So Warlord am I right?
Yeah, I loaded into Arcane Odyssey after the recent update and found that I lost access to half of my weapon skills on my Strength Weapons. I know all about the Savant meta that’s been terrorizing the game since full release but I can’t help but notice that Warlord was caught in the cross-fire with this change. I have a few issues with it that I’d like to highlight here.
- It’s taking away content from the players.
Less of a balance issue and more of an issue we saw back when Selino and Javelin were pushed back from a skill requirement of 100 to 160. It wasn’t good for any of the hybrid players losing access to those skills, as to that point they had incorporated it into their kits and were enjoying the new power boost. Having it stripped away like that felt awful at the time, and now Warlords are feeling it a second time having lost access to a large amount of skills on their strength weapons. - Warlord feels like it’s niche is no longer worth the cost.
Strength Weapons are Warlord’s niche. It’s justification for investing the points into both stats, something Conjurer and Warlock should also have but that’s off topic at the moment. While Weapons users are able to invest their stats all into weapons and equip the game’s whole arsenal to their liking. Warlords investing all into Strength and Weapons should feel a similar pay-off with their specific subsection of weapons. Split-Stat weapons like this should be a hybrid class’s means of keeping up with Pure Builds even if these means are more restrictive (example being that every Strength Weapon has a negative speed modifier, limiting how you build your file). But now, for a Warlord to get access to Ultimate Art: Raging Chaser for example. The Warlord requires level 189, while a Warrior will only require level 145. That’s a 44 level difference for Warlords to get access to the same skill on their pure build equivalent, and that’s assuming the Warlord has built their classes stats to 189/189. The drawback to Strength Weapons is how it limits your stat distribution, and the small subset of weapons that they are. Nerfing them in this way just pushes hybrids further away from pure builds. - Why play Warlord when I can just play Warrior?
With Warlord’s niche of Strength Weapons, now being inferior in terms of stat point efficiency to any other weapon type. It’s hard to justify playing it over Warrior in all honesty. Warrior innately gets a size buff from its awakening, on top of being less limited in terms of the weapons it can use, on top of not being pigeon holed into being predominantly a size build as a result of its intended weapons. - It makes the stat requirements for Warlord look wrong.
Okay admittedly a bit less of an important point here but it looks wrong seeing something like a skill requirement of 156 to be able to use a specific skill. Everything prior to this point worked fine where all of the skills ended in 5 or 0, but now its like the game is asking me to build 156S/194W Warlord to unlock Roar of Glory. It feels wrong. EDIT: I just discovered that some skills have a requirement of exactly 176, this just feels like a slap to the face after a punch to the gut.
Generally speaking prior to the update, Warlord felt like it was in a good place. It wasn’t meta defining with maybe the exception of Dragon-Slaying Ultimate Art: Colossal Cleave and a few other skills such as Roar of Glory. But a majority of those felt like problems external to Warlord and were issues across the skills themselves. Notably see Savant pulling the exact same tricks to better effect. I’m not certain as to why Warlord was dragged through the mud as a result of taking down Savant but it made an already fine class feel much worse.
And I understand the sentiment of Warlord being stronger than Conjurer, Warlock and the other Hybrids. But the problem there is that Warlord is the only hybrid class that can realistically be considered complete. It has its Strength Weapons, while the other classes dont have their “Strength Weapon” equivalents. Not to mention Warlock not even having anything planned for its equivalent yet to my knowledge. Ideally once all the hybrids have their equivalents to Strength Weapons, this problem should solve itself.
I’m genuinely hoping this change gets walked back as it just hurts a class that was in a healthy spot for little to no reason making it feel worse for all players who play Warlord.
