From a previous post of mine:
http://forum.bioware...right-solution/ When you design a game, you need to think about every type of players. With that in mind, it's "normal" and wanted to have 1 character that is easier to play for the casual gamers.
When the Turian Ghost Infiltrator or the EDI bot made their way into ME3 MP, everybody were crying for nerfs because of the "I win" button. The reality was a bit more grim than that though. Only a handful of players (5-10%) were able to truly take advantage of those characters, TGI and EDI were still dying just as much as the next character. The completion rate for a game were at best <50%, even on Bronze, even with an "I WIN" button the size of the sun. So while those characters were grossly overpowered, they didn't have a great impact in the end for more than 95% of the player base. What I've learned from this is that OP characters are not only OK but needed for the masses.
That doesn't mean the Arcane Warrior couldn't have some abilities a bit reworked. Right now it has a lot of strengths and no weaknesses. On top of that, most of his abilities synergize better than everything else. So what could be done to curb the balance of the Arcane Warrior without gimping him too much either.
First, Pull of the Abyss is by far the best crowd control spell of the game because it drags every enemy in a tight spot. Combine that with Fade Cloak (AOE 1000% damage on tight group) and Spirit Blade (AOE 500% damage on tight group) and you have some hell of a combo. To reduce the efficiency of the combo, you could easily reduce PotA's duration from 12 to 4 seconds, cooldown from 32 to 20 seconds and mana from 65 to 50. These changes would limit the Arcane Warrior in his options as he would need tight timing to pull off a PotA + Fade Cloak + Spirit Blade combo while not overly gimping any of his powers. Note that you could now cast PotA much faster now to compensate for the lost duration. On top of that, it's not affecting in the slightest his team efficiency since your teammates are attacking in the first few seconds anyway. In fact, it would force the Arcane Warrior to synergize more with his teammates instead of doing it all by himself.
Second, Fade Shield is a bit too efficient compared to Barrier. Fade Shield is instant and can be constantly up, Barrier is 1 time and can't be maintained constantly for the entire duration of the game. Since we already lowered the potential damage from a PotA combo, let's just reduce the potential effectiveness of the Barrier from 2000 to 500 points. Why? Let's get into numbers...
A normal Barrier has 2000 points, 3000 with the 50% bonus, and stays up for about 10 seconds (10% decay/second). When a Keeper or an Elementalist cast Barrier on you, it's 2000 points and that's it for 10 seconds. For an Arcane Warrior generating his own Barrier, the Barrier effectiveness is much higher than 2000 point because after dealing enough damage to fill the 2000 points, he can still get extra Barrier if he gets hit. So say over 10 seconds he was dealt 1500 damage and regenerated the full Barrier, the effectiveness is now 3500 points for the same 10 seconds. That's 75% better than normal Barrier which is already freaking good. Reducing the Barrier to 500 points would allow the Arcane Warrior to maintain a smaller Barrier (25%) but with about the same efficiency as a normal 2000 point Barrier.
The 50% bonus Barrier is actually a bad option for the Arcane Warrior because the Barrier's decay is 10% per second. At 2000 points, the decay is 200 points/second which means you need to deal 666 damage/second to keep up a full Barrier. With a 50% bonus to Barrier (3000 points), the decay is 300 points/second which means you need to deal 1000 damage to keep up a full Barrier. By adjusting the Fade Shield's Barrier to 500 points, the decay would be 50 points/second (166 damage/second to keep up) and 75 points/second (250 to keep up). The 50% bonus to Barrier is now valuable instead of being detrimental.
With that said, that means the Arcane Warrior could have 1/4 of a Barrier constantly up, but it's not an "immortality cloak" anymore. With only a Barrier of 750 points at best, your health can now be damaged. Because you can efficiently regenerate that 750 points Barrier, you can also mitigate the damage to your health. Both are now in "balance" with each other instead of being simply an "I Win" button.
Third, Spirit Blade could use a cost increase from 10 to 15 mana just to lower the damage output a bit. More than that and it would be unsustainable mana wise. Note that the change doesn't affect the damage, just the spamming. Currently you can spam Spirit Blade and you regenerate mana faster than you can use it so the 5 extra mana should be just enough so you need to do this in burst of 5-10 casts instead of an all out 500% damage/second.
With those changes, I believe you curb the self reliance of the Arcane Warrior without affecting the efficiency of his team. He'll have to rely more on his teammates and less on himself only. Which is good! You still have a very strong character, but it's now more like a teammate than a lone wolf doing everything on his own.
The numbers aren't important in that post, it's more about the principle than anything else.
And you also have to take into consideration this:
People have the bad insight of comparing Arcane Warrior soloing to its use in a team. Soloing use all the extremes to reach a conclusion that doesn't work in normal gameplay.
First and foremost, enemies scale with the number of players. Thus, soloing is by far "easier" for strong characters than with a group of 4. (This isn't confirmed by Bioware, I made some tests and it was consistent but I wouldn't bet my life on it)
Second, the Arcane Warrior benefits from having all the aggro. The more melee enemies you have in front of you, the more survivable you are. If you don't have most of the aggro, you'll die much more easily.
Third, enemies positioning is different when you're soloing than when you're in a team. When soloing they'll tend to be a short distance from you and packed together, when in a team they'll tend to be all over the place. Enemies will also come to you if you're soloing, which means you don't need to run all over the place to kill them which in turn lower the time where you'd be vulnerable. Thus, it's harder to play in a team than in solo because of the way enemies move.
"Solo" shouldn't be used as an excuse for Arcane Warriors "easiness". It's very strong but it takes advantage of all the game mechanics at the same time, it's the best case scenario. Introduce 3 teammates and you'll begin to die because the odds aren't all stacked against the enemies now. Be careful before bringing a flawed example as an argument.
All in all, Arcane Warrior isn't OP to the point of breaking the game. He can die and he can be played pretty badly. I don't think changing the core mechanics of how things work with him will solve anything. We need "easier" characters, eventually players will play him less out of boredom of always playing the same character. It's normal we're seeing him everywhere, the game has been out for only a 6 weeks and people are still unlocking him for the first time.
There are other characters that shines in this game. The problem with those characters is that they usually require good gear to shine and good execution. Arcane Warrior doesn't really need that and that's why we see him more OP than he really is. Given time, we'll see more and more of the other characters and the gap should shrink.
As a final argument, the Arcane Warrior doesn't really shine that much in a good party. We usually attribute his OPness to his score at the end of the game. Which is skewed because even if the Arcane Warrior doesn't reach 30 kills he doubles the score of the nearest teammate. My guess is Barrier's the guilty. Since he generates his own Barrier and soak up damage a lot, he generates XP at an alarming rate. Still, put him in a good party that actually kill things and he's not gonna be an "I Win" button, he's just gonna be another strong character in a strong team.
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