Suggestions For Preventing A Quickness Warrior Balance Nightmare In The Future

[Dadnir.5038]

3 minutes ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

Soldier's Focus already gives 3 stacks of might, so Core would have to give something else. Spellbreaker can already be easily reworked to grant defensive boons on Full Counter, just add resolution and make it an AoE application.

BSW's Overload Cartridges could handle Alacrity instead of being a clunky damage boost.

Lush Forest could have instead granted alacrity when using an explosion skill.

So, to me breaking Martial Cadence up by e-spec is less of an answer than just updating the e-specs for the roles.

Well, my main point is still that a core profession shouldn't be big on quickness or alacrity and making martial cadence a "floating" boon would be a solution to make things balanced without to many structural changes.

Sure the devs could make changes to each e-spec traitline and/or skills in order to accomodate a boon sharing role for each but, all in all, the thread is about the threat that so much quickness in the core profession create for balance and the fact that it would likely reduce futur options for the warrior (forcing warrior into specs that don't really feel different from each other).

It's not by leaving an issue alone and balancing around it that you fix the issue. From my point of view, banner of tactic's 5s of quickness is acceptable, the same goes for the 2s of quickness from charge however double standard and Martial cadence are things that cut off any path toward alacrity for the warrior due to the possibility of cumulating to many "roles" at the same time.

[Potato Slayer.3107]

12 hours ago, Kalthea.4326 said:

Alright, let's break this down.

 

It's more of the fact that other professions do quickness better with less investment in traits and utilities. Unique buffs were one of the only things warrior brought to the table, and that was removed so other alternatives are simply better by design. And this to your point you're right, some people just move on to the next "class."

 

14 hours ago, mandala.8507 said:

I've read the comments. I also play warrior regularly...

 

The discussion here is the current state of the warrior. Groups are going to get quickness one way or another.

 

The problem revolves around quickness being accessible in two traitlines one being support and one being essential for DPS with the assumption that warrior will always take discipline as it's mandatory for almost all current builds. It's a conflict of interests between two traitlines and unneeded redundancy. Two trait lines shouldn't be needed for quickness uptime. Either one keeps quickness and the other gets rid of it and replaced with its own concept, or make tactics the true support line with banners and replace discipline trait with its own appropriate concept.

 

There are still options without discipline, such as bladesworn stacking or berserker axe that don't require discipline or mainhand weapon swapping or burst cool down reduction by their choice of weaponry. These would see no change in their build from the tactics and discipline adjustment aside QoL while bringing other build options up to par with them in feasibility.

[Arewn.2368]

My assumption since the very beginning was that the release of a dedicated support elite spec on warrior would be accompanied by the gutting of current support options. So I don't think there will be a problem in this regarding.

 

To the rest, I would say quickness needs to be removed from banners altogether. Banners should be a free choice of flexible extra utility. In turn, quickness sources in the tactics line should be buffed.

The warhorn trait should work the same way as the banner trait currently functions. "Warhorn skills apply X seconds of quickness". This would be in addition to the current quickness on Charge.

Warhorn would be a main source of quickness for the build, which is an effective guard rail given the DPS loss of bringing and using warhorn.

Martial cadence would remain as-is. Or maybe slightly buffed.

 

I think the other problem is how viable Tactics currently is for dps. A buff to Arms and Discipline might help.

Edited November 4, 2022 by Arewn.2368

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

1 hour ago, Dadnir.5038 said:

Well, my main point is still that a core profession shouldn't be big on quickness or alacrity and making martial cadence a "floating" boon would be a solution to make things balanced without to many structural changes.

Sure the devs could make changes to each e-spec traitline and/or skills in order to accomodate a boon sharing role for each but, all in all, the thread is about the threat that so much quickness in the core profession create for balance and the fact that it would likely reduce futur options for the warrior (forcing warrior into specs that don't really feel different from each other).

It's not by leaving an issue alone and balancing around it that you fix the issue. From my point of view, banner of tactic's 5s of quickness is acceptable, the same goes for the 2s of quickness from charge however double standard and Martial cadence are things that cut off any path toward alacrity for the warrior due to the possibility of cumulating to many "roles" at the same time.

To me it's the quickness on Banner that will end up stifling anything. Warhorn and MC can cover it with an espec filling the rest in. Double Standards should give more unique boons/effects to the banners rather than just quickness as that just creates the problem where you use them for quickness on CD and no longer for their intended uses.

[Leo G.4501]

2 hours ago, Infusion.7149 said:

I don't understand why you take issue with what I wrote. Care to elaborate?

The original poster is claiming warrior would be a dominant quickness support if it gained a healing weapon.

There's a difference between a whole new elite spec and expansion (which would entail another large round of balance patches rather than hotfixes) compared to say a change to banners or spirits.

It's not about taking issue with what you said, it's about being open minded about issues, systematic, potential or otherwise.

 

If anyone is taking issue, it might be those making the argument against the OP. Instead of debating or engaging from a position of good faith, it's easy to rebut with characterizations of fear mongering. To me, I thought it was a decently worded concern. Do I agree with it? I dunno, I don't speedrun (I actually despise speedrunning and deliberate profession stacking) nor am I knowledgeable on the subject. And I bet it would suck to get nerfed for it. But that's neither here nor there. We'll see how the playing field shifts with the new philosophy.

[Azure The Heartless.3261]

20 minutes ago, Leo G.4501 said:

It's not about taking issue with what you said, it's about being open minded about issues, systematic, potential or otherwise.

 

If anyone is taking issue, it might be those making the argument against the OP. Instead of debating or engaging from a position of good faith, it's easy to rebut with characterizations of fear mongering. To me, I thought it was a decently worded concern. Do I agree with it? I dunno, I don't speedrun (I actually despise speedrunning and deliberate profession stacking) nor am I knowledgeable on the subject. And I bet it would suck to get nerfed for it. But that's neither here nor there. We'll see how the playing field shifts with the new philosophy.

It may have been decently worded, but prose means nothing if the concern it addresses is non-existent, or suggests action be taken immediately for reasons that not only don't exist now, but have to come into existence in a specific way to justify the action with no indication that will happen.

Debate without a point is useless. 

Edited November 4, 2022 by Azure The Heartless.3261

[Infusion.7149]

7 minutes ago, Leo G.4501 said:

It's not about taking issue with what you said, it's about being open minded about issues, systematic, potential or otherwise.

 

If anyone is taking issue, it might be those making the argument against the OP. Instead of debating or engaging from a position of good faith, it's easy to rebut with characterizations of fear mongering. To me, I thought it was a decently worded concern. Do I agree with it? I dunno, I don't speedrun (I actually despise speedrunning and deliberate profession stacking) nor am I knowledgeable on the subject. And I bet it would suck to get nerfed for it. But that's neither here nor there. We'll see how the playing field shifts with the new philosophy.

The February 2020 balance patch is a perfect example of what I mean by balancing on not what is but what "could be".
Nearly all CC had its damage removed. CC on warrior was pre-balanced via huge tells, melee range, and a variety of other factors such as conditionals (burst skills especially).

Being open-minded would also mean taking into account that if a future spec were to introduce possible issues (which would mainly involve alacrity and not heals as suggested above) that a follow-up balance patch for that expansion would occur. All potentially game breaking (as opposed to overperforming) aspects are addressed nearly immediately: see when elementalist damage was bugged and it was doing far more damage with strength runes; weaver getting barrier on autoattacks instead of dual attacks; breaching strike or other burst skills on spellbreakers doing actual damage instead of 0.01 coefficient.

The new warrior spec (assuming Arenanet even adds elite specs) would have to do well over 20K DPS if it were to be used as a quickness DPS based off existing performance and of the past years, original poster is stating 25-27K is "too much" (for condi quick no less) in their opinion. 

If the suggestion were instead to narrow quickness down to one trait (Martial Cadence , but without a hit requirement) and one traited skill (warhorn) instead of having it spread out among discipline (Doubled Standards) and tactics I would have been on board with that maybe. Instead there is a request for a straight up nerf instead of a redistribution.

TL;DR: is having quickness on so many things (trait/skills) on warrior good? No. Is it broken right now? No.

[Kalthea.4326]

2 hours ago, Potato Slayer.3107 said:

It's more of the fact that other professions do quickness better with less investment in traits and utilities. Unique buffs were one of the only things warrior brought to the table, and that was removed so other alternatives are simply better by design. And this to your point you're right, some people just move on to the next "class."

I brought up the tradeoffs in response to warriors not having any guardrails, and other classes doing it better the end of my reply. My point about the speedrunners was just that they don't care what the balance is, they will always find the fastest and easiest way to finish content.

[Potato Slayer.3107]

28 minutes ago, Kalthea.4326 said:

I brought up the tradeoffs in response to warriors not having any guardrails, and other classes doing it better the end of my reply. My point about the speedrunners was just that they don't care what the balance is, they will always find the fastest and easiest way to finish content.

It's less about guardrails and more of unnecessary overlap of functions between utilities and traits between two separate traitlines. Either or, tactics or discipline, should be the single traitline for 100% quickness. Needing both shouldn't be a requirement, nor should one take up your whole utility bar to do so. Having either traitlines as an option on core doesn't mean no guardrails no matter what other "what if" elite spec you're thinking of. Firebrand afterall can already heal, DPS, quickness and provide stab all in one build. 

 

It's a bigger problem of utilities (banners) and necessary core traitlines (double standards, fast hands) pigeonholing the majority of warrior builds. Them being core just allows quickness/espec builds.

[Kalthea.4326]

2 hours ago, Potato Slayer.3107 said:

It's less about guardrails and more of unnecessary overlap of functions between utilities and traits between two separate traitlines. Either or, tactics or discipline, should be the single traitline for 100% quickness. Needing both shouldn't be a requirement, nor should one take up your whole utility bar to do so. Having either traitlines as an option on core doesn't mean no guardrails no matter what other "what if" elite spec you're thinking of. Firebrand afterall can already heal, DPS, quickness and provide stab all in one build. 

 

It's a bigger problem of utilities (banners) and necessary core traitlines (double standards, fast hands) pigeonholing the majority of warrior builds. Them being core just allows quickness/espec builds.

Well, yeah, we agree on that. I was just pointing out that I had mentioned it in response to OP.

[Shadowpeixera.2918]

8 hours ago, Leo G.4501 said:

It's not about taking issue with what you said, it's about being open minded about issues, systematic, potential or otherwise.

 

If anyone is taking issue, it might be those making the argument against the OP. Instead of debating or engaging from a position of good faith, it's easy to rebut with characterizations of fear mongering. To me, I thought it was a decently worded concern. Do I agree with it? I dunno, I don't speedrun (I actually despise speedrunning and deliberate profession stacking) nor am I knowledgeable on the subject. And I bet it would suck to get nerfed for it. But that's neither here nor there. We'll see how the playing field shifts with the new philosophy.

Who does debating Warrior in hypoteticals help? Certainly not Warriors.

We need people to have MORE notion of the class on a realistic field, not less. It's this conceptual discussion that has kept Warrior in the dust for so long: Debating Warrion on a camp of ideas that doesn't illustrate Warrior on the camp of how the class actually performs.

We can argue that Warriors will overperform if a support spec comes all day long. We could also debate if the next spec is a Archangel that gives our burst the ability to fly like a skyscale and i think that warrants a nerf to Bull Rush because vertical mobility is broken and Peak Performance and Physical utilities will make the Archangel spec too broken. What purpose does that serve?

[JTGuevara.9018]

On 11/3/2022 at 5:37 AM, mandala.8507 said:

After theory crafting quickness warrior to death, playing it in all kinds of content, and engaging in discourse via various public channels with the community, I've come to realize that quickness warrior is very strong and the only things preventing it from being incredibly overpowered are that dps warrior classes (besides bladesworn) are rather weak in most encounters and that neither core warrior nor any of warrior's elite specs have access to meaningful group support (without a huge dps loss). If the next elite specialization for warrior ends up being a heal support (which I think is practically a must at this point; I would be massively underwhelmed if none of warrior's 4 elite specs had the ability to be a viable healer), that specialization will be obnoxiously strong, adaptable, and versatile.

Let me explain the problems that exist with the current state of quickness on warrior, then I'll go into why this will be an issue for the future if it isn't tackled early on in development for the next elite specialization:

First off, warrior has far too much access to quickness.

Martial Cadence in the tactics line gives 3 seconds of quickness every 10 seconds. (0.3/1)

Warhorn gives 2 seconds every 16 seconds with alacrity. (0.125/1)

Banner of Tactics gives 12 seconds every 24 seconds with alacrity and double standards. (0.5/1)

You can then run up to 2 more banners for 14 seconds every 24 seconds with alacrity and double standards in total. (0.5833/1)

And you can add Battle Standard for the least impactful addition of 7 seconds every 96 seconds with alacrity and double standards. (0.0729/1)

In total, that gives you 1.58125 seconds of quickness for every 1 second with no boon duration.

With 100% additional boon duration, you get a whopping 3.1625 seconds of quickness every 1 second.

In warrior's current state, this luckily isn't a massive issue. All viable warrior builds in group content must deal dps, and so running all these quickness sources at once is a no go. But despite this, you're still seeing this vast assortment of quickness sources becoming problematic in the speedrunning scene. Pretty much every 10-man speedclear record I've seen since EoD launch has utilized bladesworn stacking (which allows them to stack the quickness from Martial Cadence and thus not require any actual quickness support) and a lot of the recent low-man records have been shattered using quickness berserker. Even the spellbreaker build has seen some viability in speedruns.

Unfortunately, this strength in speedruns isn't translatable to regular group clears, and so warrior is sitting at a really low playrate across all builds (even bladesworn) while being what I would consider dominant in the speedrun meta.

Therefore, if warrior's lackluster popularity with the general playerbase were to be addressed and additional strength added to the dps builds to fix this, you'd see the speedrun meta become entirely consumed by warriors.

So, why is this?

The best way I can phrase it is that quickness on warrior lacks guardrails. Alternatively, you could say that there are no meaningful tradeoffs in order to provide quickness uptime on warrior. 

Bladesworns lose nothing for taking Martial Cadence, so they can stack quickness that way, and this helps mitigate the loss of damage from their very valuable utility skills if they choose to run banners and be the sole quickness provider.

Berserker and Spellbreaker won't take Martial Cadence, but because quickness uptime on banners with double standards is so plentiful, it isn't a tradeoff in any way to take double standards over the other traits of its same tier and the Discipline traitline is a staple of both condi and power dps warrior builds. Sometimes I just leave double standards selected when I play dps warrior because it's of very little value to actually swap off of it and risk forgetting to reselect it for a future quick warrior pull.

Even core warrior can keep 100% uptime on quickness with just 2 banners and no concentration gear while hitting over 20K dps.

Every single quickness warrior build is right on the cusp of being overpowered. And the only protections against this inevitability are warrior's void of group support outside of banners and its lackluster (compared to the high end of the meta) dps on most encounters (besides bladesworn).

When a heal support elite spec is added, these protections will melt away and that class will break the meta.

Additionally, if there is a viable dps build that comes along with this elite spec that offers more utility, that build will also break the meta.

So, here are my suggestions for addressing this problem before it hits the live servers and for halting the abuse of quick warrior in speedclears:

1. Lower the quickness value on Martial Cadence or remove it all together. This addition has become redundant after the massive buffs to banners, and so allowing it to continue to corrupt the state of the speedrun meta and thus prevent buffs to any warrior specs for fear of inundating that scene with warrior records is something that should be done sooner rather than later. I would honestly hotfix it from 3 seconds to 2 seconds of quickness tomorrow. The only people affected by this would be speedrunners and I think some of them might be grateful not to be chained to bladesworn anymore.

2. Add guardrails to banner warrior by lowering the quickness duration on double standards. I know, nerfing quick warrior seems like an blunder, but I promise this change wouldn't be that impactful to the health of the quickness builds and it would allow you to safely add power to the pure dps builds without breaking the game. My advice is changing it from 7 seconds per banner to 6 seconds per banner. The goal I had in mind when deciding upon that number was moving the quickness duration requirements on condi quick berserker from 140% boon duration to 160% boon duration (with 2 banners). 

I even went ahead and "benched" (did 1 golem pull each of) this change:

• The current meta condi quickness berserker build with full vipers and 140% boon duration I got 26.9k.
• The same build but with full ritualist's armor, a ritualist's backpiece (purple privilege), and a ritualist's amulet (putting me at 160.33% boon duration) I got 24.8k. 

This build would still be incredibly strong and interestingly very tanky (I had almost 27k hp), but it would allow you to safely add power back into warrior as a whole.

Trust me, if you buff any currently viable warrior dps build without making this change, quick warrior will be busted.

On top of this, I've done a lot of thinking about heal warrior and I see no way for a future heal warrior elite spec to be both balanced, mechanically engaging, and fun without nerfing these numbers on the banners. Even if you think I'm crazy to suggest this change for the current state of the game, I'm begging you not to release a heal elite spec without considering how easy it will be to give quickness on since you no longer have to worry about dmg output. Wahorn is unironically god-tier as a support weapon, warrior just doesn't have the means to support yet. When it does, the combination of the tactics traitline, warhorn, shouts, and banners will give warrior the most adaptable quickness heal support in the game imo.

Anyway, just thought I'd try to be helpful and give my advice for keeping the future balance panic to a minimum. Thanks for reading!

Hah! I just had to answer to this thread.

OP, your argument would be iron-clad except for one fatal flaw: the hypothetical situation with warrior and quickness already exists with guardian.

Guardian farts out boons(never mind quickness!) with almost no effort. Let's say your scenario DOES become true. Then all that means is that warrior would be top-tier in something in pve! I rest my case.

[Potato Slayer.3107]

1 hour ago, Shadowpeixera.2918 said:

Who does debating Warrior in hypoteticals help? Certainly not Warriors.

We need people to have MORE notion of the class on a realistic field, not less. It's this conceptual discussion that has kept Warrior in the dust for so long: Debating Warrion on a camp of ideas that doesn't illustrate Warrior on the camp of how the class actually performs.

We can argue that Warriors will overperform if a support spec comes all day long. We could also debate if the next spec is a Archangel that gives our burst the ability to fly like a skyscale and i think that warrants a nerf to Bull Rush because vertical mobility is broken and Peak Performance and Physical utilities will make the Archangel spec too broken. What purpose does that serve?

Yes, we should be debating with our fists!