Devs are happy to accept our time metrics as we reroll, then retry warrior on petty buffs
Game is 20 years in, it’s not incompetence…
warrior is kinda strictly 5 target thing outside the burst window, and they don’t hit hard. For arms, thunder clap can only apply rend to 5 targets and there is a cooldown for that. For other class, 1 press could apply dot to all targets in range, arms can barely apply dot to all targets before they die in a mega pull
While I’ll agree with others that some mechanics cost others more (in terms of unintuitiveness, making the conditions by which the best action varies too restrictive, added button-load and consequent consumption of comfortable button-space, etc.) than they themselves add to a given build or spec, I think what people too often forget is that all gameplay is, ultimately, “unnecessary complication”.
What things come down to is generally just…
- synergy between the different optimization mini-games that a spec/build is made up of, and
- decently equal (i.e., not so uneven as to push people away from A in favor of B even if A’s aesthetic or flow attracts them a bit more than B’s) effort-to-output curves across different builds/specs (of the same or different classes) — which unfortunately pretty difficult to estimate outside of players who are pretty much great at everything, and quite good at both of the specs/builds in question, detailing why A is excessively easier than B.
The key here is that gameplay synergy has nothing to do with performance synergy. “Synergy” in performance generally tops out at “Only use these things together. Macro-play is literally optimal,” while, in gameplay terms, that basically means you just wasted all but one of those CD’s buttons (if not macroing them). In fact, gameplay synergy is often more akin to performance anti-synergy or likely desync, whereby you want to, say, keep certain things out of window or delay things into window; it makes you think, rather than reducing the nuances of the individual synergetic abilities in favor of just stacking them together (and thereby thinking less).
Let’s take two versions of Sweeping Strikes by way of example.
Method 1: 20s CD. oGCD. Lasts 10 seconds. With this, you can and should stagger Cleave, Roar/Champion’s, and Thunder Clap / Blood and Thunder apart from Sweeping Strikes, giving you certain milestones in setup to max out your Sweeping Strikes window.
- This arguably gets an even higher ceiling when running Blunt Instruments instead of Warbreaker.
Method 2: Your Mortal Strike and Execute always hit a nearby enemy for 50% damage and all normal additional effects, but Cleave no longer applies Deep Wounds. This forces you to rotate your Deep Wounds spread via Mortal Strikes and eventually to weigh the value of further spread against that of Deep Wounds amping MS itself or on spending your stacks of Executioner’s Precision.
- This becomes even spicier (though the first method of course does, too) if Deep Wounds actually stores a % of damage dealt and is consumed for a portion of damage instantly when reapplied (and thereby overridden) by new Deep Wounds–applying attacks, such that one must decide between ramping a pseudo-ignite [with naturally further impact during and onto CS] or spreading the flat Bleed.
Both allow for and leverage significant combined depth from their contribution to the kit (and, just as noticeably, by lacking less nuanced redundancies with those possible rewards for optimizing these features).
you certainly said it. Always nice to see some people calling out the bad stuff and advocating for specifics to change instead of being a depressed andy who says warriors should be lucky they can even log in and leaving it at that lol. Props bro
They really need to address the amount of nodes that require two points
Also why is two-handed specialization even a thing? This should be baseline for arms
1 Like