Guild Wars 2

Cogbyrn.7283:

I’ve heard “I expected tanky” too many times. People envision a class that can stand and absorb damage, and they don’t realize that “tanky” in this game is using your weapons/utilities to maximize mitigation.

If so many people expect that, maybe they’re not the ones at fault here. Warrior heavy armor shouldn’t be just for show and maybe designing them to be fragile speedsters/glass cannons and poor at anything else wasn’t the right thing to do.

And ‘tanky’ isn’t running around trying not to get hit because you are made of glass. There is no ‘tanky’ in this game for Warriors and that is the problem.

Even then, you can still absorb plenty of damage specced/geared properly.

No, not really. And not much better than Warriors who didn’t gear/spec for that or even better than some characters of other professions who aren’t covered in heavy plate armor yet mitigate more damage and heal better because they actually get decent skills. Warriors may have higher numbers for stats, but those numbers are ultimately meaningless in practice.

“second thing, if you want to be tanky, don’t expect to give out damage, lasting for 30 seconds while being focused is quite good especially since the warrior is more of an offensive soldier class, if you wanted true survivability with a heavy armor class then go with guardian.”

First, if that is the case the Warrior has no business wearing heavy armor and being called a Soldier class. They should be in the Adventurers with the Thief. In that case, why even have Warriors?

Second, there is no ‘tanky’ way to be a Warrior. That is a large part of them problem. You can spend points and gear however you like, there are only two outcomes: ‘high damage and doesn’t last long in combat’ and ‘low damage and doesn’t last long in combat’. Plus anything in between.

Third, since there are so many people with the same complaints about Warriors, to me that’s a sign that the problem is with Warriors and not the people. People expect a heavy armor class to reflect that it is heavily armored. They expect a similar level of flexibility as they find in other Professions. If their expectations are not being met, who’s at fault? I’m going to say ‘not the ones spending the money’. The game works for us, not the other way around.

Fourth, anecdotally Warriors are the profession I’ve seen have the hardest drop off since launch. I’ve seen a shift in people dropping them for Guardians and I’ve seen it expressed in so many words in game chat. Of the people on my friends list who are melee enthusiasts and rolled Warriors, over half have dropped them by level 80 citing the fact they did not mature well at all.

Like I said, I’ve shelved my Warrior until further notice; I’m not as quick on the delete key. But Anet says they don’t intend to do any balancing for a while, so I have no reason to sink any more time into it.

“Our traits are crap, most of them don’t even work.”

Agreed. But the lame ones can be improved and the broken ones can be fixed.

“We have crap survivability”

Agreed. Presently our heavy armor is for show. Building defensively is not viable or an advantage. It doesn’t improve your survivability more than it hurts your damage. The only viable warrior is designed aorund “kill them first and fast before they kill you.”

“GS skills sometimes dont work”

Agreed. But they said they are being worked on.

“Whirlwind attack and Rush 50% of the time don’t do damage.”

See above.

“We have 0 cc control unless we are in melee while other classes can pull and push you from range.”

Agreed. In addition, aside from damage all we have is cc and it doesn’t even work on Champions. We bring next to nothing to the fight.

“How is it normal for a thief to be able to simply just pull you off a ledge from range and kill you.”

That sounds like it should be a red flag.

“our range dps is garbage, our melee dps requires us to use up all of our support slots to use control skills to be able to land our melee dps which makes us glass canons.”

Agreed.

“Toughness and armor does nothing, i have over 2.7k armor and thiefs still melee me for 5-6k with heartseeker.”

As I said already, agreed.

“I went full healing exotic gear to test out healing/vit stats and you gain about 20-30 more hp on your healing for 700 healing stats…”

Agreed. Warriors shouldn’t have to take additional healing stats on their gear to heal from the damage their armor should be mitigating in the first place. We wear magical plate for a reason.

“so if you want damage you die in 3 hits, if you want to be tanky it doesnt matter because classes still hit you for insane damage.”

Agreed. Not to mention even if you build tanky it doesn’t matter because biggest DPS is what pulls aggro anyways. Again, all Warrior roads lead to being a glass cannon/fragile speedster.

“only way to get a pvp kill on a warrior is to use bullrush+frenzy combo but half the time bullrush fails and you end up going over your target doing nothing while you’re taking 50% more damage.”

Agreed.

“So now you’re going to tell me, just go mace shield and full tank spec.”

In my experience is that’s really no better.

“nearly 20g wasted on gear combinations / specs / weapon testing ( all exotic ) and it comes down to being forced into a spec to be present or to go full support and lay down banners then /dance during a zerg.”

No, banners are really terrible too. Shouts are really the best option, but being the best of the bad doesn’t make you good.

“our Elites are horrible, signet of rage is the only thing worth akittenall the other elites are trash meanwhile a thief has a whirlwind that makes him immune to damage and i cant reflect that, and mesmers ’ skills are broken and spell reflect doesnt work on their skills.”

Agreed. Warrior Elites are all trash with the exception of signet, which is merely mediocre.

“This class needs work and not just bug reports, and yeah i know a lot of classes have issues like the necro with over 100 bugs..

but these are THE CLASSES WE PLAY – its not a dynamic event or a TP bug here its thekittencharacter you use, thats the #1 most important aspect of an mmo and should be the TOP PRIORITY FOCUS when handling bugs/flaws. Some of these bugs where reported 3 months ago during the BETAS and still have not been fixed yet."

Do like me: shelve your warrior. Give it a couple months and see if things improve and if they don’t, move on. Trust me, I’ve seen in every game; one class gets labled to be the chewtoy, it’s usually one of the melee ones, and it doesn’t stop until the problem becomes chronic.

Most of what you say is true, but you may want to present it a little better in the future.

“I’m sorry – but if you actually want to stand there and let your opponents hit you then I’m afraid GW2 doesn’t support that style of play. A defensive build is invaluable in reducing effect of the lesser hits and incidental damage that wear people down, but nobody can, or should, just stand there and take the big hitting attacks. Those are exactly what your blocking, interrupting and dodge abilities are for. If you want to be defensive, you have to use ALL of your defences.”

Then there is absolutely no reason to build defensively. If you have two people, Person A and Person B, one speced for damage and one built defensively, and both have to dodge and run, what is the point in putting those points towards defense?

You’re basically sacrificing damage for nothing if doing so doesn’t give you some kind of defensive gameplay advantage. If Person A is doing twice the damage of Person B, B should be twice as durable. That’s just common sense. If a big hit is going to drop both of them, then B isn’t twice as durable.

As things stand, there’s no difference in gameplay between someone who built defensively and someone who didn’t, other than their damage is considerably worse; they’re not gaining a proportional amount of sturdiness as a trade off. I expect guys in heavy armor to be able to take the hits; that’s kind of the point of having armor after all.

It kind of defeats the purpose of getting rid of the trinity and them telling people they wont be forced into roles if they’re just going to force everyone into being a glass cannon or fragile speedster. And, at least in the case of Warriors, it really defeats the purpose of letting people spend trait points and gear for anything other than damage.

“You also need to have a proper active combat playstyle regardless of spec (dodge rolling is required, blocking is required, general moving/breaking line of sight/retreating/using other players as body shields is required, etc.)

Once you add all of this together with a strong defensive spec warrior, you’ll see why it’s not weak at all."

OK, see, that’s being what’s called a ‘fragile speedster’, the melee counterpart to the glass cannon. If I wanted to play like that, I would have put all my points into like Arms and Discipline I guess and run around with a Greatsword.

You’re basically confirming what I said; that building defensively doesn’t pay off and it’s down to killing them before they kill you.

Which is fine if you want to play that way, but not if you want to be a heavily armored juggernaut/mighty glacier. The fact that’s not a viable option is what I find lacking.

Again, YMMV

So, I took 30 in Defense and Tactics, have tons of decent Tough and +Vital gear, run all the defensive/survival oriented skills and have maceshield and I don’t feel much more sturdy in PvE than someone who didn’t just build to be fragile speedster.

In fact I die more than someone who just took Greatsword and built for crits because they drop enemies before they can do damage. It’s just disproportionately better to build for offense than for defense as things are currently.

Which doesn’t seem right to me. There should be a pay off to maxing Defense/Tactics and playing defensively, otherwise why let people put points in them at all? Why not just have everyone be a Greatsword berserker?

I’m not asking to be utterly unkillable but I should be able to take substantially more damage than the next guy. If I want a low-medium damage and high defenses juggernaut that should be as valid a Warrior play style as high damage and low-medium defenses berserker. We should have more viable build options rather than the single one we seem to have right now.
This is just my opinion however. YMMV.