Guild Wars 2

Is it viable to bring Berserker’s gear into WvW? I’d probably roam a little but mostly stick to zergs.

The build I’m thinking of running would still give me 3K armor and 20K health, so I’m hoping I wouldn’t be downed easily.

Mentioned build: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vIAQJARTjMdUGaXIOewJiAAp4rsMKMCIli5sLV4MA-zkxAYrholALiGbZrIasqFMVJRUt3oIa1CCQWA-w

I periodically run a full GC Staff ele in zergs and it’s incredibly powerful and effective. Just be very, very, very, very careful to stay with the group and on the tag and not to be caught lingering behind even a little bit or an opportunistic Thief (or something else) will flatline you.

Full zerker armor is always viable just usually not efficient either in zerg, skirmish or roaming. I certainly don’t want any friendly that brittle anywhere near me in WvW.

Rising Dusk.2408:

I periodically run a full GC Staff ele in zergs and it’s incredibly powerful and effective. Just be very, very, very, very careful to stay with the group and on the tag and not to be caught lingering behind even a little bit or an opportunistic Thief (or something else) will flatline you.

That’s what I’m worried about. So, I’m not even going to attempt full zerk gear.

Would the extra toughness from Knight’s armor keep me safe? This build has 3K armor, the full knight’s gear build I was running before this only had 800 more than that with 3K more health. I thought the extra damage was a really good trade-off.

On a warrior you shouldn’t be running anything other than zerker to be honest. The reason is what you see in that build. You can get the armor softcap (2700) or more just from traits, runes, and dolyak signet. This lets you go full on zerker on everything else and get incredibly strong damage output.

That build? Could use some work. Doesn’t matter, you’re a warrior. You’re overpowered.

Other classes: You can run zerker but you’ll end up squishy.

Elementalist: For my ele, I’m going to be squishy no matter how I gear out. It takes effort to get to 3k armor on an ele. I’m better off in zerk gear to do aoe pressure off my staff while using cantrips and the water magic line for defenses. You can synergize your cantrips so that they remove a condition and grant regen/vigor.

Guardian: My guardian was a tough sell on zerker because I couldn’t get my precision high enough to actually do dps with. I had to roll into assassin gear instead. Celestial is currently the best loadout for a guardian though.

Necromancer: My necro seems a little too squishy in zerker gear. I hear some snickering in the back. I actually loaded out my necro in full knights and had good precision and damage while having near 2900 armor.

Other than GWEN classes: I’m not going to talk too much on all those classes.

Zerker notes: You need to play at a much higher state of awareness if you plan to roll in zerker gear. No more will you just kitten in the zerg with the rest of them. Your awareness is the defense you traded for built-in passive defenses. Watch enemy movements, learn how they train, where they put damage. Learn to dodge it while hitting the back of their movement. Their tail is the weakest spot. Savor your utilities, opting to almost never pop dolyak signet. Learning to do these things will make you more effective in zerker gear than you ever were in PVT gear.

As a Warrior my guild and I have found running zerker is a very fun and relatively easy thing to do in WvW. It can get dicey in zergs unless you are running with a pretty good group and is good at water fields and movement, but is still pretty easy as long as you keep moving in a pug zerg. If you want to use the build you posted there are only a couple suggestions I would make to help you out, get rid of Restorative Strength since you do not EVER want to actually use Healing sig and replace it with either Great Fortitude or Short Temper. Another thing is you almost need Dogged March in the defense line in WvW helps tremendously.

This is the build I have been using for months now and it will almost always win in a 1v1 and 2v1s. WvW Zerk War

In this you can switch out GS for any weapon you want, but I like to run GS because with leg specialist you can hit someone with bladetrail and spike them with hundred blades pretty well if you position it right. Eviscerate on axe will end fights and it is very easy to set up with throw axe or shield bash. When in a zerg v zerg fight it is needed to keep moving at all times and Whirlwind Attack is a lifesaver.

Edit: I also agree 100% with lioka qiao that the backline of an enemy zerg is where you want to sit and attack, any zerker eles are literally 1 hit with eviscerate and other will go down with 3-4 auto attacks into eviscerate. Warrior is supremely OP.

lioka qiao.8734:

That build? Could use some work. Doesn’t matter, you’re a warrior. You’re overpowered.

Any ideas on improvements?

sirflamesword.3896:

As a Warrior my guild and I have found running zerker is a very fun and relatively easy thing to do in WvW. It can get dicey in zergs unless you are running with a pretty good group and is good at water fields and movement, but is still pretty easy as long as you keep moving in a pug zerg. If you want to use the build you posted there are only a couple suggestions I would make to help you out, get rid of Restorative Strength since you do not EVER want to actually use Healing sig and replace it with either Great Fortitude or Short Temper. Another thing is you almost need Dogged March in the defense line in WvW helps tremendously.

This is the build I have been using for months now and it will almost always win in a 1v1 and 2v1s. WvW Zerk War

In this you can switch out GS for any weapon you want, but I like to run GS because with leg specialist you can hit someone with bladetrail and spike them with hundred blades pretty well if you position it right. Eviscerate on axe will end fights and it is very easy to set up with throw axe or shield bash. When in a zerg v zerg fight it is needed to keep moving at all times and Whirlwind Attack is a lifesaver.

Fixed: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vIAQJARTjMdUGaXIOewJiABpQD/CjijAIUKmD7IV4MA-zkxAYrholALiGbZrIasqFMVJRUt3oIa1CCQWA-w

lioka qiao.8734:

You can get the armor softcap (2700).

Armor does not have diminishing returns if that’s what you’re saying.

wwfam.2495:

lioka qiao.8734:

You can get the armor softcap (2700).

Armor does not have diminishing returns if that’s what you’re saying.

Agreed there is no “soft cap” on armor. It is a divisor and a direct counter to power. Healing scales better with armor than vitality so play styles that put players into direct contact with a lot of direct damage should stack toughness. Most melee builds running less than 3k in a group setting in the current AoE meta is likely a rallybot.

2700 armor is asking for BIG crit shots as well. Warriors have big windups, eat a lot of damage to output theirs and have excellent passive healing. This makes them prime candidates for stacking toughness.

Straegen.2938:

wwfam.2495:

lioka qiao.8734:

You can get the armor softcap (2700).

Armor does not have diminishing returns if that’s what you’re saying.

Agreed there is no “soft cap” on armor. It is a divisor and a direct counter to power. Healing scales better with armor than vitality so play styles that put players into direct contact with a lot of direct damage should stack toughness. Most melee builds running less than 3k in a group setting in the current AoE meta is likely a rallybot.

2700 armor is asking for BIG crit shots as well. Warriors have big windups, eat a lot of damage to output theirs and have excellent passive healing. This makes them prime candidates for stacking toughness.

Am I close to being a rally bot?

If you can learn to stay alive, very effective.

Forget the 20K health and 3K armor, go big or go home… less than 15K hp and 1200 armor is where it’s at lol.

Glass cannons don’t make the best rally bots because we go down in 1-3 hits anyway. If people rally off you, it will only be 1 person, maybe 2 max. Now take the those PVT people.. the ones that can take countless hits; well those are the people that can rally a huge number of people when they die, due to everyone and their dog hitting them.

Glass cannon dropping a meteor shower on a zerg pretty much ensures that you will rally (maybe multiple times) during the fight lol.

Oh and using Restorative Strength with Healing Signet is a waste. Activating that signet reduces healing output… with some rare exceptions a player should never activate that signet.

Straegen.2938:

Oh and using Restorative Strength with Healing Signet is a giant waste. Activating that signet reduces healing output… with some rare exceptions a player should never activate that signet.

That issue was fixed due to a previous reply.

Zerker warrior is still stupidly hard to kill if traited and played correctly.

However, Strength is a really dodgy trait line to go with. Restorative Strength makes no sense at all with healing signet, since you almost never use the active. You are probably better off adding to your Defense or Discipline line, you need to have much more condition removal than you do now and Cleansing Ire is a good place to start.

InfernoHero.5687:

Am I close to being a rally bot?

If your plan is to stay in bow during large scale encounters you are fine. If that is the case you may be in better shape with Sword/Warhorn offhand or Sword/Shield. It is unconventional but effective for in fight mobility. If you are roaming, drop the bow and get a LOT more condi cleanse.

In its current form, the build cannot effectively stand in the middle of AoE. Condi builds will rip it up without support. If a decent thief gets on you, your invuln and GS mobility is the only thing that will save you.

Straegen.2938:

InfernoHero.5687:

Am I close to being a rally bot?

If your plan is to stay in bow during large scale encounters you are fine. If that is the case you may be in better shape with Sword/Warhorn offhand or Sword/Shield. It is unconventional but effective for in fight mobility. If you are roaming, drop the bow and get a LOT more condi cleanse.

In its current form, the build cannot effectively stand in the middle of AoE. Condi builds will rip it up without support. If a decent thief gets on you, your invuln and GS mobility is the only thing that will save you.

I already stay in Longbow while I’m in a zerg. (With the exception of Edge of the Mists Champs.)

I have no issue with that. Now, I’ve never actually tried roaming. Is it profitable? If so, I’ll change my build to something like this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vIAQJARTjMdUGaXIOewJaAB9QD/iqQpYOsjkizYAB-zkxAYrholALiGbZrIasqFMVJRUt3oIa1CCQWA-w

The armor softcap is imo a fairly arbitrary number.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage
That page describes how damage works. Basically the armor is a denominator in a multiplication operation. This makes increases in the armor value diminish over time as the numerator stays the same for damage taken. If you want to see how it works on a graph…
https://www.google.com/search?q=y+%3D+3000%2Fx&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=sb#channel=sb&q=y+%3D3000%2F%282000%2B+x%29&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

That equation assumes a player with a base of 2000 armor vs an attacker where power, coefficent and weapon damage come out to be 3000. It’s a rational function and you can clearly see how increasing armor diminishes return on the damage taken reduction. What the soft cap ignores is what happens when you apply it to a health pool. Run the equation below through google…
y =30000/ (3000/(2000+ x))

You’ll see as the calculation is applied to a health pool that the number of hits it takes for a kill increases linearly. This is why my opinion is that the soft cap is arbitrary. In some cases of sPVP it doesn’t even matter if I had 3700 armor I was still 3-4 shot by a thief.

For the warrior build:
If you’re trying to avoid making a hammer warrior out of spite for the metagame don’t. Learn to embrace the power until ANET nerfs it into oblivion. Here we go.

Start off by taking at least 20 in Defense for Dogged March and Cleansing Ire. Cleansing Ire is one thing that ANET needs to target for a nerf. The reason is what it does. When you take damage you get adrenaline. When you get full adrenaline you power the Adrenal Health skill. That right there gives you passive 400 healing. If you burst you cleanse 3 conditions. That part isn’t particularly important, just the adrenaline part. When you dive into a zerg you’ll fill up adrenaline within 3-4 seconds. This allows you to hammer burst more.

Dogged march is part of the warrior mobility. When you combine it with Melandru runes and Condition duration reduction food (lemongrass ) you’ll have immunity to the conditions listed in Dogged march. This also gives you some regen for more passive healing. The regen has no internal cooldown so you’re permanently buffed with it so long as you occasionally get hit with a snare condition.

If you’re going to take a hammer (and you should), then put 10 more points in defense for Merciless Hammer, otherwise put the 10 in for Defy Pain. This gives you the trait armor necessary to hit that soft cap.

The next part is Dolyak Signet. Put it on your bar if you didn’t already. This signet buffs your armor instead of a direct damage decrease like the guardian one. Finally put Healing Signet on your bar if it isn’t already there. You’ll almost never activate it since you’ll have a permanent 1000 healing per second from the traits combined with the signet’s passive effect.

That’s all I need to tweak for your warrior. Put the rest of the points wherever you want. (I’ll suggest some spots in the post following this one)

InfernoHero.5687:

I have no issue with that. Now, I’ve never actually tried roaming. Is it profitable? If do, I’ll change my build to something like this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vIAQJARTjMdUGaXIOewJaAB9QD/iqQpYOsjkizYAB-zkxAYrholALiGbZrIasqFMVJRUt3oIa1CCQWA-w

Roamers who want to fight are probably the slowest of money makers. Doing PvCamp can actually be relatively efficient but boring.

I threw this together so you will have to see how it plays. The Warhorn is probably better for group play but the shield can save your bacon. I wouldn’t use the GS in this build. Bull’s Charge should be used purely for defense to get space between you and whatever is after you. Switch to your melee weapons for mobility and escape only.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vIAQNAseTjMd04ZXImdwJaAB9QDritQpYOqjkizwMA-zUyAYLioRyCE9BgABmALiGbZrIasqFMVJRUt3oIa1ECQ2YA-w

Zerker is viable if you have the skills for it. Most GvG or fight oriented guilds run mixed or full zerker in their power builds.

Just be aware though, that if you’re not careful, you’ll get dropped by thieves, necros, eles, mesmers or even rangers if you don’t have good awareness.

Warrior trait suggestions:
— Traits for helping your zerg —
20 points into Tactics for Leg Specialist and Empower Allies.
Empower Allies is what I’m after here. You already have fairly insane power since you stacked all zerker gear. EA gives you more power for you and your allies and is equivalent of putting 15 points into Strength. Leg Specialist has more use than the other traits in the first tier of Tactics. It lets you catch someone with your hammer shockwave or 1h sword skills. If you’re heavily shout slotted you may want to have the shout cooldown trait.

20 points into Discipline.
You’re here for the critical damage buff from the trait line. There are some traits to like here too. The fast hands trait is really powerful on a warrior. You’ll want signet mastery if you use Signet of Rage as your elite for more uptime on it.
— Traits for personal damage output —
This can go one of two ways:
30 into Discipline or 30 into strength. Both are for the Grandmaster trait that increases damage when you have adrenaline built. The Discipline one will result in stronger crits, the power one in more overall damage. IMO the crit damage one is better.

If you picked 30 strength: Trait 11, then pick the other traits to match your style. If you picked 30 Discipline: trait 12, then match your style.

If you picked 30 strength: the last are 10 discipline for the signet mastery and some extra crit damage.
If you picked 30 discipline, the last 10 are strength for the extra power. Pick any trait.

— Utilities to slot —
Pick up Dolyak Signet definitely. For the other slots.
Berserker stance: This stance is like stability for conditions. It prevents them. Useful for charging a choke along with Balanced Stance.
Balanced Stance: A useful stability on a short cooldown. You won’t have to pop dolyak signet. Is a stun breaker.
Fear Me: A strong CC.
Shake it Off: A fast recharging aoe condition removal. Also stun breaks.
For Great Justice: This goes a long way to sustaining fury on yourself and buffing your team.

— On Banner Elite —
The banner elite sacrifices your DPS for the ability to rez your teammates from downed. It also rezzes claimer NPCs (you know that by now). It makes you sacrifice DPS though since you no longer get the 5 stacks of might and fury. If you take the banner switch signet mastery out for run speed with melee weapons. You’ll thank me for that one when you have to chase your commander across a map.

it largely depends how skilled you are as a player… are you the sort of person who can avoid being a rally bot or are you the kind of person who likes to charge into the action?

As a rule, it is usually best to use high damage armor for solo/small group roaming – capping camps, 1v1, small skirmishes, taking out dolly etc. And to use something with a bit more toughness for zerg fighting.

lioka qiao.8734:

The armor softcap is imo a fairly arbitrary number.

There is no soft cap on armor for a variety of reasons.

• Toughness effectively scales healing. Healing for 500 with 3k toughness is roughly 10% more effective than 2.7k toughness.

• Lets say an attack lands for 5k on a player with 2700 toughness. That same attack would land for 4.5k with 3000 toughness. Going up another 300 is still a linear progression from zero just not from the 3000 mark. A player would end up taking 4.09k with 3300 toughness. For their to be a soft cap, the reductions would have to trail off significantly which they do not in this system.

• Toughness has the same linear impact on crits. A 3k hit on 2700 with a double crit magnitude is 6k. With 3000 toughness the player ends up taking 5.4k. 3300 toughness ends up being 4.9k.

The real argument against toughness is not that it becomes more difficult to scale. The argument comes in that it cannot reduce condition damage which can often be 70% or more of the damage a player gets in a fight. The other argument is on heavy crit damage builds where power scales nearly twice as effectively.

Well there’s basically full zerker, head + chest + legs knight + everything else zerker, or head + chest + legs + weapons knight + everything else zerker. Why use some pieces of knight’s? Crit damage is not statistically efficient on those pieces, but the trade-off with knight’s is that it’s primary toughness, so your effective power goes down a little more than just losing the crit damage.

As for the efficacy of power builds, they are a big part of the roaming meta and more organized zerg balls. You basically have to run a full, or almost full power build or a gimmicky condi bunker build. A balanced build won’t have enough defense to survive power builds, or enough sustain to outlast a bunker. I am painting with a broad brush here, but you hopefully get the idea.

Power builds can be defensive though, just not all the time. Warriors for instance have stances to protect against damage and condi burst, thieves and mesmers have stealth, guardians have invulnerability and high boon uptime, etc. Every class has stun breaking skills and dodging. You very often see thieves and GS warriors getting away (literally) with power builds too because they have the highest mobility, and thieves have the ultimate get out of jail free card with shadow refuge.

Roaming is not very rewarding in a monetary sense, but you can do as you please. Flipping camps and killing sentries / yaks gives a small amount of silver and reward chest from WXP ranks, and you can shamelessly gather all the whatever valuable ore and wood is on the map since WvW has high node concentration. This is basically a more dangerous PvE mode. You’ll see less player battles doing this than hanging out in the gank areas or specifically looking for players, but you can always mix it up some.

Full zerker is viable in some cases.

A Thief or Mesmer can get away with it because of how evasive they are. Being squishy means little when you drop someone in a second and remain invisible most of the time.

It also works really well on a Warrior. Who gets a lot of free toughness and vitality. That even in full zerker you’ll beat most other players in both health and armor that you get for simply clicking Warrior when you created your character.

I hate to break it to some people, but unless you are running condi bunker, most roamers are near-to full zerker…

There are some variations, like PVT armor -zerk trinks…

If you’re roaming zerk is fine. The faster you can flip a camp or end a fight the better because at any moment a zerg could roll you.
As for travelling with a zerg, I would very much recommend against going full zerk. If you’re well practiced with dodging and condition removal, it can be viable but is still risky. I prefer to either carry two sets on me, one for roaming one for zerging, or to have a set that’s a happy medium. Since I main a Necro, it’s easier for me to have high offence with a good deal of defense as well.

Yep, just need skill. There are lots of ways to avoid damage all together you just need to learn to use them.

King Amadaeus.8619:

I hate to break it to some people, but unless you are running condi bunker, most roamers are near-to full zerker…

There are some variations, like PVT armor -zerk trinks…

Most roamers are not full zerk in my experience. I won’t argue that most use zerk somewhere in their mix (I do on all mine) but I offset that offense with a little defense either with Knights, Soldiers or the like. Pure zerk is just too squishy to handle most out numbered fights. The heavy AoE and condition builds running in roaming pretty much require some type of mitigation.

Now in skirmish, zerk is not only possible but often preferred since a team can offset the full zerk builds with support builds.