Zexanima.7851

Warrior is in a drought, no doubt. I wont stay that way though, I imagine warrior will get its time in the spotlight again sooner or later. Anet is just verrrryyyy sluggish at making highly impactful changes which is its own problem. In the case of warrior it's been sliding down hill, slowly, for a long while. Completely personal anecdote but I think the reason this feels specially awful for warrior is that they're fairly "underloaded" compared to other professions. Meaning, they're skills/traits are very focused on doing singular things vs multiple functions. This isn't inherently an issue but it makes them more rigid and less flexible to shifts in the game. So when something warrior's rely on becomes less useful, it's really felt. Where as other professions may have other tools to swap around or wedge in to cover these shifts. Not saying this is the be-all-end-all reason/issue but just how I see it. Kind of a side note, the people trying to discredit the issues of warrior by stating other professions have issues too is not it. It's not productive and flat out doesn't make sense.

I mostly can only speak to PvP but fast hands is the least of the abilities in Discipline that make it required. Warrior's Sprint and Brawler's Recovery are much more critical. The movement speed is absolutely required and even if you run a movement speed rune the being able to get out of immob is just as important. You need to be able to keep up the pressure as warrior and if you're getting peeled by immob you're gonna have a bad time. With as susceptible to control condi as warrior is and as easy as it is to apply blind/weakness/cripple etc. you have to have Brawler's Recovery as well. While fast hands synergizes well with the rest of the trait line I don't think it's the crux of what makes it too good not to take. That's one reason I support the idea of making fast hands baseline as it'll free a slot for reworking trait lines. On its own it isn't all that strong. If weapon swap cooldown was all that then everyone would be running rune of the warrior. It would make sense for warrior thematically, give them more of a class identity, and be a good step towards making them more relevant again. Enough on that subject though. How would I make Discipline not required? Well, unfortunately I don't think you can, at least not without an entire class overhaul. If you moved the effects from Warrior's Sprint and Brawler's Recovery to other trait lines then those lines would become required and leave you with the same issue. If you reworked them to be active utilities somehow then those utilities would be required. There is no justification to make them inherit to warrior like fast hands. If you removed them completely it would nerf warrior into the shadow realm. They would have to remove/rework those two traits not to be as strong and then give those same tools in an easier to access way. I'm not sure what that would look like off the top of my head, too early in the morning for me to be thinking up that large of a rework. Warrior isn't the only class with the issue of being stuck in a trait line either. The difference though between other professions and warrior/Discipline is that in the case of other professions it's usually because the trait line is too good not to take. You can run without it (say ranger and survival) and still be effective but in those cases it's that the trait line is so powerful it doesn't make sense not to take it. In the case of warrior it's that it can't be effective without it. The traits are so integral to the profession that not taking Discipline isn't just sub-optimal, it makes them near unplayable. Can you run warrior without Discipline and still do things? Sure. You can also drive a car without a windshield but it's going to suck really bad in both cases.

I'm going to use Occam's razor here and ask; Did you reactive the skill? You activate it once to give you the buff portion but with all herald skills you have to reactivate it again to get the effect. You probably have but I should make sure before trying to figure out what happened.

A 50% win ratio is how it should be in most competitive modes in games, roughly. It'll be a little higher if your improving or a little lower if you're playing poorly. Think about it like this. You want to be playing people of the same skill as you right? You should be as that's where competition is at its most fun. In this senario we'll say two teams of the EXACT same skill level get matched up. Everything is the same, skill level, profession, builds, ect. Who would win? Its a coin flip right? No good way to tell. So in a perfect system a 50/50 split would be ideal. However, there is no perfect match making system. To emulate a "perfect" system though they put in conditions like "If you're on a win/lose streak then they'll try to give you better/worse players to play against to bring you back towards 50/50. It's not the most ideal but its the best anyone has come up with.

I have no proof for you but I've done very similar things on thief. I some times even run rune of speed to rotate even faster. It's the easiest way to win matches. Do you win every single match this way? Of course not, but you can easily remain in the positives up to mid plat doing this. Regardless of if it's true or not he makes some valid points.

This is a good point. A poll like this can be misleading in that people may associate what is considered "one dimensional" to being easy or unfun. That's not at all the case. Warrior is rather straight forward compared to other professions but it still requires a lot of skill to play effectively, same with thief. On the other hand you can take something like weaver which has many more buttons than warrior but to me is a lot easier to play and get value out of. The simplicity of warrior is one of the reasons I enjoy it so much. I usually gravitate towards more complicated classes in games (ADHD likes all the buttons). For GW2 at least it seems that the more buttons you have to press the less options you actually have. For something like weaver it more or less feels like I'm doing a PvE rotation when I play it. You occasionally switch things up. For warrior on the other hand I have some go-to combos but you have to crafty to land your damage. Things like retargeting, stowing, managing distance, swapping weapons properly, chaining CC and so on becomes very important. Then how you weave those things into actually skill usage. It can have deceivingly deep gameplay for PvP.

They're all about even tbh. Even the "complicated" professions are pretty one dimensional once you figure them out. Despite the ability to build every professions many ways, each just boils down to a pretty narrow way to play. Skills/passives are so intertwined in most professions it really limits your options.

At least not for a long while. This isn't a doom-and-gloom post arguing the finer points of why this unreleased expansion does or doesn't "suck". People will buy it, people will play it, people will enjoy it. Personally, with as many times as I have been burnt or seen people burnt on game releases I'm much more conservative on being an early adopter. For me it really has to ignite my interest to even consider buying something game related on release day. The previous expansions, when I was a little less cautious, were no brainers for me. I wasn't disappointed either. I much preferred HoT but PoF was great as well. Despite their good track record on expansions something about this one doesn't seem the same to me. I know Anet has undergone a lot of changes since PoF released so maybe it's something to do with that. Maybe I'm just "over" GW2 and no measure of new content would satisfy me (not likely). Regardless of the reason, what we've been presented on this expansion just hits different and not in the good way. If I were to try to pin it down to one thing I guess it might be that there is no game altering mechanic like the last two. Both gliding and mounts changed how you interact with the entire game world, old and new content. This expansion doesn't seem to have that, at least not nearly to the same extent. You have fishing but that seems like a very "low hanging fruit" kind thing to add. Setting aside any specifics on why I may not like fishing, how does this new mechanic alter the existing game? I can go back and fish in places I've been before but that doesn't change how I play the game, it's a whole separate thing. To give an analogy to how I see it (not a direct comparison in any way); Say you're really into some trading card game. When you're playing you can only have 4 cards down. With the next set of cards though they release a new rule that lets you play a 5th face down card you can flip at any time. Yeah, the new cards are cool, but that new rule freshens up how you would even play old decks. Now compare that to them instead releasing a solitaire rule set. It's neat but not nearly as exciting. I know, I know, this isn't the most direct analogy but it gets across how I view this expansion vs old ones. All that being said I may find out my suspicion was unwarranted after seeing some gameplay and rush to buy it a couple days after release. Unless there is something huge they've been holding until release, I'm not banking on it. Maybe a few months down the road they'll release some spectacular new content for it they were just holding out on but I'm not banking on that either. I didn't really have any specific expectations around a new expansion. I had things I would have liked but I never really expected them. If I had any expectations at all it was that something in this expansion would really get me excited, and I know some people are which is great, but I'm not. It could just be a lack of poor presentation on their part. Idk man, I just look at what's been shown on EoD and the beta and go "Okay cool..." and am kind of left feeling like there should be something else but I don't really think there is. It also would have been neat if they had done something more exciting with professions than just another elite spec, but that's not a big deal for me so I wont rant on that. If you made it this far you might be asking why I would bother writing this long post on the forums because no one cares. Mainly, it helps me organize my thoughts on the matter. It's also nice to get different perspectives.

I wonder how things would pan out in a death match mode. Stuff like decapping and holding node would have no value so duelist and roamers would less desirable but probably still useful to an extent. In all honestly I think think it would just turn into a mini-WvW style fight. Each team death balls as hard as they can and pelt AoE's at each other until someone goes down.

I'd like to see more resolution in warrior's kit as well to help against condi and make Hardened Armor actually somewhat useful. Tbh though I wish they would buff warrior in such a way that made them need boons less. One the of the attractive things about warrior to me is that I don't need many boons to be "effective". Leave that to the guards.

nb4 "this is just a noob stomper build" In all seriousness though, this kind of build shouldn't exist. Regardless of how "good" it is. If they do exist, it shouldn't be good in any way. Any kind of "ADC" build is not really suited for GW2 sPvP and that's more or less what this build is. For one, there is no skill involved in landing flamethrower autos, not to mention they're AoE. The other issue with this kind of build is that games where you have an "auto-attack" based class, they have a ramp up time before they're actually good. Late game they may just chew through people like a Gatling gun but in early-mid game they are low impact. That's what makes them balanced. Not so in GW2, you come out the gate blastin' This build is just good enough to be a pain in the kitten. Sure, higher tier play it'll get rolled but in your average matches it gets too much value for the zero effort it takes to play. As someone who personally doesn't have trouble fighting this build, I absolutely HATE having to do so and can see why people have trouble it with. #deleteflameengi

I would love a 1v1 game mode similar to the 2v2s. The main hurdle I see though is balance. With 2v2 you were able to cover each other's weaknesses to some extent. This would allow for you to play most professions somewhat viably, though there defiantly is a pretty small meta in 2v2 and not everything worked. In 1v1 you wouldn't be given that option so if you're matched against a profession that counters yours you're going to be at a pretty big disadvantage before the game starts, build aside. That'll probably lead too an even smaller number of professions/builds that are even playable, let alone meta. Even if Anet perfectly balanced professions for 1v1 death match they would be wildly unbalanced for 5v5's because the two modes are completely different with completely different goals. Thus why WvW and sPvP balance is split. I only see too good ways 1v1s could work well without just being a meme; Splitting the balance or only allowing profession on profession match ups (which wouldn't work for match making and is boring anyways). There may be some better way to handle this so feel free to expand on it. I didn't plan on going too deep into the if/how any of these ideas in this thread would work realistically but I'm really down for a 1v1 mode so I'm curious to discuss it.

I agree that stronghold needs to be revamped badly. I have no idea why they didn't make it more MOBA like. MOBA's formula are popular for a reason and I think they strayed wayyyy too far off of it trying to make it "unique". I think your suggestions are good ones overall.

As someone who enjoys theory crafting builds, this sounds super fun! Maybe instead of "limiting" though they just lock in skills/weapons. They choose 1 trait line (with traits), 1 weapon, and 1 skill that are locked in and you have to build around them. The "setup" maybe be themed or could be entirely incohesive. They might even add like a "bonus objective" that if you also play with a certain sigil/rune you get extra rewards when the match ends, if you win. There are a ton of ways they could do it bu I like this idea a lot.

They exist for a reason but that doesn't mean they serve their purpose well. Stats are not the win condition. You could sit on a side node and smack a fire weaver all game and get highest damage, but since he's holding the node their team wins. You could follow someone around all game being their healing bot and get top healing, but if you're not present in team fights you'll lose them and still lose the game. Stats are only really useful for your tracking your personal improvement. "Am I healing more? Am I doing more damage? Am I defending/decapping nodes better that I was?" In a single match they don't really mean much as they don't strongly relate to the win condition. A great roamer can win you a match but have very low stats in comparison to others while a tempest could fight mid all game, get all the stats, never die, and still lose the game for the team because they didn't go where they should. As far as ranks, they also don't really mean a whole lot. With as low as the player base is a lot of people fluctuate in rank wildly and often. I've had days of poor matching making where I've dropped to silver and I've had days of poor match making where I face rolled to plat. I've faced players in plat games that there was no way they were above silver. I've faced players in silver games that are way above that skill level. Rank is loosely tied to player skill but it is defiantly not the be-all-end-all in this game.