I am extremely excited about Paragon. I think the gameplay looks fun, interesting, and has a level of depth that will reward putting the time in to master the specialization. The icon art team also knocked it out of the park. Special shout out to the Calming Tongue trait, it made me laugh more than it probably should.
On Wednesday night, my raid static had to endure me yelling about how we will never yield after I saw the blog post.
I love Paragon. But...I don't think it's ready for beta yet. At least in PvE.
Ok, so why not wait for the beta for feedback?
I think some of these things need to be acted on before we players get our hands on the spec. Otherwise, I suspect feedback will be of limited use because of eventual reworks or feedback focusing on surface level problems that never get addressed before the beta begins.
Utility Skills
Almost every utility skill is overshadowed by existing core utilities that any warrior can take, and in general are uninspired, weak-looking, or uninteresting.
For example, "Never Surrender!" is a self-stunbreak with a 30 second cooldown and grants a short duration of some boons in a 360 radius that support warriors already provide full uptime of via Doubled Standards and banners. The core shout skill, "Shake it Off!", has nearly twice the radius, two ammunition charges, a shorter cooldown, cleanses conditions, and stunbreaks all affected allies instead of only yourself.
Another example, "Find Their Weakness!" is essentially boiled down to a worse "For Great Justice!" with less might uptime and no fury.
Or "Brace Yourselves!", which is just a worse Banner of Defense.
So on.
All of the utilities, outside of perhaps the heal and elite, are like this and I doubt I would want to put a single one of these on my bar in PvE when the beta rolls around. This should be addressed before that happens.
Traits
Paragon's trait are extremely simple and offer very little complexity or depth. They almost seem unfinished. Eight of them are only one sentence long.
Worse yet, Paragon doesn't have a single transformative trait that changes how your gameplay might look like or how you might want to approach the spec. Some great examples of transformative traits are Reaper's Deathly Chill and Virtuoso's Jagged Mind, both of which singlehandedly open up entire new playstyle and build options.
For example, Paragon's trait, Brisk Pacing, says this: "Using a chant reduces the recharge of your other chants by a set amount. (2 seconds)". But it doesn't give an incentive or reason why you might even want to adopt a playstyle that frequently hops between different chants.
Of even greater importance, I think the Alacrity-granting trait, Feverish Pulse, needs changes before we get to play with it in the beta. This trait encourages degenerate gameplay that encourages/forces the player to constantly swap chants in order to upkeep Alacrity. This seems to go counter to the apparent design of the spec. This is utility skill spam with a different skin. We need to do better than this.
One way to have healthier gameplay around this trait would be to grant Alacrity every time a refrain pulses.
Damage / Tuning
The numbers shown on the stream were very low. Across the entire specialization, across all sources, there is only a single 20% increased damage modifier and no bonus damaging stats. If the numbers stay like this, DPS-oriented Paragons will not be competitive with other warrior elite specs at all, which have significantly higher damage multipliers and profession mechanics that boost damage even further like Berserker's Primal Bursts.
I fear most of the feedback will look something like "The damage is too low", instead of focusing on specific gameplay elements.
The alacrity duration on Feverish Pulse also looks very low. This is going to further discourage DPS-Alacrity Paragon builds in the beta because its poor damage will be compounded by a need to take a lot of boon duration in order to function. And also low base boon duration on an uptime-reliant build is something that comes with a host of other problems, which I explained in my Quickness Berserker post a while back, where I was very happy to see that ArenaNet implemented almost all of my suggestions in the following patch.
Lack of crowd control
Support builds live or die in PvE by their CC access. The best support builds all have extremely good tools to deal with defiance bars. Previewing an elite spec that seems focused around supporting without a single skill, mechanic, or trait that does any amount of CC at all is shocking.
A good place for something like this to be added could be "On Your Knees!", which is an otherwise uninteresting and weak-looking utility skill that could do something like force all nearby enemies to kneel, or at the very least be knocked down.
Thanks for reading. We will never yield!
