I wouldn’t call your old build viable, given that it contributes much less to a group than a meta build will, and it seems that you are indeed concerned about making sure you’re pulling your weight. If you’re looking for good Warrior builds for instanced PvE content (and browse around if you’re looking for builds for other classes), see: http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/m/6563292/viewthread/12497977-dnt-warrior-build-9914
The reason that for every class full damage gear (Berserker’s, or for some classes like Mesmer, Assassin’s) is recommended is because if you know the encounters and can use active defense (group projectile defenses, dodging, etc.), stats like toughness and vitality are worthless. Stats like healing power, and healing in general other than your heal-slot skill, really aren’t very useful, either, since you simply cannot out heal the damage that comes in in any difficult encounter. You have to avoid the damage, not take it. So if active defenses are king, and passive defenses are not good, you might as well go full DPS. In fact, it’s better if you do, because that means things will die faster, ensuring more efficient runs, and ensuring that you have to rely on your active defenses for less overall time (after all, you don’t have infinite active defenses!).
Even if you roll a Guardian, you will still be doing a disservice to your team and yourself if you’re not wearing full damage gear (except in an extremely tiny handful of instances where a guardian can hold aggro by swapping to Knight’s armor and being able to hold aggro and block-rotate allows your group DPS to go up because no one else has to worry about extremely powerful attacks from the boss). Guardians do do a lot of support, but since passive defense really isn’t needed, there’s no reason to not to be wearing full damage gear; wearing full damage gear is another way you can help support your team. Another thing to note is, Guardians really need to know the encounter to bring support for it; they’re swapping out utility skills left and right throughout any dungeon or fractal, and in many cases retraiting between encounters (or at least, the good Guardians are).
I’m going to copy/paste a list of useful things for a group that I wrote on Reddit awhile back (was in the context of what you want to think about when building a good group):
1. Banners. You need a Warrior.
2. Swiftness. There are a lot of ways to obtain Swiftness for skips, so don’t worry about this too much.
3. Might. You want 25 stacks of might for every fight.
4. Vulnerability. You want ~25 stacks of Vulnerability at the start of every fight, and want to keep it high throughout the fight.
5. Projectile defenses. You don’t want to take damage and lose your scholar bonuses and/or have to dodge unnecessarily.
6. Stability. You don’t want to have to deal with being unable to DPS because you got CCed.
7. CC and Defiance Management. You want to be able to CC important attacks and/or disable the boss for safe DPS, and you also want to be able to strip the defiance and do it again as much as is needed.
8. Condition clears. You don’t want to be slowed during skips, or lose your scholar bonus, or get chilled in combat.
9. Aegis. You don’t necessarily need Aegis, but it sure is nice because it means you can actually avoid dodging some non-projectile attacks until the Aegis runs out, meaning you can pile on the DPS even more.
10. Blinds. If you must fight Elite or lower type mobs, you want blinds.
11. Stealth. You don’t want to have to fight anything that you don’t actually have to fight, because it wastes time and because you practically don’t get any loot for it.
12. DPS. The faster you kill things, the faster your run will be, and it’ll also probably be cleaner beause there’s less time for things to go wrong (and your active defenses won’t be depleted).
As I pointed out in the Reddit post, you don’t need everything in that list. But the more of it you have, the smoother and faster your runs will be.
As a Warrior, you’d provide numbers 12 (everyone in every group needs to provide number 12), 7 (with Mace #5), 4 (with Axe 2, Mace 4, and incidentally through other attacks), 3 (in the case your group really lacks might and you swap to a PS build, and also by helping to blast fire fields with banners and possibly warhorn 5 before fights), 2 (you can put on Warhorn during skips, and swap off when it’s time to fight again, so you can give some swiftness, and also blast fields with #5 to help stealth or stack might), and 1 (Banner of Discipline and Banner of Strength, a fantastic DPS boost!).
