Guild Wars 2

First off I will admit that I am a diehard Warrior player although I now have more games on Thief because they are currently more viable in tPvP. I’ve been noticing that the threads suggesting Warrior changes or pointing out flaws that cause them to be subpar always seem to go way overboard on these forums. ANet isn’t full of idiots no matter how much we joke about it(Hell I even trolled Chaplan about the recent Mes buff when I saw him in game yesterday). The class isn’t inherently flawed in design at all and aside from possibly being too weak to certain things or not strong enough in certain areas it’s not all that bad. When I see suggestions like completely gutting Rampage to make some imaginary defensive cooldown I can’t help but wonder if the devs are laughing at these threads. To completely gut an elite and remake it would require an excessive amount of work. Just think of the animation work, the backside coding, the play testing, and the debugging that went into making the transformation elites. There’s no way that an intelligent design team would ever consider gutting something that took up so many resources and no way they would consider making a completely new player suggested dream elite(one that sounds horrifically overpowered even from my biased Warrior PoV by the way).

Coming from Guild Wars 1, WoW, and SWTOR I must state that ANet is by far the most responsive dev team of any MMO out there. It’s a shame not to take advantage of this by actually giving them useful feedback. I’m hoping that in this thread we can suggest minor tweaks to make Warriors more viable in the tPvP scene because currently they’re fairly rare and are generally thought to hold a team back. Keep discussion reasonable and make suggestions that might actually be considered. Keep criticism of other peoples’ suggestions constructive.

My personal suggestions below.

Warrior Problems:

• Strong offensive capability when left alone and weak offensive capability when actively countered makes them difficult to balance at both high and low end play.
• Highly susceptible to movement impairment effects.
• Primarily a melee class with comparatively weak ranged options.
• Limited condition removal and sustain options for a class that is primarily melee.

Suggestions:

1. The trait “Mobile Strikes” seems to be a trait designed to address the Warrior’s weakness to movement impairment effects. However since it only removes immobilizes it still leaves Warriors extremely weak to the Cripples and Chills that are abundant in a meta with many D/D Aura Share Elementalists and Scepter/Warhorn+Staff Necromancers. I propose that the “Mobile Strikes” trait remove one movement impairment effect(one Cripple or Chill or Immobilize) per movement skill used. I feel that this change would make Warriors more effective against movement impairment effects. I also feel that by not making the trait simple remove all movement impairment effects at once the trait wouldn’t be overpowered and instead exist as a viable and effective choice against teams with heavy movement impairment effects.
2. The Rifle and the Longbow currently struggle between being a condition based weapons and direct damage weapons. The Rifle auto attack is bleed based with fairly low physical damage while the rest of the skills on the weapon are fully physical. The Longbow is the opposite with a direct damage auto attack and mostly condition based skills aside from the #3 ability. I suggest removing the bleed on Rifle auto attacks while buffing the physical damage somewhat to make up for the change. I also suggest adding a bleed to the Longbow auto attack while reducing the physical damage somewhat to make up for the change. This would serve to make the two weapons serve as either physical or condition damage weapons instead of being fairly mediocre hybrid weapons.
3. Currently Healing Signet doesn’t seem to serve a real purpose. With the current HPS values the skill simply doesn’t make sense over the other two healing skills aside from lazyness and not wanting to bother actively using heals for easy PvE content. I suggest adding a condition removal component to the passive to give the heal a place as a sustain heal for long fights. If the skill simply removed 1 condition per 10 seconds passively along with it’s passive heal it would be worth taking in situations where you might not take a lot of burst damage but would be taking sustained damage and be afflicted with conditions over time.

I feel that these three changes could be implemented without many(if any) unforeseen side effects. The Mobile Strikes change for example would mainly effect heavy melee builds using Greatsword or Sword and as a result would not cause primarily ranged builds to be overpowered against movement impairment effects(Rifle/Longbow have no movement abilities to proc the trait). The change to ranged weapons might make it more viable to take them but because a Warrior would either give up the strong auto attack of axe and the defensive capability of the shield OR the mobility and burst of the greatsword the buffs to these weapons will probably not mean Warriors will have all the melee power they currently have but with added ranged power as much as it will mean that Warriors have the option to sacrifice some melee to gain a ranged option. The buff to healing signet isn’t likely to be an big buff to Warriors. With the currently HPS rate and the proposed 1 condition/10 seconds removal rate it would simply be a passive signet alternative to Mending. The skill would have a niche but Mending and Healing Surge would still likely be more used. The important thing is that Warriors would have the option of choosing Healing Signet without feeling gimped.

I actually suggested the Mobile Strikes change to Chaplan in game and he gave me the impression that he would consider it!

http://i.imgur.com/MODrR.jpg

Imo if only they buffed the heals/lowered the cooldowns of these the warrior would be in a good spot. But atm the cooldowns are waaaay too long for waaaay too small heals. I often dont even use the heals midfight as they heal so little/casttime pretty long atleast for hte one im using(mending) that its often a disadvantage to use it as ull take more dmg and lose crucial dmg output during that time. Alltho there is many options, adding increased base movementspeed would be pretty neat too as they after all are meele and are VERY vulnerable to chill/cripple and their likes.

-Mobile Strikes

Movement skills break immobilize, “chill, cripple, and weakness.” Just to help glass cannons actually reach targets.

A better Atma’s Impaler (DPS per Tankiness) mechanic on Tactics and Defense just so Warrior isn’t a Guardian duplicate and feels more aggressive.

Get rid of useless traits such as Fast Healer, Thick Skin, and Determined Revival. Then replace those with something better. Something regarding damage per Tankiness or similar to the Atma’s Impaler mechanic since Warrior’s are Tanky DPSers.

Make physical utility skills actually deal damage.

Warrior’s Sprint

In the Dec. 14th patch all movement increase signets were buffed from 10% IMS to 25% IMS. The trait “Warrior’s Sprint” with it’s 10% IMS was equivalent to these signets and obviously just as weak since a 10% IMS is barely noticeable. I propose buffing the Warrior’s Sprint trait to 25% IMS to make the trait more viable. This change would provide Warriors with a viable IMS outside of swiftness. Currently nearly every Warrior takes Signet of Rage and the 20% Signet CDR trait because as a melee oriented class they are heavily dependent on having a good IMS and Signet of Rage provides this along with high up time might and fury. The other elites would likely see more use if Warriors were able to spec for Warrior’s Sprint in place of Signet of Rage. This would also not overpower Warriors since they currently already have high up time swiftness.

There needs to be more Atma’s Impaler type traits for Warriors, where toughness is converted to more power, and power is converted to more toughness.

If those traits were beefed up a bit, that would make a world of difference in viability for all builds.

Back from a 5 month break. I am sad to see little has changed with the Warrior class as the gameplay I experienced during Beta with the Warrior was what really drew me into the game. I loved the Warrior class in GW1 and I love it in GW2. I know Jonathan Sharp has posted on other threads about buffing Warrior sustain(something they’ve severely lacked since the kneejerk Beta nerfs) so I am hopeful.

Bumping this because it is still relevant.

Simple suggestion, weapon evades are currently present on many strong builds. BM Rangers in particular, with S/D thieves coming in at a close second.

What I’d like to see is warriors receive certain attacks that cannot be evaded (dodges will still work, just weapon evades specifically). I think good candidates for this buff would be earthshaker and combustive shot. Of course I mostly just want to see anything throw a wrench into the current pet madness currently taking place.

Also, brawn, really… how has this not been fixed yet.

Jonwar.9205:

Simple suggestion, weapon evades are currently present on many strong builds. BM Rangers in particular, with S/D thieves coming in at a close second.

What I’d like to see is warriors receive certain attacks that cannot be evaded (dodges will still work, just weapon evades specifically). I think good candidates for this buff would be earthshaker and combustive shot. Of course I mostly just want to see anything throw a wrench into the current pet madness currently taking place.

Also, brawn, really… how has this not been fixed yet.

I think the problem with suggesting evades is that it doesn’t fit ANet’s vision for the Warrior class. Class that have evades are supposed to be Thieves and Rangers because they’re meant to be evasive and mobile as supposed to sturdy and innately tough like a Warrior. I distinctly remember some beta threads with ANet responses to this tone so I doubt they’ll change their minds at this point.

With that said one of the most powerful aspects of the Greatsword in my mind is the #3 because it does a sizeable amount of damage, has a split second evade component, and also functions as a gap closer/movement skill. Skills from other weapons really need to be reworked or buffed in some way because really the only really great weapon set a Warrior has at the moment is the Greatsword and even that has a fairly useless skill; #2 Hundred Blades. This is because Hundred Blades is essentially a DPS loss compared to auto-attacking and is really only good for stacking might/vulnerability from traits. The skill is great for seeing big impressive numbers that cause people to cry “NERF NOW” but in reality it is terrible. Axe is the only weapon that comes remotely close to being a good as Greatsword but even that is hurt by a useless #2 that causes a minor amount of vulnerability and little damage. An issue that plagues Warrior weapons is the identity crisis half of them seem to face. Sword is a condition damage auto-attack weapon with no other condition based skills outside of the burst skill Flurry, which was nerfed nearly a year ago to be practically useless for actual damage and is barely usable for the immobilize. Rifle is a purely physical damage weapon with an auto-attack that is crippled by a bleed component(meaning the physical component is lower to compensate). Longbow is a potentially great condition damage weapon with a terrible pure physical auto attack that is borderline useless for condition builds.

The big problem ANet faces is really making Warrior as difficult to kill as other classes with tons of active defence abilities as it has been shown time and time again since launch that passive defence in this game is very underpowered in comparison. Toughness and vitality mean very little when boons like protection, regeneration, retaliation, and vigor tend to allow a player to live so much longer. I think the devs didn’t anticipate the fact that a single evade potentially mitigates upwards of 10k damage if done right while the 500 toughness bonus of Warriors might mitigate a total of 1-2k damage at best over the course of a fight. The high health pools of Warriors and Necros made them beta monsters because initially players didn’t use their active defences very well but now having a few thousand extra health is quite meaningless when you stop to consider that all that gets you is an extra 3-4 auto attacks before you die. Blurred Frenzy for example has the potential to mitigate an incredible amount of damage while also dealing damage and this makes Mesmers exponentially more difficult to deal with than Warriors.

So I’ve played the Warrior quite a lot and have experimented with 90% of these weapons.

The GS seems to serve its function well for burst damage, cleave and mobility. The Burst on the otherhand…kind of useless. For burst builds it better to take a trait to increase %dmg from stacked burst and do damage in battle. Otherwise if you’re running a consistent damage build or a tanky build, greatsword just isn’t suited for either.

Responsiveness on the sword burst is indeed needed. You miss the largest flaw of the bleeds on the sword warrior. The bleeds are just too long vs how fast they’re applied. If condition removal wasn’t so prominent, then the stacks would build up over time and eventually topple someone. It usually get cleansed before the duration runs and a lot of the damage is lost.

The Hammer just feels fine to me. As in it seems to be quite a strong weapon overall.

It seems like you need constantly have the Long Bow Burst down to actually put out condition damage with it. This becomes difficult with any build that doesn’t have high adrenaline building. Even with a high adrenaline generating build, the burns and bleeds feel mediocre. The #1 also suffers greatly from retaliation which is pretty big.

The Shield is a fair gap closer/interupt. You need runes of paralyzation if you want to do any damage during the stun.

The Rifle’s Burst is pretty impossible to land on a decent player. If you’re planning on sneaking it in during the chaos of a multiperson battle, it’s better to have had aoe in that battle. The Rifle also fires so slowly that missing just one shot hurts a lot of your damage especially since the damage of it is so split between condi/D&D. The utilities are pretty useful but the overall damage output is pretty bad.

You guys looking at the Warriors sustain tells me the prolonged damage of a warrior is what’s question and rightly so. I’ve tried SO HARD to make non-burst warrior build. In doing this I have found warriors to be over reliant on shouts (heals and cleanse), or reliant on support to stay alive to do this damage. With how much damage you have to sacrifice, along with the vulnerability of being constantly open to being targeted just doesn’t compare to the say a Berserker thief that can dart in, put up just as much damage and dart out with little to no risk. This has to do the short period of time of surprise that entering a battle brings, the power of target dropping abilities plus the time to retarget. These retreating abilities that give a sudo invulnerability. The Warriors innate health pool becomes weaker and easy targetability becomes worse the more people in a battle there are and the longer the battle goes on while these escape utilities retain their value.

RustyEyeballs.8927:

The Warriors innate health pool becomes weaker and easy targetability becomes worse the more people in a battle there are and the longer the battle goes on while these escape utilities retain their value.

Exactly. Evades, target breaks, teleports, and invulnerabilities are incredibly powerful when used correctly. It seems that when the game was released the devs seem to have underestimated the potential of these abilities in relation to pure toughness and vitality. In beta and early on in the game’s life this was fine as most people hadn’t really figured it out yet either and as a result there was a good diversity of classes in PvP(aside from Mesmers/Thieves being by far the most popular due to being OP at launch). Now people have a better understanding of the game and know that a well timed invulnerability can be worth a hell of a lot more than any increase in toughness or vitality. People also understand the power of boons like Protection, Vigor, and Regeneration and understand that to get the equivalent of high uptime with these boons you’d need an obscene amount of defensive stats; more than you can reasonably stack and certainly more than the stat advantage Warriors get in exchange for not having easy access to these types of boons.