Of thousands of pages of comments on warriors over the years they requested tools to survive, avoid CC, and mobility - to stay on targets.
NO ONE WAS ASKING FOR TOTEMS.
We made it a banner for a couple of reasons. We thought the demoralizing and mocking mechanics were more useful if the warrior could place them somewhere else. For example, imagine a warrior (and not just a tank) using the Mocking Banner to direct incoming adds over to where the tank is currently standing. Now Skull Banner doesn’t strictly have to be a banner, since the warrior will probably want to benefit from it most of the time, but we left it as a banner for one pretty cool reason: since the banner is an ally, you can Intervene to it (!). That opens up some cool gameplay options. Ultimately, we wanted to try and expand the design potential for warriors a bit. Increasingly, it seemed that any new ability had to be another type of movement, a weapon strike, or shout, or it wouldn’t feel like a warrior ability. We wanted to try something new, and we're hoping that warriors will give them a shot once we’re in beta and let us know how it feels. |
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I know a lot of you are concerned about the 30% crit increase from the Skull Banner.
It’s a number we're iterating on, and the ability isn't even finalized yet. Our hope is that the duration is short enough that it doesn’t have the impact of say Bloodlust and the radius is small enough that it might be used to hit melee only. Another variation we're trying is a 10% crit group buff, but and a 20 or 30% buff to the warrior, so that it doesn’t feel anemic to the warrior but doesn’t feel mandatory for the group.
Yep. The banner can be targeted and killed, but it has about 33% of the warrior’s health, so it can’t be easily "stomped" as a totem would be, and may not be worth attacking at all, given how long banner durations are. Anyway, we don’t want banners to feel like totems. Perhaps categorizing “anything I place in the world” as a totem is a slightly narrow perspective? |