Toughness

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Twiista.1689

Twiista.1689

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.

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Oglaf.1074

Oglaf.1074

You just have to do what every other Warrior does these days:

Equip a Greatsword.

Let mobility be your defense.

I can do thirty Five-Dolyak Arm Curls.

Do you even lift, bro?

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Brutalistik.6473

Brutalistik.6473

You just have to do what every other Warrior does these days:

Equip a Greatsword.

Let mobility be your defense.

For 1 vs 1 situations sometimes, but unless they don’t have Mobility Strikes they’re pretty screwed especially in groups.

Their only way of defense for mobility is having the shout runes with mending skill because other than that you need a babysitter to back you up in the fights.

Warriors are easy pickings which is why they get targeted the first.

Pineapples

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Oglaf.1074

Oglaf.1074

Never said it was perfect, but it is making the best out of a bad situation.

I can do thirty Five-Dolyak Arm Curls.

Do you even lift, bro?

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: LieutenantGoogle.7326

LieutenantGoogle.7326

I have 20k hp and 3.4k toughness on my warrior and I still get melted in CoF :C

lv80 with skills fully unlocked, warrior, elementalist and engineer
lv80 Necromancer, all professional skills unlocked, working on the final norn elite skills.

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Schwahrheit.4203

Schwahrheit.4203

Toughness without good work is useless. Hell any Warrior build without good work is useless.

In order to compliment Toughness or most other builds for that reason:

1.) You must know how burst and conditions connect. This is IMPORTANT for both glass cannon and Tank Warrior builds.
2.) You have to learn how to punish. If you know how to pressure people will be less intent on attacking you. This helps on setting up kills or survivability through killing if you’re glass cannon.
3.) If you’re a Tank then you must have permanent vigor/regeneration to compliment that Toughness. Your “I messed up” button if you get mauled by conditions or about to get CC bursted for some reason would be Balanced Stance and Signet of Stamina.

TL;DR You can have 4k Toughness for all I care, if you don’t actually know how to AVOID damage out-put in the first place or fail-safe in the first place, that won’t matter. But if you do take the time to learn how to avoid and punish, then that 4k Toughness will mean A LOT.

Since people are negative about nerfs, how about we buff to balance then?

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Brutalistik.6473

Brutalistik.6473

Toughness without good work is useless. Hell any Warrior build without good work is useless.

In order to compliment Toughness or most other builds for that reason:

1.) You must know how burst and conditions connect. This is IMPORTANT for both glass cannon and Tank Warrior builds.
2.) You have to learn how to punish. If you know how to pressure people will be less intent on attacking you. This helps on setting up kills or survivability through killing if you’re glass cannon.
3.) If you’re a Tank then you must have permanent vigor/regeneration to compliment that Toughness. Your “I messed up” button if you get mauled by conditions or about to get CC bursted for some reason would be Balanced Stance and Signet of Stamina.

TL;DR You can have 4k Toughness for all I care, if you don’t actually know how to AVOID damage out-put in the first place or fail-safe in the first place, that won’t matter. But if you do take the time to learn how to avoid and punish, then that 4k Toughness will mean A LOT.

I want to believe you about this toughness thing and this so called build you speak of, but in reality I can tell it’s not a good build after all even if I did not test it out.

I say this is because we don’t have abilities like protection aura, retaliation or aegis constantly up unless we’re around other professions that give us those boons which pretty much makes us a handicap profession that relies on other profession to stay alive longer.

You can have high toughness, but we are aware toughness is crappy without defensive boons. If warriors were to be this full tank you speak of then warriors would not have to worry about dodging certain attacks as long condition damage or area effects isn’t involved.

As a warrior lets face it we have a very bad condition removal system and if you can’t accept that even when the developer himself put a little brief information about warriors saying they lack in the condition removal department..then there’s a problem with ya.

To make this a short one….

1. Is this build you speak of viable in Spvp / Tpvp?

2. What are the pros and cons about this build?

Pineapples

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: CrazyAce.3842

CrazyAce.3842

If you do a stun build, many people (not all) will be too panicked to try to attack you. They will be too busy blowing their defensive cooldowns and stun breakers to try to attack you.

I don’t PVP too often, but when I do I can almost completely lock down any opponent in sPVP with my Soldier-specced Warrior. I use interrupts, dazes, and stuns to screw up my opponent’s play style and put them on the defensive, protecting myself in the process.

When the enemy realizes that you’re able to stun/immobilize them while making them eat a full 100b to the face, they’ll start to panic. I’ve had full-invisibility thieves just run from me. I thought they would stealth then backstab me, but they just ran completely. Yeah, I can’t believe it when it happens, either. But having anywhere from 2-7 stuns/interrupts available at any point gives you so much leverage, even if my DPS sucks (though when my enemy is running or being stunned for 50% of the time, their DPS sucks worse, lol).

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Clyne.9038

Clyne.9038

The warrior is like Ryu from Street Fighter 4. I play SF competitively, hence the comparison here.
Easy to play difficult to master.

The strength of the class relies heavily on the player him/herself. As mentioned, we do not really have the defensive boons that other classes have. But we have the raw strength to compensate for it. Punish their mistakes harshly is how i play the warrior

Doesn’t mean a Zangief can take kitten loads of damage doing silly stuff and still win right ? :P

(edited by Clyne.9038)

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Karaad.7930

Karaad.7930

Err….we do have condition removal and you can make yourself have passive condition removal if you spec for horn.

Signet of Stamina passively gives better endurance regen and it’s active ability is to cure —ALL-- conditions on you.

If you spec down the healing and defense lines while using a horn, you can get conditions—>boon every time you use your horn which can be used every 5-10 seconds.

We have all the same abilities as every other class minus stealth and being able to get another full bar of hp on a whim. I think you need to change your weapons and spec to see the true power of the warrior.

I’m in my own class and yes, I’m level 80.
“Holy hell, did that thing already die?”-Al
“Dude, wait like 5 seconds before you start attacking please”-Iri

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Rump Buffalo.2594

Rump Buffalo.2594

Condition removal according to many people, tpvp pros, and the devs is weak. It is actually the weakest of any profession.

“We have all the same abilities as every other class minus stealth and being able to get another full bar of hp on a whim. I think you need to change your weapons and spec to see the true power of the warrior.”

We have 1 combo field
We have no protection
We have minimal regeneration
We have no aegis (we do have blocking skills tho which I’m fine with)
We have 1 blind
We have weak condition builds (save sword/sword)
We have weak bunker builds
We have no poison, which is HUGE in spvp at least
We do not have everything available to other professions, and indeed this is okay but we really are missing too much. Warriors can be powerful in lower rankings but they are too narrow and in tpvp are kind of jokes. Lack of protection, blinds, and combo fields makes us less complex, less interesting, less mechanically deep, and less viable in high level pvp at the very least.

Toughness scales poorly. Without protection it is near useless.

Id love to have protection as a warrior, have protection be 25% instead of 33%, and have toughness scale better to compensate that 8% dip… but im a dreamer

(edited by Rump Buffalo.2594)

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Copenhagen.7015

Copenhagen.7015

I share these sentiments. Going into a dungeon with all toughness using a mace/shield I feel completely useless because I still get vaporized as easily as anyone else. Also shouts healing for a little over 1k health with no healing is peanuts when you’re taking 6-8k a hit. Toughness, healing, and vitality need to be looked at, because compared to precision, crit, and condition damage, the offensive stats offer much more. My cannon Necro can easily survive longer than my warrior who is set up defensively.

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Formana.9283

Formana.9283

IMO, having more defensive stats just allows you to make more mistakes.

Fray Formana – Warrior
Bear Hat | Tom Cruise | Chuck Norris
[Urge] Blackgate – Commander | Warrior Question? Mail me! :D

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Thunderbrew.7034

Thunderbrew.7034

All of this talk about “learn to avoid” damage on these forums is
VERY misleading. This might make sense if all battles were 1v1 and
every ability had a delay to cast with grapics.

Doesnt work that way. WvW involves larger battles in where you find
yourself surrounded by 10+ enemies. Its unthinkable to assume that you
can avoid most of the damage by “knowing what to look for.” Im not talking
about Kill Shots either. Im talking about class damage in where there is
no warning or indication its coming.

Ive played the heavy toughness with sword/shield in WvW, and I agree with
the OP. Over 2k toughness and Im still receiving hits over 5-6k. I planned
on helping a strike team roam the map, but realized that my mountain
of toughness didnt seem to matter as much as it should (so went back
to more offensive build).

I have room to talk too, since I have a level 80 bunker Ele. Its comical
how long I can last surrounded by the enemy, WHILE doing damage
and escaping. I never would have thought a fantasy game would allow a mage
class to do that better than a warrior.

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Evalia.7103

Evalia.7103

I am seeing my warrior as a serious high-mobile damage dealer who is hard to take down because of said mobility and active defences( I am using greatsword/sword+shield and while we indeed lack condition removal and some hefty boons, i’m compensating that with my runes and sigils – lyssa runes and sigil of energy in shield so to mention)
The main disadvantage is obviously when i’m on cooldowns. It takes roughly 1 minute to recharge “the killer mode” (signet of rage+frenzy combination).

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Alasteir.7031

Alasteir.7031

Condition removal according to many people, tpvp pros, and the devs is weak. It is actually the weakest of any profession.

“We have all the same abilities as every other class minus stealth and being able to get another full bar of hp on a whim. I think you need to change your weapons and spec to see the true power of the warrior.”

We have 1 combo field
We have no protection
We have minimal regeneration
We have no aegis (we do have blocking skills tho which I’m fine with)
We have 1 blind
We have weak condition builds (save sword/sword)
We have weak bunker builds
We have no poison, which is HUGE in spvp at least
We do not have everything available to other professions, and indeed this is okay but we really are missing too much. Warriors can be powerful in lower rankings but they are too narrow and in tpvp are kind of jokes. Lack of protection, blinds, and combo fields makes us less complex, less interesting, less mechanically deep, and less viable in high level pvp at the very least.

Toughness scales poorly. Without protection it is near useless.

Id love to have protection as a warrior, have protection be 25% instead of 33%, and have toughness scale better to compensate that 8% dip… but im a dreamer

When I play my Mesmer, and then my Warrior and compare Condition Removals I find it easier to remove Conditions much easier as a Warrior than a Mesmer in multiple builds. Null Field is on a 45 second cd, and doesn’t remove them instantly, and Arcane Thievery was nerfed to only remove 3, and also has a fairly large cd. A Warrior has Mending which is 2 condition removals, plus Shake it Off which is 1 more, than Signet of Stamina which removes all. Mending, Shake it off, and Signet of Stamina are on a much lower cd than both Null Field and Arcane Thievery (assuming Signet Master is being used). When it comes to condition removal (non traited) from playing my Mesmer with a Phantasm build using Inspiration for support, and a Shout Greatsword Warrior, I find removing conditions in pve and pvp to be much more reliable (selfishly) on a Warrior.

My experience from playing Thieves, Mesmers, Elementalists, Engineers, Guardians and Warriors in spvp is that Warriors are not easy to play. I can play my Warrior and get owned, and then go to my Thief and immediately with no practice or difference in skill, start doing a lot better. Which doesn’t necessarily mean Thief is better than a Warrior, but it does say one is far less skill reliant than the other. I personally loathe easy to play classes because they aren’t as fulfilling for me personally.

Edit: I forgot the Mesmer mantra that removes 2, despite it’s fairly long cd, and it being a 3 second cast time.

Lady Novae – 80 Human Ele – Blackgate

(edited by Alasteir.7031)

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Trevos.6473

Trevos.6473

horn user warrior in pvp? U kidding right? if you dont use gs u kittend dmg wise and if your other set not includes shield u r kittend overall.

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Uberrod.1342

Uberrod.1342

I think mobility is the key, which is why I have the signet slotted that removes holds, and protects against knockback, etc.

I find that when I get into trouble I need to switch to my rifle and start kiting. This gives my tier 3 healing passive regen a chance to work and keeps me out of the way of melee bad guys. When healthier, I can switch to my weapons and dive into melee.

Of course I only play PVE so my tactics may not be universally acceptable.

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: fellyn.5083

fellyn.5083

That’s been one of the main complaints about warriors since the betas. Damage mitigation, if it’s be armor or traits that give toughness does not do enough to mitigate damage.

On the other hand if they increase how affective toughness is that will also likely affect Guardians. I don’t think that’s something anyone wants.

I think the solution to our problems as a warrior is to revamp how adrenaline works for us and what it actually does. I don’t have good ideas on how to do that though and it’s not likely to happen any time soon anyways.

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Veritas.6071

Veritas.6071

Anet makes small balance adjustments. I imagine the next thing we’ll see, if anything, is something to prevent being kited to death which is the case in Tpvp right now. From there, they’ll see how that affects survivability within the meta.

Ve·ri·tas [English ver-i-tahs] A Latin noun meaning Truth.

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Pestilence.3184

Pestilence.3184

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.

i agree totally with this, i run a split tank/dmg build on my warrior and see totally where your coming from

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Tammuz.7361

Tammuz.7361

I have to agree with the OP on this issue: basicly it seems like the formula for armor was gimped sometime between BWE2 and BWE3 in order to address (the very valid concern) that guardians were too difficult to kill.

Unfortunatly this means that at high end, toughness for damage reduction is no where near what it needs to be on a warrior in pve nor in wvw when multiple opponents are the norm.

Now keep in mind that a warrior who goes for 3.5, or even 3.7k toughness has essentially put 30 points into defense, is wearing full knight gear, and by definition will be doing no where near the damage of our glass cannon counterparts much less other classes.

PvE: Still despite this, there are bosses (not using agony) in fotm that 1 shot mele characters. Basicly after fotm 20 or so mele becomes nonviable in most cases and warriors are forced to switch to ranged dps… a sad state for a class thats supposed to be designed to mele if you ask me.

WvW: again the mitigation we get from higher levels of toughness is no where near where it needs to be. Sure if we want to we can spec for 33k kill shots, but what if we want to be able to shrug off that shot? Basicly we have to rely on other professions for the protection boon, which kinda sucks when we are relying on them already for healing and condition removal and dps and aoes and ranged dps (again a toughness war having given up all of these).

I think the one way to deal with this is to make the armor stat class dependant, that way they can fix the broken toughness scaling for us without overpowering guardians in the process.

A second and possibly better solution would be to overhaul our (currently next to useless) 11 an 12 traits in the defense tree to work a often up protection boon in there. (changing retaliation to protection for example on spiked armor).

TL;Dr: It would be nice since I rolled a warrior for the ability to “shrug off blows” that would leave other proffessions disabled and out, to actually be able to do that if i build my warrior sacrificing all the burst damage, ranged dps, mobility etc to get this.

[VoTF] www.votf-online.net

(edited by Tammuz.7361)

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Thunderbrew.7034

Thunderbrew.7034

^ Agreed on above post, and well stated. Glass cannon range is fun, Ive
tried it, but you sacrifice too much to be the “one hit wonder.” My idea
of a Warrior, as you stated, was to be able to be in the center of battles
and sacrifice damage for at least SOME viable survivability (for heavens
sake a bunker Ele does this 1000% better than a warrior).

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Tru Reptile.6058

Tru Reptile.6058

It would be nice if some of our skills and or traits granted us the Protection Boon. That would go a long way.

Toughness

in Warrior

Posted by: Brutalistik.6473

Brutalistik.6473

It would be nice if some of our skills and or traits granted us the Protection Boon. That would go a long way.

I think warriors should of been had some protection boons a long time ago down the defensive tree traits and their defensive skills in general.

Pineapples