Why Smash Should Not be Nerfed

Chill out eliteduelist your precious smash spec will never be nerfed by the devs... You'll always be able to stream arena's smashing your way through the under powered classes and comps

Undying rage doesnt need removed, its easily stunned through and countered.
The smash tree talent that reduces the hp percentage needs to be thrown off a very large building tho why they buffed that i will NEVER know. Also the ridiculously low cd on rage tree with set bonus

Smash damage is fine, it's marauder survivability that is too strong relative to other melee DPS.

I strongly disagree with the suggestions to make smash less powerful as an AoE. Smash is the warrior's AoE spec and thus AoE pressure is what it should accomplish. If anything, smash is slightly too strong at single target DPS and that's where an offensive nerf should be if anywhere at all.

Marauders were initially designed without Force Camo and Obfuscate. During early closed beta, the PvP team added those two cooldowns based on a knee-jerk reaction to testers saying that the class was too easy to kill. The thing is, most of those testers were low-mid level players and marauders are late bloomers. This led to most people thinking marauders sucked soon after the game's release, when in actuality they were strong all along. I played a marauder during beta and for a year after release, and admittedly low level PvP was pretty miserable without Force Camo back then so I understood all the complaints at the time.

The point is, marauders have been defensively overpowered for such a long time now that the necessary changes to put them in the same league as all the other melee will probably never happen. Removing camo really wouldn't break the class, but it would create outrage among all the warriors who have gotten used to having 3 lives (with healers) available on a short cooldown.

It's too early to speak for 4v4 balance yet, but 1500+ 8v8 ranked games have taught me that using any other melee class in place of a 2 marauder frontline is settling for something that is beyond noticably worse in almost every way. That is the definition of a massive imbalance, but hey--at least they're fun to play.

Marauders are a guilty pleasure.

Then, why were they designed to be "late bloomers" in the first place ?

I couldn't possibly answer that. I'd imagine they weren't, and would instead chalk it up to PvP balance being very hard to achieve during the leveling process because of how rapidly the various classes evolve as they gain access to different abilities. Similar issues are present in many other classes. Snipers and Sorcs "bloom" very early, for instance.

Regardless, it really shouldn't matter. Balancing for low level PvP turned out to be a mistake that--in my opinion--was never rectified.

No, that's not what I said in my OP and that's the opposite of what I said in at least two posts in this thread alone.

There are numerous options for class balance, we don't know what the correct route is for sure. However, the hordes who claim that "nerfing smash" is the obvious solution are distracting from any discussion of the alternatives.

Also, as I mentioned in other posts in this thread, we need to address the fundamental question of the role healing should play in PVP. In PVE, healing is meant to keep the raid group from wiping. Is that the desirable outcome in PVP as well? E.g., do we, or do we not want, one team to be able to wipe the other team? As it stands now, two teams of equal ability will not die against each other.

The being healed to full isn't the issue, its the fact that a marauder can get to extremely low health and just suddenly stop taking damage for 4 seconds, while at the same time continuing to output ridiculous damage. The fact that defensive cds are being used to further a mara/sent's offensive ability rather than being used to retreat is flawed.

A healing nerf will only further amplify the issues, seeing as other players will only die faster to the smash hordes with less healing. The only answer is to bring the mara's survivability more in line with its damage output, by nerfing one or the other.... The healing issues in the game are completely irrelevant to this discussion...

That's only if you view smash spec in a vacuum. In the bigger "class balance" discussion, which I think smash is integral to, you need to discuss the effects of nerfing or buffing one class on the overall balance of the game.

Let's say we do a simple nerf of smash. In 4v4 Arenas, would you run a Commando DPS? Or a Sage DPS? Or would you continue to use the smash, or simply bring along a Guardian DPS or another Vanguard hybrid?

Don't say, "maybe a full TK sage," or something like that, because that would only prove my point that some classes or trees are utter garbage atm and nerfing smash will NOT fix that problem.

Suppose that was would be changed
....
why bring a healer instead of another smasher.?
I think I recall that healing was buffed in 2.0 partially because people complained about our friends the smash mara, farming them like pigs.
Otherwise why no nerf tanks as well, this guard and taunts are really annoying, they ruin all that beautiful damage and make healers unkillable :P

Exactly, which is why I said earlier, that the game seems to be balanced around melee (credit to this idea to Jeck). It's going to be a pain in the *** trying to figure out what kind of other balancing will be required if and when Smash is nerfed. It is not as simple as people seem to think, and it certainly deserves more attention. Simply blaming everything on smash is distracting and avoids the overall balance problems this game has.