105 WarriorFollow

Pretty terrible, if the 105 level warriors I've spoken to are to be believed. It's all relative to content, and when the trash mobs have multiple millions of hps, even DPS levels that would have made people cry years ago just doesn't cut it. I think the issue with warriors is that they don't have any sort of flashy damage abilities. While I'm reasonably certain the base dps of a warrior is higher than my paladin, I get slays against undead, which is always good for an oooh and aaaah (I've gotten into the 200-300k range with those, depending on weapon and other active abilities). Heck, I get nukes that can crit for 100k+ damage against anything, and much more against undead (which is nothing compared to most casters, but pretty darn fantastic for a tank). Warriors just don't get the big "wow' numbers, which I think adds to the perception that their damage is really bad.

I kinda feel for warriors really. To molo, they more or less have to take a healer merc. Which means they can fight just about anything all day long. The problem is that they will be fighting just about anything all day long. As in slooooooooooooooow. And unlike SKs or Paladins (or rangers for that matter), who can tailor their fights to their strengths, the warrior strength is that they are equally effective against everything. Which means there's not a lot they can do in terms of content choice to make their lives easier/faster.

The flip side is that they are desired for any content where tanking is a priority. So raids want them. And groups that are hitting tough named (which is where you're going to get content relevant drops) want them. But against "normal" content, it's a bit trickier. Even on the tanking side. I semi-regularly group with a guild member who's main is a warrior. So yeah, a warrior and a paladin with a merc each usually just tooling around doing HAs or trash content. Guess who's tanking? The paladin. Because it's just far far more efficient for us to hit medium difficulty content where I can self heal, and pull out two damage dealing mercs than any other method. When we run into a named though, he tanks, one of the mercs goes gets swapped for a healer, and I switch to support damage and heals (and cures since healer mercs don't cure stuff). Ironically, while not the fastest duo by any means, we can actually handle a fairly broad amount of content this way.

Uh.... So far more info than you probably were asking about. And no numbers (cause we don't need no stinking numbers on this forum!). But there you have it.

I'm not really into parsing stuff, but yeah, if I had to guess, I'd say most basic melee damage at that level is going to be in the 5-10k dps range (I'm talking just turning on autoattack and walking away from the keyboard to get a sandwich). Actively using combat abilities will increase that. For some classes, dramatically. For warriors? Not as much. I think they do get a few damage increasing abilities, but not as many as other classes do. Most of their abilities are aimed at preventing damage taken and gaining aggro.

Damage parsing for melee can be a bit tricky and deceiving as well since where you are relative to the facing of the mob can have a significant impact on the amount of damage you do (mobs can do things like parry, block, and riposte as well). You put a warrior on the backside of a mob and compare his base damage (ie: autoattack and walk away) to other classes and it's not too terrible (and actually better than SKs or Paladins). It's the special abilities and the fact that they're almost always in front of the mob that kinda impacts their relative stats.

Gloom and doom aside though, the game is much much easier to manage solo (molo) than it used to be. I distinctly recall literally spending 6-8 minutes soloing a single mob. One at a time. Over and over. Gah! Today, if it's taking me more than a minute to kill a mob, I'm looking around to see what I'm doing wrong. And that's against high blue and white mobs (say in HAs, or current content). Dropping down to lt blue mobs makes for an easier time and faster kill rate.

The flip side of that is that the mobs damage to you is faster as well. So instead of a slow steady grind to see whose hps run out first like it was back in the old days, you'll either kill or be killed pretty darn quick. At level 105, most mobs can dish out serious damage in a short amount of time. It's not uncommon for just a regular old mobs to do ~50k in a single round (10-12k hits are pretty common, and you can get 4-5 of them in a round sometimes). Damage spikes hit faster and can kill you pretty quick. It's more exciting, that's for sure.

I recognize that this is a topic derail:

Old EQ was "unrealistic" in that combat was a slow attrition and you could live or die by the regen of a tick of HP or Mana (and whether your target fled at low HP) vs. the typical-of-all-real-time-games "twitchy" style of faster combat it seems to have moved towards.

What I have been thinking lately, is I wished they'd never moved away from original. You can still get a taste of it (sort of) if you do a progression server and use poor gear (i.e., don't buy best in slot with Krono). I recognize "twitchy" can be more excitement, but I can get that from so many games. Being able to strategize odd combos, time things with my group (sometimes requiring talking via text during the fight) was one of the unique things of EQ.

Note this is not me advocating 10+ minute fights to kill one group level mob.

IMO all this arises often when you tackle a mob close to the limit of your or your group's ability. The difference is when mobs have 2m HPs and players have 120k HPs the result is much more believable. I've certainly boxed challenging fights where it literally comes down to the wire, with my toons almost OOM and my tank close to death and the mob at 1%---and 1% can be a lot of HPs for a named mob in current expansions!

In classic EQ where a player with 30HPs is fighting a challenging mob (which can be level 2 for a level 1 player) and is so close to death that one more blow will kill him and he's praying the mob's next swing will miss so he can benefit from that one more regen cycle. THAT seems pretty artificial to me but also pretty unavoidable given limits of game design. I mean any fighter down to 10% or less of his HPs, presumably, would be unable to fight, or at least unable to hit for even close to full effect, but none of that is simulated in the game. The only semi-realistic design is that when you're almost dead you can't run away at full speed...

Edited, Sep 8th 2016 8:39am by Sippin

Being a warrior's job is to tank, you can expect their DPS to be quite low. To give you some more detailed information, here is a parse from our Maestro of Rancor fight from one of our high end warriors tanking the fight:

Maestro of Rancor in 713s, 770350k @1080435sdps --- #22 Rriis + pets 12167k@17064sdps (17136dps in 710s) [1.58%]

Edited, Sep 14th 2016 5:55pm by Aghinem