Guild Wars 2

Hey Anet devs. Two things got me to make a rare visit to the official forums to voice my input on the Decemeber 10 proposed changes. First, the general attitude of people on these forums is toxic, and I feel really bad for you guys, especially as someone who has been around since early GW1 and loves the games you make, and who has always loved your take on the brutal archetype of the warrior class. I’m not sure why the community has gone so far down hill since launch, but I want you to know I appreciate that you still try to involve us in some way and interact, and to also know that there are many people who respect what you do. The second reason is that if I dont say anything before the nerfs, I will have no one to blame for myself for not giving input. SO here goes:

I think the proposed nerfs to hammer go a little to far if they are launched exactly as proposed. A reduction to the damage of both burst mastery and the base damage on earth shaker and the hammer knockback skill combined with moving Unsuspecting Foes to Master tier is overkill on damage reduction. I understand your goal is to make warriors choose between damage or control, but the problem with this change is that it actually makes warriors choose between control or picking a different weapon.

You see, hammer’s design philosophy (as I believe it was intended) is to be a big, slow, cumbersome weapon with devastating attacks. It currently fills that role quite nicely with the right setup, at least in wvw. In pve, hammer has never been an optimal choice because it lacks the DPS that GS + axe/mace brings, and Defiant stacks make the control that hammer brings not worth the damage gap. In spvp, on the other hand, control is so important that blinds, stability, dodges, and other forms of avoiding control are practically required and keep hammer balanced and in check.

This brings us to a very important point: the reason why earthshaker deserves to have DPS AND control. Earthshaker is one of the most telegraphed attacks in the game, and is easily dodged. THis is good though, because it fits well with the philosophy of the hammer. Both when playing a hammer war and when playing against hammer wars, the fight is always exciting, because you feel like a little guy dodging a really big guy’s slow, heavy punches. If you slip up once, you will suffer, but that is balanced by how easy it is to avoid hammer attacks. I can tell you that playing hammer in spvp, I am often blinded, met with stability, dodged, stealthed, interrupted, knocked back, or otherwise avoided. When I finally do connect with earthshaker or another awesome hammer attack, it feels great, but moreso than with other weapons, I am often whiffing. When I play against a hammer warrior in spvp i always have a stun break (because I always have a stun break in spvp). I work around the hammer warrior by keeping my distance and dodging important attacks, by using stealth and stability, or by blinding. I know if I get hit in the face with a fully charged hammer attack with a huge windup it will hurt. This IS AND SHOULD BE how hammer feels. If you nerf hammer for the sake of wvw, you will make a weapon already barely viable in pve and make it useless, and I feel you will make hammer builds in spvp cease to be viable. (For those saying hammer warriors will simply have to switch to more offensive gear, I think you should note that hammer lacks any kind of escape mechanic and generally leaves itself open to attack. It either crushes foes or is quickly disabled, and therefore needs to be a tanky build, whereas other weapons allow the warrior to move around a lot more. to compensate, the base damage of hammer should not be something you can ignore.) (CONT)

Onto wvw, where hammer is most popular: Hammer works as intended here. I cannot tell you how many times ive lept into a zerg backline with earthshaker only to see five “miss” indicators pop up because I went blind just as I lept into the air. Highly frustrating! but also working as intended. Often too I will not stun a single target because stability is so popular in wvw. Earthsaker punishes people who dont attempt to control or dodge or avoid earthshaker, but it is by no means devoid of counter play. I worry that by so heavily reducing Earthshaker’s damage, people will be able to easily ignore hammer warriors, and that these changes go against the design philosophy of the warrior.

I feel like unsuspecting foe would be moved to master tier purely as a nerf to hammer warriors, and that this trait belongs where it is in adept tier, because it has very limited functionality. Stuns are quite rare, so the trait is where it belongs.

(TL;DR) In summary: dont nerf hammer for the sake of wvw. You will make it bad in pve and spvp, and your current changes go against your design philosophy for hammer, imho. Please consider only making some of the changes, or making different changes.

Now, I have some suggestions because I want to be helpful and as a law student I know it’s important to argue in the alternative in case you lose! If you do decide to go ahead with the nerfs, here’s how I suggest you do them differently to stay in line with your design philosophy!
– Decrease the RANGE of earthshaker from 600 to 300 to further the design philooshpy of slow, cumbersome attacks. Warriors will have to get even closer now to deliver their biggest attack.
- Decrease the area of effect or increase the cooldown of the aoe knockback hammer skill, again keeping in line with how hammer should feel. This could decrease a hammer’s overall dps while still keeping in line with how its attacks should feel: devestating but slow and easily avoided.
- Nerf the percentage increase on unsuspecting foes from 50% to 33% or even 25%. The trait is already specialized enough to belong in an adept tier (in that it doesnt have much use outside of a hammer build). This nerf would bring it in line with other adept tier traits while also forcing wars to bring a little more precision to fights or risk not critting when they land their earthshaker chain.
- Decrease the stun duration of earthshaker, rather than its damage. a 3 second stun is a long time, and perhaps it would be more appropriate for the stun to scale from 0…2 rather than 1…3.
- add a wind up for the aoe hammer knockback skill, rather than removing its damage, to further the feeling of hammer as a big, punishing weapon that is sluggish
- Increase the wind up for earthshaker (more time in the air before landing, maybe even adding a red circle before impact)
- Bring down the damage nerf to hammer skills from 20% and 23% to 10% and 15%, respectively. The nerfs as proposed are really, really high, and if nothing else I beseech you to start with a weaker nerf, ESPECIALLY if you are still planning to make all the other changes, as I feel even just one or two of these changes would bring hammer warriors in line with other builds in wvw. You could always nerf warrior again if 10% isnt enough.

Overall, I want these requests to communicate that more than anything I want warrior to play as it was intended, to feel visceral, and the be dangerous if ignored. I think some of the ideas in this post can help you do that to the hammer without reducing its teeth, and while also rewarding players who are skillful. Thanks for reading

• Decrease the RANGE of earthshaker from 600 to 300 to further the design philooshpy of slow, cumbersome attacks. Warriors will have to get even closer now to deliver their biggest attack.
• Decrease the area of effect or increase the cooldown of the aoe knockback hammer skill, again keeping in line with how hammer should feel. This could decrease a hammer’s overall dps while still keeping in line with how its attacks should feel: devestating but slow and easily avoided.
• Nerf the percentage increase on unsuspecting foes from 50% to 33% or even 25%. The trait is already specialized enough to belong in an adept tier (in that it doesnt have much use outside of a hammer build). This nerf would bring it in line with other adept tier traits while also forcing wars to bring a little more precision to fights or risk not critting when they land their earthshaker chain.
• Decrease the stun duration of earthshaker, rather than its damage. a 3 second stun is a long time, and perhaps it would be more appropriate for the stun to scale from 0…2 rather than 1…3.
• add a wind up for the aoe hammer knockback skill, rather than removing its damage, to further the feeling of hammer as a big, punishing weapon that is sluggish
• Increase the wind up for earthshaker (more time in the air before landing, maybe even adding a red circle before impact)
• Bring down the damage nerf to hammer skills from 20% and 23% to 10% and 15%, respectively. The nerfs as proposed are really, really high, and if nothing else I beseech you to start with a weaker nerf, ESPECIALLY if you are still planning to make all the other changes, as I feel even just one or two of these changes would bring hammer warriors in line with other builds in wvw. You could always nerf warrior again if 10% isnt enough.

• Changing the range wouldn’t do much, since Warriors have plenty of mobility
• Staggering Blow is already a PBAoE, you cannot really make it smaller from there, unless you want to reduce it to a frontal AoE or something. Similarly, it’s already on a 20s cooldown, along with most hammer skills having very long cooldowns, so it’s not really a good idea to further increase them.
• Not much use outside of a hammer build? Guess you missed all the complaints about Mace+Shield/GS. And of course, you have always been able to use Shield Bash to guarantee that Eviscerate or Final Thrust crits.
• Earthshaker is actually 1.0/1.5/2.0 seconds of stun already. Bringing it down from there would make it pretty much useless. After all, you can’t bring the 1.0 down any further, but making it 1.0/1.25/1.5 or something like that would just make it so that gathering adrenaline would be pointless
• Staggering Blow was recently made mobile because it was too clumsy before. Making it clumsier isn’t really an option either.
• Making Earthshaker easier to interrupt will just cause it to be regarded as even more useless than it already is. Just check the complaints about making Skull Crack a 0.5s cast instead of 0.25s.
• They could nerf it and then nerf it again, but considering how infrequent the balance patches are, that’s not really a good way to go about it. Not to mention that from the player’s point of view, being nerfed twice in a row is worse than being nerfed once.

What you’re seeing is quite simple. They gave Warrior sustain in the form of Cleansing Ire and Healing Signet. However, sustain + control + damage is way too much to have at the same time. Since the sustain was a global issue, touching that would make the class as a whole suffer. Thus, nerfing the control and damage portion comes in. Fact is, the Hammer doesn’t really have that much control, there’s just an AoE stun, an AoE knockback and a single target knockdown, and the latter two are on very long cooldowns. Thus, the fate for hammer is to have its damage come down.

I want to share what i do with my hammer warrior right now.

20k health. 3k armor. 30% critc chance (+ 20% of fury + 50% of UF = 100%) 3400 attack damage, 98% critical damage.

Defensive traits, runes with 20% condition reduction, food with 40% condition reduction. Endure pain + Balance stance + Berserker stance. And i use SHIELD with a block skill and a dash with the sword.

all defensive mechanics and stats, with a berserker damage.

REMEMBER! F1 on hammer apply CC BEFORE damage, when the damage is applied you have the UF active.

If you have no stability and no dodge i can F1 you (4500 damage in 2500-3k armor) and #5 for another 4-5k and #4 for another 4-5k and #2 for another 4k. All CC.

GG.

Yes, you can dodge, break stuns, like a ninja, but i can be inmune to conditions, i have condi reduction, i have endure pain and shield block, and 8s stability, a jump to get out of combat and all aoe damage and stuns. I can wait and one mistake of you and you are in a combo chain CC and you are dead.

I play a thief, a guard and my warrior. And since i use this build, the whole game is in easy mode.

I will miss this build, but yes, it need a nerf. Idk if that big, but need a nerf.

Kiron.9048:

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Melee train standard is already 1 guardian per 1 warrior OR 2 guardians per 1 warrior. 10-th Dec this proportion will shift to 2:1 as standard. L2 WvW before making absurd suggestions.

If the changes were designed with WvW in mind then they made another mistake. Nobody seems to be taking into account that with the new Achievements for season 1 we are getting a ton of regular PVE guys in the matches that pretty much stink. I’ve fought enough of them that simply stand still and eat attacks right to their face without any attempt to dodge or otherwise mitigate damage. They just are inexperienced or bad. Rolling out some rather significant changes right after a large influx of these types of players is not smart.

I keep hearing about Cleansing Ire but in WvW half the time I just don’t see what the big deal is. The amount of conditions that are applied and the frequency at which they are applied makes Cleansing ire kinda meh if you ask me. Sure you can clear 2-3 conditions every 8 seconds but the second you clear them you will have more right back on you. I find Melandru and food a more reliable option to deal with the absolute stupid amount of conditions in Condition Wars2.

Beserkers Stance is another one I hear people complain about. It’s 8 seconds on a 60 sec cool down people. It’s great for those 8 seconds but that’s a pretty long cool down and you still take damage from a variety of other attacks….its not like you are invulnerable for 8 seconds. The majority of your time in a fight you will not even have it up unless you simply run in get a few attacks off and run away and wait around for almost a minute before going back in.

Anet, you want to nerf something….nerf condition damage.