Fencing

[Ashlyn]

Give fencing to warriors to level the playing field for the non-giant warriors. The trade off's being the boost to hit and dam scaling from int and being forced to wear light armor. Allow fencing to toggle between defensive and offensive style by manually using feint to prevent someone from just dual-wielding you into oblivion. You would see fights where disarm is actually used instead of hobble, bash, bash, bash.

[Stiehl26]

This is a very well thought out and needed option. Balances offensive prowess with loss of heavy armor and rids the trivialization of low strength high intelligence warriors.

[Dogran]

Warriors already have so much, I don't like this. The idea of a class that has fourth attack having fencing doesn't do it for me.

[Ashlyn]

It’s fair, balanced and has a HARD counter. Gives any race other than giant, slith and dwarf viability.

[deioped]

I would love to see a fire giant fencer.

[Xenyar]

Minotaur is a great warrior. Treant has best stats in game right beside OP jotun, but still carry a tough vuln. I still think they are very playable. I think the other races can be successful too. What races do you think is the worst options for a warrior?

[Ashlyn]

Funny how the races you mentioned are large size. Don't see drow, elf, halfling, avian, gnome, jagar, human, dwarf, or duergar tearing up the top 5.

[Xenyar]

Large size has their perks, that's for sure. Strength, bash, etc.. But, don't discount high dex dirt kick and trip. Also, there is a much larger variety of non-oversized weapons. Meaning you have access to a much larger pool of double grip-ables. The only problem I see with elf/drow warrior is that dumb material weakness change. With terrible con, and being hit by weakness weapons, trying to regen will be a pain in the butt.

[BlackWidow]

In response to Xenyar's question about worst races for warrior...

The worst option for a warrior has been drow for quite some time due to their stat block and questionably useful favoured weapons (a gnome may have mediocre choices but they have 100% lore so that staff bonus is actually significant). Halfling used to be worse before they could grab disarmed weapons/shields from their opponents (and are still not great). Half-elf is far worse than it used to be as you no longer have boundless mastery triggering off of stuff outside of combat (I saw Airelyn get a random bit of healing from that triggering on the fast healing skill once).

Avian also seems lackluster. Dive charge sounds cool but you don't often get to fight flying opponents who are susceptible to it (which is the time it is especially useful since you'll also be able to charge them while flying and stay flying).

Still, if I try naming a number of successful warriors from my time off the top of my head, only one human warrior makes the list that I can recall. Two half-elf warriors but they were before the nerf to boundless mastery. Maybe one gnome warrior depending on whether you count Tipplwise as successful (which is questionable given that he eventually became an outcast). Stone giants and dwarves both seem to have at least three examples each that I can name.

As for the OP's idea... Fencing does feel like a bit much to be added to the warrior's toolkit. While warriors did struggle a patch or two ago, I feel they are in a decent place at the moment.

[deioped]

How about specs for warriors as well?

We can have dex types, str types and con types.

Like the dex spec gets fencing but no double grip, etc.

[Kornhole]

OMFG YAY, lets SPEC ANOTHER CLASS!!!!!

[lionSpyre]

I think speccing is great but also a very slippery slope. I can think of legitimate specs for virtually every class that don’t currently have one. Granted, I would love to see them all implemented. But where to start?

Monk: strength vs dex (although monks can already spec with tattoos)
Warrior: strength vs dex (I don’t think con is needed here)
Thief: gadgets (utility) vs assassin (combat)
Necromancer: summons vs afflictions
Bard: entertainer (support) vs sword dancer (combat)
Illusionist: never played one 😝
Ranger: strength vs dex

And sort of stumped on Healer and Shaman - but I think since they lean into religion by default the most, which god they follow sort of specs them.

To my knowledge, everything else i haven’t mentioned has some level of speccing

[Ashlyn]

Its not about spec, its about making some of the more interesting races viable for warrior. Mostly the dex ones. Slith and Giants are the most viable. Elves having high dex and autosneak doesn't begin to offset high strength and wielding oversized in one hand plus physical resist.

[lionSpyre]

Ah okay, I see the distinction here.

I could see there being some minor modifications. For instance, I could see a dex-based warrior trading fencing for barrage, since it doesn't really make sense that a physically weak race could number the arm of a giant by banging on their shield.

Additionally, you could make warrior's favored weapon feature scale with INT rather than the lore skill. You could tune the numbers to help balance out the difference between a fire giant and an elf.

[lionSpyre]

Although the two of those changes combined could make elf warriors completely broken overnight lol

[deioped]

I don't know why kornhole seems to hate speccing so much when we have so many classes with specs, some with more and some with less:
-Paladins (I guess this is where the hate comes from)
-Druids (Circles)
-Dark knights (Ethos)
-Shadows (Ninjutsu)
-Invokers (Element affinity)
-Berserkers (Ancestry)
-Monks (Tattoos)

We don't have to go Paladin where elves get basically a whole new class of their own but instead do like berserkers.

[Davairus]

1) There's little recent data to suggest that any warrior suck balls, as evidenced by several players doing very well with them - and yes that includes non-slith, non-giant ones. There's no question that warriors are very powerful in the current meta. what a lot of wannabe warriors quickly find out though is that they have an intended high dependence on their gear. that data NEEDS to be recent because of the hitroll bugfix.

2) Thread alleges that giant warriors are better based on weapon selections. over the next month or two, (longer likely- not overnight obviously) we have 100's of rare weapons to sieve through and address their weapon weights. The other day I went through all the dual parry weapons to set the weights to historically accurate values, and that took me a bit over 30 minutes to fix about 15 weapons. Its a very large pool of weapons, so that just has to take a while, but this ties again into my first point - its a highly gear dependent class, and elves will soon (TM) have more options for overbear.

3) giants SIZE was brought into this without any discourse into what it actually does (does anybody know? if you have your knowledge confirmed, great...), I think adding fencing to warrior would be the wrong solution to balance race size, it is too specific. If there is a problem with giants because of size, its nerf time baby.

[ivindel]

Alright, time for me to weigh in on this topic.
From my perspective, there are 4 main points to address:

1) Str vs Dex based warriors
- This is the primary issue affecting why certain races with lower strength don't work as well because it affects the defense capabilities and certain core skills of the warrior. High str favors parry and dual parry (2 defenses) while high dex favors only dodge (1 defense). From my personal experience tanking the same mobs with both high str/low dex (giant) and low str/high dex (elf) warriors, it is very obvious to me that elven warriors tank worse whether in defensive, dual wield, or 2 handed. Also, certain critical skills like hobble, sideswipe, overhead are dependent on str. That said, other skills such as dirt, trip works better with dex, so the player certainly needs to adapt accordingly.

On the other hand, we have also seen recently some low str warriors do pretty well (halfling warlord Filo, and gnome warlord, Lazagg). High str does not equate to naturally higher hit/dam, this much I can confirm. A dex-based warrior certainly can hit as hard as a str-based warrior. The key difference between halflings/gnomes vs elves/drows is the CON issue, which brings me to the next point.

2) Low Con warriors
- Con affects warriors rather significantly, especially in terms of total HP pool and natural regen, since warriors depend primarily on natural regen (catching ticks) to heal back up, and a lower HP pool (about 700 hp at level 50 for an elf, all trains invested into HP, versus what you see from races with decently high Con getting around 900 hp at level 50). The tick regen for elves (15 Con) averages about 50+hp for mastered fast healing, and a fire giant (23 Con) averages about 70+hp.

I feel that this is the primary reason why elves/drows don't work as well as other races, while having to play around weaker defenses in general.

3) Race viability
- If anything, we can all see that most players are funneled into choosing races that satisfy or balance the above 2 points, with giants/minotaurs being the obvious "best" choice and there are those "middling" choices such as sliths, dwarves/duergars, halflings/gnomes (high wis) even, and in theory the new jagars (23 Wis, 4 prac per rank), which can still achieve the high enough HP pool at 50. Some races such as avian and human are not as popular because they have too many points distributed into Int & Wis that do not help that much for a warrior, while also not specialized in any one stat. Then we have the elves/drows being the "worst" choices since they suck at fulfilling the above 2 points. High Int is useful for "speed-training" a warrior and I can attest to that but that is only what it is useful for in today's climate. Maybe elves will work with the dance of silver leaves legacy, but that funnels the player into sticking with bladed weapons and it only works in dual wield + superior combat style, which is then easily countered. Drows are the worst of the lot IMO, but they do have that little bit of extra Con than elves.

Naturally, we can't expect to tune every race so that they fall into the "best" choice category or make every race viable for a warrior (we don't do that for every other class, do we?). but it does seem obvious to me that the outliers are the elves/drows (arguably we can also include avians and humans into this mix, but they are just not popular choices to begin with).

4) Does size matter?
- Now, does size matter aside from being able to wield oversized weapons in one hand and maybe lag the opponent more with a bash? I think the size factor is a moot point, because I can tell you that bash misses at least 70% of the time for a giant, I would rather use trip as a giant instead of bash if my intention is to lag the opponent. To be able to wield oversized weapons in one hand is probably the only advantage I see here, but conversely, it can only be viewed as a trade-off since giant size races (minotaur/treant/giants) cannot double grip non-oversized weapons, and it was only recently with the addition of the black pyramid area and some other additions that we have more oversized weapon choices, else in the past, there are only those limited weapon choices for double grip.