Guild Wars 2

“The op seems a wee melodramatic. Once I made a 3800 armor warrior for kicks and could literally stand there and facetank any of the test pvp NPCs while killing them with GS AA. The heal signet + adrenalin + armor kept me alive without the need to dodge anything. Now, in a real fight you also use your block, dodges, evasion, endure pain, hard cc etc.. Id say the class is fine”

Someone doesn’t pvp lol

Yeah issues with zerker:

1. Propped up with utility/elites to get that initial adrenaline. What is up with headbutt having range 180? Couldn’t even make it a bull’s charge like move?

2. Just a dps boost. The quickness and passive damage bonuses mean we use it get a slight damage boost for a short span.

3. Adrenaline decay.

4. Burst moves are not really better than normal counterparts.

5. Torch was a cop-out. Only two new moves so the zerker state burst counts for our “new moves”. But half our weapons don’t see real play so we basically got no new attacks.

6. New utility is almost all ignored because it’s physicals 2.0. Same problems as before.

The worst part is really that burst skills are so telegraphed and mediocre. What I mean is that those skills were meant to stand out as moves that turned the tide of an encounter, assuming it’s pvp. Instead, they’re at best similar to existing utilities/skills of other weapons but locked out due to adrenaline.

Warriors have enough problems without having access to the burst skills and reliably landing them. A single blind mid-swing causes all that adrenaline to be worthless. A single block or evade spam does the same.

You can’t base a class on taking hits, building up a resource, and then negating it simply with half a dozen game mechanics. It would be like if Moa took the lifeforce of a necro down to zero after entering shroud.

“I guarantee I can make a berserker build that would beat you. Keep QQing.”

You do realize that they don’t want elite specs to be better in any way than base class right? They might excel at different things but your kittening and trolling this dude is really sad.

“See, I totally predicted it! Even after Ele sustain gets nerfed, you will switch to complain about Ele mobility! You just can’t stop QQing.”

Nobody should have heavy sustain, mobility, and reasonable damage. Usually, classes have to give up damage for utility. Being able to disengage and roam well on the map as well as provide pressure and cleanse conditions trivially shuts down too many counters.

D/D will be hated as long as they don’t have a strong counter. That counter needs to be a mechanic and not just some niche class ability.

Tweaking D/D damage numbers alone is foolish. If they push too hard the class becomes bunkery but irrelevant. If they don’t provide a good counter then it’s just not balanced.

A good example are engineers. They have good damage, CC, and some sustain. What they lack are good condi clears. This leaves them vulnerable to pure condi specs as well as condi-based CC.

“its no surprise that a class without weapon swap gets weapons with strong skills. warrior has the advantage of two weapon sets with a 5sec swap. engineer only gets the one weapon, & hammer has be good to compete with rifle.”

That’s like saying that weapon swapping is an advantage so the weapons should be useless.

My god, necro uses condis so condis should be useless!

It’s okay for classes to excel at different things but engis have more access to abilities than anyone save eles.

Yeah warrior abilities don’t have the repeatability of most classes. The idea of burst skills to turn battle is highly disadvamtaged by spammable immunity passives.

Physical skills would see more use if warriors weren’t a pile of garbage without immunity utilities.

Yeah I was amazed the mesmer downed at all the first match. Rampage is a joke because he can just invis→decoy→blink and good luck finding him.

I came to see mesmer do what it does and the mesmer mostly met expectations. That is to say, most people don’t have much of a chance.

Fast hands as baseline wouldn’t change much about the viability of warrior builds in spvp. Ironically, we have some of the best condi cleanse in game but the spammability of condis and CC makes condi burst still king at the end of the day.

What I’m concerned about is that too many abilities are considered “must have”. Forget traits for a moment. CI is pretty core in defense and several other traits like fast hands give warriors reaction time. However, unless you go full shoutbow you cannot survive without stances.

Compare baseline stances to baseline shouts. There’s no comparison. Compare stances to physicals (heh). Too much of warrior viability is locked into heavily patched stances that have little to do with spec.

This is why I think the beserker is going to be a tough sell. They want us to utilize at least a few rage mechanics but they require dropping utilities that cannot be dropped. Shouts are core to shoutbow, stances for anything else.

Fast hands baseline would be a QoL change but Anet probably thinks it’s too good to baseline. The reality is that most warrior utilities need rework because warrior must soak an enormous number of hits compared to other classes. The closest comparable class in that regard are guards but they have blocks and then more blocks.

Banners? I guess you mean PvE? Don’t see banners anywhere else because they’re ridiculously slow, only modest buffs, and remove necessarily utilities (stances/shouts).

Honestly it’s bad enough with the stealth and ports that they could entirely remove the CD on abilities like rush and it would not be OP in the least. It would still mean most of the worst offenders had more mobility since warriors cannot port vertically and cannot evade spam or stealth.

Gap closers just aren’t useful if the target can evade/disengage nearly constantly.

Piece of kittycat.

As an engie I just stealthed / blocked half the duration of Berserk. Other classes can do far worse. When I was taking the brunt of it I went “that’s it?”.

I’ve heard say it’s been GS for a while now.

“Tempest got a 33% damage boost on some skills after feedback. So will berserker. Still, I needed stances to survive, not sure how they work around that.”

Tempests have lots and lots of access to boons and healing that warriors will never have.

Thieves and Mesmers have ports, blinds, evasion, and stealth so that they can apply their burst heavy specs while minimizing the chance of a glassy spec getting hard-focused and squished.

Warriors are in an odd spot. They are exceptionally easy to focus because of their lack of blocks, ports, blinds, stealth, etc. Stances provide a very potent mitigation for short durations while not necessarily changing the nature of the melee-centric class. Paired with mobility weapons (GS or SW) the warrior can sometimes manage to get out from under heavy focus, but not as well as other classes.

Warriors do not have the tools to be glassy because they cannot avoid focused CC, blocks, evades, or stealth. There are individual options to mitigate each of these such as stance stability/signet, signet of might for blocks, evades are stealth turn into disengagement to avoid the incoming burst. However, most of these tools cannot be incorporated into a build while allowing for any suvivability utilities. Sure, we could take the situational signet of might to help grind down a Guardian but then you’d be more than proportionately punished for the lack of say, Beserkser Stance.

It’s not just the mandatory traits but nearly completely inflexible choices in utilities. So many of the classes in this game have strong ranged options. The other “melee” classes, such as thieves and guardians, have pretty strong access to teleport mechanics and tons of passive mitigation through blocks, blinds, stealth, etc respective to each class. Warriors depend more on utilities, rather than weapon mechanics, to provide the necessary support.

Without weapon skills that allow the warrior to survive standalone there’s not enough flexibility to incorporate new utilities such as these rage skills. You could fix it through trait lines as well, but that’s just another avenue of inflexibility that already exists to a large degree.

Sounds like it plays like all warrior weapons.

Yeah Blood Reckoning is just Defiant Stance v 2.0. It’s too situational.

Eh more hype train. I doubt the price will stay elevated much after release. Someone’s just trying to see if they can gouge a few suckers.

So you have to build a full adrenaline bar before you can use this “style”? Sounds really, really cumbersome without something like Berserker Stance.

Welcome to warrior. All your abilities have slow animations and can interrupted easily. I’ve always thought it hilarious to see a warrior flying through the air with his hammer and then knock him out of the air with engie rifle overcharge shot.

In fast-paced play warrior has some real limitations. That, and warriors don’t have good access to evasive skills or blocks.

I’ve always felt the same way. Classes with high mobility find death to be a minor bump. Thieves in particular can rejoin the fight almost immediately. It’s no fun to sit there waiting on rez though so I understand why it’s not a hugely punitive time window. That said, yeah if you wipe a bunker after a long team fight and they rejoin before their mates feel the pinch then it’s really, really annoying.

Fast hands just makes warriors fun to play and a little more responsive in pvp because their utilities aren’t things like teleports, stealth, or much in the way of movement. Warriors then use the weapon swap to activate defensive weapon aspects such as block.

In PvE it’s nice to be able to fast swap and use Whirlwind Attack to evade. But, it’s not strictly necessary. The class just feels clunky without it and that’s more of my issue with it being trait-based. Warrior weapon abilities can flow reasonably well into each other as combinations with fast hands, however, without it the slow animations and longish cooldowns on a lot of the abilities makes the class too clunky otherwise.

I personally agree that it should be baked into the class. But, I think it’s okay to force expenditure of traits for things you want. It’s just that this shouldn’t conflict with a class being enjoyable to play. I think a lot of traits should be about preference and trade-offs. For many, the clunkiness innate in warriors just makes fast hands too good to pass up but by that token its placement should be higher up discipline. The existence of fast hands is just an awkward trait concept.

To be honest I feel like the only change they overlooked is the double penalty. You have to generate adrenaline and you have to have a burst ability off cooldown. I would take the system as is if they removed the cooldown entirely. That way, if I generate tons of adrenaline I should be able to burst frequently. It’s called “burst” after all.

Warriors suffer on many weapon sets from poor mobility and inability to cleanse conditions effectively.

A good example of this is mace and axe where failure to land a cleansing ire is a huge penalty. There’s a reason that hambow with its AoE burst has been so popular for so long.

The weapons warriors have are just too restrictive. Take the rifle for instance. The burst locks you in place and is easily dodged unless it’s a huge melee. However, even then you are susceptible to CC and the hit isn’t particularly amazing.

Warriors are fairly tanky but not nearly as much as say a meditation guardian or bunker engie. Warriors put out fair damage but cannot pursue a heavy pressure beserker setup because they only have fair mitigation and are easily CC’d.

Oddly, warriors end up mostly taking up attrition setups that try and grind the enemy down. However, specs like Ele d/d are better at this than warrior.

Really, warriors are pigeon holed because they excel at nothing. They must take lots of passive traits because they have to simply soak lots of damage and effects. It’s constrictive and they need to rethink most of the warrior weapon setups. Most aren’t very good for pve or pvp, but this problem is also shared by other classes.

The changes didn’t really kill the warrior class. PvP is fine for warriors, but the available viable specs are a bit more constrained.

The real problem is the change is not fun. One could have proposed dozens of changes that might have rounded off the edges in the class but this one just doesn’t make for enjoyable gameplay.

It’s not fun to be in the middle of a pack of monsters and have the adrenaline bar just vanish. It’s not fun to depend on Cleansing Ire and being hit in order to have reasonable adrenaline generation.

Vee Wee is whining because engies don’t have good condition removal and get owned in condi heavy spam. It’s why they lose consistently to necros and why engineers have trouble in large AoE/condition spam fests.

Warrior meta builds are entirely built around condition management because of the same issues. Unlike engineers they don’t have strong ranged options and melt without CI/longbow.

What Vee Wee is suggesting is akin to removing water fields for the entire engineer class. Sadly, nerfing CI/longbow interaction won’t bring engineers up to fighting well in large team fights.

However, if you want a bit of humor try killing a turret engie on point with any warrior spec.

Yeah, burst mastery increases burst damage by 7%. Furious doesn’t come close to being comparable.

It won’t make up for it. The damage on arcing slice is only considerable if the opponent is below 50% hp.

The warrior issue is related to what game designers view as risk-versus reward. I recall playing RA2 as a kid and they had these dumb zeppelins. They flew very, very slowly but if they reached an enemy base they would devastate it. Of course, quickly players learned how to pick them off and they were never much used owing to how readily they were countered. The game designers didn’t get it though, because they played less and saw it as high risk, high reward.

You can see the same sort of trade offs going on in GW2. Warriors are readily mobile, but their opponents are mostly ranged or ranged/hybrid with lots of control and conditions. They made a huge mistake allowing conditions to ignore damage mitigation in the game concept. Classes such as necros, engies, mesmers, and even thieves use conditions and condition effects to decimate their opponents. Worse, conditions and condition effects (blind/fear) are lumped together. It creates too much of a binary effect. Either:

1. The warrior can reach the opponent and will deal high amounts of melee damage
or
2. The ranged opponent will condition spam the warrior and CC them/evade to allow the conditions to run their course

There’s not enough middle ground. Having conditions being cleansable is akin to healing in this game. You cannot “cleanse” a melee attack but you can do it to conditions. But, it’s an all or nothing affair. This is why warriors are now stacked to the hilt with condition removal and avoidance.

You can see the wheels churning a bit at Anet though. Look at their attempts to change the active on Signet of Might. They know warriors are constantly getting blocked by bunker specs and condi’d to death. So they changed zerker stance and now are attempting to get warriors to use Signet of Might. The problem is that it’s not like 6 seconds of block-proofing will solve warriors’ issues. Taking Signet of Might means opportunity cost in losing stability, condi immunity, or perhaps a complete condi cleanse.

The condi issue pigeon holes warrior specs and prevents them from taking alternatives, such as Signet of Might. Conditions bend the entire PvP gameplay around one mechanic and the rest of the game mechanics just end up being something you have to live with rather than spec to counter.

“Earthshaker, Eviscerate, and Arcing Slice are all 3/4 second cast times, meaning Black Powder has a .035 second window of casting on average (.215 seconds to react to your cast, .5 seconds to cast their counter) to stop it. Even if they knew ahead of time when you would cast exactly, they have a .25 second leeway.”

There’s travel time on earthshaker and eviscerate which unless they are humping you are non-negligible. Most blinds/blocks are cast defensively without careful regard to the opponent. That is, bunker guards are going to bunker. Thieves are going to blind. These are how they avoid damage period regardless of if it’s burst. You exaggerate how unlikely it is to dodge a burst skill.

“Hello frands! Vee Wee here, #1 Engi NA and world first rank 80!
They should change Combustive Shot to be a targeted projectile! If the projectile hits, the fire field spawns with the target at the center! Hire me plz Anet!
Edit: They should also remove the burn that the field applies and make the projectile apply a flat 4 second burn! Yippee!
Wahoo! Bye frands!”

Heh, 30 strikes of stored combat equivalent time for a flat single target 4 second burn? That’s pretty funny you made me chuckle Vee Wee.

The issue is that it will (in general) now take longer than 10 seconds to generate the required adrenaline. As it stands now you can weapon swap and burn the adrenaline on a different burst skill. Since blinds and dodge are prevalent it means that although you might not get the exact effect you wanted there’s still a silver lining to the miss.

Under this change you’d get nothing at all. Eviscerate specs would lose out on what could be a 7.5k crit on a zerker. Even if you didn’t weapon swap the 10s CD meant you could sustain until CD expiration and then drop eviscerate or whatever burst skill had missed. Perhaps I don’t watch adrenaline generation closely, but I believe it would take longer than 10s to generate a full bar with most warrior weapons. This seems to make the CD redundant.

Additional cleanses are already the norm. Most warrior builds use Berserker Stance, Signet of Stamina, and Balanced Stance. The signet can be popped for a one time cleanse, zerker stance once for delayed condi pressure, and then cleansing ire for sustain.

With all those tools warriors can still easily fall to condi pressure. It’s a legitimate worry that burst skills will be wasted. Most of warrior burst is literally burst skills. If adrenaline generation is curbed and misses negate it all then you will see a large drop in both warrior damage and increased susceptibility to condi pressure.

It’s already the case that axe warriors bait out dodges before committing to eviscerate. But, if you add in blind spam into the picture then it could look pretty bad for the slow large effect burst skills and their associated specs.

Galandil has an excellent point as asurans just use human male armor models.

They’re not invulnerabilities know. Endure Pain does not prevent conditions and zerker stance does not remove conditions but prevents application.

There are true invulnerabilities in this game but neither is one. If you mean that warriors can be yolo machines and pop both at combat start then they have about 8 seconds where you stand off point, then run in.

It’s the nature of conditions. They ignore all armor effects and although there is condi removal by design it must be insufficient or conditions would be useless. The issue seems to stem from the fact that once condi removal is on CD the condis just overwhelm. The fact that warrior builds so strongly focus on longbow+cleansing ire is a testament to the condi issue.

“they are bad in real duels, that’s the conclusion.
they are insane in groups, and vs newbies but terrible vs good players.
even Ele.”

This. You’ll get anecdotal evidence from players about beating trash scrubs in www or spvp. In reality warriors are great in groups where you aren’t being pressured. Outside of that warriors are nearly garbage.

1v1 is not a warrior’s strong suit. They do better than some but will lose against highly skilled guardians, thieves, engineers, and mesmers. I will say though that engineers seem to be the most even fight for warriors 1v1.

I’d agree with you. Most warrior weapons are pretty clunky. They work fine in PvE where motion and mobility is less of an issue. This is especially true for GS, which is convenient since most mobs won’t budge while you plow into them.

Most of the burst abilities (F1) are just trash. Axe and Hammer are pretty good but they’ve seen incredible nerfs since release. What warriors need are viable options, as well as nerfs to the current meta builds. What really hurts us too is the current bunker meta. No zerker spec except for thieves really works in those conditions.

Yeah, hambow isn’t a bunker spec. It doesn’t have access to blocks, protection, or any serious knockbacks or heals (yes, healing signet isn’t a real heal and doesn’t counter burst).

It’s kind of funny that they don’t want hammer or bow to do damage either. If they wanted hambow to be a CC spec then they’d have to improve the CC greatly. If you can’t kill anything you have to be able to last and last I checked hambow has no sustain against burst.

More to the point why weren’t the active heals adjusted? I can see them nerfing HS, but really what’s with the other warrior heals? I’ve never once seen a warrior use Defiant Stance.

I think it helps to remember why Healing Signet was changed to be what it is today in the first place.

Warriors were a total PvP joke.

They had no access to blocks (because shield is a joke).
They had no access to regen (because builds precluded it).
They had no access to reflects.
They had no access to teleports.
They had no access to invisibility/stealth.
They had no access to knockdowns (because hammer hadn’t been fixed yet).

It was a huge design change to double the regen on Healing Signet. The reason they likely did it was because the toughness/hp of warriors was supposed to be their mechanic for dealing with damage.

But consider that still today burst destroys warriors. That’s because Healing Signet takes time to work. There’s no answer for warriors for dealing with thieves. Condition specs like necros and many engies are even fights today. And warriors lack the damage to take on bunker guardians.

People hate warriors not because of Healing Signet but because they hate getting spammed with knockdowns and stuns. Let’s be honest here, CC is how Healing Signet has time to work. That’s warrior mitigation and that’s why people hate hambow, which is basically the only spvp warrior spec.

The players? Yeah they deserve some shinies. But, I think this just puts a fresh coat of paint on a broken system. The meta is beyond silly levels of broken and basically all it’ll come down to is who can cheese the hardest. That’s not really skill, and it is all they have to work with, but it’s disappointing that instead of working hard to fix the meta it’s “Oooh look! Shinies!”

Yeah I have to say that most of the new grandmaster traits only improve the functionality of a lot of the broken meta. That is, they make broken meta specs better at being broken.

Warriors are annoying more than anything. They might have been too sturdy but they got a small nerf and none of the new GM traits improve their damage and survivability because no warriors will take them. Thieves and engies however have some pretty decently juicy new options. Those are options neither class should be allowed to bring into spvp, period.

They can’t have a game mode where short term control of points is key and classes have access to huge array of knockbacks and immobilize. That’s the problem with decap engies. It’s pure cheese-mode.

Thieves are going to illustrate some other problems when the new grandmaster traits go live. Already thieves are cheese-mode against certain opponents (you could say necros do fine against most thief builds). But, now they’re going to be able to apply -50% damage intake to themselves in stealth as well as allies who are in their shadow refuge. The ability to rez allies with near impunity will also be pure cheese. I’d say that stands a good chance of being more broken than even decap engies.

Was there too. Epic kill again but sadly, no achievement for anyone.

Yeah I was there. Epic fight but sad about no achievement. Hopefully no one else has this issue.

Having run a ton of TTS encounters I’d just say that even organization isn’t enough for fights like the Wurms.

Perhaps they tuned it for the dps raids were able to do pre-patch when you could spam fire elemental powder. It seems like you’d need relatively skilled players, organized, with some selective trait builds, and good gear quality to consistently perform on the wurm fight.

That might be a bar-too-high for an open-world encounter game.

It was fun to see it “die” in person Good job everyone on that run. It was amazing to see the wurms almost give up the fight like you’d expect them to do.