DPS its not just for breakfast.

[Kend]

Many arguments in these forums rotate around the fact that aggro and mitigation is everything. When dps become a bad thing, its what makes things dead. I would agree that mitigation is the definining attribute of a defensive fighter and that hate generation is very important, but not as much as mitigation/survivability. Dps is probably most important for small groups and pre lvl 50 warriors then it is for a raid tank. And is unquestionable when soloing. When you have 18 people there and the only purpose for half of them to be there is to burn down the mob, yeah surviveability and hate is the end all be all. But, even in raid situations tank dps is important its what get the initial aggro and compiles more hate then any taunting abilities (even in offensive stance with 0% hate modifier). My argument is that most people discount DPS's importance. Its like saying mitigation without surviveability, it doesn't play a functional role. Personally I want to be a dps king when it comes to dps due to our limits and dependency on groups for surviveablity.

DPS it's what makes things dead. (tm)

Kend - Warrior

[Gunnar]

I doubt that many warriors don't want all the dps they can get hehe:D Even if it matters somewhat less to those who primarily play in well supported groups and raids. It's just a matter of priorities and common sense given the game design we're working with.

Personally, I prefer a class system of hybrids and specialists balanced against the game as a whole, including play style. However, that's never what we were offered in Vanguard. All classes were to be balanced against their "job" within a group first, before any other consideration. This may have become less true for some archetypes, but for obvious reasons it remains the focus of ours. This is our archetype's job as defined by the class design developer, "The Tank - Take damage, maintain control of the NPC as much as possible."

To distinguish us from the other members of our archetype we execute our "job" using different abilities, but imo more importantly we have different types of secondary ability advantages. I think that generally the greater distinction between those secondary advantages the better. In order for our class to have an identity within it's archetype and feel "special" it requires that distinction to be significant in play. If our primary advantage is dps, it shouldn't require a parse to notice the difference.

I've always enjoyed the warrior as a simple, straight forward class. I liked the "brutal" aspect of Vanguard's warrior vision. For myself I'd trade all of those silly buffing abilities ( never been fun for me /shrug just button mashing) for more dps. Of course our dps output needs to respect that of what dps classes can offer to groups, given the archetype class system we are balanced within.

In order for dps improvements alone to balance us with other classes regarding current survivability against all content, we would need far more than we're ever likely to get. Most classes manipulate distance or self heal to ensure survivability. I'd love to see a mix of dps, stuns and some form of hp regen to better support both our "brutal" identity and need for class balance. I think those abilities make sense for warriors in Vanguard, mobs and players alike.

Obviously, there are balancing concerns with those abilities from many angles. I still think they can be worked out. Aggro itself has always been subject to many modifiers and our comparative dps amongst the tanks never needs to be the sole factor in our relative aggro output.

[Bhima_LS]

Well, this also brings up the point of leap attack again. Which dev team was it that scrapped replacing the release-time move of leap attack that was the meat and potatoes of DPS for warriors. Did Sony scrap that idea, and thus attempt to redefine the warrior away from the release-time DPS skill?

One of the things I liked about how different stances operate in the Warrior compared to all other classes is that up until now, the warrior is either DPS or Tank, but not both. DK's still get DPS in defensive mode, but Warriors actually have to pick one or the other. I liked that so far, because it means we actually get DPS on warriors.

But I'm wondering if Sony is trying to redefine that.

[Gunnar]

Personally, I always hated the idea that I marginalized my archetype defining focus in order to gain our primary feature of identity and balance within our archetype. It left me feeling useless in both offensive and defensive roles by comparison with other classes.

There's no doubt we could tank while supported by a group which offered the utility and healing we lacked (and the knights possessed some portion of), but so could the knights and they brought much more.

In offensive our dps was generally no replacement for a real dps class and we lacked the utility to make it comparatively effective. Besides, I build a tank class to have the strengths of a tank. I'd like my secondary abilities to be an addition to that focus.

Leap attack was a relatively brief deal. Although I enjoyed the dps and aggro control, I didn't like the ability's execution myself.

[Tuddar Raddut]

Well, this also brings up the point of leap attack again. Which dev team was it that scrapped replacing the release-time move of leap attack that was the meat and potatoes of DPS for warriors. Did Sony scrap that idea, and thus attempt to redefine the warrior away from the release-time DPS skill?

One of the things I liked about how different stances operate in the Warrior compared to all other classes is that up until now, the warrior is either DPS or Tank, but not both. DK's still get DPS in defensive mode, but Warriors actually have to pick one or the other. I liked that so far, because it means we actually get DPS on warriors.

But I'm wondering if Sony is trying to redefine that.

Well, yes and no.

Yes, they are redefining the Warrior compared to what exists today. It really was necessary, because the current model of stance restrictions was the source of many balance issues.

However, I believe the changes are bringing the Warrior more in line with what the original concept of the Warrior was; a tank who excels at mastery of arms. So instead of being that master of arms half the time, they do so all the time. Stances merely modify the effectiveness of the activity, rather than inhibiting/prohibiting the activity altogether as stance restrictions did.

As far as Leap Attack, it was just a problematic skill programming-wise. They could never get the "Leap" part working the way the wanted it to work. The crit rate on it was insane.

They could have merely upped the recast timer on it and dropped the crit %, and just work on the leaping thing when they had time. Rather than do that, they just removed it (to the puzzlement of many) with promises to put it back in and giving nothing in the meantime to fill the void it left.

Honestly, at this point, I don't expect them to ever put it back in. It is still a needed skill, doubly so for PvP. Charge has some characteristics of Leap Attack, but just doesn't do the job. Leap Attack allowed me to move to another mob out of melee range quickly while tanking, and that functionality just hasn't been replaced.