Warrior Spear made me switch class

[lol.9027]

My two main classes are Warrior and Elementalist. Resently i enjoyed my warrior a little bit more than playing ele and i was hopefull to get a cool new weapon to play around with.

TLDR: The spear preview basically killed my enjoyment of warrior immediately. It really feels like they deliberately made it to be underwhelming.

Graphics/Theme: The warrior in general doesnt have visually impressive skills, but thats ok. Even without fancy magical effects there are warrior weapons that make the class feel like a mighty force on the battle field. When the warrior jumps and lands there is a big impact. When the warrior hits the ground with his hammer there is a huge shockwave. Even skill 3 of the staff auto chain has a visual shockwave on it. Those big impact abilities make the warrior thematically very cool because you feel like you are dishing out big hits that are on par with the magical effects of other classes. But the spear in that regard is so underwhelming. All the abilities feel like they are two sizes too small. The animations are small and there is no sound that indicates any big impact. Everything about spear just feels like a wet noodle instead of a mighty combat weapon.

Mechanics: The mechanics are even worse. There is no special mechanic at all on the spear. Its mechanic literally is "spear gets worse if you are far away". Also there is no synergy between the abilities. The weapon rewards you for getting close but skill 3 is a  leap backwards and a push back to get as much distance between you and the enemy. Skill 2 is also completely backwards. It has big initial dmg in a decent area while the delayed aftershock is very little dmg and depending on the distance to the enemy a smaller aoe. Ideally this should be big dmg on the aftershock but because it is delayed, you need CC to set it up. Why didnt they do that? Pretty easy, because spear has no realiable CC. Skill 4 is only an imobalize and the daze is pretty much luck if you get it or not. Skill 5 first of all is the most underwhelming in terms of looks. This is the long cooldown, big dmg skill of the spear and it looks like toothpicks are falling from the sky. Aside from the visuals i think there is not much wrong with the skill... its just very boring... which would be okay if the rest of the kit had some sort of synergy.

How to fix it: I mean, if i could make a wish i would say delete it and design a new spear from scratch. But the weapon would be a lot better if the y fixed just a few small things. Make Skill 2 very powerfull but put the bigger part of the dmg into the aftershock so you have to set it up. (similar to Hammer 2). While we are at it, the aoe of the aftershock, even in its smalles form, should never be smaller than the initial aoe. Make Skill 3 a gapcloser instead of a gap widener. Make Skill 4 a realiable hard CC. In terms of graphics? Well... just make the stuff a little more visually impressive so it actually feels like you are doing dmg instead of tickling your foe.

Edited June 26 by lol.9027

[Inssengrimm.7924]

The animations sure leave much to be desired.

Warrior doesn't need many special effects, but does need a good feedback on their skills, sound design is a must for warrior to feel good to play and they are not achieving that with the spear.

Also, the design of making like a FPS shotgun, a ranged weapon that does more damage the closer you are to the target, translates awfully to this game combat, is a terrible idea and also shotguns don't work like that in real life either... But well, this is fantasy land. The whole point of it being a ranged weapon makes no sense if everything is less at range. 

Skill 1 and 2 suffer from range damage decay... On a ranged weapon, lol.
Skill 3 is basically useless/very situational, all things considering skills 1 and 2, a DPS reduction even.
Skill 4 is an interrupt on a 3 and half second cast and could be more telegraphed if they also added a message on top of the warrior saying "imma about to interrupt you", lol.
Skill 5 has a terrible AoE, is basically a single target skills unless the enemy is extremely packed.

Burst skills are okay i guess, but the whole regular kit is so awfully bad and non-cohesive, literally unworthy for warrior mains to even care about this addition.

IS OKAY THE SPEAR IS RANGED.
Whats not okay is any kind of damage decay on range nor the small area of effect of area of effect skills. 

My changes: 

If intending to keep this shotgun philosophy on design.

Skill 1 and 2 need to have very increased close ranged damage compared to long range.
Skill 3 needs to be a pull, not a gap closer nor a gap opener, a pull, rename it "Chained Spear", add a chain FX to the spear and let us scorpion some people. Then allow us to shotgun blast them up close.
Skill 4 needs to be much quicker on animation and release, maybe add a little "splatter" sound effect to it.
Skill 5 needs to be horizontal like the burst, not vertical, those spears should be flying like proyectiles, in a cone maybe, like this whole shotgun idea. 

Burst 1 is alright, probably the only thing okay with this skill set.
Burst 2 should switch places with skill 5, this is the one that should be vertical and non-proyectile. Make it a "Spear Rain" and instead of doing it in a circular area arround target, make it a straight line to the target with dropping spears along the way. 

Anyway, details aside, the weapon is severely lacking in sound/effects, really nothing to look forward to.

[Fueki.4753]

For me, it'd need just two changes to make Spear potentially interesting to me:

1) Unshackle its "mechanic" from the range requirement and have it apply at any range. Our spear ought to be a ranged weapon, not a melee or hybrid one.

2) Remove the ground-targetting and make the abilities enemy-targetted instead. I don't like ground-targetted abilities. One ability on a weapon might be fine, but three is too much in my opinion.

[DanAlcedo.3281]

No CC on Core burst when you would think they wanna make it good on spellbreaker. 

A freaking 2. 5s cast time on the Primal Burst. 

 

[Purple Effects.2503]

Why didn’t they give warrior spear unarmed Stance that was attached to 5 

a throwing spear that in close combat can be sheaved for unarmed combat attacks. 

- in spear 5 is a defensive ability that leads into unarmed combat.

- in fist 5 is a mobility leap that actives spear abilities to follow. 

Woulda been so much cooler, then giving it some ranged spear shatter rubbish that makes a ranged weapon useless to use at range. 

[Smoosh.2718]

Honestly they should have done the same mechanics that they did to Anets favourite classes. Skill will carry out a ranged attack when out of melee range and melee when in range for a higher damage hit.
This current spear felt more like a different version of Rifle, nothing new was bought to the table with it.

[Bris.7984]

"Fail spear" would be called from my side if this unpolished useless new weapon is going live... We support the game just to freaking give all good things to other classes and we don't have a chance to even get close to one...  good design.😡