Feedback:User/Armond

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The Warrior PvP article is "finished" - which is to say, pass one is complete. Currently it's getting a lot of great peer review along with a few formatting suggestions I'll probably carry over once I figure out how to make things easily readable without code that makes my eyes want to bleed.

I really appreciate the input I'm getting and have decided to delay the beginning of the rest of the series in order to properly address issues as they come up (no, this is not another way of saying I'm lazy, despite the fact that I am). However, I recognize that it's difficult to give feedback for one profession when you don't know my goals for the rest of them, so I'll try to make a short list of my goals.


 * 1) Reduce melee damage. Melee should still be the only real way to kill stuff, but currently the game has too much melee damage as a whole. This is a large part of the reason for my critical hits suggestion under mechanics changes.
 * 2) Reduce melee counters. Anyone who's played a warrior in GvG knows how frustrating it is to go 75% of a match under the effects of Blind, Blurred Vision, any of a multitude of snares, or weakness - and often more than one at once - while also having to contend with an 80% block chance on any given enemy once the monks realize who you're attacking. Now, I grant you, this is exaggeration - the Aegis nerf makes block webs much less of a problem, and it's really not 75% of an entire match (though it can feel like it at times) - but the basic point remains the same. (Along this line, I have considered suggesting reducing Blind's penalty to 50%, but this is not something I will reach a decision on until the Elementalist line has received its love.)
 * 3) Severely reduce ranged damage. I'm absolutely fine with casters carrying a single damage spell such as lorb or lbolt or something like that, but they shouldn't single-handedly turn a spike from "this has little chance to succeed" to "that's a lot of healing/prot the other team needs to do in order to keep that guy alive", even on long cooldowns. A step further is caster-only "spikes" such as Searing Flames-way, Ranger spike (which, with the introduction of Keen Arrow, is almost as spammable as caster damage spells), and Bloodspam. In short - if you're ranged, you should be utility.
 * 4) Reduce the number and effects of hexes. Hexes have very rarely had viable counters, and looking at your party bars and realizing that each purple arrow hides another 2-3 arrows on every member of your team isn't a good thing unless each hex has an almost insignificant effect. There are two ways I may go about this: I may completely remove a large number of hexes and/or substantially increase the power of hex removal, or I may make hexes individually more powerful so that choosing a target becomes an important part of your strategy. Because an entire necromancer line would become obsolete with option a, I'm leaning towards option b.
 * 5) Smooth out the passive bonuses of primary attributes. As an example, Expertise shouldn't be an absolute requirement for playing a ranger - it should be a bonus that distinguishes one as a ranger instead of a warrior/assassin/monk with a bow. Depending on how this goes, I may well retract my suggestion on secondary attributes - but don't bet on it.
 * 6) Make secondary professions a bonus, not a requirement. How many other games support rangers that take big hammers and smash things? (Hint: Most of them have rangers suck horribly if they don't use a bow or other ranged weapon.) How is it right that mesmers, who are supposed to be masters of manipulating the enemy's tactics against him, do huge amounts of damage in short periods of time? I'm fine with things like dipping into your secondary profession for a couple utility skills (channeling, shock, hard reses, pdrain as a caster, etc), but there needs to be a line drawn at the "bullshit" level. (Also of note: This means making melee good enough that they don't need things like Strength of Honor or Conjure Element - both of which will probably only continue to cause problems.)
 * 7) Find a purpose for the Dervish, Ritualist, Necromancer, and Paragon. These four have generally been destructive to GW PvP (at least post-Factions), and yet there's no clear role for them outside their current ones. This will take time and brainstorming.
 * 8) Rework the Assassin to not be awful. In general, this means making him a toolbox with spike capabilities (or a spiker with a toolbox), but in specific, it also means giving things like Shadow Form a bigger nerf (in both PvE and PvP) than Smiter's Boon got. It also means completely reworking shadow steps (perhaps even to the point of making them fail against human targets). This ties in closely to...
 * 9) Bring back old tactics to GvG. NPCs (with the exception of the Guild Lord and possibly the Bodyguard) have meant little since the demise of Victory or Death. Splitting off to an enemy base provides pretty much no benefit unless you can get in a few human kills or lord damage. Also, the current tiebreaker needs to die.
 * 10) Reverse a lot of the power creep introduced with Nightfall and Eye of the North. This likely means the death of things like Natural Stride, Mending Touch, Assassin's Remedy, Blinding Surge, Storm and Flame Djinn's Haste, and Freezing Gust.
 * 11) Basically destroy Smiting. It sounds harsh - and I'm really hoping I can find an alternative before I get around to the monk page - but Smiting isn't going to be balanced until it's "that attribute" - the one you take a skill or two out of to support the rest of your bar, but really couldn't see anyone good making an entire bar based off of it. Of course, even then, the skills need to be powerful enough to hold their own against other options - at least in some team builds - which may cause even more problems. I'm likely to end up gutting most of the line and redesigning a few of the skills to be awesomepants in certain situations/builds.
 * 12) Completely rework Fire and Earth Magic. Earth Magic tends to be useless; Fire Magic tends to be overpowered in areas with choke points and near-useless everywhere else. On a similar note, without Blinding Surge (which it won't have - as Ensign said, this is a skill whose very existence completely changed the game), Air will need some good elites.
 * 13) Rework chants, shouts, and echos. This ties in with the "finding a purpose for the paragon" thing above, but I want to specifically address these mechanics. Without a counter and with their current stacking capabilities, they're problematic from a balance point of view.
 * 14) Buff Weapon Spells. A lot of you are going "wtf?" right about now, but I intend for weapon spells to be useful and counterable. Ideally, a ritualist will carry two or three weapon spells and have to consciously choose who gets what buff, when, and why (while, of course, weighing the risks of that spell being removed). This might involve some form of "weapon sickness", meaning that once someone's been hit with a weapon spell, they can't be hit by a new one for five or ten seconds, but that's just a brainstorm I wanted to write down somewhere.
 * 15) Make skills require more skill to use. A great example of this would be doubling the recharge of Distracting Shot and make it recharge 50% faster if it interrupts. A great example of the opposite is a Curses bar where you target a warrior and spam curses until he dies.

If you have any questions about my goals, please ask on this talk page. I'll probably say something like "hey, that's a smart question, let me add it to the list". However, please don't talk to me regarding actual feedback or my goals on my personal talk page. There are three reasons for this: One, it is annoying, as I check my feedback pages almost more than I do my userspace. Two, keeping everything related in one space is excellent for organization (and my OCD). Three, I really don't want to screw over my feedback because of some dumb licensing clause thing, so let's keep all the feedback where we don't have to worry about that.

I am always looking for feedback and discussion so long as it is productive. "Don't make this change because you're the only person ever who wants it" isn't helpful (I expect to get a lot of this regarding secondary profession changes). "Are you sure you want Berserker Stance to not have a drawback?" and "Did you really hit "save page" when Riposte was an unconditional "target foe loses all energy"?" is exceedingly helpful - mostly because, no, I'm not sure I want to do that. Obviously, things won't always be to those extremes, but you get the idea.