When I Warrior in sPvP (which is rarely), it can easily get out of hand if I ever have to fight a mesmer 1v1. Even with the aforementioned tricks and my standard healing shouts build getting rid of the billions of CCs, the constant teleporting and the damage done by the phantasms (and subsequent need to kill them) make the mesmer way more tanky than I can ever hope to be, and far more powerful to boot. I mainly just wish they’d tone down the recharge on a couple of the skills for just a second or two. Even knowing which one is which (which is easy just watching how they move or how often they attack), it’s a huge pain in the kitten to get to them. But then, I’m a warrior in this case, which has notoriously huge problems staying in range of targets without immensely specialized builds. Well… BUILD. Singular. We have one.
@Velk yea I think people should take a look at what the guildwars 1 counterpart is.
Given this dude didn’t bring res to ra, and probably wasn’t the optimal build at the time and I don’t have any of my own, it’s a decent video of a sin spiking targets. While it doesn’t show what guildwars 1 pvp is about it shows what a sin could do in a few seconds.
Good ol’ Shadow Prison. Assassins were a stupid profession to include. A class that is based around killing someone with a three second spike? Yeah, nothing can go wrong there. Flash forward a year, and they are just crappy Warriors, which themselves are not too great. You don’t put Thief, Assassin or Rogue style classes in the game if your concept of them is something that deals burst damage but is squishy. That never works, especially if there’s a stealth mechanic. Never. You never, ever balance a profession or even a single move to the attacker. “Well, you can kill this guy in one hit but if you don’t do X you might die.” It’s unfair to the defender. Attacks of consequence should always be subject to the defender. And this doesn’t mean dodging a barely telegraphed move out of stealth in a fraction of a second. Honestly. You’d think after Factions, they’d understand this a little better.
That’ll happen in group play anyway. It’s an issue with how broken some of the Thief’s mechanics are right now, not with the flow of scaling combat. It’s another issue entirely, and one very similar to the problem Assassins in GW1 had. (You don’t ever introduce a class into the game that’s predicated on spiking another player to death in a couple of seconds because you have to treat them like boss characters, but that’s another discussion.)
Warrior traits in general are terrible and outdated for the release meta; they’re relics of alpha builds. If they don’t revolve around just shortening weapon cooldowns and raising damage (which isn’t even a real trait, just lazy, uninspired design), they’re granting boons you will naturally have up all the time anyway on almost all builds, or doing something unproductive.
As far as this one minor abomination goes, considering it’s a 5 point minor trait, I expect it to be bad, but even by game standards, it’s pretty pathetic. I appreciate that it’s trying to allow you to dictate how you play by not just giving you a permanent buff to an invisible number, but 90% is just silly. It should probably be somewhere in the 80% range, making you aware that you have a choice between waiting to heal or wasting a few health points in your heal to get back your toughness buff. That’s how traits should behave. Not this “oh, your axe skills recharge a little faster and do 10% more damage” crap.
My suggestion is to make Rampage something more along the lines of some of the elites from GW1, like Dwarven Battle Stance, Defy Pain, Battle Rage, Soldier’s Stance (or any of the many choices GW2 foolishly doesn’t have…).
I think right now the main problem in changing it is Signet of Rage, since SoR is such a generic kind of skill, and probably the most similar to a GW1 stance elite. You don’t want to make one that is just like it in every way when you only have three options to choose from.
SoR is your option for keeping up with targets in terms of speed (but not accounting for conditions or CCs), raising your critical chance a little and raising your power a little. Rampage then, could be your option for granting long term individual stability, protection and retaliation. It should become a stance rather a generic skill, so that we’ll have a signet, a stance, a banner (and hopefully if they bring back IWAY in some way, a shout). A complete rework of the skill isn’t a big deal, as it’s not like we’re losing anything worth keeping. Rampage is a worthless elite in its very design, and to me smacks of them just throwing together existing animations and applying a cute little fX and calling it an elite, just to get something out of the door.
While we’re at it, make Warbanner the option for group-wide stability and regen. Right now it’s intended to be, but it’s just awful, for various reasons. Bundle stat reduction, lack of synergy with your existing build, extremely high recharge. You can keep the recharge if you make Warbanner have a much wider range of effect, allow it to grant almost any boon but make it a little random as to which you’re getting, and have them arrive in pulses that visibly ring out of the banner itself. This IS an elite, after all. Not a normal banner skill. Right now it also is just far too weak and pathetic to be an elite, especially since the whole downed/revive mechanic has changed since it was first internalized.
As I tried to say in a topic a day or two ago (that got no replies…), GW2 PvP seems to be heavily balanced by 1v1 testing. 1v1 fights seem to be the most fun and balanced, and often take more or less the right amount of time to feel satisfying. The more people involved, the more messy it becomes.
A lot of the reason why is that healing is balanced for the individual player and whoever they were testing the profession against in alphas (apparently). As there’s no party healing mechanic due to there not being any monks, this healing doesn’t scale to the damage you will receive when targeted by more than one person. Consequently, combat largely favors DPS and focus-burning targets down OR bunker-builds that rely heavily on stacking various kinds of protection, blocks and so on to account for this. The damage you take will always increase as more people get involved, and as soon as someone else shows up in a fight, it becomes very unfair for whoever is outmanned (not that you can’t fight back, but there’s a big difference compared to a fair fight).
I feel like the solution to that problem is to have some natural resistance or diminishing return to damage poured onto a single player, by other players. As healing never gets any better or any easier to create, and group healing is so awkward and difficult to coordinate, I feel like some natural DR to damage is warranted, to help scale damage. This would also go a long way in WvW, to prevent one person evaporating as fifty people roll over them, or even just ten or so. Having ten people spiking you should still take at least half as long as a single person wailing on you, not directly be 1/10th the speed of a normal fight.
That’s not the only problem with the PvP, but the one thing starkly different especially between GW1 and 2 is that combat doesn’t scale as more people get involved because there are no Heal Party or Word of Healing style moves that will mitigate an entire group trying to kill off one person, and especially no one person to do that job. That lack of scaling in GW2 makes the combat feel very messy and frantic because the pace is not evenly distributed during gameplay.
The problem now is that many skills aren’t viable unless you consciously decide to take a step backwards and use a worse build. That, and using the same primary skills gets old very quickly.
Oh, okay. It’s a trait that’s doing it.
As far as grind goes, the “You don’t NEED cosmetics” argument falls flat with me. You don’t need to play the game either. You don’t NEED anything associated with it. It’s about enjoyment, and people derive enjoyment from personalizing their characters. Gating that to a slow crawl encourages grind because people want to have that experience at a rate they consider normal. When you unnaturally space rewards out to the point you become aware of the gap between them, you have grind.
There’s no reason for the rates of xp gain in PvP to be as slow as they are. Just because looks aren’t required to participate is not an excuse to drag out the only objective that pvp has, long term. I think too many people get caught up in rhetoric and can only repeat “BUT YOU DON’T NEED IT” without understanding anything about design or how to make your game fun to play. It’s witless.
Random Arenas. Four/Five players per team. Randomly selected. No objectives other than “kill them all.” Winners move on, losers return to HotM.
The benefits of Shield Block honestly don’t come up very much either way. Anything shield block can do, an evade can generally do, or some offensive moves can do. It can be good for blocking a lot of blows, all at once, but this really only comes up in PvE. So, Shield Block is honestly just a glorified Endure Pain in sPvP.
I’d like to see melee attackers automatically fall when they strike the shield, and possibily include retaliation within the move, somehow. Perhaps a trait, as the trait to reflect projectiles right now is very rare to actually see a benefit from. The ability to reflect projectiles may even need to be innate to the skill, as it’s not that big of a benefit to begin with. You don’t want to reduce the recharge on shield block too much, since it does grant invulnerability, so you’re left with assigning a couple of minor benefits.
(edited by Plague.5329)
I haven’t thought too highly of the game’s pvp most of the time. The exception are the very rare chances I get to have 1v1 encounters. These fights can drag on for several minutes, and cooldowns actually begin to play a very big role. More importantly, there’s a definitive push and pull to combat in which you can actually feel ground slipping away, or gaining advantages over time. Once you get beyond that, the game starts to become far more frantic, and more about just burning targets down quickly.
I get the feeling then that ANet, in development, did a lot of 1v1 testing to determine how the professions stacked up to one another. I say this because in 1v1s, most of the professions can seem pretty even because the fights often tend to drag on, and there’s a lot more forgiveness associated with decision making in combat.
To briefly touch on the cause of this, I feel like because there’s no standard party healing system, this balance doesn’t scale upwards, only laterally. By that I mean your individual healing (which is balanced for 1v1s) will never get any better, whereas you can pile on damage very, very easily with no real effort at all. Just have another player attack the same person. Group healing in contrast is far, far more difficult and involved. I wonder then if damage in sPvP and WvW was capped to a certain DPS threshold, what would happen to fights, in general – if the game would break, get better, or if anything would happen at all.
In my experience, the mobs hammers work on can be killed far more easily with a greatsword or axes. The enemies a hammer would be very useful on, simply ignore your interrupts and knockdowns and knockbacks, and weakness only lasts about half a second on them.
Very rarely there’s a boss somewhere that actually doesn’t cheat you and will allow you to, you know… enjoy a weapon built entirely around control effects. But not often.
It’s an old song and dance. GW2 isn’t what GW1 was, even in Prophecies, and it’s probably not going to change much. I think ANet’s head honchos were polluted by worse games sometime in the last five years.
It’ll probably be a year or two before we see real skill and trait content that will open the doors up on what’s possible. It’ll probably even be half a year until we get the skills fixed that we have now.
The way I see it is, many of the builds in GW1 were invented by the players. Anet never anticipated them. They integrated these into the game with balance changes, fleshing out the meta in the process. In GW2, the only builds are ones Anet personally invented. These are mostly terrible. Anet has never been any good at making their own builds, for some reason. Consequently, most professions have one or two build types with very minor alterations that everyone runs, and 75% of the secondary skills and traits are never even touched, because they either don’t work, or worse, they are simply bad skills. Even the poster child for “we’re satisfied with it” – the Warrior – has this problem in spades, as everyone runs some variation on healing shouts, simply because stances, signets and banners are generally a bad idea, with very small exceptions. A good portion of our Anet-brand builds aren’t used because Anet signed off on bad builds. I’m personally waiting around for some major rebalance patch in the next few months. Right now, the meta is just too limited by Anet’s paranoid stranglehold on the metagame. I’ve never agreed with their “it made balance too much of a problem” stance that they retroactively started spouting after GW2 began its alphas. It just sounded like bogus market speak to me.
No.
I suggest switching to a healing shouts build, like all the good boys and girls. Signet builds are good for starting out, since it buffs you to laughably high levels to account for your inability to invest any traits or gold into equipment to leverage against this. After about level 50-60 it starts getting about time to put on the big boys pants and get an actual build.
Is it just me or are Survivability warriors nothing compared to guardians?
in Warrior
Posted by: Plague.5329
Overall I feel like the Guardian is a better profession, top to bottom. You have to make some wide steps in discussion to claim the two are equal. Different, sure. But even considering differences, they are not equal. The very few things Warriors can do better, they don’t do very much better.
I still prefer playing a Warrior, just because I like the aesthetic. Guardians are far more fleshed out and interesting to play, though. It’d be nice if the art and theming of the Warrior was coupled with the Guardian’s design concept.
No matter how often I’ve tried to trigger this bug in PvE, I’ve never seen it. But yes, it’s well known.
Not really. Unless you mean PvE, where you can do just about whatever you want anyway. The constant healing plus the removal of conditions regardless of whether you’re stunned is just too good. Especially considering one of the primary problems of the profession is condition removal, allowing you to move around freely. Most of whether we live or die is determined by how well we can move, after all, as we can’t stealth out, make clones, hide in turret farms, or so on. It’s just us.
There are other builds that are intended to be similar, but are just too weak. Warhorn builds can give some somewhat consistent condition removal and speed buffs, but nowhere on the level of shouts + SoR. You can focus on mace and shield but the shield’s cooldowns are very high, even with traits, and they won’t help you get rid of conditions. As well, mace primary isn’t going to stop anyone, much less a group.
None of your secondary skills are going to make up for that loss either. Signets? No. Stances? Endure Pain buys you 5 seconds, and only 3 seconds with a grandmaster trait that auto-activates it (both conflicting with one another). Banners? No. The regen they can provide while traited does not stack and regen itself barely heals at all. The actual defensive bonuses are nearly worthless because banners are intended to be used in large groups (although they aren’t since WvW doesn’t work that way). So you won’t be supplementing the loss with other weapons or skills.
It’s not that healing shouts is too good. It’s just that the other possibilities are absolutely terrible. There’s a reason why it’s such a common build, and why people were prepping for it during betas.
Until they fix our traits + warhorn, shield, mace and banners/signets/stances to be less mediocre and “safe” in terms of design, it’ll stay that way.
Yeah, the profession has a lot of problems with this. Signets are another example of things being more valuable sitting there doing nothing than they are doing anything of consequence. Things like this should not be anywhere in the game. Skills should always be things you want to encourage the players to use, not to avoid unless absolutely necessary.
Just one of many minor problems with Warriors, and one players are very aware of. Whether the devs understand it is another matter. It probably doesn’t help that the burst skills themselves are so underwhelming, so never using them is not a hard decision.
All the of current balances you’re seeing in patches are game breaking bugs, oversights or just novelty changes to transparently stupid design decisions (Tremor locking you in place is a good example). The reason the Warrior never appears isn’t because ANet loves them. It’s because the Warrior is the oldest profession in the game, as it was the base model during early alphas and the first class to be considered “done.” This is also why so many of its traits are “out of date” with the rest of the game – because the class’ internal logic is a year or so old by now.
We won’t see any real changes the professions until probably February or March of next year, if I had to wager a guess. Either way there will probably be a large rebalance patch at some point that touches on dozens of skills all at once. A lot of the professions have very major problems, not just in terms of bugs, but just in terms of skills being worthless or builds not being viable for a myriad number of reasons. Warriors may actually be one of the worst professions in this department, just because it’s so out of date. It has no real major bugs, but a large number of minor problems that make a very large portion of its builds and skills either boring or completely untenable.
I didn’t even notice it. Not much of a difference. I honestly wish she held it more like everyone else, a bit more upright and ready to strike, weapon pointed to the sky. It makes her look weak. You especially wouldn’t hold it that way in real life, unless you wanted to die.
I’ll keep my nine foot tall supermodel, thank you very much.
You can make some giant helga beast woman on your own dime.
You expected a nine foot tall woman to sound girly? What’s wrong with you? The voice is right, but the voice acting is often terrible. My shouts for instance sound more bored or annoyed than anything. I was shocked when I first started playing and heard the other races/genders’ versions, which actually sound like they’re in a battle.
The VAing for female Norn is also bad throughout the story, although I attribute a great deal of this to how ANet stereotyped their own races. I feel like they must have gone over in great detail how two dimensional the player character needs to sound to whomever they got to do the VA work, because that definitely comes through. The final discussion with Trahearne in the final quest made me cringe.
I kind of wonder if they’ll ever fix this. And I mean fix all the other skills, not nerf shouts into the dirt. Shouts are the only thing that actually works well at the moment. One day they’ll figure it out… one day…
GS is fine for tagging. It’s better than the bow when you need to move through enemies quickly before other people kill them. The bow is too slow to tag sometimes. GS does the most damage of all the Warrior weapons, and since our weapons are for the most part devoid of much utility, you’ll be using it a lot as a result. I mainly only use Axe when HB isn’t much of an option. Then I’ll usually go axe-axe so I can move through enemies fairly easily.
So, it’s “viable,” yeah. In the sense that it’s like a slightly worse greatsword with better combat mobility. GS freezes your character with most of its moves, after all. I usually run bow + GS, axe/axe when I’m doing something like killing burrows.
Nothing is bugged about it; it’s just a terrible weapon. Its condition damage pales in comparison to most other professions, although Warriors were never too condition damage-focused. My suggestion is to stop using swords. It’s not they’re brimming with utility anyway, especially in PvE.
When all your weapon options lack major utility variety and are only competing in terms of damage applied, just bring the weapon that deals the most damage. That’s sword’s main problem. Greatsword is the obvious damage dealer, with some obvious flaws. Hammer is our one major utility weapon (disruption). Mace has its moments, especially as a weapon swap set. Axe is kind of just there when greatsword isn’t a good idea, as it doesn’t do anything very interesting. Sword’s only real cute trick is that it’s good at closing gaps in PvP. Offhand especially is worthless, as the damage just does not compare, especially lacking utility as it does. Why anyone would use it in PvE, I do not know.
^mind if I ask what your entire build is? including sigils, runes, trinkets, etc. thanks!
Just the standard healing shouts build that everyone uses. +Power (major) +Vit +Toughness armor with soldier runes for the additional condition removal, and more soldier equipment for the accessories. I keep Spiked Armor, usually the +200 toughness while frozen, immobilized, etc. I switch out between gain adrenaline on hit and the hammer, mace or shield traits based on what I’m doing. For tactics it’s the boring old healing shouts, reduced shout cooldown and Empowered Allies (some people use Empowered, although I thinkittentle of it). In Discipline, adrenal shouts so I can use the shouts to build my adrenaline up, which I use mainly with my bow so I can create my own combo field very easily.
Sometimes I think almost all warriors in PvE run healing shouts in some variation. Not that it’s that good. It’s just the only real option.
Or you can just run a real build and be twice as effective. But I know some people like to feel cute, so feel free to waste your time.
@Steely
Balanced Stance, I suppose. I never use it, myself, but people swear by it.
You could have easily left off FGJ and OMM – especially OMM since most builds will just use Fear Me, FGJ and SIO.
A proper list of Warrior skills that actually are useful would look like this:
Bull’s Charge
Fear Me
Shake it Off
Endure Pain
Balanced Stance
I wouldn’t include SoR since it’s basically not an option anyway, being an elite (and the only elite, effectively.) Other skills make it onto the bar, but they’re basically just along for the ride.
I love my 0/0/30/30/10 build, although that’s because I’m using soldier gear. The actually useful traits are hidden away in the defensive lines anyway. I have 30k health, 3k damage (with the right weapon) and 3k armor. And a lot of skills grant fury, so I have a lot going for me.
My golden rule is don’t waste attribute points on what you can cover with equipment. If an att line has terrible traits, don’t waste your time.
A lot of other profession players in this thread.
Warriors now easily have the worst downed state in the game. Unlike other professions, our #2 only affects a single target and can be blocked or blinded, in addition to simply ignoring by standing behind an obstacle like say, oh… a BEAR. Stealth, stability and so on also apply. The #2 is definitely the worst in the game. If anyone actually argues against this, they’re a fool, or just being contrarian.
The #3, before you even get to it, is rarely used. If you are downed and an enemy begins to spike you, if you time your hammer perfectly to hit them in the final moments of their kill animation, Vengeance will still not be charged by the time they get back up and attempt to spike you again. So, already, it’s bad.
Vengeance, of course, WILL kill you. Using it is tantamount to saying “I want to pay armor repair costs” in PvE or WvW. In sPvP, it’s a “I lose” button that allows you to potentially do a little more damage before the other players wins. Maybe you can turn it into a draw. So, at best, even if you USE the #3 skill, you still lose in every situation.
The only exception is the incredibly low chance of rallying off a Vengeance kill. I have used Vengeance in PvE and literally killed twenty minor enemies before it ran out and killed me anyway. The odds are not good. The ONLY way of remedying this is a single trait buried in the major zone of the worst attribute line in the game across all professions. Discipline has been nerfed since the betas, and now effectively does nothing other than allow you to choose the traits located there. When you invest 20 points in Discipline, you’re doing it only to fix Vengeance. The loss in points and the loss of a trait somewhere else means you’re most likely going to be going down more often anyway. Vengeance will finally rally you when you kill someone (as it should natively), but you still most likely will not be able to use it due to its high charge time.
Also, when considering Warrior is probably the weakest dueling profession in the game, the entire downed system of the class seems to be built around punishing you for not having better professions nearby to help you. We get it, ANet. You want us to accompany other players. But you’re not helping.
The problem with the players is all they see is a skill that makes you ignore the downed state and keep fighting, which of course isn’t true. The problem with the company is that they want our downed state to be terrible because their intention for the class is outdated by several betas. I imagine we won’t see our downed state fixed until they start addressing all the other minor problems with the class, which considering they’re “most happy” with the Warrior (at least in terms of having the least need), won’t be for a very long time.
My suggestion for a solution is to lower the charge of Vengeance by one second and make it have, at least, have a native 100% for you to reenter the downed state after a kill, with a small chance to rally. In addition, increase the speed of the hammer throw, remove its high arc and give it a small AoE that can knock off several players if they’re balled up together. Also, make it ignore blinds, at the least. Stability, blocks and the like I can understand.
(edited by Plague.5329)
In PvE, there’s no real reason to be unhappy with anything. It’s rather pointless to even bring up PvE.
Soldier. Regen is not especially useful in most situations, especially as it’s a passive heal, and the game is hostile even towards active heals. Having the ability to get rid of conditions on a regular basis is invaluable.
They aren’t. Here’s why:
In PvE, mobs generally will be melee, with a couple of ranged options, so no adorable projectile reflections with traits. In addition, aggro rules spread out enemies rather than focus them on you, meaning you aren’t going to be defending anyone other than yourself. A single interrupt with a high recharge (shield bash) is not going to do a single thing against large groups of enemies, and against single enemies, they are usually invulnerable to it. Your block, with its own massive recharge, lasts only long enough to block at most two attacks from normal enemies, which again will likely not be attacking you exclusively.
In general PvE, the Shield is worthless, as it has zero offensive capabilities in a game mode that is all about rewarding offense and enabling defense as an emergency measure.
The one place the Shield does help a lot is in dungeons. The passive defense and the +70 toughness with trait can help in certain situations, and some speed runs and quest moments (Ascalonian path 2 comes to mind) make it essential.
It’s honestly more of a running skill, for getting past things you don’t want to deal with. Its intended purpose as some sort of defensive weapon to protect allies doesn’t work, whatsoever. It’s basically just a little more free toughness if you want it, at the cost of a real weapon in your off hand. It’s something you keep in your inventory as a just in case item, for the rare moments you actually need it. You should never, ever be using it as a primary weapon, as its skills are very weak in an environment dominated by DPS spanning many various kinds of enemies.
So far I'm not satisfied with Warrior damage. Does anyone have any advice?
in Warrior
Posted by: Plague.5329
The idea behind the Warrior is not that they deal the most damage. That’s obviously not true, nor should it be. The idea is that they should offer the most reliability and the best sustained presence on the battlefield. Right now that isn’t true because the Warrior lacks a couple of skills to allow it to freely roam. In addition, its natural damage resistance is too low on resiliency builds. As far as glass cannons go, I think they’re fine, and in a couple of cases it needs to be reduced. The main problem is that the means to lay in that damage is not good, as the profession is oriented around sustained damage, and even then it has poor options since it’s so melee-oriented.
Really, you just need to make the Warrior more mobile. We need more build options other than Healing Shouts and Mobile Strikes.
Addressing the Warrior's "Hundred Blades" immobility issue: a proposal
in Warrior
Posted by: Plague.5329
My main problem with Hundred Blades is that it exists only to deal damage. Only the primary skill of any weapon should lack utility. The rest of the GS’s skills are various kinds of closers. The #2 stands out a lot amongst them. It doesn’t belong on the weapon. What is the greatsword after all? It’s a distance closing weapon for sustained DPS. It’s not a burst weapon. Vulnerability, cripple, two closers – one of them a whirl.
HB probably needs its damage drastically lowered, and it needs to have some sort of innate utility to it. Whether you remove the freezing mechanic or not (and IMO no melee weapon should ever freeze the player), it does need to be less focused on just dealing damage and actually doing something of use.
For example, if you keep it freezing you in place, it could immobilize targets caught in it, like the Sword burst skill. It could also cripple or freeze. That’s basically it, as when you lock the player in place there’s only so much the skill can do. Tremor operated the same way until they fixed it. You could also have it remove conditions on the player as the hits land. 1s, you remove freeze, cripple and immobilize, 2s you remove any other one condition, with the final blow you remove another condition. Mobility.
If it can be used on the move, as it probably should, the vulnerability applied by skill 1 should probably be moved to HB, and the finishing blow (that overhead strike) should probably be a minor leap of about 100 range with no finisher. You could also dramatically increase its area of effect (and decrease the damage even more) but give it some innate life steal or adrenaline gain to reward using it on choke points or on balls of enemies.
I honestly just don’t care much for the weapon’s overall design. I like the fact that it’s meant to close distance (and all warrior weapons should), but once you do, it doesn’t do anything other than damage. Hundred Blades is a poster child for this. The whole skill sums up the weapon with that one animation, pretty nicely. It works if your opponent is dumb, and it deals a lot of damage. That’s it.
I don’t think many people complain about them in PvE. In WvW I suppose they could just use more diversity, as the class is so melee-heavy and the gameplay in WvW is so focused on huge groups (yet the Warrior class obviously catered to supporting large groups) that the roles you can perform are quite awkward.
The real monster is s/tPvP. A lot of the problem here is other classes being far too powerful in comparison, in certain ways. I think once you start nerfing some of the more ridiculously powerful skills and traits in the game you’ll get rid of some of the problems.
The problems Warriors have is honestly too vast to touch upon. Poor traits (esp +damage% ones), damage-focused primary skills, repetitive competing secondary skills (many of which are completely worthless at level 80 – I’m looking at you, physical abilities and signets), extremely poor elites that are often completely outclassed by normal secondaries on other professions, burst skills that exist only to deal more damage and hence have to be toned down to the point of them being worthless outside of extremely specific builds, and of course the inability to compete in roles.
Basically, I think right now the Warrior is just too “stupid” for its own good. The simple-mindedness of the entire class is neutering it in PvP. It’s the core principle of the entire profession but also the worst part of it.
*Traits need to be completely replaced, especially +damage traits.
*Many primary skills need to be changed from just doing more damage to actually doing something that changes the battlefield.
*Elites need to be completely altered. Physical skills need a large overhaul in terms of function, damage and recharge to synergize them with normal skill usage.
*Signets need to focus more on their active use and pull away from encouraging players to hang onto the passive effects.
*Discipline’s passive function needs to be completely reworked, as right now it’s a worthless attribute other than a couple of traits hidden away inside of it.
*The downed state, now by far the worst in the game, needs a minor overhaul. Less importance needs to be placed on Vengeance, especially traiting it to actually work correctly. The hammer? That’s gotta go. When stealth, hiding behind bears or just blinding you is enough for a stomp, you have a problem.
*Physical skills need to actually work, and have much lower recharges with much higher benefits within the trait lines.
*In general, Warriors need to have more passive means of ignoring or mitigating CC, as this completely dominates the profession, and there’s only two ways around it – healing shouts + soldier runes or mobile strikes. Stability options for Warriors are few and far between, last for only a fraction of the time you need them to actually be effective (read: basically 100% of the time) and it doesn’t even help with conditions. This is probably the biggest single problem with the profession in s/tPvP across the entire game, as this limits build diversity to such an extreme degree on a melee-oriented profession that it’s actively ruining every other part of our meta.
Warrior is a bit odd. It’s probably the most fleshed out profession across most of the game, but in terms of tPvP, it’s probably the biggest failure and the most innately broken in design.
Guild Wars 2, otherwise known as Trading Post: The Game. Or, Economic Management: The Game. Gameplay, skins and other items exist only to motivate the financial model.
Factoring in common opponents, what do you think? A lot of the upper tier matches are often plagued with problems, including oceanic coverage, high wait times, zerg-focused combat, and so on. The smaller worlds simply have no one playing, which can result in one or two guilds on a whim dominating the map.
I imagine the most “fun” worlds would be in the middle of the pack, where the wait times are low, population high enough for there to be a battle but not so high and tightly organized that the fights just turn into rendering contests or two minute sieges.
Speaking from your own experiences, on your own servers, do the scores of your matches always come down to the wire, or does one side break after a few days and decide PvE is more fun? How even is the competition for you?
Warhorn is just a swap weapon to use when your real skills are on cooldown. The area weakness and the area swiftness can be kind of useful, although honestly you should always have swiftness up anyway (SoR) and you can mitigate a lot more damage with disruption or defensive skills from mace, hammer or shield.
I imagine warhorn will have to be buffed eventually. You can tell they meant for it to be a weakness/support set meant to keep enemies weak while you beat them with maces, but it’s just nowhere near as effective as it should be.
I guess its place is mainly in WvW, although usually there are so many people chaining IRSs you don’t really need it there either. The recharge on the skills is so high you can’t reliably use it as a counter to cripples and such. That basically leaves it as a chasing weapon for increasing speed and applying weakness, which again, are things done five times as well by other skills. It’s not a bad weapon; it’s just severely outclassed for what it intends to do. In small fights you can do the same things with other weapons and skills, and in large fights (WvW) it becomes irrelevant because you’re obviously not going to be in enemy formations to weaken them.
I think the #5 slot needs to apply its AoE onto the target you’ve selected, rather than around you, and have its recharge reduced. Adding some light damage wouldn’t hurt it either. The #4 skill is fine for the most part, just in applying Swiftness. The ability to remove some conditions honestly seems more like a cute trick, since you can’t really use it reliably as a counter.
CoF is more about learning the mechanics of a fight once. After you do that, you’re done.
The thing about combat is that the difficulty has to be dynamic. If you just slap tons of health on enemies, the combat becomes tedious and boring. It’s not hard so much as you just get tired of the fight and start to make mistakes. If you predicate success in the fight off knowing one little trick, once you learn that trick, there’s no longer any difficulty.
I find the most rewarding boss fights are ones with high risk-reward situations, where you can risk some sort of major damage or even death to deal massive damage yourself. Or, the boss has a one-hit kill that you have to dodge to or mitigate with a block to survive. All that with normal health, of course. The developers rely far too heavily on just slapping more health on things to say “it’s hard now.” With dungeons like CoF, you can tell someone thought it through, but didn’t think to themselves, “After they figure this out once, will it still be hard?”
Do you find this to be true? Are bosses hard to beat, or do they just take forever to kill? The list of bosses I actually enjoy fighting because they are challenging without being “cheap” or more importantly, time sinks, is a short one. Some dungeons are worse than others in this regard, but in general, I’ve found little challenge other than trying to stave off tedium.
Today while doing Honor of the Waves (for the first time, even), we noticed how easy the bosses were, but the absolutely massive amounts of health they had. We took turns during a couple of them going to the bathroom and getting something to eat, leaving our characters to autoattack. Several of them took more than ten minutes to kill, simply because they had too much health and not enough sense.
To name a boss I do enjoy, I’ve always enjoyed the fight with Lieutenant Kholer. Well, after the first time fighting him and trying to figure out how we were dying in one hit. He has at least one move combo that can definitely kill you in a couple of seconds if you aren’t careful. His health is high enough for a boss but not high enough that you actually become aware of how long the fight is taking to complete.
I feel like this is a failing across many bosses in the game. They lack interesting skill sets and mechanics and supplement these failings by forcing you to attack them for five times the length of time you should. Agreements, disagreements?
I must be psychic, because I can predict the topic of these threads, every single time. It’s amazing!
Hell of a lot better than normal old Empowered, which is only affected by boons (not even including Stability), only affects you, and only gives 1.5% damage buff. Compared to +70 power to you and everyone around you, all the time. You have to jump through a lot of hoops just to get Empowered even close to being effective.
I think you need to actually play one. They’re a low skill ceiling class that coasts against normal players, but are next to worthless in higher tier play, as far as playing a role goes.
Just get some more hours under your belt and come back to the topic later. I’m sure you’ll be amazed you ever thought Warriors were ever a threat to you. They’re the worst 1v1 class, contrary to what you’d expect, and 2v1 they melt very easily.
I don’t want legendary armor in the game if it’s as big of a nuisance and a community destroyer as legendary weapons are. Tier 3 cultural armor is bad enough, and I don’t trust modern ANet to implement it correctly.
I hated the idea of the Mystic Forge when I first heard of it. Of course, fanboyism was far more rampant during prerelease, so I was told to keep my doomsday prophecies to myself. Things like the MF exist only as gold sinks. They aren’t there for fun, no matter how desperately ANet tries to market it that way.
As far as the suggestion goes, I think people who didn’t play GW and only played WoW (shame on you) don’t really see where he’s coming from. In GW, you had to farm a boss to get his weapon, sure. But if you were clever enough to make the right kind of build so you could kill him 1v1 (since loot is spread out across the party or “eaten” by heroes), then you’d probably only need to kill the boss about five to fifteen times before you got it. Some were worse, some were easy. It wasn’t WoW, where you spend an hour getting to something, killing it and then giving up until next week, or whatever you people did in that awful game. You just walked outside, made your run to the boss (probably took a few minutes), killed it, waypointed to the town (for FREE I might add), then did it again. I had a few greens I wanted for my own characters, and went and got them after an hour or so. It was pretty fun, since you were grinding, but knew it wouldn’t take too long, and it never drug on so long you became aware you had reached a key efficiency in your run and no longer had anything to gain from the experience.
That may clash with GW2’s philosophy of physically abusing the player and spitting in his face for wanting things, though. I imagine ANet employees angrily stomping around the office if they hear that someone achieved something too quickly, and gathering together in a dark room to discuss how to keep players from enjoying themselves in the future. Not really, but jeez. Just leave us alone, and get rid of this grind. Aren’t you people supposed to be killing the worst parts of MMOs? Not making them worse? Guild Wars did it right. I don’t care if it’s NCSoft or whatever-her-name was people were throwing a fit about pre-release. Just whatever is the problem, just find some integrity and cut that tumor out.
My dream would be for the Mystic Forge to just cease to exist. Take whoever dragged that stupid djinn up to Lion’s Arch, have her executed, then burn whatever is left. Everything you’d use with the forge is now either craftable or a drop from a mob with at least a 5% chance of giving you the item. Get rid of that awful thing. It’s the worst thing in the whole game, by a large margin. It’s terrible.
Yeah, it’s not the same experience. I chalk it up mostly to design progression just not being the same. Once you get your skills, that’s it. The skills you use in the tutorial will be the ones you use at level 80, and perhaps the entire game depending on your preferences.
It’s not just combat, but also how rewards and goals are very spaced out. In GW1 you might set a goal of gaining all profession skills, which would take a while but you’d be getting new skills almost all the time. You might also decide to collect various sets of armor, and after a month, have a couple already. Personal goals in GW2 are fewer to choose from and require far more grind, so you end up committing five times the effort and money towards things. And of course, there was no mystic forge in GW1 where 50% of the art assets were hidden and required 100 gold to buy a piece. Also, everything wasn’t designed to vacuum your money away in GW1. Loot rewards were also satisfying enough to make you feel good about what you did to get it. GW2 obviously has very big problems respecting its own players.
The way progression and effort-reward works in GW2 just leaves some of us feeling very unsatisfied and irritated, as the game doesn’t keep reinventing itself as you play the way GW1 always did. GW2 just keeps doing the same thing and expecting you to commit large amounts of time and money to it.
(edited by Plague.5329)
Sins in GW1 had the same problem, and ended up deevolving into cruddy Warriors over time.
You just don’t put Assassin characters into PvP games. They’re predicated on killing people unfairly, or so quickly it forces everyone to treat them like mini-bosses.