Guild Wars 2

Wouldn’t that determine on type of exploit? The only ones I’m aware of is the wall jump and the glitch where you start outside the gates before the game starts (which is still in the game and not fixed, happened to our necro last night). What control would TP have if middle is capped before they get there? What control would they have if a mesmer sneaked past, blinked past the gate and dropped his portal? The question doesn’t really lend itself to anything other than play to your best ability and believe in your own team’s strength to be better than your opponents to offset the exploit. i.e. Win back mid, maintain map control to see the people trying to sneak past and react accordingly.

There are a few absolute top tier classes, which would be thief and mesmer, and then everyone else falls in place based on what you want to achieve as a team. Not every team has the same philosophy and concept for what they want to do. In TP’s case, the warrior does the least for them in their objective as team, and forcing a warrior into their composition probably requires changing the playstyles/builds/mentality/etc. of all other 4 players. That in itself should flag the class as being a problem for that team. I personally like running warrior in the comp, but I wouldn’t place it anywhere near the top of the list. It’s more along the middle/low-end of classes.

That being said, the warrior is in an odd spot right now. It doesn’t mean there’s no room for the growth/evolution of the warrior in terms of creating builds for it. It’s been previously stated that the issue with warrior is active mitigation. Many professions have different ways of handling damage. ANet decided that the warrior will rely on raw stats and actual immunity from incoming damage as its form of mitigation. This is bad in two ways: existing conditions do damage through immunity, and armor isn’t the same type of stat in other games. Now condition damage is whatever. You can work around it through traits, runes, and your bar. It does impact how big of an influence the class may end up having in a fight though. The bigger issue is that armor, while very useful, doesn’t mean anything when the usual forms of mitigation that goes with “tanking” don’t exist as a passive. This means, no natural parrying, no natural block chance, no natural dodge. All of a sudden, you’re exposed to the same attacks that all other “squishier” classes receive, and thus you aren’t any harder to kill, you simply take longer, all mitigation being equal. I would argue that the warrior is one of the easiest classes to kill, because if there’s no shield, he will die rather quickly.

ANet seems to have gone away from their original stance of “offense is king.” The way warriors used to live was through sheer CC and damage output. It put them at the top, because the other classes weren’t nearly as refined as the warrior was. However, with all the recent changes since BWE1 & 2, a lot of professions got huge defensive utility built into their bars, or are allowed to specialize their utilities to be defensive to make up for their very offensive builds. You can see it many classes like the thief (evasion, longer stun duration built into their strongest burst skill, the new shadow refuge being commonly used on glass bulids), mesmer (blurred frenzy), engineer (toolbelt skills provide offensive utility on defensive utility skills), elementalist (mist form/blink are commonly used utilities), etc. This doesn’t mean those classes are OP, it just shows a different philosophical approach or an unexpected end-result of ANet’s original design.

The warrior is one where his utilities actually need to synergize with his weapon bar properly to maximize its output, or else you put yourself in the middle in which case you’re probably less effective than another class fulfilling the same role. The great versatility of the warrior is that he can do specific things extremely well. I personally think he tends to fall flat when you start trying to adjust for counters or do more than what his role is asked for. The game is still young, and there’s plenty of room for growth (both player wise and meta). So we will continue to see the rise and fall of classes on a “tier” list. Just realize that every team has their own goal in mind when creating compositions. Unless the class is at the very top, it doesn’t really matter where it falls.