2H styles suffering. What are people's thoughts?

[Adoede]

Hi Kreegan - yes I have a few theatrics that score a pretty consistent amount of damage per hit - and they have decently high agility. But none of them is even at 50% win/loss yet in Blood Gods. They lose quite often to the strength builds, actually...especially the ones stacking HP and armor. But my strength builds definitely have a harder go at it. I can't get them very competitive without better gear - but they're not rising in BGP fast enough to get it.

Also - why don't strength builds simply stack equipment that boosts both Strength and Agility? There's no reason you can't have both 250 strength and agility. I'd do that...if I could get some gear of my choosing.

[Kreegan]

V1) If we had the ability to go back and look at all the fights over the past months what do you think the "agility based weapons vs strength based weapons" win ratio would be for agility based weapons? We're only talking about when a gladiator using an agility based weapon is matched up against a gladiator using a strength based weapon.

2) What win/loss ratio would you consider to be "balanced" enough as to be acceptable? e.g. 50%-60% win ratio for either agility or strength based weapons.

For 1) I guess it depends on the match. If you match a gladiator with full Blood Gods gear equipped with Strength-based weapons with a newbie in the bracket with Agility-weapons, I guess the former will win pretty often. If you match gladiators who are equally well-equipped, I'll certainly bet for the Agility guy.
2) 50% is quite enough, there's nothing more balanced than an eye for an eye.

And Nate, the problem is not necessarily with who scores more wins in the long run, it's more with the manner in which a certain build can overpower another. A Strength-based gladiator can lose a fight against some Agility monster in round 1 and will lose it quite often no later than round 1. All it takes is a single successful stun, knockdown or hamstring. If none of these trigger, the fight will still not be exactly even because of bleeding and the high damage output per round of the speed builds but if they do, the fight just ends because your fighter's overall activity changes from slow to crippled (no matter how high you set you Activity level ). The Strength guys can't do that because they can't land that many attacks per round even if they manage to disable the opponent for a while - hence one of the reasons why War Cry is usually wasted on a gladiator who can't attack frequently.

@Aboede, if you manage to make a gladiator who has 250 Strength and 250 Agility, he'll probably nail him/herself to number 1 in Blood Gods. I doubt that this will ever be possible, even if you have incredible luck with the Blacksmith items.

[Pit Lord]

My scribe says Erupt hit for 400-500 while Arrgh and Amon hit for 150-250 so the claim they hit like strength based gladiators doesn't make any sense.

1. All it takes is a single successful stun, knockdown or hamstring. If none of these trigger, the fight will still not be exactly even because of bleeding and the high damage output per round of the speed builds but if they do, the fight just ends because your fighter's overall activity changes from slow to crippled (no matter how high you set you Activity level ). The Strength guys can't do that because they can't land that many attacks per round even if they manage to disable the opponent for a while - hence one of the reasons why War Cry is usually wasted on a gladiator who can't attack frequently. - if you go berserk type war you must expect this will happen to you .

War is defensive by design. The skills, the armour and their strategy show this.

If at some point of the arena history offensive type of war was possible it was due to their opponents not developed/setup correctly.

[Kreegan]

Does your scribe also say how many attacks each of them makes per round?

Edit: and as your probably only look at Blood Lady who counter-attacks against speed builds from what I've seen, so you won't get the real number of attacks against a Strength-based gladiator, maybe you should check something else than your scribe too.

[Pit Lord]

You should not expect to match the speed build number of hits when you are in full heavy and using heavy/slow weapons. You did expect it?

[Kreegan]

If you actually follow the logic of the whole discussion so far, you'll find out that the damage output of the speed builds per round and not per hit is one of the major concerns of the people running Strength gladiators. No, I'm not expecting a Strength gladiator to attack as often as an Agility gladiator but if the former attacks twice per round for 300-400 damage and the latter attacks 6-7 times per round for 200 damage and is the first who will land strikes, it's not that hard to do the math, even if you don't consider critical effects and activated abilities.

[Pit Lord]

If you actually follow the logic of the whole discussion so far, you'll find out that the damage output of the speed builds per round and not per hit is one of the major concerns of the people running Strength gladiators. No, I'm not expecting a Strength gladiator to attack as often as an Agility gladiator but if the former attacks twice per round for 300-400 damage and the latter attacks 6-7 times per round for 200 damage and is the first who will land strikes, it's not that hard to do the math, even if you don't consider critical effects and activated abilities.

Following the logic and the flow of the discussion so far you would had noticed that the war type from your examples have bad skills/strategy/gear/setup and was given hints how to change this.

[Cynaidh]

War is defensive by design. The skills, the armour and their strategy show this.

I'd agree with this except for why do they have the two handed weapon skill and one of the largest damage skills in the game Death From Above. Since the option is there to use a purely offensive weapon it would be nice if it was viable. Again my opinion is variety is better, if warriors have to be defensive to be successful i'd consider that a fail.

Really before the skill tree revamp in Jan 2013 warriors where much more balanced at that time there where very effective defensive warriors and very effective offensive warriors both, they had hamstring to keep the mass speed attack glads from swarming them every round to get stuns/knockdowns to keep them from attacking, and they had a skill that a lot of the time let them attack first in a round , even if it was their only attack in the round at least they got to make it back then. Throw in how much more powerful theatrics and speed rages have become due to the agility damage change (and for theatrics picking up both of those skills warriors lost) its not really surprising we are having this conversation.

Now i mainly talk about warriors as its was a fun class that i used to enjoy running but really its the same for theatrics all i hear is how the strength based theatrics are in a much worse place then the agility based ones (the only opinion have on this is my guys seem to beat the strength based ones more then the agility). And Apoc started this thread about how strength based two handed rages are having issues. So i dont see this as a "warrior" issue more but again really the effectiveness of strength based weapons vs agility based weapons based on the fact that they both get bonus damage from there main stat (strength or agility) now but agility gives a lot more additional offensive beneficial stats to an offensive gladiator (attacks per round, initiative bonus).

[Cynaidh]

Also - why don't strength builds simply stack equipment that boosts both Strength and Agility? There's no reason you can't have both 250 strength and agility. I'd do that...if I could get some gear of my choosing.

Actually your seeing that in the top of the blood games several of the strength based glads i looked at the beginning of the week are running 150-180 agility to be competitive.

The issue i have with this is strength based offensive glads still need agility (for extra attacks per round, improved initiative, and the extra defense doesn't hurt) but agility weapon glads can completely dump strength and get gear with the other stats that help you in combat like Chi or even Presence for more initiative.

[Cynaidh]

I think you guys might be getting a bit premature saying that agility is the end all be all. In your discussions of strength based glads needing copious amounts of agility you have ignored the example of my war pirate who has a mere 121 agil and 109 pres. It is true that agility builds are proliferating now, but strength builds are in no way impotent. I will elaborate more and give suggestions later in the week when I have more time (getting swamped at work).

Looking forward to reading it Sotc. Arrrrrpirate is the outlier for str glads for me for sure, I just figured its from her gear advantage over the other agility glads at this point, when she matches up against Arrrrrghpirate (since they seem to be on the same gear level...amazing gear ) how does she do?

While they are both amazing glads just looking at the current season Arrrrrghpirate is 8.6% higher on win rate and she is 13.4% (83.3% vs 69.9%) higher lifetime compared to Arrrrrpirate so i'd have to think Arrrrrghpirate has some type of advantage over Arrrrrpirate and perhaps its the difference between strength and agility weapons.