Welcome to the Guild Wars 2 State of the Game part five for May.
Unsuspecting Foe
Another suggestion Grouch brought to Arenanet’s attention regarding warrior was the trait Unsuspecting Foe. The trait grants a 50% damage buff against stunned targets. The problem with the trait is how narrow a stun is. Very few abilities actually stun the target, though many incapacitate in some way. The idea was to expand the admittedly narrow trait to encompass more forms of crowd control instead of just stuns.
Sharp agreed the trait was too narrow, but brought up an issue from the beta where they had the trait as Grouch suggested. The warrior could destroy anything under crowd control and there was a mesmer build designed to apply constant crowd control to everyone. The result was pairings of warrior/mesmer running around winning every 2v2 fight in the game with little way of stopping them.
Conditions and Healing
Zoose spoke the night before the streamchat with a few warrior players and what they came up with was the realization that the class could build tanky dps and whittle down just about anyone, but could be countered hard by conditions. Their suggestion was to add a trait to reduce the amount of damage each condition on the warrior beyond the first does with each tic of damage.
Grouch brought up how high the health pool on a warrior, even running a berseker amulet, and how little of that health pool their healing skills actually restore while still having extremely long cooldowns.
The devs confirmed they are looking at improving the warrior’s healing capabilities to try and keep up better with the amount of health they have and possibly giving them new ways to better survive conditions.
They also discussed the warrior healing skill that heals more if their adrenaline is full, with everyone agreeing the implication that a warrior should not use their burst skill, the key feature of the class, if they want the heal to be worthwhile. Sharp went on to mention there are some new traits in the works right now to interact better with adrenaline and the healing skills.
Weakness
Sharp interrupted the mention of death shroud to pointedly discuss changes coming up to the weakness debuff. It increases fumble chance, drastically reducing damage from many builds. It only causes fumbles of regular attacks, however. Critical hits suffer no fumble chance, making certain crit-focused builds largely unaffected by the condition.
Arenanet will be changing weakness so it will affect critical hits as well, drastically reducing their damage. The condition will have either duration shortened slightly or fumble chance reduced slightly in order to keep it balanced, but the effect will not longer be useless against crit builds.
Ranger Pets
Rangers are going to have their pet dps reduced a bit. The pet damage increases were based on the class being easier to kill than it is. Being able to sustain themselves in a fight for longer and longer makes the pet damage build up significantly more than intended. The intention is to make it more important for players to swap pets mid-fight to maximize their damage.
Zoose Questions
Zoose was suggesting a cooldown decrease on the warrior skill mending to allow them to clear conditions more regularly, which Sharp confirmed as a possibility they are considering among others.
He also had an idea for a new possible secondary objective. The concept was having a single large node in the center of the map and a flag in each team’s side of the map. The idea behind the map would be to promote capturing the enemy flag and returning it to the node. Zoose’s hope is such a map would encourage players to use highly mobile builds rather than the dedicated heavy teamfighting compositions of players that currently dominate sPvP on basically all maps.
Hit the link below for the last part of the State of the Game!
Part 5
