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Warrior Ideas Revisited
I've been thinking about Warriors again, and here's some of the ideas I think would help the class. Some buffs, and a big nerf (diminishing returns), to hopefully overall make the class more fun and balanced. All numbers are open to tweaking, but this is the general direction I like.
Problems as I see it:
Adjust the wounds per strike to 7 for a 1her (14 per round) and 15 for a 2her. Adjust the amount of wounds cured to 4/5/6 at light/heavy/critical. This leads to a 25% buff to wounds building at heavy, and a slight nerf at crit if there's any hindering. Overall this makes it easier to get to build to heavy and crit as a solo Warrior and be able to use the more impactful and spec defining mods and means any spec can get to heavy in three This also means that wounds cure faster if you heavily hinder or escape a Warrior entirely. This also increases the wounds building of 1hers compared to 2hers.
Proposal 2:
Add diminishing returns when multiple Warriors hit a single target. Make the formula the same as hemorrhaging (50% for 2 warriors, 33% for three, etc). This removes the issue of multiple Warriors being able to highly overwhelm wounds curing. There's still a bonus to multiple Warriors, with the initial hit giving a relative bonus, and the extra affliction and damage output. This encourages the use of mods in Warrior heavy groups as well.
(As an aside, i feel a bit mixed about this as Warriors aren't really the meta right now, but there is an issue in some circumstances, and this helps mitigate future problems as well.)
Proposal 3:
Adjust modifiers which don't deal an ice affliction or stun to also deal wounds. (There was a report that half did this for 2hers that's been accepted, I would increase this and add this to 1hers). A non ice/stun mod should deal 5 wounds for a 1her or 13 for a 2her. This encourages the use of mods, leading to more interesting gameplay, and equalizes out the power of the different mods.
Proposal 4:
Nerf plate armour for everyone but Warriors. Reduce the armour value to 14%, and add a skill in Athletics that will add +6% to this. This both slightly helps Warriors relative tankiness, and encourages the use of Splendours again. Following this, there may also be a need for further survivability buffs in Athletics, but I don't have any specific ideas and this is an issue that can wait.
Summary:
Buff Warrior wound building for a solo Warrior. Nerf wound building in groups. Make mods better. Nerf plate for non-warriors.
Let me know your thoughts.
Problems as I see it:
- Warriors are ok 1v1, but could use a slight buff.
- A single Warrior in a group has difficulty doing much, due to the requirement to get to heavy (which takes at least three balances for 8p as a 2her, even longer for a 1her) to get the impactful mods. Exception: Pincharge.
- Multiple Warriors on a target heavily outpace wounds curing. Two Warriors more than doubles the wounds output due to the static amount of wounds cured over time.
- It takes a long time to cure down from critical wounds (over half a minute).
- Warriors are very repetitive. Pure wounding strikes are optimal for building wounds, with mods only done to hinder. Exception: OpenCavity in groups.
- Warriors have lost a lot of their tankiness compared to other classes. Everyone can wear plate, everyone can get max resists, everyone can get nearly max health, compared to top Warriors able to get nearly double an average demigod and everyone can get Vitality. The best defenses right now are being very slippery, which Acrobatics is the best skillset for, or Serpent, which any Lowmagic class can get.
- 1hers are heavily outpaced in wounds building and wounds burst by 2hers, and the extra 'versatility' and poisons don't make up for this, as 2hers have better mods anyway and even a bonus to the chance that the single poison they have goes through.
Adjust the wounds per strike to 7 for a 1her (14 per round) and 15 for a 2her. Adjust the amount of wounds cured to 4/5/6 at light/heavy/critical. This leads to a 25% buff to wounds building at heavy, and a slight nerf at crit if there's any hindering. Overall this makes it easier to get to build to heavy and crit as a solo Warrior and be able to use the more impactful and spec defining mods and means any spec can get to heavy in three This also means that wounds cure faster if you heavily hinder or escape a Warrior entirely. This also increases the wounds building of 1hers compared to 2hers.
Proposal 2:
Add diminishing returns when multiple Warriors hit a single target. Make the formula the same as hemorrhaging (50% for 2 warriors, 33% for three, etc). This removes the issue of multiple Warriors being able to highly overwhelm wounds curing. There's still a bonus to multiple Warriors, with the initial hit giving a relative bonus, and the extra affliction and damage output. This encourages the use of mods in Warrior heavy groups as well.
(As an aside, i feel a bit mixed about this as Warriors aren't really the meta right now, but there is an issue in some circumstances, and this helps mitigate future problems as well.)
Proposal 3:
Adjust modifiers which don't deal an ice affliction or stun to also deal wounds. (There was a report that half did this for 2hers that's been accepted, I would increase this and add this to 1hers). A non ice/stun mod should deal 5 wounds for a 1her or 13 for a 2her. This encourages the use of mods, leading to more interesting gameplay, and equalizes out the power of the different mods.
Proposal 4:
Nerf plate armour for everyone but Warriors. Reduce the armour value to 14%, and add a skill in Athletics that will add +6% to this. This both slightly helps Warriors relative tankiness, and encourages the use of Splendours again. Following this, there may also be a need for further survivability buffs in Athletics, but I don't have any specific ideas and this is an issue that can wait.
Summary:
Buff Warrior wound building for a solo Warrior. Nerf wound building in groups. Make mods better. Nerf plate for non-warriors.
Let me know your thoughts.
2
(c) Iron Realms Entertainment 2012.
Comments
If your buffing a warriors ability to put out wounds and afflictions at the same time then some of the instant kills will be too easy to do.
Also if your making it so stun and ice afflictions don't cause wounds you'll probably want to make it so impale doesn't cause wounds either to avoid someone just spamming impale to build wounds to crit.
Yeah I think Impale is fine with no wounds. IIRC the impale tics do wounds anyway.
The reason why imaple is ok now is that a warrior can't spam it and maintain it, eventually you'll cure out of it and the impale won't hit. Its the same principal as spamming arm breaks. Its amazing hinder but you cant maintain it due to it not doing wounding.
I am 100% on board with the plate armour issue for various reasons including that there is no reason to have any other armour in game because Plate trumps all.
I would like to revisit Transmute in Athletics. I feel it is a useful damage mitigation skill that can never actually be used, I just am not sure entirely of which way to take it.
I would like to see some low level hinder mods in Blademaster, as they are the only spec without a true hinder until high wound levels. I would also like to see their ability to use poison increase (as we discusssed in regards to Stab).
I am sure I have other thoughts, I just can't think of them currently.
Also it was my report and I demand justice!
I guess warrior wounding and diminishing returns hasn't really been as big an issue as even with warriors stacking they still stack slower, if more certainly than other classes.
There were classes with better group burst under old warriors too. The difference is that if you survive the burst, you can recover quickly. Recovering from warriors requires sitting out of the fight for extended periods of time.
Given, I don't know how quickly they build wounds right now, but the premise is the same. Without a way to expedite wound curing, they need to build significantly slower than vitals pressure in a way that offsets the speed of recovery.
There are tons of fast kills, but you can escape them and be healthy in under 10s normally. Warriors' relevant difference is that you can escape for 10s and still be in instakill range.
It's a huge difference, that's not only relevant in war seal challenges. Having to run away and heal up for 30+ seconds is a huge deal.
If more people played warriors you'd see it more often.
If we can get hemorrhaging down for both bleeding and bruising, we plan to make it a thing for both warriors and monks. The problem is getting it down, and we've taken a bit of a break on monk changes for a few days to focus on actual envoy reports to try and get things moving there.
Increasing wounds cured by level is an interesting idea, and one I don't think we've even thought of at this point. Definitely bears more looking at.
Proposal 3 is already an approved envoy report for 2handers - I'm way to add it for 1handers, but it can be looked at after it's implemented for 2 and that's been tested (Since I've forgotten twice already, I'm going to go implement that after I finish typing this).
Proposal 2, aka diminishing returns, I have a special report request to add this globally anyway. There's also some ideas going around up here I might bring up to envoys in this direction.
Overall, Shedrin, good writeup. After you get some feedback, mind shooting it off to me in an email as an official SR request?
Right now you are stuck with building towards being able to apply afflictions or applying afflictions (which lowers your ability to further apply afflictions because the buildup gets cured, actually setting you back-- meaning that many of our afflictions are actually useless because using them does nothing but hinder our own offense).
I've been waiting for the implementation of this report to see how it goes before further suggestions / griping, but I personally find it to be a much less enjoyable mechanic than we started with.
Sure. Though I was content to use regular reports for this as there's only a few reports that need to be done.
I'd agree with your assessment in how it works but in terms of overall balance the quicker kills are more deadly, more flexible and generally more useful for group combat. Like I can attempt a kill set up as a bard in seconds and if it fails and the target runs out or gets back to the nexus or something then eh no worries I can just switch to the next target and attempt on them with no major time investment required and only a small amount of power to set up, leaving plenty to retry numerous times on different targets or the same target if we pull them back. As a warrior its much much harder to switch targets as you've just spent a considerable amount of time and power getting the wounds up here so if that target runs to a safe area you need to switch and start from scratch again.
Its part of why I like Shedrins suggestions in giving Warriors more power up front, more damage, more afflictions, more powerful afflictions. It will let them compete in a game "meta" where kills come quick in seconds from instant kills or damage.
Its also why I suggested nerfing the warrior instant kills because if your giving them the affliction and damage output they need to compete in group combat then their attrition kills are going to be too good for solo.
Not to mention just for compassion right now but you have attrition skills like healing. As you can see from the war logs one healer can build as fast to a kill as three warriors stacking and well both take a crazy amount of time to heal up and come back to the fight with. I think most folks are on board with a healing fix though anyway so hopefully that's not going to be a comparable issue in the future.
I think partially because of them being an constant attack class. Just from an overall bigger picture if a burst kill class is as tanky or tankier than the longer kill set up class then the burst class has a clear advantage in offense and defense. Which isnt usally the case usally you trade offense for defense. Your tankier but cant kill as fast or you kill fast but cant survive as long.
Usually in most games the burst classes tend to be the glass cannons, they burst to try and kill and kill or fail and then are potentially vulnerable for others to counter back. The attrition style classes tend to be tankier and have a lower offensive output but can sustain it much longer.
Like if you can kill someone in 10 seconds and another class can only kill in 60 seconds then the bursty class that can kill quicker tends to be much less tanky than the other class.
Not sure if I've worded that exactly right but hopefully you get the picture.
I guess its a question of what way to do want to take warriors. Do you want them to be the trundling along attackers or do you want them to bursty?
Knowing how survivable I was, I am loathe to think about mechanics that would compound that problem.
Lusternia is not like this at all. Every class can more or less put up a fight and every class can more or less be tanky. You can pick the worst class defensively in the game and put a top tier player in that position and they'll still be able to escape from most situations. Do the same with the worst class offensively and the top tier players will still be able to be able to put up an offence that cannot be ignored. This is why I don't believe that warriors need to inherently be more tanky than other classes just because they are warriors. They have an offence that may be slower than other classes, but in return their offence actually sticks because they are an attrition class. As long as you are attacking you are advancing towards winning the fight. Even if you cannot continue to attack at worst you are only set back by however long you are unable to attack. For a burst class this is not the case. They may build up their offence a bit quicker than the warrior, but unless they can actually pull off the kill within seconds their entire offence could be reset and it would be like nothing had happened at all.
That maybe sounds a bit odd but one of the suggestions I made earlier was a dramatic increase in the wounding a warrior can put out but also a dramatic reduction in the instant kills themselves. And also a quicker way to cure wounds when not being hit, like if you dont get hit with an attack in the past 8 seconds you unlock a combat ability 4second equi or something that lets you cure a sizeable amount of wounds or something, just a random idea.
Like for example a warrior should be able to get to the required wound levels to attempt an instant kill within 20-30 seconds but that instant kill should not be guaranteed.
Bonecrusher seemes to be a good one to be on track for this. It'll need tweaking but with the 100% parry change you can in theory, solo anyway, totally avoid a bonecrushers brainbash with the right parry. Even with critical chest and critical head if you switch your parry correctly at the right time you can shrug off the afflictions required for the set up. This way to avoid the bonecrusher kill wont work if beast spit paralysis hits though so there's that to factor in or in groups if someone else prones or removes the targets parry.
The Blademaster instant kill isn't a bad guideline with some tweaks its got a number of different ways to do it with a number of different wound and affliction set ups, they'll have the damage option with the haymaker changes etc. This is what I'm liking the look of multi ways to kill that'll require different ways of set up.
It'd mean putting more affliction requirements and changing the instant kills a lot but honestly I think something like this would be the right direction because its more fun. You do more afflictions you do more stuff and your instant kills are not so flat and set.
For proposal #3 I'm trying to evaluate how much of a buff to 1-handers that's going to be and if it'll be too much. A BM with that change could output monk-levels (!) of afflictions while also building wounds (albeit probably not into heavy). Even if it does make 1-handers the top dogs I think the numbers are reasonable enough to start with, and I like that this part of the proposal is very tweakable.
We don't need to go back to the situation where people could essentially ignore any vitals pressure due to high HME and mitigation.
It's still entirely possible to tank up now, yet I don't think anyone is fully pushing the envelope to the extent that it's possible in the current meta in terms of damage mitigation and recovery. To buff a class without first seeing the outliers that exist in the current system is just tempting fate for a return of the juggernauts.
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
On the modifier wounds, I think adjusting the 1her wounds per strike will make the biggest difference to their balance, but I also want to make and encourage mod use as it's much more interesting than just spamming wounding strikes 90% of the time. I don't think dust aff spam or whatever will be as impactful as it is for monks, due to a few factors: One, Warriors have a more limited amount of afflictions available to them, they need to get to those wounds levels on that bodypart to do them, and there's much more obvious tells on how to parry a Warrior. That said, this can be approached conservatively. edit: The one that I can see being the biggest impact is BM dust stack. This requires heavy chest, and let's them deal paralysis + asthma + two poisons + beast + potentially remiss. Paralysis report will help this a bit, but it could still be too strong as chest is also the kill bodypart. Something to watch for, certainly.
On tankiness, I think Warriors could use a relative survivability increase, and it fits their current gameplay, but I don't want a return to previous levels. I don't really have anything specific planned beyond the plate thing (which I think should happen if only to make Splendours a thing again anyway). It's a more minor point compared to wounding, though.
I was planning to start with two reports, one for the diminishing returns, and another for the base wounding strike and curing changes. If we do a special report, we can potentially do that and test the mod changes as well, and other reports to tweak things like instakills, BM stab, hemorrhaging for warriors and other miscellaneous things all at once. Personally I'm fine with taking this slow, but let me know.
Assuming no mod that stuns or does an ice affliction does any wounding then:
I could be spamming paralysis and blackout or paralysis/asthma on near every move plus two poisons while building wounds. Or Impaling and building or so on. I 'm not sure I like the concept that a warrior can spam hinder and that'll get to a critical state for a potential instant kill, not when some of the instant kills are too easy to do at high wound levels. It'll not be optimal to do. You'll be better off striking for pure wounds as much as you can but for example if a warrior gets into trouble and needs to hinder to stop an enemy from killing them then they can switch to spamming knock down/wind or impale or something like that. Which will still build wounds meaning that the warrior can build to an attrition kill while spamming hinder. Previously warriors had to stop their instant kill build to hinder.
That was one of the big complaints about healers aurawarp in that they can spam hindering afflictions that built to an attrition instant kill.
Things like impale and knock down wind are sort of semi balanced now in that you can not spam them for ever. Eventually the target will cure out of your lock down and be able to fight back. Being able to maintain knock down wind or impale on a target constantly just seems too good.
Instant kill wise I think there should always be a way to counter the instant kill no matter what. Like with Pureblade there is. They hit the affliction and if you then web them or hinder them near when they recover balance they wont be able to pull off the kill because your cure goes through before they get out of a web for example.
Cav's instant kill isnt avoidable because the impale writhe lasts longer than the balance so there is not a way to counter its set up. You get impaled then you die before you can writhe off. Same as Axelord you get the wounds then you die.
I'd be a fan of moving all the instant kills to non hindering aff requirements like bonecrusher and pureblade. Maybe a bit more creative though but you get the general concept. With bone crusher if you have critical head and chest if you parry the chest stun you can hinder them to avoid the kill or you can in fact simply just switch your parry to the head to avoid one of the affliction requirements.
Tl;dr we need data.
Good point to bring up though. May want to adjust the afflictions various warriors can have. Most body parts should have something scary on it so you have to make a decision on how to parry not just auto leave it on one or two areas.