Guild Wars 2

importune.7120:

Absolutely love it! 10-10-10-10-30! D/D!

You know, if you’re going to modify a build, you should tell us more about it than this. We have no clue what major traits, healing skill, utility skills, or elite you use.

I have attunements bound to zxcv. F1-F4 works decently, but I find that unless I’m on a laptop or something, there’s this giant gap between my movement keys and my attunement keys, and I’m not ok with that. But then, my whole setup is kind of crazy – I use ESDF to move (seriously, why did the first computer games use WASD? Is there any logic behind that?), W for heals, R for autoattacks, A for interact, and mouse 4/5 for dodge (the other’s vent, and I always mix them up). My naga has buttons in rows of 3, so I have slot skills 2-4 on 1-3 (first row), 7-9 on 4-6 (second row), and 5 is 8 (because those generally have giant cooldowns and I don’t want to hit them by accident).

Damastes is a smart guy with well thought out suggestions. That said, I’ve not played a warrior past 10ish, but I have a question: what part of your suggestion makes me not want to sit in one stance for forever and stack its bonuses? Most builds that I’ve seen – and I’ll admit to not being anywhere near the most experienced player in the game – would benefit most from choosing one of those stances and sitting in it. If you’re a glass cannon, you sit in glass cannon stance. If you’re a brick wall, you sit in one of two of the brick wall stances.

A few notes on the specifics: for starters, might sucks. Each stack is 35 power and 35 condition damage. I can hop into the mists on any character, spend five minutes rearranging my gear and traits, and come out with over 2,000 power. 35 power might maybe be significant on a naked level 80, but even then, the baseline is 914 in all stats. You really need two or three stacks of might for it to be noticable (actually, might needs to have two or three times the potency it currently does, but that’s a discussion for another thread).

Do the offensive and defensive stances apply the vulnerability and weakness conditions to you? I really hope not – I hope that you apply them with your attacks in some way, but I’m not sure what would be a good way to do that. Vulnerability isn’t a big deal until you have five or more stacks of it, which means that if it was applied to self, it wouldn’t be a huge difference in playstyle most of the time, and if applied to enemies, it would need a very carefully set method of application to stop it from being either too weak or too strong. Weakness makes sense to apply to enemies (you stop them from dealing damage to you) but not yourself (you stop yourself from being able to dodge attacks).

Your balanced stance, honestly, doesn’t impress me much. It feels like a defensive stance – as I understand it (and someone correct me if I’m wrong, so I can update the wiki page[s]) it prevents you from being flung around, blinded, crippled, etc. It almost has an offensive benefit, but instead of increasing your damage, it prevents your damage from being decreased. It also has the problem of being significantly more conditional than the other stances, making it less likely to apply to a particular fight than its brothers. I would instead suggest having the balanced stance grant a couple stacks of might and reduce incoming damage by x% for each level of adrenaline (with the usual disclaimer of “numbers tweaking happens during the week of testing before implementation”).

You say make it exponentially harder to gain adrenaline levels, because that rewards you for sticking to one stance and makes it a harder choice to switch to another. I propose to instead make it easier to gain adrenaline levels, as follows:

Level 1: 50 adrenaline (add 50)
Level 2: 90 adrenaline (add 40)
Level 3: 115 adrenaline (add 25)
Level 4: 130 adrenaline (add 15)

This makes it a tougher choice for the warrior to decide whether to switch stances – is it worth trying to get another boon if you have to go without any for a longer time? Under your model, it’s fairly easy to get to the first stage of adrenaline, which makes it less of a risk to jump between stances (should you have incentive to do so). My model also has the advantage of making “full adrenaline” a reasonably achievable goal, which is more fun than feeling like you’re grinding adrenaline for that last boon.

Finally, I disagree with the removal of burst skills. However, with stance dancing filling the role of “lose all adrenaline”, I think burst skills should make you lose two levels of adrenaline. After readjusting their damage output and general dramatic feeling and effect, this would allow a skilled warrior to recognize times when his stance is temporarily less than fully effective and utilize a burst skill to compensate.

Hell, while we’re ignoring the groans of the programmers, why not make burst skills have different effects in different stances? Perhaps Arcing Slice only grants fury while in offensive stance. Perhaps in defensive stance it blocks the next attack after the animation completes, and in balanced stance it grants two stacks of might and a few seconds of protection. Perhaps Flurry removes a condition in balanced stance. Things like that.

Edit: I accidentally a wall of text about a class I’ve barely played. Whoops. :/