Guild Wars 2

So they designed the warrior first, and polished that bad boy until he was shiny. He was a bad boy in melee range and an unstoppable beast. Very similar playstyle to the gw1 war, as he is/was the bulk of the damage. Then the next 7 classes came along and things got creative. Invulnerabilities and teleports, stealths and ai. Now all of this is cool design, but with the creativity things got pushed a little too far.

Cleave effects.
Although cool idea, in practice, you have introduced a serious imbalance. With single target abilities versus multi target and potential cleave ones, there is no comparison.
Skills are balanced for there single target numbers, then people start getting cleaved and there is no way you can balance for that. Skill x should do 2000 damage, but we did not consider it could do 6000 damage across 3 people.

Range versus melee.
The age old battle of the two types. Pros and cons to each basically consistent across every game. So without healers, we need a way for range to survive melee ranged characters. Therefore we have the inclusion of slows and teleports. Honestly, when has a slow ever stopped a ranged character? They can still range you slowed. When has a teleport stopped ranged? The range just changes direction. So two more mechanics with more hate against melee.

armor and hp vs healing and regeneration
This last set is a always thrown around the forums as defense for some class survivability. Now I think it would be fair is armor mitigation was significant but time has shown it is minimal. This is probably due to the multiplier versus addition formulas they used for damage. Interestingly enough, range gets a bulk of the healing and regen minus the guardian.

So here we have a case against melee, and the result is no one plays it. Imo, if you consider the common used classes, the top 5, they are pretty balanced. They all bring similar attributes to the table. Guardians, elementalists, engineers, mesmers, rangers.
Invulns or evades for damage mitigation. Potential AI generation for assists in fights. Strong defense mechanics (protection, stun breaks). Consistent damage without having to stand in melee range.

No way warriors are the greatest.

Let me just say it again

you can always roll a zerker melee guardian that has amazing blocks, amazing teleports and gap closing skills so you can catch up enemies with insane speed (unlike some other slow kitten prof with their gap closing skill getting shot down on mid way), aoe blinds, aoe burns,aoe cc, amazing condition cleansings and stun breaks and high damage skills that actually hit without the need of using 2 utilities. Good freaking job!

oh did i mention that it has crit damge paired with toughness in trait lines and not some sad sad 3% burst damage joke?

Yeah, I agree with a lot of what OP has here. In a vacuum, war is a well designed class. I like the weapon designs and the trait layout (aside from a few flaws). You’ve already mentioned what I think the big problems are:

The base hp/armor given to war just does not seem high enough to compete with the damage mitgation and sustain mechanics given to other classes. It’s extremely difficult to win any prolonged fight against another class played well.

The AOE in the game makes it difficult for anyone but a bunker to play melee. Warrior and thief are hurt the most by this, and it gets doubly tough when you start throwing out lots of aoe cripple/chill.

^ You have literally nothing to add to these forums. It’s rather sad. (And now you’ll say: gw2 is sad, blah blah… )

I love this game. It is a lot of fun and I enjoy playing my warrior. I just want to put some analysis into perspective. Warrior is not bad design. Everything else is just designed to counter it.

Interpret Interrupt.3824:

I love this game. It is a lot of fun and I enjoy playing my warrior. I just want to put some analysis into perspective. Warrior is not bad design. Everything else is just designed to counter it.

Correct-o-mundo.

The game has far too much AoE, especially ground targeted persistent AoE attacks.

There’s too much cleave also, 1H weapons should not cleave and only a few skills should cleave on 2H weapons.

Ranged builds also get a disproportionate amount of escape and disengage abilities through weapon evades, leaps that can be used to run away, swiftness, cripple and teleport.

Stun breaks on weapon skills for the Mesmer and Thief are silly.

Phase Retreat and Blurred Frenzy offer far too much for their low cooldowns.

Ranger has an insane amount of weapon evades across Sword, Dagger and GS.
GS giving 50% evade time through the auto-attack chain.

Thief being able to build stuff like Sword with Larcenous Strike spam, evade attacks, get taken to the player you’re attacking, do good damage and steal boons?
All in one button you can just push push push push no user input required to move your character into melee range like a Guardian or Warrior would have to, you know like actually follow your targets movements and time your attacks.

Not enough finesse, too much extreme deeps and invulns/immune/dodges.