Guild Wars 2

Paraphrased summary of everything warrior-related from the 14/3/13 PvP State of the Game discussion
Transcript and Video of said discussion if you were so inclined:
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/news/1070-gurus-spvp-state-of-the-game-w-tyler-bearce-jonathan-sharp-and-karl-mclain/

• “We are afraid that making changes to the Warrior will make them unstoppable beasts in PvP”
• “Some Warrior builds are absolutely disgusting in PvP” (In an OP way, Most likely referring to bullsrush-100b combo )
• “We’re looking into giving Warrior access to ‘boon hate’ (what they described as being a flat % damage boost scaling with the number of boons on the target)”
• Only concrete thing on the patch notes is that banners are being buffed (again) to give more flat stat bonuses than they used to

• There was no mention about warrior mobility – in fact they mentioned that the thief of all classes should get more accessible mobility skills
• No mention about Brawn being a 3% bonus to burst damage at max

Let’s get the discussion rolling.

I have no idea how they arrived at these conclusions for warr.

“We’re buffing kick, rampage, and banners. We’re aware of warrior’s vulnerability to conditions.”

Look at the past patch changes to warriors. This is like going to the moon and back for ArenaNet with warrior changes.

They only barely hinted at the real problems with warriors. The entire segment was just disturbing. Buffing kick, really? OH BOY THAT’LL SURE HELP.

Larynx.2453:

“We’re buffing kick, rampage, and banners. We’re aware of warrior’s vulnerability to conditions.”

Look at the past patch changes to warriors. This is like going to the moon and back for ArenaNet with warrior changes.

Oh yeah, I think I just blocked that whole part about rampage out of my brain.

Do take note of how they just glossed over “warrior’s vulnerability to conditions” like that was a granted thing. I don’t think they see it as a problem, despite clearly being one to anyone who gives a cat.

Larynx.2453:

They only barely hinted at the real problems with warriors. The entire segment was just disturbing. Buffing kick, really? OH BOY THAT’LL SURE HELP.

Quite frankly I think the failing there was having 2 mesmer players be the community representatives. I was inwardly begging them to say something – anything! Significant during the entire warrior segment. Instead the only real indepth discussion was about an already popular class having it’s utilities made even better at the cost of shatters being reduced in power. Not that I am complaining about that, it’s just that it would make a lot more sense for the low-tier classes to get more talk-time.

Is there a link to this SotG?

Let Arcing Slice transfer 3 conditions from you to the target. There I fixed 2 problems at one time.

Jzaku.9765:

Larynx.2453:

“We’re buffing kick, rampage, and banners. We’re aware of warrior’s vulnerability to conditions.”

Look at the past patch changes to warriors. This is like going to the moon and back for ArenaNet with warrior changes.

Oh yeah, I think I just blocked that whole part about rampage out of my brain.

Do take note of how they just glossed over “warrior’s vulnerability to conditions” like that was a granted thing. I don’t think they see it as a problem, despite clearly being one to anyone who gives a cat.

It’s most likely an intentional design decision. The warrior archetype is typically something like having really heavy armor/defense, hitting really hard, but being very immobile and having limited ability to deal with magic (conditions, in this case).

Thematically, vulnerability to conditions is perfectly fine. The problem is, warriors aren’t any of the above either. They hit hard, but not harder than anyone else. They have no mobility, so they can never hit hard in the first place. They’re easily the least durable glass cannon since they have no way of disengaging and limited defensive capabilities.

Honestly, the only thing GW2 Warriors excel at is having a lot of access to control effects. That’s a first for me, honestly.

In other words, it’s an intentional issue on ArenaNet’s part. There’s two correct choices they can do. Either they can forsake the entire idea I just described and make warriors able to cleanse conditions and whatever, or they can buff them in other ways. I don’t like the first, since it just leads to class homogenization. It makes the game a lot more boring, and there’s no reason to start so early in GW2’s life. But it’s the easiest solutions, since the other would just make warriors an outlier and might not fix the fact that they’re undesirable since everyone else can do fine by themselves. Warriors are really bad 1v1 since they rely on team support, and what I’d prefer to happen would just exaggerate this more.

LordSlack.4685:

Is there a link to this SotG?

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/news/1070-gurus-spvp-state-of-the-game-w-tyler-bearce-jonathan-sharp-and-karl-mclain/

LordSlack.4685:

Is there a link to this SotG?

Oh of course, adding that in now. I always forget to source stuff.

The transcript really sounds like it’s stretching what the devs said about everything though, what I took away from those ~5 minutes was not nearly that positive and “change being looked into confirmed to be implemented!”.

Thanks team!

xoxoxoxoxoxoxo15chars

That’s disappointing. I guess I’m just about done playing my warrior. Too bad I’m not interested in rolling another prof.

Larynx.2453:

They only barely hinted at the real problems with warriors. The entire segment was just disturbing. Buffing kick, really? OH BOY THAT’LL SURE HELP.

They also said they were buffing utilities across the board and aiming to make alternate builds more viable. Even mentioned the response of players going “What!?! Why are you buffing that(Kick)!?” with the response “Because it’s weaker and we’re trying to make it viable.”

And yeah, the change to Kick was suppose to make it ‘mobile’ so who knows. You QQing about chill/cripple, this change might be the answer you’re looking for.

-Shrug-

Rush, Ride the Lightning, and Swoop all have roughly the same cooldown, go about the same distance, and do about the same damage. Why then is Rush the only one that is affected by movement impairing effects? If they would just allow the Warrior’s movement skills to work the same way as every other movement skill in the game, a great deal of the mobility issues would be resolved.

Of course this would just pigeonhole Warriors even further into requiring the greatsword, but if they would allow Bull’s Charge to be 1200 range and change Stomp to a ranged leap with 900 range, that would resolve the greatsword problem. Hell, they could remove Rush at that point and replace it with a defensive parry/riposte move; something the Warrior is also in short supply of.

Now I hope they rethink this boost bane thing too. I hope instead of these things being a passive increase based on the number of boons the target has, they’re changed to actually consume the enemies boons and give a damage increase based off the number of boons removed. The perfect moves to attach these to would be the burst moves. Especially to ones other than Hammer and Axe.

The only thing left after these very simple solutions would be the condition removal issue, but even this I don’t find that big a deal if it weren’t for our movement abilities being so awful when snared/chilled, etc.

Now are you honestly telling me expecting our skills to be consistent with the mechanics of other identical skills and giving the class a move that dispells buffs is somehow overpowered or too large a leap all at once to ever consider?

The transcript has this line about Warriors:

“Warrior has insane specs in PvE, but don’t work in PvP, get shut down by condition damage. Changes to help them against condition damage.”

That sounds like exactly what warriors need. Because we are OP in PvE, by far. If they really can give us some way of defending against Condition Damage for PvP I’ll be happy.

“We’re looking into giving Warrior access to ‘boon hate’ (what they described as being a flat % damage boost scaling with the number of boons on the target)”

I think this would actually be an excellent replacement for brawn. 0.1% damage per point and enemy boon could be incredibly punishing to ele’s and guards (the two classes kindof in this indestructible realm that is somehow ok) while not boosting warriors above classes that don’t have 4-9 boons up all the time which coincidentally are the other classes lower on the PvP totem pole.

I’m quite disappointed in the balance staff honestly.

I’ve come to the conclusion that those 3 guys simply don’t know their job enough.
They don’t even know what skills have a blast finisher etc, I am a player and I do.
They don’t know what are the real problems of a class even though we spend all days here posting about it.
I work in a hospital and if some paramedic said they are not sure what’s the optimal blood pressure value for a 60 years old man, I’d fire them right away.
You can’t miss the basics of your job, especially after several years of working on it.

When the Team Paradigm guy put them in front of the current major issues they were completely grounded and didn’t know what to answer, as if that was news to them.
I mean, your only job is to take care of balance issues and you don’t know what are the most prominent ones?

Warrior has sustain issues and they say it has condition removal issue.
Warrior has bugged gap closers and they say it needs boon ripping.
Warrior is the least represented sPvP class and they say they fear it becoming an unstoppable beast.

Let alone Karl continuously answering with class description.
“The thief is a class based on, like, mobility, and like, ability to get around, and y’know, being slippery, like, mobile.”
We know, Karl. You were asked what you’re going to change about Thief, if we wanted the description of the Thief class we could simply open the wiki.
I know that was “filler talk”, but if you can’t do filler talk properly don’t bother interrupt the long hair guy, he already had enough issues with public talking, you just made him a bit more anxious.

That being said, Warrior needs sustain, Brawn/Evis BWE nerfs changed, Arcing Slice buffed to “worth using”, mobility skills unaffected by slowdowns.

There were a lot of ’um’s, ’uh’s and ’well’s in that SotG. They even had the players suggesting things that they would turn around and say, “well…uh…YEAH, see…that’s another option we were looking at…”

I know you guys aren’t PR masters and you don’t want to say things you’ll later regret but you need to SAY when things are too powerful. You certainly don’t have a problem with saying when things aren’t powerful enough. Why not the other way around?

Xeph had to really push hard on them about the ele’s healing until they finally thought twice about the difference between what they thought was happening and what was actually happening when fighting well-played eles. And I saw that “wtf” look on his face when they said that Spatial Surge would pierce…he plays a mesmer and was immediately referring to how it was going to be OP. I’d like to hear/see a transcript from one of these balance meetings.

I usually don’t comment on the forums just for the fact that I don’t feel a.net actually applies anything on them to the game (as far as the warrior goes).

My favorite class in the warrior, don’t know why, maybe I’m a glutton for punishment. But what I have noticed, is that no matter how many people make valid points, or great suggestions, I just don’t see any proof that a.net is using any of it.

They seem to do what they think is best, but sometimes they would be better off listening and actually acting upon suggestions made to improve the warrior.

Warriors need more sustain so they can stay in the fight longer, with a sacrifice to DPS for doing so. (AKA defensive tree…)

No, most likely disgusting in both ways. Damage and easy to get shut down

I don’t think these guys have any clue as to what is going on with the game. They obviously seemed to be on a script about a certain set of questions. When given any kind of “off the script” questions, their brains shut off.

These are smart guys, it’s obvious, but if you are going to do a SOTG like that, you need to come prepared, and those guys were not prepared to be asked poignant questions, at all. They should have been ready with questions for each class, simply by taking friggin notes from the class forums. Each class forum has a thread dedicated to the issues we as players see. Why is it hard for them to just take 15 minutes out of their day, take a few notes, see what we see as major issues, and prepare a suitable, even if filler, response?

I would not take anything away from that pitiful sotg. Those guys were not prepared at all to receive questions from players, and seemed way out of touch from the reality that is on this forum. It’s clear as day that they are not reading this forum. It’s sad really, because there are a lot of ANet people posting on the forum who seem to be far more knowledgeable than those 3 were.

ANET needs more of a prescence on these boards as it is. I feel that the classes are not getting nearly enough attention from ANet on the forum, and many of our concerns seem to be falling on deaf ears. I really hope that they are not, but from where I am sitting, it seems ANet is totally out of touch from their player-base. They have no idea because they don’t seem to be reading any of the threads based on our class concerns (all the classes, not just Warriors).

Kind of a kitten move to call him a mindless complainer when that’s pretty much the communities feelings towards that SotG video. Or was that your intention to troll the guy you perceive to be a troll?

Warriors need Sustain BADLY…

It does not matter if we have powerlevel 9000 super amazing DPS if we get shut down and destroyed so quickly.

You are all right in that A net does not seem to be listening to the community at all. I have seen this before in so many other games. Devs just seem to loose connection with the player base after the game is released. This is a real shame, but it happens a lot.

I just started playing again after a long time away, WvWvW is the only aspect i play. I can not believe how poorly Warrior perform in combat. There is no doubt in my mind that we need help. Not in our damage output, but we need to beable to survive during combat. Conditions pile up and we are dead. We try to close gaps to be effective we are cc’d and die.

All the advantages are with range and anyone trying to get into melee range are easily dispatched with little impunity.

Warrior is the only class i play, even in its current state i will continue to play the Warrior, but atm we are merely cannon fodder for the other classes.

As has been stated by others and i feel is true, our damage output is fine, what we need help with is mobility and survivability.

@AlBundy

He was trolling me, and calling me names. I chose to ignore his post. He obviously did not listen to that fail of a SOTG very well, especially when 99% of all the forum posts are wondering why they didn’t answer any of the player questions adequately.

I’d like to see a change to Hundred Blades to move it from burst to sustain, while encouraging condition builds:

The direct damage of Hundred Blades is reduced by 50%. Each strike adds one stack of bleeding, 9 stacks in total. In addition, the ability can now be used while on the move.

Seezungenschleuder.8319:

I’d like to see a change to Hundred Blades to move it from burst to sustain, while encouraging condition builds:

The direct damage of Hundred Blades is reduced by 50%. Each strike adds one stack of bleeding, 9 stacks in total. In addition, the ability can now be used while on the move.

Yes, fantastic idea. Let’s add condition damage to our burst weapon.

Yes, fantastic idea. Let’s add condition damage to our burst weapon.

It’s not a burst weapon. It’s a mobile weapon. Look at those two gapclosers. To build on that, you have to remove the standing-still component, which can’t be done without reducing the direct damage.

Seezungenschleuder.8319:

Yes, fantastic idea. Let’s add condition damage to our burst weapon.

It’s not a burst weapon. It’s a mobile weapon. Look at those two gapclosers. To build on that, you have to remove the standing-still component, which can’t be done without reducing the direct damage.

It’s both.

There’s no sense in adding a random bleed component to a completely direct damage weapon. Unless you can find a DoT that scales off of power, it’s completely useless for that weapon’s niche.

Seezungenschleuder.8319:

I’d like to see a change to Hundred Blades to move it from burst to sustain, while encouraging condition builds:

The direct damage of Hundred Blades is reduced by 50%. Each strike adds one stack of bleeding, 9 stacks in total. In addition, the ability can now be used while on the move.

That is just too good. Why would anybody then select sword over greatsword?

Greatsword is already by far the most popular weapon for warriors. The least common weapons need buffing 1st. Making 100blades non-rooted and giving it potential for 9 stacks of bleeding would make that weapon extremely overpowered, since 100blades has just 8 sec cooldown.

Deniara Devious.3948:

Seezungenschleuder.8319:

I’d like to see a change to Hundred Blades to move it from burst to sustain, while encouraging condition builds:

The direct damage of Hundred Blades is reduced by 50%. Each strike adds one stack of bleeding, 9 stacks in total. In addition, the ability can now be used while on the move.

That is just too good. Why would anybody then select sword over greatsword?

Greatsword is already by far the most popular weapon for warriors. The least common weapons need buffing 1st. Making 100blades non-rooted and giving it potential for 9 stacks of bleeding would make that weapon extremely overpowered, since 100blades has just 8 sec cooldown.

One-hand weapons offer versatility. In turn, they are also typically going to be slightly weaker than two-hand equivalents. Hammer vs Mace for example. While hammer is probably the stronger of the two, you can take a warhorn or shield with a mace mainhand.

Not that I disagree, but that’s the general philosophy behind it.

shimmerless.4560:

I think the devs are going to find Warriors very difficult to balance with a single spec (the ideal situation). They’re already pretty ridiculous in PvE and easily the most desirable endgame class. I think it’s the same reason they’re struggling to get Eles just right (only for Eles it’s the reverse).

They are able to balance PvP and PvE separately. Example: Save Yourselves.