Guild Wars 2

1/2

While still giving us more utility/viability/niche in PvP without drastic incoherency between the two modes.

Right now warriors have a number of problems:

PvE:

-Forced into damage/hp centric builds
-OP because of the horrendous damage we can push out through just autoattacking
-Boring/stale/afk: engis have to swap between everything they have just to reach the same damage as us

PvP:

-Predictable (Who wants to take bets on how long that GS warrior will take to rush/bulls charge me?)
-Lack a role that’s not done better than someone else
-Lack useful utility
-Forced to use greatsword to be mobile
-Locked into certain builds

Global:

-Burst skills generally useless, nothing to sacrifice for

And now my proposed changes:

-Decrease autoattack/rotation ability damage slightly, increase validity of burst abilities

I’m not sure if the decrease in autoattack damage should be in pvp because big autos are all we have going for us, but this has to happen in PvE. Right now because of traits like berserker’s might and furious precision, (Which are really good for PvE) it’s actually worthwhile to do nothing but autoattack and use rotation skills like cyclone axe off cooldown. Which is incredibly boring, and even more skillless. It also encourages min/maxing to a degree, because some level of skill is taken out when you don’t use anything but 2 to three skills which are just more damage. Example: It’s actually less dps to use something like Eviscerate unless you can get that adrenalin back really quickly, so why would you? I’ve taken to positioning my warrior in front of a boss, alt-tabbing to read something else and tabbing back in to hit FGJ every now and again because that’s almost my max effectiveness as a warrior in PvE. Eviscerate shouldn’t have a straight up damage buff (We all know how that turned out) but maybe something in terms of 8 vulnerability per adrenalin bar or something. Arcing Strike is utter tripe and I don’t know who would use this ever. Hammer/Maces burst skills are okay but those weapons are generally poor outside of lesser creep pulls (Which everyone skips). Honestly at this point I think 100 blades and Arcing Strike should swap places, but that might be too drastic a change this far into the game.

-Give warrior a third weapon slot, using F2, F3, and F4 to switch

Sounds drastic but hear me out: warrior traits seem to be built around being a master of weaponry but we’re locked into simple builds because you’d love to use a mace but if you don’t have a greatsword then you lack mobility and if you don’t have a ranged weapon then you lack finishing power and all the other benefits that come from a ranged weapon. It would also raise the skill cap dramatically – I think we can all agree that ele’s are the hardest to play class in the game, a change like this would turn warriors into pseudo-ele’s, needing to keep an eye on cooldowns and switch between weapons for the required skill. In PvP it would give us the utility we need (As we’d be able to take something like mace or hammer without forfeiting greatsword damage) and in PvE it would force us into switching our weapons constantly to be as effective as we can be. Some op combos might need to be tweaked (Hammer burst skill into 100 blades holy kitten) but other than that it should be fine. So many dungeons requiring a ranged weapon also shoehorn you away from this kind of build right now – I use Hammer/Axe+Warhorn in dungeons I’m familiar with right now, but I just can’t get away with that in something I haven’t done before or high level fractals because there are so many enemies that will tear you apart in melee if you’re unfamiliar with their attacks. An extra weapon swap would also help to alleviate what I like to call the “Ursa” problem by letting us use gap closers and making us a lot less predictable.

cont.

2/2

-Change berserker’s might to a trait which gives 10% extra damage if you have switched weapons in the last 5 seconds

Again, this trait encourages very passive PvE gameplay – the facetanking afk autoattack warrior style that we get now. It’s kind of strange that doing this is the most effective way of playing warrior, as oppsosed to actually using utility and, you know, actually doing things. It would also synergyze with the previous suggestion – it might artificially encourage people switching weapons by forcing them to do it in order to maximize DPS, but it’s better than what we have now. Furious Precision is okay because there needs to be some trade off to using adrenalin, although it could be changed to something like “Switching weapons causes your next attack to do 25/35/40% extra damage based on adrenalin level”.

-Change discipline trait line’s bonus from 0.1 extra damage on burst skills to -0.1 seconds on weapon swap

To clarify: fast hands would need to be decreased to about 3 seconds less instead of 5, a 1 second weapon swap combo’d with the above suggestions would be rediculous.

Ever since fast hands got fixed I feel the class is completely different. Still not as good as it should be, but I feel the potential for it – you can knockdown combo someone with hammer, switch to axe for an eviscerate and then switch back in a mere 5 seconds for more ragdolling. You can use switch sigils whenever they’re available (provided they’re off CD) as opposed to mashing Q when you need it only to find it’s on cooldown. Best of all, you can make use of the adrenalin on weapon swap trait to build adrenalin really quickly.
Moreso, 0.1% extra damage is honestly the most useless trait bonus in the game. 80% of burst skills aren’t even damage based – the only ones I can think of are killshot, eviscerate, and that underwater one. On sword flurry it’s barely a dent, maybe one extra point of damage for each swipe? Even on the damage based burst skills, it’s extremely insignificant. Consider you put 30 points into discipline (Don’t know why you would, the traits are pretty poor) for 3% extra burst damage. Consider, also, that you hit for 4000 on eviscerate (Sounds reasonable?). With that trait line you now hit for 4120 instead. 120 damage. For 30 points in a trait line. Okay.
-0.1 second on weapon swap would encourage the more dynamic, adaptable, unpredictable style of warrior play I was suggesting with the previous changes. Warriors seem to be some kind of master of arms and weaponry, but instead they’re just a master of greatswords. Improved burst skills could replace one of the grandmaster traits or something.

-Improve our condition removal ever so slightly

There I said it. I don’t like the idea of being shoehorned into a single soldiers rune + shouts based rune just to do something like that. It doesn’t even have to be that big, something subtle could work. A trait for -10% duration on non-DoT condtions, maybe? Not using this build should be a sacrifice in terms of condition removal which you accept for a free util bar, but it shouldn’t be that bad to run without it. Even with mending and signet of stamina and sigil of generosity I find it hard to stay (We’ll say fairly, because it’s obviously not fair on condition builds if you can just remove every condition you get) condition clean.

TL;DR/In closing:

Increase the skill cap through making and encouraging warriors to change weapons to fit the situation, and at the same time decrease our crippling and seemingly unintended weaknesses such as lack of utility, build monotony and insane predictability, using similar/uniform yet relatively subtle changes for both PvE and PvP as not to confuse new players.

EDIT: Just thought of a potential one more slight change, and you’re going to hate this, but the removal of might gain from For Great Justice. Because right now, if you’re not using For Great Justice in dungeons, you’re just a pleb and on top of that you should pretty much have it on autocast. The fury is something that can be combo’d slightly more than might, if that makes sense – Fury will do more for Eviscerate than 3 Might will.