Warrior Concepting | Patreon Weekly #301

Hey Patrons! In this weekly I’m going to go into some more detail about the rough plans I have for Warrior changes!

(this Weekly’s content was also in the Shattered Secrets for January this year, so Shattered Supporters might feel some deja-vu)

Warrior’s Problem

It’s no secret that the Warrior is generally the least respected character among the more dedicated members of the playerbase. He is often called weak and boring, and with somewhat good reason. The Warrior’s ability seemingly give him a paltry amount of passive shielding and no actual gameplay options.

So he just needs buffs right, perhaps a more direct ability on top of his shielding? Well that’s where the real problem starts, his lack of interactivity is by design, and he’s actually the strongest hero in the game (at least on average). I want his ability to get out of the way as much as possible so that new players can focus on other game mechanics. His emphasis on armour and easy passive shielding give him a very good ‘cruising speed’, which results in him just barely having the highest winrate among average players (0 chal players who already have a win).

Obviously this falls apart a bit as player skill goes up though, as skilled players can maximize the benefit of more complex effects. This, along with ‘Faith is my Armor’ nerfing him so strongly, makes him very weak at the highest tiers of play. Also, the lack of perceived power in his ability is a universal problem, even if it does end up benefiting new and average players a lot.

A New Shielding Ability

My plan to address this is actually pretty simple in execution: move the broken seal’s shielding effect away from a slow shield boost, and instead make it a stronger automatically triggered shield effect with a cooldown. The Warrior will gain a larger shielding buff just before taking damage that would otherwise reduce him to below 50% health. This ability will have a cooldown, and the amount of shielding granted will likely scale based on armor tier/level, or based on hero level.

This has several upsides:

• The ability is now much more noticeable, as you get a big mitigation to a single attack (and possibly attacks right after), instead of a tiny mitigation to many attacks.

• The ability is still largely passive, automatically triggering when it’s needed, which should mean newbies can get a lot of its value passively. However, more experienced players can now do things to try and maximize the benefit.

• This naturally encourages players to stay at low HP, while also making it safer to do so. This is generally something that new players want to be encouraged to do anyway.

• It’s very easy to balance this vs. The existing seal ability, likely with some direct buffs to account for the ability not always being active.

• It has synergy with the Berserker subclass, and can easily work with the Warrior’s other existing mechanics (though some will need mild tweaks).

• The possibility of tieing some of this to hero level makes the Warrior a little less dependant on directly upgrading armor, which is a nice potential option for higher chal players.

I don’t expect this is going to immediately fix Warrior for high-chal players, but I do hope this will go a long way toward improving his perceived power generally and usefulness at higher level of play. I would also like to keep adding challenges over time, which should make turning on faith is my armor feel less necessary.