Do you feel like Warrior is fairly compensated in terms of Power Budget?

[Jzaku.9765]

TL;DR: Discuss - Warrior's entire left side of the skillbar is pathetic compared to most other specs.

The October 2022 Balance Philosophy had the following excerpt to say regarding the subject of Power Budget:

On 10/28/2022 at 11:24 PM, Rubi Bayer.8493 said:

 

Power Budget

For a given skill or trait, there is a "power budget" that can be spent on individual elements. A skill that only deals damage can deal X damage, but if that skill also applies conditions or provides other value, then it needs to deal less damage to stay within budget. In the context of a weapon, the budget is considered across the entire kit, so some skills may be weaker than average in order to allocate more power to a particular skill. Budget can also vary depending on a skill's cooldown; skills with longer cooldowns are generally more powerful.

Trait budgets are to be considered on a per-tier basis; adept traits should have less power than grandmaster traits.

I don't know about you, but I've always felt like Warrior's Burst skill (in all forms) is an essential factor in the strength of the weapon itself. (E.g., GS's Arcing Slice / Arc Divider is where the majority of power is on the GS kit - you would never take this weapon without it). Please post in this thread if you disagree with this assessment, I would love to hear your perspective.
This falls neatly into the section of the above quote that specifies:
" In the context of a weapon, the budget is considered across the entire kit, so some skills may be weaker than average in order to allocate more power to a particular skill. "

I know I can't read the mind of the devs. But I want to proceed with the rest of this thread making this assumption anyway.
Note that I'll be using Warrior Greatsword as an example for the rest of this thread because it's the most egregious example that I'm fairly confident everyone can relate to. 

To which I have to say:

BURST SKILLS SHOULD NOT BE A FACTOR IN THE WEAPON POWER BUDGET. IT IS OUR (ONLY!) PROFESSION MECHANIC.

I want to be clear that Power Budget as defined above by the Balance Philosophy includes effects beyond DPS - DPS across classes is in one of it's most balanced states it's ever been in the history of the game. It is clearly stated to holistically include other factors including but not limited to Conditions, Support, and CC. 

Does picking Firebrand on Guardian nerf their weapon skills to compensate for the immense overall Power Budget having access to their 3 Tomes give you? No - in fact, Firebrand's Axe is one of Guardian's best weapons. Does taking Druid on Ranger nerf their weapon skills to compensate for the addition of Celestial Avatar's immense Support Power Budget on top of their existing Profession Mechanic of Pets? 

When you compare Warrior's entire left side of the skillbar to these other specs, do you feel fairly compensated? Do you feel like you have the tools to compete with these specs in the value you provide to the team? 

Warrior's Greatsword should at least be able to set up it's own combos with far more utility than it currently has. Just a wild suggestion here, but how about being able to pull enemies into it's AoE burst damage? Maybe have a stun that resets it's powerful sudden spike damage? 

How about the realm of defensive Support? Warrior (along with Mesmer) is one of the only remaining classes to be unable to scrape together a PVE Heal build. Mesmer is at least able to provide an immense wealth of utility that Warrior is hard-pressed to: a non-exhaustive list includes Portal, Blinks, party Stealth, party Stab and aoe Pulls.

In fact, Warrior's only easy access to a long-distance knockback was nerfed into a knockdown, of which Warrior has a million! The only other access to a long-range knockback is on Rifle, which is it's own can of worms. 

Warrior's Mace was recently buffed to provide self-Barrier. Would it have been too much for it to provide it to the party? Would that have made mace too strong? Surely such a skill would just be on par with being able to give regen to allies. Warrior has been waiting for a mainhand support weapon pairing with Warhorn for 10 years! 

 

Anyway this rant got way longer than I expected. What are your thoughts on the subject? 

Edited July 18, 2023 by Jzaku.9765

[Zekent.3652]

Well, apart from Sundering Leap, warrior is the only class wtihout damaging utility skills on PvP, Break Enchantment is a joke and the damage from utility CC skills was removed.

Edited July 17, 2023 by Zizekent.2398

[Shinja.3451]

You've said it, all you have to do is say it, they're clowns balancing the game... (the rest of the post was something I wanted to mention, but with what you already wrote it's superfluous, I'll leave it anyway for the haha)

Well, just looking at the axe abilities in pvp and wvw (casi mvm) it's obvious that something is stupidly wrong with the balance team and not to mention the other weapons, but this one is too obvious.
They raise the cd for no reason, they lower the damage when it is already considered a damage-only weapon, they take away all the duration and stacking of blessings and conditions that it had, which they had stupidly added for the same reason that it did not work totally fine, the traits that affect it are nerfed and for the stupidity of anet it buffs other builds that completely counteract the purpose of the weapon, making combat practically impossible, bravo anet it is understood that you know how to balance the game, 10/10.

Anyway, that's what happens when you make a pvp oriented game, with your strong foundations for pve and then hand it off to a bunch of incompetents who balance it according to the pve they came up with instead of balancing the pve to the game already established.
 

Spoiler

Tú lo has dicho, solo te queda decirlo, son unos payasos balanceando el juego... (el resto del post era algo que quería mencionar, pero sobra bastante con lo que escribiste, igual lo dejo por los jajas)
Bueno, con solo ver las habilidades del hacha en pvp y mvm es evidente que algo está estúpidamente mal con el equipo de balance y ya ni mencionar las otras armas, pero esta es demasiado evidente.
Le suben el cd sin razón alguna, le bajan el daño cuando ya de por sí es un arma considerada de solo daño, le sacan toda la duración y apilamiento de bendiciones y condiciones que tenía, que estúpidamente habían agregado por la misma razón que no servía del todo bien, le nerfean los rasgos que le afectan y que para la mayor estupidez de anet buffea otras builds que contrarrestan por completo el propósito del arma, haciendo combates prácticamente imposibles, bravo anet se entiende que sabes balancear el juego, 10/10.
De todos modos, es lo que tiene hacer un juego orientado a pvp, con sus bases sólidas para el pve y luego pasárselo a un grupo de incompetentes que lo balanceo de acuerdo al pve que se fueron inventando en vez de balancear el pve al juego ya establecido.

This was translated horrible XD

[oscuro.9720]

Speaking from the perspective of someone who mostly plays spell and competitive modes; we are not. Our weapons are often balanced with the burst skill in mind, which isn’t necessarily wrong, but I feel the adrenaline cost of using a burst skill is often forgotten and our kit is just balanced assuming it has 6 skills instead of 5 instead of 5+mechanic as I feel other classes are. Granted I don’t think the disparity between theoretical balance is far off, it’s just a few skills here and there that have strange balance that seems to try to keep our weapon skills from being dominant relative to other weapons in the game since people often consider our burst as “part of the weapon skills” instead of “part of the mechanics”. I feel like I’m explaining this horribly but I’ve written this much so I’m just going to post it cause I really don’t have any more kittens to give today. 

[sneakytails.5629]

Warrior has requirements baked into our mechanics, traits, and weapon skills. We must meet these requirements during a fight or we loose. We have to land hits to get adrenaline so we can burst, land cc to actually get some damage in from our weapon skills, land hits to secure adrenal health, land our full counters to turn a fight around, etc.

We can land a bulls charge perfectly and hit them with 2 big attacks and still not down them. Mean while the other class simply resets and continues stacking.

Other classes stack things like evade frames, teleports, boons and conditions without such strict requirements.

Either other classes cannot keep stacking and spamming things with very loose or no requirements, or Warrior needs way more changes to balance things out.

[oscuro.9720]

42 minutes ago, sneakytails.5629 said:

Warrior has requirements baked into our mechanics, traits, and weapon skills. We must meet these requirements during a fight or we loose. We have to land hits to get adrenaline so we can burst, land cc to actually get some damage in from our weapon skills, land hits to secure adrenal health, land our full counters to turn a fight around, etc.

We can land a bulls charge perfectly and hit them with 2 big attacks and still not down them. Mean while the other class simply resets and continues stacking.

Other classes stack things like evade frames, teleports, boons and conditions without such strict requirements.

Either other classes cannot keep stacking and spamming things with very loose or no requirements, or Warrior needs way more changes to balance things out.

As per my other posts, I don’t think those requirements are in and of themselves a bad thing. I just think the “power budget” treats warrior’s mechanic as a 6th weapon skill and balances the weapon sets with that in mind and as it would any other weapon skill.

I would argue that the weapon set should be balanced to stand more independently of the burst skill, and the burst skills need to be better rewarded for the costs of use since most have low pay off relative to the cost of use compared to other skills (usually a comparable pay off, but a higher cost of use due to the requirements surrounding adrenaline).

The weapon kit is then restricted because they treat it as having 6 skills instead of 5, which leads to things like 100blades being useless because a weapon kit with a high-damaging 100b and arcing slice would be much stronger than other weapon bars, but if you only take the core 5 skills it’s a weak weapon. So we are getting screwed on both ends, for lack of a better phrase. 

[EphemeralWallaby.7643]

I feel that if power budget were a thing they closely followed, it would be the elementalist and engineer forums completely full of threads complaining about lacking skill damage and wishcasting skill improvements (due to those profession's many extra skills), and not the warrior forums.  Not that they don't have a share of such threads, but kitten it's the lion's share of threads here. And, my post will be no different.

Bursts just don't feel like bursts to me anymore, even in PvE.  They feel like a utility skill that has a variable and unreliable charge-up timer instead of the set CD of utility skills.  (Personally, I wonder if the perception of the berserker class added to the peeling-back all bursts got... I recall when the espec first released, playing berserker was almost all about berserking as soon as possible, then casting as many primal bursts as possible before berserk ended.  I haven't really touched the espec much since, so I have no idea if that's changed.  But, when warriors are spamming bursts, primal or otherwise, I can see that as a call to Anet to nerf... even though I disagree with that direction, and there's the fact they designed it like that in the first place.)

I do think Warriors should have been at least somewhat exempt from CC skills losing damage in WvW/PvP. 

And, this might be heavily disagreed with, but I also think the warrior's special attack/damage/cc/boon/whatever of most weapon's aa3 skill ought to be moved up to the aa1 or aa2 slot in WvW/PvP.  I can't recall a time I've ever hit someone in WvW with the third aa skill so I just don't bother considering what it does in any of my builds anymore for that mode.  And, if power budget is actually a thing, then those stronger aa3 skills that never get used become a big liability I think.  If anyone else here does say they get to use them, then I'll defer to you... it's just not my experience.

~EpWa

Edited July 18, 2023 by EphemeralWallaby.7643

[Jzaku.9765]

4 hours ago, oscuro.9720 said:

Speaking from the perspective of someone who mostly plays spell and competitive modes; we are not. Our weapons are often balanced with the burst skill in mind, which isn’t necessarily wrong, but I feel the adrenaline cost of using a burst skill is often forgotten and our kit is just balanced assuming it has 6 skills instead of 5 instead of 5+mechanic as I feel other classes are. Granted I don’t think the disparity between theoretical balance is far off, it’s just a few skills here and there that have strange balance that seems to try to keep our weapon skills from being dominant relative to other weapons in the game since people often consider our burst as “part of the weapon skills” instead of “part of the mechanics”. I feel like I’m explaining this horribly but I’ve written this much so I’m just going to post it cause I really don’t have any more kittens to give today. 

I totally understand you and it's the main thrust of my post in bold and caps. Burst skill being considered part of the weapon budget is more insidious than it seems - not only are our weapon skills worse on average because part of that budget is in the Burst skill, our Burst skill alone, as our class mechanic, is competing with the likes of Firebrand Tomes or CA or Holoforge or Necro/Specter Shroud. 

[Jzaku.9765]

10 minutes ago, EphemeralWallaby.7643 said:

If feel that if power budget were a thing they closely followed, it would be the elementalist and engineer forums completely full of threads complaining about lacking skill damage and wishcasting skill improvements, and not the warrior forums.  Not that they don't have a share of such threads, but kitten it's the lion's share of threads here. And, my post will be no different.

Bursts just don't feel like bursts to me anymore, even in PvE.  They feel like a utility skill that has a variable and unreliable charge-up timer instead of the set CD of utility skills.  (Personally, I wonder if the perception of the berserker class added to the peeling-back all bursts got... I recall when the espec first released, playing berserker was almost all about berserking as soon as possible, then casting as many primal bursts as possible before berserk ended.  I haven't really touched the espec much since, so I have no idea if that's changed.  But, when warriors are spamming bursts, primal or otherwise, I can see that as a call to Anet to nerf... even though I disagree with that direction, and there's the fact they designed it like that in the first place.)

I do think Warriors should have been at least somewhat exempt from CC skill losing damage in WvW/PvP. 

And, this might be heavily disagreed with, but I also think the warrior's special attack/damage/cc/boon/whatever of most weapon's aa3 skill ought to be moved up to the aa1 or aa2 slot in WvW/PvP.  I can't recall a time I've ever hit someone in WvW with the third aa skill so I just don't bother considering what it does in any of my builds anymore for that mode.  And, if power budget is actually a thing, then those stronger aa3 skills that never get used become a big liability I think.  If anyone else here does say they get to use them, then I'll defer to you... it's just not my experience.

~EpWa

As a regular Ele player as well I think Ele's problem is with the right side of their skillbar. 

Both Ele and Engi can put together support builds so strong they are able to hard carry a team in PVE. Engi especially formed the backbone of the PVE community and currently continues to with the highest playrate spec in the game: Mechanist at 14.5%(Raids) and 13.7%(Strikes), thanks in no small part to Heal Mech generating an insane amount of value to the team. For reference, the entire Warrior class with all specs combined approximates ~6%. 

[Myror.7521]

Yea i could not more agree with this. Warriors Burst skills (especialy Power ones) do not feel rewarded if you hit them.... meanwhile u waste 2 or even 3 Ressources to make sure u gonna hit them (Adrenalin Mechanic, CC's and for PvP use lower dmging skills to force peops to not be able to dodge the burst skills).

I mean Burst skills especialy in PvP are just doing dmg and thats it (since boons Like might Stack on eviscerate and Fury on Arc Divider got nerfed or simply deleted) but seems like they are not even doing good dmg (3-5k just like a normal utility Skill). So the only reason why u use its burst skills rn are just the traits that could get triggered while hit with it.

[JTGuevara.9018]

Screw the "power budget" and screw this game's "philosophy".

gw2 is an awkward action-rpg hack-and-slash. There is no "philosophizing" your way around that. To even entertain Anet's talking points is a WASTE of time. This is the same Anet that sold empty banners with a straight face last year.

[FirePowerr.1820]

To answer simply: lol no

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

Simply put. No. Profession mechanics should have a separate power budget. As it stands Bursts should be more powerful, and many of the weapons should be as well.

[Leo G.4501]

1 hour ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

Simply put. No. Profession mechanics should have a separate power budget. As it stands Bursts should be more powerful, and many of the weapons should be as well.

Maybe because I'm just a zerg noob but it's hard to imagine war having stronger bursts AND stronger weapons. 

Maybe part of the budget (not talking about weapons but purely the bursts) is that the traits were meant to help customize them, getting boons, making them cheaper, losing conditions, ect. And the frequency of those bonuses is tied to them which is why they are budgeted the way it is. Not saying it's a good thing, just wanting to have MORE ways to customize the bursts with better options. 

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

4 minutes ago, Leo G.4501 said:

Maybe because I'm just a zerg noob but it's hard to imagine war having stronger bursts AND stronger weapons. 

Maybe part of the budget (not talking about weapons but purely the bursts) is that the traits were meant to help customize them, getting boons, making them cheaper, losing conditions, ect. And the frequency of those bonuses is tied to them which is why they are budgeted the way it is. Not saying it's a good thing, just wanting to have MORE ways to customize the bursts with better options. 

Think in terms of what other profession's main mechanics can do even without trait support then come back.

[Jzaku.9765]

15 hours ago, Leo G.4501 said:

Maybe because I'm just a zerg noob but it's hard to imagine war having stronger bursts AND stronger weapons. 

Maybe part of the budget (not talking about weapons but purely the bursts) is that the traits were meant to help customize them, getting boons, making them cheaper, losing conditions, ect. And the frequency of those bonuses is tied to them which is why they are budgeted the way it is. Not saying it's a good thing, just wanting to have MORE ways to customize the bursts with better options. 

Keep in mind that an imbalance in the competitive game modes is far more likely to be addressed than when there is an imbalance in PVE, which is largely what the OP is referring to.

I believe that PvP/WvW players should still remember how Firebrand and Scourge dominated the meta early on in POF's lifecycle, because their core, baseline mechanics were so immensely overloaded - they had a tool for every situation. They had to be nerfed into the ground multiple times before their play rate actually dropped. These changes largely did not affect PVE. 

Admittedly, there is not much outcry about this subject (Power Budget) though recently there's been increasing discourse online. My guess is because the "bad" specs and classes see less play and thus there are less people complain about them in the first place. I refer again to the Profession Popularity chart  - Mechanist had to get to an absolutely LUDICROUS 33% play rate before any serious mob formed regarding just how much it was blowing other classes and specs out of the water. Firebrand's been skirting 15% for an exceptionally long time and only sees the occasional complaint. For reference, in the imaginary (impossible) perfectly balanced game, every spec would see 100%/27specs = ~3.7% play rate.

[DKRathalos.9625]

To be fair warrior never fairly compensated in anything.

[Lonecap.4105]

Honestly no. We have less skills to use to damage opponents and we never fully recovered from things like bulls charge losing damage. Our single hits are so crucial to land, you're punished so heavily for whiffing, and you need to invest so much (traits and multiple utilities at once) to make those singular hits feel paid off. And even then it isn't enough.

[prototypedragon.1406]

I feel like warriors so called power budget is similar to how anet tried to force everyone to enjoy the desert borderland map when it had replaced all the alpine maps aside from ebg. They keep trying to shove the power budget down people's throats instead of actually testing the warrior itself out and being like hey these weapons haven't changed much in a decade perhaps we should adjust them especially if they are never used. But eh warrior tends to be the scape goat anymore. Let's make a new elite specs that does warrior like things but better instead of revamping warrior to improve upon it where it lacks.  And let's give it a boomstick that locks it in place when it's a melee class  even when knowing in other game modes movement is often required 😂🤣