Warrior Modifier Tweaks

Shedrin

I think it's time to go over each spec and look at what modifiers need changing. I'll give one idea per spec as a starting point.

BC -
Solid spec, has good light modifiers, and good scaling on head and chest. Biggest weakness is if the target just camps parry on head and chest, they can have some issues.
 - Add mutilatedarms at crit. Would give another bodypart that's worth building wounds on and helps directly bypass parry and hinder when achieved.

BM -
In a poor place. The lock is too difficult to achieve, and it has low hindering until crit legs. Poisons are too inconsistent even with all the poison buffs.
 - Move damagedorgans to heavy and change the effect to: Poison shrugging is 0.  And a buff specifically to BM, all attacks on a target with damagedorgans have poisons rub off chance be 100%. Would increase consistency, give a purpose to gut wounds, and make Eviscerate a bit more achievable.

Cav -
Solid spec. Good hinder on multiple bodyparts and two viable instakills, and Maul especially is hard to parry against, though it requires more wounds. Guard is overly strong in 1v1, adding a ton of extra wounds.
 - Remove the extra wounds aspect of Guard, or remove Guard self.

PB/AL -
These specs are really similar. Damage vs bleed is a wash. Both have heavy mutilates. Execute is easier, but Exsanguinate should be doable with the report. I think AL is a bit stronger overall.
 - Add anorexia to the slitthroat modifier. This would help make damagedthroat actually stick the afflictions you want (paralysis or haemophilia primarily).

Karlach

The only gripe I have with pureblade this year is the only method of hindering is double tendon, the loss of hemiphlegy and no other damaged arm affliction it's very difficult to keep a target down, or slow their offence.

I also would love the option to amputate again, with regards to ways of raising bleed levels and help hindering stick.

Plus there's always the comedy value of beating someone to death with their own limbs but I digress.


In truth, I'd like to revisit this discussion after the various existing changes that are yet to be implemented or currently on the report list approval. I don't want to overbuff pureblade, just make it competitive.

Shedrin

I was also thinking of changing how collapsedlung works and giving it to PB. It could be a hinder. Not sure specifically how to change it though.

Luce

Asthma-like aff where it consumes balance when you move? Something about needing to work to take a breath.

Deichtine

Ok I'm just going to list a bunch of stuff I had thought about before.


Bonecrusher:
Bonecrusher suffers heavily against people who can parry half decently due to it not being about to draw peoples parry away from the chest or head. Bonecrusher needs some dangerous afflictions somewhere other than the head and chest.

For example make smashleg at critical legs do a lot of damage and bruising or give the mutilate legs at critical.

Bonecrushers instant kill is the easiest instant kill to do in group combat but its very clunky and reliant on random luck solo, unless you happen to have a 4 balance buff which is unobtainable by average warriors(Unless your stag or heavily artifacted) The bonecrusher instant kill is sort of semi-locked behind an artifact or rng gate at the moment. Even if I have critical wounds on every body part against a warrior without a 4+ balance buff and the right weapons I can avoid a brain bash the majority of the time unless a beast spit manages to hit me.

On the other hand bring brain bash to the group and it requires less wounds and less set up than any other warrior instant kill.

Brainbash should probably be made easier and more reliable to do in one on one and harder to do in the group. 




Pureblade and Axelord are good specs now. Well Pureblade's instant kill is impossible one on one but that will be fixed with the upcoming report.

Axelord and Pureblade(after the pureblade fix) will kill in exactly the same ways, build on legs for threat and chest/gut/head for axelord and gut/chest for Pureblade for the kill.  

Axelord needs 5 power and 145 wounds min to kill. Pureblade needs three power and 150 wounds min to kill. 

Pureblade gets a timed instant kill which has utility use.

Axelord gets anti prismatic. (I want to say give anti-prismatic to every warrior, take it out of axelord and make it an atheletic skill.) A way to break prismatic barriers is something I feel all warriors should have right now, its way way to easy for a non warrior to just pop prism and sit there healing up a lot of wound progress now.

I'm finding the only hindering I want to do or need to do is mutilates which both specs can get a few combos into the fight. These two hander specs have decent hindrance already with mutilate legs.

Then for group Pureblade has twist which is amazing and Axelord has OpenCavity which is also amazing.




Give Blademaster damagedarms, that'll give it the hindering it needs to do well early on. It's instant kill could probally do with being tweaked but its still possible to get.


I really really want to point out that all the one handed specs are so much weaker than all the two handed specs due to the difference in wound levels. I really think that people have been hugely overestimating that one handers can give 2 afflictions and the chance for 2 poison.

I honestly think that you could buff the one handers to do the same wounding levels as two handers and that would be fine, maybe with a few tweaks though. Two handers get better afflictions than one handers earlier so even if they had the same wounding output you'd see still a difference in affliction output.

Synkarin

I agree with @Karlach and think we need to really wait to see how the warrior special report pans out before stacking more changes onto warriors. 

A lot of changes are incoming, lets wait and see.

Shedrin

Most of the reports are already in, and I think there's still a lot of issues that need to be addressed. Not saying that Warriors are hopeless, or certain specs are hopeless, but I don't think we need to wait to discuss things.

Shaddus

Maybe collapsed lung can give a .5 second delay to all actions you take that require balance. Like aeon, but doing multiple actions doesn't cancel each other, just adds to the delay.

Breandryn

I didn't poke into Blademaster that much, but that's in large part due to my disappointment with affliction delivery. On paper, and in skill descriptions, it sounded like I'd be focusing around vlocking people, but even with tracking's poison delivery buff the miss rate was high enough that the only reliable delivery was via stab, which was too slow to gain affliction traction (I could have been missing vital buffs, though!). Sidenote: How has the overhaul affected affliction-based combat? It's odd to not think of things in terms of kelp trees. >_<

At the least, I'd suggest thinking about what the point and goal of BM is and helping present that concept better - coming from other IRE games, I read about BM when picking specs and it really sounded like it was a standard speed/vknight spec, so it was jarring to see it in action. This is more of a cosmetic/meta suggestion, perhaps.

Deichtine

You really cant compare Lusternia knights to any other IRE knights at all. It's a totally different thing.

All Lusternia warriors operate in the same fundamental manner to build wounds to get to their instant kill. Poisons and afflictions are just what they use to help get to that goal.

They also get a sort of side damage plan for group combat I guess as well.

Breandryn

They are similar to Carnifex from Aetolia or rogues from WoW, in that they build resources via attacking to use for more potent attacks. I'm just saying that to someone coming from other IREs BM looked like it was a vlock knight. The whole wounds concept isn't something you find out about until you are/fight a warrior. I'm not commenting on balance, just initial impressions as a newb warrior.

Shedrin

BM lock right now has too many requirements to pull off. The main obstacles being needing both heavy head and and heavy chest. Moving damagedthroat or asthma to light isn't the way to go, as they would likely be too strong in groups. I think remiss could be the answer. If asthma and either anorexia or slickness (or both) were added to remiss, then you could remiss asthma + anorexia/slickness, and when remiss procs, do the damagedthroat + stab for the missing affliction.

So then you'd only need heavy head for the lock, at the cost of some power and wounds buildup.

Deichtine

BM doesn't need locks right now to kill. I guess it's a question of what direction do you want to take them.

 Being able to lock reliably at just heavy wounds would be very powerful.

Shedrin

It'd be more reliable, but at a cost, and interruptible. I do want to make the lock work, as I think it's one of the unique things about the specs and a draw towards it. Anecdotally, I've seen many BM players cite that as a reason for choosing the spec (myself included).

Deichtine

I'm thinking you should probably require at least 1 critical wound to be able to lock someone reliably.

If you can start throwing out green locks at just heavy wounds then you'll be able to sort of spam it after the first few combos in group fights a bit too easily.

Im kinda also a little bit dubious about remiss and asthma as well what with all the all the easy aeon in group fights.

Shedrin

It'll have an impact, but I think the telegraphed delay mitigates that factor.

If it should be crit, then that's basically what we have now (two heavy ~ one crit), but the poison rng makes it unreliable. Adding slickness and anorexia to remiss makes it reliable. But then I think we start getting into the issue of whether it's worth it at all. The lock isn't a kill by itself, and using remiss for it is pretty negative on wounds unless it sticks a long while.

Shango

Poisons don't do a damned thing to help with Wound building, only POSSIBLE exception being Senso, if Warriors had a means to get it to stick longer than instantly cured as we lack any means to give asthma now with the Chansu change, save for Blademaster getting the only afflict that allows for it. Still not sure how/why that happened unless non-warriors just really didn't want to deal with Senso venoms anymore. With Dendroxin and Calcise removed...there are NO ice venoms now, whatsoever, so nothing actually assists Wound building there. 

Only things that effect wound building are Balance speeds (3.5s vs pre-overhaul average of 2s due to high Precision from Tempers and stat runes, plus Aslaran balance buff which was why everyone was bottlenecked into Aslaran and why the Overhaul was so necessary), and Power. Which of course bottlenecks Warriors into Lucidians now, since they have the highest rate of Power Regen if they have that expensive artifact for Demi+.  1p/10s with nontrans Discipline, 1p/8s with trans, 1p/6s if also Lucidian with trans Discipline. Thanks to the loss of Calcise/Dendroxin, and the fact there are so few Ice balance consuming warrior modifiers save broken/mangled limbs (which save for Cavalier, do nothing to directly help the kill method timer hardcoded by requirements at the wound levels they are)...so if you try to do an affliction modifier and it's NOT ice based, you've wasted precious time and taken away from Wounding pressure. 

Shango

I did try to suggest making Exsanguinate's focus be as it was before...Critical Gut wounds+Internalbleeding, but shift focus away from Chest (which was always useless to target before this recent Report 1466 went live as it has a hemophilia and sensitivity afflict combo (light and heavy respectively) as the only mods offered), to legs at heavy with one being tendoned. But will wait till the current Exsanguinate can be better tested before pushed for changing it yet again. Still, I ran through the calculations for it, minimum timer to get a kill as is, hardcoded to 87.5s, add 24s to that if they miss since the nearest possible time to get that kill coincides with an ice balance so falls on whomever has the faster ping.

Unsure if the goal is actually to hardcode in minimum times to kills exceeding a minute or two, but that's the situation as it currently stands. 3.5s per swing, and wound cure rates of 4wounds/1s...and that's without hinders, parry, being taken from the room/target leaving, prismatic shield going up to negate ALL wounds before it drops to reset the timer by losing the Warrior all the Power spent to that point, etc being taken into account.

Karlach

New Exsang certainly looks viable to pull off, moreso after the two impending knighthood changes to 2h attacks and 2h power attacks go through, allowing you to continue to build wounds while repeating tendon.

Still want to play with that on live before making any further suggestions to the spec, I've a few ideas on ways to improve PB but any further additions may not be necessary.

Deichtine

I said about prism being a pretty heavy counter to warriors. Its why I suggested taking hack from axelord and putting it in athletics so all warriors can break it. Fighting as a warrior without hack is really difficult vs certain classes.

Xenthos

... giving prismatic break to every warrior is probably not the best idea.  Prismatic is kind of supposed to be a strong defense.  Axelord being able to break it is a new loophole that weakens it but doesn't entirely ruin it.  All warriors being able to break it will essentially make the trans ability worthless...

Deichtine

Serpent isn't worthless vs an axelord though. If you use serpent the Axelord can basically take it down for every other balance if they have full power, once the axelord is out of power then serpent will still continue to last for some time.

So for ten power your still getting a ton of defense and also forcing the enemy to use all their power to half counter it.

EDIT: Just warriors need to be attacking fairly constantly to maintain wounding build up. Anything that can stop a warrior attacking for a good length of time or force the warrior to have to run for significant amounts of time is a big balance issue for warriors.

Xenthos

Who serpents against one warrior?  One axelord in a group pretty much makes Serpent irrelevant, and group situations are where Serpent (generally) shines.

Xenthos

To your edit: If you change it so that hack does not drop serpent entirely, just makes a hole for the warrior who did a hack to be able to do warrior attacks through it for a short period, then maybe we could discuss giving that version to all warriors.  I am not on board with giving every warrior the ability to entirely destroy prismatic barriers on demand.

Deichtine

I guess if your talking about purely group combat then you just make axelord a required part of a large balanced group then, like you must have a melder, bard, axelord, etc.

Xenthos

Most combat in Lusternia is group combat, so it has to be considered and weighted appropriately in these balance discussions; sometimes things that are fine 1v1 just won't cut it when considered in that context.

Deichtine

Xenthos said:

To your edit: If you change it so that hack does not drop serpent entirely, just makes a hole for the warrior who did a hack to be able to do warrior attacks through it for a short period, then maybe we could discuss giving that version to all warriors.  I am not on board with giving every warrior the ability to entirely destroy prismatic barriers on demand.

Thats what it does now isnt it?

You hack, takes normal warrior balance to remove it. So you get Serpent for 3-3.5ish seconds.  Then you get an attack or two in depending on your speed and serpent pops up again and you hack again right?

Xenthos

And everyone else gets in multiple attacks in that time, too, so that is not what it does right now.

Deichtine

Oh you mean you wanted so only the warrior could attack though it? I misunderstood you.

Hmm thats not a bad idea though, give athletics like an ability that allows warriors to bypass prism themselves for x amount of seconds for x power.

Xenthos

I do not know that I am in love with the idea, but it is more preferable than hack-for-all to me.  And yes, that is what I meant.

Karlach

Just rework puissance. Barely gets used as is.

Edit: Goddamn autocorrect.