Hey all, it can be difficult coming up with ideas for things to envoy to balance the warrior specs so I invite any and all ideas no matter how good or bad, overpowered or useless. Ideas can spark others that are good changes so please fire away. Please do try to stay on topic.

--Problems (just a couple off the top of my head)--
BM:
-Reliance on impales, which are only significant vs good curing in groups
-No head jabs worth getting
-No decent proning until crit tendon, greatly limits ability to build wounds initially (As with AL, relies on leg affs too much for building wounds)

BC:
-Arms hits are mostly useless as there's no decent threat to take advantage of for those who overly prioritize head/legs
-Wind balance loss was reduced too much to take advantage of even with ectoplasm being afflicted on target
-All head affs worth gettings are swings

AL:
-Chest hits largely useless, endurance drain is not much (shared problem)
-Only one trivial gut aff until severspine, a crit swing
-As with BC, relies on leg affs too much for building wounds

PB:

-***********Ideas********
-change % on multiple limb attacks to favour the first limb
-reduce miss rate further
-minorly reduce plate/robe/tattooarmor and give caps to stat max (introduce robe tempering possibly)
-convert AL to 50/50 cutting/blunt damage/wound source
-add bleeding to BC
-disallow acro balancing from effecting knockdowns
-remove or nerf acro dodge %
-reduction in contort effectiveness
-(not in thread but suggested to me) change BC shieldsmash to disallow parrying on that shield for a short duration
-remove trueshield, or reduce to shield arm only
-change grip rune to disallow parry with that arm for a short time (but keep wielded)

I'd like to add to the BM list that Impale is still horrifically bugged, according to the people I talk to. I'll check to make sure they have current bugs submitted.

Well, I'll probably have better ideas later when I'm not collapsing of exhaustion, but here goes:

1) Swings:-

Right now, here's some info on swing maneuvers from the ABs:



As we see here, hack down allows you to hit head and chest. Hack down is usually where a BC will get his brain-bash (through smite down) or everyone else will get their behead. Now the problem with this is that at the moment, the chance to get a hit on the head when hacking down isn't that much more than getting one on the chest. Most warriors can tell you horror stories of almost killing someone, but because they kept hitting their chest on hack down, the person slowly managed to cure themselves up, re-parry and stance, and basically erase all of the warriors work. The solution: Increase the chance of getting the primary organ on a swing so that it's far more significant and reliable.

Anticipated Argument: "But I like getting gash chest! It's really useful!" Well, the proposed solution will only decrease the chance of chest hits, not eliminate it. Besides, this is where swiping comes in. I wonder how many warriors even use this?

Why it is necessary?: A lot of warriors depend on soft locks and green locks in order to get an opponent into the position where they can get beheaded. Other kill methods are just not feasible on someone who cures well (outside of a group fight). Slit-throat is a swing maneuver found among axelords, blademasters and pureblades and is key to our green and soft-locks, however, if we keep hitting people's chests, we're not getting anywhere.

Anticipated Argument 2: "But if you're hitting chest so much, surely you have lots of wounds on the chest! Go for the big chest afflictions!". Well, while it's true that some of the higher level chest afflictions can lead to a kill (in groups), they don't lead to a lock. They don't help to put someone in a position when they can't parry/stance/apply health/smoke rebounding like a lock can. Also, some of these chest afflictions are worthless, depending on the class.



2) Miss rates:-
Report 512 came out a failure. Given the number of defenses against a warrior (Generally: stance, parry, rebounding, acrobatics and then specific skills like magnetism and many other things to even list), I feel that the natural miss rate should be removed. Not lessened. Removed. This should be true, at least, for a transcendent warrior. Oil of sharpness could be given another effect. At the moment, even after applying oil of sharpness after report 512, warriors still miss far too much for a class that needs to constantly keep pressure on its opponents and already has a hard time doing so.

3) Poisons and afflictions:
We're not monks. Monks can have their own properties in regards to this, since they can hit harder, faster and stack more afflictions than a warrior can and ever will. Most warrior afflictions are simple cures that barely hinder at all, or are cured easily before they ever get the chance to hinder. Warriors use poisons to get their active afflictions most of the time, and to assist in sticking their own warrior-specific afflictions. I propose that warriors should be able to have a 100% chance to hit poisons per swing, or, for the very least, have it be a -much- higher chance. Resilience already does a significant job of reducing the effectiveness of poisons. Warriors, being a class with lacking afflictions, already suffers enough from this skill and does not need their poisons to fail to come off the blade.

4) The cost to become viable:
If you're not a demigod and/or don't have high tier runes, you can't be a good warrior. This is not true for any other class. I don't have any real specific solutions, except for a revision in the wounding mechanics so that those who are already doing reasonable wounding will continue to do so without much improvement, but those who are not demigods and/or have high tier runes will at least be more viable. I can't suggest anything specific, since the wounding and affliction code and mechanics is (mostly) a mystery to us .
Either that, or reduce your prices significantly.


Okay, that's all I can post for now. It's probably barely coherent, and I might come back to this.

Don't bother, they do

Not going to happen. $$$ trumps all. So long as runes are necessary for high tier combat, people will pay for them. There's absolutely no incentive to lower the prices or make the runes unnecessary.

'Tempering' for robes.
Have stats for robes have a max of 60 for greatrobes, total ~110, max of 70 for splendours, total ~125-130. Tattoos accordingly (might have a higher total, but should NOT have a higher max).
With those stats in mind, weapon stats for the different types (speed, damage, precision focused) can be revised a bit, since the min-maxed speed weapons (with the very low damage minimum) won't be necessary any more to build wounds reliably.

Don't really agree with the reliance on legs/proning to build wounds for any of the specs, you can build those fine just by variation of where you hit and using power attacks. Of course, this is less true if there are not worthwhile afflictions in certain body areas, so that might have to be fixed.

There's really no justification for the natural miss that warriors have to deal with (so please get rid of that, not give us a useless, barely perceptible increase to the sharpness oil. At the very least have it so power moves aren't affected by it, sheesh.)

There also needs to be something done about the skill Combat. If you don't have any combat, a warrior will wreck you. If you have some combat, it is the opposite. This isn't quite balanced!

I've only been a BC, but there's a huge thing you didn't mention that is a real benefit to the other specs: BCs don't do any bleeding, making it much harder to get wounds to stick. (new BCs...don't get bleeding runes. Quite useless.) The bleeding from the other classes will eventually get them to sip mana from clotting or health from blood loss...with a BC there's only damage, and that damage is typically easily sparkle/scrolled/regened. Combine this with parry/stance/rebound/natural miss, and you'll have to be very clever to make this spec work (especially with a tertiary as useless offensively as Moon >_> ). I am not clever, I want an easy-win button.

An idea I've had is being able to 'bruise' the target. It would work similarly to burns...certain deepwounds would add to bruise levels, which would steadily get worse and eventually reach a max level. Bruising would be like sensitivity, increasing damage the worse the bruising is. A new skill called "splatter" that would rupture the oversensitive skin resulting in scaling bleeding damage based on bruising levels (bruising levels are set to 0). Splatter would be a feat. Apply arnica or something to cure bruising levels like liniment does burns.

Some hindering would be nice (BC hindering is nonexistent), but I think Iasmos' ideas for hindering got shot down by the furries.

All the decent BC afflictions are...to the head. Which everyone protects with priority one. Knockdown is...a 1s balance loss and prone? It's not serious enough to cause much hindering, even when adding mantakaya to the combo. So hindering would be nice, but my most creative idea is bruising, which isn't hindering.

It'd be nice if we got some brain matter to drop when we land a brainbash. Bladed warriors get heads and the target is unable to be resurrected, and we get... fictional brains :< (Is this meant to say something about the opponent?!)

PS: It is 3:30am, I'm dumber than usual right now, so that says something.

Tempering seems right on point. Plate should be reduced too. Weap stats wouldn't need to be revisited unless it's to open access to other weapon types for variety by cloning the mins of speed weapons.

Your reason for not agreeing was contradicted.. by yourself. Power attacks for BC are jabs, and every single head aff worth a darn is a swing only, legs for the most part too sans KD. Tendon is crit for BM and not used to build until target is already getting pretty abused. Stance/parry head/legs cripples both and nothing either spec has can punish someone for not switching stance/parry.

I also forgot to add grip rune before. Grip rune is just insanely too strong IMO. It should keep things wielded but drop parrying for a brief time.

Edit: another thing is heartpierce is phys damage. 5? Years ago I hit Narsrim with literally 10-15 in a row and he didn't die, and remember this was before beast heal and no one was a demi.
Edit2: As this goes on try to suggest some specific things we can envoy. Move a wound state aff from heavy to medium, change swing to a jab, etc etc whatever.

Power attacks still build wounds, whether the affliction sucks or not. And windpipe is not a sucky affliction. As a bm, you're free to ignore legs completely if they insist on keeping stance/parry there. Go for the arms, collapsednerve, with morphite to prone. Or for gut impales. Or just for the chest, because: heartpierce did 1500 additional damage to me last time I tested it with Malicia. That's 3000 damage a combo. Noone survives that for long. Bms seems to have plenty of options.

If you build wounds without affs outside of a single herb cure either their parry/stance is weak or their armor is weak. That may work on a 55 robe but it's not going to on 75 robes with any decent parry/stance.

Windpipe is not "sucky" but it's not good inherently because of the double venom to stick it for more than the ping on someone's computer. 50% chance each weapon, before shrugging, is unreliable at best.

I agree on the collapsed nerve- a pretty nice affliction if you can get it (decent even as it requires two RNG wins before they cure severnerve, a 1s herb cure) Morphite is a joke unless used with impale/pinleg as rending venom application gives enough to sustain a decent chain of it.

Heartpierce is hard to chain even with lunge. Those who get high enough into crit, around 5-6k wounds to the point where it becomes very likely to hit multiple times, do suffer at this point yes. The problem is more so being able to build and sustain heavy wounds into crit levels.

For PB at least, some issues I've found myself having are that 1) preapplying regen. If I want to amputate a leg, chances are I want to prone them first by tendoning. Even without a special system in place, tendoning the leg will cause a preapplication of regen that will pretty much immediately cure the amputated limb. So now I need to tendon one leg and amputate the other 2) poisons give little synergy for PBs. One poison and one affliction really has little viability for stacking anything in a meaningful way. The options typically seem to come down to tendon-whoring constantly (which is a great affliction don't get me wrong!) 3) No decent swinging aff on chest. Not only does hitting the chest mean you're not hitting the head - but the PB/axelord openchest isn't even a decent consolation prize, would love me some stun there.

As an addition to the cost to becoming viable, the cost for new players to become equipped as a warrior is insanely high and discouraging. It was already expensive for them before the comm-change, now to get a masterweapon, field plate, and helm the cost is 720 commodities (400 for masterweapons, 250 for plate, 70 for helm). I would say the average price for those commodities is between 80-150 gold, probably more often 100-130. Assuming 100 gold per (which is probably undershooting it), that's 72,000 gold for somebody new to the game to get the full basic equipment. And that's not including tempering costs if they can't find somebody with a mallet.

You could half the cost on masterweapons and plate, they would still be expensive without being depressingly expensive.

I was quite disappointed that report 584 didn't go through. It had good support, I thought. I asked for more information on why it was rejected and simply got the usual 'we don't see this as necessary' response, which is clearly not in line with what the players feel is necessary.

Even if report 582 ends up getting through now, the skill won't be fixed by a long-shot. Knockdown is pathetic, especially one-on-one. No bleeding damage. CrushAorta has no real synergy with anything. Plus, there's all the things that plague warriors in general, as Ixion and Rivius have already listed.

Can we get a special report or something already? Just to play a little bit of catch-up with the shiny, new skills?

I like the idea of armor stats scaling a little like dmp. While the numbers would need to be tweaked around with, something like after 40 armor points, it takes 2 to be the equivalent of 1. Maybe another threshold where it takes 3 to be the equivalent of 1. Could have that only apply to wounding and not damage. I haven't really thought this through, so no clue if its the best idea. Just throwing it out there.

The idea is it wouldn't make regular robe wearers have any less protection, but it would be a nerf to splendours, tattoos, and plate.

This is true. Although it isn't really an envoyable thing, it is a big problem! It breaks my heart to tell a novice that he has to do so much mindless hunting before he can get his first real set of armour. It's even worse because novices that come right out of the Portal don't have access to the big money makers that we do, since they're so low-levelled.


Also, Veyrzhul, maintaining those wounds is quite difficult in practice. Parry and stance catches up quite nicely, and anyone with good curing can prevent you from even reaching past heavy on a single body part, so it's not just a "move around and distract thing", because unless you're really dealing out hurt, they have no trouble catching up. Lunges do build wounds, but you're not given a lot of lunges to work with, and once that power burst is gone, we're just doing regular strikes. Also, keep in mind that after the initial 10 power to 0 power blow, a warrior who is fighting his opponent now has to use lunges sparingly as the power comes. The higher afflictions -are- nice, and I agree with you that in theory we have a lot of options, but with the RNG problems all warriors have (that I listed), even blademasters suffer a lot.


Oh, before I forget, my sig also has an envoy idea that is relevant to warriors. I think that acrobatics dodge should steal balance akin to a miss instead of stealing equilibrium. It really is too much punishment to a warrior who already has a lot working against him.

BM's have pinleg to prone as well, it's just not tendon, hell, pinleg is prone+ because it stops certain curing as well. I'm with Veyrzhul here that BM's are pretty nicely rounded.

As far as PB's tendon/amp pre-apply issue, I find that if (assuming a 3 sec balance) you hit tendon (4sec cure) then amputate you'll still get 6 seconds of prone time, enough for two more hits, where you can snag a tendon on the other leg or even the same leg, prolonging prone. Yeah it's not the full shabang but it's pretty decent.

I think the major issue here is how to make warriors more viable against splendours/plate (remember, some splendours with trueshield actually give more protection than plate) without making them OMGWTF on regular robes.

As far as I'm concerned, Warrior is attrition combat, you're just going to slowly build wounds over time against good curing, but it doesn't have the burst offense that is more commonly seen in other archetypes and the offense people seem to want rather than actually working for a kill

Well, yes. But the RNG is a pretty big problem as it is right now and needs some amelioration. I agree with you on all other points.

While I like that warrior combat takes skill, attrition combat isn't going to work well against other classes who can hinder and kill you before you can do the same. Besides, there's just too much random in there for us.

It's been said that this is supposed to be balanced around omnitrans, and everyone has agreed that poisons are a major part of a warrior's offence, but with the one-handed specs there's a 50% base chance of applying a poison and then a 33% chance that even though it was applied, it'll be shrugged! That means a poison only has around a 33% chance of hitting, and that isn't even counting natural miss/parry/dodge/ect.
I think that poisons should be applied every single time if not having a significantly higher chance to apply and roll the RNG with Resilience.

I'll keep it short and to a few points:


Blademaster: It seems like most combatants are drawn to this spec. You see some PBs, and the rare "other", but most of the scary people seem to like Blademaster. Back when the stun train was in full swing, it was BC, with a smattering of Blademasters. I can only imagine this is due to the effectiveness of pinleg. I'll stop short of calling this a problem, but if Blademaster is looked at, pinleg must be looked at as well.

Armour: We need some controls on armour. Controls on the maximums would allow for greater agility in both the finding of issues and the repairing of them. We're seeing issues with outliers- some crazy kepheran monk can load up on tattoos, or get some lopsided 80/whatever splendours, and with their 55/55 shield rune equivalent ability, they're going to bounce knight attacks pretty easily. I am in accord with the tempering for robes suggestion- figure out what you want the max to be in both stats, and CAP IT THERE. (And by all means fix existing robes retroactively- its far too easy to keep a grandfathered in piece of equipment from decaying if you REALLY want to.)

Damage types: As some function of both the above, we're almost in a pure cutting game, at least regarding knights. Tahetso should be thrilled (assuming as I am that they are blunt) but its a bit of a problem/headache for everyone else. Something that would partially alleviate this would be to diversify knight damage types. While I'm not kidding at all about a two handed hammer spec, that would only be one way to address this. I don't buy in to "buff BC just to get more blunt damage out there" (I started when BCs were king of the hill, and I've no inclination what so ever to go back to dulak/manta stuntrain garbage, but addressing problems with the specs, in addition to armour, would help out. Or, you know, a two handed hammer spec.

1h vs. 2h weapons: Since I have started, the dominant specialization has always been either Bonecrusher or Blademaster. (save for a brief, quirky time when AL doubletap with a fast balance race was popular, followed quickly by a rapid nerfing.) It feels to me that the double affliction capacity and greater versatility of 1h weapon specs generally outweighs the wounding bonus of 2h weapons. Not to the degree that the specs are useless of course- Pureblade has floated anywhere from dead last in usefulness to a meandering second place, but on the whole, 1h weapons seem to have the better end of things.


EDIT: I agree strongly with Sidd's commentary about attrition, as well as that people want it quick and easy. Even without going into other archetypes, BC stuntrain, AL doubletap, and the much talked of pinleg are testament to this!

-I agree with adjusting stupid outliers (fullplate/tattoos/trueshield/whatever) to make it so warriors can actually build wounds effectively on them. Not instapin, but it'd be cool if I didn't have to swing for 10 minutes as well. I like the diminishing returns style system for this, like Turnus suggested.

-Destroy acro dodging, make it give a flat DMP bonus, and so on, just change it. There's no reason to keep it considering that both monks and bards now get decent DMP from their skills, trades, etc.

-I think resilience should not give poison shrugging anymore, instead, it should just give a passive bonus to reducing mob damage, up to a full chance to even just absorb the damage the more you learn it. I wouldn't be opposed to some other benefit like more health too.

-Blah blah miss rate here.

-I think when it comes to weapons, I've been more a fan of just standardizing more variables related to pk (wounds, DMP, plate, damage, precision, speed, etc) so that fighting as a warrior becomes easier to balance overall. What I mean to say is that if we were to just, for example, make it so 10 hits to a limb will = heavy wounds, then it becomes much easier to adjust wound afflictions, warrior speed, and the like while at the same time reducing the number of things you have to keep track of.

-I've always loved the idea of a wounds based instakill. AL's have it, I think the other specs should too, that way you give warriors an opportunity to not have to spam pinleg/tendon/etc for the win.

-Should just make AL's 50/50 cut/blunt damage, as people thought for the longest time, this would go some way into making people care about blunt damage a bit more, but AL needs its own upgrades to make this change worthwhile.

On the cutting/blunt issue, we might as well make axes 50/50 like rumours used to indicate. I think that'd be fun.