The Warrior Class

[Big Crunch]

So there has been talk of 'balancing' armor to the effect of reducing the amount of damage is removed from a monster's attack. It is my personal opinion, as someone who plays all three classes, that the warrior is the weakest class already and reducing the one good thing about a warrior, the ability to wear full armor, will only serve to effectively destroy the class.

I personally use what is most likely the most aggressive warrior stats of all players. Only with both iron and con potions can i come close to matching an archer that is 10 levels behind me in damage per sec. Considering my stats i'm always on the bleeding edge of dying, where as a mage or archer, considering the movement requirements, can live for much longer a time period, if i'm not sucking down healing items every 20-30 seconds.

Also, this will harm every build that has 'tanked' in the name, even archers and mages. A tanked mage is generally a 'support first' style mage. He is one who can switch to armor when the situation gets hot and either draw aggro away or approach and heal without fear.

Overall, if the thought is that we should reduce the damage reduction to current armor in favor of adding newer better armor, then i can support that. However, if the thought is that armor should just not do as much, period end of story, I am against.

BC

[o11c]

This isn't the right poll to make. The correct question is "what changes need to be made to the warrior class once armor is fixed"?

Arguing about "stronger" and "weaker" is will give misleading results and won't give that kind of helpful feedback.

--

Top-of-the-line armor should give about 50% damage reduction - this is about what Ragnarok has. Due to the fundamental laws of mathematics, anything beyond that has an extreme effect.

Rebalancing all monsters and weapons is going to require a lot of tweaking and testing with a variety of play styles. The exact builds are likely to be slightly different than the current ones.

A likely side effect is that critical hits will become relatively less powerful (monsters do less damage, and less damage is normally absorbed)

[Big Crunch]

This isn't the right poll to make. The correct question is "what changes need to be made to the warrior class once armor is fixed"?

Arguing about "stronger" and "weaker" is will give misleading results and won't give that kind of helpful feedback.

--

Top-of-the-line armor should give about 50% damage reduction - this is about what Ragnarok has. Due to the fundamental laws of mathematics, anything beyond that has an extreme effect.

Rebalancing all monsters and weapons is going to require a lot of tweaking and testing with a variety of play styles. The exact builds are likely to be slightly different than the current ones.

A likely side effect is that critical hits will become relatively less powerful (monsters do less damage, and less damage is normally absorbed)

You are assuming that that armor needs to be fixed. I would maintain that the current player base (those that play warriors) feels that armor is fine as it is.

[Ablu]

Why is reducing armor fixing? For what reason?

[o11c]

I would maintain that the current player base (those that play warriors) feels that armor is fine as it is.

Well duh, it makes them immune to all monsters. Of course they like it.

That immunity is also the exact reason it's broken.

[Crush]

Related thread: http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... 13&t=11060

The high armor values also block further content development of armor. Armor values are as high as they can go without totally breaking the game. Thus no new armor can be introduced, as it would have to be still a bit better when people are supposed to use it. Reducing the overall armor values would give the content development room for expansion again.

[Big Crunch]

Related thread: http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... 13&t=11060

The high armor values also block further content development of armor. Armor values are as high as they can go without totally breaking the game. Thus no new armor can be introduced, as it would have to be still a bit better when people are supposed to use it. Reducing the overall armor values would give the content development room for expansion again.

And that i can support.

[o11c]

Armor values are as high as they can go without totally breaking the game.

Right, except that they're already higher than that.

[baedamichi]

I voted that the warrior class is fine as it is now, which doesn't necessarily mean that I wish for no changes to the class at all, but I think if you take something from the warriors (like their ability to survive without too many healing items), something has to be given back to them.

Now I understand that warriors have to be a bit weaker (read: slower exp / less loot) than archers (as a penalty for not having to move around / being good and quick at the keyboard or joypad or joystick) and as a penalty for not having to buy arrows or iron ore.
Thus, I'm perfectly fine with the lower exp/s rate of warriors.
The only thing which troubles me (slightly) is that warriors get no items at all when teaming up in the graveyard (unless some mages or archers discover the spirit of charity and enable item sharing within a party or simply leave drops lying on the ground for warriors). But since I can't think of a solution to this problem (as it's sort of an all or nothing problem, with the current drop protection, warriors got no chance of picking up an item, without it, it would be the other way round, archers would have no chance as warriors stand closer to slain mobs), I voted the warrior class is fine as it is.

Overall, if the thought is that we should reduce the damage reduction to current armor in favor of adding newer better armor, then i can support that.

I second that. Would be really nice to have a new armor to grind for, I wouldn't mind at all to TEMPORARILY lose some of my survivability for that.

reducing the one good thing about a warrior, the ability to wear full armor

What else would be the good thing about being a warrior?
I often hear the argument "Ohhh, warriors are sooo good for making money, archers have to buy arrows!" I must admit I never played an archer, but still my impression is that this "warriors are so well off, they never have to grind for money" argument is only valid for a comparison between mages and warriors, not archers and warriors. It's true, mages need iron ore, and that's expensive at Mana Market (~2000 GP, or it takes a lot of time killing yellow slimes to be well equipped for say a graveyard raid or a candor). But arrows? Unlimited supply at an NPC shop for 2GP a piece.... 3000 arrows for 6000 GP... How long does it take to farm 6000 GP from, say, red slimes? Even as a warrior, it takes me maybe 15-20 minutes, so an archer should do in much less time.
Also, I never understood why an archer should NOT be able to wear full armor... In fact, I've seen quite some (successful) archers hunting in the graveyard wearing a warlord helmet and a warlord plate. I mean, of course they have to give up the forest armor, but is 99 dex (wearing plate) versus 102 dex (wearing forest armor) really such a big difference in terms of damage/s that it supports the statement that "archers can't wear full armor"?

In short, there is one reason why I play a warrior (and that reason is definitely not that I earn money more quickly, in fact, I don't), and that reason is that I can for example survive 4 skeletons without healing or that I can survive a few more graveyard mobs like zombies and fallens with a few bottles of water.

That immunity is also the exact reason it's broken.

I strongly disagree here. For two reasons. Firstly, like I said a few lines above, that immunity is the reason why people still play warriors, and that immunity is also the reason why it makes sense to have a warrior in a team. Seriously, if a warrior is not able to really "protect" "their" archers / mages, why would you want a warrior in your team?

Secondly, I think the usage of the word "immunity" is a bit of an exaggeration here. My current build (lvl 84) has 75 vit (and no "raging" penalty, I can't afford that now or I can't call myself a tank anymore, maybe once my vit has reached 90), and it's of course true that I'm immune to a single skeleton, three lady skeletons, low level mobs and such, but when really fighting in the graveyard and there's like 5 skeletons and 3 lady skeletons after me, nobody has to worry about "immunity", then I need water and sometimes I even need to run away to avoid dying. And the top of the range mobs (like jackos, zombies, fallens, terranites), I still can't even kill a single one without healing, so immunity is a bit too strong of a word here.

Same thing goes for saying "it's broken", how exactly is the game broken because warriors are too strong?!? I don't really get that, at the moment, I think it's almost well balanced between the three classe (not speaking of pvp here, just pve!), it would just be nice if someone could come up with a solution to the "archers and mages get 100% of the items in a graveyard raid, warriors get 0%" problem. But even that's not a really big problem, I just solved it by farming red slimes' loot and then simply buying the stuff I need for high level quests from mana market.

[sango98]

I think you should add new items to help them because other classes have an easy time taking their drops .

[prsm]

i am a warrior, i leveled as a warrior, and i play the game!

The warrior level has become fodder! I know that i am old school, when i started playing the game there wasn't mages or archer level (well there was archers, just no one played them).

Since than we have become nothing but a wasteland, everyone can kill us and dominate us. We don't get drops to other classes, we don't level as fast, the developers have chosen to help the others and we are basically forgotten! The last new item we have seen is the rock knife, which is below setzer and the rage skill, which eliminates the whole concept of a tanked warrior.

I know people will respond to this, and i am good with that, but until you actually play the game, Big Crunch's poll wont make a whole lot of sense.

[Frost]

I also started as a warrior, and still play that style at times. I generally prefer the faster pace of lightweight archer, though. Archer is also a much faster way to gain levels and items.

To be honest, I think the warrior "class" would be more fun if combat had more depth to it. For example, if we could do area damage, attempt critical hits (much as the raging skill does now, but on demand), maybe use a "block" move instead of attack, learn special moves like "burst of speed" which temporarily reduce strength, and so on....

As an archer, I've learned to time the "knock" effect of my hits, target specific monsters to do maximum damage or to protect others, run through mobs to heal characters, et cetera. It's fun to break out of the simple hack and slash combat dynamics, and I also get to show off my skills to other people. After 6 level 90+ chars, I'm more interested in gameplay than reaching milestones.

I realize the above suggestions might be impractical on our tmwAthena code. I'm just trying to come up with creative ideas outside the "weaker / stronger" axis.

[sango98]

warriors should have fun in the game too . I hated when people told me don't be a warrior you can't do much in the game ; It's fun to play a warrior sometimes being able to take a lot of hits but it sucks getting your drops taken all the time plus archers taking all their exp in the gy .

[Crush]

eAthena always had support for active skills. It was just that the client had no support for using them. That's why the magic system uses chat parsing instead of a user-friendly hotkey-and-click interface. Finally enabling active skills in the client would be a great step forward. The magic system could be made more user-friendly and warriors could be made more interesting to play by giving them special attacks and temporary self-buffs.

Unfortunately it would temporarily create a huge disparity between those who can use the newest client and those who can't because they use operating systems which are unsupported or rely on outdated software repositories.

[baedamichi]

To be honest, I think the warrior "class" would be more fun if combat had more depth to it. For example, if we could do area damage, attempt critical hits (much as the raging skill does now, but on demand), maybe use a "block" move instead of attack, learn special moves like "burst of speed" which temporarily reduce strength, and so on....

That's an interesting idea, reminds me of a game (not sure, but I think it was one of the Zelda series) where your shield had to be actively held up at the right time by pressing a button on your joypad to deflect arrows, and you couldn't attack while holding up your shield to protect you.
I can't speak for others, but I (I've been playing a warrior exclusively for the year I've been playing) wouldn't be at all opposed to giving up some of my armour bonus and get a stronger shield instead which I would really have to use at the right time. This would make my gameplay depend more on my "realtime combat skills" than stat points of my character and his equpment alone.

Just an idea, I don't know whether such a thing is feasible on eAthena...