Guild Wars 2

I remember when they were selling us this game there was big talk by the devs against the standard, never-ending, MMO buff/nerf cycle. The trait system was this great new way for them to tinker with balance, allowing them to avoid drastic direct changes to individual weapons, abilities and utilities. Oh, how far we’ve come.

Now, over a year in, we get these reactive pendulum swings of balance changes. Huge buffs that have to be countered by huge nerfs. Someone else said it in another thread: Anet balance is like a dog chasing its tail.

Seriously? A YEAR in and you’re nerfing a weapon that’s been around since launch by 20+%?! 20! And from multiple different angles at the same time, just to make sure it’s completely dead! How is that not seen as anything but beta stage developing?! Are we in beta, a year in?!

Now, despite the game not being broken from launch until now, despite there being plenty of counters to this dreaded CC+damage abomination, and many, many builds with unquestionably more flagrant OPness (have you seen other class forum vids of 1v3, 4, more? Have you seen the warrior ones with 1v1+up-level?), you decide it’s necessary to come in and surgically neuter weapons and any builds connected to them, rendering a years worth of effort in ascended and legendary gear completely worthless. Oh yeah, funny, that gear grind we were promised wouldn’t happen? Feeling pretty nice right about now…

So we have to question. Is it incompetence that is fueling the endless carrot on a stick, donkey on a treadmill? Or is this the Plan? How many gems will be bought trying to recover from a butchered build, trying to chase the next OP created by this patch, and the next, and the next? 14 months in and the buff/nerf cycle is still going stronger than ever baby! C.R.E.A.M. get the money. Dollar dollar bill y’all.

How long before this post is deleted? It’s best not to question The Man.

I don’t know, maybe I’m blowing it out of proportion. But I know I’m not wasting time and money chasing the next gimmick when this is the track record. How many poor saps are already, right now working for dire gear to jump on the condibunker band wagon, or whatever other junk rises up? Well not me…. This donkey is going on a carrot-free diet.

/rant

Olba.5376:

ArtemisEntreri.4138:

Olba.5376:

Kai.9182:

coglin.1867:

Kai.9182:

The hammer nerfs are just for spvp right? Already a terrible weapon in pve so that didn’t matter.
Talk about a massive nerf to organized wvw groups though. People are just gonna blob more now.

Why? what makes the warrior profession so special that it deserves to do as much damage on its CC weapons skills as other professions do on their damage weapon skills?

Just did a test just then. Lvl 80 Warrior, lvl 80 Guardian and lvl 80 elementalist. All with 3.3k attack on LA training dummies.

Warrior Earthshaker results
3.3k attack Exotic Weapon :1349, 1428, 1534, 1467, 1402

Guardian Mighty Blow results
3.3k attack Ascended Weapon: 1831, 1903, 1874, 1827, 2000
3.25k attack Exotic Weapon : 1720, 1888, 1774, 1702, 1862

Elementalist Lightning Whip Results
3.3k attack Exotic weapon : 1612, 1518, 1614, 1598, 1590

Not only that the desired crowd control you’re looking for in the ability requires a charge time. Not saying guardian or elementalists need a nerf, but their damage abilities are far outperforming a burst ability, so what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense to me.

Edit:
Warrior Staggering Blow
3.3k attack Exotic Weapon: 1351 1528 1378 1500 1576

Nice job... *except that you cannot crit the dummies as they’re structures*. You also cannot disable them.

Means that your supposed damage isn’t taking into account Unsuspecting Foe or Merciless Hammer *at all*.

I don’t think he took into consideration on the other class’ weapon bonus traits either so this test is unbiased if he is just checking base damage.

This test would, however reveal that the damage is probably where it should be and it is the damage bonus for merciless hammer and UF that is giving hammer that edge.

If that is the case, adjust those traits and then call it a day. Merge UF and Merciless Hammer and place it in Arms in the master tier.

Merciless Foe Hammer - Gain 25% crit and damage bonus vs disabled opponents (stun, daze, knockdown, and knockback) with your hammer attacks.

UF only works off of stuns, though.

Correct so UF is only great for rapid use of Earthshaker. the 0/10/30/0/30 build uses this trait to the fullness as long as you’re getting 30 adrenaline back in the time it takes for Earthshaker to come off cd. I will say it does help give it that pop if you can get your crit chance up to 50%+ with traits/gear/fury but without the rapid use of Earthshaker, it is lackluster for hammer or mace even.

I use to run Hammer/Axe+Shield and UF was primarily used for lining up 100% crit with Eviscerate or Earthshaker depending if I needed CC or burst dps. Sadly, the biggest con to that weapon combo was mobility.

kitten.3178:

IMO These warrior changes were much needed, and this is coming from someone who has mained a warrior since headstart. I wonder what people running gs m/s will run now, hopefully more warriors will diversify their builds while still being efficient.

0/30/20/0/20 instead of current 0/20/20/0/30

Disadvantages to current build;
-8 1/4 second cooldown on mace F1 instead of 7 3/4. So you lose half a second.
-10% less critical damage.
-No more gaining 1 stack of might on weapon swap due to 25 point minor trait in Disc (which allowed you to maintain 2 stacks pretty easily).

Advantages;
-Bleeds you apply have 50% more duration, which in itself doesn’t really help your damage, but;
-Your overall damage is increased by 10% thanks to 25 point minor in Arms.
-100 more Precision.
-100 more Conditions damage.

Overall, damage done is increased thanks to Arms minor. The half second increase to your mace cooldown is hardly noticed. There are no other noteworthy changes. I am already running this build instead of the old one.

The problem, of course, is what they are doing to the F1. Because I don’t want another slap on the fingers for writing something that’s not allowed, I’ll just describe their claim of wanting Mace to make a comeback as the control weapon instead of hammer as, well, odd.

I was just reading this thread due to Anet replying. The frustrating thing about this game is that they are overbuffing and overnerfing every single time. Take the suggested change to Mace. They are making the animation easier to see. I guess warriors have to be the easy to master easy to counter class.

But, instead of testing to see if the improved animation fixes the ‘issue’, they also increase cast time by 100%.

Making changes based on bad players’ lack of knowledge fueled complaints is taking the fun out of playing GW2.

limonovich.4971:

“Warriors by nature have a lot of survivability, and we need them to make a choice between heavy control and heavy damage.”

my sides are in outer space, i’m done with this game

Although I do not share the whole of the sentiment, I tend to agree that this claim is rather laughable.

No, warriors do not have a lot of survivability by nature (at least no more than other professions at level 80). In fact, until several recent changes they were an extremely weak class when it comes to surviving. If warriors seem like good survivors, it is because the manner in which they can be built to be survivable is accessible to a wide number of players (i.e. it does not require a great deal of keyboard gymnastics). If a warrior is built to be a heavy damage-dealer then, as is the vision of the developers, it will melt in the face of a zerg (or even more than one opponent player on average assuming all are equally skilled, whatever that means) just as easily as any other DPS-focused build, regardless of profession. Let me explain:

The nature of the “survival” game in GW2 is not based upon armor level, at least not to the extent it was in, say, GW1, and this along with a high HP pool is the only “natural” advantage a warrior might have. This is partly because increasing armor rating has vastly diminishing returns. Once you hit around 3500 armor (or perhaps less), adding additional armor becomes almost a moot point; you would be better off attempting to out-damage your foes or find some way of avoiding damage altogether, and this is precisely what many other professions can do that warriors cannot. Even if a warrior has nearly 30,000 HP, this number is ineffectual as a deterrent if the armor rating is mediocre, and entails a great deal of sacrifice in terms of offensive options. Reaching the 3500 armor mark is not something that many attempt anyway, since they would rather allocate their points for damage output. Besides, as many will note there are better ways of mitigating damage, namely the protection buff (to which the warrior does not “naturally” have access). I shall not even touch on “invulnerability”.

So what does increase one’s odds of survival? Several factors come into play here. First, and most obvious, is mobility: the ability to simply avoid getting hit. Mobility takes several forms in GW2, including leap, dash, teleportation, and basic evasion. The effectiveness of this lattermost option is only amplified by the vigor boon to which, again, the warrior’s access is quite poor. As such, warriors tend not to be very “dodgy” unless they do such things as equip Signet of Endurance, but then this is forcing a niche skill, and I took the project to be able to give players a variety of options. As such, in terms of mobility warriors rely upon leaps and dashes to get in and out of combat. Of these options, however, there is only one skill to my knowledge (Whirling Blade on the greatsword) that provides any kind of evasion, so the best warriors get with mobility is a way to (not always reliably) close gaps when entering combat and run away slightly faster when leaving combat. This is not really a viable way of avoiding damage.

So, warriors do not possess a great deal of in-combat, damage-avoiding mobility. They possess high armor, but this does not entail overpowered damage mitigation (it slows things down slightly at best). They do not have access to two of the best damage mitigating buffs in the game. What other options are available? The two best defensive options available to a warrior come from recent (I cannot emphasize this enough) changes to the profession, both of which require investment in certain skills and trait lines: out-healing damage and rapid condition/control removal. Now, both of these qualities are possessed by a few other professions as well, most notably the guardian, which has seen almost nothing but considerable buffs over the past few patches, and looks to be getting stronger in the next patch (By the way, did you know that the guardian can also be built as a glass cannon and has one of the highest potential DPS outputs in the game? Play around with a few builds; I am sure you will figure it out). For the warrior, out-healing damage requires investment in at least the Adrenal Health trait and the Healing Signet skill. The trick here is that the healing is “passive”, so the warrior can continue attacking while still healing. This is a nice little mechanic and it distinguishes the warrior (and guardian) from other classes; it makes them more unique. Recent complaints have been that this combination makes the warrior’s healing “too” strong, but let us consider: poison, burning, or sufficient stacks of bleeding or torment can easily out-damage the passive heal; a half-decent spike breaks through Thick Skin (if one even uses it) and whittles through the regeneration; AH is dependent upon having adrenaline (this is minor, though, since a tank-y warrior will likely have a full bar almost always); HS has a dismal active heal; AH requires investment in a particular trait-line. A warrior specialized for banners, might be a source of considerable frustration with the constant regeneration and additional stat buffs, but then this also requires some significant trait investment (and banners are wildly _un_popular anyway, weak of an argument as that might be), so we can hardly say that they are an ubiquitous advantage. There are a number of costs required for these buffs, then, so the benefits seem rather fair. None of them, however, are natural for the warrior, and few of them (if any) have been around since the game’s release.

Similarly so for condition removal: the majority of condition removal spam comes from investment in Cleansing Ire, a master level trait in the warrior’s defensive line. This is, undoubtedly, a great trait, but at 20 points it requires a reasonable investment. The warrior’s other condition removal skills include Signet of Endurance (which I think almost no one uses), Mending (which requires one to give up HS), and “Shake it Off” or any shout if one is using six superior runes of the soldier. All of these additional skills and traits require some considerable trade-offs on the player’s part and, again, are often not conducive to producing a high-DPS warrior, or at least not high enough to mesh with whatever crowd control one is utilizing and create an unstoppable killing machine.

There is, of course, a third way of mitigating damage available to warriors: shutting opponents down. This is achieved through simple pressure by damage, spamming control effects, or some combination thereof. This seems to be the focus of the critique and hence why so many “nerfs” are directed toward hammer and mace/shield sets. Is this reasonable, however? It is true that warriors can spam CC and deal decent damage, but is this genuinely the only profession so capable? What about engineers? Elementalists? Fear-focused necromancers? Greatsword and hammer guardians? It seems like most other professions have access to this mechanic as well; they simply choose not to use it because there are other viable options on the table for builds. A quick look at the PvP “meta” reveals that the CC-heavy warrior game is likely an attempt to give warriors a viable play-style to contend with (contend, not necessarily counter) numerous other effective builds. So, ultimately, it looks like the warrior CC is not necessarily more effective than other professions. Even if it is, the build seems to be prevalent not merely because it is effective, but because of limited viable options available to warriors for sPvP and WvW engagements. Mind you, I am not suggesting that some of these changes are unwarranted or unnecessary, but I think, perhaps, we may be using an ox cleaver to kill a chicken.

The solution, then, should not be to nerf select warrior skills and traits (at least not exclusively), but to make others more interesting/better/viable/what-have-you to encourage build diversity, and I take it that this is an intent of the proposed changes. Note, however, that there seems to be very little in the proposed changes that will give rise to any real build diversity; it simply weakens one particularly good build in favor of promoting universal build mediocrity…or it forces warrior-players to take on a new “fotm” build that will no doubt be hit in the future as well. This comes from someone who does not play a hammer or mace/shield warrior. I do predict, however, that the build that I do run will be the one hit next, and in some ways already has been…unless, that is, we avert from this course of “balance”.

tl;dr

Warriors are not naturally more survivable than other professions, at least not problematically so; “balancing” is better than “nerfing”, and this is not a good argument to support the proposed changes (not that the changes are themselves necessarily bad).

Etaoin, I have to say your entries are very thoughtful but there are a few items that I fundamentally disagree with. I’m not sure what game mode you’re analyzing warrior in or if you’re going for a general analysis but here goes:

Of these options, however, there is only one skill to my knowledge (Whirling Blade on the greatsword) that provides any kind of evasion, so the best warriors get with mobility is a way to (not always reliably) close gaps when entering combat and run away slightly faster when leaving combat. This is not really a viable way of avoiding damage.

Warriors have the highest combat mobility of any class in the game short of a blink-spamming thief. They have THE highest sustained combat mobility of ANY class by equipping only one weapon: greatsword. Noted: in PvP and PvE applications this is not anything exceptional but in WvW it means a half decent warrior can disengage easier than anything other than a stealth spamming class or someone using snow leopard form. In fact if you want to do a direct comparison (which fail due to many reasons but there you have it), with Greatsword alone, a warrior attains very similar mobility to a ranger who has both sword and a swap to greatsword.

This is exacerbated by the recently buffed Healing Signet and the warrior’s ability to spec to A. Passively ignore conditions (up to -98% condition duration on mobility-affecting conditions) B. Ability to spec to eliminate immobilize when using a mobility skill and C. The ability to spec to automatically apply a lengthy stability when subjected to a crowd control.

Added to the above, Healing signet currently allows spectacular sustained self-healing with little to no healing power investment. Furthermore like points A, B and C this is a PASSIVE spec which means a player need focus no active attention on defense OTHER Than withdrawing then returning to combat. In a game environment which supposedly emphasizes player skill (PvP, WvW) this gives warriors a myriad of ways to ignore using skill and basically bull through all that an enemy can offer, while still being able to withdraw and escape seemingly at will.

Don’t get me wrong, I remember well the time when warriors were a complete joke in PvP type environments and would hate to see that happen again. But I think a number of unexpected synergies has turned the warrior into a very mindless passive class and that definitely needs looking at

profgast.7816:

This is exacerbated by the recently buffed Healing Signet and the warrior’s ability to spec to A. Passively ignore conditions (up to -98% condition duration on mobility-affecting conditions) B. Ability to spec to eliminate immobilize when using a mobility skill and C. The ability to spec to automatically apply a lengthy stability when subjected to a crowd control.

Essentially no one is using Last Stand because it currently competes with Cleansing Ire and Merciless Hammer in that Master tier position. The only plausible way to get it would be 30 into Defense, which pretty much always translates into a heavy sacrifice elsewhere. Also, Last Stand has a 90s cooldown, which is more than double that of Balanced Stance.

Don’t get me wrong, I remember well the time when warriors were a complete joke in PvP type environments and would hate to see that happen again. But I think a number of unexpected synergies has turned the warrior into a very mindless passive class and that definitely needs looking at

That’s what you see. In my perspective, the only passive a Warrior has is Healing Signet. In comparison, pretty much all of our top utilities are active use-only. For example, other classes have passive condi removal, such as all those “remove 1 condition every 10 seconds” traits or signets, we get our best removal from using adrenaline.

The solution, then, should not be to nerf select warrior skills and traits (at least not exclusively), but to make others more interesting/better/viable/what-have-you to encourage build diversity

Kinda like what they did with MH Sword?

Etaoin.4362:

limonovich.4971:

“Warriors by nature have a lot of survivability, and we need them to make a choice between heavy control and heavy damage.”

my sides are in outer space, i’m done with this game

Although I do not share the whole of the sentiment, I tend to agree that this claim is rather laughable.

No, warriors do not have a lot of survivability by nature (at least no more than other professions at level 80). In fact, until several recent changes they were an extremely weak class when it comes to surviving. If warriors seem like good survivors, it is because the manner in which they can be built to be survivable is accessible to a wide number of players (i.e. it does not require a great deal of keyboard gymnastics). If a warrior is built to be a heavy damage-dealer then, as is the vision of the developers, it will melt in the face of a zerg (or even more than one opponent player on average assuming all are equally skilled, whatever that means) just as easily as any other DPS-focused build, regardless of profession. Let me explain:

The nature of the “survival” game in GW2 is not based upon armor level, at least not to the extent it was in, say, GW1, and this along with a high HP pool is the only “natural” advantage a warrior might have. This is partly because increasing armor rating has vastly diminishing returns. Once you hit around 3500 armor (or perhaps less), adding additional armor becomes almost a moot point; you would be better off attempting to out-damage your foes or find some way of avoiding damage altogether, and this is precisely what many other professions can do that warriors cannot. Even if a warrior has nearly 30,000 HP, this number is ineffectual as a deterrent if the armor rating is mediocre, and entails a great deal of sacrifice in terms of offensive options. Reaching the 3500 armor mark is not something that many attempt anyway, since they would rather allocate their points for damage output. Besides, as many will note there are better ways of mitigating damage, namely the protection buff (to which the warrior does not “naturally” have access). I shall not even touch on “invulnerability”.

So what does increase one’s odds of survival? Several factors come into play here. First, and most obvious, is mobility: the ability to simply avoid getting hit. Mobility takes several forms in GW2, including leap, dash, teleportation, and basic evasion. The effectiveness of this lattermost option is only amplified by the vigor boon to which, again, the warrior’s access is quite poor. As such, warriors tend not to be very “dodgy” unless they do such things as equip Signet of Endurance, but then this is forcing a niche skill, and I took the project to be able to give players a variety of options. As such, in terms of mobility warriors rely upon leaps and dashes to get in and out of combat. Of these options, however, there is only one skill to my knowledge (Whirling Blade on the greatsword) that provides any kind of evasion, so the best warriors get with mobility is a way to (not always reliably) close gaps when entering combat and run away slightly faster when leaving combat. This is not really a viable way of avoiding damage.

+ 1909

Great words! The whole class-mechanic is garbage vs stealth, ports, minions and tons of cons. To be realy viable, warrior must have acces to perma evasion and more utility. I know, nothing will come of it.

Etoin, pls write your opinion and facts! also in this thread
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Dec-10th-balance-preview/page/6#post3158062

ElDudemeister.5108:

I just wanted to chime in and say that it’s really disheartening to learn that you’re “nerfing” hammers after we just spent 100g + many hours crafting our way to 500 weaponsmithing and then another 40g on making an ascended hammer. We might not have done that if we knew you were going to contemplate pulling the rug out from underneath this staple of WvW warriors.

The changes suck a bunch but they aren’t the end of the world, your hammer will still be useful in WvW just dramatically less so. That being said, you’re totally right regarding your ascended weapon, at least you didn’t go for a legendary. On release this really wasn’t an issue as exotics were always fairly easy to get, one of the (apparently constantly overlooked) issues with the implementation of ascended gear is that it makes it more and more difficult to have any build flexibility.

It is pretty unpleasant having to farm up new gear any time balance changes are made, standard in MMOs typically but exactly not what was expected with GW2. I’m glad that I decided to sit on my materials to delay making my ascended weapon until after the updates. My hammer is definitely going to my guardian at this point, since Hammer is for control on Warrior not much point in bothering with a top end one.

So we have a slower single target Mace stun, or a weak aoe hammer stun. So I’m meant to be tempted to take the mace now…why?

Jon
Please tell us if you are planning to change sword (main hand – and/or off hand sword) skills. With that I mean the damage or conditions or anything… I think I speak for most of the warrior community that swords 4th and 5th skill are really useless compared to it’s counterparts… or the damage on the swords first skill… even if you are not going to change anything about it, just tell. Thanks in advance.

The proposed changes to hammer are completely unwarranted. I am still shaking my head at how long warriors were an absolute joke…..numerous times voted as the WEAKEST class by community polls….and you are so quick to swing the nerf bat on them. The other problem is you guys try changing waaaay to many things at once without fully realizing how the cumulative changes end up going to far. Why not make a minor tweak and re-evaluate first? Do you think the yo-yo approach to class balance is the preferred method? Another dumb patch that is out of line on a class that up to very recently was at the bottom of the food chain….guess that is where we are supposed to be right?

IMO the nerf to Hammer cc dmg is needed. I hate the idea myself as i have recently crafted an ascended hammer for my warrior, but coming from the perspective of playing a different class going against a hammer warrior i am looking forward to these changes. The 20% nerf is going to make the hammer cc abilities hit as hard as an auto attack. and from a hammer warriors perspective, the auto attack from hammer can hit pretty hard (my auto attack on the hammer crits from 2-3k while the auto attack from my gs crits from 1.3k-2k)

With the upcoming changes, ill be missing my epic 16k crit disable chains from my warrior. However this is GW2. There are other classes to play & have fun with and it seems like the devs are trying to encourage players to level up/play other classes rather than just sticking to one specific class.

limonovich.4971:

“Warriors by nature have a lot of survivability, and we need them to make a choice between heavy control and heavy damage.”

Are you going to do the same with all of the other classes, with only a narrow choice of builds?

My real question is why is ArenaNet enacting so many changes at the same time? Wouldn’t it be better to make small, incremental changes than to play whack-a-mole balancing? Additionally, shouldn’t there be a test realm where we can see the repercussions of these potential changes?

Unfortunately for warriors, we’re a class that’s very effective against terrible players and not terribly effective against good ones. The changes to hammer (though I admit some were needed) and the telegraph being added to mace are just reinforcing this.

JonPeters.5630:

Warriors by nature have a lot of survivability

yes sure, care to explain what exactly these “lot of suvivability” is ?

Trollmacht.4105:

yes sure, care to explain what exactly these “lot of suvivability” is ?

Probably somewhere between the “H” in Healing Signet and the last “e” in Berserker’s Stance. (And if you’re in WvW, somewhere between the “B” in Bogged March and the last “p” in Bowl of Lemongrass Poultry Soup.)

Its hidden in their, so it might be hard to see.

Kai.9182:

What part of this is a skill that needs to charge up to get that stun don’t you understand? You don’t even mention the cooldowns. The lightning whip is an auto attack with no cooldown that is hitting harder. Mighty blow is on a 5 second cooldown.

What I’m more interested in is why you are comparing Earthshaker, a sixth skill with hard CC, along side five other skills all of which are buffed to mercilessly high damage thresholds by a couple of traits, to a main-bar hammer skill with zero utility for a class that has exactly one trait that modifies the hammer in a meaningful way. Mighty Blow and Zealot’s Embrace are just about the only attacks on Guardian hammer that even do anything for damage (you’re not going to stand around and get hit by the main chain unless you’re dead at your keyboard (and this isn’t even an issue of telegraphs, the chain is so slow and depends on a symbol that you’d have to be daft to take damage from the majority of it), and getting hit by Banish requires you to be asleep).

More, why or how did paper-thin elementalists get involved in this? You should have compared it to the main hand axe for warrior hitting harder.

Deccode.3659:

Jon
Please tell us if you are planning to change sword (main hand – and/or off hand sword) skills. With that I mean the damage or conditions or anything… I think I speak for most of the warrior community that swords 4th and 5th skill are really useless compared to it’s counterparts… or the damage on the swords first skill… even if you are not going to change anything about it, just tell. Thanks in advance.

I actually don’t mind the number 4 & 5 skills on sword. Rip could use a little buff, such as inflicting confusion or weakness, but impale and riposte work pretty well as a condiwarrior.

Combustive Shot – Increased pulse duration to 3s. Increased burn duration per pulse to 3s. Normalized damage per pulse. Updated pulses per tier to 2, 3,and 4 respectively for tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3. Overall physical damage has been reduced by 15%.

Update on Combustive shot from anet.

hidrOxi.7082:

Combustive Shot – Increased pulse duration to 3s. Increased burn duration per pulse to 3s. Normalized damage per pulse. Updated pulses per tier to 2, 3,and 4 respectively for tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3. Overall physical damage has been reduced by 15%.

Update on Combustive shot from anet.

15% it’s a LIE it might as well be a 50% nerf since no one will ever get hit by 2 ticks anymore while before was getting hit by 2 ticks the 1st one and the second.If a target was fully Pindowned was eating a 3 ticks(1st insta and respectively at 2 and 4 seconds) now it will eat at max 2(1st and at 3 seconds) making it a 33% damage nerf.

What is up with Anet’s pve logic in pvp.Players are not npcs that stand arround for 10 seconds in the affected area And even if it were it is still a lie since 4 ticks out of 5 it’s not 15% but 20%.Basic math.

Combustive shot power dps needed a boost not a nerf and it already needed faster ticks or more raw damageAll the complaints in spvp were all about the burning too not one about the already laughable power damage.

So what it was an andrenaline builder at the expense of sitting ducks.Warrior was supposed to gain andrenaline in other ways except getting hit in the face. Oh wait that must be because “Warriors (key word)→by nature have a lot of survivability" Loooooooool.

Olba.5376:

Essentially no one is using Last Stand because it currently competes with Cleansing Ire and Merciless Hammer in that Master tier position. The only plausible way to get it would be 30 into Defense, which pretty much always translates into a heavy sacrifice elsewhere. Also, Last Stand has a 90s cooldown, which is more than double that of Balanced Stance.

I see plenty of people using Last Stand. You can realistically reach it in 20 points simply by you know… not using hammer and cleansing Ire isn’t a must have for a lot of builds. So yes in my experience I meet a fair number of warriors with autopop Stability. Not all, but many. Also 30 in defense is hardly a “heavy sacrifice” given one of the common meta builds for warriors in both sPvP and WvW right now is 0/10/30/0/30.

That’s what you see. In my perspective, the only passive a Warrior has is Healing Signet. In comparison, pretty much all of our top utilities are active use-only. For example, other classes have passive condi removal, such as all those “remove 1 condition every 10 seconds” traits or signets, we get our best removal from using adrenaline.

IMO, Dogged March is much more effective than any of the Remove condition ever 10 seconds, except for maybe the Rangers’ grandmaster Empathic Bond. After all dogged march applies to ALL snare conditions that are applied, not just the 1 every 10 seconds. But that’s just me.

Vena.8436:

Trollmacht.4105:

yes sure, care to explain what exactly these “lot of suvivability” is ?

Probably somewhere between the “H” in Healing Signet and the last “e” in Berserker’s Stance. (And if you’re in WvW, somewhere between the “B” in Bogged March and the last “p” in Bowl of Lemongrass Poultry Soup.)

Its hidden in their, so it might be hard to see.

Kai.9182:

What part of this is a skill that needs to charge up to get that stun don’t you understand? You don’t even mention the cooldowns. The lightning whip is an auto attack with no cooldown that is hitting harder. Mighty blow is on a 5 second cooldown.

What I’m more interested in is why you are comparing Earthshaker, a sixth skill with hard CC, along side five other skills all of which are buffed to mercilessly high damage thresholds by a couple of traits, to a main-bar hammer skill with zero utility for a class that has exactly one trait that modifies the hammer in a meaningful way. Mighty Blow and Zealot’s Embrace are just about the only attacks on Guardian hammer that even do anything for damage (you’re not going to stand around and get hit by the main chain unless you’re dead at your keyboard (and this isn’t even an issue of telegraphs, the chain is so slow and depends on a symbol that you’d have to be daft to take damage from the majority of it), and getting hit by Banish requires you to be asleep).

More, why or how did paper-thin elementalists get involved in this? You should have compared it to the main hand axe for warrior hitting harder.

The reason I compared the Elementalist was because it is one of the few 80’s I have that is built to be able to reach the 3.3k power I was using as baseline.

The comparison to Guardian is more than fair tbh simply because mighty blow is the Guardians hardest hitting aoe ability on that weapon set, just at Earthshaker is currently the Warriors hardest hitting aoe ability on that weapon set. In that comparison the Warriors Earthshaker hitting significantly less, suggesting that there was a damage tradeoff for cc already, not to mention the build up and additional cooldown timer as a further tradeoff.

If you look a few pages back there was the Dev post that suggested they were okay with Hammer shock and Fierce blow hitting hard because they didn’t have Hard CC on them, however both these abilities hit like wet noodles.

Kai.9182:

The reason I compared the Elementalist was because it is one of the few 80’s I have that is built to be able to reach the 3.3k power I was using as baseline.

Which is a bit of ?? moment consider you could have rolled PvP characters, speced them all out in equal X power gear and just measured from there. It’d have been the same as I don’t think any of the involved skills have PvP splits.

The reason I question it, though, is because you’re trying to compare the melee damage of paper to the melee damage of heavies. These will not be equivalent and shouldn’t be compared.

Kai.9182:

The comparison to Guardian is more than fair tbh simply because mighty blow is the Guardians hardest hitting aoe ability on that weapon set, just at Earthshaker is currently the Warriors hardest hitting aoe ability on that weapon set. In that comparison the Warriors Earthshaker hitting significantly less, suggesting that there was a damage tradeoff for cc already, not to mention the build up and additional cooldown timer as a further tradeoff.

Mighty Blow is also the only ability on the weapon set that even does reliable damage, and it does not have a 2 second stun. Earthshaker is not the only reliable skill, it is not main-bar, and it does have a 2 second stun.

You can’t just compare their damage and then say “Because Earthshaker hits for less, it is fine!”. That hard CC makes it such that follow-ups also have a window to connect barring stun-break interference. Guardians don’t have such availability as Mighty Blow, irregardless of stun-breakers, cannot reliably set-up a hammer chain.

Kai.9182:

If you look a few pages back there was the Dev post that suggested they were okay with Hammer shock and Fierce blow hitting hard because they didn’t have Hard CC on them, however both these abilities hit like wet noodles.

They hit like wet-noodles in a vacuum. They don’t hit like wet-noodles in a Unsuspecting/Merciless Hammer chain. Guardians cannot even remotely set up such a chain when (a.) they don’t have traits that modify hammer in meaningful ways outside of 20% cooldown reduction, (b.) have no hard CC to set up hammer chains, and (c.) their attacks are as or even more so telegraphed as a warriors in hammer.

So in short, Mighty Blow rightfully deals a lot more damage when taking into account that it:

• Cannot set up a hammer chain.
• Has no hard CC -> At best has an immobilize and ward ability both of which can be avoided by simply walking to the side/away from a class that has zero cripples.
• Has no partner attacks to chain into other than itself.
• Is not a sixth weapon set skill.

Vena.8436:

Kai.9182:

The reason I compared the Elementalist was because it is one of the few 80’s I have that is built to be able to reach the 3.3k power I was using as baseline.

Which is a bit of ?? moment consider you could have rolled PvP characters, speced them all out in equal X power gear and just measured from there. It’d have been the same as I don’t think any of the involved skills have PvP splits.

The reason I question it, though, is because you’re trying to compare the melee damage of paper to the melee damage of heavies. These will not be equivalent and shouldn’t be compared.

Kai.9182:

The comparison to Guardian is more than fair tbh simply because mighty blow is the Guardians hardest hitting aoe ability on that weapon set, just at Earthshaker is currently the Warriors hardest hitting aoe ability on that weapon set. In that comparison the Warriors Earthshaker hitting significantly less, suggesting that there was a damage tradeoff for cc already, not to mention the build up and additional cooldown timer as a further tradeoff.

Mighty Blow is also the only ability on the weapon set that even does reliable damage, and it does not have a 2 second stun. Earthshaker is not the only reliable skill, it is not main-bar, and it does have a 2 second stun.

You can’t just compare their damage and then say “Because Earthshaker hits for less, it is fine!”. That hard CC makes it such that follow-ups also have a window to connect barring stun-break interference. Guardians don’t have such availability as Mighty Blow, irregardless of stun-breakers, cannot reliably set-up a hammer chain.

Kai.9182:

If you look a few pages back there was the Dev post that suggested they were okay with Hammer shock and Fierce blow hitting hard because they didn’t have Hard CC on them, however both these abilities hit like wet noodles.

They hit like wet-noodles in a vacuum. They don’t hit like wet-noodles in a Unsuspecting/Merciless Hammer chain. Guardians cannot even remotely set up such a chain when (a.) they don’t have traits that modify hammer in meaningful ways outside of 20% cooldown reduction, (b.) have no hard CC to set up hammer chains, and (c.) their attacks are as or even more so telegraphed as a warriors in hammer.

So in short, Mighty Blow rightfully deals a lot more damage when taking into account that it:

• Cannot set up a hammer chain.
• Has no hard CC -> At best has an immobilize and ward ability both of which can be avoided by simply walking to the side/away from a class that has zero cripples.
• Has no partner attacks to chain into other than itself.
• Is not a sixth weapon set skill.

You continue to compare the damage between the two skills saying that Earthshaker is free cc. You HAVE to build your adrenaline bar to achieve that CC!
The reason I don’t do these tests in sPvP is because as I said earlier this is from a organised WvW group perspective where the weapon in question gets almost all of it’s use.
You continue to bring up “Hammer chains” which isn’t a damage issue it’s a cooldown issue, the damage in question could be coming from anywhere.
To mention it once again, the traits that were there to build dps Hammer builds have been nerfed and/or moved to lower damage already. The weapons base damage doesn’t need to be touched at all.

Edit: Not to mention sPvP dummies are affected by crit and a whole load of other things which don’t concern the base damage.

JonPeters.5630:

Warriors by nature have a lot of survivability, and we need them to make a choice between heavy control and heavy damage.

Sorry but i respectful disagree and, moreover, i think this is a mistake you’re making in balancing.

Warrior’s baseline isn’t the survivability. It’s dmg.
You have already a class that have a good baseline survivability, it’s called Guardian, do you remember of him? But you never gave them the “You have good base suvivability, now pick up CC or Dmg” choice, he doesn’t have neither of them, so is locked in a bunker role.

By assuming Warrior’s baseline is survivability, you’re making huge mistakes in balancing, cause
a) you give them the option to spec for great CC, something Guards never had the chance to get
b) you never toned down the dmg, so by bringing up the Warrior’s survivability to be good as baseline, you now have a prof that have BOTH great dmg and decent survivability as baseline and can spec for great CC on top of it.

I know most of this points will probably be adressed in upcoming patches, and that this will sounds like a veiled “Why Warriors have all the good stuff and Guards are pigeonholed since headstart as bunker?”, but that’s another topic.

The new meta warrior is a joke, many CC, big damage and high hp regen. Need nerf!!!

nicknamenick.2437:

Anet,

I am sort of OK with the warrior nerf, i do hope you dont nerf combustive shot more after this.
because it got 2 huge nerfs in short time.

But what i really like to see is a buff to longbow #1 autoattack speed.
its way to long!
pls reduce the aftercast and /or
casttime

I second this. There has been a thread about reducing the aftercast by 0.25. The other day I was standing next to a ranger with a shortbow and the attack speed of the SB was twice as fast. It made the warrior LB AA look ridiculous in comparison.

The fact that matters is what happens to those who use the hammer but do not use this trait combination (see #1). The nerf for those is even bigger.

What if the reduced damage is moved to the other non cc skills? The slow animation and attack speed should be compensated with powerful attacks.

MasterAbaddon.7839:

With the upcoming changes, ill be missing my epic 16k crit disable chains from my warrior. However this is GW2. There are other classes to play & have fun with and it seems like the devs are trying to encourage players to level up/play other classes rather than just sticking to one specific class.

Whats so hard about people realizing that, if you don’t slot stun breakers and stablitiy in this game and learn the very obvious warrior animations, you should plan to die? And for the love of god stop stunbreaking the 1 second stuns and save it for the big ones.

The warrior hammer build does kitten damage against someone who knows how to properly rotate their stun breakers (which I’m guessing no one at Anet has yet figured out how to do) and properly dodge/block/evade or blind earthshaker/shield bash/pin down/arcing arrow/bull’s charge/backbreaker/fierce blow/final thrust/impale, which are the most telegraphed and delayed-activating moves in the game, as well as earthshaker still being bugged when initiating it from a place of higher terrain to a target on lower terrain.

It’s the equivalent to not slotting any condi cleanse, making kitten -poor usage of dodges and blinds/blocks/evades/steath/teleports, and then complaining that necro staff should be nerfed because it does way too much damage. Or running runes of lyssa against a necro, popping them immediately at the start of a fight and complaining when they are corrupted a second later. A game cannot be balanced around poor play. It cannot be balanced to the lowest-common denominator player, or you imbalance the game at higher levels.

Our skills should do more damage because they are extremely telegraphed and offer a skill-based counter of dodging/blinding/blocking/teleporting/invul countering, especially relevant when every other class and their mom gets perma or near-perma vigor, massive amounts of blind, rediculous block uptime, evades, stealth, instant-cast teleports and access to invuln, all of which are direct counters to most warrior abilities. There’s no reason they should be doing equal or less damage/CC as to something that is instant-cast, either power or condition based (or better yet, instant cast and ranged). Ever. If a warrior was routinely able to deplete a very skilled player’s hard counters to the hammer (i.e. stun breaks + stab AND their dodge bar AND their blind/block/blink/evade/invuln CDs) then yes, it might be overpowered. But good players properly know what skills they can tank and what skills they need to dodge/evade/block/blind/stun break and did so accordingly. And when they did, hammer lost much of its effective power.

And if that’s what we are defining overpowered, then what about condi bunker mesmers and perma-vigor celestial/rune of noble rifle engies, both of which faceroll to victory on the basis of being able to infinitely mitigate their opponents damage from range while simultaneously burning their opponents cooldowns through sheer attrition. As long as players running either of these builds don’t commit mistake after mistake, they are guaranteed to win any fight against any other class and build. Period. Is that not the true definition of overpowered, when there is no counter to a build except relying on the person running said build to commit enough mistakes?? The warrior hammer build was never in this position because it always had skill-based counters.

If the opponent to the warrior makes a mistake, and pays a big price for it either because their build isn’t designed to properly deal with a threat they very well knew they would be facing, or they didn’t see the animation or realize what the animation looks like, or they make a poor decision post-stun that burns too many CDs and allows them to be vulnerable later in the fight, then the warrior deserves the win and the opponent deserves the loss.

Of course, rather than improving their own play, they chose to project their own skill deficits onto the rest of the community. And the worst crime of all, Anet listened to these unwarranted projections and acted with a heavy-hand to cater to players who, if they had channeled a fraction of their forum whining into self-reflection and improving their own play, they would never have had major issues competing against a hammer war in the first place.

Reminder: Try to keep the posts related to the December 10th Changes only

However, Jon Peters doesn’t appear to be visiting this thread anyway or responding anywhere to any Warrior questions in the general thread or this one, feedback on legitimate concerns of developing balance, feedback on player suggested alternatives, player questions on inconsistent design balance changes (in the same update), etc. compared to every other class change in all the other class forums, that it would appear that the feedback and attempts of the Warrior community is going to deaf ears and closed eyes.

My main concern is that Warriors will have these changes implemented because it is clear that Jon Peters and other ANet development staff have already decided the changes are final or they would be actively providing specific feedback to encourage the next bright idea of the next poster to show collaborative development as the other player boards have shown.

I’m hoping some acknowledgment soon or a significant population of the game will be damaged not by the whacking-hammer of a nerf but by the complete silence from behind the closed door.

Suggestion to ANet: it may be better to postpone the Warrior changes altogether and admit that with all of the other sweeping and mostly positive changes to all the other classes and related fine-tuning, that there is just not sufficient bandwidth to address the Warrior changes for Dec 10th roll out.

Continue with your feedback.

I think the changes are fine, and I kind of look forward to mixing the traits up. I would vote against postponing anything.

AndrewSX.3794:

JonPeters.5630:

Warriors by nature have a lot of survivability, and we need them to make a choice between heavy control and heavy damage.

Warrior’s baseline isn’t the survivability. It’s dmg.
You have already a class that have a good baseline survivability, it’s called Guardian, do you remember of him? But you never gave them the “You have good base suvivability, now pick up CC or Dmg” choice, he doesn’t have neither of them, so is locked in a bunker role.

This must be a joke.
Guardian baseline survivability is lackluster at best. We can become pretty tanky with serious trait investment, that’s true, but baseline … just no.

Vargamonth.2047:

AndrewSX.3794:

JonPeters.5630:

Warriors by nature have a lot of survivability, and we need them to make a choice between heavy control and heavy damage.

Warrior’s baseline isn’t the survivability. It’s dmg.
You have already a class that have a good baseline survivability, it’s called Guardian, do you remember of him? But you never gave them the “You have good base suvivability, now pick up CC or Dmg” choice, he doesn’t have neither of them, so is locked in a bunker role.

This must be a joke.
Guardian baseline survivability is lackluster at best. We can become pretty tanky with serious trait investment, that’s true, but baseline … just no.

As oppose to baseline for Warrior? I’m not sure I understand…

This is coming from a player with 8 80s (one of each class) by the way so I kind of question how you came to this idea. Just the baseline Guardian mechanic of the passive Virtues and on-demand Virtue activations tells me what I already know from playing a Guardian (compared to Warrior).

Guardians ‘tank’ better and have better defensive weapon set abilities like access to Protection Boon (and talents that enhance those abilities to be used more often or for greater results) but there is nothing wrong with that. But to call, Guardian baseline defense lackluster is …

am I being trolled? You win.

Cogbyrn.7283:

I think the changes are fine, and I kind of look forward to mixing the traits up. I would vote against postponing anything.

The lack of player engagement is what worries me. Lack of player communication typically means that this is not the end of the negative Warrior changes because they intend to ‘throw a bone’ next time.

Hi there , here are my 2 cents :

1)

Strength 5 – Reckless Dodge. Increased Damage by 25%

Ok, why not

2)

Arms IV – Unsuspecting Foe. Moved to Master Tier.

Must admit it was needed yeah so OK.

3)

Arms VII – Crack Shot. Moved to Adept Tier.

Well, could be nice to rebalance LB/Rifle

4)

Arms XII – Last Chance. Increased the threshold form 25% to 50%. Reduced the cooldown from 45 seconds to 40seconds

Still meh imo

5)

Defense 25 – Armored Attack. Increased conversion rate from 5% to 10%.

Good one

6)

Defense XII – Spiked Armor. Reduced the recharge from 15s to 10s.

Interesting

7)

Discipline II – Thrill of the Kill. Increased Adrenaline gain from 1 to 10.

Good one. Definitely agree on the WvW aspect not really raising a problem since there are already a tonload to get much adrenalin in WvW so it’s ok.

8)

Discipline XI – Burst Mastery. Reduced damage increase from 10% to 7%. Removed erroneous adrenaline gain fact.

Ok with this one, not that much change.

9)

Earthshaker. Reduced damage by 20%.

Hugh. 20% is quite a lot. I would agree on 10-13% but this is quite a lot …
PLEASE, leave PVE out of this and keep the nerf only PvP/WvW.
As sombody said, hammer warriors are already pretty useless in PvE, this makes things much worse …
Yes, you’re going to rework defiant mechanics, sure, it will improve. BUT this change will hurt NOW so there’s a lot of time in between being “useless” …
Actually, in PvE hammer should need damage buff while waiting for defiant change but I know it’s too much to ask.
But seriously, this is the only thing to split so it should be splitted …

10)

Staggering Blow. Reduced damage by 23%.

Well, definitely easy to see it coming with the ability to cast it on the move. It’s a lot but yeah this move really is just here for CC so definitely OK.

Ok for Skull Crack and Combustive Shot too.

TLDR : Ok for everything EXCEPT split earthshaker and don’t nerf it for PVE.

Why are you people even trying? Anet decided to make warriors useless again, not by simply nerfing them, but also buffing everyone else just because some noobs QQed about being stomped while not using dodge.

Warriors were average at best, and kept some pretty hard to counter builds under control with plenty of CC. Just watch how some other professions will explode with some wicked OP builds, while warriors lose any roll in PVP.

I guess it was fun while it lasted.

Lighthammer.3280:

Why are you people even trying? Anet decided to make warriors useless again, not by simply nerfing them, but also buffing everyone else just because some noobs QQed about being stomped while not using dodge.

Warriors were average at best, and kept some pretty hard to counter builds under control with plenty of CC. Just watch how some other professions will explode with some wicked OP builds, while warriors lose any roll in PVP.

I guess it was fun while it lasted.

Because there is still hope that Warriors will be revitalized again in ~6 months when the perception of the Warrior players posting right now finally makes it to statistical tracking ANet does internally.

But I get it, who is really whining louder?

Artaz.3819:

Vargamonth.2047:

AndrewSX.3794:

JonPeters.5630:

Warriors by nature have a lot of survivability, and we need them to make a choice between heavy control and heavy damage.

Warrior’s baseline isn’t the survivability. It’s dmg.
You have already a class that have a good baseline survivability, it’s called Guardian, do you remember of him? But you never gave them the “You have good base suvivability, now pick up CC or Dmg” choice, he doesn’t have neither of them, so is locked in a bunker role.

This must be a joke.
Guardian baseline survivability is lackluster at best. We can become pretty tanky with serious trait investment, that’s true, but baseline … just no.

As oppose to baseline for Warrior? I’m not sure I understand…

This is coming from a player with 8 80s (one of each class) by the way so I kind of question how you came to this idea. Just the baseline Guardian mechanic of the passive Virtues and on-demand Virtue activations tells me what I already know from playing a Guardian (compared to Warrior).

Guardians ‘tank’ better and have better defensive weapon set abilities like access to Protection Boon (and talents that enhance those abilities to be used more often or for greater results) but there is nothing wrong with that. But to call, Guardian baseline defense lackluster is …

am I being trolled? You win.

Lets talk about the passive virtues and on-demand activations.
We have a 84 bonus HPS through Virtue of Resolve. Sounds like a baseline survival boost but:

Signet of Resolve (our highest HPS heal): 203 HPS, 1 condition removed every 10 seconds if it’s not on CD (40 seconds).
Mending: 262 HPS, 3 conditions removed every 20 seconds.

With both signet and passive we slightly overheal (287 against 262) a warrior heal with better condition management than ours. The difference might be even smaller because healing power coefficients favour the warrior one (2 against 1.25).
No chances against the 392 of healing signet, but I guess it’s unfair since we have a minor conditon removal. Let’s try with Shelter then.

Shelter (152 HPS) + VoR (84) = 236 HPS
In order to match Healing Signet we would need to mitigate over 4,5k damage on our slightly over 1 second block channel, which is quite situational.

My point can be adressed better leaving the warrior for a moment and taking a look at the following thief skill:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Withdraw

Pretty much the same mechanic, yet the thief one outheals the guardian one (Virtue of Resolve included) ad can be used twice as often. It also can’t be hard-countered by some skills like “Fear me”, which is pretty funny btw.
Even if we have a baseline bonus HPS through VoR, our heal skills have so low HPS that is common for us to end on par with other classes (and sometimes even behind), so it doesn’t add baseline survivability at all.

Our second survival virtue is courage. We usually start every fight with an aegis up, which is quite useless since everybody knows it no decent player will open the fight with a powerful attack. After that we can use another one on demand on 90 second CD.

That’s all our baseline survivablity, a bonus HPS that’s next to a scam, and a single block every 90 seconds, that I guess should mitigate 7.5k health, which is the amount the warrior is above us.

Our weapon defensive capabilites are also fairly average.
Hammer grant us almost perma protection when we fight a dummy that endure all the slow attacks and let us keep fighting inside our symbol, but that’s all.
We have a few blinds (only the 1HSword one is useful in this resgard) and blocks (3 every 40 seconds on focus, 1 every 15 on mace; warrior beats us here), some minor regeneration/healing sources here and there (nothing really serious unless standing still on a mace symbol or wielding a staff, a pure support weapon with next to zero offensive capabilities), but nothing like 3 low CD evades in the same weapon set (S/D ranger), evade spam + weakness + disengage + stealth (S/D thief), … Not even talking about our laughable kiting/disengage capabilities.
Seriously, our weapons don’t make us extremely tanky, not even close.

Traits are what make us tanky. We spec for it.
There are some easily taken ones, like almost perma-vigor for 5 points in honor and 5 seconds of protection (twice, once before and once after Renewed focus) for 5 in virtues. Even with that, it’s still fairly common for any guardian that doesn’t go full bunker, with healing power amulet and every single trait point in defense/support (and even for some of them), to still invest 30 points in valor for healing on meditations or altruistic healing.

Calling baseline survivable to someone who is investing about half of his trait points, sometimes even more, in defense and also picks a defensive elite, is completely unfair.
It’s like calling a Warrior baseline survivable because he can go for adrenal health + cleansing ire + shout/banner heal.
It’s survivable? Hell yes. Baseline? No way. There are 50 trait points right there.
We aren’t even chosen as mid point bunkers because of our survival, which is on par and even behind of what some other classes can achieve, but because our probably unmatched support on top of it.

PD: Reading everything again I feel I completely misunderstood what you were meaning with “baseline”. It’s probably closer to support than defense but, anyways, stupid wall of test what I wrote … hope someone finds it interesting :P

Artaz.3819:

Reminder: Try to keep the posts related to the December 10th Changes only

However, Jon Peters doesn’t appear to be visiting this thread anyway or responding anywhere to any Warrior questions in the general thread or this one, feedback on legitimate concerns of developing balance, feedback on player suggested alternatives, player questions on inconsistent design balance changes (in the same update), etc. compared to every other class change in all the other class forums, that it would appear that the feedback and attempts of the Warrior community is going to deaf ears and closed eyes.

My main concern is that Warriors will have these changes implemented because it is clear that Jon Peters and other ANet development staff have already decided the changes are final or they would be actively providing specific feedback to encourage the next bright idea of the next poster to show collaborative development as the other player boards have shown.

I’m hoping some acknowledgment soon or a significant population of the game will be damaged not by the whacking-hammer of a nerf but by the complete silence from behind the closed door.

Suggestion to ANet: it may be better to postpone the Warrior changes altogether and admit that with all of the other sweeping and mostly positive changes to all the other classes and related fine-tuning, that there is just not sufficient bandwidth to address the Warrior changes for Dec 10th roll out.

Continue with your feedback.

A picture of a Dev plugging his ears with his index fingers going “La la la la la la la” comes to mind.

I don’t really care that we are getting nerfed personally. I will still destroy bad players who will still claim warrior is overpowered (which still happened at least once a day even before the buffs), and I will still get ripped apart by pro mesmers and thieves. The main problem I have is this game is more balanced around forum whining than any MMO I have ever played. You can pretty much guarantee that if a class gets whined about on the forums for a little while, it is going to get nerfed. I know the developers will claim that is not why nerfs happens, but the proof is in the pudding.

Anyway, Wildstar is coming up early next year and looks pretty amazing. They really seem to be doing almost everything right. Of course, this could change, especially if Ncsoft gets more involved in the project as it gains popularity.

Ashanor.5319:

I know the developers will claim that is not why nerfs happens, but the proof is in the pudding.

The proof is in the win/loss and kills/death ratio trackers you and I will NEVER be privy to.

They don’t this out of pure ignorance, you know. They make poor choices in execution, but there’s generally a very good motive behind the direction of any adjustment up or down.

Nike.2631:

Ashanor.5319:

I know the developers will claim that is not why nerfs happens, but the proof is in the pudding.

The proof is in the win/loss and kills/death ratio trackers you and I will NEVER be privy to.

They don’t this out of pure ignorance, you know. They make poor choices in execution, but there’s generally a very good motive behind the direction of any adjustment up or down.

Let’s hope it is not Win vs Loss as it is just one data point because the ignorance of the data analytics should come from hundreds of other variable drivers (other teammates and support during win or lack thereof for loss, boons on Warrior generated not from the Warrior, length of battle, siege equipment in WvW used, having the killing blow, equipment choices, weapons used, frequency of movement, etc.)

To also disprove the Win v Loss record assertion drives change, I would think Thief and Mesmer would be continuing to fall and that is clearly not the case with the Dec 10th updates so I can’t imagine that is how ANet looks at the data.

IMO, I believe these changes are simply perceptual based on a ‘stale-meta’ motif that is almost universally agreed to from all players (too much condition spam without thought, too much CC spam from Warriors without thought, etc). This doesn’t mean the Warrior is any more broken than the Ranger class needs fixing but this is the easiest route to take.

Nike.2631:

Ashanor.5319:

I know the developers will claim that is not why nerfs happens, but the proof is in the pudding.

The proof is in the win/loss and kills/death ratio trackers you and I will NEVER be privy to.

They don’t this out of pure ignorance, you know. They make poor choices in execution, but there’s generally a very good motive behind the direction of any adjustment up or down.

You have proof that they use this type of program? Where do they pull their data from? PvE, sPvP, or WvW? The problem with this is there is a huge variable (and many others) that are not taken in to consideration. Player skill, situation, build variation, weapon choice and how long used, as well as if it was more than 1 player fighting and the final blow happened to be a specific weapon.

No, I am willing to bet they don’t use a tool you suggest simply because it’s illogical.

Artaz.3819:

Defense XII – Spiked Armor. Reduced the recharge from 15s to 10s.

Ask yourself, with the cooldown reduction, do you believe that anyone will take this Grandmaster trait over Defy Pain (or even some of the lower-tiered Defense traits)? If the answer is yes, then you are getting close. “When struck” (instead of when critically struck) with the 15-second internal cooldown would make much sense and even then …

I’ve tried to see if spiked armor was worth picking up lately.. I don’t know if it belongs as a grandmaster trait, and given how many other good choices the defense line has right now, I don’t even know if it belongs in the line at all – besides the name itself. I do like the idea of warrior’s having more access to retaliation besides just this one trait..

@john if you are going to nerf the hammer damage please lower the cast time of back breaker because the only player i can hit with that is either stun which is useless because i already stop the player or players that unaware that i’m going to use the skill 99.9% they just dodge unless they are newbie players that aren’t aware of warrior hammer animation. Pls don’t nerf hammer in pve i love hammering those npc, defiant already make us useless.

Azrayl.4936:

Artaz.3819:

Defense XII – Spiked Armor. Reduced the recharge from 15s to 10s.

Ask yourself, with the cooldown reduction, do you believe that anyone will take this Grandmaster trait over Defy Pain (or even some of the lower-tiered Defense traits)? If the answer is yes, then you are getting close. “When struck” (instead of when critically struck) with the 15-second internal cooldown would make much sense and even then …

I’ve tried to see if spiked armor was worth picking up lately.. I don’t know if it belongs as a grandmaster trait, and given how many other good choices the defense line has right now, I don’t even know if it belongs in the line at all – besides the name itself. I do like the idea of warrior’s having more access to retaliation besides just this one trait..

Basically Anet remove Hammer and Bow from game, and one more time buffed GS.
They looks like very much of GS :/

- Spiked Armor with 10s CD allow retaliation in 50% up time (Retaliation in power builds deal much more damage)
- Armored Attack with 10% of conversion grants more power (oh! more power!)
- Last Chance in 50% health increase 100b and Kill Shot efficiency.
- Burst Mastery nerf do not affect GS builds, because anybody uses GS Burst :/

I think Anet will give a step back in terms of build diversification

I dont believe any of the changes proposed to warrior, with the exception of moving UF, will bring any good to the game.
It will be a kill fast as you can or be killed situation and that is what we had before the bufs. The diference is now you will do a lot less damage with any weapon you choose with the nerfs of weapons and traits and with the move of good traits to GM.

I only wish the next meta wont bring mesmers and enginiers to be OP. Right now they are quite efective to play and i must say that they are much more anoying to fight than any warrior build. Mesmers can also go berseker and have good surviability.

But a meta with those classes would be a step backwards in PvP in my opinion.

silentnight warrior.2714:

I dont believe any of the changes proposed to warrior, with the exception of moving UF

Agreed!

Obviously they want the Hammer brought down. But isnt nerfing UF enough?! Isn’t that where all the OP damage is coming from primarily?!

And why LONGBOW of all things?! It’s our only half decent ranged weapon! Rifle is either so bad it’s a joke, or it’s part of a Full Zerker 20k sniper build.