Wardancers

Instead of doing one big catch-all classlead thread before the next round, I'm starting some smaller threads in the hopes of keeping things more focused. So with that out of the way, here are my thoughts on Wardancers:

I want Wardancers to be strictly sword and shield: Right now, I have three options. Sword and board, sword and sword, board and board. The issue here is that my best shield attack does literally half the damage of my best sword attack, so that double-sword is by far my best damage option. However, this comes at the cost of losing a huge chunk of my physical mitigation. That might seem like a balance factor, but it is not. It's a price I only have to pay against people who do physical damage; when I don't need to tank big physical hits losing the shield isn't a sacrifice at all. This kind of damage discrepancy makes it damn near impossible to normalize WD damage because I get my best damage potential against a super squishy Hunter and my worst damage potential against a tanky Knight.

I want to normalize offensive shield stats: Picking the right shield for a WD is a confusing issue involving damage, balance time, and sychronizing with kicks. This involves a lot of stupid crap like "When I use splitleap I should use a tower shield because the tower shield provides more protection without being slower than splitleap but when I use blade strike I should drop to kite but banded for broadsword slash and a buckler for a sabre slash and..." and it's really an irritating pile of crap to deal with. I would like it if all shields had the same baseline offensive stats and artifact shields just did more damage. Also, right now shields are still credits=speed, with an L3 shield shaving 0.19s off of your shield hack. I think this should change.

Blade Spin: Blade spin either needs to go away entirely or it needs a clearly visible "THIS DUDE IS ABOUT TO MESS YOU UP" type of message so that you know something big is coming and you can take steps. Right now it's just a generic slash message that doesn't give any warning about the train collision you're about to be a part of.

Shield Absorb: The class tanking defense should not be at Mythical Shielddance. Lower this to something newbies can get. You know, just like Barkskin, Demon Armor, Stoneskin, Distortion, etc, etc.

Bashing: Bashing at trans is pretty great. Bashing before trans is miserable. Kickflip is awful until Doubletime at Trans Wardance. Blade abilities are awful until Bloodthirst at Virtuoso 33%. Shield Batter is awesome, except it's at Expert in a different skillset. Having to go deep into three different skillsets to bash decently is awful, and this is the only class that is that way. Combined with the fact that Absorb is currently deep Mythical and you've pretty much got to be Trans/Trans/Virt to bash decently. This is awful. Lower kickflip baseline to the Doubletimed time and make it unaffected by doubletime, lower Batter down to Skilledish or so, lower bloodthirst down to Giftedish maybe?

Skill Placement: Carrying over from bashing somewhat, I think the wardancer experience could really benefit from picking one primary skillset and readjusting skills so that newbies can be told "learn this first" while doing right. Wardancer is in a weird place right now where they have 3 primary skillsets, which is sort of awful.

Sentinel: Right now, Sentinel comes down as soon as you unwield a shield for any reason. If I am wielding sabre/shield and do "quickdraw shield broadsword", I lose my sentinel dance. Right now, the eviscerate dance will only drop if you're not wielding a sword when the dance actually ticks; I would like it if Sentinel could have this kind of behavior and only drop if you don't have a shield when the dance would tick.

Damage: Stacking +% from artifact weapons with +% from heavy weapons with +arpen from sharp weapons has things a little high right now and it could use looking at.