Hey warriors,
I recently read a thread about the core issues for the warrior. A lot of things were brought up. However, one thing that struck me was that no one mentioned our stats.
Unlike every other class, outside of our Endure Pain (which every class has something similar to) and our stats, the warrior has very little defensive abilities to rely of when it comes to mitigating damage.
- We do not have the boons to protect ourselves (outside of vigor)
- We do not have stealth
- We do not have blinks
- No shadowsteps
- No clones for distraction
- No perpetual blinds
All this coupled with the fact that we are susceptible to conditions (runes do not count as they are not profession specific)…and no passive condition removal, and they only thing that warriors can effectively count of in terms of defending themselves….are our stats, mainly toughness.
However, toughness in this game is NOT where it should be in terms of scaling. To put things into perspective, my character is very “defensive” stat wise. Mostly PTV gear and 30 points spent into defense. Endure pain traited and as a utility. About 2100 toughness and STILL its very problematic to run into any glass cannons. HB warriors still can bring me down from full hp to nearly nothing. Shatter mesmers taking half my 25k hp in one shatter. I even had a NAKED thief (dunno if he had trinkets or not) hit me for an 8k backstab 5k CnD.
Now this would all fine and dandy, if I also hit them back just as hard. But i don’t. My Evicerates crit for 6-7k on those same targets. And this is cool for me damage-wise. But whereas I have to keep on depending on my stats after the initial burst, other classes have tons of other ways to mitigate dmg, whether glass cannon or not.
You would think a glass cannon meeting a bunker would result in a fair fight but 8/10 times it favors the glassy character. Now inb4 L2p noob, lemme rebuttle with this…If speccing for glass cannon makes u do TONS OF DMG with every swing of your weapon, shouldn’t speccing more defensive (at least for the warrior) make you take a lot of dmg per swing? Yes it should. But it doesn’t. I still have to use my stunbreakers and in-vulnerabilities exactly at the appropriate time or I’m in trouble. But I can do that whether i have toughness or not. So then whats the value of having high toughness (other than aggro-ing every mob in dungeons).
Idk, it just saddens me to know that an elementalist (the poster child for high dmg low dmg mitigation) can be played better defensively than a warrior can.
TL:DR : Toughness is the warriors main form of damage mitigation, however it doesn’t scale well when compared to the how much damage we still take and might need to be adjusted to make us more bunker-ish…if we want to.