Is warrior is way too unpopular on GW2?

[Zekent.3652]

Warrior, one of the most popular classes for RPGs/MMORPGs, is barely being seen on GW2, despite having:

PvE:
-Condi quick berserker: the BEST damaging quickness dps build of the entire game.
-Bladesworn: the BEST power dps spec.
-Spellbreaker: doing a good dps and very welcoming for people that wants to get into warrior on PvE.

PvP: 
-2020 patch really affected this class.
-Warrior doesn't feels rewarded for how telegraphed it is, when you're casting your skill, your enemy already used 2, moved away and on it's way to cast another thing with even lower effort in general.
-Copium disappeared pretty fast, from a lot and coming back players (who've believed that lol) trying their main buffs on pvp to very few, the class is better, but still needs more polish, specially on bladesworn and berserker.

WvW:
-Clearly not what used to be, but in my experience, i've seen some on zergs on NA (like 2 or 3 max per squad), not sure about EU.
-Still one of the worst classes for roamming (and used to be one of the bests), the warrior roamming population went pretty low after 2020 patch.
 

Edited November 3, 2022 by Zizekent.2398

[Zekent.3652]

And the class still have a lot of dmg reduction bugs:

 

Edited November 2, 2022 by Zizekent.2398

[Shinja.3451]

You can't see them as roaming when there are literally things that instantly teleport 1200 away or attack you from even further away with exaggerated damage, even on attacks you can't even see or react to and on top of that there are things like the ele that they can be spinning around you while attacking and putting constant control effects, you just have to take builds to deal with them and they will still mean an absurd problem and you will lose a number of equally absurd things, currently it seems like a bad meme.

[Shinichi Megure.8061]

Cannot blame anyone for not playing warrior the class is in a bad state at least for the fun part as far as i know.. As others said before all 3 specs have the same role no diversity. Also the patches have little to no impact like the last patch turned berserker into a bruiser the same role as spellbreaker and killing the burst ascpect of the class...

Futher many utility and traits re straight up useless or outdated like throw bolas, kick and many others..

No flexibility on traitlines since discpline is mandatory for many builds and most traits have a boring or bad design.

The new elite spec is a missed chance but i don't have eod so i can only talk about it from videos or playing against it in pvp. The design of not moving is not realy good as others said. The skill animations of bladesworn re so obvious and slow easy to dodge or kite around. The only interesting aspect is the charging up attack but it can't even one shot or be a threat. When fighting a bladesworn i don't feel threatened by it at all if u compare it with other classes specs it's realy lacking good skill combination and design.

Edited November 3, 2022 by Shinichi Megure.8061

[Fueki.4753]

Unless Arenanet releases official statistics, we literally have no information on the popularity of any profession.

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

56 minutes ago, Fueki.4753 said:

Unless Arenanet releases official statistics, we literally have no information on the popularity of any profession.

We have player reported stats from wingman at least and the MAT representation.

[Fueki.4753]

45 minutes ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

We have player reported stats from wingman at least and the MAT representation.

But these are neither representative of the playerbase, nor vertical slices of it.

The majority of the playerbase doesn't interact with axillary websites and tools and likely don't even post on the forums. How can some third party measure any semblance of popularity, when they don't have access to the biggest portions of the playerbase?

For all we know (which practically is nothing) Warrior could be incredibly popular among the silent masses.

Edited November 3, 2022 by Fueki.4753

[Obtena.7952]

1 hour ago, Fueki.4753 said:

But these are neither representative of the playerbase, nor vertical slices of it.

The majority of the playerbase doesn't interact with axillary websites and tools and likely don't even post on the forums. How can some third party measure any semblance of popularity, when they don't have access to the biggest portions of the playerbase?

For all we know (which practically is nothing) Warrior could be incredibly popular among the silent masses.

I suspect it is popular because:

1. it's a very easy class to play in the 'bad' to 'average' range of performance.  

2. it's as archetypical a class you can get in an MMO

3. it's got lots of choices for people to play how they want with many weapons

The problem with threads like this one is that the person making the assertion it's unpopular is assuming a significant fraction of people are using criteria to make class choices that would dissuade them from choosing Warrior. They can't imagine the reasons they think warrior is unpopular may actually not be all that significant to most players. 

Edited November 3, 2022 by Obtena.7952

[Zekent.3652]

4 hours ago, Fueki.4753 said:

Unless Arenanet releases official statistics, we literally have no information on the popularity of any profession.

Thousands of hours in this game playing raids, strikes, wvw, pvp, all 3 gamemodes, there are just less warriors, clearly not what used to, and as said on post, PvE warrior is in a good state, yet you barely see a dps Bladesworn or a Warrior as qdps for fractals, raids, strikes. Despite how good those builds are, literally at the top.

Edited November 3, 2022 by Zizekent.2398

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

5 minutes ago, Zizekent.2398 said:

Thousands of hours in this game playing raids, strikes, wvw, pvp, all 3 gamemodes, there are just less warriors, clearly not what used to, and as said on post, PvE warrior is in a good state, yet you barely see a dps Bladesworn or a Warrior as qdps for fractals, raids, strikes. Despite how good those roles are, literally on at the top.

I think I see three warriors total in each of the EoD metas I run daily, and that includes me. Mechs? about 13-15 of them pretty consistently.  Lots of Virts and FBs too.

[Shadowpeixera.2918]

I think both reasonings can be correct: Only Anet knows the numbers, and even on that level, player perception can be somewhat of a factor, albeit anedoctal to realize popularity.

Like, i don't think Warrior has anything wrong with it, if anything, everytime i think about rerolling, i just find myself satisfied with my little Asura. But at the same time it's undeniable at least to me that there's a wave of mechanists, firebrands and such. I think these classes trivialize the game to a point where most people want them as mains or FoTM to simply make things more efficient.

I've been annoyed with the mechs cluttering my screen more times than i can count.

[felix.2386]

19 hours ago, Fueki.4753 said:

But these are neither representative of the playerbase, nor vertical slices of it.

The majority of the playerbase doesn't interact with axillary websites and tools and likely don't even post on the forums. How can some third party measure any semblance of popularity, when they don't have access to the biggest portions of the playerbase?

For all we know (which practically is nothing) Warrior could be incredibly popular among the silent masses.

How are these not representative of the playerbase.

GW2efficiency is more then enough to have a general grasp of overall player base behavior.

Like seriously, wow warrior might be so popular around those lv56 players who did not even finish core story line and have green/blue gears and only play a few hours every 2 months.

but do you really need those players to know anything about gw2 at all to form any real opinion about the game?

 

no. it's the guys who have multiple lvl80s, full ascended gears and invested in the game and who 95%+ the times also put API on gw2efficiency, who play all kind of lv80 contents/end game content/pvp/wvw and have a choice between different lvl80 classes

and among these players, warrior has literally the bottom play time.

yes. that's more then enough.

 

i'm not sure if you noticed, on twitch gw2 stream, there's been 0 warrior for a long time, till steam release, suddenly quiet a few warrior pop up then every single gw2 stream with a warrior in it are literally below 80 and doing core story or some dungeon stuff lol and what happens with these warriors after they reach end game? they are switching class like all the invested guys on gw2eff or wingman, because that's exactly what's showing to us, or they simply quit.

also most likely the recent heavy focus on warrior because they saw the numbers, but yea not like those patches really worked out much.

Edited November 4, 2022 by felix.2386

[Azure The Heartless.3261]

28 minutes ago, felix.2386 said:

How are these not representative of the playerbase.

GW2efficiency is more then enough to have a general grasp of overall player base behavior.

Like seriously, wow warrior might be so popular around those lv56 players who did not even finish core story line and have green/blue gears and only play a few hours every 2 months.

but do you really need those players to know anything about gw2 at all to form any real opinion about the game?

 

no. it's the guys who have multiple lvl80s, full ascended gears and invested in the game and who 95%+ the times also put API on gw2efficiency, who play all kind of lv80 contents/end game content/pvp/wvw and have a choice between different lvl80 classes

and among these players, warrior has literally the bottom play time.

yes. that's more then enough.

 

 

This. There may indeed be a large portion of individuals who have very basic grasp of the game mechanics and swing warrior GS at moa because it's animated beautifully, or started playing because they always pick the big sword guy in video games, but if you're looking for data that matters, your trends should come from the people serious enough to gear out and throw their warriors at some of the most challenging content the game has to offer. Even if they all had to opt into divulging that data, it's still reliable and there's enough individual data points that the large picture can tell us useful things about how people feel about the classes they play.

 

Balancing entire classes around the top 0.1% is destructive, but so is balancing (or failing to balance) based on the presumed existence of some unseen mass of players that all happen to hold the position contrary to what the data we have shows, that will somehow be negatively impacted by buffs. 

Edited November 4, 2022 by Azure The Heartless.3261

[DaniTheHero.6318]

On 11/3/2022 at 12:39 AM, Zizekent.2398 said:

Warrior, one of the most popular classes for RPGs/MMORPGs, is barely being seen on GW2, despite having:

PvE:
-Condi quick berserker: the BEST damaging quickness dps build of the entire game.
-Bladesworn: the BEST power dps spec.
-Spellbreaker: doing a good dps and very welcoming for people that wants to get into warrior on PvE.
 

- What objective reason is there to play Condi Berserker instead of Condi Virtouso, other than hating pink?
if we only consider Instanced PVE, since in Open world "anything goes", The most popular healer in the game will be a quickness provider anyways.
If anything it's a travesty Power Berserker has been gutted so much. Is not only the most fun warrior to play, but also the only thing close to Li warrior has.
 

-On paper? Sure. Highest potentional DPS.
In reality? One of the hardest and most punishing class to play in the game, if not THE.
A kit that is pretty much built around a single big hit move which is Melee, highly telegraphed, has to be charged while being immobile, easily distrupted (and avoided). A lot of content isn't even viable for Bladesworn, which is already a problem when you have to swap to something else if you're doing certain encounters, when other classes don't need to do that.
There's a reason why barely any people play it if you look at the overall playerbase, other than the ultra min/maxing  of the veteran population. Even on Wingman and other sites that provide statistics, where usually people who at the very least aren't casual interact with,  Bladesworn is less popular than even Daredevil. less than 2%.

 

-There's plenty of "decently average" and "welcoming" things to play that would be far more useful and diverse down the line.
Saying "well X isn't TERRIBLE, so there isn't an issue" isn't much of an argument.

It's not just the lack of safety, numbers or ease. It's also the lack of diveristy of play.
Core warrior is a warrior, Spellbreaker is a warrior, Beserker is a warrior, bladesworn is a warrior. There's no real diversity of play.

Core warrior Spellbreaker and Berserker practically have the exact same gameplay, GS + Axe with certain variations and slight adjusments in rotations.
Also No healer build, no alacrity build, no real tank build.  Just DPS/qDPS, while others do higher numbers, more easily achieved, and have the options to do other things.
That's across 4 version of the class.

Edited November 4, 2022 by DaniTheHero.6318

[Peacekid.1463]

warriors = a class with TOO MUCH EFFORT

[Fueki.4753]

7 hours ago, felix.2386 said:

How are these not representative of the playerbase.

GW2efficiency is more then enough to have a general grasp of overall player base behavior.

Things like that are opt-in third party tools not just by the large majority of people. And given the name of this example, its user base is biased towards efficiency, thus the statistics largely ignore every other type of player who didn't care to opt-in to that third party. And if large chunks of the player base are mostly not present, it doesn't make a for decent representative statistic.

That's why only official statistics, including all kinds of players (which I doubt Arenanet will ever release), can theoretically be used to make semi-accurate assumptions about popularity. Every other statistic is too biased for that.

7 hours ago, Azure The Heartless.3261 said:

This. There may indeed be a large portion of individuals who have very basic grasp of the game mechanics and swing warrior GS at moa because it's animated beautifully, or started playing because they always pick the big sword guy in video games, but if you're looking for data that matters, your trends should come from the people serious enough to gear out and throw their warriors at some of the most challenging content the game has to offer. Even if they all had to opt into divulging that data, it's still reliable and there's enough individual data points that the large picture can tell us useful things about how people feel about the classes they play.

Your "data that matters" only matters to a small subgroup of the entire players base and is data that's solely compiled based on that small subgroup. This means it literally ignores everyone else (who happen to be the majority of the playerbase). This means, these statistics only show a profession's popularity within said small subgroup, making the statistics effectively pointless when looking at the popularity among the entire playerbase.

Edited November 4, 2022 by Fueki.4753

[Jzaku.9765]

2 hours ago, Fueki.4753 said:

Things like that are opt-in third party tools not just by the large majority of people. And given the name of this example, its user base is biased towards efficiency, thus the statistics largely ignore every other type of player who didn't care to opt-in to that third party. And if large chunks of the player base are mostly not present, it doesn't make a for decent representative statistic.

That's why only official statistics, including all kinds of players (which I doubt Arenanet will ever release), can theoretically be used to make semi-accurate assumptions about popularity. Every other statistic is too biased for that.

Your "data that matters" only matters to a small subgroup of the entire players base and is data that's solely compiled based on that small subgroup. This means it literally ignores everyone else (who happen to be the majority of the playerbase). This means, these statistics only show a profession's popularity within said small subgroup, making the statistics effectively pointless when looking at the popularity among the entire playerbase.

I'm curious what you would think of a hypothetical situation where a class is insanely popular in open world but sees sub 1% play rate literally everywhere else (endgame PVE/PVP/WvW). That would be a class that looks like it's perfectly balanced across all kinds of players (among the entire playerbase) but clearly something is wrong. It's far more relevant to look at the overall popularity of a class through a combination of the areas of play in the game.

Regardless, you are lowballing the accuracy of GW2Wingman statistics. You don't have to engage in the Website at all to be part of the statistics it gathers, merely in the same squad as someone who does. And considering a squad is 10 people, it should not be too far off an accurate representation of the endgame PVE playerbase. 

[felix.2386]

4 hours ago, Fueki.4753 said:

Things like that are opt-in third party tools not just by the large majority of people. And given the name of this example, its user base is biased towards efficiency, thus the statistics largely ignore every other type of player who didn't care to opt-in to that third party. And if large chunks of the player base are mostly not present, it doesn't make a for decent representative statistic.

 

You did not read anything i just said but only the first sentence didn't you.

so funny.

[eXruina.4956]

capabilities aside i think warrior is very popular, it would probably be one of the top 3 options for many new players, just thematically considering.

Edited November 4, 2022 by eXruina.4956

[draxynnic.3719]

I have to admit to feeling some dark amusement when people base their arguments over the idea that the silent majority might be happy with something a 'vocal minority' is complaining about, without taking into account the possibility that the silent majority might be silently voting with their proverbial feet. It's basically an appeal to popularity fallacy, except without even demonstrating that their side is popular in the first place, but instead relying on the lack of data meaning that the other side can't prove that the majority doesn't agree with them, making it a burden of proof fallacy nested inside of an appeal to popularity fallacy.

Yes, Wingman and the like is a biased sample. But it's biased towards the people who actually know and care about the balance state of what they play. And while the numbers might not be precisely accurate across the whole player base, they do seem to at least approximately carry through into what you see in open world squads (and you're setting a pretty low bar if "joins squads for open world metas" is where you deem something to be toxic elitist territory).

The question is - how much of it is for performance reasons, and how much of it is because warrior as designed in GW2 is more of a niche profession in who it appeals to? The two situations would have different responses (although one could certainly help with the other), and in the latter case a question could legitimately be raised as to whether it should be addressed.

One thing that I'd probably be inclined to keep an eye on, if I was going to do a study of such things, is how many people start out as warrior, try something else before they get to elite specialisations, and switch over to having that something else as a main? Because I think there is a degree to which, compared to, say, GW1 warrior or the Diablo barbarian, core warrior does seem to lack a degree of spice compared to the other professions. Other professions have various crazy things they can do, while core warrior has... they can charge up adrenaline to use a really powerful attack when a trash mob is likely already dead, most of their weapon skills are relatively mundane, and the majority of their utility skills are simply buffs. The elite specialisations help with this, but that requires getting to that point. Now, there's a degree to which you expect a lot of warrior skills to be various forms of "I hit you really hard with a big weapon", but I do wonder how many people might switch away from warrior for that reason.

[prototypedragon.1406]

Honestly besides the old Hammer damage and the ancient  warrior fall damage reduction skill that would send enemies flying in world versus world. Core warrior is still missing fun things that were greedily taken away from world versus world. Along with many things that could make warrior a more enjoyable class 2 play and stop them from going the way of unicorns.  Dual swords could be more of a countering weapon set while doing it's mix of condition and power damage . Shield could even proc barrier upon hitting a enemy with shield bash while stunning them. It seems odd that anet removed our one trait that converts our toughness into power damage as well🤔 even though our damage was already barely useable against protection spam. Instead of coupling it into a passive trait instead. Along with increasing warrior shield's 5 block skill's cooldown for some odd reason. Having a functioning shield is kinda a variant of being iconic for a warrior no?🤔

[prototypedragon.1406]

Plus shouts had their adrenaline generation removed entirely long ago as well which they kinda made perma adrenaline. But as warriors wouldn't it make more sense if all of our skills gave us adrenaline if not slightly more?🤔 Fight or flight not crawl or walk I believe. As a class that is use to battle one would think adrenaline would be instant someone swings a sword at you one would not just sit there and get hit with it as a warrior.  Since many patches over the years it feels that anet views warriors as caveman instead of what they should be " Adrenaline Filled Fighters" nigh Adrenaline Starved.

[draxynnic.3719]

5 minutes ago, prototypedragon.1406 said:

Plus shouts had their adrenaline generation removed entirely long ago as well which they kinda made perma adrenaline. But as warriors wouldn't it make more sense if all of our skills gave us adrenaline if not slightly more?🤔 Fight or flight not crawl or walk I believe. As a class that is use to battle one would think adrenaline would be instant someone swings a sword at you one would not just sit there and get hit with it as a warrior.  Since many patches over the years it feels that anet views warriors as caveman instead of what they should be " Adrenaline Filled Fighters" nigh Adrenaline Starved.

One of the things I was thinking is that in GW1, adrenaline did generate a more active style overall than it does with core GW2 warrior. Largely because you'd have a variety of skills on your bar, each tracking adrenaline individually, and likely requiring different amounts of adrenaline to use. So it created a system where, if you built your bar appropriately, you'd constantly be having more adrenaline skills coming up to be used in between more conventional skills. While in GW2 it's one skill per weapon and adrenaline is tracked globally so spending adrenaline on one means not having it for the other (well, outside of the gain-adrenaline-on-swap trait, anyway).

It's somewhat notable that all of the elite specialisations modify the core adrenaline system with the effect of making them able to be used more often, but I do wonder if warrior would have been better off if they stuck to the GW1 adrenaline system and used adrenaline for weapon skills instead of recharge.

[Grand Marshal.4098]

Warrior sucks in comp that's about it.

[DanAlcedo.3281]

Well. Its was the only class in Gw2 History that was unironically dead in all 3 gamemode at one point.