Guild Wars 2

Hi. Just reached lvl 80 with my Asuran warrior. I have a complete set of Knight’s Draconian Armor. I need to decide what to use rune wise. I do much of my fighting with a rifle (or Long bow if I need AoE), and wade in with sword/warhorn mostly (with a tad bit of hammer/great sword/dual axes at times). I was looking at Superior runes of Divinity (ouch expensive) and Superior runes of the Soldier. It will be a full set of six. Thoughts on these or another direction?

Hi

First of all gratz on getting level 80. you got the world ready to start playing endgame.
I’m not going to say directly you are wrong. I actually understand why you are thinking bout knights in combination with divinity or soldier.

I would suggest to rethink your role and start doing some dungeons (easy paths, only join groups that ask for level 60+, do not join only level 80 adverts)

The reason is that you are miles off from what is considered meta. specially if your goal is PvE. I could tell you what the meta would be, but I think you used simular stats all the way through your leveling process and haven’t really learned some basics off the game.

So the answer is Beserker (for PvE). power – precission – critical damage.
This will mean you hit hard, with a high change of hitting harder, and if you hit harder you will hit a lot harder. You are a DPS machine and that is the core quality for warriors in this game.

This game is designed to not have tanks. survivabillity do not come from armor stats (specially not on a warrior). it comes first off all from player skill (keep mobile and keep avoiding enemy damage) and secondly from you traits and skills (but not the stats the traits deliver, just the effects).

tl:dr: for this setup choose rune of divinity, but please consider a different direction. please do read all I said

What mercury says is correct, to some extent. The “meta” in GW2 is heavily skewed towards damage, damage and more damage. (I feel this is a flaw, but that’s the way the game’s evolved due to the rules put in place.) There’s nothing wrong with playing a tanky character, but there’s also no need to go FULL tank defensive as normal enemies won’t be able to hurt you much anyway, and powerful bosses have one-shot attacks that will probably down you no matter how tanky you are.

Instead, what you want to do is to build yourself so you’re sturdy (since obviously that’s what you like to play), but still able to deal decent damage. Having a set of Knight’s armor is fine, but consider padding it out with more offensive trinkets, weapons and runes. (The most popular offensive rune are Superior Runes of the Scholar, but they’re pricey. If you’re after cheaper substitutes, Sup Runes of Strength or Sup Runes of Hoelbrak can also serve well in most scenarios.)

Finally, with regards to dungeons, there are a subset of players who do what are called “speed clears”. These are specific team builds designed to complete dungeons as fast as possible for farming purposes, and as a Warrior, you’ll be expected to go full-on glass cannon for these runs. If you want to join one of these teams, then yes, consider building a Berserker armor set specifically for this purpose. Otherwise, your standard gear should serve you fine in normal dungeon runs.

Whilst still getting used to the game I’d recommend investing in Orbs rather than Runes. Over-all the Orbs tend to be cheaper than runes and add a decent amount of stats, where-as Runes are often picked on a certain effect they have which fits the traits you run, like Soldier’s 6th buff will go to waste if you don’t run shouts (and even then a single condition seems a bit mediocre to me.)

I’d recommend either Beryl Orb (Power, Vitality, Critical damage) or Ruby Orb (Power, Percision, Critical damage) since Knights lacks Critical Damage, which makes the percision you’re stacking less useful. Once you got a feel of endgame you can always override them with a rune fitting your playstyle.