Großes Statement zum Warrior
Verfasst: 31.01.2005, 02:36
Als Reaktion auf eine lange und intensiv geführte Diskussion in den offiziellen US-Boards zum Krieger und den anschließend durchgeführten Kriege-Streik auf einigen US-Servern kam gestern von einem Developer von Blizzard ein auführliches Statement zu den Problemen, die viele Spieler in den Fähigkeiten des Kriegers sehen.
Soweit ich es bisher mitbekommen habe, ist es die ausführlichste Antwort überhaupt, die Blizzard bislang zu den konkreten Beschwerden der Community formuliert hat und lässt hoffen, dass der Warrior mit den in den Aussagen enthaltenen Bug-Fix-Ankündigungen im Bezug auf die Spielbarkeit und Utility wieder etwas an Boden gutmachen wird.
Quelle
Soweit ich es bisher mitbekommen habe, ist es die ausführlichste Antwort überhaupt, die Blizzard bislang zu den konkreten Beschwerden der Community formuliert hat und lässt hoffen, dass der Warrior mit den in den Aussagen enthaltenen Bug-Fix-Ankündigungen im Bezug auf die Spielbarkeit und Utility wieder etwas an Boden gutmachen wird.
Fortsetzung im nächsten Post .....Kalgan hat geschrieben:Very contructive post, deserves a read from the CMs/Devs.
First, I’d like to thank you for the constructive post. Although we practically never miss reading a post like this, we unfortunately don’t typically have time to respond in detail to posts of this depth. However, since warriors have been a very hot topic lately, I’d like to give some insight into our thoughts on both warrior issues in general and the points raised below…
Long Term Issues - Rage Build -
Because of often slow rage build, the Warrior class is often uninvolved and requires little interaction, making it a less entertaining option than other classes. The amount of time it takes to generate enough rage to use abilities is too long in relation to other classes (namely rogue, for easy comparison).
While I don't disagree that warriors could use some more effective rage generation (I'll get into that in more detail in just a bit), I'd like to point out our general philosophical approach with regard to the warrior.
Warriors in WoW are absolutely intended to be more interactive then warriors in other similar games (and possibly more interactive then characters of any class in other similar games). However, they are definitely intended to be less "twitchy/frenetic" to play then WoW rogues are. We feel as though it fits the kit of the rogue class best to have the most spastic gameplay of any class, which I believe we've accomplished pretty well.
As such, I don't necessarily think it's legitimate to directly compare the twitch value of the warrior versus that of the rogue with the expectation that they will be the same. So, although we really do want warriors to have a substantial amount of button-pushing (which is already arguably very significant for some warrior builds that stance-twist a lot), rogues are intended to press noticeably more buttons in a given period of time then other classes. Therefore, I don't want to foster an expectation that warriors will be equivalent to rogues in this regard, even after the rage issues have been satisfactorily resolved.
Please remember, this is not intended to imply in any way that warriors should be "slow or boring" to play, only that they aren't intended to be as frenetic as a rogue to play.
While I don't disagree that 1h+Shield is the lowest rage-generating equipment choice, it is intended to be so, primarily for the following reason.1h+Shield: This build has the biggest rage issues; usually 3-5 per hit, which generally means around 6-12 seconds of regular melee to use a basic attack skill (HS). Compare this to the rogue, which regenerate 20end/2seconds. Over the same length of time as a Warrior, a rogue may regenerate 60-120end, enough for multiple special attacks. This large gap further increases as rogues regenerate end constantly, while warriors only generate [notable] rage from successful regular attacks.
The more enemies you have hitting you at once, the less your rage generation from dealing damage means to your total rage generation (compared to the rage you generate from being hit). This means that as you take on more mobs, the 1h+shield approach becomes the stronger strategy since you gain an extremely significant amount of damage reduction, while drastically narrowing the rage generation gap caused by dealing less damage than 2h or DW (dual wield) equipment choices.
Obviously, there is a chicken-and-egg scenario where warriors need some rage to get the mobs on them in order to get more rage so they can keep the mobs on them. However, it is intended that this be manageable through bloodrage, taunting, and potentially starting a fight in another stance to build some agro (and also rage if you have Tactical Mastery), then switching to defensive, and finally through rage potions if other methods still aren’t enough for that particular encounter.
In addition, I noticed that you compare warrior rage generation to the energy regeneration of a rogue. This simply isn't a meaningful comparison for several reasons.
First, warrior abilities don't generally cost as much rage as rogue abilities cost energy (ie: 15 rage for heroic strike, 40 energy for sinister strike). So, while rogues do indeed still press more buttons then warriors due to power generation rates (as intended per the general philosophical comments earlier), trying to draw 1-to-1 comparisons between rage and energy generation aren’t entirely valid.
Second, rage does not translate into damage in the same way that energy does. For example, Mortal Strike costs 30 rage (compared to 40 energy for Sinister Strike), yet it is a free attack with usually a 2h weapon (whereas rogues can only use 1h weapons, which means Mortal Strike’s free attack is more potent then Sinister Strike’s), the additional damage bonus of Mortal Strike is considerably higher then the damage bonus of Sinister Strike, and Mortal Strike has a secondary effect of reducing the targets ability to heal to go along with it all. Simply put, 1 point of rage generally translates into a greater effect than 1 point of energy.
Third, if rage and energy were generated at equivalent rates, it wouldn't have been particularly meaningful for them to be different mechanics. If we intended for them to be the same, we probably would have chosen to make warriors use energy just like rogues do, yet all this would have done is water down the core differences between the character classes. So yes, we’re quite aware that rogues and warriors generate their power very differently. Thanks for pointing that out. ;]
Finally, if when it was all said and done warriors dealt as much damage as rogues (due to similar rage-energy translation into damage and similar power generation rates), warriors would be flat-out better characters then rogues (better armor, more hit points, same damage), so again, it simply isn't reasonable to draw direct comparisons between the two.
All of that having been said, we agree that there are some issues with rage generation in general, and we plan to address these so that warriors dish out some more damage and push slightly more buttons than they do today (more on this still to come).
Ok, yes, 2h rage generation is better then 1h+shield in a 1v1, with that gap narrowing the more targets you have on you at once (or generally speaking even just the more damage over a normal 1v1 amount you're taking in a given time frame). As noted above, this is known/intended. Also as noted previously, one Mortal Strike does not equal one Sinister Strike, so the frequency of performing said abilities, especially when coupled with other core differences between the classes, should not be expected to be equivalent.2h Weapons: This build performs moderately for rage requirements. Average rage build per hit is 5-10, depending on damage; which means slower weapons, more damage, more rage/hit. Skills such as Mortal Strike (favoured by most 2h users) require large amounts of rage (30), a simple skill such as HS requires 2-3 regular hits to use, about 6-8 seconds on average. Once again this faces the same issues VS. Rogue end gain, where one HS attack would be the same as several rogue attacks.
It is intended that DW produce slightly more rage over time then 2h. This is partially due to the fact that in our opinion, warrior abilities and general game mechanics overall slightly favor 2h weapons over DW, so it helps offset that. Again, there's nothing really "wrong" with that in particular as far as we're concerned (other then the overall rage generation issues that I have yet to cover, which are indeed a problem).Dual Wield: This build performs best overall for rage gain/use. Because these are 1h weapons, they recieve the same rage gain per hit as 1h+Shield. Because of the increased miss rate for Dual Wield, the extra weapon results in roughly 50-75% faster rage build than the 1h+shield build. The major issues with this build are the Miss Rate increase, which lowers overall DPS and rage gain, and the lack of abilities to use with the extra rage produced. Talent builds do not support Dual Wield spec, while the large miss rate reduces the effectiveness of abilities due to drastically lowered chance to hit. This build is the most comparable to Rogue ability, as it should be due to weapon similarities.
With regard to dual wielding, I'd like to clarify how it works and its intent. First, we do obviously realize that DW has a significantly higher miss rate, and that the offhand weapon does not deal its full damage. This is done to keep DW in direct DPS balance with using 2h weapons, and to ensure that both 2h and DW are well balanced in total effect against 1h+shield.
For a little background on the DW balance process, I need to first give a little background on how 2h weapon use is balanced against 1h+shield.
In order to make both 2h and 1h+s viable strategies for general purpose gameplay, we want approximately the same overall effectiveness in terms of total sustained killing ability over time between 2h weapon and 1h+s. This means that if you were to kill 100 creatures (for example) of your level, it should take close to the same total time including downtime when using 2h or 1h+s, perhaps favoring 2h choices somewhat (although it should be noted that there are intangibles that make measuring downtime a reasonable estimate rather than a perfect science).
While you will kill more quickly using 2h, you are expected to end the fight with a lower remaining health compared to the same fight using 1h+s. In the 1h+s case you will be killing more slowly, but have more health at the end of the fight, and therefore less downtime over the long haul (and yes, it is balanced to account for the fact that killing more quickly implies taking less hits from the enemy).
After it was all calculated to exhaustion (factoring in other objectives such as the desired damage reduction contribution of your shield relative to the rest of your armor), we determined that to achieve our goals of relative balance between 2h vs 1h+s, 2h weapons needed to produce approximately 20% more DPS then 1h+s. What this meant was that in order for DW to be an interesting (but not overpowered) choice, DW needed to also produce a total increase of 20% DPS over 1h+s (just like 2h does).
As you might realize at this point, if you got the full DPS from your second weapon while dual wielding (by having the offhand weapon attack at full speed, with full hit chance, and full damage), your DPS would go up by 100% rather than by 20% (assuming an equally good weapon in the offhand). Unfortunately, 100% amounts to a *lot* more then 20%, and would make DW the best choice by such a wide margin that it would have been pointless to have 2h or 1h+s in the game at all.
Given that, we needed to find a way to modify some combination of damage, hit chance, attack speed, or other basic combat factors in order to achieve 20% rather than 100%. Since we didn't want to reduce any one of these by too much, we opted to reduce the hit rate for both the main and offhand (since at least swinging a lot more helps correct streaky behavior caused by the increased miss rate).
In addition, since increasing the even-level miss chance to 24% or so for both weapons while using DW still wasn't enough to get us down to 20% increased DPS (and for "feel" reasons I'm sure you can understand, we didn't want to push the miss rate higher than that), we opted to reduce the damage of the offhand weapon, figuring that doing less damage from your offhand seems like it makes sense to players and would feel acceptable.
The combination of the increased miss rate for DW and lowering the offhand damage got us down to the 20% overall DPS increase from DW that we needed to ensure that DW was well balanced against 2h weapons.
So, while it can be always be said that some other combination of trade-offs for DW would have proven to "feel" better, we do have a DW system that is balanced and arguably feels more like you're actually using two weapons than DW systems in other RPGs that are also intended to be balanced.
As such, in response to the myriad of posts that offer the shocking revelation that DW has a higher miss chance than 2h or 1h+s, I’d like to say that it really isn't necessary to inform us of this. We know this, that's how we made it, thanks again for the reminder. ;] Also, it seems these revelations often imply that since DW has a higher miss chance, that the DPS isn’t as good as 2h, which (as explained above) simply isn’t factual.
Quelle