Section 1: RNG, Miss-rate, and General Setbacks
Alright, so I've been doing a lot of sparring lately, and though I have some legitimate strategies, I'm having trouble pulling them off, despite the amount of setup and adaptation I have to do during a fight to even start to put them into action. I generally have the most luck starting on arms and stacking hemi for collapsednerves, as I am undoubtedly thankful for the efficiency and power of Pureblade arm affs and the lack of common support for parrying or stancing one's arms. Once I get a general hinder-train going and my opponent switches their parrying to arms to try at healing their wounds, I take a swing or two at their legs and then unload two assaults into said legs, and about 60% of the time I'm able to score a tendon, after which I transition into my slow kill-chain of stacking more collapsednerves to keep them prone while taking a jab at their head every so often until I have two or three unhealed wound blasts built up, which is when I start hacking down. This bread-and-butter strategy is useful to me just as long as three conditions are met:

1: I don't hit rebounding. This is the easiest obstacle to overcome, and I hardly ever hit after setting up some echoes and retempering my katana

2: I hit the relevant afflictions. I fought Raeri today, and finally managed to bring his demi-tanky butt to the ground, then abruptly hit him for a lacerated arm, then missed, ruining my timing, swung three assaults into his leg trying to bring him down again, missed, hit piercedleg, then hit piercedleg, then missed again, was hit by a stun, and by the time I recovered he'd moved his parry back to legs and healed up completely. We timed out.

3: My enemy doesn't know what I'm doing. If they catch wind of it and anticipate my strategy, they can totally shut me down, even if they're only right with their parry or rebound guessing about 1/4 of the time, since that's enough for my swinging to fail to outpace their curing, even with my 18 strength and rather nasty katana stats.

If I wasn't PB, I probably would've switched archetypes already, since looking at other specs' ab lists makes me so thankful for my own.

Preaching to the converted.

Well.

I'll just say as someone who's played warrior for a short amount of time, it really can get frustrating at times, and you generally feel pretty worthless 1-on-1 against just about any class. Every single other class out there, without exception, will have better hindering and burst offense than you will for less than a quarter of your investment. That's something you're going to have to live with.

That isn't to say warriors are totally hopeless or you should just qq and become something else. I've found much joy in group fights and find myself feeling pretty helpful to my team. Also, warriors stack together better than any other class in the game save for TPs/TKs and can instakill people in a matter of seconds together. That's really where we shine as a class: group combat.

Investment-wise, you'll have to throw in quite a bit for runes, but once you have a set, the difference is pretty noticeable. I won't pretend I do well with building wounds (due to my own shortcomings as a combatant) but I will say getting wounding+stat runes make a pretty massive difference.

There's a few people who make warriors really shine, like Ixion for example. I've yet to figure out how he consistently does it, but he manages to build other warriors to critical wounds pretty well. I'd go so far as to say he builds wounds on plate better than most do on robes, so there's definitely a sudden gap in the strength of warriors when you manage to max yourself out.

I think the many RNG components can be fun and make for an interesting fight, but they can also be very frustrating. I sort of wish warriors could be redesigned so that we didn't depend on an RNG, yet were redone so that we wouldn't be ridiculously overpowered either, really. But a lot of balance just dies to "the vision".

To be fair, when one thinks of a list of top combatants in this game, the names of a couple warriors have to pass through your head, so it isn't that hopeless of a class. I noticed a lot of the good warriors tend to be pretty crafty in combat, and I suppose that's a side-effect of being so gimpy (having to be a little more shrewd).

As for the differences across classes: there's been a sudden resurgence of axelords lately, and I've seen people toying around with new classes. I met a little bonecrusher from Glomdoring who's actually been doing an excellent job with it. I'm starting to believe that maybe the complaints about those specializations are a little exaggerated (at least in regards to how they compare with pureblade and blademaster).

I daresay, being a warrior is more about adaptability than any other class in this game, so spend a lot of time trying new things!

So, those are my thoughts on it.

Edit: As for hitting rebounding, that's usually quite easy to track, and an autorazer isn't to difficult to code up, either. I'm sure you could ask the codey-types to help you out with that if you have trouble doing it yourself. Highlights are great, but for something you have to be mindful of every 6 seconds or so, ontop of everything else in combat, you probably want to automate that little bit.

Edit: Also, I don't think you -need- to be demigod, but you'd need a nice set of artifacts, always. I remember admiring how well Kelly built wounds before she even reached titan, so there's that to think about. Dex platters and all the stat boosts you can get are nice too, since warriors are -the- most stat reliant class in the game, too.

It's a combination of RNG, plus seeing monks hit the same, if not better, affs almost at will, compared to us hit and praying.

I don't necessarily agree with all other classes and specs having guaranteed better hindering or burst offense then warriors, though at max, their credit investment will be much lower then a warrior's. Warriors REALLY feel like they need the cost/effectiveness/requirement of artifacts reduced, and then need to get rebalanced around the new max.

Though the rng isn't something that can really go, I think that totally natural miss-rate at trans Knighthood/Combat or even Omnitrans is stupid. This doesn't include so called dex-dodging, or the result of skills such as illusions blur or of course Acro and Aeonics dodging. I really don't think it makes any more sense for a omnitrans warrior to flat out miss someone any more then it makes sense for a druid to be in a forest, call for an effect and have it just... fail, for no real reason. If warriors have to be rebalanced after not naturally missing at trans, so be it.

Honestly, my artifacts probably only really raised me about 100-200 points of wounding per sword. The difference becomes notable, sure, but I think you're also severely overestimating how warriors perform now. Very few people will reach the levels of insane wounding that some of the outliers have achieved. Good robes, an artifact shield and trueshield in combat (as well as high resilience) will put your character in a good spot against warriors. Add in an intelligent parry/stance algorithm and decent sipping/applying priorities, and you might be able to really AFK some of them. I'd go so far as to say that a really artied warrior is on par with a robes wearer who put in about a quarter of the investment. Take an outlier robes though, and they're far behind.

I can't see where you disagree with the hindering/burst-offence either. I'm easily outhindered by a novice nihilist, Miciah as a Celestine was able to stall Lerad from ever gaining momentum, another small Celestine did a great job building up to a kill under constant blackout, mages have psionics, Illuminati and researchers are wacko, monks are...monks and even druids can pretty much kill a warrior without much trouble. Bards do some pretty insane levels of damage and their hindering is pretty slick, if they're competent . Wiccans have access to some pretty solid sleeplocks if they take hexes. A warrior has to build up against these guys, and if they made all the necessary preparations it can take a little time. Meanwhile the other guys are more or less able to throw out a solid plan from the start and really outpace you entirely. Couple rebounding, natural miss and passives, the only way you'll really be able to do well as a warrior is to have some very high burst wounds, rely on some tertiary skills or just be shrewd enough to find faults in their curing and abuse it.

The real joy of being a typical warrior is in group fights, really.

Which is my problem, since I don't especially like big group fights. Skirmishes I love, sure, but even then I feel like I'd be better suited to it as an archetype like monk or guardian, since I could have a faster offense and a more reliable overall experience. I can't even jump people efficiently as a non-tracking warrior, since I have barely any way of keeping them in the room long enough to even start scoring any high wounds. I dunno. The general frustration despite myself enjoying my warrior roleplay and flavor gear is starting to bear down on me too much for me to justify spending enough credits to become effective, because what then if I still am having problems (likely) and I can't leave due to investment. I've even avoided advancement to full member in the Serenguard because I've been thinking very seriously about going back to the Shofangi or becoming a Moondancer.

I dunno, maybe I'm blowing it out of proportion, but it's pretty disheartening, especially after sinking so many lessons into forging and my guild skills.

You have ways of keeping them in the room, it is just much harder than most would like. As a warrior(Pureblade) and former Blademaster...I can assure you it is possible, just not easy enough to do with one simple strike of a keybinding linked to an alias.

You have the option of applying poison if nothing else. Try working on different locks. Sleep and Paralyze work well if you tend to them while building wounds. I am far from awesome, most know that, but I have had luck getting other classes into paralyze to the point where it really is as easy as just re-striking a limb once to re-afflict and continue focusing on another affliction.

Sad to say though, warriors are best in groups...this isn't the typical warrior most are used to. They aren't overpowered brawny centaurs with muscles bigger than mountains that deal insane amounts of damage and can cause one to die just by breathing. Warriors are more of a support class in Lusternia from what I have gathered. We work on disabling the enemies while other people get the kill shots off and occasionally we might deal that last bit of damage to send them over to the Void.

We rock at hunting though!

There isn't a single class in the game that can reliably hinder someone enough to prevent them from running if they really want to.


Also, you pretty much need to be demi as a warrior to do well against other demi's and other warriors. Those extra stat points are pretty necessary.

As much to your warrior woes, That's kind of how warriors are. Very much an attrition class, tank someone long enough to build wounds to finally land kills. As much as other classes have the ability to burst damage, warriors have the ability and skills to take that burst to continue building. Not to mention, warriors in groups can kill someone in seconds, especially robe wearers (I found that out recently ). It's incredibly common to sit there and land great tendon/collapsednerve trains on someone just to have one bad shot and they stand up and run away and heal up, but there's a fine line between making warriors better and making them too powerful, especially since they're already powerful in groups and groups are the majority of the fights you'll be in. There's been like 3-4 reports trying to get rid of natural miss rate and they've all been shot down.

I love it when people try to play warriors up as not being utterly fail except as extreme outliers based on their own lack of utilization of trueshield, or extremely poor robes. If warriors must damn near omnitrans-demigod-spend-3Kcr-in-arties to have a prayer of beating someone at top-tier, then other people can stop whining when their 45/45 robes and crap shield don't make them invulnerable to warriors.

If you're losing to a warrior that isn't artied out the ass and backwards, fullstop, it's entirely your fault. No excuses. There are so many ways to completely shut them down, if you die to a warrior who isn't one of the very very few who have put in the vast amounts of time/effort/money to become able to have a prayer of killing other top-tiers, then you have failed, and need to look at yourself, rather than at them.

Note that tendon is not a win for warriors anyway. Unless you can land both the tendon and the amp immediately, you'll get a tumble out of a multi-warrior jump more than half the time.

Have to admit that warriors were the most fun to fight as a guardian 1v1, since unless they were artied and Demi'd they couldn't even build wounds on me.

I disagree that all other classes have great off the cuff hindering/burst offense.

Keeping people in room is everyone's problem, and for almost all classes it's hard to do against a determined enemy (though I've had 6 or so movement attempts fail in an aqua demesne, and it took me a full minute of trying to leave the room of an Illum once). I have fought against warriors where the only thing keeping me from a 30 second death was being annoying and spamming shove/treebane/treelife and running away when I could, and this not ONLY from people like Ixion (and I have trueshield, max combat, decent non-splendour robes and -now- a decent parry/stance/wound curer-er). Anyways, warriors don't have the worst buildup issue.

What I meant about the runes was this: If they don't do much (and I sort of am on the fence about 200 wounding extra each hit not being much) then they should be made cheaper. If that makes warriors on the whole overpowered in some way, then we can rebalance things to where they need to be. I think a big step to helping warriors is to leave them at the exact same level of power on average, and reduce the cost to reach that average.

But yes, as Sidd said: it's a fine line. At base, the wounding mechanism, where you have to prioritize health damage or wounding makes it so that with a single partner of any damage dealing class, a warrior will eventually kill you, and it's why warriors can't really have their damage buffed back up. Unless warriors are made to not stack so easily, I don't see them getting any real buffs, which is unfortunate for the skirmishing warrior.

EDIT: though magnetize changes are WELL warranted, and things like forcedsymmetry are problematic.

Now if you get level 2 wounding runes and level 2 stat runes...is that enough to be viable as a non-demi warrior? Or not really?

Not really.

Demi stats are pretty much mandatory for warriors. And runes. One without the other just doesn't cut it.

And how long does it take to get Demi....?

Anywhere from two weeks to six years, depending on who you ask.

Just about 4 years for myself.

IE, "How much spare time do you have?"

IE, "How much willpower do you have?"