Guild Wars 2

Cogbyrn.7283:

I think there are some interesting ideas, but a few necessary aesthetic concerns:

1. For the Mace #1 Attack 3, what is the combo field made of? I understand the desire for a combo field, but you’re wielding a blunt object in one hand. I have no idea what it could really be that would make any sort of sense.

2. For Hammer #3, I get the idea, but we aren’t Thor, or Wulfgar. Having a greatsword boomerang is already a bit of a stretch, but throwing a hammer at someone and having it somehow pull them back just seems aesthetically silly. I’d also personally rather have the conal cripple, but if they could make the movement more like Mighty Blow for Guardians (where the character leaps forward and slams down, providing movement but still making sense from an animation perspective), then it would be less of a mobility liability.

3. I use Greatsword all the time, and I would be heavily bummed by those changes. To be honest, moving 100B just frees up another ability slot that I would use more frequently, and then I’d probably almost never, ever use 100B. The bummer lies in 4/5. Bladetrail already doesn’t seem to do a very good job of being a predictive projectile when targeting an enemy, so when I hit someone on the way out, I feel good. If that turned into my only means of gap closing, I’d be horrified. Not only that, Rush is incredible. I know you’re looking at tPvP, but the consequences of WvWvW and even PvE and I’d venture sPvP/tPvP mobility give me a sad. The fact that it doesn’t often hit is almost a non-issue. It’s the long range dash that is the key that adds really good mobility for the weapon. A block would be nice I suppose, but the weapon seems geared more towards mobility, and blocking is in stark opposition to that design philosophy.

4. For Hammer #4, I think I’m the only one in the world who isn’t bothered by the self-root. I use it to follow up after an Earthshaker for clearing people away from the area, or for predicting when someone will be attacking and having the knockback already swinging when they get to me. It has its place, but if they wanted to make it so you could move while knocking back, they’d have to change the animation completely, and maybe reduce the AoE as well (even though it already isn’t very big).

5. For the Longbow F1, when is the boon removal applied? Is it ticked immediately, then every 5 seconds? Or is the first tick of removal after 5 seconds of being down? If it’s the former, I’d be concerned that it would almost be too good, and if it’s the latter, I’d be concerned that it would almost be a nonfactor.

6. For Longbow #1, I feel like there are already infinite ways to cripple. Putting it on something spammable in any class feels lame. I’m not sure what the answer is to spice this one up, but I’d personally prefer just about anything else. Maybe they can apply 1 second of burning or something to tie the weapon into a condition damage/burn theme.

Ok lets revise it then.

1) Mace has a Combo Field attack, not a creation of one. A ‘finisher’ where it does something but I have no idea what.

2) The problem with Hammer #3 is that its on a completely horizontal pane. If you’re above someone you have a 50/50 chance it actually hits based on elevation. I don’t have an exact idea of what to put there but I’d like some form of gap closer OR an AOE Buff where you kiss the top of the hammer and spin in a circle ending with a high five to your closest ally, giving them Vigor.

3) GS needs to have 100B revamped, its only intelligent. Maybe removing Rush went to far. How about
GS #5 (rush) – Targeted enemy becomes immobilized (2 seconds) Rush towards an enemy, crippling all enemies in your path.

4) Hammer #4 is only useful if you can time it right such as hiding behind a wall as they walk in. Or comboing into it, its not a skill you can actually use on its own without having a great chance of missing. There needs to be a way to actually make it MORE useful oppose to just a follow up. Maybe have a whirl like Axe #5 where it knocks back those in your path for say 3 seconds of a whirl. But the AoE is smaller.

5) First boon is removed after 5 seconds of the F1’s use. Giving enemies a chance to move out of the attack.

6) A burn on attack would be fine as well but the problem is are traits associated to burning (10% + dmg on burning foe) would have to be reworked as well. Otherwise the primary attack will always do +10% Dmg.

Well, of course, if we need a rework of our skills, that should be done too with traits. Else there will be op combination or useless traits (like now).

If the mace #1 grants vigor (on second and third attack), that would focus even more the mace as defensive.

The Hammer #4 is very situational, due to his self root. Maybe reduce his effect and being able to cast it moving. Although, there will always be skills “follow up”, you can’t have only skills on their own (that’s even against the idea of combo you had).

About the longbow burn, the rifle already applies a dot condition (bleed) on mono target. Having longbow doing that too is a bit redundant. Or else change rifle with longbow (more realistic, but that’s not very important).

@Braxxus

I never said Warriors can hold points well though. Point holding as a Warrior is lacking considering a Necro/Guardian/Engineer would hold a point better. Didn’t disagree with that at all.

However, If you’re saying Warrior isn’t more viable than (at least) lets say “Thieves” or “Rangers” in terms of roles then you probably didn’t even try to find a way to stay on par with those classes if not better.

The issue with the warrior in spvp is not that the warrior is that bad a class. It’s just that everyone else is just so much more effective in all the roles. (Let’s be honest, you could just have a team of mesmers and guardians and you’d win 9/10 matches).

Our weapon skills are mostly single target oriented. When you’re attacking a point there’s so much aoe damage flying about and boon strips etc the warrior has to

1) Be right in the middle of all that .
2) Stay in melee range of a target.

No one else has to worry about that range. Thieves heartseeker spam leaps you to the target. Guardians spam scepter attacks. So the only person who realistically has to be on top of another class to do damage/use alot of weapon abilities, is the warrior.

I can’t count the number of times my sword adrenal has missed or my hundred blades has missed. I’ve even missed it after bullrushing someone(many times) due to latency?/lag? who knows!

If there’s any sort of z axis difference in your opponent your GS 4 will miss, as will your mace 5, your bola etc. Your sword 5 and mace 2 are single target and block one attack…just one. I once had the trait ‘gain might on blocking’. I put it up during a point fight. I stacked something like 75 stacks of might in 3 seconds(or something foolishly high?), so my mace 2 would have prevented 1 of those….

It’s good 1v1….but how often do you get those.

The banner set is terrible. Huge cooldowns, clunky, most fights are running fights so impossible to stay in the range of a banner in WvW, if you pick it up you reduce your dps by 90 percent to gain 1 lackluster ability on banner 2.

Honestly the banner should equip on the warriors back (a la shogun style), So he can carry it round and be able to use all his usual abilities. OR…make banners part of the F key system if equipped.

Warriors need more closing abilities, more ways to keep people reliably in range since nearly every single class can kite well and still do good damage from afar. That’s where it falls down.

I think one of the most common problems are methods for a Warrior to avoid damage.

I firmly believe giving the Warrior more ways to grant Vigor to themselves / Allies will result in a much higher survival rate and increase the skill cap. Forcing those who want to do well to be mindful of Vigor in order to survive.

We don’t have teleports, or stealth or protection. So give us Vigor so we can do what Warriors are meant to do best: Be in the battle, in your face.

I do believe the Warrior is too weak in the current state of things. That’s why right as the beta ended I changed to a Mesmer (and now, primarily to an Engineer).

They flat out should lose duels, as they have less “counters” to other classes in most situations. The problem is, the Warrior to me is the best profession in terms of being supported. They amplify better then any other profession in the game to me. So I’d be wary of overbuffing the Warrior in this situation as it could lead them to being too strong in a team.

Do they need fixes? Heck yeah. Their survival build needs a little more survival. Their condition damage build needs more condition damage. Their support builds need more support. But by how much? Not that incredibly much. This could realistically be done with just a few weapon tweaks and trait tweaks. No massive overhaul is needed.

The Sword bleeds need to be pushed to 8 / 12 / 16 stacks again on the burst skill. The Shield cooldowns need to come back down just a little. The Warhorn needs it’s cast animations to be shortened significantly. The Banners should drop a unique boon when dropped, and persist Regeneration without a trait. Many of the utilities need to be looked over to become viable again. The Longbow and Rifle need better hybridization of damage, and should be effective regardless of a focus on Power or Condition Damage. The traits need a good check up because a lot of them are severely nonviable.

^Good point there

Warriors are “melee carries.” Meaning they are stronger when they have team mates to support them. Without the drummer, bassist, and lead guitarist, the lead singer is nothing. Same for Warrior in one scenario for example, if you don’t have a Necro to remove a Guardian’s boons then obviously you’re not going to insta-gib a Guardian. But if you do then it becomes possible.

Here’s what I think though. At Warrior’s current state, no one should simply ask Jon to over-buff a melee carry just because that one guy solo plays a lot. There are ways to make carrying as a Warrior easy with a coordinated team. And even if it was Solo play, Warrior isn’t exactly out-classed.

^ This is what I have been saying, that we’re not in as much bad shape as people make it out to be. However there are some glaring issues in regards to boons and conditions we bring. A lot of our attacks are very straight forward:

Attack in a cone and do damage

Attack in 360 degrees and do damage

Attack the target only

We don’t have really much else in terms of fun and interesting mechanics.

Now I play Warrior exclusively. I’m very open with my skill level and I consistently post videos online for those to view or judge me by: http://www.twitch.tv/defektive

I mostly sPvP (r28) but I also leveled to 80 and I dungeon / some WvW.

I hope these ‘credentials’ are enough for me to say: I firmly believe that we should get some more interesting abilities in order to spice up the Warrior livelihood. I think it would go a long way to changing the perception of Warriors by people as well as making them a compelling class to bring to tPvP.

@Defektive
To be honest, If you’re idea made Warrior more challenging and rewarding then I’d be up for it . It kinda sounds like that’s what you’re trying to make happen but I don’t know if ANET would even take player suggestions at all.

They would probably do something like decrease Bulls Charge cool down to 20 seconds or add poison to Sword off-hand’s number 4.

I agree that extra spice is needed too, and I think that can be introduced through subtle changes in some of the weapon skills and most of all, through the traits. Heck, some of the traits the Warrior has now should be automatic, such as the Longbow Range increase.

Yup more challenging / higher skill cap was the objective with Attack Combinations because it would force people to be aware of all their attacks and the coinciding abilities and then have to weigh the decision to weapon swap and start the swap CD in order to gain a large buff or do something important to an enemy.

However a lot of people who have commented believe that it may be easier/better development wise to give bonus’s / buffs / debuffs to current attacks instead of an attack system overhaul. So I made suggestions in that light in an earlier post as well.

What I would love to see is some ANet love in regards to:

Are these good ideas?
Bad Ideas?
Is more time needed to evaluate everything?
Some hints as to planned changes if any?

If ANet came out and responded with any depth regarding the ideas for the Warrior class, every other person for every other class would start demanding responses to their ideas, then ANet has two options:

1. Start responding to everyone about everything lest the populace get angry about being snubbed.

2. Respond to a few, and make many people feel snubbed.

It’s a really slippery slope when it comes to communication with a community. The people who would be able to provide insight that mattered at all are busy, and company policy around disclosing what important decisions are being made is another touchy subject. Every single thing produced by an ANet employee and posted officially anywhere is always going to be referenced as fact.

What if they say the ideas are good? How many people take that to mean “We’ll get right on it”, and then start to get upset when the changes don’t happen?

Anyway, I wouldn’t expect ANet love. Not that you are, but so many people expect “developer” input on their posts, and that just isn’t really how things work. Then again, who knows what they’ll respond to and how.

With that out of the way, I’ve personally been having fun look at fights from the perspective of “what do they expect me to do” instead of “what should I do next”. I’ve seen many people just run away casually, I guess expecting me to do something that has an animation. Instead, I run with them and auto attack for fairly substantial damage. Many times I’ve caught myself doing the “obvious” thing, and many times, they’ll obviously dodge out of it. However, even with slow hammer abilities, I’ve caught people off-guard on a number of occasions. I even knocked an Eviscerate out of the air with Staggering Blow. Lucky? Yes, but I did see him coming towards me, and I did figure he had some sort of attack up his sleeve. Odds are he wasn’t expecting me to randomly knock everything back, and why would he?

Regardless of the fun-having, I’d still love to see more dynamic elements incorporated. I wouldn’t be surprised if it took multiple months for something to happen, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just minor tweaks that happened instead of any class overhauls for the first 9 – 12 months anyway.

Just two (probably bad) suggestions:

1. Maybe make (some) weapon skills and ‘physical’ skills power/effect dependent on adrenaline? Right now adrenaline is just basically “Is bar filled? FIRE!” mechanic – making some warrior skills having the more power/effect the more adrenaline you currently have would actually make it beneficial to not use your adrenal skill whenever you can.
2. Adrenaline giving passive effects – for example, the more adrenaline you have the more toughness bonus you get?

Anyways, great job Defektive (and others of course too )

@Cog: Indeed. I would hope people realize the point of the thread isn’t to get a response or anything from ANet, but merely a place for us to collectively get together and brainstorm some ideas and suggestions for ways to make the warrior more than a sub-par (in TPvP) “vanilla” class. Perhaps ANet has checked out the thread, perhaps not. Even if they did it doesn’t mean they’ll for sure use any idea they see but maybe it could be helpful in just sparking thought about “what can we do to add flair and complexity to the warrior”.

Hell if anything it’s been far more civil in here than in other areas of the forum and that has been most welcome.