Guild Wars 2

While Banners have been an important part of the PvE Dungeon for ages, they’ve only seen real use in PvP for a very short duration (and it wasn’t as effective as some made it out to be). Now, for whatever reason Banners were nerfed in the same patch as Shouts, greatly reducing Warrior’s ability to give support. The ability to offer support, and baseline Fast Hands, is keeping Warrior from seeing any sort of serious use at the moment.

Even builds such as MediGuard and Trap Ranger bring some sort of team support whether it’s AoE Aegis or faster revive speed with a bit of AoE healing. While you could still run Settler’s Shouts, there’s no way for Warrior to provide a bit of support without going totally into a nerfed part of their class. Banners being in Discipline could bring a way for Warriors to bring a bit of…Inspiration to their team.

Proposal: Changing Inspiring Banners so that it can effectively be moved around the battlefield and actually have its attack skills be used.

Changes: Move Inspiring Banners from Master to Grandmaster and replace it with Merciless Hammer (which will help other builds as well). Bring back the old CD reduction. While the trait is slotted you carry your first Banner around with you on your back. Carrying a banner replaces its Utility skill with a “Swap to Banner” button kind of like Engineer kits. Summoning another Banner works as it currently does, picking up a second Banner puts that one on your back and you drop the first one.

Details: Now, the biggest problem with my proposal will be adding carrying animations for every class and every gender. I’m sure clipping will be annoying to deal with, but personally I think the function is more important than the aesthetics in this case. I personally wouldn’t even care if they just made it hover behind you with Asuran tech or something like that.

The most interesting aspect to this change would be the ability to swap to the banner on the fly. The Banner skills aren’t amazing but they would still be worth using once and a while (making skill 5 just a blast finisher would make it pretty great). The greater mobility of the Banner in general would make Warrior able to offer some support in team fights without having to go totally down the Shouts route.

I’d like to stop being selfish and actually support my team when I play Warrior, but I don’t want to hit like a wet noodle while doing it. Oh, and can we get a look at the Tactics minor traits…they are terrible.

Brawlers + Merciless Hammer is soooo nice tho.

choovanski.5462:

Brawlers + Merciless Hammer is soooo nice tho.

It’s all about meaningful choices. Being able to have Burt Mastery + Merciless Hammer + Cleansing Ire should more than make up for it. Full bars Combustive Shot + 1-2 Bar Earthshaker = 4-5 condis on not that long of CD. Right now if you try to do it your Hammer doesn’t hit that hard cause you can’t have all 3 traits.

@OP:

The banner trait should be left where it is, but buffed. Before the balance patch, there used to be a banner cooldown trait. That is no longer available. That banner cooldown should be added to the current trait.

tbh Banner trait placement makes no sense. why discipline? maybe its just me but I thought support traits warriors have were mostly in Tactics.
the trait also got gutted for no reason with the removal of the increased radius and cooldown reduction.

you have to agree with the OP regarding how trivial the support warriors give out at the moment.

Well either way you slice it, something (a buff) needs to happen with banners.
Maybe on the Trait, maybe something baseline for all banners, maybe both.