Guild Wars 2

I want a proper discussion on these please.

Most of them are excellent abilities that can change the outcome of a battle significantly.

I don’t play warrior (never have), but I’ll proceed to list what they do based on my personal knowledge:
Arcing slice (greatsword): Melee hit that gives fury, by far one of the worst out there.
Earthshaker (hammer): Aoe stun with respectable damage (also a blast fin. didn’t know that).
Skull cracker (mace): Single target, long duration stun.
Eviscerate (axe): Single target, very high damage nuke with a small gap closing leap.
Combustive shot (LB): Fire field, lasts a long time.
Kill shot (rifle): ranged extremely high damage nuke with a channel.

These are all fine on their own. But what I can’t understand is why these very powerful abilities are allowed to have cooldowns equal to 10 seconds.

Isn’t that a bit too short, considering that you can reduce the cd even lower?

Someone please try to explain the reasoning behind this, and why warriors need to have these bonus abilities on such a short CD.

Sounds like QQ but I actually want insight from warrior players and everyone else.

I never understood why each burst skill had a 10 second cooldown while some were significantly stronger than others. Stage 3 adrenaline isn’t hard to get, and a 9 second combustion can literally be permanently covering a point in pvp with some points into discipline. Backbreaker is a 30 second cooldown for a 2 second single target kd but earthshaker is an aoe stun for 2 seconds (same duration) and a blast finisher and has some decent damage attatched.

Some things are just too easily accessible on warrior :/

inb4warriorsaystheyarebalanced

Yeah, that too. They have individual cooldowns. Kind of mind blowing…

I actually like just about everything a warrior has going for it….

…my problem is with the other classes being so lame in comparison.

They should have different cds for each “level”.

Then separate the burst buttons into f1, f2, f3.

F1 consumes 1 adrenaline bar, F2, consumes 2, F3 consumes 3.

Adjust cds accordingly. This way, you can still use burst at lower adrenaline without being affect by the level 3 cd changes.

I just did a little research, and here is what I’ve found according to the official GW2 wiki.

Stage 3 eviscerate has a damage coefficient of roughly 3.0

The Elementalist’s fire grab has a damage coeficient vs. burning targets of roughly 2.8

So lets see, a 10 second cooldown skill thats easy enough to land because of the leap, does more damage than a 45 second cooldown skill that is difficult to land on an enemy without using lightning flash (and sacrificing another cooldown) and requires a condition to be on an enemy to do its max damage?

I’m not very experienced at all with warrior, so I’d love for someone to justify this disparity between, damage, cooldown, and ease of use, so I can make sense of this..

Also, I read that adrenaline doesn’t deplete if the warrior doesn’t hit his target, but ithe burst skill still goes on cooldown correct?

step 1….play warrior….step 2 understand warrior……step 3 give feedback.

Alternatively, cut a hole in a box.

Comparing warrior bursts to ele skills like firegrab is not logical. Ele is a different profession with a different set of strengths and weaknesses.

It should be pointed out that most of these skills are extremely dodgeable with large slow animations. All of them can also be blocked or blinded. Most(not all) of these skills are dps decreases…and stability and stun breakers exist.

Arc’s idea….I kinda like it. It would need to be adjusted though. Some bursts do really well at stage one..

crunchyraisin.6054:

Comparing warrior bursts to ele skills like firegrab is not logical. Ele is a different profession with a different set of strengths and weaknesses.

So is it a strength for warriors to have a better skill that does more damage and is easier to land with a lower cooldown?

When you miss a firegrab, you could be missing a gamechanging burst, and you’ll have to carry on without it.

With eviscerate, not only is it more powerful, but if you miss you aren’t as penalized from it.

And don’t try to tell me that ele’s condition clearing and self healing ability make up for that in every way.

Ezeriel.9574:

I actually like just about everything a warrior has going for it….

…my problem is with the other classes being so lame in comparison.

This. I’ve mained a warrior since BWE and honestly, I’m kinda bored of it, but why play another class when I can do more damage with more sustain and less effort.
I don’t think War’s should be nerfed, I want to see some of the other classes get something tasty to make them exciting to play!

crunchyraisin.6054:

step 1….play warrior….step 2 understand warrior……step 3 give feedback.

Alternatively, cut a hole in a box.

Comparing warrior bursts to ele skills like firegrab is not logical. Ele is a different profession with a different set of strengths and weaknesses.

It should be pointed out that most of these skills are extremely dodgeable with large slow animations. All of them can also be blocked or blinded. Most(not all) of these skills are dps decreases…and stability and stun breakers exist.

Arc’s idea….I kinda like it. It would need to be adjusted though. Some bursts do really well at stage one..

Your bias is showing. You provide 0 logical or valuable input to this discussion.

Every single ability can be dodged, every single ability can be blinded (hi berserker stance), 99% abilities can be blocked.

Stability and stun breakers do exist, but they don’t have 10 seconds cooldowns.

You fail to explain why it’s fine for warriors to have these abilities on <10 seconds cooldowns.

you’re implying an ele has one source of burst?…. an ele’s strength lies in it’s evade, mobility, defensive utilities, cleanses, heals, support, or highest burst in game.

a good d/d ele will win a 1v1 against a good warrior most of the time…just sayin.

Well you can try to see that question from the point of view of other professions.
What is the cooldown of stealth? Its way lower than 10 seconds. Why did ANet do that? Why they let one of the biggest offensive/defensive mechanism have that short cooldown?
Because the professions who use them need them and their utilities/skills work around that mechanism (along others).
Same with mesmers, what is the cooldown for creating ilusions? The mesmers need their ilusions and their skills/utilities work around that mechanism.
Warriors without burst skills would lack Control or damage in their weapon skills. If the cooldown of burst skills is increased then warrior weapons skills needed to be changed a little to face that change.

Razor.6392:

Yeah, that too. They have individual cooldowns. Kind of mind blowing…

Same with mesmers shatters, guardian virtues and so on…

silentnight warrior.2714:

Well you can try to see that question from the point of view of other professions.
What is the cooldown of stealth? Its way lower than 10 seconds. Why did ANet do that? Why they let one of the biggest offensive/defensive mechanism have that short cooldown?
Because the professions who use them need them and their utilities/skills work around that mechanism (along others).
Same with mesmers, what is the cooldown for creating ilusions? The mesmers need their ilusions and their skills/utilities work around that mechanism.
Warriors without burst skills would lack Control or damage in their weapon skills. If the cooldown of burst skills is increased then warrior weapons skills needed to be changed a little to face that change.

Having such low cooldown on abilities trivializes the possibility of misusing them.

Missed your 9k damage eviscerate? It’s ok, you can try again in 8~ seconds.

Thieves require a previous setup and they don’t have stuns on demand or 24k vitality :|

that is the biggest problem with this forum….people that play one class complaining about the strength in other classes too much to notice the strength of their class.

crunchyraisin.6054:

you’re implying an ele has one source of burst?…. an ele’s strength lies in it’s evade, mobility, defensive utilities, cleanses, heals, support, or highest burst in game.

a good d/d ele will win a 1v1 against a good warrior most of the time…just sayin.

Well if you’re playing D/D, your only other real sources of burst are fire 3, which is a bit easy to dodge, and earthquake, which is much easier to use and also has a high cooldown. Really ele burst is S/F or S/D and which cannot be done on D/D.

It makes sense for a D/D ele to have less sources of burst and a higher cooldown, but for S/D its more punishing when those bursts miss.

For warrior theres hardly any punishment for when their burst skills miss, except if they fail to proc cleansing ire.

I’m really perplexed by people that think it’s logical to compare across classes directly. Ele is sooooo different than warrior. Warriors do not expect to be able to drop aoe meteor showers that can hit up to 8k each and eles should not be able to expect the low downtime of warrior skills.

The next post will be a mesmer that is sad because they don’t have lich form.

You did describe why s/d is so much less popular now. Even for those that approach it’s skillcap, which is very high. That build is kinda silly anyways once people catch on to it. I feel like it’s rightful place is something for high level players to do when they get bored.

Razor.6392:

silentnight warrior.2714:

Well you can try to see that question from the point of view of other professions.
What is the cooldown of stealth? Its way lower than 10 seconds. Why did ANet do that? Why they let one of the biggest offensive/defensive mechanism have that short cooldown?
Because the professions who use them need them and their utilities/skills work around that mechanism (along others).
Same with mesmers, what is the cooldown for creating ilusions? The mesmers need their ilusions and their skills/utilities work around that mechanism.
Warriors without burst skills would lack Control or damage in their weapon skills. If the cooldown of burst skills is increased then warrior weapons skills needed to be changed a little to face that change.

Having such low cooldown on abilities trivializes the possibility of misusing them.

Missed your 9k damage eviscerate? It’s ok, you can try again in 8~ seconds.

Thieves require a previous setup and they don’t have stuns on demand or 24k vitality :|

So what is the penalty from missing a backstab? Or a mesmer shatter? As a thief you are not revealed if you miss/block. You miss and try again. There is no penalty for that.
And if you are revealed you just have to wait 3 or 4 seconds to vanish again.
Do you miss a gap closer as a thief? do it again right away.
You miss a shatter as a mesmer? Do it again, DE have no cooldown.

Also thiefs have stuns/daze on demand. I use them often.
Also you cannot have 8 seconds burst cooldown on warrior without setup and you need even more setup with runes/sigils to do damage (same as thief).

It’s hard to give a more complex answer other than it’s the Warrior’s unique profession mechanic. From my experience, the 10 second recharge fits pretty naturally into the pace of Gw2’s combat. The impact that missing a burst skill has (like having Combustive Shot blocked/reflected away for instance) can definitely be felt in the heat of a fight even though it may not seem like it with a base 10 second recharge.

Edit: Arcing Slice is awesome :P

Razor.6392:

I don’t play warrior (never have), but I’ll proceed to list what they do based on my personal knowledge:

These are all fine on their own. But what I can’t understand is why these very powerful abilities are allowed to have cooldowns equal to 10 seconds.

Isn’t that a bit too short, considering that you can reduce the cd even lower?

Someone please try to explain the reasoning behind this, and why warriors need to have these bonus abilities on such a short CD.

Sounds like QQ but I actually want insight from warrior players and everyone else.

your personal knowledge does not matter at all and is invalid, because you do not play warrior personally to understand the profession.

the burst abilities are supposed to be powerful and are working fine as intended.

nope. the recharge timer of 10 seconds or 7 is fair and just.

because the warriors do not have other abilities such as death shroud, illusions, stealth, pets, minions, turrets etc.

it is QQ and nothing more.
if you would simply take some time to play the warrior profession for yourself, in sPvP, especially in team arena, then you will understand.

until then, please only come back when you have done so.
http://www.gw2score.com/PvP/player/Razor6392

you have a decent number of games played in solo arena.

now go and play a warrior at least 100 times in team arena, with a proper team of your own friends or guild members, not going into team arena by yourself.

Razor,

because you did not play a warrior yourself, you are very likely a warrior hater and is extremely biased towards the warrior profession, and will not stop complaining about warriors until warriors are made into easy kills again.

if you think they are the easiest and most forgiving, then, by all means, play 100 games of team arena with warrior.

seriously, only come back when you have done so.

because until then, all your feedback regarding warrior will not be positive and constructive at all.

because you will be biased and hell bent on seeing warriors nerfed to the ground.

Warriors are overpowered, such hard hitting abilities should not have such low cooldown. You can evade like most of the eviscerates but if warrior even lands one its GG. The telegraphs does not cut it as many other classes have similar telegraphed ability that has longer cd yet doesn’t hit anywhere close to as hard as warriors skills. This isn’t even just an eviscerate problem, many warrior skills like impale, eartshaker, pin down, arcing arrow have way too low of a cd for amount of dmg and/or CC they provide.

This is on top of the class having one of the best survivability vs direct dmg and condition as well as having the best mobility (if in wvw), also not to mention the insane CC they have. This class has everything and no weaknesses.

are we really talking about low cd’s? thieves have no cd’s on their weapon skills, backstab is available every 4 seconds.

and yet dagger thieves aren’t op at all. point is you can’t compare skills from different classes in a vacuum.

Razor, why do you even bother to ask if you laugh at the reasoning given to you? Says kinda lot about you as well.

And if warrior actually wants to have full adrenaline bar after 7-9 seconds one has to play really aggressively. Assuming you don’t use berserkers stance you have to hit and be hit 30 times to have it full. Sure, weapon swap gives you 5 adrenaline so it’s roughly 20/25 hits taken or given during that time. One needs to be really aggressive to maintain that through out combat.

And no, warriors don’t spam eviscerate, they set it up by stunning first or baiting evades. And it is conditional like your fire grasp, we need to have full bar of adrenaline to make it hard hitting.

And play warrior. Try it out. Get the feeling down how the flow of the combat goes with warrior. Then you can predict bursts skills with ease and dodge every one of them. It’s like people calling stealth a learn to play issue. This is one of those as well.

@Lifestealer: Please, don’t pull the mythical 6/6/6/6/6 warrior with 4 weapons swaps into this conversation again. People should understand that warrior is a versatile profession that can bring a lot of things into the table but not all of them at once.

First of all I play a Warrior as my main and have logged plenty of hours onto the toon so I know what I’m talking about. So let’s look at the upside of warriors in list form.

UPSIDES
1. Tied for highest kind of armor (heavy)
2. Highest raw dps of any class in the game
3. One of the best profession abilities, burst skills with adrenaline, where they all have an ability that’s available to classes, but are far more powerful, and can have as little as a 7 second cd
4. Most mobile weapon in the game (GS) that allows you to go in an and out of combat pretty easily no matter the enemy.
5. Healing Skill- Healing Signet = OP even after nerf, nuff said
6. Some of the best utilities
a. Shouts – great might stackers, high mobility, and a troll fear for eotm
b. Signets – on an equal level with other classes but slightly poorer active effects
c. Stances – 8 sec stability and swiftness combined, 8 sec invincibility to conditions,
and 4 second of invincibility to normal damage (can be wtf lol?!?!
d. Physical – Some nice CC
7. Elite- 50% fury, 5 might, and swiftness uptime OR a banner that does same in aoe
a long cd
8. Traits that are pretty good, especially the Discipline line ~ only thing is many of
them kind of go against certain war mechanics (Berserker’s Power, Heightened
Focus), but others that work great along with adrenaline
9. Decent condi clear if traited (Cleansing Ire) or Shake It Off
10. Simplest profession with straight up mechanics that any ol newbie can pick up

DOWNSIDES
1. Easily Readable ~ can kind of be canceled out with an Asura but that’s it

So yes as a warrior I will say we are SOOOOO OP; I love it! (Probably used that semi colon wrong) My question to you guys is why aren’t you using a warrior! Simple and boring blah blah blah I guess.

crunchyraisin.6054:

I’m really perplexed by people that think it’s logical to compare across classes directly. Ele is sooooo different than warrior. Warriors do not expect to be able to drop aoe meteor showers that can hit up to 8k each and eles should not be able to expect the low downtime of warrior skills.

The next post will be a mesmer that is sad because they don’t have lich form.

You did describe why s/d is so much less popular now. Even for those that approach it’s skillcap, which is very high. That build is kinda silly anyways once people catch on to it. I feel like it’s rightful place is something for high level players to do when they get bored.

I don’t understand your crusade of removing cross class discussions. You have to compare them at some point, otherwise class A would look at class B and say “I know I’m generally a support guy, but why does his power build do 3x more than me and have stronger defenses?” You can’t just put every profession in their own corner and “balance” them based on their own strengths and weaknesses, because it wouldn’t go anywhere.

There is more to balancing then looking at numbers, there is the animations, cast times, cooldowns, reliablility of hitting (some only follow X axis) but its not like people are comparing ghastly claws to eviscerate. They are comparing similar skills on similar play styles.

NinjaEd.3946:

crunchyraisin.6054:

I’m really perplexed by people that think it’s logical to compare across classes directly. Ele is sooooo different than warrior. Warriors do not expect to be able to drop aoe meteor showers that can hit up to 8k each and eles should not be able to expect the low downtime of warrior skills.

The next post will be a mesmer that is sad because they don’t have lich form.

You did describe why s/d is so much less popular now. Even for those that approach it’s skillcap, which is very high. That build is kinda silly anyways once people catch on to it. I feel like it’s rightful place is something for high level players to do when they get bored.

I don’t understand your crusade of removing cross class discussions. You have to compare them at some point, otherwise class A would look at class B and say “I know I’m generally a support guy, but why does his power build do 3x more than me and have stronger defenses?” You can’t just put every profession in their own corner and “balance” them based on their own strengths and weaknesses, because it wouldn’t go anywhere.

There is more to balancing then looking at numbers, there is the animations, cast times, cooldowns, reliablility of hitting (some only follow X axis) but its not like people are comparing ghastly claws to eviscerate. They are comparing similar skills on similar play styles.

Yup, pretty much this ^^

I think I got my point across, so thats that. And yeah S/F and S/D are really are high skill level builds for people that are bored with the conventional ones and just want to blow kitten up, which is fine, but I don’t really play ele anymore so I digress.

Oh and I’m also not a warrior hater. I just feel like the class is too easy to play, and lacks one uniform weakness across all or almost all builds. It doesn’t have a standard ktryptonite, as each build covers up a weakness but creates a new one. But some of those weaknesses are a bit too niche to be considered weaknesses. I remember over a year ago wen warriors were said to be bad for spvp because they lacked reliable condition clearing. With cleansing ire, it seems almost too strong. I would tone down CI just to make it easier for warriors to have a weakness thats easy enough to exploit, as mesmers and thieves are general weak to conditions too, but with traits they can mitigate some but not all of it (ie mender’s purity with heal mantra).

Anyway, a question to all of you warriors, how much stability can you have on one build? In solo q yesterday I tried to kill a warrior on the enemy treb, who was a very high end player with some sort of longbow set up, and if I were playing condition at the time, maybe I’d be okay, but he appeared to have gained stability at 3 different points in the 20 seconds I lasted before I died.

As a WvW player, I do respect warriors and appreciate them greatly in our groups, so of course I don’t want them to experience as many nerfs as necros and mesmers have had, but I feel like they need a bigger exploitable weakness thats not mitigated by playing asura.

nearlight.3064:

Anyway, a question to all of you warriors, how much stability can you have on one build?

1st utility slot – balanced stance (swiftness & stability)
2nd utility slot – dolyak signet (stability)
master trait last stand – negates cc and activates balanced stance

elite skill – rampage (20 s stability transform)

Paavotar.3971:

Razor, why do you even bother to ask if you laugh at the reasoning given to you? Says kinda lot about you as well.

And if warrior actually wants to have full adrenaline bar after 7-9 seconds one has to play really aggressively. Assuming you don’t use berserkers stance you have to hit and be hit 30 times to have it full. Sure, weapon swap gives you 5 adrenaline so it’s roughly 20/25 hits taken or given during that time. One needs to be really aggressive to maintain that through out combat.

And no, warriors don’t spam eviscerate, they set it up by stunning first or baiting evades. And it is conditional like your fire grasp, we need to have full bar of adrenaline to make it hard hitting.

And play warrior. Try it out. Get the feeling down how the flow of the combat goes with warrior. Then you can predict bursts skills with ease and dodge every one of them. It’s like people calling stealth a learn to play issue. This is one of those as well.

@Lifestealer: Please, don’t pull the mythical 6/6/6/6/6 warrior with 4 weapons swaps into this conversation again. People should understand that warrior is a versatile profession that can bring a lot of things into the table but not all of them at once.

not hard to bait evades when your normal attacks do 1k+ damage each hit and rather quickly too… then there is the stances while doing this…. need to run away somehow while we wait as you try to stun us into place with hammer shield axe combos……………because running away is a perfectly acceptable counter according to the balance talk live stream -.- #will never be an esport

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

nearlight.3064:

Anyway, a question to all of you warriors, how much stability can you have on one build?

1st utility slot – balanced stance (swiftness & stability)
2nd utility slot – dolyak signet (stability)
master trait last stand – negates cc and activates balanced stance

elite skill – rampage (20 s stability transform)

Thanks for the info, that is a considerable amount. Now if only necros could get that much from utilities instead of the trait.. but I digress. its just a game and as long as we have fun, I’m okay with my main being a giant green ping pong ball!

nearlight.3064:

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

nearlight.3064:

Anyway, a question to all of you warriors, how much stability can you have on one build?

1st utility slot – balanced stance (swiftness & stability)
2nd utility slot – dolyak signet (stability)
master trait last stand – negates cc and activates balanced stance

elite skill – rampage (20 s stability transform)

Thanks for the info, that is a considerable amount. Now if only necros could get that much from utilities instead of the trait.. but I digress. its just a game and as long as we have fun, I’m okay with my main being a giant green ping pong ball!

you do realize there is still a sizable amount of stability downtime even with all these options, and that stability itself is a boon that is easily removed, stolen.

if the warrior packs so much stability the warrior will be missing out on other things.
there are choices and consequences.

having stability only means protection against control effects.

the warrior still melts to massive condition spam and sustained heavy burst damage.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

nearlight.3064:

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

nearlight.3064:

Anyway, a question to all of you warriors, how much stability can you have on one build?

1st utility slot – balanced stance (swiftness & stability)
2nd utility slot – dolyak signet (stability)
master trait last stand – negates cc and activates balanced stance

elite skill – rampage (20 s stability transform)

Thanks for the info, that is a considerable amount. Now if only necros could get that much from utilities instead of the trait.. but I digress. its just a game and as long as we have fun, I’m okay with my main being a giant green ping pong ball!

you do realize there is still a sizable amount of stability downtime even with all these options, and that stability itself is a boon that is easily removed, stolen.

if the warrior packs so much stability the warrior will be missing out on other things.
there are choices and consequences.

having stability only means protection against control effects.

the warrior still melts to massive condition spam and sustained heavy burst damage.

Yes I do, I’m not a 4 year old.

I was simply playing power at the time, which didn’t have boon removal/corruption options. If I played condition then, maybe I could have came out victorious. Of course, then it would’ve been pointless for me to even be at the treb since it not like I could have bled it to death.

And stability aside, I basically got wrecked by CC and pin down blah blah blah, and that was a build with 3 stunbreaks. I don’t know anything else about his build, but using a soldier’s amulet I still basically melted and was unable to to any significant amount of damage to him. But I’ve since learned that condition necro or MM cheese is the best for solo q.

And what is sustained heavy burst damage? Isn’t the defintion of burst something you can’t sustain? A combo of damage in the span of a second or two that blows up a chunk of your health before you can react?

Razor.6392:

I don’t play warrior (never have), but I’ll proceed to list what they do based on my personal knowledge:
Arcing slice (greatsword): Melee hit that gives fury, by far one of the worst out there.
Earthshaker (hammer): Aoe stun with respectable damage (also a blast fin. didn’t know that).
Skull cracker (mace): Single target, long duration stun.
Eviscerate (axe): Single target, very high damage nuke with a small gap closing leap.
Combustive shot (LB): Fire field, lasts a long time.
Kill shot (rifle): ranged extremely high damage nuke with a channel.

These are all fine on their own. But what I can’t understand is why these very powerful abilities are allowed to have cooldowns equal to 10 seconds.

Isn’t that a bit too short, considering that you can reduce the cd even lower?

Someone please try to explain the reasoning behind this, and why warriors need to have these bonus abilities on such a short CD.

• Arcing Slice has low damage (1.3 coefficient) but provides a lot of Fury. So it’s a utility skill.

No one uses Arcing Slice because it’s weak. It provides Fury, but so does Signet of Rage, which most Warriors run with.

• Earthshaker was strong at a point because it had a high aoe CC with good damage. That damage was heavily cut down a while back. Also, Earthshaker is one of the most telegraphed skills a Warrior has.
• Skull Crack has the longest stun in the game, but it’s on a slow weapon. They also recently doubled the cast time on it from 0.25s to 0.5s.
• Eviscerate has high damage, but a very telegraphed animation. If you’re wondering, Final Thrust at <50% HP has the damage damage on a 15s cooldown.
• Kill Shot has one of the highest coefficients of a single hit skills in the game. However, other than that, Rifle is a pretty bad weapon. It’s got Volley and Kill Shot and that’s pretty much it. And Kill Shot has a 1.75s channeling with a pretty obvious animation.

The above skills have one thing in common: They are all awesome as heck, but they’re all very hard to land. All of them have a lengthy channel, an obvious animation or both.

The only universally great burst skill is Combustive Shot. And Combustive Shot on its own is kind of crappy, actually. It’s got low damage, burning and a combo field. The combo field isn’t very useful with just longbow. In fact, the reason why Combustive Shot is so awesome is because of how well it works with Cleansing Ire.

And that’s why the burst skills have low cooldowns.

Razor.6392:

I don’t play warrior (never have),
Arcing slice (greatsword):
very powerful abilities

/thread.

I don’t consider the burst skills to be a problem. I mean, how’s this different from what a thief can do? (Except, you know, telegraphed. So more like a mesmer’s traited shatters.)

unlucky.9285:

Paavotar.3971:

…

not hard to bait evades when your normal attacks do 1k+ damage each hit and rather quickly too… then there is the stances while doing this…. need to run away somehow while we wait as you try to stun us into place with hammer shield axe combos……………because running away is a perfectly acceptable counter according to the balance talk live stream -.- #will never be an esport

Hammer/axe + sh has some big mobility issues so you should exploit that. And yes, there is pressure weapons on warriors. Hammer, axe and gs all have pretty good AA’s to keep the pressure on, only the greatsword doesn’t have that great AA but the vulnerability stacks cover it a bit.

And running away is a valid tactic. You should not stay in unfavorable fight if it has no value. I’m not saying you should always start to run away when you spot a warrior, but if you know the warrior can take you down 1v1, why do you need to stay? Leave and go to another battle with your teammates, gank the warrior with two, make the fight favorable for yourself.

Olba.5376:

Razor.6392:

I don’t play warrior (never have), but I’ll proceed to list what they do based on my personal knowledge:
Arcing slice (greatsword): Melee hit that gives fury, by far one of the worst out there.
Earthshaker (hammer): Aoe stun with respectable damage (also a blast fin. didn’t know that).
Skull cracker (mace): Single target, long duration stun.
Eviscerate (axe): Single target, very high damage nuke with a small gap closing leap.
Combustive shot (LB): Fire field, lasts a long time.
Kill shot (rifle): ranged extremely high damage nuke with a channel.

These are all fine on their own. But what I can’t understand is why these very powerful abilities are allowed to have cooldowns equal to 10 seconds.

Isn’t that a bit too short, considering that you can reduce the cd even lower?

Someone please try to explain the reasoning behind this, and why warriors need to have these bonus abilities on such a short CD.

• Arcing Slice has low damage (1.3 coefficient) but provides a lot of Fury. So it’s a utility skill.

No one uses Arcing Slice because it’s weak. It provides Fury, but so does Signet of Rage, which most Warriors run with.

• Earthshaker was strong at a point because it had a high aoe CC with good damage. That damage was heavily cut down a while back. Also, Earthshaker is one of the most telegraphed skills a Warrior has.
• Skull Crack has the longest stun in the game, but it’s on a slow weapon. They also recently doubled the cast time on it from 0.25s to 0.5s.
• Eviscerate has high damage, but a very telegraphed animation. If you’re wondering, Final Thrust at <50% HP has the damage damage on a 15s cooldown.
• Kill Shot has one of the highest coefficients of a single hit skills in the game. However, other than that, Rifle is a pretty bad weapon. It’s got Volley and Kill Shot and that’s pretty much it. And Kill Shot has a 1.75s channeling with a pretty obvious animation.

The above skills have one thing in common: They are all awesome as heck, but they’re all very hard to land. All of them have a lengthy channel, an obvious animation or both.

The only universally great burst skill is Combustive Shot. And Combustive Shot on its own is kind of crappy, actually. It’s got low damage, burning and a combo field. The combo field isn’t very useful with just longbow. In fact, the reason why Combustive Shot is so awesome is because of how well it works with Cleansing Ire.

And that’s why the burst skills have low cooldowns.

Telegraphed yet warrior has multiple methods of chaining attacks to land those telegraphed hits. Axe+SH, quite simple to explain landing eviscerate. Same can be done with leg specialist and #3 on axe. Combustive shot can have a 90% uptime and being a combo field work in all sorts of ways while also providing constant damage ticks which can crit to apply on crit effects (or just on hit effects). 100b is the most telegraphed skill imaginable yet people get it off by combo-ing it with some form of cc (often skull crack), and just getting a couple hits of that off is painful.

So yeah, I don’t understand why every burst skill has a 10 second cooldown. I don’t mind them having separate cooldowns, but all having a 10 second base is most certainly not right especially since it is the only adrenaline spender and adrenaline is incredibly easy to obtain. What happened to GW1 adrenaline mechanics where you had to make choices and many skills had additional effects for spending that adrenaline? (spend all, gain additional for X skill type, disable skill type X, etc)

I honestly feel like some adrenaline skills could use a change of mechanics with also a change of cooldowns.

Arcing slice- Lower fury duration to 5 seconds at stage 1, 7 seconds at stage 2, and 10 seconds at stage 3. Now cleaves. Fury gain is per target hit (max number of hits 3). Increase range to 180. Increased cooldown to 15 seconds.

Eviscerate- No mechanic or cooldown change.

Earthshaker- No mechanic change, increase cooldown to 15 seconds.

Flurry- Only apply immobilize if the first hit makes contact, no cooldown change.

Combustive shot- Increase field duration at stage 1 to 5 seconds, stage 2 to 8 seconds, and stage 3 to 12 seconds. Increase cooldown to 20 seconds.

Skull crack- No mechanic change, increase cooldown to 15 seconds.

Kill shot- Movement no longer interrupts channel, however it reduces the range to 750 and has a 25% chance to miss now(25% chance it will stray from your target). No cooldown change.

NinjaEd.3946:

You have to compare them at some point, otherwise class A would look at class B and say “I know I’m generally a support guy, but why does his power build do 3x more than me and have stronger defenses?” You can’t just put every profession in their own corner and “balance” them based on their own strengths and weaknesses, because it wouldn’t go anywhere.

Erm, why not?

Or rather, why would you need to compare anything but the class (as a whole) directly. And that was the point of the OP, that it’s ok to compare the class, since that’s the smallest comparable unit, but not an individual skill, because there’s no common unit of measurement for those.

So the balance process should be this:

1. Change something about the design of the class or its abilities or traits. This can be a nerf, assuming that a lack of viably challenge is identified.
2. Compare the new setup of the class to the other classes, and adjust numbers accordingly.
3. Recursively call (1) again until (2) is judged to be too small a change to bother with it any more.

Carighan.6758:

NinjaEd.3946:

You have to compare them at some point, otherwise class A would look at class B and say “I know I’m generally a support guy, but why does his power build do 3x more than me and have stronger defenses?” You can’t just put every profession in their own corner and “balance” them based on their own strengths and weaknesses, because it wouldn’t go anywhere.

Erm, why not?

What part is that referring to? The last part?

If so, its because balance isn’t a 1 way street. If they balanced every class based on their own strengths and flaws warrior would be invulnerable, guardian would need to be killed 50 times before actually dying because of their healing, thief would 1 shot tanks, and necromancer would pour acid over their foes and melt them faster with conditions than they are already capable of.

Its vital to compare certain parts of the class. Not necessarily change them because not every class is a copy of one another, but its healthy to compare similar mechanics on similar play styles. The whole point is every class should be able to fill any role, not all of them are going to be pulling straight A’s in every role but noticeably large differences are the reason for many of these cross class comparison threads.

Like I said, design based on internal balance. The class has to feel meaningful, feel overpowered, feel awesome.
Then change numbers based on comparison to the other classes. Mind you, this comparison happens whole-class-vs-whole-class. Not per-ability. Not per-set. Not nothing. Any smaller-scale change should be done on a design level, and always ignoring the other classes.

If Warriors are too mobile, then reduce the distance moved on their skills, change cooldowns, lower output, whatever. OR, go back to the drawing board. Maybe a mobile warrior is a bad idea in the first place? Replace the skills entirely, with a whole new slew of abilities centred around a wholly different idea. Maybe add strain-damage to some warrior abilities instead of replacing them?

The problem with comparing skills versus other classes is that you ignore context. People are always easy to say “Yeah but warriors are too mobile in XYZ”, usually 1v1 I-don’t-like-winning-so-I-play-roaming. But what they ignore is that this is a tiny slice of the entire cake, and more importantly the situation where class A uses ability X is not 100% identical to the situation where class B uses similar ability Y. Sure, I can find overlaps. Easy enough. And what about the rest? Ignore them because I think smallscale PvP roaming is a viable perspective upon the entirety of balance?

IMO the burst skills should have at most a 15 second GLOBAL (across all burst abilities) cooldown on them. It’s enough time to where a miss is punishing, but not long enough for it to be completely unfair to them.

RyuDragnier.9476:

IMO the burst skills should have at most a 15 second GLOBAL (across all burst abilities) cooldown on them. It’s enough time to where a miss is punishing, but not long enough for it to be completely unfair to them.

that would be acceptable if you make all burst skills instant cast, like steal. otherwise warriors would be the only class without a class mechanic.

wads.5730:

RyuDragnier.9476:

IMO the burst skills should have at most a 15 second GLOBAL (across all burst abilities) cooldown on them. It’s enough time to where a miss is punishing, but not long enough for it to be completely unfair to them.

that would be acceptable if you make all burst skills instant cast, like steal. otherwise warriors would be the only class without a class mechanic.

Argument doesn’t fly because Rangers can be without their class mechanic for 40 seconds at a time, Thieves for 30 seconds, etc.

RyuDragnier.9476:

wads.5730:

RyuDragnier.9476:

IMO the burst skills should have at most a 15 second GLOBAL (across all burst abilities) cooldown on them. It’s enough time to where a miss is punishing, but not long enough for it to be completely unfair to them.

that would be acceptable if you make all burst skills instant cast, like steal. otherwise warriors would be the only class without a class mechanic.

Argument doesn’t fly because Rangers can be without their class mechanic for 40 seconds at a time, Thieves for 30 seconds, etc.

you misunderstood, i meant that unlike steal, which you can’t actively dodge, everyone would be able to dodge a warrior burst skill, since they are all extremely easy to dodge.

wads.5730:

RyuDragnier.9476:

wads.5730:

RyuDragnier.9476:

IMO the burst skills should have at most a 15 second GLOBAL (across all burst abilities) cooldown on them. It’s enough time to where a miss is punishing, but not long enough for it to be completely unfair to them.

that would be acceptable if you make all burst skills instant cast, like steal. otherwise warriors would be the only class without a class mechanic.

Argument doesn’t fly because Rangers can be without their class mechanic for 40 seconds at a time, Thieves for 30 seconds, etc.

you misunderstood, i meant that unlike steal, which you can’t actively dodge, everyone would be able to dodge a warrior burst skill, since they are all extremely easy to dodge.

Except that eviscerate is not that easy to dodge when the a/sh war has either stunned you with sh#4 or bated out your dodges with their extremely had hitting auto.

Specklez.2694:

First of all I play a Warrior as my main and have logged plenty of hours onto the toon so I know what I’m talking about. So let’s look at the upside of warriors in list form.

UPSIDES
1. Tied for highest kind of armor (heavy)
2. Highest raw dps of any class in the game
3. One of the best profession abilities, burst skills with adrenaline, where they all have an ability that’s available to classes, but are far more powerful, and can have as little as a 7 second cd
4. Most mobile weapon in the game (GS) that allows you to go in an and out of combat pretty easily no matter the enemy.
5. Healing Skill- Healing Signet = OP even after nerf, nuff said
6. Some of the best utilities
a. Shouts – great might stackers, high mobility, and a troll fear for eotm
b. Signets – on an equal level with other classes but slightly poorer active effects
c. Stances – 8 sec stability and swiftness combined, 8 sec invincibility to conditions,
and 4 second of invincibility to normal damage (can be wtf lol?!?!
d. Physical – Some nice CC
7. Elite- 50% fury, 5 might, and swiftness uptime OR a banner that does same in aoe
a long cd
8. Traits that are pretty good, especially the Discipline line ~ only thing is many of
them kind of go against certain war mechanics (Berserker’s Power, Heightened
Focus), but others that work great along with adrenaline
9. Decent condi clear if traited (Cleansing Ire) or Shake It Off
10. Simplest profession with straight up mechanics that any ol newbie can pick up

DOWNSIDES
1. Easily Readable ~ can kind of be canceled out with an Asura but that’s it

So yes as a warrior I will say we are SOOOOO OP; I love it! (Probably used that semi colon wrong) My question to you guys is why aren’t you using a warrior! Simple and boring blah blah blah I guess.

Myth busting time.

1. Easily outwayed by insane protection uptime (ele, guardian, mesmer).
2. No. Thief, Guardian and elementalist all do better.
3. Elementalist, Necromancer, Mesmer and Engineer have arguably better profession abilities. More skills. Even if you don’t agree with this, don’t post your opinion as fact.
4. FGS from ele gives higher mobility. And talking about escaping, thief, elementalist and mesmer all do way better. When it comes to escaping, stealth and teleports>running.
5. Another opinion, weak.
6.
a: mobility in a shout? might stacking ok, that’s what warriors do. And you worry about EotM trolling?
b: Ah, so our signets are on par, but have weaker passives?
c: Other classes have way more access to complete invulnerability then warriors do.
d: this one made me laugh. The only viable physical skill is Bull’s Rush. So that’s 3 useless utilities right there.
7. Warrior has good elites, I’ll grant you that.
8. This does not help your point, every class has great traits.
9. We have good condition clear as you say, but we can not function without it. Other classes suffer less from this.
10. True, but I’d rather have a higher skillcap.

Try again.