Curse

Reverend Dr · Dec 19, 2009, 12:30 AM // 00:30

While Enraged and Mokele smash are probably overpowerd (Definately enraged), Unless Anet was planning on removing those, how can they say that adrenaline gain on a hammer is slow? Couple that with the standard PVE ES -> Crude -> ES -> Whirling repeat, how they arrived at the conclusion that hammer was slow just shows how little they understand their own game.

draxynnic · Dec 19, 2009, 02:53 AM // 02:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hugh Manatee

Also, what's the deal with belly smash? 30sec recharge on a short blind skill? I like it's activation time, so you can get a swing in right after crude before they get up, but prot strike, eremites, mystic sweep or holy strike is way better for that sort of thing. You can flourish it with club of a 1000 bears and crude for something kinda interesting but still... I dunno what you do to belly smash, but this is the one you buff. Keep it's 1 second activation time, keep the interaction with a KD'd target, but make it hurt things a lot more.

How could I have forgotten Belly Smash?

Probably the only real change it needs is a change in recharge. Cutting the recharge down to 10-15 seconds would probably be enough to make it a good skill.

S{R}Raptor · Dec 19, 2009, 05:09 AM // 05:09

Quote:

Originally Posted by Reverend Dr

While Enraged and Mokele smash are probably overpowerd (Definately enraged), Unless Anet was planning on removing those, how can they say that adrenaline gain on a hammer is slow? Couple that with the standard PVE ES -> Crude -> ES -> Whirling repeat, how they arrived at the conclusion that hammer was slow just shows how little they understand their own game.

Not everyone has every expansion, so that means not all skills are available to everyone. The whole purpose to doing something to the hammer line is to make more builds possible. As it stands now, there are not many viable hammer builds, and many of the skills just do not get used.

The hammer skills either need to be less conditional, or have the adrenaline based ones cost less. Half the time i find myself trying to get a chain started when my team has pretty much killed the enemy. The knock down effect is nice, pretty much necessary with out a shield to even things up. When you do encounter enemies that you cannot knock down, then you need to do more dmg.

Basically if you run a hammer build you rely on knock downs to keep your opponent off balance while you continue to do dmg. The dmg you do is not near as much as an axe or sword since the non elite knock down skills dont really do any extra dmg. Pretty much all sword and axe skills have + dmg on them save the interrupt skills, and it would be really nice if the hammer had that as well. Maybe for instance counter blow, if i get the knock down, i get no +dmg, but if i dont get the knock down i do some + dmg. This at least helps hammers do more than just regular hammer dmg when the knock down gets blocked.

With my sword, when i wind up for Final Thrust, that is a heck of a blow im dealing and i get alot of dmg for doing it, even more if their health is below 50%, yet using hammer bash to knock the enemy on their bum in a downward blow is pretty devastating, yet at best i get a critical hit for dmg. Just comparing the looks of those two attacks, one would think that they would both deal massive dmg, yet the hammer doesnt. I would think that some +dmg would be warranted as i that attack does nothing but knock enemies down and a regular hammer hit worth of dmg. Take away knock down ability and a hammer build gets very weak as you basically turn the hammer warrior into a slow swinging default attack monkey.

I also agree on the get rid of the non elite skills sucking away all adrenaline as it takes a long while to build it back up and be effective again. The recharge time of belly smash needs to be brought way down so it will see some play. Staggering blow imo should be a 4 adrenaline skill, maybe some +dmg to, as it is, it takes to long to get to it, and alot of the other knock down skills are ready before staggering is and they require weakness to work.

As for knock down time you get 2 seconds default, 3 seconds with stonefist insignia, and then 4 seconds with one of the elite hammer skills. Without the stonefist, it can be hard to get in some of the skills due to cast time, maybe consider dropping cast time to 3/4 of a second vs 1 second

Now on to a bit about a warrior as a secondary class. With the hammer skills able to do knock downs, it can be quite easy to just load up a few skills to do hammer knock downs and switch weaps. No real reason to have a ton of hammer mastery if all you are doing is knocking your enemy on their bum, any old hammer will do. Maybe do like what was done with gale for ele's, have a min hammer mastery requirement on skills if need be to help balance when a warrior is a secondary profession on a character. A hammer warrior is going to have hammer mastery of their weapon at the very least, more than likely it will be way more than that as skills dmg scale the higher your attributes are.

draxynnic · Dec 19, 2009, 08:54 AM // 08:54

One possibility, if ANet decides that simply making nonelite hammer knockdowns lose the "lose all adrenaline" clause might make them too repeatable is to apply a disable period (NOT a recharge) to it. This disable period could then scale down with increasing HM, so a character with high Hammer Mastery is rewarded by being able to start rebuilding adrenaline more quicky.

Reverend Dr · Dec 20, 2009, 12:31 AM // 00:31

Quote:

Originally Posted by S{R}Raptor

Not everyone has every expansion

Lets not just make skill lines balanced among each other, lets make sure each expansion has its own selection of overpowered skills, that will sure be easy and provide final balance to the game. Until someone combines all of the newly overbuffed skills and we realize we are in a worse state than before.

Who cares about people that don't have every expansion? No really, that is the point of the game design, to sell expansions, as such all expansions have to be desirable. Already in place for PvP, for very practical reasons you need every expansion. Suddenly for PvE the game mode that actually gets added content someone jumps up and says "what about the people without all the expansions?"

Really if you are trying to balance for lack of expansions then you are trying to balance for 31 separate games (faction, faction + proph, faction + proph + nightfall, etc) rather than just balancing for one game. Putting forth that much extra work because a group of people don't want to buy your product is RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing retarded.

It also doesn't change that how they described hammer bars is contrary to how they actually function in the game.

OMFGimCUTE · Dec 29, 2009, 01:20 AM // 01:20

as long as its all for pve its cool with me

Deatgs Corrupter · Jan 01, 2010, 02:17 PM // 14:17

to be fair hammer right now is pretty powerful if u use frenzy but as eragon said u decrease armor and u take double damage, i think that you should have in PVE only a 25/33% chance to knock down whenever u use a hammer swing or make more of the hammer skills have knock down effects

Olle · Jan 01, 2010, 04:40 PM // 16:40

Quote:

Originally Posted by Deatgs Corrupter

to be fair hammer right now is pretty powerful if u use frenzy but as eragon said u decrease armor and u take double damage, i think that you should have in PVE only a 25/33% chance to knock down whenever u use a hammer swing or make more of the hammer skills have knock down effects

Great Dwarf wep does that

but again, imo, Hammer are decent, sure they could use a buff, but then a week later we would see QQthreads about how OP it is..
keep hammer.change SHADOWFORM.........

Tenebrae · Jan 01, 2010, 04:45 PM // 16:45

They need to buff a lot of skills in :
- Recharge time
- Adrenaline required
- Effects and or Bonuses
And "just" that . Dont really think that some new AoE effects are needed but ofc it would be a great addition.

Yuna Matsumarui · Jan 02, 2010, 04:07 PM // 16:07

well to be honest

if you place a hammerwarrior build in the correct context (OoP+Dark fury)
then all your hammer attacks only need 3-4 hits to work. add FGJ for an adrenaline overkill (since it's capped @ +150%) you only need 3 hits to fuel Earth Shaker.
now throw in crude swing and you can spam earth shaker.

just my way though.