KryTiKaL.3125

I am honestly just at a point where I just resolve to get my Warrior fix in other games as opposed to GW2 considering ANet just routinely ruins how the class feels to play over and over again, and honestly not even directly most of the time...just the existence of other things in the game that they don't give Warrior access to but do so for other classes. Well at least they are working on backend stuff in their engine so maybe we could see them do something much later to address long standing old, outdated, things that hold back the class. Not holding my breath, though.

It is yet another situation of "Warrior gets thing, people get culture shocked by it, people complain, it gets nerfed" meanwhile all of the everything else with other classes continues to persist and isn't deemed "oppressive". Also another situation of Conquest being the worst thing to base balance around because its an old gamemode that mechanically has not been kept up with despite the ever evolving state of the game. In other words, no, Conquest did not withstand the test of time.

Honestly I think it is, at this point, boiling down to lack of understanding of how classes feel to play being important just as much as numbers balance is. They could give Hundred Blades a 4.0 coefficient in competitive modes, it would still hit two times or none at all...because its rooted in place and slow.

What are your frames even dropping to during these meta events? Also bear in mind, running in 4k without the rest of your hardware able to keep up with the demand, especially so with your CPU since GW2 is an MMORPG and they tend to be CPU intensive, then you are going to have a rough time. Another thing to remember is that even with top end hardware, MMORPGs such as GW2 or even WoW, which has arguably more "accessible" graphics, that have areas with events or just high populations of players at any given time are always going to spin your framerate down to probably below 60 FPS. Now if you're hitting the below 20 range then its likely the attempt to play in 4k.

What do you do against daze spam mirage? Also you can intentionally trigger the FC, dodge or evade the attack so they don't get their burst trait benefits. At this point in the game, with the presence of basically most other meta builds on other classes Spellbreaker really is not as oppressive as you are illustrating it to be. Not to mention a simple 3 stack of Stability would completely negate these CCs you're having issues with, alongside any Blinds or Aegis which the majority of builds often accidentally have access to at this point. Warrior has some of, if not the most, telegraphed "core" skills in the game. Their burst skills are either a very visible wind up or leap, their CC skills also have visible windups or delayed activation (such as Bull's Charge and Shield Bash) as well as absolutely everything in their kit being tied to actually needing to hit with the burst skills, not just activate them. You can hard deny any Warrior build just by negating 3 to 4 (half of which they need to build Adrenaline to even use) specific hits with basically anything ranging from Blind, Aegis, Evades, dodges, blocks, and invulns, once you know what they are and their animations you're golden. Now, granted, within the space of Conquest as a game mode FC and Rampage have always been stronger than they actually are purely because the size of capture points is abysmally small for a game with this kind of combat mechanics and the movement allowed so it has created an environment of heavy AoE which functions as area denial since most AoE radius take up most of, if not all or more, of the capture point space as well as just simply rotating away from a capture point if a matchup is "unfavorable" for a particular class. Like I said in another post, any time Warrior seems to have just "a thing" in any capacity people cannot deal with it. And I am not referring to things like Defense Bladesworn or Defense Condizerker, or anything in the past like any time it has had bloated sustain (Shoutsworn) that absolutely needed to get toned down because apparently ANet can't figure what to do with the class. The amount of CC you are talking about on Spellbreaker is quite literally not new to the game. Not even when using Hammer with Staff. Hammer with Dagger/Shield has been a thing, or Greatsword Hammer. Hammer with Dagger/Shield has the same amount of CC as Hammer Staff Spellbreaker. Including a block. Does it have healing paired with these things? Yeah, but with the amount of burst I see the very class you are playing do, not to mention many other classes doing the very same, I really don't view it as being a problem. Ignoring the presence of Cele stats, though...that makes problems everywhere with everything which is why it got removed in sPvP.

They absolutely do have the capacity to facilitate these discussions...but they don't. Which is an issue, a problem, a mistake. When you are developing a game, like it or not, the community cares the most about feeling like they are being heard. When you create an environment where your community feels like they are not being heard they get angry, frustrated. They either lash out at the developers or if it goes on for long enough they basically just give up and that isn't healthy either because the developers need player feedback. It is a necessity. The community is what makes these games survive, GW2 had a good run with that for a time...still does, they are lucky the community is what it is still ingame. However this is despite ANet, not because of them. ANet has not been the example of this cooperation, the community simply latched onto the concept and it has stuck. ANet isn't following that lead...and they really need to. I know this seems like a "nothing" thing for many people probably on this Forum but not having an official Discord at this point...is just weird. Also at this point it doesn't really seem like they even use the forums for feedback, just bug reporting, so what purpose is this even serving? They even had some "secret" Discord a while back where they pulled feedback from specific players about balance and not the community at large...so they were already doing the thing, just in the wrong way. ANet as a developer, in my opinion, is just weird. They do weird things, for weird reasons, for weird results. Weird.

See these are the kinds of topics people seem to not want to talk about. Once we start delving into the problematic design choices surrounding an ingrained mechanic in the game, purely because it is the status quo, people push back hard against the idea of addressing the issues the balancing has created around it. This, however, is something Warrior players have been dealing with for years now because of the simple fact that the ingrained mechanics for the class have been so poorly kept up with in the evolving state of the game. This forum actually has those conversations because of it. Like you said, Thief being balanced around Shadow Arts and Stealth is another one. Mention this on the Thief forums and they will absolutely light you up with "skill issue", same happened for a time before ANet addressed Mirage Cloak on Mirage where the problem with it was that it could be used while CC'd, their initial response to address that (remove second dodge) was silly and the absolute wrong approach. It took them years to actually address and change it properly so that it could no longer be used while CC'd (people still complained about that but that tapered off because shocker they don't need it to work that way). Meanwhile Spellbreaker similarly had Full Counter changed to no longer activate burst traits simply when it is triggered, it now needs to actually hit like any other burst skill (in my opinion they still need to change Longbow to have similar behavior as well). This very forum pointed that out as the actual issue with Spellbreaker's overbearing sustain because it was so easy to stack up Adrenal Health and utilize other burst traits by simply walking into an AoE or getting hit by a clone, or pet, or whichever. I'm pretty sure I didn't see any Warrior complain about that, they simply agreed because yeah...they told them. ANet avoids making the difficult decisions just as I feel a lot of players maybe don't have the difficult conversations surrounding these things, the community reflects the developer. It would absolutely be a risk if they were to undertake reworking Adrenaline as a mechanic, for instance. A huge risk. They could flub it exactly like they flubbed the initial Banner Rework, which I think is the exact reason why people don't want to make that suggestion...because ANet doesn't really seem like they know what they are doing in this area, unfortunately. Think to other MMORPGs and class reworks they have done. For a direct comparison, look at Warrior on WoW. It has evolved several times over the years. An ingrained mechanic it had for years was stance dancing, swapping between Battle, Defense and Berserker stances all to use their different skills. They literally removed that and it has not been back in that form in retail WoW since they did it. The other stances still exist, but they are spec dependent, and there are no skills that are specifically tied to any stance, the stances simply alter the bonuses you are passively benefiting from at that time. This is the issue; ANet likely finds the risk too great to put resources and time towards what would actually need to be done to get some proper changes done to classes and balancing. They would rather haphazardly slap the "solutions" into the new things they add into the game, which has been their approach to everything since the game released. Dungeons not challenging or rewarding enough? Fractals! Endgame not there, huh? Raids! Raids not accessible enough? Strikes! Ranked PvP wintrading is an issue? Automated Tournaments! Warrior doesn't have a Support spec? Staff! This is not good design philosophy. Though I will admit I'm curious what this "surprise" or whatever it is will be for the next expansion.

It really doesn't. This is what happens every time Warrior gets...anything. Any form of additional utility in their kit and suddenly it is "too strong" or it is "overbearing" meanwhile Cele stats exist on basically...anything, we have perma daze Mirage builds, perma immob builds on Druid still exist, Axe thief is basically Willbender but with Stealth, Harbinger is Harbinger, so on and so on. Literally Warrior having the bare minimum of a thing and people absolutely cannot deal with it.

Just to point out, if this were indeed a genuine problem that was generating issues with gameplay across the board with any class that requires these movement skill sin their rotation then would we not have been seeing very similar threads posted in greater numbers beyond your own? It is not as if these skills are new, or that their presence in these rotations is new either. If this were a common issue faced by players then the complaints about it would be more widely visible. I'm curious...do you use the action camera by any chance?

In WvW it seems as if when trying to whisper someone on the other team while you are in the downed state that it breaks your ability to whisper that player. The game throws the error code 3054 during this, the player whispering you seems to fix it but if you try to whisper them while downed again then it just simply breaks once more. It is an exceptionally frustrating bug when you're just trying to have a conversation with another player, and the error code after some quick googling seems to be related to new player restrictions so I'm curious if for some reason attempting to whisper another player while you are downed makes the game mistake the state of your account but only when trying to whisper that player? Just a theory, based on very limited information. It is weird, it is frustrating. Please attempt to recreate and address it.

Someone asked an AI not too long ago about reworks to Warrior and Berserker and posted it in that section of the forums and it actually came out with some fairly decent looking stuff. So I'll be honest...if the balance changes were AI generated, if anything, they would probably be better... ANet does consistently confuse me with their approach to numerous things, balance being a huge one. I know they have metrics and data internally that they go off of...but truthfully if that is the only thing they are measuring their balance changes by then that is by far a massive mistake. Note their initial rework to Warrior Banners and how poorly that went and what they came out with in the aftermath due to the, for lack of better wording, absolute blunder that it was. There is very clearly a disconnect in how they approach balance and class changes and how it actually may need to be done. Note their balance philosophy post a while back, outlining counterplay as an important aspect...and yet one huge thing we have seen them consistently do is strip away the boon strip in the game all while adding more boons which is just making boonballing stronger and stronger and much tougher to crack. Quite literally removing counterplay. It makes no sense.

When Warrior does not routinely have access to on demand Aegis, Blind, or true invuln states, yeah. And at this point its mobility is...lackluster compared to other things out there. This is another point as to why Berserker holds its own better, because if you're using Longbow you have access to a Blind, Aegis from Sundering Leap as well. Throw Staff into the mix and there is more Aegis, plus a heal off of the block. Honestly this is why I was so annoyed at ANet brutally nerfing Unyielding Dragon on Bladesworn by removing the stun, because I actually enjoyed playing it as Discipline/Strength/Bladesworn and the Aegis functioned as the primary defensive tool plus the mobility you could achieve with the build. It is wild that the removal of the stun effectively gutted that specific build purely because it was likely done to rein in Defensesworn which could have been accomplished in any other way, which are things others have suggested here many times before and after the change happened. But yes, to get the damage other classes would have you have to sacrifice basically all of your defense which, as you said, you really can't do because of the current meta.

I think its in response to all of the burst damage becoming so present again. I've been playing Willbender for a few weeks now and I can confirm that the majority of Warriors are just fairly easy pickings when roaming, only encountered a few that were difficult and truthfully my loss against them is a result of my own flaws while playing the class (I get too greedy because WB does actual damage and I'll be honest...it feels nice to do damage). Any Willbender playing better than I am currently capable of would walk over those Warriors. My experiences with Willbender simply reaffirmed my perspective on the issue with Warrior; Everything is tied to bursts. Your buffs, your damage, your utility, everything is centered around burst skills. This normally wouldn't be that much of an issue with any other class having these things centered around their class mechanics. You don't see that issue on Elementalist, Guardian, Engineer, Mesmer, and even Necromancer. Why? Because Warrior Adrenaline drains out of combat and everything is tied to being able to hit the one or two skills associated with spending this Adrenaline. If you avoid those 2 things Warrior practically loses access to its traits. Thats why certain traits being tied to weapon swap instead of Burst were fairly good changes, because it is consistent and accessible. This is why Warrior does not feel all that great to play, even Spellbreaker and Berserker. Yes, they hold their own...but I personally think it speaks volumes that Condi Defense Zerker is the meta almost purely because it makes such effective use of Relic of Akeem and has consistent access to albeit short invuln states through simply entering and exiting Berserk Mode, whereas Spellbreaker has damage negation in the form of Full Counter that can be "force triggered" by any AoE sitting on the ground, or just a pet/clone attacking. Both of these builds only remain relevant basically because they have access to things that mitigate incoming damage in a meta that has again fallen into big burst hits. Granted it isn't the 25k Mauls from Sic Em Soulbeasts that it once was, so its more manageable...somewhat. The issue is that Warrior doesn't...really have those hits, and they are all backloaded behind the Adrenaline mechanic.

Throne & Liberty is being Published by Amazon Games Studios, that has been confirmed for many, many months now. What do you mean in terms of "laggy"? Framerate or latency? In the case of the former when you have that much going on within your screen literally no game is going to run 60 FPS or higher. WoW has arguably less demanding graphics and even that game still hits framerate issues, no matter the persons hardware, when there is that much going on within your screen. Any large scale PvP or large scale situation in an MMORPG will see framerate drops due to the amount your hardware needs to render being...more. To be completely honest GW2 probably does better with it out of other MMORPGs (I don't know where ESO stands with this since they have a similar gamemode), which is something they ironed out with their graphical culling settings many, many years ago. In the latter case that isn't a game engine issue, thats server infrastructure. It gets bloated with a lot of information being sent from a lot of clients all at once while having to also send that information to each individual client present...and you just see how that gets to be a lot. This is why servers in any game have a cap, and why things like sharding, instances, phasing, channels, etc are all things many MMORPGs use to handle player populations within any given zone or area. GW2 has a "megaserver" for the PvE side of things but its not a literal massive server, it separates things into different shards or instances. Each one is effectively its own bottled group of players, when that bottle fills up then another one is opened and players start filling that one. WvW does not have this for each map, each map has a capped number of players, as do the servers in each matchup. So yeah, they get taxed quite a bit more "easily".

They added new kits, which technically are their own "weapons", such as Gunsaber. Granted the execution of that is...not great, but that is more to do with the fact that its a kit and not a normal weapon swap. I don't think we'll get Spear next, though. If anything it will be Focus or Scepter in the off-hand and it will replace Shield as a defensive weapon. Watch.

They have the team sizes to do so, though, and likely operate through larger publishers. A single studio does not usually undertake the running of multiple MMORPGs simultaneously. Remember, there is a difference between Publisher and Developer. In the circumstances surrounding ANet they self publish, due to necessity likely from NCSoft West getting downsized pretty significantly several years ago, and any other NCSoft related MMORPGs (Blade & Soul, Lineage, Aion, etc) in the west are all run by their individual studios supporting them. Currently really only Blizzard accomplishes this, technically, due to the fact that they have such a large studio it being under Activision itself. They operate several variations of WoW; Retail, Classic Hardcore, Classic Season of Discovery, and Classic WoTLK (soon to be Classic Cataclysm).

They haven't been able to handle managing two. GW1 is just existing. They keep the servers on, thats about it. The biggest thing GW1 saw in terms of an update was several years ago where it got some new graphics settings to facilitate some of the newer things in that space.

Having been playing Willbender for the past week and a half I can say that it is fairly easy to pick up and just insta death many players, but there is still a learning curve, just like with any class in the game, when it comes to any encounter with competent players. The issue Warrior has is the learning curve that it has within an environment where things like Willbender, Harbinger, Catalyst, etc all exist. These classes have effective tools while also being able to push out a lot of damage. Warrior still...not so much. Staff, oddly enough, helps. If not just for providing access to things like Aegis, self sustain not reliant on physically landing a burst hit, passable mobility, a pull, and actual access to boons for once.

This is essentially what you're signing yourself up for when you choose to play 34 characters. You can put many on the back burner for the time being if you want, but ultimately if you're swapping around between all 34 of these characters on a regular basis just throughout any given week...you chose that path. I do not imagine swapping around between 34 different characters is standard practice for the vast majority of the playerbase.

Zealot's Defense on Guardian is now also mobile and doesn't even have a movement speed penalty while casting. Meanwhile also changing Deathless Courage to reduce strike and condition damage taken for the duration of Courage (6 seconds) by 20% in PvP/WvW when they already have essentially permanent Resolution which reduces Condition Damage by 33%, not to mention access to Protection which Crashing Courage gives access to both. If Celestial stats on Willbender weren't already annoying enough...

I still think its weird ANet puts as much value in that HP pool as they do, at least seemingly, because the game is at a point where its effectively irrelevant due to burst damage making the comeback it has made despite the damage squish 4 years ago.

I would trade Hundred Blades for a high damage single hit skill in its place, just to have some reliability. Could pull something like Steelfang Slash, Galrath Slash or Pure Strike from GW1 Swordsmanship and adapt it into the GW2 flavor. I would also trade Warrior's "highest health pool" for 5 second weapon swap baseline for the class as a part of its Profession mechanic, alongside a more offensive oriented Specialization line from the Core class so we're not stuck with Discipline/Defense/X anymore.

White Tiger Staff skin is a guandao or a glaive, also looks very fitting.

This was something I threw together making a lot of assumptions of some dream changes for Warrior. Namely Alacrity on Spellbreaker, potentially on Magebane Tether (just in PvE) as well as maybe Fast Hands just becoming a part of Warrior's profession mechanic baseline. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PKwAgeFlFwOYUsJWJO+K3veA-DSJYzRH/hEnQoWFQFyAZeWIIhxe4to/ZEA-e You can way overcap crit chance on bosses due to Unsuspecting Foe but Dragon is the only stat set with the most Ferocity, you can also substitute Bull's Charge in place of Signet of Might as well as substitute Signet Mastery in place of Opportunist for more Ferocity which could send you over 300% critical damage. Dual Wielding kind of just in there...cuz, but Burst Precision likely more ideal. Now if you were to go a different route, assuming they allow this dream Alacrity to pulse to allies while Magebane is tethered to an enemy, this build could be something; http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PKwAgeFlFwOYUsJWJO+K2veA-DSJYwRH/hEnQoWFQFyAZeWIIhxe4to/ZEA-e Opening with using all Signets to get the stacking Ferocity for 60 seconds, just always critting, Kick and Disrupting Stab keeping Attacker's Insight up. Really this is just me wanting to see Arms used in Power builds just because of the sheer amount of Crit chance and Ferocity it can build, as well as just wanting to see it as a viable option for group Alacrity while also just putting out damage.

The removal of the stun on Unyielding Dragon not only hurt Bladesworn's presence in PvP in general, but also severely damaged any build diversity for the Elite Specialization because previously you could functionally use Discipline/Strength/Bladesworn due in large part to the Stun being a vital utility tool for disengaging and interrupting, but removing that essentially necessitated foregoing Discipline in favor of Defense because the overbearing sustain is all it has left and even that build isn't doing so hot anymore. ANet yet again took the exact wrong path to reigning something in. Color me not surprised. Don't worry, they'll finally go back and address it after 6 years much like they did with Full Counter activating burst related traits when FC was triggered instead of on hit which was basically reiterated on this forum about a few hundred times as to why Spellbreaker sustain was so easy maintain, as well as giving Mirage their second dodge back after removing it because they finally got a clue and made it so the Mirage can't use Mirage Cloak while CC'd anymore because that definitely wasn't suggested to them again about a few hundred times on the forums at the time. There are countless other examples of there being feedback from the community that is a genuine solution to these sorts of mechanic issues that pop up in the game, ANet literally does everything else other than that, then they get a clue several years later and implement the changes suggested by community feedback after reverting all of their bonkers and nonsensical other "solutions". Trend. This is called a trend.