Guild Wars 2

This is just one indepth example. I shouldn’t even have to be so elaborate to point out the comparisons between warr and other classes. An ele’s healing and survivability? A thief’s peeling, gap closing, similar burst damage, and boon hate? A ranger’s dodge rate, regeneration, pet burst? A guardian’s blocking and invulnerability? A mesmer’s 20% minimum invulnerability uptime? And engie’s sustained aoe damage, control and ability to consistantly res himself?
What does warr have to compensate for an utter lack of those things? More healthpool? Slightly higher base defense? Being a meatshield does not make up for the sheer amount of damage, control, and conditions mitigated by simply being able to dodge twice as much. This leads up to my next point…

• Developer Hesitance

This refers to their “Slow and Steady” philosophy, as well as all the (wrong) feedback they receive making them afraid to do changes. The developers are afraid to overhaul mechanics, they are afraid to shake up the meta. Is a warr’s survivability going to be at a viable level by addding a few condition cleanses? No! Not untill Every class has it’s mechanics brought in-line with warrior’s (invulns, risk-reward ratios, get out of jail free cards) or the warrior’s brought up to theirs, will it be viable. But despite all the evident flaws I can list out when comparing warr mechanics(cough Brawn cough), this isn’t the thread for that.

And that’s why Warriors will never be viable unless Arenanet stops being so timid with their changes.

Preface: I am by no means claiming this as fact. These are just the opinions of an (almost exclusively) Warrior main who spends most of his time in PvP. I am by no means a top player, but I do have a lot of experience regarding this class.

TL;DR, NOT EVEN THAT ACCURATE OF A REPRESENTATION EDITION:
Unless you've actually played it a LOT, nobody knows what's really wrong with warr; Other classes have amazingly bull mechanics when it comes to risk-reward; developers too timid to make any significant changes to warr, and when they do give small buffs, they feel the need to buff other classes, keeping Warrior at the bottom of the pile.

• Misinformation

What do you take away from a fight with a Warrior? Most probably something along the lines of: “He did a lot of damage.” “Wow, he died fast.”

This lack of understanding of how Warrior works, from a perspective of other classes, leads to the main topic, misinformation. What makes a warrior tick? Why do they die so easily? You don’t know, because 8 out of 10 times you’re going to easily defeat a warr on any other class. It wasn’t even challenging or engaging! This problem is only made worse by how over time less and less decently skilled players run warr, even in hotjoins, so the ones you DO run across are terrible.

And thus, this leads to the spreading of misinformation. “Warriors are just a step away from becoming an unstoppable beast!” “Warrior’s only problem is condition cleansing.” “Warriors do so much more damage than other classes.” “Warriors are perfectly viable, you just need to babysit them!” “Warrior’s condition removal is fine as it is, you just need to run traited warhorn, 3 shouts, and soldier runes!”

• Relativity

Some people claim that warr is the “most balanced profession”. This is true! If you were looking at warr in a vacuum. High risk, high reward design? Check. Tells and animations you can react to and skillfully dodge? Check. Substantial loss in damage if you spec for survivability and vice versa? Check.

But what happens when you compare warr to other classes? You realize that the other classes don’t remotely follow this “balance philosophy”. Take Mesmer for example.

A GC warr’s most infamous burst combo would be to:
1) Pressure the opponent and bait out all their dodge rolls
2) Frenzy(Utility) to speed up 100b
3) Bull’s Rush(Utility) to controls the opponent and a gap closer
4) Endure Pain(Utility) if this was a teamfight to prevent melting due to Frenzy’s increased damage side effect
5) 100 blades (weapon skill) for frontal arc cleave burst damage
6)Whirlwind (weapon skill) for AoE medium damage

Now look at a GC mes’s most infamous burst combo:
1) iDuelist for a ranged volley, high damage, bleeds (weapon skill)
2) Dodgeroll for a clone
3) iLeap for another clone (weapon skill)
4) (Optional) Magical Bullet for a daze (weapon skill)
5) Swap for an immob and gap closer(weapon skill)
6) Shatter for AoE burst damage(Class Mechanic)
7) Blurred Frenzy for frontal arc medium damage(weapon skill)

Immediately there’s already something appallingly wrong with this comparison. Almost everything required for the Mesmer burst combo is built into the class on low cooldown weaponskills. Not only does their combo leave them free to choose whatever utilities they wanted, but what should be the most high-risk portion of their combo that roots them on the spot leaves them invulnerable 2 seconds. Both combos take approximate the same amount of time to execute, why is one practically cost and risk free?

Great! So now you can unlock those missions faster and still not remotely be able to muster up the manpower to do the actual missions for commendations in your small guild!

Awesome design anet have my babies

There’s a cap on condition stacks of 25. In a scenario where you have two thieves attacking a boss and one of them can achieve a stack of 25 by themselves, the other one essentially becomes useless because they’ve got nothing to stack on. Is anything being done to address that to make them less redundant?

Colin: Currently no. Interesting statistic for you: every condition in the game costs server bandwidth. ‘Cause we have to track how often the condition is running, what the duration of that condition is and what the stack is. So the more stacks we allow them more expensive it gets because we’re tracking every additional stack on there. And so we could, say, you can have infinite stacks. Number one: that becomes really unbalanced. But number two: it’s actually extremely expensive for us, on a performance basis. That’s one of those weird, kind of back-end server issues that can help make game designer decisions regardless of what you want to do with it.

One of the things people have been talking about is having their own individual stack limit that they can apply, rather than an infinite amount on one boss.

Colin: Yes, it’s tough. It’s certainly something we can look at, it does drastically change the way that the professions play, right? It does say “you can no longer stack all of one type of condition”. It might change the skills on each profession if we were to do that. It would encourage a little more group play to some extent. It’s not something we’re really talking about, but it’s an interesting idea. I’d have to think a lot about what the effects of that would be overall, but it’s an interesting… interesting idea.

So we can derive at least 2 things from this:

*Colin himself doesn’t actually understand his own game and doesn’t realize that 5 condition builds in a party without a condition cap would be outputting equivalent damage as 5 direct damage builds because on an individual level they are equal

*He seems to think it’s perfectly okay to leave it as terrible as it is because fixing it would make hosting more expensive. I.E., it’s okay to leave things completely unbalanced.