I.e., how many hours of the day can you aetherhunt with an efficient crew?

...warriors can at least survive getting beat down...I can not argue with the demi stats and thousands of credits required to be comparable to other demi classes. I do typically laugh when I kill somebody, mostly cause it shouldn't be possible with my weak setup..

I don't think PB offense is bad, it's just that defenses and RNG create a wall at a certain point, against big opponents, that I can't get past, even if I have an uninterrupted attack string. Against most people I do pretty well, and I can nearly tank demi bard combos, and my hindering is great, but I'm not good enough to be consistent and figure out the little tricks yet, and I have no reliable kill goal like guardian archetypes and damage classes can resort to. Liok, for example, killed me pretty easily. He built one of my legs high, choked, and scored an amputate. After that, though, it took until my mana was drained to zero, and wounds were built to crit on my head, and then another 15 seconds or so before I died. And I paused my system to tumble (mistakenly) for a few seconds before I got amped again right after the choke, so got set back significantly in my curing. I did everything wrong, and I was still sitting in there slitlocked, in choke, with a bleeding amputated leg, for a shockingly long time before I died. If I was totally dominated in the fight, and it -still- took that long for me to die, something seems a little weird.

If you think warriors need more power to wound or do damage, maybe the envoys could consider power skill(s) to do a burst or other ways to give warriors more of an offensive edge. (Or suggest other ideas to help.)

That said, it should be noted that fiddling with the warrior formulas is extremely problematic. We've done it several times, had envoys test and review until satisfied, and are where we are which is probably as good as it gets (for general damage/wounding).

OK, how about this, then. What if Aggressive and Concentrated stances were changed to have more of an effect on wounding and damage, something like Aggressive increasing the effect of strength on damage by 10%, and adding a 5% chance of the highest wound possible proccing, while lowering poison fire rate by 15% and lowering any "All DMP" the user has by 20%, and Concentrated increased wounding by 5% and eliminated missrate? That seems like it could add some usefulness and narrow down the RNG, while giving non-demi non-artied warriors more of a fighting chance, and maintaining the flavor of knight skills.

I'd really rather avoid touching stances because that unravels a lot of the damage formulas (it's not simple %) and really skews damage to either really high for the high end or really low for the low end (we've been through that before) which is why I suggested new power skills that give brief bursts. I'd prefer to keep the miss rate (though it's meant to compensate for the generally higher damage that warriors do). I'd be more interested in seeing solutions that would balance the miss rate than eliminate it.

I know little about the actual percentages or the math involved but adding skills such as "Berserk" might be good. Would lower the chance to hit but upon hitting do a devastating amount of damage/wounds with a small percent of some sort to amputate the afflicted limb. Could even add this to Dramatics as a performance type....just a thought.

The RNG itself is the problem. My only suggestion (yes I know it's entirely unreasonable, but I believe it's necessary if any hope of true balanceability is wanted) is its removal from the warrior aff proc requirements. Rebalance the wounding categories if you have to in order to compensate, but I'd much rather know that, like -every other class- I can afflict what I'm trying to, given enough buildup. Having someone at 10K+ head wounds and hacking down over and over and over and finally getting the kill 3 minutes later makes me never want to play a warrior. Then getting an absurdly lucky hack down at 50 wounds above crit, makes me feel just as frustrated, and as though any skill I may or may not have as a player is irrelevant in the face of the Random Nefarious Gods and whether they choose to deny or bless me in their terrible wisdom.

Whoa, higher damage? That's usually the last thing I worry about from a warrior (except notable outliers), I've always felt that warriors in general did less damage then everyone else.

Very true. Monks with their 4.5K damage single combos make warriors cry at their own pathetic-ness. Well that and monks can pretty much pick what affs they wanna cause, and when, and can utterly dominate stance/parry shifting with greater ease... and are well, pretty much everything warriors can do, but better, and with complete consistency.

Indeed, the last time we rebalanced warrior damage, the envoys did rigorous testing and retesting and the current levels were what was finally agreed to.

Primarily because decent damage on top of wounding and afflictions is not terribly balanced, so damage was downplayed. This also avoided returns to Ye Olde Days Of Warrior Instagibs (which is a Good Thing).

High damage wasn't part of the equation, really.

Monks just blow that balancing act out of the water these days, though.

Edit: Basically, balancing warriors is near impossible due to the warrior weapon runes causing such wide shifts. If you balance it for the standard warrior, warriors all decked out just tear through the non-plate populace, so... yeah. I'm still not a fan of a return to the old days though, it wasn't terribly fun for anyone but the small handful of us with runes.

You can't balance just based on expected wound output, because it boils down to health application wounds cured vs. wounds applied, weapon speed, how adept the target is at stancing & parrying and the warrior at maneuvering around it, rebounding, natural miss rates, rune of absorption, whether the target is holding an item with a shielding rune, or has runes of gripping... (oi, so many things).

The more damage you do over apply-level, the better off you are. If you do anything equal to or less than apply rate, you're dead in the water. So that +15% wounding is a Really Big Deal.

(The above is also why I suggest people don't bother with Shadowlord any more; with the reduced strength, the wounding percentage is lowered enough that building up wounds is pretty rough. There are so many things in play that all that really needs to be done is a teeny shift one way or the other, even by a couple of percentage points, to make or break the formula. It's just an extremely difficult balancing act.)

Part of the problem with warriors is the constant comparison to monks as a gimped version. At maxxed runes and full bore offense, warrior damage doesn't compare, the affliction rate is abysmal, there are additional RNG hurdles to go by. Monks are supposedly balanced with momentum mechanics with highly limited afflictions and low wounds during low momentum, but many point out that the speed of min-max monks (aslaran, faeling) make momentum building easy.

There is also the additional caveat that monks get damage multipliers that stack on top of each other, prone adds a significant boost, and so does high wounds. Even with strength as the main damage modifying stat for monks, it is not uncommon for 2k+ damage combos to happen due to smart stacking of afflictions and wound building. Outliers can theoretically go to 3-4k, I believe this was tried and tested on test servers, though I don't know any monk capable of reaching such damage active in the game at the moment.

I think the least that can be done for warriors is to review some of the RNG hurdles they have to jump. It is important to keep them balanced and to limit the high end/low end extremes, but it is also important to make combat fun. This is a game, afterall. There is nothing more frustrating that having to grapple against multiple RNGs stacked on one another. Missrate->Dodgerate->Poisonproc (double RNG because of transfer rate as well as shrugging rate)->Afflictionproc. If warriors need to be balanced by not having their full affliction complement all the time, then another mechanic beyond missing or affliction proc should be considered, at least.

As a disclaimer, I've never been a warrior combatant for any significant time, so all of what I said above are merely going by secondhand information and my own theorizing, which can be flawed, yes. But even as a monk, the worst thing I find in combat is dealing with miss rates on a power form (5p for a missed hit?) and dependancy on poison procs. I think that warriors have that a lot worse is not in dispute. If nothing else, the current status quo should be reached by tweaking other mechanics to make up for reducing RNG dependancy on warrior combat.

Warrior damage always have been inferior to high int staffcasts even 6 years ago when we did great damage. Now, warrior damage is quite low. Low enough that many can apply health for wounds every single balance regain with simply using sparkle/scroll to heal health.

This. Even more so now, with Tuning and whatnot. And that's taking into account elemental runes - I usually don't even need to sip for the unruned warriors running around.

Also @ Lerad, I don't doubt 3-4k monk katas are possible - I've managed to hit 2.8kish damage in a specialized kata from 0 wounds during some testing as a tae'dae shofangi without runes.

Since monk damage is largely based off strength, tae'dae's are more an outlier. That damage might be utterly possible, but slightly unrealistic. More average monk races range between 9 to 12 strength compared to the tae'dae's 18. Likewise with katas. When you say, "highly specialized," does that mean you would reliably be able to pull that off in combat? Just curious. What was your kata combo?

I'm a bit hesitant about adding burst wounding power attacks. It's hard to say if this would really help the 1v1 situation, and I'm concerned it'll make warrior ganks in group fights an even quicker job than it currently is (which isn't needed). I'm also not too keen with increasing our damage too much. Maybe slight adjustments so that someone would need to sip after a number of combos, instead of being entirely covered by sparkle+scroll. But I'm still worried about how this damage would stack when you have multiple warriors on you.

In regards to the miss-rate, I understand the general decision is to not eliminate it, but I do feel like some layers should be toned down. Perhaps remove misses on power attacks alone? It only makes sense to me that the other 'less concentrated' attacks could miss but power attacks wouldn't.

I think if the RNG was made a little fairer, warriors would be in a much better place. At the moment you need to get nearly twice the minimum wounds on a bodypart to score an affliction reliably, unless you have some really, really high dexterity. Maybe warriors could have a defense similar to strength in athletics that raises your dexterity by a notable amount (+3)? Failing that, find a wound range in the middle for easier procing instead of nearly double?
I'd actually really like opinions on this idea. Would people find such a defense useful, or a waste of time? Would it tip the other way and be too powerful?

I've also felt that the issue in report 630 was a commonly complained about one. Basically, it feels like we hit the chest on hack downs more often than not. There came a point where I thought it was bugged, but decided it was just psychology. But really, maybe the swings across the warrior specs should be tweaked slightly more toward the primary body part - especially since we have enough swing-types to cover them all.

Finally, when warriors were readjusted from being omgwtfbbq to being where they are now, a lot of skills still remained with that overpoweredness in mind, and end up really hurting us. Magnetize is pretty rough on a warrior (and monks too) as well as skills like forced-symmetry, scorpion tail etc.


Some warriors have argued that people with really good robes are part of the problem when coupled with trueshield. An artifact shield reduces wounds by a crazy amount on the entire body minus the unshielded arm and the legs. Naturally this isn't a problem on people with subpar robes and with basic unruned shields, but the people who invested more become a little too difficult to take down except for the warriors who've really maxed themselves out and literally shelled out 8-10 times the credits.

Edit: I'd also like to say that Lerad's post is pretty spot on.

Here is a link to a little test I did today with Barrin. I was originally performing the test to see if converting my fighting katana to a bashing weapon, but still using it to fight would work, so Barrin was only using rebounding and his Acro dodge to "hinder" me. I had 18 strength and 16 dex at the time, and I'm swinging a 256/255/310 katana at around 2.5 seconds. So max possible DPS with my hybrid speed/damage katana against Barrin sits at around 294, NOT factoring in cleave/miss/dodge/rebound, and without any sort of hindering, stancing or parrying. That doesn't exactly seem like high damage to me, and it's against a demi (larger health pool so scaled to higher damage) bard in robes. Despite my katana, which has higher damage than any specialized wounder that is being used, there was no issue in healing both damage, bleed, and wounding. I got a single tendon the entire test despite almost constantly hitting the left leg, to illustrate how well the damage was being handled. Only 58.5%ish of my swings and jabs connected, effectively lowering DPS to 172. and that's much more damage than I'd be doing if I'd been using a wounder, been hindered, and been working around parry. Barrin does have acrobatics, but if you look at the log, you'll see it isn't just the Acro that's crippling me.

I have Transcendent combat, pureblade, and all forging runes, along with two cosmic knight runes on my katana.