It’s odd, hammer Warriors were able to do basically the exact same thing in GW1 and I don’t remember there being all that much fuss over it. In GW1 I had a build that had around 4 knockdowns in a row. I had also mastered “quarter-knocking,” timing your knockdowns so that your target doesn’t even have enough time to cast a 1/4 second spell.
If used perfectly I could kill most light armored classes in one combo. Rather than complaining people just started bringing skills to counter me. GW1 always had problems balance wise, but it was always playable and even enjoyable. You know why this is? Counter-Play. Whenever something became the “meta” you would see people shortly after posting a build designed to counter it. I hardly see any of that going on in GW2 except for the builds Warriors are currently running to counter conditions.
About why people are complaining about Warriors when GW1 had them; No healers.
About why there are no counters; There are counters. Mantra of Resolve for mesmers is a great counter to repeated stuns because you can stun break a thousand times. Engineers can deal with it as well and they don’t have stability, Guardians are also good against these guys due to their repeated blocks and blinds, Thieves can also counter them but a well timed stun can put them in a bad place, Rangers can run Rampage as one, Eles can use focus to add another layer of defence against stuns, etc.
It’s all about whether people want to play those speccs or not.Fact is, counterplay by players is so rare, all they want is to nerf things so that they can deal with them 1v1.
I do agree that no healers does change things a bit, but the basic concept is still there. Something is killing you? Then bring something to make that harder. What I’m seeing is “this is killing my current build, nerf it.”
You named several good counters and my whole point in my “PR” campaign for Warriors is that many of the people calling for nerfs are not interested in balance, they just Warriors to go back to being a free kill. What’s even more frustrating is that some of these people are the same ones who were always talking about how much they hated the condition meta.
Sure, lets have a honest discussion on how to balance Warrior CC pain train.
What is the standard spec for CC warrior? A variation of X/10/30/X/15(min). They have high toughness, high crit damage, low to medium crit chance, etc. Basically, they sacrifice damage for the ability to CC. Wrong. Their burst line gives them 30% crit damage and with Unsuspecting Foe 50% vs stunned target, a player can ignore the need to have high crit chance to DPS. I don’t think it is balanced when you can have your cake and eat it too…
Solution to this?
1 – Move Unsuspecting Foe to either master trait or buff it and make it a grandmaster trait.
2 – Swap Fast Hand with Building Momentum. This makes sense since Building Momentum is tied to burst skills.
So your solution is to make CC not worth running. CC alone isn’t what makes Warriors good currently. What keeps us viable is the fact that we have decent DPS, but less than a Thief, and decent sustain, but not as much as a guardian.
Yes our hammer builds have decent damage, but it’s DPS over a longer duration. A Thief can still burst down a target much faster. We have enough armor/hp/regen to stay in a team fight, but if you think that makes us as tough to kill as a Guardian you’re sorely mistaken. There’s a reason you don’t see any (successful) Banner Regen Warriors playing mid bunker.
Reduce any part of these builds too much and suddenly the class falls back into being not worth bringing on your team. Unsuspecting Foe after the Sigil of Paralyzation fix will not be all that strong. It will be a major hit to both Hammer + LB builds and Mace/Shield + GS builds. It may not be possible to land that last hit of 100b because Skull Crack will last around 3.45 seconds and the channel time is 3.5 seconds, factor in the weapon swap time and unless the guy stands there after the stun ends that last blow will rarely hit.
I have not been seeing any reasonable suggestions, only ones that would send Warrior back to how they were pre-buffs, worthless. They aren’t interested in balance or counter play, they just want to be able to run the same build they always have and not have to adapt in any way.
My idea for nerfing them is to reduce their stability uptime and maybe make Beserker stance less than 100% (80-90% would be alright I think). People may stop playing them but, they would still be very good against the classes they are meant to counter only with a shorter time to pressure them.
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