Spear Factor: Warrior, Thief, and Engineer

[Rubi Bayer.8493]

Game designers Chun-Hong Fung, Cal Cohen, and Karl McLain from our Janthir Wilds combat feature team are ready to give a peek at the spears for the warrior, thief, and engineer respectively. Read on! 

 

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

Hey, flow this back to the team.

Put a small daze on that Spear F1 on warrior. Doesn't have to be a long one, a 1/4s daze would be enough.

Edited June 13 by Lan Deathrider.5910

[asket.5674]

Engi looks really nice. 

[Manpag.6421]

I love the GW1 references and the lightning rod style of the engi skills. Kind of surprised you didn't play off the lightning theme by referencing Shock and Awe though, especially as the latter was a paragon skill.

[Luthan.5236]

Probably paragon-style (GW1) combat for the warrior? For engineer disappointing that is it melee again. But if they enforce a good auto attack damage making it easy to get high dps without having to perform lots of "keyboard acrobatics" I might use it.

[Kris Knives.8513]

Thief spear looks really exciting, the assassin like chains sounds very interesting and not just empty GW1 nostalgia.  I think this will lead to some interesting choices in combat and fit into a lot of builds.  I bet that is going to be fun with Daredevil, very fun.  Having no cool downs, thief weapons always seems like they're probably hard to design, as you need a strong reason to select each option situationally but I feel like we always get very strong designs as all the thief weapons have and continue to be great....except for shortbow.

Warrior spear seems fine, I'm curious how it will pair with Bladesworn but not sure what what new gameplay it will open up.  I guess I was hoping for an interesting twist on Burst skills given we've seen some ambitious new designs for things like guardian symbols, ranger stealth and now thief combo attacks.  From the description it sounds fairly similar to the Gunsabers ranged with melee bonuses style of gameplay.  Maybe I'm missing something right now but this seems to be the least interesting spear so far without much to really get excited about.

As for Engineer spear, I'll wait for the beta to render judgement but I cannot help but be a little initially disappointed the Engineer isn't a hybrid ranged/melee weapon.  It feels like the classes with only a single weapon slot would really benefit from one of those, though the hybrid damage is very welcome.  Hopefully once we get our hands on it, it will be more clear why they decided to make it a strictly melee weapon.  Not sure about the Deadeye like target and destroy gameplay, might be good but I suspect I'll prefer the guardians more open ended illumination mechanic, but the idea of dashing from target to target as you drop them like a Willbender seems fun so we'll see.  I'm a very curious about the comment at the bottom with Spear/Kit gameplay, sounds like they have something specific in mind there so hopefully spear makes one of the lesser used kits more viable in some way.  I wonder if they are envisioning something like dashing in with spear and then switching to bomb kit?  I hope it is something like that and not just a throw away comment at the end of the post.  Despite my disappointment around what it isn't, I'm still fairly excited about the potential here.  I would not object to them throwing some small heat benefits on this too so holosmiths have strong alternative to sword but honestly I wish all engineer weapons had that feature.

I missed commenting on Guardian/Ranger/Nerco last week but all those spears seemed pretty great from the write up.  Particularly this new stealthy ranger.

Overall what I'm seeing here has me hyped about spears.  A lot of these seems different enough to really stand out and great new gameplay.  I'm really glad to see how many skills have dynamic "flip" options.  I'm a big fan of that gameplay, it feels very rewarding when you successfully pull off a move and land both modes of a skill.  I also like "stack" effects on some of these weapons but worry some classes might get pretty visually busy in combat.  With carapace effects, spear shards and harbinger's blight shroud I don't know if you'll even be able to see my necro at all in combat.

[Dolce Luce.6529]

Am I the only one that got Game of Thrones - Oberyn Martell (Red Vipervs. the Mountain, you all know the scene) - vibes from the Thief-spear-poison attacks? Let the role playing commence...

[Randulf.7614]

Warrior wins. Fatality

[Gehenna.3625]

ooh, thx for making the Warrior spear a ranged power weapon!

[Fueki.4753]

Warrior's spear being ranged is great.

Engineer's spear looks neat, too.

I'm neutral towards Thief's spear.

Edited June 13 by Fueki.4753

[TwistedAlga.4235]

Thank you for making Warrior's spear weapon inspired by Paragon, as it is also ranged too just like in GW1 Paragon. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I am so happy that ''Paragon'' is back but as Warrior! ❤️

[HotDelirium.7984]

If ele is melee spear, we riot.

[Therac.6431]

I still can't believe they're actually listening to the players' demands when it comes to designing the spears. It's almost hard to talk about. I can't wait to see how they're going to roll out the housing system. Expectations are through the roof! I see people who are all about housing talking about GW2 like it's the release of a new The Sims.

Warrior = Amazing
Thief = Amazing
Engineer = Cool, looks promising 

[Ashantara.8731]

...and the visual effects cacophony continues.

It's already hard enough to make out enemy AoEs in tightly stacked groups when those AoEs are covered with toxic green haze and tons other friendly effects. With the spear, it will get only worse, it seems. 😕 

[Linken.6345]

13 minutes ago, Therac.6431 said:

I still can't believe they're actually listening to the players' demands when it comes to designing the spears. It's almost hard to talk about. I can't wait to see how they're going to roll out the housing system. Expectations are through the roof! I see people who are all about housing talking about GW2 like it's the release of a new The Sims.

Warrior = Amazing
Thief = Amazing
Engineer = Cool, looks promising 

Well it was more then likely already planned beforehand then them listening to the players that wanted ranged warrior spear mate.

[PixelHero.5849]

Warrior is really, really clever and sounds fun!  It's an interesting take on GW2's issue of ranged combat vs melee range group boons.  Ranged, but can take advantage of close/melee range.  Smart!  A solo player can participate in all content types and play with interesting mechanics, while a player in an optimized group setting can continue to use the weapon at range during anti-melee downtimes, overcoming one of the big downsides of melee-focused rotations.

Very smart. 👌

 

Thief also seems to have have decision making built in, which is nice.  Now that we aren't getting new class/elite playstyles introduced, we need more than "walk up and smack person in face with slightly different effects!" to keep things fresh.  Flexibility and decision making is good, but hard to avoid there always being a clear and best choice for each situation.

 

Engineer... well, we'll see.  The lack of weapon swap makes any new weapon have a high bar to clear, because it doesn't matter how interesting a new weapon is if another weapon is just strictly better, or more flexible.

[Mor The Thief.9135]

Thief looks amazing, but then I remember that any spec but Deadeye has massive Initiative deficiency, which in turn makes the new chain mechanic of Spear on Thief, pretty much have the same issue as any other weapon, spam the highest damaging ability until no more Initiative is left and auto-attack until enough Initiative regenerated, rinse and repeat...

Please tell me Spear will have some way to refund spent Initiative!

Edited June 13 by Mor The Thief.9135

[Tempest.8479]

An interesting wrinkle to note with Thief spear: even though it's explicitly stated to be a melee weapon in the blog post, the trailer opens with the Thief throwing the spear from range twice before leaping to their target. This leads me to believe that it will also get the bimodal autoattack seen on ranger spear, or at least that some portion of its skill set will also be useable from range.

[Therac.6431]

1 hour ago, Linken.6345 said:

Well it was more then likely already planned beforehand then them listening to the players that wanted ranged warrior spear mate.

When it comes to Elementalist, anything less than 1200 range spear skills with good attack speed will be a tragedy for those who play the class.
We'll find out if they're really listening to the players or not.

[LichOverlord.6329]

5 hours ago, Kris Knives.8513 said:

As for Engineer spear, I'll wait for the beta to render judgement but I cannot help but be a little initially disappointed the Engineer isn't a hybrid ranged/melee weapon.  It feels like the classes with only a single weapon slot would really benefit from one of those, though the hybrid damage is very welcome.  Hopefully once we get our hands on it, it will be more clear why they decided to make it a strictly melee weapon.  Not sure about the Deadeye like target and destroy gameplay, might be good but I suspect I'll prefer the guardians more open ended illumination mechanic, but the idea of dashing from target to target as you drop them like a Willbender seems fun so we'll see.  I'm a very curious about the comment at the bottom with Spear/Kit gameplay, sounds like they have something specific in mind there so hopefully spear makes one of the lesser used kits more viable in some way.  I wonder if they are envisioning something like dashing in with spear and then switching to bomb kit?  I hope it is something like that and not just a throw away comment at the end of the post.  Despite my disappointment around what it isn't, I'm still fairly excited about the potential here.  I would not object to them throwing some small heat benefits on this too so holosmiths have strong alternative to sword but honestly I wish all engineer weapons had that feature.

Ironically enough, I thought the engineer one was the coolest by far

I'm all for it being a melee weapon, considering 3/6 of the weapons (not including shield) available for engineer are all ranged, the most recent addition (shortbow) was also ranged, and 5/6 of the toolkits (not including medkit) are ranged

I can see them trying to alternate between a ranged and a melee each expansion, which makes the most sense imo

[LichOverlord.6329]

25 minutes ago, Therac.6431 said:

When it comes to Elementalist, anything less than 1200 range spear skills with good attack speed will be a tragedy for those who play the class.
We'll find out if they're really listening to the players or not.

GARY, YOU ARE GOING TO FINISH YOUR DESSERT ENJOY YOUR MELEE ELEMENTALIST SPEAR AND YOU'RE GOING TO LIKE IT!!! 🤣

[Gaiawolf.8261]

1 hour ago, Linken.6345 said:

Well it was more then likely already planned beforehand then them listening to the players that wanted ranged warrior spear mate.

Really? Seems unlikely Anet was planning this since 2012. 🙃

[Quench.7091]

The spear projectiles being thrown or in spells vs. the spear being wielded are pretty noticeable in certain cases.

[Luthan.5236]

1 hour ago, LichOverlord.6329 said:

I'm all for it being a melee weapon, considering 3/6 of the weapons (not including shield) available for engineer are all ranged, the most recent addition (shortbow) was also ranged, and 5/6 of the toolkits (not including medkit) are ranged

I can see them trying to alternate between a ranged and a melee each expansion, which makes the most sense imo

Not really true though. Maybe if you look only at the core stuff not available without owning any expansions. Hammer, sword and mace  are all more melee - from the later expansions. The added bow is more of a support type weapon. Guardian for example has more weapons + weapon swap and stuff like the scepter in core and they also added a bow with Dragonhunter elite.

I'd rather have had more kits (so they'd actually be a bit more interesting :D) with melee. There it is true with many being ranged lol. For weapons at least mid-range (600-900 range) would be interesting. Good movement skills are the main interesting thing at the weapons I think - needed to make a melee weapon a bit more interesting. (Like the hammer ... had rocket charge.)

[Kris Knives.8513]

Well said and I see what you mean, but with the spear you don't have to choose.  Several classes previews already have the spear as a combined melee & ranged weapon.  It could have been 3 melee, 3 ranged and 1 hybrid weapon just as easily.

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I would also like to see some love given to kits.  I personally think all the explosive kits seems to similar for their own good and wouldn't mind a rework of one of them.