Guild Wars 2

I feel like warrior balance is just a symptom of ArenaNet’s design falling into the trap of tying complexity and strength together too closely. As it stands, Warrior just doesn’t do enough with its skills and utilities right now, so in order to be balanced its numbers have to be kind of insane. For example, how do you balance a three hit combo that does nothing but damage (most warrior weapon basics) versus ones from a class with comparable base behaviour (revenant) that stacks both torment and poison? What amount of damage can reasonably make up for having little to no utility in a game that’s about highly loaded ‘techy’ kits? The only way is to have the warrior stuff do unreasonable amounts of damage, which is obviously kind of toxic and annoying for people to play against.

It also gives you the other problem of them needing to have certain traits (looking at fast hands especially) as baseline. Warrior skills generally don’t do much of anything but damage, maybe a single effect if you’re lucky, so you need the equivalent of two weapons equipped at all times to reach even a minimally comparable bag of tricks to someone sitting in a single stance with one weapon. Unfortunately, I think the only long term solution for Warrior’s involves a balance pass over all their skills. Personally, I think players looking for simplicity should be able to find it with whichever class they want; that’s what build diversity is about after all. Every class should have some kind of straightforward power-style build available. MOBAs seemed to have learned this as they’ve grown as a genre, but shunting the desire for simplicity onto a single class is just asking for something that either under-performs or chokes out the competition. There’s really no in-between.