 20 of which we will spend on Upheaval.

3. So now the Mildzerk rotation should look like this starting at 100 Gauge: http://ffxivrotations.com/143a

At the end of the Mildzerk, we once again start our rotation after an SE Combo, but with 60 gauge this time. We now have another 30 seconds before the next Berserk, this time with IR.

4. With our 4 Combos post Mildzerk, we will be doing:
3x SP Combo > SE Combo = +110 Beast Gauge
Including 60 Gauge from the opener, we now have 170 Beast Gauge. We then spend 20 on Upheaval once again, and 50 on FC.

5. So now we once again start our Berserk, this time with Inner Release with 100 Gauge and at the end of an SE combo: http://ffxivrotations.com/143b (Alternative: http://ffxivrotations.com/14hw)

Note that although the GCD usage is flexible, your combo will break if you hit more than 4 FCs in a row. We once again end our Berserk with 20 Gauge. At this point, you may continue again from the opener without the extra Infuriate, and the rotation repeats.

Rotation Tl;dr

1. Opener: http://ffxivrotations.com/1430
2. Do 4 Combos + Fell Cleave (Infuriate) + Upheaval
3. Mildzerk: http://ffxivrotations.com/143a
4. Do 4 Combos + Fell Cleave + Upheaval
5. IRzerk: http://ffxivrotations.com/143b
6. Do 4 Combos + Upheaval
7. Repeat from 3. Mildzerk
Warrior Rotation map over 3 minutes (2.43 GCD)

Rotation Visualized:

100 Gauge and Deliverance

It should be noted that Deliverance will give you 0.1% increased critical chance per point of gauge. This critical hit chance is one of the reasons why we prefer starting at 100 rage at the beginning of each Berserk. The increased Critical hit chance will be applied onto the ability/GCD that we spend the gauge on. Please note that staying at 100 gauge and overcapping is ALWAYS a damage loss.

Gauge usage, Onslaught or Fell Cleave

Upheaval is very clearly the best Gauge spender, but one of the questions that is often asked is whether you should dump gauge into Fell Cleave or Onslaught. Here I will explain when to pick Fell Cleave or Onslaught as your gauge spender and why.

To begin, a lot of people mistakenly compare Fell Cleave to Onslaught + a GCD, using the following calculation:

60 Gauge comparison
500 Fell Cleave potency
vs.
503 Onslaught Potency (3 x 100 potency + 203 potency (average GCD potency))

On paper this makes sense. You gain a GCD by not using a Fell Cleave, so you add the average GCD gained to the total of the onslaught potency. However, this is the incorrect way to look at it.

At 2.43s GCD, you are allowed to use approximately 49 GCDs (actual number is 49.3) every 2 minutes. Assuming 9 Fell Cleaves every 2 minutes (spent in Berserk), you now have 40 GCDs left to spend and build Gauge. This is 13 combos + 1 GCD.

In 13 combos (9 SP combos, 4 SE combos) you will generate +350 Gauge = 350 Gauge
You will gain 2 Infuriates over 2 minutes +100 Gauge = 450 Gauge
You will use 9 Fell Cleaves over 2 minutes (6 are half cost) -300 Gauge = 150 Gauge
You will use 4 Upheavals in over 2 minutes (1 is half cost) – 70 Gauge = 80 Gauge
You will use 2 Onslaughts during IRzerk – 20 Gauge = 60 Gauge

With 60 Gauge leftover, we have the choice of either spending it on 3 onslaughts, or 1 Fell Cleave. If we spend it on Fell Cleave, then our rotation is complete. We use exactly 49 Gcds before our next Inner Release. Everything repeats at the same GCD, same time, and all buffs are aligned.

If we choose to spend our Gauge on Onslaught however, we run into the issue of having an extra GCD with nowhere to go. Our choice then becomes:

Delay Berserk by 2 GCDs to finish a combo
Heavy Swing twice so Berserk and Inner Release stay aligned

Delaying Berserk by 2 GCDs is the incorrect choice. Each time you delay Berserk, you stray further and further away from raid buffs, and the damage loss after delaying your Berserk twice will be much worse than simply Heavy Swinging twice.

So in an effort to prevent Berserk from misaligning with raid buffs, we can no longer use the average potency of a combo to compare with on the Onslaught option. Instead we have to compare it as such:

60 Gauge comparison (Heavy Swing)
500 Fell Cleave potency
vs.
450 Onslaught Potency (3 x 100 potency + 150 potency Heavy Swing)

If we optimise it slightly by using 1 of the Onslaughts in Mildzerk, and a BB combo to avoid overcapping, the result then becomes :

True 60 Gauge comparison (BB combo and Mildzerk Onslaught)
520 Fell Cleave potency (+20 potency from BB combo)
vs.
480 Onslaught Potency (100 potency x2 + 130 Potency (Mildzerk) + 150 Heavy Swing potency)

So even if we optimise a little bit, Fell Cleave still wins out, on top of being much easier to execute.

At 2.43s GCD, Fell Cleave is always the superior option

What happens if we have a slightly faster GCD at 2.38s, where we gain 2 full GCDs over 2 minutes rather than just 1?

We then encounter these 3 choices:

Fell Cleave and Heavy Swing twice
Onslaught, Heavy Swing, Maim, then Heavy swing to avoid delaying Berserk
Onslaught, Finish a SE combo and delay Berserk for 1 GCD

Assuming we don’t want to delay Berserk for the same reasons as above, let’s compare the first 2 options.

60 Gauge comparison (2.38s GCD)
670 Fell Cleave potency (+150 Heavy Swing, +20 BB combo)
vs.
670 Onslaught Potency (100 potency x2 + 130 Potency + 340 potency (Heavy swing + Maim))

In this case, we have both options at the same potencies after optimisations… at first glance. Unfortunately, there is a small loss to using the Onslaught option. Storm’s eye buff will fall off right before the next Storm’s eye application, resulting in a -54 potency loss. The Fell Cleave option does not suffer from this issue as it is placed elsewhere, while in the Onslaught option you are forced to: Storm’s Eye -> Heavy swing – > Maim -> Berserk -> Heavy Swing. The comparison then ends up as:

True 60 Gauge comparison (2.38s GCD with Eye loss)
670 Fell Cleave potency (+150 Heavy Swing, +20 BB combo)
vs.
616 Onslaught Potency (100 potency x 2 + 130 Potency +340 potency (Heavy swing + Maim) – 54 Potency (Eye buff loss))

So even at 2.38s GCD, the better option is still to Fell Cleave if you don’t want to delay Berserk.

A 1 GCD delay every 2 minutes however, is actually probably going to be inconsequential most of the times. A fight would have to be mostly uninterrupted by mechanics, and likely needs to be over 8 minutes long before the delay becomes significant. Smart placement of Berserk can also help alleviate this issue. Finishing your combo is going to be superior for damage no matter what, as long as you understand where raid buffs are placed and how delaying Berserk will affect you. We’ll do a final comparison with a finished combo:

Combo finished comparison (2.38s GCD)
670 Fell Cleave potency (+150 Heavy Swing, +20 BB combo)
Vs.
836 Onslaught Potency (100 potency x 3 + 130 potency + 203 x 2 average potency combo)

And we see that Onslaught potency has finally become king! Because we actually finish a combo, we can use the average combo potency as a comparison point instead of just Heavy swing. We also gain a full Onslaught from the finished combo. However, be aware that missing a GCD where you have both raid buffs and Berserk will be without a doubt, a DPS loss, consider your team when you consider which option to take.

So at 2.38 GCD, your options are to Fell Cleave and Heavy Swing twice, or finish an extra combo, Onslaught 4 times and delay IRzerk by 1 GCD. Pick the one that aligns best with your raid group.

Remember that the goal is always to align Berserk with raid buffs. Your decision around whether to delay Berserk by however many GCDs will always revolve around when raid buffs will begin and when raid buffs will end.

Gauge Tl;dr

1. Hit Upheaval on Cooldown
2. You get 1 extra GCD and enough gauge to FC somewhere every 2 minutes at 2.43 GCD
3. We don’t like spending Gauge on Onslaught to avoid delaying Berserk.
4. Things get really weird at 2.38 and using FC or Onslaught is up to the player
5. If you take the FC option at 2.38, you have to Heavy swing twice in a row before Berserk. If you take the Onslaught option, you have to delay IRzerk by 1 GCD to finish a combo
6. Pick that option that lets you stay aligned with the rest of your team
7. Double Heavy swing is a viable option. Breaking a combo after Maim is not.

When everything goes to shit

Sometimes mechanics don’t allow you to finish your combos. Sometimes you’re forced to spend gauge on Onslaught everywhere. Sometimes you walk off the edge of the arena because your controller disconnected. In these cases your rotation has become a mess and nothing makes sense anymore. Learning to adjust to these situations is the key to not only making you a better Warrior, but a better player. The following is a list of a couple of ways you can help keep your damage up even when things look bleak.

Keep Storm’s Eye up as much as possible

Sounds simple but sometimes it can cause a lot of headache. Sometimes a mechanic can delay you in finishing a combo. Sometimes there will be an add that spawns that you need to pick up with a Butcher’s Block. It is important to look at these situations ahead of time and try to prevent Storm’s Eye from falling off. Sometimes you have to skip a combo and go Eye > Path > Path > Eye. Prioritize keeping the Storm’s Eye buff and clip it if you need to. 60/80 gauge is the secondary priority for building up to Berserk in comparison.

You can use the Berserk cooldown as a way to track how many combos you have left until the next activation

You can use multiples of 7.5 (or less if you’re sanic) to keep track of how many combos you have left until your next Berserk. For example, a Berserk with 15 seconds left on the timer means you have two combos to use. That means you can generate up to 50 gauge for a Fell Cleave, or 40 Gauge for an Upheaval and Onslaught. Remember to account for Upheaval!

If you miss a Berserk window, it might be better to simply hold the buff until the next set of raid buffs are happening.

Sometimes you might end up dying because of unfortunate accidents and you couldn’t hit Berserk on time. When you raise you now have 0 gauge and a misaligned Berserk. In these situations consider just holding off on Berserk until the next window you were supposed to use it. This way you regenerate the gauge you’ve lost and can continue to align with raid buffs. Also consider simply re-doing your opener with 4 FCs. That is also an option if you are scrambling to fit it into the ongoing raid buffs as you raise. If something like a mechanic screwed up your ability to Berserk, that means it likely screwed it up for everyone else. Pay attention to when everyone else uses their raid buffs and act accordingly.

Consider using Butcher’s Block or Storm’s Eye during IRzerk if you need aggro during or immediately after the window

Sometimes you’re in the middle of an IRzerk when you’re about to need aggro (I’m looking at you Apanda and Grand Cross Delta). These situations can suck but Warriors aren’t completely bound by their rotation. In cases where you are at 90+ gauge, you do not need to use a Storm’s path for 6 FCs and an Upheaval.

The biggest goal is to have 100 Gauge and hit Upheaval by beginning of the next IRzerk. There are a couple ways to achieve that based on how you end your Mildzerk.

The following section is credited to Damelia Lhea[Gilgamesh] on the Balance Discord for his excellent write-up. The following is a scenario of what to do when you Mildzerk at what gauge start amount and end amount

a. Start at 100, end at 40: Best case scenario is generating 130 for 170 total Rage; 70 of this can be expended outside of Berserk. 20 is reserved for Upheaval, leaving 50 for a Fell Cleave.

b. Start at 90, end at 30: Best case scenario is generating 130 for 160 total Rage; 60 can be expended outside of Berserk. 20 is reserved for Upheaval, leaving 40 for 2 Onslaughts. Consider that we basically have 2 Onslaughts in our pocket for the entirety of this 60s Berserk-windup sequence. Move 1 into Berserk.

c. Start at 80, end at 20: Best case scenario is generating 120 for 140 total Rage; 40 can be expended outside of Berserk. 20 is reserved for Upheaval, leaving 20 for an Onslaught.

d. Start at 70, end at 10: Best case scenario is generating 130 for 140 total Rage; 40 can be expended outside of Berserk. 20 is reserved for Upheaval, leaving 20 for an Onslaught.

e. Start at 60, end at 0: Best case scenario is generating 120 for 120 total Rage; 20 can be expended outside of Berserk. 20 is reserved for Upheaval.

So basically, there are two cases: either you generate 130 (3 Path) out of Berserk or you generate 120 (2 Path) out of Berserk.

Enhanced Infuriate

With Stormblood came the Enhanced Infuriate trait which reduces the cooldown of Infuriate every time we use a 50 cost gauge spender. The conditions for taking advantage of the Enhanced Infuriate trait for a free Fell Cleave requires Berserk to be at least 28s+ away from the next activation the moment you hit Infuriate. Unfortunately in a proper rotation, this doesn’t happen and we will only be taking advantage of this trait once every fight regardless of length. Otherwise, Infuriate should always be used during Berserk.

Upheaval

Upheaval is your most efficient gauge spender and should be used on cooldown. It is 3x stronger than Onslaught for the same cost, and nearly as strong as Fell cleave when you consider the fact that you gain a GCD from using Upheaval over Fell Cleave.

Upheaval decreases in damage as your hp goes lower. In most cases you should ignore this mechanic and simply hit Upheaval as it comes up. At worst Upheaval will be 100 potency at anywhere under 33% HP, which is the same as an Onslaught.

Upheaval will increase in damage as your max hp increases. This mechanic only works with Defiance and Thrill of Battle, and will increase the damage by the same % amount that your hp increases (Defiance +25% HP, Upheaval +25% potency). Note that Unchained will increase the damage of Upheaval by another 25%, and Defiance will also add another +25% damage on top of the HP increase. It is unknown if these interactions are a bug or not.

Equilibrium

It would probably not be an understatement to say that Equilibrium is amongst the best skills in the game. The ability to generate aggro and give Warriors the ability to pull without being in tank stance for more than 1 GCD is absolutely amazing to say the least. Thanks to this ability, both tanks can enjoy next to 0 dps loss in the opener.

The TP restoration aspect of Equilibrium is pretty limited in usage. Warriors are already enjoying a TP positive rotation. Along with the easily spammable Tactician and the lack of TP consumption from Sprint, most Warriors will find little use in Deliverance Equilibrium outside of dungeons or failing mechanics that will consume TP.

The HP restoration aspect of Equilibrium is actually quite powerful, although it requires you to be in Tank stance which is unfortunate. As you are forced into tank stance, it is extremely rare that the self-heal from Equilibrium worth the damage loss from the Warrior as opposed to simply committing resources from your healer. It can be quite a good ability for progression however, and is excellent for providing heals after tank busters or clutch situations where your healer may have died.

Shake it Off

Warriors received an incredibly useful party mitigation tool in the form of Shake it Off in patch 4.1. The Shake it off shield is based on the receiver’s HP, starts at a base 8% and will increase by 4% for each defensive buff you remove with this skill. You do not need to have any buffs to remove in order to use this skill. This shield will also apply on the Warrior.

Shake it Off ends up being quite useful since many bosses in this fight follow up tank busters with raid wide abilities which you can then mitigate with Shake it Off. Raw Intuition, which shares a cooldown with Shake it Off, and Thrill of Battle, which is primarily used for Upheaval, are prime candidates for usage with Shake it Off. Vengeance can be used to improve Shake it Off’s shield, but as Vengeance itself is an extremely powerful cooldown, you should wait until the duration is almost over before using Shake it Off.

Part 4.0: Stats and Sets

These gear sets are compiled using both the Statistic Intervals Sheet created by Nemekh, and the Gear Stats Calculator by Mike Matrix.

BiS Sets

2.44 GCD Genji Legs BiS Gearset created by Voxfall Valerie [Ragnarok]

Meld 2x Quickarm V for 2.44 in one of the accessory overmelds. This is the standard set for Tanks and can be used if you plan to play other tanks who don’t like Crit or Skill Speed quite as much.

2.38 GCD Crit Focus BiS Gearset created by Damelia Lhea [Gilgamesh]

As with the above set, this set is also melded for 1x Quickarm V for 2.38 on one of the accessory overmelds. Has much better distribution of stats, including Crit/Sks and is the set that I personally use. 2.38s GCD can be more difficult to play with though.

2.38 GCD Genji belt+Necklace

Slightly better Crit for less Direct Hit. An option for those who want to save a little bit of money on Pentamelds and Tomes for gear or got lucky with drops.

2.38 GCD no Crafted
2.43 GCD no Crafted

For those of us that have no money. These sets will do less damage due to the lack of Direct Hit, but sometimes we don’t have much choice.

Stats, and Reasoning

Currently (4.0), we regard stats in the following manner –

DH > CRIT > DET > TEN > SKS

Why Direct Hit? – Unfortunately Tank gear contains no DH, and we are forced to meld it if we want to utilize it. The reasoning for this relatively simple. In SB, most of the stats are fairly equal, and stacking a single stat for damage output will not work as well as before. Instead, having an equal distribution of stats will often be better for damage output and unlocking DH as an extra multiplier for us will increase our damage quite a lot.

Why no Tenacity stacking gear? – Tenacity is an inefficient stat for what it is – 217 points for 1% DMG, and mitigation. A gearset with full Tenacity, melded, at the moment is somewhere in the ballpark of only 8% added mitigation (364 is considered 0% for all intents and purposes). However, the overall cost sacrifices much of our personal DPS, and does not noticeably increase healer DPS in exchange.

Tenacity is currently regarded as a progression stat, in a similar vein to Tank stance usage – helpful on occasion, but not enough to warrant future use. Most discussions revolve around a simple statement – Tenacity is fine on gear, but awful melded. Don’t go out of your way looking for it.

Skill Speed is actually the worst stat – With Stormblood came a much needed buff towards Skill Speed. Unfortunately for Warriors, we can’t really make use of this buff. As outlined in the gauge section, we have 2 desireable GCD breakpoints for Warrior: 2.43(-2.44) and 2.38(-2.39). Any GCD that is more or less than these breakpoints will do absolutely nothing for you. You must always align your rotation to the cooldowns of Berserk and Inner Release and thus the standard Skill speed breakpoints are often not a gain until you receive a full GCD every 2 minutes.

There is an additional breakpoint for Warriors are 2.33(-2.34) but the current choice of gear does not allow us to use that GCD in any meaningful way.

Fight Specific Optimization and Tips

Trials

Susano

First Phase Assail timing for CD usage
1. After 3rd auto – Vengeance
2. 2nd auto after the first stack mechanic – Rampart + Raw Intuition
3. 3rd ish auto after the 2nd stack mechanic – yell at dps to do more damage
2nd phase – Tank swaps happen once a minute. One cast of Ukehi per tank swap. Both tanks having Shirk is a must. Reprisal on both tanks will have the debuff for each tank buster, and each Ukehi.
Liberal use of Holmgang on Tankbusters allows you to use cooldowns during parts where you must go back and forth the arena which is otherwise more difficult to heal due to possible Healer stuns

Lakshmi

You could probably 6 cleave opener this fight depending on dps
All busters, including the 2nd threat cleave, are magical. You can Holmgang the Vril busters instead and use your Vril for a different tank buster as a better cooldown and heal.

Shinryu

Aggro generated on the Worm’s Heart is added onto the boss, so feel free to hammer it
Make sure Infuriate is used after the Heavy swing in your opener, even if it delays you going into Deliverance.
If you Holmgang the first Akh Morn, you can Holmgang the Aerial Blast later in the fight
You can hit Berserk for the start of the add phase, but don’t use Inner release if it’s available until you can attack Shinryu again
You can parry Shinryu’s auto attacks, but the attacks don’t come directly from Shinryu and are angled slightly, so be sure to use Awareness if you are to use Raw Intuition for mitigation

Omega – Deltascape

Universal timeline guide can be found here. Unknown author.

O1S – Alte Roite – Speedkill VoD(Patch 4.06)

Alternate between Vengeance and Rampart + Raw Intuition for tank busters
You can Reprisal the Wyrm Tails that follow Double Roar and Double Blaze
Onslaught can be used to effectively cancel downburst (except for the one where Clamp follows it) for maximum uptime. If you screw up you can also Onslaught Clamp although the success rate of that is low

O2S – Catastrophe – Speedkill VoD(Patch 4.06)

Use every cooldown for the cleaves before tank busters, and then Holmgang the actual buster. Tank swap AFTER the tank buster.
Reprisals are best best used on Gravitational Waves or Long Drops
Raw Intuition works on Long Drop and is honestly the only good place to use it
Onslaught should have little use in this fight outside of IRzerk

O3S – Halicarnassus – Speedkill VoD(Patch 4.1)

Warriors are the only Tank capable of efficiently solo tanking the boss in this fight thanks to Holmgang being available every other Critical hit. Alternate between Holmgang and Awareness + Raw Intuition on Tank busters for an easy game.
Hold the first Onslaught in your opener. If you do not get 4 Fell Cleaves in the opener you will lose the extra Infuriate post-opener. Holding Onslaught ensures you will have enough Gauge to use Fell Cleave a final time under Inner Release if you are stunned.
Don’t pick up the White Flame unless you run double Warrior. Fuck that shit.
You can deal with Dragon (Rampart + Vengeance) and Apanda (Rampart -> Raw Intuition -> Vegeance) quite easily and efficiently.
The best spots for Onslaught are during the Forest Tethers, and whenever the boss jumps extremely far away in the final phase. Anywhere else can be dealt with using Sprint. Using Onslaught on adds are also an option.
If you need to pick up Apanda, use a SE combo for the Inner Release before Apanda rather than a SP combo so you can freely Butcher Block Apanda without dropping the Eye buff.

O4S – Exdeath – Speedkill VoD(Patch 4.06)

At 2.39 GCD, if you burn cooldowns for double cast Thunder 3, you can double weave Onslaught -> Holmgang before the second hit
The second Berserk should be used as Vacuum wave is casting.
The second IRzerk should be used as the second Thunder 3 is casting.
Hit Vengeance for the Meteor if you plan on tank swapping there.
Wait for the knockback animation to start before using Onslaught to cancel Vacuum Wave.

O4S – Neo Exdeath – Speedkill VoD(Patch 4.06)

Warrior is the strongest tank for aggro related mechanics in this fight, but also the worst defensively without the use of Inner Beast
The best way to use Warrior in this fight is to have the Warrior control aggro for Grand cross mechanics, while getting the other tank to handle most Aero 3’s
Assign one tank to Reprisal Almagest and another for Aero 3’s/Double Attacks/Earthshakers
Warriors do not have enough cooldowns for this fight without Inner beast. Get your Co-tank to take some of the Aero 3’s or request an Apoc
Onslaught can be used generously in this fight. Remember to count your gauge.

Unending coil of Bahamut

~~Nael is a Bully~~
~~Bahamut is a bigger bully~~
~~DDoS Trio WutFace~~
IT’S FINALLY OVER

Twintania

Using Onslaught during a Twister cast will likely kill you
You can Holmgang on the Shirk-less tank swap to make it safer, this likely prevents you from using Holmgang on the first Raven’s Beak however (depends on push time). Holmgang at the end of the cast so you can survive Plummet as well.
If your group’s DPS is adequate, you can save the second Inner Release use for Nael, and combine it with 3 minute raid buffs for a second opener. If you do use Inner Release a second time, try not to Onslaught until you can Shirk your co-tank again
You can hold the second usage of Shirk if you see a fourth Death Sentence, and Shirk your co-tank back during the phase transition so he can take the Bahamut’s claw instead for consistency
The aggro for Twintania, Nael, and Bahamut are all shared, so they will attack the tank who had aggro of the previous boss the moment they appear
Shake it off is best used on the second Fireball if you don’t skip it, as your group can pre-pull shield for the first Fireball. Only the first and second Fireballs have Twisters right before it, making it harder for your healers to shield it

Nael deus Darnus

The most important place to use Shake it off is during the dive bombs of Nael, which can lead into Meteor stream or Thermionic beam (which will usually only have a 6 person stack)
Bahamut’s Claw will do 50k-55k unmitigated while Raven’s Beak will do 77k-80k unmitigated. Vengeance will return damage for each hit of Bahamut’s claw
Like Twintania, you can hold the last usage of Inner Release for Bahamut (even Berserk) if your Dps is good enough.
If you see the Final Ravenbeak/Bahamut’s Claw, use Inner Beast as a cooldown so you have things to use at Bahamut

Bahamut

Bahamut drop
1. Use Rampart + Raw Intuition for this Flatten if you are taking it
2. Use IR/Unchained as early as possible so you can use it again in a later phase
3. Bahamut DPS check is actually quite easy once you get used to the Trios, nor does Bahamut phase if you push a certain % so don’t worry too much about pushing tank dps here.
4. You can end this Phase at 0 gauge
Quickmarch Trio (1st Trio)
1. Use Shake it Off as you spread for the Dive here
2. Use Vengeance as a cooldown for the Tempest Wing + Flare Breath
3. Use Holmgang for the Flatten here
4. Tank swap if you can after this
5. You want to end this phase at 80+ gauge after using Upheaval
Blackfire Trio
1. Use Berserk as early as possible here (after 1st/2nd GCD)
2. You want to end this phase at 50+ gauge
3. You don’t want to tank Bahamut here so you have cooldowns for Fellruin Trio. Try to get your co-tank to swap or cover here
Fellruin Trio
1. Be in Defiance and use Rampart + RI for the Tempest wing + Aetherial Profusion + Meteorstream
2. Use Shake it off for the Gigaflare here so it will be buffed by Shake it off. Thrill of Battle is optional
3. You should have IRzerk at the end of your second combo (path combo) if you used Zerk right away on Blackfire trio. You can make a full 100 Gauge IRzerk here if you ended the previous phase at 50+ gauge.
Heavensfall Trio
1. The Berserk in this phase should be 2 FC + Upheaval
2. If you tank Bahamut here, you can use Vegeance + IB/Apoc for Triple Flare Breath
Tenstrike Trio
1. Use Shake it off with RI here for the Meteor streams. It should come up on time if you used it for the Gigaflare at Fellruin
2. If you tank Bahamut here, only use Vengeance and/or IB or Holmgang as a cooldown for Flatten -> Flare Breath. Save Rampart and RI.
3. You may use Berserk here with no issues, but it is best to save IR for Nael+Twintania Phase if you can

Nael and Twintania, Adds Phase

You want to use Rampart + RI for the first Claw/Plummet, regardless of which boss you tank. Decimate is the stronger Raw option, although you may want to opt for Fell Cleave if your group wants to focus the bosses down one at a time.
For any Nael mechanic that goes Dive -> Thermionic, you want to move to the middle as quickly as possible to place Shake it off in time
Using Vengeance near the end of the Megaflare cast will let you mitigate the Megaflare, Tank buster, and follow up Claw/Plummet
If you did not get a chance to use Shake it off for the Nael mechanics, do not try to use it on the second Megaflare
You may Berserk a third time in the adds phase as the transition will last 52 seconds

Golden Bahamut

You can use Shake it Off once the ball of fire that Bahamut comes from starts shining gold if that is your group’s mitigation plan
Use your first Berserk as quickly as possible, you may hold on to IR for a little bit to establish aggro in Defiance
The Equilibrium pull does NOT work for Golden Bahamut. The extra damage from the Phoenix buff does not apply to Equilibrium and your DPS will quickly pull off you.
IRzerk and Potions are used on the 3rd minute of the fight so you can combine it with 3 minute buffs
You can Vengeance as soon as you finish dodging to first Exaflare. It will allow you to cover the 2nd Akh Morn and will come off cooldown again for the 4th Akh Morn
If you’ve actually read and gotten all the way here, you’re about as crazy as I am

Credits

Author: Yuki Hellscythe – Lodestone || FFLogs || Twitch || Twitter || Discord – Yuki#0195

Again, thanks to The Balance Discord Server for all the help maintaining and building this guide.

Emiin Vanih [Lamia]
Pasquale Omega [Ragnarok]
Voxfall Valerie [Ragnarok]
Damelia Lhea [Gilgamesh]
Sky Ikaza [Balmung]
Nemekh / Velinas Dar’Korsalar [Exodus]
Aya Liz [Gilgamesh]
Mike Matrix [Ragnarok]
Aria Freya [Sargatanas]
Achnolis Erizor [Leviathan]

Change/Editlog

27/09/2017 – Created
28/09/2017 – minor editing, added placeholders for Shinryu and Bahamut
30/09/2017 – Fixed Upheaval Potencies
13/10/2017 – Added Speedkill VoDs, Shinryu tips, and Shake it Off
19/10/2017 – Added O3s Speedkill VoD
29/10/2017 – Added some Bahamut Ultimate tips
31/10/2017 – Removed catgirl glamor shot since too thotty for google
9/12/2017 – Finished Bahamut Section
16/1/2018 – Minor edits

FFXIV FF14 Warrior Feast PvP Guide 2023

alext96 — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 10:38:08 +0000

Warrior
Feast PvP Guide

Written by Praesul Presul

Special thanks to: Brian Ricardo, Aurelia Weaver, Straigus Reyist and Xy Xx for providing their thoughts on the job and this guide.

Your Role in Feast ➤

Skills, Abilities, and Your Gauge ➤

Additional PvP Actions ➤

PvP Traits ➤

“Rotation” ➤

Helpful Macros ➤

Your Role in Feast

As a warrior (and really for tanks in general) your role is that of an enabler. You enable your team to get kills, and provide them with the space and safety they need to get their job done. You don’t provide as much damage as a DPS but you bring strong cc, a very powerful debuff and high burst damage while having versatile tools that can be used both offensively and defensively.

Strengths

+ Highest tank burst damage

+ Powerful, high uptime 10% damage debuff for your whole team to take advantage of

+ Very strong personal defensive options that can be staggered out to survive, with Inner Beast being arguably the best personal defensive ability in the game.

Weaknesses

– Cooldown based team defensives. Your team defensive options aren’t up nearly as often as Dark Knight or Paladin’s, and when they’re on cooldown you’re reliant only on smart stuns and heavies, with the stun having the longest cooldown of all three tanks.

– Unusual learning curve. While WAR is easy to pick up and play, truly mastering it requires some clever thinking on how to use their tools instead of just ungabungaing your way to victory.
– Gauge reliant. Fell Cleave, Inner Beast, and Onslaught are some of your most important abilities and all have a gauge cost. You may find yourself unable to build enough gauge to get burst damage out at the right time or not have enough gauge for an important stun.

Skills, Abilities, and Your Gauge

Beast Gauge is your job specific resource for using some of your most important abilities. It gates the usage of Onslaught, Inner Beast, and Fell Cleave. You build gauge by using Skull Sunder, Butcher’s Block, Maim, and Storm’s Path. Being starved of gauge impacts both your offense and defense so try to keep high uptime so as to not be caught without beast gauge during important moments.

Butcher’s Block is arguably your most powerful ability, and one of the most powerful abilities in the entire game mode. At 1500 potency it’s your hardest hitting combo finisher, and applies a powerful 10% damage taken debuff on the target that lasts for 15 seconds. This will be your most used ability in a match due to it’s damage and to keep high uptime on the debuff. You can keep it applied on one target continuously or spread it between two targets, whichever the situation calls for. It also still provides you with 10 gauge, helping you build enough per combo to at LEAST get enough gauge for an onslaught. This combo does everything!

Be careful being too obvious about your burst targets with this. If the ranged DPS is all the way in Zimbabwe and you waddle over to apply Butcher’s Block you’re giving away the fact that they’re the next target or will be a target soon. There’s some mind games you can play with this, and it’s not always necessary to have it applied to secure a kill.

Storm’s Path is what the designers intended to be your gauge builder, since it grants you 20 gauge instead of the usual 10. Sadly this isn’t really the case, and you’ll often find you will go multiple matches without using it. It’s rare that using Storm’s Path is better than using Butcher’s Block, for a couple of reasons.

It cuts into your Butcher’s Block uptime. It’s a crazy good debuff, that benefits your entire team. So any time it’s not up on the target not only is it a damage loss for you, but it’s also a damage loss for your whole team. You also can’t keep Butcher’s Block up on multiple targets if you choose to use Storm’s Path, since by the time you finish one combo the debuff will soon run out before you can finish the next.
The whole combo deals piddly amounts of damage. Both Heavy Swing and Maim deal 750 potency of damage, and Storm’s Path only 1250. This seriously cuts into your overall pressure during a match, even if it may result in more fell cleaves over time.

Even in situations where you’d THINK Storm’s Path would be a good idea, it falls flat. If you’re at high stacks and need gauge for survivability , one could argue that more Butcher’s Block uptime and pressure on the enemy DPS creates a bigger safety net then extra Inner Beasts. They’ll have trouble killing you if it’s not safe to do so.

Some players think Storm’s Path has its uses for building gauge on objectives like Adrenaline boxes or the Wolf’s Heart, but I’d also argue dealing more damage to the boxes in the first place to secure them is even more important. The only time I would consider using Storm’s Path useful is building gauge shortly BEFORE boxes spawn for Fell Cleave and Onslaught usage to get the boxes.

Fell Cleave is your burst damage ability. It deals the most damage out of anything in your kit, and is what you’ll be using to assist your teammates in taking a target down. You don’t want to be too trigger happy with this skill, while the damage is pretty good it, it’s usually easily healed when used on its own, and it has a hefty 50 gauge cost. That gauge is generally better spent on Onslaught, which can help peel for your team or lock someone down for burst. Especially with the increased aggression this season. There are still opportunities outside of burst windows to use it though, Fell Cleave being the best skill you have to secure boxes, and if you get some opportunities for kills from your DPS, like a caster LB debuffing a target, or during Culling Time when damage is very high.

Inner Beast is the big daddy of all tank defensive abilities in the game. Since it’s gated behind gauge, this means it’s available as often as you want it to be, and with smart usage you’ll never feel like you don’t have it when you need it. It replaces Fell Cleave whenever you’re in Defiance, deals 500 potency less in damage, but heals you for the damage dealt AND decreases the damage you take by 10% for the next 5 seconds. 10% is not enough to completely negate the damage penalty of 4 Heavy Medal stacks but, it still serves as damage reduction at any medal stack below that. The heal isn’t too impressive, but it’s icing on the cake. Whenever you want to reduce damage with this ability you have to make sure you time it correctly, you don’t want to use it too late or too early. For instance if you’re the target of a melee LB, you don’t want to use it at the beginning of the cast bar. Try to use it just before the majority of damage you will take goes off, but not too late that the damage sneaks through unmitigated. Also don’t be afraid to use back to back Inner Beasts with Inner Release if you have to, tank kills can result in some wild swings back to the enemy being ahead and potentially winning the match, your survival is often extremely important.

During some dangerous moments during a match, you may find yourself hesitant to leave Defiance. While Inner Beast is not as strong as Fell Cleave in terms of damage, it’s still higher potency than anything else you have due to it ignoring the damage penalty inflicted by Defiance. You can help your team burst with Inner Beast, it’s better than not assisting them or attempting to assist them and dying. If you’re feeling confident enough you can also use an Inner Beast first for the damage reduction than toggle Defiance off and continue with Fell Cleaves. This is something you’ll have to feel out throughout a match, and you’ll get better at doing with experience.

Onslaught is your final gauge spender. At 20 gauge it’s pretty cheap, you’ll have enough gauge to use it after any combo you use. It’s a 2 second stun, a dash, and is off the global cooldown so it can be used while you’re attacking with other abilities. It’s extremely fast and responsive, the fastest gap closer in the game. You’ll be using it to lock targets down, peel for your team, or to stun the enemy healer during opportune moments. Be careful not to abuse this ability too much though because it does have a 10 second cooldown, and while that may not seem very long, it’s twice as long as the other two tank stuns.

You can use this ability for some extra damage to help secure boxes. 750 potency isn’t a lot but you can use it in conjunction with Fell Cleave or Butcher’s Block for that little extra boost. Just be very careful that it’s safe to do so, otherwise you’ll not have a stun ready for important targets like a melee that is casting their LB.

This ability can also work as an escape if you find yourself in danger. If your healer is down and you’re running away, you can use it on boxes if they’re up to create some distance between you and the enemy, or if your healer is alive and you’re being targeted you can dash to a distant enemy like the healer or ranged DPS to create distance between you the enemy tank/melee pair.

Tomahawk is your TP spender, your ONLY TP spender. It’s ranged, off the global cooldown, deals minor damage and applies a 50% heavy effect for 3 seconds. It can be used to peel for your team or to slow a target down to put them in range for your team to reach. WAR isn’t a very TP starved job so this ability can be used pretty liberally.

Tomahawk can be used during burst windows for a little bit of extra damage. It’s not much, but every little bit counts.

It can also used to remove Concentrate from enemies. Concentrate is an additional action that some healers and DPS take that prevents 1 CC effect on them within the next 10 seconds. Since Tomahawk is the lowest impact of your CC abilities, you can use this to quickly remove the Concentrate buff and then respond with either Onslaught or Holmgang. So if you see one of the enemies has Concentrate as their additional action you’re going to want to be a bit more conservative with your Tomahawk uses just in case.

Since it’s ranged it can be used to help secure kills if you’re chasing or a target manages to get away. 500 potency is very low but it’s better than nothing.

Inner Release is your burst damage cooldown and emergency defensive. It allows you to use all of your Beast Gauge abilities at no cost, and makes you immune to all forms of cc for the next 6 seconds. You will be using Fell Cleave or Inner Beast during these windows. It’s rare that using any other global cooldown will be more beneficial than those two during that 6 second period.

Do not pop this ability too early after using an attack, if you use it right after you just get done using a global cooldown, you will actually cut into how many abilities you can use with it and only get 2 global cooldowns out of it instead of 3.

Don’t be too trigger happy with this ability, while you may want to get lots of uses out of it during a match it’s better to use this ability effectively rather than as often as possible. Quality over quantity. If you know the enemy team is low on defensive options, or has none available those are the best times to use it for offense.

On the other hand, don’t be too conservative with this ability especially when it comes to defense. Because Inner Release makes you immune to CC effects and can grant you free uses of Inner Beast it can become an extremely powerful defensive ability. Chaining Inner Beast back to back will heal you for however much damage it deals and extend the damage reduction, AND prevent you from being locked down.

It is situational, but you may use Inner Release for Inner Beast defense buff and immediate switch out of tank stance and use Fell Cleave after. If you need to defend yourself before bursting.

Defiance is your tank stance and unlike pve it’s actually really useful! It decreases the damage you take by 20%, and replaces Fell Cleave with Inner Beast. Before patch 4.5, this ability would only increase your max HP but has no changed to instant 20% mitigation, making it more useful to swap to if you get caught with your pants down. Still, it’s important to be aware of your surroundings and be in Defiance before any major damage comes out, and why being too greedy very often kills newbie warriors.

How much time you spend in Defiance during a match is something you’ll have to feel out. Some teams, especially at lower ranks, never even think to touch the tank in which case spending time in Defiance is wasted. Once you get to higher level matches though, kills on tanks or at least attempts on them will become much more common, and personally I often find myself spending the majority of my time in Defiance once I stack. Remember that your death can cause wild swings back into the enemy’s favor and while it might not lead to full team wipes like a healer death can result in, it’s still really bad. You also drain more of your team’s resources to keep you alive when you’re out of Defiance, leaving less options available to protect the rest of your team. It may feel bad using Defiance especially if you’re very used to the warrior playstyle in pve but pvp is a very different game, don’t fall into that trap. Besides you’re still capable of helping your team out through peeling, offensive cc, and you STILL provide the Butcher’s Block debuff.

Always be in Defiance if you 4-stack. Previously WAR was the premier 4 heavy medal stacking tank, after the changes to Defiance and Inner Beast the jury is still out on whether or not this is worth doing. I haven’t had enough time to test out whether it’s worth doing, but if you DO end up with 4 stacks stay in Defiance or your death will cause a 100 medal swing back into the opponent tying, or back into their favor.

Thrill of War is your unique party defensive. It’s an aoe heal, that heals based on 20% of your individual party member’s maximum HP. This means it heals you the most, followed by your healer, then melee and finally your ranged party member.

Unlike its pve counterpart, Thrill of War does not increase maximum HP, it only heals. So you can’t use this preemptively to give someone an HP buffer. It’s a purely reactive ability now, and using it when there’s no damage taken by your party members means it goes completely to waste.

Use it to save individual party members. Don’t just save it for the rare times when everyone needs a heal, the cooldown isn’t super long so you can get a good amount of uses throughout a match.

Since it’s based on max HP, it will heal you for more when you’re in Defiance, and will be ever so slightly stronger (by 100 HP) if you take the Increased HP trait.

Holmgang is the swiss army knife of your kit. It’s your invincibility move, strong cc and displacement. It has a fairly short cooldown for how impactful it is, at 45 seconds. So you don’t have to be stingy with it.

It’s the closest thing you have to an “Oh shit” button, but you have to be careful. It has a short duration, and doesn’t prevent you from losing HP. It just prevents you from dropping below 1 HP so you still need to be healed, and it also keeps you in place. Mistiming this can be fatal, especially if the enemy team baits it out and deals their damage just as the effect ends and you can’t run away.

You can use it offensively to keep a target in place, usually to combo with your damage dealing party member’s LBs.

It can also be used as peel for your party, pulling dangerous enemies away and holding them in place while your party members create some space. Note that it does not prevent the target from attacking, just from moving, so any ranged abilities they have can still be used. So it’s a bit less effective on enemy ranged DPS.

You can use its displacement effects to grab enemies behind walls, preventing line of sight from the enemy healer. Or alternatively you can Holmgang the enemy healer behind a wall, also preventing them from having line of sight on their party members. Do be careful that the target isn’t already moving by the time you use the ability though, because there’s a slight timeframe where the ability goes off but the target can still move, resulting in them being chained on the other side of the wall…

Also try to stay still as you use this ability. If you move too far, you’ll still prevent the target and yourself from moving but there will be enough space between you and the target that you won’t be able to attack them. Standing still prevents this from happening.

Aegis Boon is your adrenaline rush, also referred to as “tank limit break” or “tank LB” by players. It’s shared between all 3 tank jobs, and you’re guaranteed to get at least ONE use out of it during a match, with the potential of a second one depending on when you use it and whether you get some extra adrenaline kits from your team. It’s essentially an aoe Safeguard so it’s very powerful. Using this ability correctly is difficult and is something you will learn to use effectively over time, because it can make or break matches.

Aegis Boon can help completely negate, or lessen the effects of culling time. When one team has this buff and the other doesn’t, it makes a huge difference. Try to time it well so that you don’t waste it by popping it too early during culling, as it will allow the enemy team to back off until it wears off.

When your team has a significant lead it’s often better to take the adrenaline kits for yourself if you know you’ll get an extra tank LB use out of it, and if you feel confident you can time it correctly.

If you still have tank LB during the last 10 seconds of a match, you may as well pop it if you’re in the lead. The enemy team won’t be able to work around it and will be forced to burst into it or take a guaranteed loss.

Additional PvP Actions

For Warrior there aren’t too many options when it comes to additional actions. You’ll often find yourself using the same ones, but there are at least some choices available.

Safeguard is the most important and mandatory of additional actions for tanks. As the “primary” medal carrier, you can often find yourself becoming the juiciest target on your team, and with your high medal stacks you’ll be taking significantly more damage, with your death being very costly due to the amount of medals you drop. Without safeguard, you’ll become much easier to take down and even if you don’t you’ll drain much more resources out of your team just to keep you alive.

Safeguard is NOT an “Oh shit” button. Similarly to pve, you want to have this cooldown up BEFORE any major damage is dealt to you rather than in reaction to damage. If you panic and use it too late it won’t save you and will just be wasted. Be aware of your surroundings, as you gain more experience in Feast you’ll know what signs to look for.

Recuperate is generally the most preferred second action taken. It has a short cooldown, heals you for a hefty amount since it’s based on max HP, and there’s not really any other additional you’d really be willing to take with the exception of two, so most will default to this.

Since it’s based on max HP it will heal you for more in Defiance and if you take the Increased Maximum HP trait

Bolt is a less common but still viable additional action, especially at low ranks when tanks are less likely to become targets. It’s the pvp equivalent to sprint, increasing your movement speed for 10 seconds.

Warrior mobility is already quite good, but making it better can still be useful. You can use this to chse down targets, or to help you kite away if you’re in danger.

Purify is a potentially useful additional. I’ve toyed around with this one for a bit, and it can be used as a replacement for Recuperate. If used with good reactions it can prevent you from being locked down before you can use your other defensives like Safeguard, Inner Beast, Holmgang and tank LB. I would not use this if you’re new to the mode though, I’d save this for more experienced players, I just felt it worth listing as an alternative.

Any additional actions not listed are currently not worth taking under any circumstances.

PvP Traits

Pvp traits are passive bonuses that boost your stats or reduce cooldowns. Most of them are fairly minor boosts, but there are some that are definitely better than others when it comes to Warrior. Any traits not listed are not worth taking.

Increased HP is the most useful defensive PvP trait for warrior. It provides more effective HP than Decreased Damage Taken and comes with some extra benefits.

Since Thrill of War and Recuperate are based on max HP, they’ll both heal for slightly more when you take this trait. Nothing too major, but it’s an extra perk

Increased TP Regeneration is another useful trait. While you only have one ability that uses TP, this gives you breathing room to use it a lot more often, resulting in more peel for your team (especially during emergencies) and making sure you have enough TP for that extra little Tomahawk damage. Again, a minor boost but still a useful one.

Increased Damage Dealt does exactly what it says on the box. Makes you do more damage, by 3%. A small boost but it’s better than anything else you have access to most of the time, and more damage is never bad. That extra bit of damage can help secure kills, and if your DPS players also take this (which they most likely will) it adds up.

Decreased Damage Taken is the other defensive trait option for warriors. You can take this when the enemy team is filled with some crazy good DPS, which is something you’ll have to figure out through experience. You can also take it when against players you know will target you often, pair this up with Increased HP.

If you do take this trait, both Increased TP Regeneration and Increased Damage Dealt can be swapped out based on preference or whether you feel like the extra TP/Damage done is needed.

Priorities and “Rotation”

PvP is not like PvE, it’s much more dynamic and there is no set in stone “rotation”. Instead I’ll list some priorities, but do note that these priorities can and do change throughout a match

Enable your team do not be selfish and use your abilities for personal gain, that is rarely the correct choice. The game is balanced around teamwork and playing just for yourself almost never works. You do not have enough damage to solo someone, and you shouldn’t use your team defensives like tank LB or Thrill of War for yourself IF you have other, personal options available like Safeguard, or it’s absolutely crucial to you winning by making sure you don’t die towards the end of the match.

Keep high uptime on Butcher’s Block, that ability is probably the biggest reason as to why the warrior job is so strong. The damage adds up, even outside burst windows it makes it so healers have to heal more often and dissuades enemy DPS from going full aggro if they know they’re going to be a target soon.

Keep your global cooldown rolling if you can hit someone, hit someone even if they’re not your intended target. You build gauge by attacking people, so any time you’re not attacking you can find yourself gauge starved. Obviously during burst windows you’ll prioritize damage on the target but otherwise doing some damage is better than doing no damage, especially since downtime will allow enemy healers to regenerate MP.

Be mindful of you and your team’s positioning, being at the wrong place at the wrong time can be catastrophic, do not overextend just because you’re a tank. You’re naturally bulkier than other roles but you will still fall over and die if you’re too far away from your healer, and can result in teammate’s dying if you’re also too far to assist them. This is very important if your team is ahead and are all stacked with heavy medals. The match can easily swing back into the enemy team’s favor if you’re not close to help.

As for rotation, really the only thing is your Inner Release window which is very basic.

Try and have Butcher’s Block on a target before a countdown happens, if not don’t fret too much about it and just join your DPS with your burst rotation.

Finish whatever global cooldown you have available, prioritizing Fell Cleave if you have enough gauge for it → Tomahawk + Inner Release → Fell Cleave + Onslaught → Fell Cleave + Tomahawk → Fell Cleave

There are mind games you can play with this rotation, but I’ll save that for a more advanced section at a later time.

Helpful Macros

Here are some helpful macros that can make targeting a bit easier for you. They can all be adjusted to your liking

This first macro is for Onslaught targeting. Instead of having to tab target or click, pressing this will use the ability on whatever you set it it to, assuming they’re in range I would recommend keeping the standard version of Onslaught on your bar too for standard stuns

/micon “Onslaught” pvpaction

/pvpac “Onslaught”

So the in the macro stands for “Enemy 2” which is whichever enemy member is in the second slot in the party order. By default this is the healer, but it can change if you’ve reorganized your party order settings.

E1 is enemy tank
E2 is enemy healer
E3 is enemy melee
E4 is enemy ranged

I’d definitely keep one for the enemy healer and enemy tank, since you’ll much more likely to be targeting the enemy DPS you don’t need a specific macro for them unless you really prefer it. The macro can also be used with any of your abilities that require a target including Tomahawk

/micon “Tomahawk” pvpaction

/pvpac “Tomahawk”

I keep a macroed Tomahawk set to the melee handy since melee is the most likely to take Concentrate, and as I mentioned earlier in this guide it can be used to remove the Concentrate buff, allowing you to cc them after it wears off. Again, this can be changed to any enemy target and you can even keep multiple copies for each individual party member if you choose to.

And of course it can also be used with Holmgang

/micon “Holmgang” pvpaction

/pvpac “Holmgang”

Changes/Edits

1/13/2019: Defiance changed to 20% damage reduction and Inner Beast nerfed to 10% damage reduction.

FFXIV FF14 Warrior Guide 2023

alext96 — Sat, 22 Jun 2019 14:57:21 +0000

Warrior: The Berserkless Berserker

An advanced guide to the class

Latest Update: 3/14/19 (Patch 4.55)

Changes from 4.1 to 4.2

Warrior received a complete rework in 4.2. Storm’s Eye was cut from a 20% to a 10% damage boost, potency for most GCDs went up slightly, Berserk has been completely deleted, and Inner Release functions completely differently. The new Inner Release is on a 90 second cooldown (down from 120) with a 10 second duration (down from 20), removes all gauge costs (rather than half gauge cost), and ensures 100% crit and direct hit rate for the duration. Unchained has been separated from Inner Release, meaning you no longer sacrifice Inner Release when using it.

Disclaimer

This guide will talk about Warrior at raiding (Level 70, 8-man) level. Some topics will be addressed that will spread towards other avenues of play within FFXIV, but raiding will be the primary focus.
Tooltips and basic skill potencies will not be addressed unless mathematically necessary. I expect anyone reading this guide to be able to understand how to read tooltips.
Initialisms used throughout this guide:
1. GCD – Global Cooldown: Weapon Skills, Spells
2. OGCD – Abilities
3. FC – Fell Cleave
4. HS, SS, BB – Heavy Swing, Skull Sunder, Butcher’s Block – Threat combo
5. Eye/Path – Storm’s Eye/Storm’s Path – Gauge combo finishers
6. IR – Inner Release
7. IB – Inner Beast
Potencies listed do not include slashing damage or Storm’s Eye modifier, to simplify the math therein.

The Basics

General rundown for anyone somewhat new to Warrior:

It is much better for you to pull the boss. Warriors have absolutely insane enmity generation in the first 20 seconds of the fight without having to sacrifice DPS, don’t let it go to waste. If the other tank wants to main tank you can swap after by using Shirk.
When using Inner Release, you want to always land 5 FCs and fit your Upheaval and Onslaught in it as well. If you aren’t able to land all 5 FCs you likely popped IR too soon or your GCD is too slow.
Avoid using Defiance when you are comfortable with a fight and not in danger of dying, you can still go into Defiance with minimal penalty if you use Unchained.
Maintain Storm’s Eye at all times.
Avoid using Butcher’s Block combo unless it is required for threat generation.
Use Inner Release, Upheaval, and Infuriate on cooldown.
Onslaught to get back to the boss when you get knocked back or have to move out for a mechanic.
Never allow your Beast Gauge to overcap. If your next GCD will put your Beast Gauge above 100, spend it on Upheaval, FC/IB, Decimate/Cyclone, or Onslaught. Make sure Infuriate is used at 50 gauge or below to ensure you don’t overcap when using it.
AoE Priority (3+ targets)
1. If mobs will survive for a while longer ensure Storm’s Eye is up. When dealing with mobs that have very low health you can ignore Storm’s Eye as they die quickly and doing 3 more AoE attacks will outweigh the 10% damage bonus from Eye.
2. Use Inner Release and spam Decimate
  1. Can use Steel Cyclone instead for increased safety, but lower damage.
3. Continue using Decimate until you run out of gauge
4. Spam Overpower
5. Deliverance Equilibrium to recover TP if needed
6. Use Vengeance for the 55 potency counterattacks if available

Part 1: Defense and Defiance

Defense

In an optimal raid setting, Convalescence loses its effectiveness as healers will be using less heal spells, and more abilities. By all means, use Convalescence if it is effective for your raid team, but understanding how your healers are healing you is more important. 2500 health gained on a single cast of cure 2 within 20 seconds may not be an efficient use of a cooldown.
Map. Your. Cooldowns. If you want to shoot for high parses and ignore Defiance you need to understand the damage that is incoming in a fight, when to use cooldowns, tank swap, and what cooldowns are best utilized where. A good tank uses their cooldowns effectively so that their healers never notice they were out of Tank stance.
Tank Swapping both utilizes Shirk to its full effectiveness, as well as enables your co-tank to use his mitigation tools effectively. Your raid group has two tanks worth of cooldowns, use them to both make the fight easier, and give your healers a helping hand. Delete the thought of always Main Tank and Off Tank. Both tanks in an optimized setting will share equal burden. Main Tank and Off Tank terms should be used as a “Who is currently tanking the boss,” similar to how other languages use “First Tank” and “Second Tank.”
Your DPS have mitigation abilities as well. All Melees have Feint (-10% phys), Ranged have Palisade(-20% phys), Bards have Nature’s Minne(+20% healing)/Troubadour(variable 10/15% buffs), Machinist has Dismantle (-10%), Casters have Addle(-10% magic) and Apocatastasis(-20% magic). Discuss mitigation options with your raid group for optimal play.

Holmgang

Make sure your healers know that you’ll be using Holmgang so they save their healing for after you get hit rather than topping you off before.

If you don’t need Holmgang for tankbusters, you can also use it to nullify knockbacks since it binds you to the target you use it on. This is mostly useful in O5S.

Defiance

Is Unchained + Defiance a DPS gain?

Sometimes due to a bugged interaction with Defiance buffing Upheaval far more than it should. This will be covered in detail later in Optimization and the Memeheaval opener.

Cross Role Actions

A majority of the cross-class actions have obvious uses, but I’ll spend a moment to discuss the ones that are less obvious to most upon first inspection.

Ultimatum – AoE Provoke, but typically taken as a secondary provoke in a few scenarios. If your group can use it, then more power to you. It can be used as a pinch in saving wipe scenarios in longer fights, such as Ultimate Coil. Use this at your discretion.
Low Blow – Raid bosses can’t be stunned, typically.
Interject – If you have a Ninja, they can do this without sacrificing a cross-role. Bards and Machinists would sacrifice either Second Wind or Invigorate.

You can now take every cross role ability and do not need to choose between which ones you want to get.

Sample Timeline + Defensive Cooldown Spreadsheets

O8S – Kefka and God Kefka

O9-12S (WIP probably never going to finish)

Ultimate Coil

UWU

Part 2: Opener and Optimization

Openers

Main tank

Off tank

Memeheaval

Q: Why use a single FC before IR?

Q: Why Thrill of Battle?

Q: Why Unchained in the standard main tank opener?

Main-tank Opener

Off-tank Opener

Memeheaval Opener

“Rotation”

Optimization

Uptime

Timing Inner Release

Maintaining and Minimizing Storm’s Eye

Manipulating your GCD

Gauge Management

Do Not Overcap Beast Gauge

Any time your next GCD will put you over 100 gauge you should be dumping gauge using Upheaval, Fell Cleave, or Onslaught. Based on Onslaught every 10 gauge is worth approximately 50 potency.

Fell Cleave vs. Onslaught

3x Onslaught = 300 potency / 60 gauge = 5 PPG (Potency Per Gauge)

FC – Heavy Swing = 360 potency / 50 gauge = 7.2 PPG -2.2 PPG x 50 = 110 potency loss

FC – Maim = 320 potency / 60 gauge = 5.3333 PPG -0.3333 PPG x 60 = 20 potency loss

FC – Eye = 240 potency / 60 gauge = 4 PPG 1 PPG x 60 = 60 potency gain

FC – Path = 240 potency / 70 gauge = 3.4286 PPG 1.5714 PPG x 70 = 110 potency gain

5x Onslaught = 500 potency / 100 gauge = 5 PPG

FCx2 – Heavy Swing – Maim = 680 potency / 110 gauge = 6.181818 PPG 130 potency loss

FCx2 – Maim – Path = 560 potency / 130 gauge = 4.3077 PPG 90 potency gain

FCx2 – Path – Heavy Swing = 600 potency / 120 gauge = 5 PPG 0 potency difference

FCx2 – Maim – Eye = 560 potency / 120 gauge = 4.6666 PPG 40 potency gain

FCx2 – Eye – Heavy Swing = 600 potency / 110 gauge = 5.454545 PPG 50 potency loss

Keep Beast Gauge as High as Possible

Use Infuriate on Cooldown and Gain Full Gauge

Issues with Infuriate and How to Deal With It

Overcapping with Infuriate: Onslaught is 100 potency for 20 gauge, so every 10 gauge is effectively 50 potency. 50 potency lost per 10 gauge overcapped.

If you use a normal FC in Trick instead (which is what you’ll be doing here) it’s:

(1,027 – 520) = 507 less potency in Trick, a 50.7 potency loss

If that FC crits, its:

(1,027 – 520 x 1.58) = 205 less potency in trick, a 20.5 potency loss

Find out your average crit rate to find out the average loss:

2412 crit = (2412 – 364 / 109) = 18.8% crit chance + 5% base crit + 8% crit (80 gauge) = 31.8% crit

Now apply both the crit rate and crit damage to FC:

0.58 (crit damage) x 0.318 (crit rate) = 0.184, 18.4% more damage on average

520 x 1.184 = 616. 1,027 – 616 = 411. 411 x 0.10 (Trick) = 41 avg potency lost per IR FC outside Trick

Which option is best depends on each individual situation, keep these numbers in mind when trying to figure out what you should do.

Dump Gauge into Raid Buffs

Raid Buffs

All Damage –

Balance(AST) – 5% damage AoE, 10% personal, 15% full buffed – 30-60s duration
Trick Attack(NIN) – 10% Damage, 10s duration, 60s CD
Hypercharge(MCH) – 5% damage, 27-30s duration, 2m CD
Foe Requiem(BRD) – 3% damage, 15-20~s duration, CD dependant on mana
Devotion(SMN) – 2% Damage, 15s duration, 2m CD

Critical/DH Rates –

Spear(AST) – 5% Crit rate AoE, 10% personal, 15% buffed – 30-60s duration
Chain Stratagem(SCH) – 15% Crit rate on target, 15s duration, 2m CD
Battle Litany(DRG) – 15% Crit rate, 20s duration, 3m CD
Battle Voice(BRD) – 15% DH rate, 20s duration, 3m CD
Song buff(BRD) – 2% Crit rate, constant.

Physical Damage –

Embolden(RDM) – 10%-2% Physical damage (drops by 2% per stack), 20s duration, 2m CD
Brotherhood(MNK) – 5% Physical Damage, 15s duration, 90s CD
Radiant Shield(SMN) – 2% Physical damage, 16-20s duration, 60s CD

Opener (10-15s)
(60s) Trick Attack window – Flat 10% increase 10s, every minute. This should land 4 GCDs at a minimum.
(90s) Brotherhood – Should always line up with IR as they share the same cooldown.
(2m) “Second” opener – Trick, Embolden, and Stratagem will be active for this window.
(3m) – Trick, Battle Voice, Battle Litany, Brotherhood. IR should always be back up here to line up with Trick.
Repeat ad infinitum

Upheaval

Upheaval (usually) on Cooldown

Using Thrill for Upheaval

Save for IR	Opener	3 mins	6 mins	9 mins
Use on CD, save last	Opener	2 mins	4 mins	6 mins	9 mins

Using Defiance + Unchained for Upheaval

Potency (Deliverance)	Deliverance + Thrill	Defiance	Defiance + Unchained	Defiance + Thrill	Defiance + Unchained + Thrill
300	360	435	543	522	652

Again, do not try to do this for IR or Trick Upheavals. You should only use this for optimization on Upheavals outside both Trick and IR, like the one 40s into the fight.

It is not better to save Thrill for these, you want Thrill on your Trick and IR Upheavals listed earlier.

Vengeance

Opener and Optimization Demonstration

Part 3: Stats and Gearing

4.55 BiS Sets

According to calculations done by the Math Wizards on The Balance discord, these are the current BiS lists for Warrior.

Full BiS list for all tanks (including UCOB/UWU)

2.37 GCD (x4 crafted 1 tome acc)

2.38 GCD (x3 crafted 1 raid 1 tome acc)

No Crafted Accessories

Alternate WAR UWU BiS (same pentamelds as Sigma BiS so you don’t need to remeld sks)

Hydatos gear BiS

Skill Speed

Stats and Reasoning

Crit is the best substat, but it is not the end-all be-all god stat. Sacrificing a large amount of one stat to gain a small amount of Crit will never be worth doing.

Part 4: Utilizing FFLogs for Self Improvement

XIV Analysis

Comparing Yourself to Other Warriors

Credits to Mox Xinmagar

Nycro’s Additional Tip;

Frequently Asked Questions and Fight Optimization

F.A.Q.

Q: How many Fell Cleaves should I get in Inner Release?

A: You should use 5 Fell Cleaves, Upheaval, and Onslaught inside every IR.

Q: Fell Cleave or Onslaught for dumping gauge?

Q: Should I Upheaval on CD?

A: Almost always yes, some rare situations you want to delay it which is covered in the Optimization section.

Q: Is Unchained a DPS gain?

Q: What GCD is best?

A: Current BiS lists are 2.37 and 2.38 GCD. If you’re lacking a lot of SkS pieces and have low SkS 2.43 is also good.

Q: What do I meld?

A: SkS until desired GCD, then Crit, then Det. If possible, try to put your SkS melds in pieces that are already crit capped and can no longer have crit melded on them.

Fight Specific Optimization and Tips

Omega – Alphascape

O9S – Chaos

Auto attacks and tankbuster are physical, tankbuster always forces a swap. Tank tethers are magical.
Tanks and Healers will always have Headwind and be facing outwards from the center.
DO NOT use Inner Release when you have Headwind, it will prevent the debuff from resolving and knock you up later. You can still do IR during this phase if you’ve been using it as soon as its available since it will expire right before the knockback, if it was delayed at all or you want to play safe do not use it here.

O10S – Midgardsormr

Auto attacks are physical when on the ground and magical when in the air. Tail End is physical. Dragon add’s ice breath is magical.
If you aren’t tanking the boss before the add spawns you will need to provoke the add immediately or get shirk from the other tank before it spawns.
There is potentially several tank swaps depending on Time Immemorial debuffs and a guaranteed tank swap late in the fight where he doesn’t cast Time Immemorial.
You can barely squeeze in a 4-5 FC IR at the end of phase 1 if IR is used immediately off CD. Likely worth it to skip the buffer FC in opener but I haven’t cleared this fight enough times to know if the skip is necessary yet.

O11S – Omega

Auto attacks are physical, tankbusters are magical.
You can get Cover from PLD for Mustard Bombs without the OT tether so the main tank isn’t taking the DoT and autos at the same time.
Use Tank LB3 at around 60% of the cast bar during the phase transition.
Ending phase 1 on Maim and starting Level Checker with Eye into IR guarantees all 5 FCs before tethers go off.
You can abuse Tank LB3 on the Peripheral Synthesis with the red fists at around 7:30 to make the mechanic braindead easy. Have the entire party stack up and pop LB3 as soon as you see the fists spawn then run out.

O12S – Omega M+F

This fight is nearly entirely tank mechanics, so brace yourself and study up.
Male auto attacks are physical, Female auto attacks are magical. Sagittarius Arrow and Optimized Blade Dance are physical, Solar Ray and Meteor are magical.
Positioning of the bosses is incredibly important, make sure you’re constantly paying attention to where your boss is, where the giant eye is, and where you need to move your boss next.
Suppression is a straight line AoE from eye, Advanced Suppression is a frontal cone AoE from eye which comes close to hitting the middle. Make sure you and your boss are never positioned on the same half of the arena as the eye when the eye cleaves are coming, it’s ok to be directly at cardinals since the cone won’t reach.
Local Resonance will require the bosses to be on opposite ends of the arena, Remote Resonance will require the bosses to be grouped together. Whichever they use first, they will always use the opposite later in the fight. Make sure you react quickly if they have Remote Resonance and you will be the one moving, pop Sprint and don’t attempt to get any GCDs in while moving the boss.
Before Fundamental Synergy is casted, one of the bosses will need to be brought slightly further out than the other to avoid overlapping dashes. We have the tank who has Male move it further out while the Female stays directly at the cardinal. Make sure you move the boss away from the eye or you’ll get cleaved.
Both bosses should be brought together and placed at a cardinal that is adjacent to the giant eye during Sagittarius Arrow + Meteor. It’s also good to have them slightly away from the middle away from the eye so that the tank with Sagittarius Arrow can move down without being cleaved.
Ultimatum can be used to get aggro for tank swaps even if the other boss is immune since it doesn’t actually target the boss. You can also use Ultimatum and have the other tank Shirk to have both bosses at once, this is especially useful for the double Optimized Blade Dance. Make sure you provoke your boss back after Optimized Blade Dance.
Make sure you’re standing towards the middle for the start of each Sagittarius Arrow + Meteor so you can take the Meteor out as fast as possible. Pop sprint if you have Meteor.
Holmgang can be used near the start where M is swapping to F to nullify the knockback. I use it right when the liquid puddle turns into the female shape and it runs out right after it hits so I can still reposition immediately.

O12S – Final Omega

Auto attacks are physical, tankbusters are magical.
Cover can be abused heavily in this fight on Target Analysis. If you get targeted by the magic vuln you can get covered after and the PLD will barely take damage since he doesn’t have the vuln debuff.
During Archive All you can use Onslaught to immediately get to the hand you need to be on.
Save Sprint for before Oversampled Wave Cannon during Patch, there can be a lot of movement depending on which side the tankbuster is on and which tether you have.
Make use of stance dancing and use Inner Beast when cooldowns are low. I personally use Inner Beast on all of the Patch Oversampled Wave Cannons.
You can solo tank Target Analysis with Holmgang if you’re targeted by the vuln hit, try to do this when you and your co-tank are low on cooldowns. If the other tank is targeted and you’re both low on cooldowns, have them use their Invuln instead.

Credits

Ny Cro – Lodestone || FFLogs || Twitch || Discord – Nycro#6041
Feel free to message me for any questions on this guide, or things you’d like added.

Mox Xinmagar – entirety of part 4, Unchained Upheaval testing, reviewed the guide

Emiin Vanih – layout and several general sections of the guide that I left unchanged, helped with several calculations, reviewed the guide

Damelia Lhea – “rotation” picture

Berke – brought up the bug with Defiance + Upheaval being abnormal

The Balance – Tank Guide Trifecta

Emiin Vanih – Paladin Guide
Emiin Vanih – Dark Knight Guide

Again, thanks to The Balance Discord Server for all help maintaining and building this guide.

Change/Edit Log

3/13/18 – Created/Published.
10/3/18 – Changed gearing sections to 4.4 BiS sets.
10/8/18 – Removed outdated boss fight tips and added current ones. Also changed my character photo to a Lalafell.
10/11/18 – Added Memeheaval opener and explanations for when to use each opener.
10/17/18 – Added a section on XIV Analysis
10/28/18 – Various minor changes
1/24/19 – More dumb memeheaval math, UCOB/UWU BiS, and minor edits for clarification
2/8/19 – Fixed a minor issue with the standard MT opener and added more to both openers. Alternate UWU BiS added.
2/12/19 – Added Hydatos gear BiS if you actually want to do Eureka
2/20/19 – Added UWU sheet
3/14/19 – Fixed minor issue with memeheaval math.

Warrior – Gamerstips

FFXIV Warrior Guide

Several parts of this guide are now outdated, use this guide by Mox.

Disclaimer

The Basics

Part 1: Defense and Defiance

Defense

Holmgang

Defiance

Is Unchained + Defiance a DPS gain?

Cross Role Actions

Sample Timeline + Defensive Cooldown Spreadsheets

Part 2: Opener and Optimization

Openers

Main-tank Opener

Off-tank Opener

Memeheaval Opener

“Rotation”

Optimization

Uptime

Timing Inner Release

Maintaining and Minimizing Storm’s Eye

Manipulating your GCD

Gauge Management

Do Not Overcap Beast Gauge

Fell Cleave vs. Onslaught

Keep Beast Gauge as High as Possible

Use Infuriate on Cooldown and Gain Full Gauge

Issues with Infuriate and How to Deal With It

Dump Gauge into Raid Buffs

Raid Buffs

Upheaval

Upheaval (usually) on Cooldown

Using Thrill for Upheaval

Using Defiance + Unchained for Upheaval

Vengeance

Part 3: Stats and Gearing

4.55 BiS Sets

Skill Speed

Stats and Reasoning

Part 4: Utilizing FFLogs for Self Improvement

XIV Analysis

Comparing Yourself to Other Warriors

Frequently Asked Questions and Fight Optimization

F.A.Q.

Fight Specific Optimization and Tips

Omega – Alphascape

O9S – Chaos

O10S – Midgardsormr

O11S – Omega

O12S – Omega M+F

O12S – Final Omega

Credits

The Balance – Tank Guide Trifecta

Change/Edit Log

FFXIV A Warrior's Way – An advanced guide to Warrior

Disclaimer

The tl;dr Basics/Faq – I need to be good. Now.This is a Tl;dr to the guide. You can read the following for a relative idea of what to do, and look at the specific sections for explanations.

Part 1: Defiance, Inner Beast, and other Defensive cooldowns.

Defiance and Tank stance

Inner Beast

Unchained

Holmgang

Cross Role Actions

General tips

Part 2: Berserk

Inner Release and Mildzerk

4 and 7 Fell Cleaves or Upheaval for our Berserks?

Berserk and 9 GCDs

Raid Buffs

Trick Attack Optimization

Part 3: Rotation and other specifics

Openers

Rotation explained

Rotation Tl;dr

100 Gauge and Deliverance

Gauge usage, Onslaught or Fell Cleave

Gauge Tl;dr

When everything goes to shit

Enhanced Infuriate

The tl;dr Basics/Faq – I need to be good. Now.

This is a Tl;dr to the guide. You can read the following for a relative idea of what to do, and look at the specific sections for explanations.