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Just wanted to start a discussion with other pvp warriors on your thoughts in warrior in pvp.
I don't want this thread to devolve into angry or snippy posts.
I hope we can consolidate meaningful, andthoughtful feedback for warriors for improvements and make them even more fun to play.
I suppose I'll start off with my experience with warrior.
Warrior definitely feels strong in low ranks where players haven't mastered burst, team burst and cc.
But at higher ranks, warriors feel like one of the squishiest jobs. They certainly are the squishest tank. And that's fine, but they are even easier to dps down than some, if not most, melee dps jobs.
This is because warriors have no means to reduce incoming damage. They have health shields and heals. Both are inherently weaker, by far, when compared to flat damage reduction modifiers, especially in a team pvp environment.
On top of this, several actions cost health. Orogeny costs a whopping 20% of maximum health to use. Onslaught costs 10% for a total of 30% health cost, that's north of 20,000 health or 20,000 self inflicted potency harm.
And these actions not being weapon skills, don't even benefit from bloodwhetting self heal.
I feel at higher ranks, diamond and above, this health cost coupled with the weakness of healing and health shield, especially after the recent nerf, is too punishing.
I support the self healing nerf, because in situations where the warrior is not team focused, the warrior's self heal allows him to keep fighting for a long time, dealing massive aoe damage.
However, against skilled players and teams who focus dps the warrior, the warrior often dies before he can do much of anything.
SUGGESTIONS
My suggestions are:
(1) NERF - reduce bloodwhetting's self healing to 50%.
This weakens warrior at low ranks where less skilled players are not able to coordinate personal and team burst damage.
(2) CHANGE/NERF/BUFF - remove the health bubble effect from bloodwhetting.
Add effect: reduces damage taken by 20% (the percentage is just my suggestion. Can be higher or lower)
(3) BUFF - reduce the self harm/health cost of orogeny to 10%.
Orogeny costs too much health right now to really be useful in my opinion.
GOAL of CHANGES
My goal with these changes is simply to WEAKEN warriors at LOW LEVEL play, while SLIGHTLY strengthening warriors at HIGH LEVEL play.
It is not enjoyable to be cc'd and killed instantly as a warrior with little to no recourse. Health bubbles and healing as a means of defense are weak to cc because no attacking means no healing.
While health bubbles are completely useless against attacks that do a flat percentage of health damage.
A switch to some level of %damage reduction will allow warriors to survive slightly longer to enable the use of combo actions like storm path at higher level play.
Orogeny self damaging cost is way too high to justify its use most of the time.
With all of this said, I'm open to other nerfs, including potency nerfs, in order to balance the warrior.
I'm not looking to make warrior overpowered, I just want him to be more enjoyable to play at higher ranks.
Thanks.
Oh, and I would make one more suggestion.
CHANGE/NERF/BUFF - I would NERF Primal Rend by increasing cooldown to 20 seconds, but BUFF stun duration to 3 seconds.
Increasing the cooldown on primal Rend reduces the number of stuns a warrior can inflict per match, which I would argue is good for the game as a whole because it reduces CC in the game a little bit.
The 1 second Increase to stun is mostly a quality of life adjustment which doesn't affect team play as much as its helpful in occasional 1v1 or 1v2 situations where it can allow the warrior to mitigate a bit more damage by interrupting incoming attacks.
I should clarify, global cooldown between attacks are over 2 seconds but less than 3. Increasing primal Rend to 3 allows for a preventing, in SOME, instances, depending on the timing of the enemies previous button press, allows for the prevention of an income attack for the duration of a global cooldown.
Personally, I think all stuns should be at least 3 seconds. But this is my understanding and my opinion.
And I feel it's a fair tradeoff for NERFING primal Rend by increasing cooldown to 20 seconds. Which not only nerfs warriors CC ability, but ALSO nerfs the warriors maximum potential dps.
Oh, and I would make one more suggestion.
CHANGE/NERF/BUFF - I would NERF Primal Rend by increasing cooldown to 20 seconds, but BUFF stun duration to 3 seconds.
Increasing the cooldown on primal Rend reduces the number of stuns a warrior can inflict per match, which I would argue is good for the game as a whole because it reduces CC in the game a little bit.
The 1 second Increase to stun is mostly a quality of life adjustment which doesn't affect team play as much as its helpful in occasional 1v1 or 1v2 situations where it can allow the warrior to mitigate a bit more damage by interrupting incoming attacks.
I don't think WAR needs much in the way of changes right now. They are very well-tuned right now. They are the most fragile tank due to the HP cost on some abilities and a complete lack of damage reduction, but they have a *ton* of control and pressure, and exceptionally high DPS during LB (12k or 16k per GCD is *very* high sustained DPS.) WAR is a major play-maker, but that can also backfire if you're bad at it - a bad WAR will often cost their team the game. Your focus should be on initiating (Primal Rend if they are stacked up, or pull a specific target out with Blota) and peeling. Nothing is more frustrating than to be playing a healer or caster and having a MNK, SAM, etc riding you all game while your team's WAR is off fondling the enemy's healer or something. Your job as a WAR is to protect your allies and turn diving enemy melees into kills for your team. MNK is very difficult to peel by design but you can easily force them to burn all three Thunderclaps in a short period of time with good play, which leaves them very vulnerable (smart MNKs will typically disengage with a defensive Tclap to safety, but most MNKs are not smart because the class is overpowered and pretty mindless.) All other melees are easier to deal with. Your BLM, healer, etc are going to have trouble contributing if they have to spend all of their time kiting a melee in circles, and WAR is better than any other tank (and damned near any other class, period) at peeling. If you want to be a good WAR, you need to be aware of where the enemy players are and make good use of quickchat. Use stuff like I'm going on ahead! and target macros to indicate that you're going to initiate on someone; you can use Covering to let people know you're going to play defensive and focus on peeling and protecting.
I don't care about low skill games. You do not design or balance a competitive game around low skill play. You design and balance it around the highest levels of play, and the balance changes trickle down from there. In rare cases, you may be able to make a change that doesn't impact high skill games while affecting low skill games, but these are often rare exceptions and should not be expected to happen frequently.
WAR is a class I'm always anxious seeing on my team. Bad WARs will probably cost me some points, but good WARs can turn the game into a 100-0 stomp.
Thanks for the detailed reply Gserpent!