It's been a very busy time for me and I haven't played as much as I wanted to, but my runs with Warrior have left me with these early impressions:
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Berserker has a lot to gain from regular shielding at low health. Pairs well with Ring of Tenacity, enough that it didn't feel like a meme to run it. I don't think it represents a huge power spike but a setup that allows you to reap the benefits of lower HP actually exists now, which is cool
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Gladiator on the other hand feels somewhat worse to me. Typically I played Gladiator as an HP tank, so that passive shielding was more like active HP protection and the lack of cooldown on shield regeneration + permanent uptime meant that after any given fight I'd already gain the benefit of the shield, if I even needed it - if not, I'd just try to maintain combo between encounters. That's been turned on its head now and the shield can actually trigger frequently but disappear after combat, which makes the need to combo kill at the end of every fight is pretty crucial now, so building combo for a good kill feels far more pressing than it used to. You also gain nothing for doing so until you drop to half health, so you're not leveraging a big HP pool anymore.
Low health still feels like a risky way to play and while there's far more reward in it for a Berserker now, the Gladiator doesn't feel like it gains anything from this rework and maybe loses a little something - at least, in the way I always used to play Gladiator, it just doesn't exist anymore.
I'd be interested to hear what some other players have thought about the Warrior changes. My TLDR is I'm a lot more inclined to pick Zerk, a lot less inclined to assume Gladiator, and Ring of Tenacity feels way less like a meme now with regular shielding popping up once you're low enough health to make the shield effectively worth more than it says on the box.
Reading over these comments, I generally agree that Gladiator already has a lot to deal with and the extra juggling of shield uptime is a bit much. Some of this is intended, but I'm considering softening it a bit by allowing the shield to stay active as long as enemies are near OR the gladiator has combo. This won't affect balance much but should make it feel like the various mechanics are clashing a lot less.
It seems if this specific change was intended as a buff, it may be a bit of a nerf. Now, when you have just a few points of shielding after a fight, you hold a meagre shield rather than going into reset right away. On the other hand, if you had most of your shielding in tact, that means the fight was ideal and minimal damage was sustained. And you would get a reduced immediate cooldown previously. It just seems like the worser case scenario got worse and the better one got rewarded.
Just thought I'd provide some feedback and I'm not looking for any change or reversal. It was manageable before and I'll manage with the current mechanics.
It's worth noting that the shield starts cooling down immediately after it activates, you are not losing out on cooldown duration if it ends up lasting longer.
That is a pretty solid idea, it would definitely make it feel more worthwhile to save your combo up between encounters. It can be a difficult resource to manage effectively given the other extenuating circumstances like environmental hazards and "oops all melee whiffs, womp womp" so feeling less pressure to just spend it at the end of every encounter would take a load off!
Personally, I don't see it as clashing. The gladiator is the more active sub-class and currently, in the situation where you're about to kill an enemy but your shield is up, strategically, you should not end the combo and be in search for your next fight. Your shield will be in cooldown but you have combo built up ready for a finish and reset. The gladiator should be played differently than the berserker.
But the change you proposed shouldn't be game-breaking and it'll make some players happy so I'm not opposed to it or anything. It's probably a good change.
The shield persisting through the Combo would be a great addition, it would definitely feel better. I'm looking forward to that.
I'm wondering though
The fact that we can't begin stacking Lethal defense until the passive shield triggers. Is it intended? Would it be too strong if the passive had full uptime on top of the Gladiator talent?
I'm not totally sure what you mean by this. The talent absolutely shouldn't require the shield to be currently active to trigger, and it doesn't from my testing.
Thanks for the response. I think I should explain the situations I'm seeing more clearly.
Let me explain two scenarios I'm seeing through my testing.
Scenario A
Even I get multiple kills in succession with a combo, the talent won't trigger unless the passive seal shield triggers
Scenario B
This is very consistent for me
I also noticed that even when the shield is on cooldown, if a combo kills multiple enemies, or if the shield could further decrease cool down reduction, it just doesn't.
This might be intended, but just in case
For example
Scenario C
After that happens, then scenario A will keep happening if I don't take damage, or scenario B will happen if I take even a bit of damage
Scenario D
Same circumstances as the previous scenario, but I use the Crush ability and successfully kill multiple enemies. This should give me cooldown for each enemy killed, but as of now, it just refreshes the cool down to 0.
Hm, there must be something extra going on here because from a quick test the cooldown works correctly in both A and C:
A: shield is correctly reduced to -100 cooldown, can be triggered twice in a row on two successive attacks
C: shield cooldown went from 90 to -10 turns, after re-triggering the cooldown correctly started at 90 turns.