Curse

Neo-LD · Jun 23, 2005, 05:13 PM // 17:13

Small analysis on the current state of the game:

First, it was the rangers that were exiled in PvP. No one wanted them, for anything they could do, some other class could do better. 2nd best at everything apparently didnt cut it. Rangers have recovered a bit by forming their owns groups (trapper teams, spirit spammer teams) but that is another story. Balanced groups dont usually want them.

Now, warriors are getting the same treatment. This is because their main purpose, damage, can be outdone by air elementalists. Their secondary advantage, their enormous ability to inflict conditions, is largely useless because in reality inlficting conditions only gives the other team more HP because of all the monks that carry mend condition/ailment.

Necro primaries have not been used in a long while because of energy storage > soul reaping. Any good necro is a E/N. But technically,, that means necros are still around.

So really, that only leaves monks, mesmers, elementalists, and necros as the characters commonly seen in balanced PvP teams. You know what? They are all caster-types. They all have 4 pips of energy regen, they all have priamary attributes geared towards magic, they all are effective from range, and they all are considered "soft targets".

In the current state of the gamem, "soft" characters are more effective while alive than "hard" targets are, but they (obviously) die easier. Hard targets die slowly, but can do less while alive. The general theory is that the enemy team will always target enemies that are easy to kill, particularly if they are the most valuable assets the other team has. This nullifies the hard target's advantage of damage resistance (generally referred to as tanking). This is the reason why rangers and warriors are currently unuseful to balanced PvP teams. Sadly, it seems that the PvP teams arent missing much:

Elementalists are for killing the other team
Monks are for keeping your team alive
Mesmers are for disrupting what either the eles or monks are doing.
Necros are for attrition and support.

Looks like they have pretty much every role still covered. I find it very interesting that the preferred build for a "balanced" team consists of enirely casters, all vulnerable, but powerful, ranged characters.

In Warcraft III, we had a name for this kind of gameplay. This "type" being defined as the preferred army consisting of nothing but massed casters of assorted types (priests, sorceresses, etc), with no melee, seige, or anything else required, except a hero :P. It was called Castercraft. (Warcraft slang includes many other takeoffs on the game's title, including theorycraft, haxxorcraft, elfcraft, etc, similar to how GW is currently criticized as Grind Wars)

Everyone complained that all the other units paled in comparison because the casters seemed to be best at everything. You know what happened? It got patched. Dont worry, if there is something seriously wrong, GW will too.

The thing that make this situaiton different than warcraft's is that rangers and warriors are not totally out of it yet. Creative builds have allowed some rangers and warriors to do things that only they can. For example, the R/Me Dibil Shot spammer, and the ever-more-common hammer knocklock warrior. These builds can do things no one else can, which means that if the team wants the energy denial or best knockdown in the game, they cant outsource it to other caster primaries (or china lol)

So the balance is not sooo bad. All classses are still useful for something. The problem is that enire skill lines from certain classes are underpowered enough that they are rendered useless, or at least substandard. I am of course talking about the Marksmenship, Axe, and Sword lines which currently lead to substandard builds in competitive PvP play. Warriors and Rangers that try to win with pure damage simply cannot fill that role as effectively as Elementalists. This is dissapointing, considering that souped up bow, axe, and sword attacks practically make up half of the rangers and warriors total skills.

A suggestion that I think would partially solve the problem:

Weaken condition removal. Both Warriors and Rangers have tons of abilites which inflict conditions. Because they can be removed so quickly and with so much bonus healing, these condition skills are often unuseable. Increased Mana Cost, Casting Time, or decreased Bonus healing would make these skills much more viable.

Whew that was long. =) I hope I have provided some insight, and I hope this will reduce the number of "why are (insert class here)s useless?" threads.

rii · Jun 23, 2005, 06:15 PM // 18:15

If you weaken condition removal youll have to decrease condition inflicting. To be fair, e.g. sever artery is 4 a, which is often buffed by say battle rage or for great justice on offensive adrenaline builds. People neglect conditions can be inflicted almost as fast as they can be applied.
The warrior and the ranger do have important roles in pvp, except (as some would argue against) they are quite hard to perform easily, so people run with 'easier' characters like eles. Im not saying the ele isnt skilled (i used to play one), but in terms of putting together a skillset ele is easier than warrior. ele is all about damage, and of course it can do other things (ARMOUR OF EARTH LOL (-.-)) but thats the focus. warriors have several roles, but sustained damage is the main function. they can tank, but tanks are about as useless as soul reaping. sustained damage is overlooked in most groups since in fact it needs about the same cooridination as a spike but it has less flair. if you get 3 warriors on your team with 50dps (a fairly average figure) you can have them focus target and have 150dps 'sustained' unlike ele which is x damage over the course of about 3 seconds. Thats just as likely to reap a kill than an ele, its just more about teamwork. (e.g. enchantment strippers and mesmers shutting down the monks yada yada). You may say to that: "well if three warriors can do the job of two eles, wheres the advantage? Well, i wont go into the obvious factors of armour and low tagging, but the main thing is the word 'sustained'. That means once youve had your way with one foe, you ready to rumble on the next. eles need a reasonable proportion of their skill bar to perform such a feat, and is fairly impractical. So i wouldnt say that warriors or rangers are imbalanced, or that this 'castercraft' is very vaild. I personally feel 50dps over x seconds > x dps over 5 seconds.

Tellani Artini · Jun 23, 2005, 06:39 PM // 18:39

All caster teams can already be eaten for breakfast by ranger and warrior teams. The rangers and warriors just need to be more strategic than "shoot, smash, chop." No rebalance necessary.

Neo-LD · Jun 23, 2005, 07:41 PM // 19:41

please dont take my small suggestion at the end to be the summation of my entire post. Its just a small endnote. The rest is really much more important, explaining why rangers and warriors find themselves left out of most PvP groups. I wrote it becasue I looked at the boards and saw about 5 threads complaining about rangers or warriors "sucking" or not being "respected" etc.

Draven Mauler · Jun 23, 2005, 07:51 PM // 19:51

I played War/mo since Beta. I ascended him, and was doing UW quests non-stop when I deleted him last week. In PvE War/mo was cherrished and revered, in PvP I was the lamest n00b to ever set foot on the PvP battlefield. I don't think your point is invalid. However, I do believe that if I had the time to unlock Superior Vigor and apply a Superior something or rather I may have killed someone just before getting casted to pieces. I would still go at least one hour before PUGging a decent team with 3-4 TS users, just to get my ass handed to me by a team of 5 air elementalists. In most games the tank and the ranger are indispensible. In GW all my previous knowledge of team play has been turned on its ear. I wish I could explain it better but if its any consolation I deleted like 30K of armor and runes for their total uselessness outside of PvE.

Mak · Jun 23, 2005, 08:11 PM // 20:11

Quote:

Originally Posted by Draven Mauler

I played War/mo since Beta. I ascended him, and was doing UW quests non-stop when I deleted him last week. In PvE War/mo was cherrished and revered, in PvP I was the lamest n00b to ever set foot on the PvP battlefield. I don't think your point is invalid. However, I do believe that if I had the time to unlock Superior Vigor and apply a Superior something or rather I may have killed someone just before getting casted to pieces. I would still go at least one hour before PUGging a decent team with 3-4 TS users, just to get my ass handed to me by a team of 5 air elementalists. In most games the tank and the ranger are indispensible. In GW all my previous knowledge of team play has been turned on its ear. I wish I could explain it better but if its any consolation I deleted like 30K of armor and runes for their total uselessness outside of PvE.

Draven I dont know for sure but you probably got called a noob becasue you brought selfhealing skills, perptuating the myth that all W/Mo are noobs. Think about the team and your role in the team. Try out the smiting line or bring along life bond to keep a monk alive. This helps the team more than mending.

zorades · Jun 23, 2005, 11:18 PM // 23:18

The Warriors that are complaining here are the obvious noobs that have no idea of team play. Until recently I used to think that W are useless in a team...until I ran into a team with 4 W, 3 Mo, 1 ME ... and let me tell you ... it was a devastating experience. I play an air ele, and I thought that i could protect myself (gale, blind ...) against any W, but I never had to do it before against 4 W that actually played together and mover like a team. I couldn't do anything to stop all 4 and they were pretty quick in killing me and then proceeding to the rest of my team.

My point is that the reasons nobody wants W is due to the fact that in general they don't play together and don't have skills to compliment each other, but once you get 3-4 W on a team that actually know how to act together its a totally different matter. Granted, its a lot harder to coordinate 3 W to act together than 3 air eles, but once you do it ...it is devastating.

Zeru · Jun 24, 2005, 12:01 AM // 00:01

Warriors are not bad because eles cannot do their job for them; that is hardly true, most eles will stand around spamming wand attacks with conjure * on waiting between spikes. Warriors or Rangers are needed for constant dps so that enemy monks cannot save up all their healing for the big spike without difficulty.

The big issue with warriors is that wards are simply, extremely good, and people are really realizing it. I always make sure to have at least 2 people with ward of melee and at minimum 1 with ward against foes. At first I thought that people could be forced out of wards with AoE such as Chaos Storm, Maelstorm, Chain Lightning, Poison+epidemic, etc. However, a closer look is that wards can be spammed reasonably well, and if more than 1 person is able to continuously throw them down your warriors are going to have serious issues because there's not much you can do once the wards are down.

Don't be too quick to dismiss conditions too quickly though. Korean teams really seem to love spamming conditions, and when I play conditions/hex monk it really drains your mana extremely fast trying to get rid of them especially if someone throws down a spirit of quickening zephyr

Draven Mauler · Jun 24, 2005, 01:36 AM // 01:36

Quote:

Originally Posted By: Mak

Draven I dont know for sure but you probably got called a noob becasue you brought selfhealing skills, perptuating the myth that all W/Mo are noobs. Think about the team and your role in the team. Try out the smiting line or bring along life bond to keep a monk alive. This helps the team more than mending.

I'm sorry if I sounded like a n00b in my post. Anybody familiar with my other posts on other subjects would most likely keep their feet out of their mouth. You on the other hand are a GENIUS!!!! Why couldn't I ever think to do something like leave self-healing solo/farming spells at the door!?

Praises to Mak for helping me see the light... /sigh /sarcasm.

As for team effort and team work, Show me an organized team out of the dozens of guilds I've joined and left, who have TS or Vent, a guild hall and a useful Guild website and I'll join. Then if the majority of them don't prove to be ass-hats I might even stay for more than a week.

Crito · Jun 24, 2005, 04:53 AM // 04:53

As was the case in testing, these thing should cycle to some degree. The best thing to break caster based teams is ranger based teams for several reasons: less affected by mez tactics, anti-element armor, interrupts/denial shutdowns and steady damage across multiple targets. Rangers are really the anti-Air elementalist in many ways; down to tactics used. The other anti-caster/anti-spike trend is movement from heal to protection and specific spells chosen by monks (ie, Protective Spirit, Signet of Devotion and heal other). We are beginning to see ranger heavy builds, which will require more balanced builds. The best response to rangers IMO is enchantment W/Mo using no energy.

Rock, Paper, Sissors...the game cycles. In test, my guild looked at elementalist heavy builds and they couldn't consistantly win against teams that knew what they were doing. No single setup is better than solid team work and knowing what you are doing.

On wards...every group should have some form of AOE. You can stop warriors from hurting you, but you are asking for meteor shower or barrage spam.

Racthoh · Jun 24, 2005, 05:38 AM // 05:38

It really bugs me that in this game, the two physical damage dealing classes are ignored. Typically the warrior character excels in the early stages of the game with his high defense and incrediable damage output, while the lowly mage struggles on. When I briefly started an elementalist, I couldn't believe the ease in which I took on multiples of enemies that my starting warrior would fall to.

When all warriors actually target the same enemy, they'll drop that enemy quickly. The problem with tanks is that they're pretty useless to be blunt. Sure they can heal themselves, but as it has been said time and time again, they aren't targeted first. When 8 players are beating down on one w/mo, in my eyes he isn't a tank... he is merely a mouse being toyed with by a group of hungry cats.

IMO, more of the warrior's skills should require adrenaline as opposed to energy. They have very few ways to increase it, and few ways to restore it, and even those methods aren't very reliable.

MuKen · Jun 28, 2005, 09:49 PM // 21:49

I generally agree, it makes no sense to me that warriors are tanks first and foremost in pve, and then serve completely different roles in pvp. This is not the case for any other class. Sure, an ele may change up which skills he is using for pvp, but his role remains the same: do damage fast. Why do warriors no longer serve as tanks?

Warriors have always been tanks, in all rpgs, and its stupid that this role relies on the stupidity of AI. As soon as you run into real people who are no longer constrained by 'aggro' or whatever, they can no longer function as tanks, and now have to get random other roles like make conditions or knockdown.

IMO, the correct way to fix this is to give them skills that restore their ability to tank, things like:

Shielding Meat: For X seconds, damage received by target ally is reduced by Y if you are within Z feet of him. This damage is cut in half and applied to you.

Meat Ward: For X seconds, Y% of all attacks targetting nearby allies instead target you and do half damage.

Meat in your Face: Target player cannot attack or cast spells that target enemies unless they are targetting you for the next X seconds.

Last Line of Meat: If player takes damage that would be fatal in the next X seconds, you are teleported to their location, they are knocked down, and all attacks for the next Y seconds that would target them now target you for half damage.

With skills like this, for the enemy to effectively do damage, they must attack the warriors, and then after the warriors are dead they can move on to the others.

And I know I'll run into a lot of opposition here, but I feel that monks should have the protection line removed and replaced with something else. Protection is done by tanks, healing is done by monks. I mean come on, they even have spells like Life Bond which is practically made for the purpose of turning someone into the tank. This is an effect that should be for the warriors. Monks can afford to be toned down, as it stands they are the ONLY class that is 100% required in every single group to be successful.

Kaleban · Jun 28, 2005, 10:53 PM // 22:53

There's actually an easy response to this problem in the way the game is played during the PvE portion.

If you're a warrior, and you come across, say, 3 Grawl, 1 Grawl Shaman and a Grawl Elementalist Boss, which target do you go after first? Personally, I go after the Shaman, to stop him from healing everyone, then the Elementalist to stop his AoE spells, and then the warriors last.

The AI does a pretty good job too, I've noticed on multiple occasions that NPC warriors usually target the player monk or hench monk unless they take massive spike damage from some other player/hench.

IMHO, this makes logical sense, if the healer is alive than the other "team" still has a chance to come back and win, and this idea is even reinforced (PAINFULLY) during the Thirsty River mission, when you take on multiple teams of forgotten with the "priest" who can auto-resurrect the whole team in two minutes.

While I like Muken's "Meat" line of skills for the warrior, at least in theory, I disagree that a paradigm shift from traditional RPGs of the warrior ALWAYS being a tank is a bad thing! Sure, in the traditional RPG dungeon crawl, where three sturdy dwarves form a shield wall across the tunnel and heroically defend their escaping brethren from a massed army of goblins might sound heroic, it hardly makes sense in an expansive, dynamic area that GW offers.

I would say what's needed is a terrain modifier to certain skills, such that an Elementalist dropping fireballs from an elevated position would do more damage, just as a Ranger (or any class using a ranged weapon for that matter) would. This would then make for spectacular mage duels, where opposing team's mages duke it out with each other from opposite ridges, while the warriors struggle to defend or assault "chokepoints" to these ledges upon which the mages cast from. The problem as it stands is that there's really no tactical options available for warriors to exercise their skills on when it comes to the maps themselves, when its only 8v8 and there's plenty of maneuvering room for warriors to get at the mages, the best a warrior can hope to do is hamstring or knockdown an opponent before he gets at the mages.

Basically, the game right now is a free for all, and might as well be a gladiatorial pit with no entrenched defenses or walls. If you look back at WWI with the hedgerows of Germany and other such examples, when you're fighting what amounts to close combat, often the only advantage is Line of Sight or cover, and Guild Wars offers neither as a benefit or restriction.

Kana Himezaki · Jun 29, 2005, 04:27 AM // 04:27

On a quick note, it's hardly "Grind Wars". If you've played Ragnarok Online, you have grinding. Only 20 levels and getting so quickly through them is like a dream for me.

And I actually believe there's nothing wrong with the current setup. Rangers and Warriors CAN be adapted and used effectively. Yes, to many casters outshine them. But it's due to the fact that when many play warriors, they just want to run in and start attacking.

It forces people to be smart. People don't want their tanks to be smart, they're not sure what to do. The typical "I have more health and armor than you" strategy doesn't work. So they ditch it because they find no success.

Arclyte · Jun 29, 2005, 06:33 AM // 06:33

I played some tombs with an awesome team of guys, I used a warrior for one of the runs. I was used basically for knockdowns and as a smite bomb.

Worked pretty well until we ran into spirit spam.

Bast · Jun 29, 2005, 08:18 PM // 20:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by MuKen

I generally agree, it makes no sense to me that warriors are tanks first and foremost in pve, and then serve completely different roles in pvp. This is not the case for any other class. Sure, an ele may change up which skills he is using for pvp, but his role remains the same: do damage fast. Why do warriors no longer serve as tanks?

The reason Warriors are not tanks in PVP is because they can take the damage given them. It's stupid for the other team to waste their energy and adrenaline killing the Warrior first. Therefore, it follows that it's stupid for a PVP Warrior to build for "tanking," since there is no tanking in PVP. Build for offense or disruption instead.

Tanking. Haha.

MuKen · Jun 29, 2005, 08:37 PM // 20:37

Erm, I thought it was pretty clear that that was a rhetorical question...

I wasn't asking why warriors can't tank in PVP, I was stating that it doesn't seem right to me that Warriors can no longer perform their fundamental role from PVE in PVP while generally all other classes can.

I think this would be pretty obvious to anyone reading the remainder of my post.

Phades · Jun 29, 2005, 11:21 PM // 23:21

Warriors definatly weak in pvp?

That thread has just about every angle hashed out within it, so there really is no sense in repeating it. I could cut/paste my main post, but its better to read the thread in its long-winded entirety.

Long story short though, warriors are disrupted by more ways than any other job. They also have the unique position of being able to be disrupted by every job within the game, in their intended role, and by the basic game mechanic of melee vs ranged skill use. The biggest culprets from my own experience have been (in no particular order) wards, blind, mark of protection, pacify, etheral burden, and stacked dots. The dots was more of an issue outside of pvp.

I am not too sure on what would fix warriors properly overal. Tuning the warrior skills and innate abilities to do more damage would help, but wouldnt compensate for the damage deflection, damage diffusal, ease of healing, or +AL stacking possibilities. Adjusting them to have a more well rounded tank, similar to rangers, wouldnt help much except get them ignored more than they are now on the target priority list. A streamlining of the skills to allow for a blending of the weapon options would add a little depth, but really wouldnt solve the problem. Adding some form of innate magic resistance/immunity/ability to ignore effect could help, but could also easily cause alot of other balance issues. A combination of the above would be a step closer to raising the level of power with a varied combination of options, but i think for warriors to really not seem behind the curve, is that they would need something unique to warrirors in a similar way that spirits are unique to rangers. Stances are shared by other jobs; knock down is reproducable in other jobs and able to occur more frequently, in many instances from range, and more reliably. Skill interupts are more reliable from other jobs. So either i see the need for stances to be removed from all other jobs and made longer duration/more potent as a warrior only thing or something entirely new created for warriors that has the same potency as the basic lineup of skills found within other jobs. Shouts are unique, but most cant be sustained, are limited in duration and function, in addition to having a very puny area of effect, if any. I also think that there needs to be a weeding of the skills in the warrior domain because there appears to be too many that do the same thing and have varied levels of effect or are useless in general. Skills such as rush or i will survive have either alternate forms that are more effective logistically, tactically, and flat out better and need to be removed or combined with other skills to be made useful.

Aside from warriors specifically, i think some wide stroked balance can be played out through a few other changes to the core of the game, such as what actions a character can take durring which animation sequences. For example performing melee attacks without comming to a complete stop. Forcing a little bit more diversity within the skill setups. Say for instance only allowing 4-6 active skills, 2-3 passive, and 1-2 misc at a time; while at the same time forcing skills of those respective classes occupying slots reserved for them. An example of this could mean for a elementalist, 4 directed target or area of effect spells, 3 long durration self enchantments/group protection spells and 2 glyphs or signets. Things such as short cast/duration protection and healing spells dont really fall neatly into a catagory, but could be sorted easily enough i think. This could be done in addition to forcing some degree of party structure upon parties for different area challenges such as the tombs. For example no more than 1 healing combinations allowed for every 4 people in the party. This would be more difficult to implement, but i think it would force more cohesive setups and playstyles while at the same time causes more diversity to be used.