Joko's support warrior rebalancing

[ZeftheWicked.3076]

Greetings fellow warrior enjoyers! ..and sunspear dogs.

As Joko the Insightful was looking into july 27th warrior patch notes, he could not help but to notice that while the main goals of patch were achieved (no more quickness on core, alac for bladesworn), some changes aren't clearly well thought out.
Being the magnanimous incarnation of benevolent wisdom that Joko is, he has come to grace you all with his proposal of support warrior rebalancing.

A Tactical problem

Changes done to tactics in upcoming patch are in Joko's opinion rushed and poorly planned.
This is evident in new Martial Cadence trait - linking a reactive boon (stability) to a proactive mechanic (bursts).
Warrior who picks this will either waste stab in order to keep his normal dps rotation going, or butcher his dps,
so that the stability proc from Soldier's Focus can be used a the right moment. This design clearly contradicts itself and warrior's general flow.

Joko is also quite unsure about protection added to soldier's comfort.
Warrior's identity is that of an offensive soldier profession, which was expressed in near non-existant access to protection boon.
While one might argue his access to resolution (now for party), the latter does make sense - warriors hate foul play.
Conditions are by all means underhanded, while getting bonked on the head by enemy is simply you getting outplayed.

A Tactical solution:

With these in mind Joko proposes the following changes to tactics line:

1. Martial Cadence - you are now in permanent state of soldier's focus. Grant swiftness and fury to allies when expanding soldier's focus.

This change removes 10s icd from the marching orders, meaning that soldier's focus is triggered every time you land a burst (at cost of selecting this grandmaster trait).
When landing a burst on enemy you obviously want offensive, combat boons. But due to cooldown being now gated only by bursts (which are quite frequent for berserker and spellbreaker), the boons applied are much more ..tame.
In return however, a strong healing option emerges. Soldier's comfort that can be procced even once every 3.5s is a real option for a dedicated healer warrior.

2. Soldier's Comfort - protection boon removed.

Due to the above change application of prot to party may get outta hand.
And Warrior isn't a profession that should be overflowing with party protection.

3. Vigorous Shouts - renamed to Lungs of Iron.
Your shouts and warhorn skills heal nearby allies. Warhorn skills now grant protection. Gain healing power based on your vitality.

Vigrous Shouts (especially after shout cd reduction becoming baseline) are not worthy of grandmaster tier. This change expands their use cases to warhorn skills as well (which is a supportive offhand), and also moves the lost protection from Soldier's Comfort into much more predictable and reactionary warhorn skills.
Lastly healing power scaling from power was ignoring possibility of condi zerker supports that want to heal allies as well.
Vitality is a much more build agnostic stat that also makes logical sense since you need good constitution to yell your lungs out 😉

 

Edited June 22, 2023 by ZeftheWicked.3076

[Grand Marshal.4098]

Phalanx Strength desperately needs a buff to compete as well.

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

Marching Orders should not have an ICD by default. Granting 3 might to allies in an AoE why using a profession mechanic should itself never have had a CD.

If warrior is to have a support role then it needs the boon access to do so. Protection on Soldier's Comfort is fine considering we are getting resolution on banners. Soldier's Comfort, like Marching Orders, being keyed off of the profession mechanic also shouldn't have an ICD but should have scaling based on adrenaline spent on both the healing and the protection duration. This can be balanced with the warrior receiving less healing and protection than what they grant to allies.

With Martial Cadence you are completely correct that putting stability on our profession mechanic forces the warrior to use it for support rather than damage. That isn't necessarily wrong. A warrior isn't just a brute, a warrior can also be a tactician and commander. What Tactics is doing, poorly due to bad design, is to push the use of the burst as a support mechanism rather than a damage mechanism. Anet is doing this poorly because they are still trying to keep both roles, damage and support, there when Tactics should instead be about building up Bursts as support abilities rather than as damage abilities. I'd rather MC not have an ICD and have a short duration stability on it in all game modes, again keying off of adrenaline being spent rather than having to hit something, and again becoming stronger based on the amount spent.

I think that last part needs to be emphasized more. Tactics should be about turning the Burst mechanic into a support mechanic rather than a damage mechanic. This could be done by adding a damage (condi and strike) penalty to Soldier's Comfort and Martial Cadence to justify adding more support into these two traits, or possible a third trait in the Master tier. If that happens then the traits within Tactics that activate when using the Burst mechanic should be allowed to be activated without requiring a target to be hit. Loading so much of our support onto requiring a strike to connect severely limits how effective our support abilities could be.

[Imperial.8471]

Interesting ideas, I like the Lungs of Iron. But I can see a problem with the permanent Soldier's Focus. Combine it with Empower Allies, Phalanx Strengh and Mending Might and a Decapitate berserker becomes unkillable. While a healer warrior would still be stuck choosing between the new Martial Cadence and heal from Soldier's Comfort, or Lungs of Iron and heal + prot from shouts and warhorn

Also, what would replace the current warhorn trait Roaring Reveille if it's merged with Vigorous Shouts ?

[Jzaku.9765]

I appreciate that you've put the thought into presenting the problem you have identified, and the corresponding solution. 

I agree with the first problem you have presented - that a reactive boon like Stability being attached to a proactive mechanic like Burst is a dramatic mismatch. If we widen the scope of what we're looking at, the very concept of Shout Healing falls into this category as well, which is a significant factor in why it's never been good. Whatever happened to Purity of Purpose? 

As for the Protection flavour mismatch - I would agree with you, if we lived in a world where I could dream of a defensive support Elite Specialization on the horizon where they could slap Protection onto. As things stand now, short of a dramatic rework of Spellbreaker to the point of practically being a new Elite Spec (extremely unlikely), Protection has to go on Warrior somewhere to give it parity to all the other classes.

As for your suggested changes:

2 hours ago, ZeftheWicked.3076 said:

1. Martial Cadence - you are now in permanent state of soldier's focus. Grant swiftness and fury to allies when expanding soldier's focus.

2. Soldier's Comfort - protection boon removed.

Stability on 10s ICD [Martial Cadence] is an unwieldy mid trait, but your suggested change to it is directly competing with both your new [Lungs of Iron] AND [Phalanx Strength] (which admittedly really sucks in 2023 GW2), and more importantly still sucks as a GM trait - providing perma 25 Might and Fury to the party is stuff some classes are able to do baseline with no trait investment at all. It does not really address the core problem where Warrior has a dramatic opportunity cost to access any form of defensive support, due to a complete lack of it otherwise. 

I've also come to the realization that even if [Soldier's Comfort] had no CD at all it would still be a mid trait. You'd think that with Berserker's Decap you'd be able to really abuse it, but Berserker would need to crit-cap while using Healing gear, which is super scuffed. Every other build on Warrior has a much slower rate of Burst Skill usage.

2 hours ago, ZeftheWicked.3076 said:

3. Vigorous Shouts - renamed to Lungs of Iron.
Your shouts and warhorn skills heal nearby allies. Warhorn skills now grant protection. Gain healing power based on your vitality.

This implementation falls under the exact type of effect you were just criticizing in [Martial Cadence]. You would want to spam Warhorn skills off CD to upkeep protection - but the Healing and Barrier on it is inherently reactive. 

[ZeftheWicked.3076]

53 minutes ago, Jzaku.9765 said:

I appreciate that you've put the thought into presenting the problem you have identified, and the corresponding solution. 

I agree with the first problem you have presented - that a reactive boon like Stability being attached to a proactive mechanic like Burst is a dramatic mismatch. If we widen the scope of what we're looking at, the very concept of Shout Healing falls into this category as well, which is a significant factor in why it's never been good. Whatever happened to Purity of Purpose? 

As for the Protection flavour mismatch - I would agree with you, if we lived in a world where I could dream of a defensive support Elite Specialization on the horizon where they could slap Protection onto. As things stand now, short of a dramatic rework of Spellbreaker to the point of practically being a new Elite Spec (extremely unlikely), Protection has to go on Warrior somewhere to give it parity to all the other classes.

As for your suggested changes:

Stability on 10s ICD [Martial Cadence] is an unwieldy mid trait, but your suggested change to it is directly competing with both your new [Lungs of Iron] AND [Phalanx Strength] (which admittedly really sucks in 2023 GW2), and more importantly still sucks as a GM trait - providing perma 25 Might and Fury to the party is stuff some classes are able to do baseline with no trait investment at all. It does not really address the core problem where Warrior has a dramatic opportunity cost to access any form of defensive support, due to a complete lack of it otherwise. 

I've also come to the realization that even if [Soldier's Comfort] had no CD at all it would still be a mid trait. You'd think that with Berserker's Decap you'd be able to really abuse it, but Berserker would need to crit-cap while using Healing gear, which is super scuffed. Every other build on Warrior has a much slower rate of Burst Skill usage.

This implementation falls under the exact type of effect you were just criticizing in [Martial Cadence]. You would want to spam Warhorn skills off CD to upkeep protection - but the Healing and Barrier on it is inherently reactive. 

1. Martial cadence is supposed to compete with Lungs of Iron.

Unlike e-spec tratlines (such as berserker) Tactics has one primary theme - support.
So since all 3 grandmasters are supportive it makes total sense for them to compete with one another.
The real choice here would be "which is best for my build" as each works wonders for certain build paths.

Martial cadence would work wonders for support warrs who want to stay on the dps side of things.
Huge in combat swiftness and fury uptime, without having to equip warhorn and be chained to banner of discipline (story of most meta support warr builds). While also outputting aoe healing with soldier's comfort. Price for that? Loss of access to aoe protection.

Lungs of Iron is for warriors more dedicated to support role. Healing comes from shouts and warhorn skills (clearly favouring warhorn builds). Here you do get party protection as well to strenghten the "more defense less dps" choice.

Also i believe shouts (except for "For Great Justice") are very reactive skills, so healing on them fits.
Warhorn skills are quite neutral - you can just cast them off cd if you just want the boons, sure.
But they shine when they're used reactively, especially warhorn #5 with big beefy barrier.
Adding prot on top of that seems like a good choice to me.

Edited June 22, 2023 by ZeftheWicked.3076

[Jzaku.9765]

2 minutes ago, ZeftheWicked.3076 said:

1. Martial cadence is supposed to compete with Lungs of Iron.

Unlike e-spec tratlines (such as berserker) Tactics has one primary theme - support.
So since all 3 grandmasters are supportive it makes total sense for them to compete with one another.
The real choice here would be "which is best for my build" as each works wonders for certain build paths.

Martial cadence would work wonders for support warrs who don't want to stay on the dps side of things.
Huge in combat swiftness and fury uptime, without having to equip warhorn and be chained to banner of discipline (story of most meta support warr builds). While also outputting aoe healing with soldier's comfort. Price for that? Loss of access to aoe protection.

Lungs of Iron is for warriors more dedicated to support role. Healing comes from shouds and warhorn skills (clearly favouring warhorn builds). Here you do get party protection as well to strenghten the "more defense less dps" choice.
I disagree with your sentiment about prot on warhorn skills being bad. Protection is a neutral boon much like warhorn skills themselves. Some may spam prot off cd and that's it. But by it's nature, especially on professions that aren't overflowing with it, prot should be a reactive cast. Use it when you see incoming big damage. Warhorns skills are also between "cast and forget" and "reactive use" cases as well. Warhorn #4 is a great out of combat mobility. But it can also be used to grant boons and cleanse movement impeding condies in combat. Warhorn #5 is a big panic button and adding prot to it's barrier is absolutly fitting to it's theme.

I can see why you think this way but it is quite the departure from how this game is actually played. It might be fun to imagine using your skills reactively or having tradeoffs in the type of Support you provide, but this would be a build in direct competition with other builds that come with the entire package, making no tradeoffs whatsoever. 

[Leo G.4501]

Maybe I'm a little high, but I thought Powerful Synergy had the workings to become a cool trait if they just beefed it up more. They could even have split the tactics spec to have an option to focus on combo finisher effects:

Phalanx Strength >> Phalanx Synergy: When you grant yourself might, grant it to nearby allies as well + [x] where x is a *GOOD* option involving combo finishers. 

With the addition of light fields to the profession as well as all the finishers we have, this could even be effective in PvP.

x.1) Performing a combo finisher increases all boons by 1sec to all allies in 360 radius; icd 3sec

x.2) Perform modified combo finishers. Basically changes all combo finishers into kinda really nice effects...what those could be, idk.

x .3) Performing a combo finisher while having Soldier's Focus grants its effect without consuming it; icd 6sec

x.4) Combo Finishers you perform can be stacked over multiple fields.