Guild Wars 2

Used to see you guys a ton when I played. Now it’s hard to even find you guys in HOTM. What happened to you guys to make you disappear?
Was it power creep from elites? Did y’all get nerfed? Or has the low skill ceiling of warrior finally become it’s doom? (Nothing bad meant by that, I mean we all know a class built with passives as it’s only defense can only go so far in this game)

But seriously, where’d you guys go?

Our elite spec isn’t viable in PvP/WvW, and warriors received nothing but nerfs for the last 12 months and were incredibly pigeon-holed into very specific builds that just don’t compete with the stupid damage that every other class can put out.

The “simplicity” of warriors has become their downfall. We have no answers to the ridiculous evade/block/invuln/blind spam, our weapons and cooldowns are based ENTIRELY on the concept of Fast Hands weapon swapping (which is worthless when they all miss/block/evade/invuln, etc.) and we just don’t do damage anymore outside of gimmick builds.

Best part is that Anet literally does not care. They’ve not so much as acknowledged that warriors are in an undesirable spot. Not even pre-HoT necros were ignored so badly.

They’ve probably lost a ton of players to other games already, and they still don’t seem to care.

Ah that bites. But as a thief, I feel your pain.

So what types of buffs are warriors in need of? Is it damage? Defense? Defensive options? Utility?

Low skill ceiling?? Low skill floor compared to others* high skill ceiling compared to others*
When it comes to core warr, dunno about berserker, i dun play that bullkitten

Sorry dude but war is definitely not high skill ceiling. That is on the thief and engi. Warrior is too simplistic (as stated by bLind) to have a high skill ceiling. Please, don’t try to feed people the idea that warrior is high skill ceiling. Cause I’m pretty sure at this point that it’s the low skill ceiling that’s forced them out of the meta.

This game has changed a lot since the release. And the changes that were made to it have all worked against the idea of what warrior is in this game.

There is no other way to make Warrior viable, but to basically make a complete reconstruction of the class.
The foundations of this class are so rotten right down to the core that there’s obviously only two ways warriors live: they are either useless or almost godlike. And there’s proof of that, just take a loot at a 3 year history of warriors since release and until now.

Because the core of the class, the basic idea of it, is bad, the class itself is stuck in this endless circle of being bad or having a build that is gimicky OP. You cannot build on such core, and the sooner Anet realize that and act on it, the sooner this class my see some sort of decent life. Until then it will not. At least not in PvP and WvW.

If Anet accepted that earlier on and acted on it they could make the class work sooner. But what they did instead is just make another heavy class and gave it all kinds of things that warrior should acutally have, and the rest of the good ideas they gave to guardian. Now there’s nothing unique they can really do with warrior anymore.

I could accept that our whole class is kitten, if we (as masters of weapons) at least had the best weapon skills. But no, our weapon skills are also at the bottom of the barrel in this game.

If we take a look at the latest buff that they gave us (17% damage in berserker tree though 2 trait changes), you can see how clueless and ignorant about this class problems they actually are. 0 effort was put into that. ZERO EFFORT, Zero care and zero thought. Which is why I have no hope of them fixing Warrior anytime soon. Or ever.

It’s a class forgotten.

Ario.8964:

Sorry dude but war is definitely not high skill ceiling. That is on the thief and engi. Warrior is too simplistic (as stated by bLind) to have a high skill ceiling. Please, don’t try to feed people the idea that warrior is high skill ceiling. Cause I’m pretty sure at this point that it’s the low skill ceiling that’s forced them out of the meta.

Warriors are simple yeah, which just limits their tool kit, but combat wise, is the same as trying to juke everything from your enemy with out stealth and resets with zero reward in even scoring those.

And no engineers are not high skill ceiling, they are D/D ele of new generation.

Biggest underlying problem is that arenanet doesn’t split PvE and PvP balancing changes.

So as a result they greatly weakened the efficacy of the warrior in PvP and overly-buffed it in PvE. They genuinely have no idea what they are doing.

This is a problem of both side. From the player’s perspective, their capacity to dissolve the problem is extremely limited, (i.e., I have seen so many outrageous buff requests without any reason to compete with other class or PVE scenario. Few of those are accompanied with reasonable changes.) On the other hand, Anet devs completely forsake this forum. At least dev can make a post, answer questions and give us a notification of the progress.

Roughly speaking, players are running amok without any tools which the devs can access to collect statistical data while devs are disconnected with the rest of the population.

Ario.8964:

Sorry dude but war is definitely not high skill ceiling. That is on the thief and engi. Warrior is too simplistic (as stated by bLind) to have a high skill ceiling. Please, don’t try to feed people the idea that warrior is high skill ceiling. Cause I’m pretty sure at this point that it’s the low skill ceiling that’s forced them out of the meta.

Many people tend to think warrior is skillles because they try it out and reside at the skill floor, and cant progress, making themselves the disservice of thinking they’re at this seemingly low skill cap. I’ll adress this later on.

What makes warrior more skill based is that its 50% based on movement. With no port or stealth and only meele, (yes i exclude killkitten and longbow cuz lame and admittedly less skill based due to range). Rsnge is generally less skill and provides for the current ability wars we see with many other classes that us genuinly less skilled.

Skill cap or skill ceumiling is undefined and unreachable, and warrior has high skill ceiling because of the reason u think its low. A warrior will get much lower performance ‘reward’ for each skill step they make, and making it hard to climb it. And as i stated with movement, the skill can increase in a much broader sense. Warrior cant have a low skill ceiling if nobody can be there, its about how hard it is to get there, to become greater than the reså and can be donenin many different ways that means its high!

I know u stated at first against me, and will thusly probably do so again even if u know otherwise. And if so ill just ignore you, because this is reason i tend to avoid the forums, people wont realize, being stubborn and cant be reasoned with. But if u wont i will only resoect u, so theres no reason to lie to yourself.

Sorry if many typos and what not, worte on phone on the bus ^^

Ario.8964:

Ah that bites. But as a thief, I feel your pain.

So what types of buffs are warriors in need of? Is it damage? Defense? Defensive options? Utility?

honestly it’s not really warrior, i actually think warrior is fine and balanced along with thieves. it’s just that the other 7 elite specs are so op kittenin broken

like literally 1 meta ago we were a really good class, then as soon as HoT dropped we fell off real quick. if they just toned down all the other classes we’d be viable again.

Obindo.6802:

Low skill ceiling?? Low skill floor compared to others* high skill ceiling compared to others*
When it comes to core warr, dunno about berserker, i dun play that bullkitten

Power based berserker is ok for pve as you have threat of missing the burst skills so you can pretty much spam them, not so good in pvp vs compitent people though haha

I’ll just leave this here then…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BHw5fMUenw&ab_channel=Vaanss

belhor.5610:

I’ll just leave this here then…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BHw5fMUenw&ab_channel=Vaanss

Dno, man, u just take roaming gear roaming build and pwn people in wvwvw builds, such an achievement it seems ?

Purple Miku.7032:

…….They genuinely have no idea what they are doing.

Quote for truth.

Short answer? Nerfs.
Old warrior design is old, and it shows through all the skills and traits. If there’s a dev that actually plays warrior with something other than Eternity, it’s nowhere near obvious.

Rauderi.8706:

Short answer? Nerfs.
Old warrior design is old, and it shows through all the skills and traits. If there’s a dev that actually plays warrior with something other than Eternity, it’s nowhere near obvious.

Not sure what you leading into, but the best build for wars right now is still Shoutbow with BOW Sword and Shield. Without Eternity.

Ario.8964:

Ah that bites. But as a thief, I feel your pain.

So what types of buffs are warriors in need of? Is it damage? Defense? Defensive options? Utility?

The (hopefully) short and simple list:

• Lots want Fast Hands as a baseline trait to break the dependency on Discipline and increase build variety.
• Warrior has limited access to Stability and Resistance. Stances barely provide 15% uptime, at the most, on either. Berserker has some access, but overall, more Stability and Resistance to justify being a front-line fighter.
• If our skills stay dirt simple, decrease cooldowns across the board. Looking at Rev hammer as an outlier (and probably several elite specs), there are great effects on short cooldowns, while base warrior as to wait forever.
• Fix our closer skills.
• Weapon skills need a redesign to increase effectiveness.
• Traits need more synergy in a way similar to Forceful Greatsword and Phalanx Strength. To say it’s OP isn’t exactly right, but in relation to other weapon traits, there’s no reason not to take FS/PS, so it looks overpowered within Warrior itself.
• Mending as a Physical skill. Other physical skills need (traited if it must) something else to make them desirable as something other than low-damage interrupts and ineffective CC.

I probably missed a bunch, but a few stalwarts in the Warrior community have been actively pushing a legion of design ideas that devs can pick from.

Arcade.8901:

Rauderi.8706:

Short answer? Nerfs.
Old warrior design is old, and it shows through all the skills and traits. If there’s a dev that actually plays warrior with something other than Eternity, it’s nowhere near obvious.

Not sure what you leading into, but the best build for wars right now is still Shoutbow with BOW Sword and Shield. Without Eternity.

Except it isn’t..

What bothers me while playing warrior is that weapon swap cool down. I just cannot switch the weapons at the appropriate time because of this. 10 seconds feels way too long for me. Of course there is a trait where it reduces swap cool down, yet this also means that there’s no other choice but taking discipline trait just for one single trait. Will zero cool down make warrior OP? Otherwise what would be a big deal?

Arisen.2560:

What bothers me while playing warrior is that weapon swap cool down. I just cannot switch the weapons at the appropriate time because of this. 10 seconds feels way too long for me. Of course there is a trait where it reduces swap cool down, yet this also means that there’s no other choice but taking discipline trait just for one single trait. Will zero cool down make warrior OP? Otherwise what would be a big deal?

Which is of course the “Fast hands,” that everyone wants as a baseline.

ReaperJr.5967:

Arcade.8901:

Rauderi.8706:

Short answer? Nerfs.
Old warrior design is old, and it shows through all the skills and traits. If there’s a dev that actually plays warrior with something other than Eternity, it’s nowhere near obvious.

Not sure what you leading into, but the best build for wars right now is still Shoutbow with BOW Sword and Shield. Without Eternity.

Except it isn’t..

Well, i dunno i ve played like 500 games on my war in HoT only, then i just gave up, Shoutbow still works kinda with amount of necroes nowadays, but ele and druid still better no questions here, but you at least support those who can actually kill fotms.

GS/Hammer, it’s like, after every 1on1 i won i thought, dam that guy had no clue what he was doing there.

So it’s just my personal opinion.

Though it seems to have passed, quick notes on skill floors and ceiling:

Skill floor refers to the amount of skill needed to be somewhat useful with a specific class’ mechanics.

Skill ceiling refers to the amount of skill needed to fully exploit a specific class’ mechanics..

Warriors undoubtedly have a low skill ceiling, but that doesn’t mean warriors aren’t skilled players. Indeed, a low skill ceiling makes high player skill that much more important… things like positioning, baiting, conserving, etc. But this is also why warriors are virtually non-existent in top tier pvp, where player skill across classes is uniformly high. That, and how easily they’re countered.

I think warriors used to have a lower skill floor than most classes, and it might still in general (i.e. non-end game or dungeon) pve. But in wvw at least (and probably pvp), I think other classes have considerably lower skill floors.

Arisen.2560:

Arisen.2560:

What bothers me while playing warrior is that weapon swap cool down. I just cannot switch the weapons at the appropriate time because of this. 10 seconds feels way too long for me. Of course there is a trait where it reduces swap cool down, yet this also means that there’s no other choice but taking discipline trait just for one single trait. Will zero cool down make warrior OP? Otherwise what would be a big deal?

Which is of course the “Fast hands,” that everyone wants as a baseline.

Why they would design every weapon around Fast Hands and then not give it baseline at launch is beyond me. Just shows how inept the development team really is.

belhor.5610:

I’ll just leave this here then…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BHw5fMUenw&ab_channel=Vaanss

Yep, 100% of those fights happened in order in a 14 minute period. None of those were picked out of potentially hundreds of fights at all.

Obindo, ok I see what you’re talking about. The reason I claimed what I claimed is there, at least in my experience so take that for what its worth, is nothing outside of mobility that is a form of active defense. Warrior being built around simple combos, passive invulns, and a lack of in combat versatility (In relation to other classes. Not saying it doesn’t have any, just that it’s overshadowed) Definitely agree with a ton of the stuff you said but in relation to other classes, it’s skill cap is not as high as it could be with different design.

And about the typos: I feel ya, we all know how phones are

Arcade, engineer is definitely high skill cap. Is it op right now? Most definitely but that doesn’t take away from its high skill cap. All that stuff comes from in combat versatility which engineer is pretty much made of. It’s still very easy to tell the good engis from the bad ones even with the specs being op.

So from my understanding, Warrior needs fast hands baseline and needs redesigning of traits to cut off dependency on trait lines in order to be functional. That sound like a good start for warrior fixes?

What happened?
Long story short: anet killed the class so that more ppl rerolled into the new meta class: revenant.
There.. thats what happened

Ario.8964:

Sorry dude but war is definitely not high skill ceiling. That is on the thief and engi. Warrior is too simplistic (as stated by bLind) to have a high skill ceiling. Please, don’t try to feed people the idea that warrior is high skill ceiling. Cause I’m pretty sure at this point that it’s the low skill ceiling that’s forced them out of the meta.

It shows only how low your skill ceiling. In gw1 and gw2 a like warrior was the shot caller of the party. Because they are form follows function and intuitive to use, it allowed those playing them to keep one eye on mini map, count opponents dodges and heals and best co-ordinate a team spike and when to instruct others to break off for rotations. In any organised, well established group there is always a shot caller who will monitor these aspects of where their opposition is at. It required intimate knowledge of builds and professions cool downs. Because warrior by nature was mobile and in the thick of it, it made them the ideal profession to assign for the duty.

However if all you do it occasionally take a warrior for a spin in hotjoin and the odd unranked match, and your only objective is damage,..then yes they will appear simplistic. Every other profession has too many cool downs and internal cool downs that needs to monitored and managed by the player. Warrior has 99% of the information you need on screen at all times..which again, is why they were typically assigned the role of shot caller. Only highly skilled players in organized competitive matches would play warrior because it allowed them to play 2 roles. One in the match, the other co-coordinating the match. They were an ideal designed profession for players who manage a team. Everything you need, on screen, at all times. If your not using your warrior in this capacity, it is the player who has set the bar low for themselves.

Some problems could be fixed by improving certain aspects:

1.Make all gap closers actually hit.
2.Make F1 skills unblockable.

Arcade.8901:

ReaperJr.5967:

Arcade.8901:

Rauderi.8706:

Short answer? Nerfs.
Old warrior design is old, and it shows through all the skills and traits. If there’s a dev that actually plays warrior with something other than Eternity, it’s nowhere near obvious.

Not sure what you leading into, but the best build for wars right now is still Shoutbow with BOW Sword and Shield. Without Eternity.

Except it isn’t..

Well, i dunno i ve played like 500 games on my war in HoT only, then i just gave up, Shoutbow still works kinda with amount of necroes nowadays, but ele and druid still better no questions here, but you at least support those who can actually kill fotms.

GS/Hammer, it’s like, after every 1on1 i won i thought, dam that guy had no clue what he was doing there.

So it’s just my personal opinion.

Ive found burst builds more useful than shoutbow in this meta. You wont survive with shoutbow regardless, even in a 1v1. So going ham and hopefully catching a player off guard means winning the team fight for your team. War only works against players way below your skill level atm though regardless of what you play since the amount of faceroll in other elite specs are so high.

It all comes down to nerfs. Each time warriors had a good build, it got nerfed due to the complaints on forums. Skullcrack got nerfed, Hambow got nerfed, Shoutbow got nerfed, and last Rampage Warriors got nerfed. So there is nothing left for warriors. It’s funny because the amount of complaints DragonHunter are getting far exceeds Warriors yet warriors get nerfed rather fast.

If they want to fix warriors, revert some nerfs, esp adrenaline nerfed. Make fast hand baseline so it opens up build diversity and give warriors more sustain abilities such as overhauling the new rage skills so it can help warriors stick close to their enemies. And fix all the gab closing skills so that it actually works. Another thing they should do is speed up the animations of warriors attack and increase some of the range of his attacks.

I’m not sure if it’s intended that warriors are left behind to ensure the popularity of Revenant which will increase sales for Hots. Basically it just feels like Revenant got all the buffs that warriors been asking for. Revenant is basically warriors 2.0.

Doon.2364:

It all comes down to nerfs. Each time warriors had a good build, it got nerfed due to the complaints on forums. Skullcrack got nerfed, Hambow got nerfed, Shoutbow got nerfed, and last Rampage Warriors got nerfed. So there is nothing left for warriors. It’s funny because the amount of complaints DragonHunter are getting far exceeds Warriors yet warriors get nerfed rather fast.

If they want to fix warriors, revert some nerfs, esp adrenaline nerfed. Make fast hand baseline so it opens up build diversity and give warriors more sustain abilities such as overhauling the new rage skills so it can help warriors stick close to their enemies. And fix all the gab closing skills so that it actually works. Another thing they should do is speed up the animations of warriors attack and increase some of the range of his attacks.

I’m not sure if it’s intended that warriors are left behind to ensure the popularity of Revenant which will increase sales for Hots. Basically it just feels like Revenant got all the buffs that warriors been asking for. Revenant is basically warriors 2.0.

Even though I loved shoutbow, pre june patch it did need balancing. It was such a dominant force ad taking an extra energy sigil meant I could last even longer. It could contesta point, heal, rez and do decent damage for it’s good defensive stats.

My issue with warrior right now is it doesn’t play like a warrior in pvp. I never really pictured the warrior class as a frail hit and run spec like the common gs builds, if I wanted that I’d play thief. DH and Herald feel more like what warrior players would enjoy because they are both bruisers that can take a few hits, provide team support via CC or boons.

CntrlAltDefeat, your going to tell me that the whole reason warrior is not in the meta right now is because of me? Yeah good one, in gw1 yeah warrior was a shot caller because they were the frontline fighter, they could see what was happening. Gw2 it’s the thief or the mesmer who calls the shots because he sways the fight instantly. They have the map awareness, and they do the observation. Please don’t question my skill level because your pride is hurt over the fact that your class isn’t the top dog. The point of this post isn’t for you to come in here and tell me how to play (because believe me, I don’t need instruction from you), it’s for me to figure out what changed for the warrior that dropped it from the meta. Considering more people than just myself even in this thread have claimed it’s the simplicity of the class obviously means that may be a contributor to their problem. So if you’re done being a kitten you may contribute POSITIVELY to this discussion to help others understand what your class needs to be restored to it’s once powerful state otherwise take your nonsense somewhere else.

Now for the people in this thread that are actually addressing the point:
What do you see as the necessary role for warrior to fill? Right now it’s kind of hit and run with gs, before it’s been tanky point fighter. What do you see as the role anet needs to push the warrior class towards with their changes?

@Ariol.
Yes warrior has quite a simplistic design, wich makes it all the more hard and skill demanding to manage in high skill play. I.e requiring alot more skill to make something “extraordinary” from this simplistic design.

Rauderi.8706:

Ario.8964:

Ah that bites. But as a thief, I feel your pain.

So what types of buffs are warriors in need of? Is it damage? Defense? Defensive options? Utility?

The (hopefully) short and simple list:

• Lots want Fast Hands as a baseline trait to break the dependency on Discipline and increase build variety.
• Warrior has limited access to Stability and Resistance. Stances barely provide 15% uptime, at the most, on either. Berserker has some access, but overall, more Stability and Resistance to justify being a front-line fighter.
• If our skills stay dirt simple, decrease cooldowns across the board. Looking at Rev hammer as an outlier (and probably several elite specs), there are great effects on short cooldowns, while base warrior as to wait forever.
• Fix our closer skills.
• Weapon skills need a redesign to increase effectiveness.
• Traits need more synergy in a way similar to Forceful Greatsword and Phalanx Strength. To say it’s OP isn’t exactly right, but in relation to other weapon traits, there’s no reason not to take FS/PS, so it looks overpowered within Warrior itself.
• Mending as a Physical skill. Other physical skills need (traited if it must) something else to make them desirable as something other than low-damage interrupts and ineffective CC.

I probably missed a bunch, but a few stalwarts in the Warrior community have been actively pushing a legion of design ideas that devs can pick from.

While you have good points in your text, I have to disagree on the stability part. Barely 15% uptime on stability? Come on.

Balanced stance: 8sec stability on a 40sec cooldown. That’s already 20% uptime by taking one utility skill, non traited. Slab the trait on it and its 10sec with 40sec CD, we are on 25% now. But that’s not all, the trait provides automatic balanced stance on a disable so now we have 50% uptime on stability.

Then we have Signet of Dolyak which is extra 8sec stability on 60sec cooldown (can be traited to 48sec).

And outside of those two huge stability utilities, we have 5 stun breaks (mind you those two stability skills are also stun breaks which I didn’t count on the 5 stun breaks). And one of them is a stun break on 10sec cooldown (yes, it is a berserker skill, but still).

If warrior is good at something, it’s the self sustaining stability and breaking out of stuns in general. And I have never felt that I didn’t have enough options to mitigate hard CC on my warrior.

sth. which is hard to be successful with does not automatically mean that it takes skill, tho.

if you are playing sword offhand only it will be extremly hard to kill anything but it won’t take any skill because of the limited scope. You are using 2 dodges, sword 4 and sword 5.

That’s the disadvantage of the warrior in top tier. You have the same simple mechanics and these simple mechanics become less usefull in top tier pvp play. Other classes are able to improve because their mechanic allow them to get more out of the class , the warrior on the contrary can’t do this because of the limited and simple mechanics.
But those mechanics do not require more skill suddenly only because it’s harder to be successful.

Last meta the main differences between good and average warriors in pvp were
- precasted warbanners, – 180° pindowns, – juking around 2v1/3v1, – evading bruning speed 24/7 , – and general teamfight / map awareness.

Hard to be successful /= needs skill

Ario.8964:

CntrlAltDefeat, your going to tell me that the whole reason warrior is not in the meta right now is because of me? Yeah good one, in gw1 yeah warrior was a shot caller because they were the frontline fighter, they could see what was happening. Gw2 it’s the thief or the mesmer who calls the shots because he sways the fight instantly. They have the map awareness, and they do the observation. Please don’t question my skill level because your pride is hurt over the fact that your class isn’t the top dog. The point of this post isn’t for you to come in here and tell me how to play (because believe me, I don’t need instruction from you), it’s for me to figure out what changed for the warrior that dropped it from the meta. Considering more people than just myself even in this thread have claimed it’s the simplicity of the class obviously means that may be a contributor to their problem. So if you’re done being a kitten you may contribute POSITIVELY to this discussion to help others understand what your class needs to be restored to it’s once powerful state otherwise take your nonsense somewhere else.

Now for the people in this thread that are actually addressing the point:
What do you see as the necessary role for warrior to fill? Right now it’s kind of hit and run with gs, before it’s been tanky point fighter. What do you see as the role anet needs to push the warrior class towards with their changes?

Your not to blame. But the attitude you represent is.
It is beyond doubt, if your intelligent enough to recognise the general attitude towards warrior is the issue written between the lines. Thieve’s have the ability to instantly sway a team effectiveness? I guess that is why they are currently in a terrible state. Thief, in it’s better days simply made a reasonable decapper and solid +1, but they have never possessed the means or capacity to change or sway or leverage a situation. Guardian has held this spot since day dot. Mesmer? I am assuming your kidding now right? Mesmer has rarely ever been above mid tier at best. To scroll through the history of sensible feedback on the state of PvP shows the incredible amount of complaints about the state of mesmer. The nerf history shows that mesmer has never been reliable in terms of that every patch they receive numerous and continuous nerfs. At times they have possessed one key utility that has made them useful for rotations, but beyond that they have been more blue chip than every other profession combined. Just because they have achieved a place again in the meta with chronomancer doesn’t reflect their history accurately.
The skill ceiling ideology is flawed one. It is no different that stating a house with 15 rooms is easier to live in than a house with 25 rooms. If one moves from 15 to 25 rooms their is a small period where one might need to remember where the light switches are, and where the stair case is in the dark, but after 3 days you’re living as comfortably as ever. The skill ceiling people refer to is nothing more than a illusion. It is just a matter of time and immersion on any profession before you can play them without thinking. This idea that more clicks=more skill when broken down to simple analogy shows my point. Everything stated still doesn’t refute anything I have said. Warriors possessed 99% of needed information on screen at all times. It’s form follows function approach, high mobility, large cleave, AoE stuns (before stability became so ubiquitous) and for a brief window shouts made warrior more of a profession that could sway a node contest than thief or mesmer.
As for being positive, I was throughout all the beta weekend feedback. But the attitude by anet that warrior should be a selfish profession with little team dynamic now, a lot of traits angled purely at damage and large amount of skills that either don’t work, don’t behave reliably or are niche to 0.5% of the games entire content and players belief that they simple and singular has been a driving reason to why they have dropped out of the meta in PvP, fractals, WvW and are only used as a DPS mule in raids.

I player Warrior for 2+ years straight. It hurts, but I ditched him for a revenant. My biggest complaint on Warrior – save for what has been said in the thread, is that his elite spec is so bad. I couldnt find a single skill I would use in PvX, they basically became “physical 2.0”, also the trait line for berserker is incredibly unattractive.

Except CntrlAltDefeat (which btw is an awesome name, thought I’d mention that) the skill ceiling ideology is not an illusion when you look at it from the right perspective. The classes with the most potential (highest skill ceiling) are the ones that can adapt the best into any situation, have the most free way to play with the skills, and have the highest ability to allow you to outplay your opponent while in the fight (meaning not running away to get out of combat then running back in to re- engage your foe). Warrior just doesn’t have that potential anymore because of the reasons you just stated. Anet has nerfed them and pushed them into a very narrow style of play and that kills their ability to adapt to situations without having to do a build change (which is why I claimed they are not high skill ceiling).

The claim for Mesmer and thief being the impactful ones was the fact that they are the burst characters. The way Gw2 PvP works is people focus their burst together in order to sway the fight quickly in their favor. Mesmer and thief provide that damage (even if nerfs make them a bit unreliable they still do their jobs at least somewhat effectively) which is why they are in charge of picking out a target to take out. If you doubt it then you must not have played with a decent thief who knows how to burst. It takes knowledge of the class and timing so it is definitely not easy but when pulled off, yeah it’ll sway a situation better than almost any other class in the game. A majority of the complaints on Mesmer are the glassyness of their clones keeping them out of PvE groups because someone else can do the long term damage better with more support. PvP is a completely different story as Mesmer and thief can still have high single target damage burst while locking down their target. Just takes a good player to survive the rest of the fight and learn where they need to be.

So on the subject of warrior’s current state: Would you like to see things like shouts rebuffed then? Cause from what I’ve heard from others it seems like you guys just need some defensive buffs. Do you think it’s something different?

Dunno if I’d correlate skill ceiling with adaptability. A build can be adaptable but also be incredibly imbalanced and easy. A class with nine skills on zero cooldown with no resource which all stated: “Kill target of x profession” and a heal would be extremely adaptable but with pretty much no skill ceiling. As such, the engineer is also in a wonky state like d/d ele as it’s very much rotation-based; there’s not really so much a skill ceiling in terms of smart play but learning the kit, and that only goes so far. The thief in its design is exploitive which makes it seem either really OP or really bad depending on the skill of the opponent.

Unfortunately the warrior is so simplistic and offers so little in terms of gameplay depth that it’s really hard to balance due to a low barrier of entry and relative ease of mastering the core mechanics without much substance behind them; do well as a warrior, and odds are you can do better on another class, because behind its complexity lies more utility and hidden potential.

Warriors have the difficult problem, as someone mentioned above, that in this design ideology, they end up overpowered from an objective/numbers perspective, or end up too weak to function in competitive environments. The lack of depth is holding the class back a lot, and the power creep from the rest of the professions paired with repeated nerfs and trait line dependencies for core functionality, like the thief, isn’t helping.

While I’m no expert on the warrior, I think the diagnosis of how to attempt to balance the class better are similar to the thief’s in that the problems persist more on the design/mechanics level rather than in implementation and numbers. Just bumping stats up or making things baseline to give the illusion of more choices won’t resolve the underlying problem with the class; for the warrior, it’s the lack of depth which keeps it from being unpredictable, and like the thief, it lacks overlapping of abilities/necessary capabilities within trait lines to open up opportunities in other build concepts.

Obviously there are OP specs keeping the class (and many others) out right now. This will likely change. The design flaws really holding the class back need much deeper evaluation.

Choppy.4183:

Though it seems to have passed, quick notes on skill floors and ceiling:

Skill floor refers to the amount of skill needed to be somewhat useful with a specific class’ mechanics.

Skill ceiling refers to the amount of skill needed to fully exploit a specific class’ mechanics..

Warriors undoubtedly have a low skill ceiling, but that doesn’t mean warriors aren’t skilled players. Indeed, a low skill ceiling makes high player skill that much more important… things like positioning, baiting, conserving, etc. But this is also why warriors are virtually non-existent in top tier pvp, where player skill across classes is uniformly high. That, and how easily they’re countered.

I think warriors used to have a lower skill floor than most classes, and it might still in general (i.e. non-end game or dungeon) pve. But in wvw at least (and probably pvp), I think other classes have considerably lower skill floors.

I actually think it’s the opposite. To me at least, it seems Warrior has a low skill floor. Many people can pick it up and it is accessible being one of the simpler classes in concept and design.

I think this scales in a steep fashion at higher tier though, where the simplicity works against the player. The high skill ceiling comes from the lack of tools in an environment where more buttons doesn’t mean anything to say, an experienced Engineer. At this point the player must ‘carry’ the profession in a sense to victory, demanding more of the player in question. You could say this is due to the low skill ceiling however, which is a fair point. I do think though the bigger picture shows a higher skill ceiling… I hope I make some sense in my thoughts.

If I gave two people a toolbox each, and one had only a hammer inside, the other having many different tools. Sure, the one with many different tools would take the person longer to learn to use each tool, but once learned, if I asked both people to build a specific object, the person with more tools would be at a huge advantage to just the hammer. It would be down to the skill of the builder in question to make it work.

At that point the person with the hammer would have to think very creatively on how to use it like a screwdriver for example. This creativity, and improvisational nature is just one of the things the simplicity of a Warrior forces out of the player.

Just my take on it.

Yesterday using full COF set on my rev i was doing 5-9k crits on hammer skill 2 and thats from the safe distance.

On my warrior full ascended… legendary hammer i have to go balls deep and cant reach those numbers without sacrificing a lot of sustain.

Know what is even worst… those numbets were on aoe dmg and 2 sec delay…
And anet calls this ballance..
I dont even know how to play rev properly and i know it is broken..
I really think they want warriors to reroll rev for real