cryorion.9532

This patch was clearly created to get rid of unique buffs (banners, spirits, etc) out of the game, so that all builds in game are more consistent across all PvE content. At the cost of sacrificing warrior in PvE, basically. Notice how they didn't really fixed any bigger issues like condition builds overperforming and so. That is simply because condi builds are way easier to play and that is what Anet wants. They want the game to be even easier for as many people as possible. Therefore, they don't care about proper and FAIR balance between professions and their specializations.

I know, I was sarcastic.

I guess I was wrong... 😞

I am a bit afraid that support warrior will be simply worse than other supports now (how shocking, who would have expected that). If new Martial Cadence competes with Phalanx Strength and Vigorous Shouts, that means warrior can't really do both healing and boon support. Since support war has to pick Tactics now, the damage hit will be significant. Together with boon stats gear, damage will be non-existent and there is no way warrior can compete with e.g. Firebrand (which of course did not get any significant and meaningul nerfs to its overpowered kit... disgusting). I am not sure about these changes, they feel lackluster, maybe except Bladesworn. Nice Spellbreaker PvE buffs, btw. I guess the hope is gone.

Trust? No. Hope? Maybe... There is this Anet_Solar guy on reddit, who seems to be nice. Their replies about balance stuff kinda gave me glimpse of hope. It's always nice to see some more information about balancing which is non-existent here on official forums.

Berserker's hammer primal burst would be ideal for pull, together with its aoe indicator being changed into big proper circular aoe instead of current lame frontal half aoe impractical bs. The hammer could be actually useful in PvE with that, think about pulling mobs to you for your group, slightly less op version of mesmers focus pull.

Anet wanted Bladesworn to be different and it is, but in a bad way: 1) Bladesworn mechanics and Dragon Trigger rooting Flow, Gunsaber and Dragon Trigger + Dragon Slash skills, as a whole are pointlesssly overcomplicated, meaning that they could have been done more straightforward without clunky interactions. Gunsaber as kit has absolutely atrocious interactions with swapping. Detailed explanation: normal weapon swap button (default ~ key) is not affected by alacrity/chill, but F1 gunsaber swap is. When you enter Dragon Trigger from normal weapon set, Gunsaber F1 always goes on cooldown (cherry on top - in case you have chill on you, normal wep swap button will be ready sooner than F1 one - if you have alacrity, then its the other way around). This means if you want to swap back to normal weapon set after you use Dragon Slash, you have to wait for weapon swap cooldown. But this does not happen if you enter Dragon Trigger from Gunsaber and F1 is not on cooldown, you can go into normal weapon set right after Dragon Slash (but you still have to press F1 since you always go into Gunsaber from Dragon Trigger...). These interactions are clearly result of lazy approach of creating a specialization mechanics. First of all, why the hell are there 2 weapon swaps close to each other and they are not even the same? Why making such stupid designs in the first place? Why not make something new and innovative instead of ctrl+c ctrl+v kits from engi? Another thing is rooting which is obviously unfun in fast paced dynamic combat system. We can think of rooting as another trade-off (because Anet loves slapping trade-offs on warrior specs it seems...) just so warriors can have high burst damage which is not really that amazing - more about it in next part. 2) BS damage output Imagine if Berserker charged one Decapitate skill for 5 seconds and then unleashed 180k damage in single hit. Damage per second is similar, but actual damage done is much less frequent. Such design is very sensitive to missing a single important skill. If you think about it, Bladesworn only pretends to have big damage. In reality, there is so much damage downtime that in the end, it is similar to other power dps options but with much higher chance to screw things up. Other dps specs simply have their "Dragon Slash damages" stretched from 1 hit into 5 seconds. Simple as that. Also, think about this situation: multiple people are DPSing a mob. They all do continuous damage to the mob except bladesworn who is charging Dragon Slash. By the time DS is charged and released, the mob has like 5% HP remaining and Dragon Slash finishes the mob. The mob had most likely much less HP than DS damage received - let's say mob had 30k HP remaining and DS did 150k damage. That means 120k damage was wasted and Bladesworn would be better off using spec that deals less burst but more frequently. This situation happens all the time. You can also think about situation where things die/phase right before releasing Dragon Slash. This practically means not doing any damage and missing a lot of damage. 4) BS weapons, skills and their effects I guess people (myself included) are disappointed with Gunsaber because it it way too similar (both visually and performance-wise) to greatsword and rifle which haven't been amazing weapons "lately". Pistol off-hand being melee is uninteresting as warrior is lacking good ranged options. Flow Stabilizer is a must if you want high Flow uptime. Combat Stimulant is ok, elite is lazy design 🤦‍♂️ and rest are "flavor" skills (aka useless garbage which Anet didn't bothered to be more creative with to introduce more useful skills). Anet should change their mentality about these useless skills on purpose... it really is disappointing. 5) BS theme Thematically, BS fits EoD very well, if you look at it from that point of view. But if you look at it from "but I wanted XY" point of view, it will always be bad or not enough. I had fair amount of fun with Bladesworn, but I fully understand people who don't like it. Hopefully we will see some nice improvements and QoL.

One could argue that it is core skill that can be used on every specialization vs specialization exclusive elite. But I get your point. 🤡net is doing same thing they did in the past. Powercreeping things with absurd bonuses and effects (of course Guardians and Necromancers are on the top again... 🙄). Meanwhile warrior is dumbed down (when it comes to skills and their effects) to Mr Simpleton because I guess Anet thinks warriors are supposed to be dumb or overly "head-on into battle and don't think". Pathetic, just like balance in the past few years.

Yes, exactly this, just like others pointed out, too. I didn't even notice that Mai had new voice in EoD to be honest, it was well voiced and fitting. But the change to fractal/story voice was imo unnecessary and downgrade to the original version which had that "incoming combat" and "things-getting-serious" energy.

I am afriad that new content in fractals would only spark interest of small minority of the playerbase. That's how raids died, basically. Even though I would love new fractal content, I am pessimistic about future of fractals. The way they "reworked" instabilities was very underwhelming. On the other hand, "newest" fractal is one of the best and most engaging fractals ever released (partially also because it has CM mode). Sadly, game balance also started to interfere with fractals (shocking, I know) because of buffing condition builds to absurd levels and making fractals brainless content. If anything, I would love to see properly reworked instabilites with a lot more variety and fun aspect. Maybe even tier 5 fractals which would be really hard but such content would be accessible only for like less than 0.01% playerbase... so realistically, I don't see that happening.

"This is what your curiosity gets you." Iconic voice line was replaced with much less energic version as the Mai voice actor is now different. Let's take a moment of silence for the old version. No matter how trivial this is, I always enjoyed the start of fight with such well voiced and energic dialogue between Mai and Horrik, and now it just feels so boring and empty. Sad day 😞

The 1 thing I would do for next balance iteration is to buff Spellbreaker's dagger skills in a way that it would make Spellbreaker great dps option for PvE endgame (both main hand and off-hand dagger would be BiS for this build). No point to be more specific as this is purely wishful thinking. If it could be only 1 thing as in 1 skill or so, I would add ability to exit Berserk Mode at will after like 3 or 5 seconds of its activation.

Black Desert and Lost Ark warrior classes are really well done. I play both and I really like that warrior in them doesn't feel as if devs threw logs under its feet just so the class can be different from others (comparing warrior in BDO and LA with warrior and warrior e-specs in GW2). GW2 is different as classes are able to use e.g. multiple different weapon types. Sadly, most weapons are useless, bad or too average to pick them over better ones. Hammer could be great weapon in every game mode, but Anet is not willing to do so. Sword could be traited for either power or condition damage, both would have great endgame performance in all game modes. But Anet is not willing to do so. Shield could be usable on proper PvE dps build with great performance. But Anet is not willing to do so. Instead, Anet picks 1-2 weapons (in case of warrior it's axe), buff it that it is absurdly ahead of other weapons and call it a day. GW2 has so much better potential build variety and options compared to BDO and LA, and yet warrior's build variety is tragic. E-specs brought some variety but also weird trade offs, changes to aesthetics and useless or very niche skills (so called "flavor" skills). Most of those skills lost that true warrior flavor. EDIT: I forgot to add, the only exception to this is Berserker. Berserker's flavor is probably the best Anet could ever come up with. It's also the only condition spec warrior has access to. Sadly, weird trade offs and some annoying mechanic design choices drag it down. BUT THE FLAVOR IS THERE.

This is so called "meta shifting". The intention is to temporarily address outliners, even those that aren't as big of an issue as other. Anet is simply unable to grasp whole game balance and balance it out as complete whole. They just focus on some of its parts, ignoring some other parts and by ignoring those parts, we've got current balance. It takes way too long for them to address bigger issues, postponing them to quarterly balance updates. If those even get addressed there. Let's just wait for another PR post about Anet trying hard to improve communication and better transparency. This time will be different! 🤡

Trade-offs in this game are a bad joke. Professions like ranger or guardian can freely run around without any special modes, without any special bars, without having to wait for something to fill or whatever. Then there are other specializations that automatically have their bars filled out of combat and ready when they get into combat right away. And then there is warrior, getting trade offs from left and right just to please brainless individuals that buffing warrior is not going to powercreep the game... classic double standard 🤡net. Also, imagine thinking that tagging a dev here will make them read it and actually do something about it. You tagged CMC quite often in the past few months (maybe even years...), not sure if that helped as we didn't get any major fixes/changes. Unless you spam tagged him with request to nerf WoD in WvW 😐

The issue is that Anet is not doing any bigger positive game-changers for warrior and when they do, it's like once per year. 😞 As if the profession didn't have any issues...

Case closed, everyone! If JunkJunk finds warrior fine then the profession is fine. Time to return from forums back into the game and enjoy warrior in its current state with its amazing build variety and various playstyles, and pretend there is nothing wrong with the profession and balance! Gotta stay positive, amirite?

Yep, we can clearly see how amazing balance is after the Feb 2020 powercreep reduction. 🤡 I doubt Anet will revert that balance patch mostly because they never admit they did something wrong. That patch was not good/not enough as time has shown, it didn't make the game balanced at all even though it brought pretty drastic changes. As we saw, it just made people swap to things that remained overpowered. Some stuff was nerfed, some wasn't. Also, 300 sec ICD traits say hi. Eventually we ended up with EoD specs that are overpowered af (how shocking... 🙄). Now it will take years to get "balanced". Just like after HoT. Just like after PoF. This is same thing all over again. At this point it's hard to believe that this is incompetence and not intentional design. We have to embrace the fact that Anet is not willing to actually balance the game (equalize performance of all professions in all game modes). They would do that already if they wanted. Just think about it. How else can you explain the quality and amount of balance they did over all those years? CMC was just temporary distraction from reality. I hope I am wrong, but everything seems to boil down to this, sadly.

How do you get enough adrenaline to enter Berserk mode before someone with brain shuts you down with conditions?

Yeah, it all started with PoF specs, mainly firebrand and weaver which were (still are?) able to stack absurd amount of burning very fast. Basically going against the mentality of what condis should be, slower start but better and better over time, compared to power which is best at start but is susceptible to other issues, some of which you pointed out already. Torment change powercreeped the hell out of Scourge and Renegade. It is fine if there is fight that favors conditions more, like e.g. Sunqua Peak CM, but that fight would benefit condis more even before Exposed/Torment changes. Then EoD specs happened and now we have some builds that are absurdly overpowered, like condi Specter or Virtuoso. Not to mention there are most likely builds that I don't know of that are probably even more overpowered. Not sure if the in-game state we have now is intentional (Anet pushing people more towards condi builds because most of them are easier to play and much more forgiving = friendly for new players) or just someone being incompetent and neglecting the game. In any case, sooner or later this condi mess will be toned down when more and more poeple learn to abuse it 🤷‍♂️

Yeah, this is sadly most likely Anet's way to make warrior have spamable stuff like other classes, so warrior can be "relevant" in this spam fiesta balance that has been here since HoT. Gunsaber skills follow similar mentality as rifle "rework", where Anet gives boring skills ammo and call it a day. It's more like lazy design to me, tbh. I am surprised (but not really) how bad rifle still is even when it should have amazing synergy with Bladesworn traits... 🤢

I agree that Gunsaber skills are a bit boring and need some nice touch to functionality/cast. Gunsaber 2 skill feels sluggish. Making explosions delayed would make no sense because the explosions happen right after the Bladesworn spins (they are fired off the gunsaber at that moment). Better idea is to simply make explosions appear sooner in animation with shorter interval in between each explosion. Maybe even better and simpler idea is to buff its damage so it is worth casting and to make it feel more powerful. Gunsaber 3 being projectile has its perks, like being able to hit things on walls and then it spreads, so this skill doesn't really need any changes. You can just unload it all at once and be done with it. Gunsaber 4 is kinda weird. It is very fast in some situations, which is nice, but the projectile absorption is a bit hard to time properly. Reminds me spellbreaker's dagger 5. Maybe make the projectile absorption a bit longer or change it to reflect so the hard timing is rewarding. Dodge on 5th skill would be too much and it is not really that needed. I suggest this skill to get direction indicator like greatsword 3rd skill (Whirlwind Attack) which would significantly improve the espec maneuverability (together with Dragon Slash directional indicators). I would even suggest to remove ammo count from Gunsaber skills so they can have more powerful effects/damage. Then we could talk about adding evade on 5th skill and so. But that would require changing also traits etc. Not sure if that would be realistic at this point, so meh.

It will be 180 range because so far, no profession to my knowledge uses bow as melee weapon. Warrior will be special, as usual. 🙃

Jokes aside, it really feels that Anet almost forces people to just play condi over power. After EoD elite specs were added into the game, condi burst is so overpowered nowadays, that it almost trivializes power builds. Condi is also more forgiving on mistakes because conditions keep ticking damage even when you do mechanics, get interrupted, most condi builds can ignore protection, weakness, etc. I wonder what happened with condition builds taking longer to reach spike damage but also being better in long run, stacking up condis and reaching greatness over time... sad.

Why is it that Vengeance Instability applies weakness when boon is removed on players? This is way too punishing especially for Bladesworn and hinders its performance significantly. Properly timed Aegis to avoid getting cced (+ getting Aegis from support) always results in Weakness application when stripped which Bladesworn has no control over. This annihilates damage output (50% chance to do non-crit damage, which is huge deal when vast majority of damage is condensed into Dragon Slash skills). The negative "challenging" part of the instability is already mobs getting boons and becoming stronger. Please remove Weakness application on players from this instability (or at least when Aegis/Stability gets stripped).