Is GWF even worth playing?

Regardless of class the main issue with Neverwinter is the choice between PVE and PVP. People are divided on the matter if Neverwinter is pay to win or not and that is also the determining factor for the class you want to play. Some classes do better with less tenacity and others need more tenacity (although tenacity is a MUST for PVP only the amount needed differs between classes). The problem is that stacking tenacity and the gear that gives tenacity makes it difficult to stack your power/crit/armor pen high enough without using only the small amount of gear pieces that give you the stats you need. In PVP the GWF needs at least 800 tenacity if he/she wants to survive long enough to make a difference and likely it needs more than 800 tenacity if he/she wants to really be able to turn the match in their team’s favour. The first nerf to Unstoppable broke the tank abilities of the GWF because they could survive longer with the defence bonus it gave and with less tenacity. Now stacking tenacity makes it difficult to stack enough of the other needed stats of the offense type. This caused the players who want to do serious PVP to resort to pay to win because the only way you can get enough of all the needed stats is with the artefact gear on Legendary (5-9 mil AD per piece depending on Auction house prices for refinement stones) and also only certain types of gear will give the right stats which basically takes away any kind of creativity for builds anyone can have. The game has an attitude of “if you don’t slot these exact items and stats you won’t win” and that means that everyone who has the cash to afford paying (and should have a certain degree of skill and contacts in the right guilds to queue with) can make it to the top 20 pages of PVP leader boards. It also means that nobody made it to the top 20 leader boards on their own steam because there is no skill or any personal glory in just “following the build that everyone uses” and indicates a game with no depth. This goes for ANY class in the game. In mod 3 I made it to page 3 of the PVP leader boards with no pay to win, only purple items, 900 tenacity and no more than 4000 power on my HR by following my own build and so did a lot of other people. After mod 3 with the introduction of artefact equipment and some new standard artefacts things went south rather quickly and there was only one build thought out for each class type and shared somewhere on the web and everyone started following that like sheep “because we want to win no matter if it’s with someone else’s build”. And like I said, this is the case with all classes. In PVE you don’t have to pay to win but you still need to grind a 5hit load to get to a 26k character. Regardless of this you don’t need to compete with anyone for PVE status and it’s easy to play with any character so long as you don’t try to Tiamat with a 10k character and then also some dungeons you should really stay away from if you only have a 10k character, but, from 16k upwards the PVE world is your playground as long as you stacked the correct stats or at least the correct stats for your play style. But back to the pay to win matter, Neverwinter is free to play and you can grind for everything , that part is true, but the rate at which the new mods are released make it impossible for a normal person working 8 hours a day and then having 5 hours to play between making supper and going to bed/spending some time with wife/girlfriend to grind 8 Legendary items and this is also based on you not playing any other game than Neverwinter because that would make it less than 5 hours for Neverwinter. It’s just not possible. And like it or not the majority of gamers are exactly that “Normal People” which makes it a fact that the guys on the top of the PVP leader boards are either not working and only gaming so they have time to grind 3 times as much as we normal guys can or they pay to win. Which makes this game 33% pay to win, 33% only for people who don’t work and 33% for normal people who should rather not play it if they want to actually get anywhere in the game or else get ready to feel under-accomplished. It also makes the game 99% unfair. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the game, but the truth needs to be told and it’s for each person do decide their own choice of what they want to do with the truth. The people who argues this post are either the pay to winners wanting to protect their ego’s, the lifeless/jobless people wanting to hide their shame of not working or the normal people so in love with the game that they are blind to see it. But it’s not the GWF class, it’s all of them, they are item reliant and the game decides the items for you if you want to PVP because that is their source of income with the game being free to play and all that. At the moment the Rogues are the only ones not so heavily reliant on items but rather on stats, as the only thing they need to do to survive is stealth and run away (but hey, it’s their turn to be OP so let them have it).

/r/Neverwinter Thread