Sir_Kai wrote:I'm speaking as a near 13k might War Mage, with full T14 gear, the T16 pvp sword and a shield, and a roughly 300/200 win/lose ratio, so I believe I have some experience here. And let me just say, War Mage is broken for pvp. As in, it doesn't have a chance unless extreme luck goes our way (or our opponent isn't very skilled, which accounts for most of my wins).
This needs to be fixed, now, long before any pvp beta items go away, to give the war mages a chance at them. Venan chose to put pvp into this game, so they have a duty to balance the classes.
Now to explain, in detail, the precise reasons, I will give all Shadow Walkers and Justicars access to the knowledge of their IWIN buttons. It's a sequence of skills that ensures you rack up big damage and put the opponent in a situation where they have very little hope of winning. This works amazingly well on War Mage, though as I don't play the other classes, I can't say how they do against each other.
Justicar
You probably want to land Seismic Slash first, although if you can land Brutal Strike, that is the better combo opener. If you feel you can't land either of those, open with Stunning Blow. To do this, wait for your opponent to use up their defend, and have their stuns/delays be down or unable to respond in time. It's okay if they hit you quite a bit first, since that builds up your vengeance and applies stagger to them. Then go: Seismic Slash > Brutal Strike > Wound, and then see how much time is left before they can respond. If you can fit in another attack, good. But if not, use Heroic Will and start the cycle again. If you need to, use your stun to keep your combo going, but if you can save it until the end for another Brutal Strike, that is best. This is because Brutal knocks you back 0.5 seconds, while Seismic knocks you back 1.25 seconds, leaving the opponent basically unable to respond. By the time they can do something, you've easily knocked 15k off their health... and there isn't any coming back from that much. Also, by this time they have 2 or three wound debuffs, meaning they are taking an easy 1k damage a second or so.
In short, it is the Justicars knock back abilities combined with heavy damage (even with a 1 hand weapon!) that allows them to rip an opponent to shreds. Two knockbacks, a stun, and a move that can make them instantly usable again. If you can delay the fight long enough, Heroic Will may come up again, sealing your victory.
Shadow Walker
Shadow Walkers, your combo is: Ensnare > Defend > Caltrops > Piercing Strike. That's an easy 4-5k damage, which may not be as damaging as Justicar, but they have something to even it out: Reflexive Strike. Speed is king in pvp, and spamming this move whenever it is up, means an easy 1-2k damage ever second. Also, your caltrops dot is ticking for 500 to 1k damage every second. Reflexive Strike is also useful for removing buffs like Ice Shield. Now, after your combo is done, you generally want to look for an opening to use smoke bomb, which will allow you another piercing strike and another couple of Reflexive Strikes. If you have Riposte, which you should, then defend against damaging attacks and your defend will instantly finish, meaning no lost time. With Riposte and Reflexive Strike, your damage per second will be insane. I've seen some Shadow Walkers use poison attacks like Toxic Blade to fairly good success, but most use Piercing Strike. The advantage of the former is the magical damage, which most don't gear to defend against.
In short, the Shadow Walker's incredible speed and damage means they can eviscerate opponents fairly easily. Reflexive Strike, in particular, doesn't leave you as vulnerable, since it gives you an easy way to set yourself up to see what your opponent does, then react to it .2 seconds later. It's a strong method of controlling the fight and giving you a steady damage rate.
War Mages
So what can War Mages do against this? Not much. Icy Grasp is nice, and it's usually my first move. I get a weak slow out of it, and it allows me to land Incinerate, which will hopefully start a burning effect (about half the time). And then I can usually get off a fire blast before a Justicar or SW gets off their next move, but then I'm vulnerable. Why? Because our cast times for most of our abilities are insanely long, compared to everyone else. I can't use Ice Lance or Incinerate much because that opens me up to Seismic or Smoke bomb. And stuff like Brutal Strike and Piercing Strike will land before that. So, yay, even if I get off a big attack, I've usually taken more damage than I've dished out. I use a Sword and Shield, because a staff would just make me too friggin' slow. By the time I landed spells, half my HP would be gone. I've only seen a couple of War Mages do real well in pvp, and only one used a staff. And her win/lose ratio paled next to a 1h/shield war mage that does fairly well.
So, as I said, Incinerate and Ice Lance are out, and the latter is our only pushback move, which means it rarely comes into play. And it's only 0.5 second pushback instead of the 1.25 of Justicars (although their Brutal Strike is more comparable). Against Shadow Walkers, instead of pushing them back, they have time to defend which leads to a dodge which completes their defend timer; so instead of pushing them back, I've only sped them up. So that leaves me with Icy Grasp and Time Void, both 5 second recast(TV doesn't even really stun, just interrupts, so limited usefulness). Fire Blast and Frozen Shards are my only two real attacks, then, and even Frozen shards can be a bit too long to cast (too long for speed SW, and longer than Seismic Slash and Stunning Blow).
So how does a War Mage win? Luck. A LOT of it. It requires my flame dots to land, and stack up to three. They supposedly have a 75% chance to land, but I've gone through 10-20 castings of fire spells and not seen one. Also need luck with ice shield procs (a lot of them), and perhaps a bit of luck with Snap casts and random freezes... which have low percent chances of happening. Luck can also happen if I dodge or block a lot, or if I resist their debuffs and stuns. I have 10.5% chance via enchants to resist debuffs, but it is still not something to count on. So whereas Shadow Walkers and Justicars can win with a fair bit of skill and a little luck, War Mages need a LOT of luck to win. We need misses and procs by the shit ton, because most of our spells can be repeatedly blocked or stopped due to cast time.
It gets so bad, that I've seen many War Mages just outright give up in PvP. They enter combat and then go afk, leaving their toon to auto-attack and lose. They know they can't win, so at least they can get some tokens for minimal work, right? War Mages are about the only class I've seen do that. How sad is that? That they know they don't stand a chance, so they just plan to give up in advance. How many of the top PvPs are War Mages? Maybe I'd guess there might be 1 in there.
Now that I've highlighted the problems, how do we fix things? I could ask for Shadow Walkers and Justicars to be weakened, but nobody likes their classes nerfed. So the only solution is to buff War Mages. How? Here are some suggestions, at least several of which will be needed:
#1. Decrease cast times for Incinerate and Ice Lance. It's ludicrous how long they take, which means in pvp they are barely usable, since at best, they will simply be blocked (when opponent defends, who has plenty of time). At worst, they leave the war mage extremely vulnerable to stuns/knockbacks/even more damaging moves that take less time to do. I'd suggest lower base cast time to 1 second.
#2. Increase proc chance of snap cast to mirror Riposte more closely. Instead of a paltry 2/4/6%, go 10/20/30% at least, if not the 20/35/50% of Riposte. For a tier 4 skill, the proc chance is pathetic.
#3. Increase proc chance of flame dot from 75% to 100%, and increase damage. That means that if it isn't blocked or resisted, it lands. When Shadow Walker and Justicars DoTs can do much, much more and land much, much easier, there is an extreme disparity.
#4. Increase Fire Blast damage from 40/50/60% to 50/75/100%. Or alternatively, lower recast to 0.5 seconds. This is to bring it more inline with Reflexive Strike, as a move a mage can use to actually get some damage out and help control the fight a bit better.
#5. Increase the Freeze chance of Deep Freeze from 3/6/9%, to something a bit higher.Like 10/20/30% chance. This gives ice mages more of a chance.
#6. Increase pushback of Ice Lance to 1 second. 0.5 second pushback for a spell that takes so long is a joke.
Now, obviously, doing all these would make War Mages overpowered. Pick and choose about 2 or 3 of these. I'd personally like the first 3 as the most balancing. And all of these would just involve going in and modifying a few numbers. Should be relatively easy.
We are in the PvP BETA, right? Make some changes to War Mages and see how it plays out. Do War Mages get overpowered? Nerf their abilities back down a tad. But if they finally manage to be able to put up a fight, then the BETA will have succeeded in it's mission.
If a developer puts PvP in a game, they have a responsibility to make sure the classes are balanced, so each class has roughly equal chance of winning. But when one class can easily and repeatedly lose to lesser gear players with 2k less might than them, something is wrong.
Devs, please acknowledge this and fix the problem, above all else. Don't let the Beta end with War Mages so disadvantaged in terms of tokens won. They'll miss out on a chance for a pvp beta sword or a pvp beta background.
If justicars did what you said up there, they would Lose more than win, you have obviously never played a justicar, and if you get beat by that rotation then you need some better practice. I stopped reading after that since your justicar info was bogus I assumed everything else would be. I have currently faced 4 mages that can consistently beat me, and they all seem to have different rotations than the vast majority of wms. The vast majority of wms I fight are still 2h. And the 1h o fight are still aoe Pve specced in a 1v1 environment. Kai I have fought you, and you fall into that category. The problem is, people are crying about how broken wms are, so they will get buffed and be unstoppable. I agree they are the weakest class, but they only need a slight adjustment to be balanced in the currently RNG based PvP.
Justicars and sws are only balanced because of rng, and that usually seems to go the sws way. One dodge/riposte will ruin any kb chain a justi can throw. 0 dodges and the justi wins. End of story.