Guild Wars 2

Many Warrior players, myself included, having about 250 hours or more under our belt, feel that while the Warrior is in a good place for several kinds of builds, but in other areas it is either lacking, or more importantly, is simply very dull. By the way, this is for the purposes of discussion. If all you have to add is that no one should suggest anything and just accept the existing state of the game and leave it up to ANet, just… don’t post. The forums exist for a reason. (Come on, guys.)

I thought I’d list a few ways you can potentially change up the class with minor alterations to make it more interesting. Most of these involve altering traits or secondary skills to make them more active. Much of the Warrior’s problem isn’t numbers (which it has a lot of), it’s the fact that it compensates for the lack of proper utility and interesting gameplay by just slapping more and more numbers on top of one another. So…

Core problems:

Stability, utility, “number” traits. Utility should exist either through active effects in traits or more importantly, secondary skills. For the purposes of this example I’ll treat stability as something that should be handled primarily by trait use, not secondary skills, as those should be unique to one another. More on that later.

(cont)

Secondary Skills:

Healing skills are generally fine. They’re just heal skills, after all. Healing Signet is pretty ineffective in sPvP, though, because you don’t generally have the native resistance you will in PvE. It should probably heal for more, actively, if you’re loaded down with CCs, which are way, way, way more common in sPvP.

The “three slot” secondaries are primarily trivialized in sPvP because of the dire need for closers and stability in a very CC-heavy environment with no native reductions. Proposed changes to traits should alleviate some problems. However:

Signets all have direct competing skills that do the same thing but with much lower recharges. (Dolyak/Balanced Stance; Stamina/Shake it Off; Fury/Berserker’s; Might/FGJ) This was obviously intentional, but I feel like it was already a mistake. It waters down an already small array of choices. Due to active use playing a prominent role in sPvP, signets are often fairly worthless; their passive effects do not accommodate the loss of an active state, and as such you are encouraged to never use the signets or to simply bring the competing skill. In PvE, they may see use, but again, simply due to the fact that their passives are passively working, and you never have any need to use the active abilities. This discourages their use and as such, discourages actively playing the game. This is wrong. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but mine is the only correct one. (Kisses.)

My opinion on the signets is that their active states should be distinguishable from the “real” skills they are modeled after, and their effects should move away from simply being boons or buffs. Their passives could even be the actual boons. Might, for example, may actively cause your next attack to also have knockback (bow AoE hilarity ensues) while its passive state simply gives you a single stack of Might (would have to check the math on this). Fury could actively grant ranged attacks piercing and melee attacks life steal, or similar. Stamina is in a good place but could function to actively remove a condition a second for five seconds (right now its intended function is rarely needed, and when needed, is usually in a situation in which you’re going to die anyway). Dolyak’s, you could make actively consume control effects for health, rather than simply granting Stability.

I think the physical skills are fine, but would see more use with improved traits that focus more on stability and less on just adding up damage values. More to come on that. Stomp could use an improvement on recharge, as right now it has a high recharge rate just because Physical Training exists. More on THAT later, too.

Shouts are fine, as is, and are one of the few viable kinds of builds for Warriors at the moment. I’d like to see a better selection of them, however. In addition, it would be nice if their mechanics were more interesting than just granting boons or a condition (excluding Fear Me, which actively DOES something), but… I’ll settle.

Banners are kind of a big problem child, as they rely a lot on large groups of people to be effective, and the traits dominate their use. If you aren’t running traits FOR banners, you’re usually wasting a slot by bringing them. For one, I think they should always do a little bit of damage when you summon them. Just nowhere near the amount you currently trait them for. Secondly, I’d like to see them be able to behave as an offhand rather than overwriting your whole skillbar. Not too important, but it’d encourage some people to actually use them, as right now, as with all skills in the game that overwrite your actual skills, they just destroy your build synergy. The #5 skill also needs to go, as dropping the banner (no animation) has the same effect. It does act as a combo finisher, although this does no damage and only grants a short, worthless boon. The #5 skill should instead be a reticule throw ability that can strike enemies, and loses the weapon. It would be nice if the passive effects of the banner improved if the number of people it affects is reduced.

The rest of the skills are fine, and are considered the core skills to begin with, and are generally why I’m writing this to begin with. The only one I can really ridicule is Berserker’s, because it’s marginally eclipsed by the other three, just because the other three are often so much more useful, as they actively change how you play. Berserker’s simply increases adrenaline gain. If its adrenaline gain was reduced some, but you gained a second of quickness for each level of adrenaline you do NOT have at the moment (3, 2, 1), I think it’d be a better skill while achieving the same thing.

(cont)

Traits:

Without actively going through every trait in the game, the general problem is that Warrior traits are mostly all +10%, +5%, +12%, and so on. This may be intentional, but it’s BAD intention. I literally cannot begin to go into this, as the problem is so vast I’d be here all day. Almost all Warrior traits are like this, and this is a very big reason for why the profession is often so boring and stuck in a rut when it comes to playstyles. Instead, I’ll nitpick a few traits:

Powerful Banners would be more interesting if instead of applying a flat damage on summon, it did small bits of AoE damage around their location – or even applied single stacks of bleeding or poison every few seconds – allowing them to be used as very minor control abilities. Warriors in general need more abilities like this – things that allow them to be at least a little creative, rather than behaving like drooling idiots just spamming cripples and bleeds 100% of the time. Just because it’s not supposed to be a Thief or Mesmer doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have some depth.

Weakness-based builds are mostly worthless because they rely a lot on constant strikes, which is more of a GW1 style of application, where it’s easy to maintain constant hits. It’s not especially viable in sPvP and is certainly boring in PvE. It’s a sustained damage kind of setup, which is not viable on the Warrior in GW2, because GW2 is not a sustained damage kind of game. It’s a game about suppression, burst and sustained support, not damage. Traits in this sort of line should focus on also granting short bursts of stability either passively or (preferably), based on your actions. Using a burst skill on a weakened enemy granting stability, for example.

Make Empowered work with any passive state, boon or not, including signet passives, but reduce the gain. Warriors don’t have a very wide range of boons to begin with, and Empowered is already outclassed by a large margin by Empower Allies, which does the same thing for you and allies while granting a better resulting buff. You know what would be even better, though? If instead of just raising invisible numbers, the trait actually did something, like dropped little AoE fields that granted Might, whenever you use a Burst skill – anything that actually changes the battlefield around you instead of just crapping numbers.

Avoid traits that increase recharges. All this does is cause you to balance the skills so that you HAVE to bring the traits to normalize them, which means if you don’t have the traits, you won’t be using the skills. This is a no-no. I will spray you with a Windex bottle full of water if you do this again. Traits like Physical Training should not exist. They do more to hurt normal use of the skills than to benefit you for bringing it, because I know good and well you are increasing their native recharges because the trait exists at all. Traits like Physical Training should do something like increase the knockback of all physical skills, or apply a short immobilize after their use, or cause cripple for a second or two. Lots of choices that don’t involve punishing people trying to use the skills normally on other trait lines.

In general, Warriors are very melee focused in a metagame that is VERY control-heavy, meaning certain skills are simply not viable over others. I cannot stress the importance of changing your traits to reflect this. Certain trait lines should include the means to grant yourself passive stability upon triggering actions in combat that should normally be quite rare. This can be burst skills, combo effects or simply things like “grant 3 seconds of stability at the end of a dodge roll.” (Warriors don’t get to roll too often anyway.) You get the idea.

Innnnn conclusion, Warriors are dominated by certain skills mainly because of how bad their traits are in a metagame that does not like them. This is why Warriors in sPvP are generally considered jokes if they aren’t running very specific kinds of builds, which are usually novelties that rely on awkward chains. The traits are simple-minded and have extreme tunnel vision with no utility involved in acquiring them. This is bad. Very bad. It’s not a feature of the profession; it’s a crutch. In addition, its weapons have their own problems, many of which are tied to how traits do NOT change how you play. If you change your traits to do something other than just pile invisible damage buffs, you will see the gates of how Warriors can use their weapons and secondary skills open up immensely.

I look forward to your disagreements and nitpicking.

Healing signet works fine in PvP if you’re built to be tanky.

Full 30 in Defense, toss on a Soldier neck and rock around 2k Toughness and 3.3k Armor, have regen from Signet, regen from Adrenaline levels and if you want you can toss in the rune set that gives regen with 6/6.

You can survive for quite awhile in fights actually. I mean if you’re being focused by 2-3 people yeah you’ll probly die but I mean at that point none of the healing skills are gonna save you heh.

+10. I really like your thoughts on the state of traits.

Plague.5329:

Make Empowered work with any passive state, boon or not, including signet passives, but reduce the gain. Warriors don’t have a very wide range of boons to begin with, and Empowered is already outclassed by a large margin by Empower Allies, which does the same thing for you and allies while granting a better resulting buff. You know what would be even better, though? If instead of just raising invisible numbers, the trait actually did something, like dropped little AoE fields that granted Might, whenever you use a Burst skill – anything that actually changes the battlefield around you instead of just crapping numbers.

Avoid traits that increase recharges. All this does is cause you to balance the skills so that you HAVE to bring the traits to normalize them, which means if you don’t have the traits, you won’t be using the skills. This is a no-no. I will spray you with a Windex bottle full of water if you do this again. Traits like Physical Training should not exist. They do more to hurt normal use of the skills than to benefit you for bringing it, because I know good and well you are increasing their native recharges because the trait exists at all. Traits like Physical Training should do something like increase the knockback of all physical skills, or apply a short immobilize after their use, or cause cripple for a second or two. Lots of choices that don’t involve punishing people trying to use the skills normally on other trait lines.

Empowered is not bad in a group due to other people’s boons, or even alone if you have the warhorn with quick breathing (which I use). I usually have at least 6 boons on me when engaged in combat in WvW. I wouldn’t say it’s totally outclassed by Empower Allies, although that one is also pretty good, with 70 power worth about a 2% increase in power damage, multiplied by up to 5 players around you (5 being more likely in WvW than tPvP). The latter doesn’t stack though, and I find a fair number of people seem to have it in WvW.

I don’t think all the traits are balanced around the assumption you got the recharge reduction. Healing signet is good without the signet trait, the stances work great without the stance duration trait (although given what these stances do, increased stance duration is inferior to the equivalent recharge reduction in my opinion), and it is totally viable to do a 3 shout healing shouts build without the shout CD reduction (I think warhorn quick breathing is much better choice than the shout CD reduction). Warhorn is viable without speccing into tactics at all. The physical training trait, though, is totally lackluster for a 30 pointer, and the damage part of the physical abilities are a joke.

I definitely agree that the warrior traits are a bit too straightforward, and there should be ways to cater to more interesting high risk/high reward playstyles if you choose to take it in that direction. Banners are also pretty clunky to use still.

Agreed, Warrior’s have far too much number stacking, reducing, crunching, and adding going on. There is absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing, exciting about increasing a toon’s damage by 10% more, reducing cool downs by 20%, or compounding damage, and these sorts of traits, talents, and boons just encourage cookie cutter builds.

What every profession needs in GW2 is more flavor, more ways of standing out, and neat little traits that make abilities, utilities, and elites turn into something spectacular; like turning kick into: Flying-crane-kick-of-awesome-pwn-your-face-at-1,200-range—I don’t mean this in a literal sense, but I’m assuming everyone gets the point.

This sort of “kitten poo”—were developers throw in numbers and call it a day—has plagued mmos since their inception. There really shouldn’t be any wonder why balancing has been such a pain in the rear. Math can turn into a real nightmare when you keep throwing in new unknowns.

I really wish you hadn’t started by stating: “Many Warrior players, myself included, having about 350 hours or more under our belt.” Starting with such a grand claim makes it harder to swallow the rest of what you’re saying.

It’s only been 528 hours (22 days) since launch. To have played 350 hours at this point you would have had to play 15 hours a day, every day. I doubt the number of people having played that much is far from “many”.

Anyway, you have some good points, but the way you talk about Banner’s makes me wonder if you’ve used them at all. The passive bonuses they offer pale in comparison to actively using the Banner’s skills. The fact that you want the #5 Banner skill changed alone indicates you miss the point. The #5 skill is a Blast Finisher and a very useful one at that. Also, making them behave as an offhand would be a huge nerf to them overall. If you’re not making active use of 2, 3, 4 constantly you’re missing out on some major buffs and speed boosts.

I honestly consider Banner’s to be a core skill and not using one is a crime against the class. Every one of my builds has a Banner. I only recently traited improved Banner’s for the shorter cooldown and now there’s almost zero downtime on Banner’s, so your assertion you need to trait them to be effective is false. Yes, they do get much better with traits but it’s far from a necessity.

@ Ragnar Dragonfyre

Using a Banner as a DPS build is a crime against the player. From the amount of time it would take the player to summon, pick up, spam 2,3,4, and then drop, and then go back into their attack sequence is going to cause that player to go spat.

Banners AOE passives are garbage, the elite can be interrupted—which places it on a CD—and unless the player goes “I’MA GONNA BE A WALL” build, banners play next to no use.

Shouts beat banners hands down in alot of non-tanky builds.

Number boosts are probably never going to be incredibly interesting by themselves, but I don’t think I’d have as big a problem with so many of them existing if getting big numbers in advanced PvE content actually mattered.

If dealing tons of damage quickly, or lots of condition damage reliably, actually changed the meta of encounters, then all of those 10%, 12%, 5% traits could really add up to something important. Phases and powerful abilities could be skipped, kiting could be reduced, aggro AI could be manipulated (though in more productive ways than “oooh melee damage dealer chase chase chase kill kill kill!”) all based on effectively pressuring a mob’s health bar and not just outlasting them through control, avoidance and healing.

There are ways to get there. Warriors could probably use an entire trait line dedicated to increasing the utility and efficacy of combo finishers that they set off, given that they’re almost exclusively a finisher class and not a setup class (with longbow being the single exception, I believe.) These amped-up or altered finishers could be tweaked to suit multiple playstyles, with Melee Damage being one of them. Right now, combos are nice, but they’re always more useful for a group that’s already kiting and tanking than for a group that actually wants to pump out DPS.

Warriors could also use some traits that specifically synergize with dealing huge crits or inflicting x amount of damage through conditions per second. These would obviously synergize best with other players who are able to either buff the warrior with extra might stacks, or inflict tons of stacks of vulnerability on mobs, or both.

I think that for a lot of these ideas to really work, something needs to be done about the core issue: the amount of damage that a dedicated damage-dealer deals relative to mobs’ total health before they have to run away or get killed. Tweak that, and suddenly a whole new world of interesting possibilities opens up. “Do cool or different stuff if the mob’s health is above/below x” is a lot more interesting if your role in a group is dedicated towards dealing damage and getting mobs’ health bars into certain thresholds, and you can actually do it without running around like a headless chicken.

The goal, in my humble opinion, is for a damage-oriented signet build not to be useless, as long as the warrior is willing to take some traits that specifically convert damage dealing into utility, generally through cooperation with other players. The way combos work right now, you can get 100% of their utility just by pressing your skill button, and so it still makes all the sense in the world to pump survivability at the expense of damage in every facet of character-building.

@Ragnar
I actually meant 250. Although, some people DO have 350, I think. I actually have 292 hours on the Warrior and 315 hours total. I’ll edit it to prevent confusion.

I know the 5 skill is a blast finisher, but combos in general are not as useful as we were led to believe. Honestly the benefit of using it vs just getting it out of your hands just isn’t there. Three stacks of might, frost armor, etc. Not really a big benefit. Just a cute trick. I think making it a long range attack that lets you place it at range would be a lot more fun and useful, while retaining the finisher.

I actually know about the active skills (the offhand suggestion, I wasn’t intending to retain the 4 and 5, but to possibly have a new 4 and 5). The damage the primary attack does is actually pretty funny. It usually won’t exceed your ordinary 1 skill chain, but it’s more than what you’d think. It actually does a little more damage to gates, for example, than your normal attacks can do. It’s a little weird. But again, it’s not worth losing your whole skillbar. It’d be nice if the banners gave interesting conditions or effects based on the profession using it, and had their own 1 skill chain. But anyway.

I agree with the majority of this post.

Having weapons balanced around certain traits irks me to no end and vastly reduces our versatility of playstyle. I really can’t stand sPvP because of this.

We lack uniqueness. Our stated flavors are fine, but they don’t come through well, or at all in many cases. Weapon Master? Too bad I can only use the Greatsword/Hammer/Double Mace/etc. cause that’s what I’m traited for. Oh, and my weapons swaps are identical to everyone else’s unless I put 15 points into a sub-optimal (though cool) trait line. Front-line soldier and commander? What? Our shouts could do this… but Guardians have them too, which they never should have. Theirs are also cooler. (Stand Your Ground! is a Warrior thing to say,kitten)

Our sole unique mechanics are either a boring throttling device (adrenaline/burst skills) or useless for everyone but heavy support builds (banners). This kind of sucks. I do like how the Strength line at least makes us interact with our endurance a little bit.

As it stands, I feel like the only real “Warrior-like” trait line is the Discipline one, which is well-designed, but the passive bonuses are just so terrible (especially when compared to Strength and Arms) that no DPS warrior could ever justify it, and the bonuses aren’t useful past the 10 point mark for any other build.

And it struck a chord that anything we can do, someone else (usually multiple someones) can do significantly better while also doing more on top of that. I can’t think of a single reason to bring a warrior over a Guardian, ever. It was this that made me finally quit WoW, and if it turns out this way it GW2, too, I have no idea what I’ll do. At least the other classes in WoW were at least mildly interesting.

3% Burst Damage is laughable, but 30% crit damage is no joke. You’re correct, however, that going 30 points deep into Discipline practically demands going deep into Arms/Strength as well to get the most out of it, and then you have yourself a build that won’t survive 5 seconds toe-to-toe with any genuinely challenging mob.

If you go ranged in response to that quandary, then suddenly you don’t really need to be switching weapons, which means that Discipline’s minor traits become much less useful.

I suppose I could see a ranged/warhorn 0/10/0/30/30 build. Maybe.

30% crit damage is good, I agree, but it’s utterly useless without stacking crit chance, which mandates 30/30 Arms, something that typically doesn’t work for any Discipline build. Anytime you’re looking to put points into Discipline, at all, they’re misplaced, except maybe for leveling. Are you support? Why are you even considering Discipline past maybe adrenaline on shouts in the first place? If you’re DPS, are you maxed out in Strength? No? Max it. Yes? Are you maxed in Arms? No? Max it. If you’re maxed in both… those 10 points really do better in Defense for the survivability.

The only thing I found it even somewhat decent for was a Hammer/Mace+Shield build that revolved around control, 10/10/30/0/20. The faster swap was nice for alternating between defense and offensive control; this build, despite being offensively-minded, did next to no damage. It was a fooling-around fun build.

It’s our coolest, most versatile, most iconic tree, and it’s next to useless for serious play. This saddens me.

I’m not sure we’re really disagreeing. Discipline belongs in a Damage-focused melee build, and doesn’t really have much use anywhere else. Damage-focused melee builds are the redheaded stepchild of “serious” play in GW2.

If I’m not playing seriously, I can put together a 20/20/0/0/30 build that’s ridiculous. The weapon swapping minors, adrenaline shouts, and lower burst cost synergize quite nicely if you pick weapons whose burst abilities are worthwhile. Sadly, GS’s specialization is hands-down the best in the entire tree, so if you use any other weapon you’re kittening yourself. Sigh. My kingdom for that exact trait in that exact spot, except for axes.

I guess I’d just rather see that sub-role (melee-centric Damage) be more important and viable, rather than have (major) changes made to Discipline – although that 3% Burst Damage does need to be changed into virtually anything else damage-related.