Guild Wars 2

Here’s why: Identity.

What made Primal Bursts great is maximizing the potential of bursts skills, what they can do, and allowing warriors to be creative in that area who love the concept of bursting and applying tons of pressure.

By changing Primal Burst to only count as ONE bar of adrenaline, you not only removed the synergy of Primal Burst to other traits and abilities, but you ruined the IDENTITY of Primal Bursts and THE BERSERKER as a whole.

Let’s start with the basics: Core Warrior.

The base of what a Warrior is – It’s not gonna go down without a fight. It’s a fighter who is well built, in good shape, can take hits just as much as it can deal em.

It’s a Sustained Fighter.

It has strong passive abilities such as Stances like innate conditioning of a fighter, strong Physical moves to control the opponent, and the mastery over weapons resembling different styles of each warrior’s preference.

Fighting is the name of the game, it knows how to stick around and hold it’s ground.

The tactic for opponents is to know it’s moves, fighting style, and feint the fighter to make it waste his passives and innate fighting capabilities to compromise the Warrior to take it out.

Now – The Berserker:

The PRESSURE Fighter.

The Berserker again, is designed to go further with The Warrior’s Burst Skills and maximizing it’s potential with Bursts in the form of PRIMAL BURSTS.

This Warrior, is a kittening animal, period. It’s about constantly applying pressure to your opponent, giving it no room to breathe.

(which is visibly signified by the Ascended Torch Weapon with animal figures around the Flame)

With short CD utilities like Headbutt to CC, and a CC clear on 10 second cooldown, allows it to be reckless and keep the pressure.

If you are trying to cast, forget it, if you are trying to run, forget it, if you want to heal or block, forget it, anything you try to do the Berserker is always on your tail.

With the addition to the Torch, the Berserker has the added Unique use to apply burning to further apply this pressure on it’s target. And LORE WISE, this makes sense during it’s introduction against the fight against Mordremoth, A PLANT. Hence the burning.

The key to Berserker is that it can CLEAR PRESSURE off of itself in order to APPLY IT.

With Primal Burst synergizing with Cleansing Ire, Berserker’s Power, and Adrenal Health for example. This allows Berserker’s to BERSERK.

(And if you look at the Torch for example, burns and does damage, while clearing condis simultaneously. A key characteristic of the Berserker.)

Now, by making Primal Burst count only as One adrenal bar spent, you are destroying the identity and ability for the Berserker’s to apply pressure and being able to clear pressure off of itself.

It takes THREE, I REPEAT, THREE WHOLE adrenaline bars to get Berserk to activate in the first place. But when it’s used, it is only worth one adrenaline bar each primal burst use… so you are saying it shouldn’t be worth the amount we spend?

Bull.kitten.

Applying Pressure, and Clearing pressure off oneself is key to a pressure fighter and as a Berserker. We want to go BERSERK.

This is the golden principle, what we SPEND is what it is WORTH. You have nuked this in a way that is not healthy and poorly justified.

I’m gonna give possible solutions to this problem in a moment, but let me wrap this up and we’ll move on to the Spellbreaker which I feel is important to cover complimenting the current issues with Berserker that need to be addressed.

So how do you beat a Pressure Fighter, Berserker? The issue with Pressure Fighters and real animals of this nature is that they are predictable. They are going in only one direction, YOU. Trying to destroy you and take you out, the key to to lead the Pressure fighter to where you want him to go, he/she is always coming towards you therefore the trade off is now you have an opening to take advantage of that, tire him out. And make him/her trip on their own feet.

Here are the solutions to the Berserker Primal Burst problem:

1. Make Primal Burst worth 3 bars again. If it costs 3 bars to get into Berserk Mode, the use of Primal bursts have to equalize that in spades.

2. OR this is my solution, when you trigger Berserk mode, THIS ALSO TRIGGERS 3 bars worth of any burst abilities or traits. So with Berserker’s Power or Cleansing Ire, going into Berserk mode clears three conditions and grants you 3 stacks of BP, along with the one adrenaline bar worth of subsequent Primal Bursts to apply pressure.

What’s cool about this, Berserk Mode is a lot like a full 3 bar burst skill, that DOES NOT require you to land a hit. Because it’s a “Mode” not an attack.

This will make WHAT WE SPEND EQUAL TO WHAT IT’S WORTH, and bring the IDENTITY of the Pressure fighter back to the Berserker.

Finally, let’s get to the Spellbreaker.

The COUNTER Fighter.

We have the Sustain, the Pressure, and now the Counter.

The whole point of the Spellbreaker/Counter Fighter is to PUNISH people with a cheese or niche build and counter it.

If you are a boon spammer, the Spellbreaker can rip you apart and counter it.

If you are condi trash, Spellbreaker has Revenge Counter trait to punish you for it giving your conditions back to you.

If you are stealth ganker, EI Thief, DD, or Druid invis/snare, Magetether he or she won’t let you get anywhere without being seen and goodluck trying to get away.

And if you think you can burst him/her down, Full Counter, it’s main mechanic, he/she is just waiting for you to come at him only to take advantage of your offensive position.

So what’s the catch? The Spellbreaker can’t counter everything at the same time.

It can counter everything, it is anti-cheese/niche, but it can’t counter all at once.

Fighting the Spellbreaker forces you to adapt, if you can. If you are running pure condi cancer and he/she can directly counter that, YOU BETTER THINK OF SOMETHING DIFFERENT. Or in a group fight call in a friend you know he can’t counter after seeing what he/she is doing.

Anet… If you can nail all this down. Core Warriors the Sustained Fighter, Berserkers the offensive animal as a Pressure Fighter, and Spellbreaker the calculated Mayweather-type Counter Fighter.

Us Warriors will be SUPER HAPPY with the options and variety we have to bring wherever we go in your wonderful game.

The changes to Core Warrior are great, with Might Makes Might, and etc.

But make the Pressure for Berserker worth WHAT IT COSTS in order to go Berserk, apply Berserking via Primal Bursts. Therefore maitaining and respecting the identity of the Berserker, being still onpar with Core Warriors and Spellbreakers.

If what we spend is not worth it, why play it?

Thank you and I hope an Anet dev receives this well and takes affirmative action.

Love,

A Warrior

ArenaNet is too lazy to comment on last stand’s bug/typo. They were too lazy to balance power zerker so they just said “eh it’ll be condi only, kitten build diversity pay me.”

My hope is that they own up and make healthy changes to berserker. But be it lack of resources or incompetence, I’m not holding my breath.

The way they screw up in so many areas, especially communication, has put my path of fire purchase on hold. It’s honestly ridiculous that a triple a title like this makes so many mistakes.

I agree with your overall take on what the overall identity of what Berserker should be, and proposed having entering the mode count as the bursts as well.

I personally see that as better than rolling back the change to primal bursts as it relates to traits like BP because it gives fair credit for adrenaline earned, concentrates the sustain to berserk mode itself, and helps cut down on the sustaining cheese that many berserkers crutched on.

I’d also (personally) be in favour of increasing the cd of all rage skills by (say) 50%, but then cutting them by 50% if used in Berserk mode. That would give headbutt a cd of 30s normally, but 15s if used in Berserk, and Outrage a normal cd of 15s, but 8s in rage. Just an idea, and maybe a bad one, but intended to load up the value on the identity of the specialization.

The obvious counter would be to try to kite while a warrior is raging, but then giving the berserker tools to make this no easy feat.

Entering berserk mode should count as using a tier 3 burst skill, and berserk mode bursts should have shorter cooldowns if primal bursts remain tier 1 bursts.

TheBravery.9615:

Entering berserk mode should count as using a tier 3 burst skill, and berserk mode bursts should have shorter cooldowns if primal bursts remain tier 1 bursts.

How short? I’d think undoing the change to Smash Brawler would be enough, especially since it can be combined with the reduction minor from Discipline.

I don’t think a buff to the core spec traits is necessary, it’s specifically the berserk elite specialization that got nerfed so that needs to be dealt with. Yeah just making smash brawler’s cooldown reduction baseline would be enough to merit

Your identity definition doesn’t reflect reality (the pressure warrior that is always on your tail, etc) because core warrior can do that part. Regarding what you feel berserker should do and how its executed sounds like a straight damage upgrade with no downfall. But in a way, it has become truth because you say core warrior is the one to hold his ground, cleansing ire and adrenal health helps that, but berserker not so much.

If we’re going to identify berseker(that is, emphasize its unique iddntity) why baselessly hold onto the thing that paralells core (primal bursts aren’t really the unique factor here since they are only altered burst skills) while ignoring what actually makes them unique? It’s the fact that Berserker has 2 modes that make it different from both core and spellbreaker.

Choppy.4183:

TheBravery.9615:

Entering berserk mode should count as using a tier 3 burst skill, and berserk mode bursts should have shorter cooldowns if primal bursts remain tier 1 bursts.

How short? I’d think undoing the change to Smash Brawler would be enough, especially since it can be combined with the reduction minor from Discipline.

basically both of these would solve it tbh

My main thing is, if they wanted to lower the cleanse, they could have gone from 3bar’s worth per zerker burst to… 2.

They nerfed it to 1. Because IN THIS CURRENT META removing cleanse makes total sense ! It’s trump-like balancing ! ALT BALANCING!

Obviously they still haven’t split guard traps yet. or significantly nerfed fullpassives with condi. that would imply the balance people actually be doing what they’re supposed to be doing.