Guild Wars 2

I’m tired of meeting shout Warriors thinking they are Guardians with 100B.
This trend reminds me a lot of GW1 Wammo.

The shout healing build:
- Is not a “survivability” build. Healing is the worst form of survivability, especially when in such low amounts. This is a support build to heal and buff your team, period.
- It does not make you a “tank”. Most stuff at 80 will hit you for as much as a shout can heal, anything non-trash will hit you for 10 shouts worth of heals. Tanking means preventing damage, aka Aegis/Blind/Evade/Protection which Warriors completely lack.
- It does not make you a “paladin”. Absurd at the very least.

A Warrior is meant to deal high damage while surviving enough to get out of trouble, it isn’t a tanky class by any means.
If you think so you’re not 80 or you haven’t tried any semi-serious content.

So here is the deal, Warriors should stop this trend on mocking the Greatsword builds (which is your best DPS/burst) and running around with full defense setups.
You don’t have to worry about your survivability, others will buff/heal/protect you.
Warriors need to deal damage.

The best way a Warrior has to stay alive is Endure Pain and Defy Pain, not heals.
Because preventing dozens thousands of damage while dealing tremendous DPS is the role of the Warrior, not trying to be a GW1 Wammo.

If you spec into shout heals you’re a great support character but don’t remotely believe that makes you able to tank anything.

Thank you.

Huh? I go into WvW specced into shout heals, and I tank a lot. I’m in the front lines swinging my axe and blowing my warhorn.
I actually dont use Endure pain anymore, because you can still take a lot of damage with it. It also has a 90 second recharge. 90! thats forever in a battle, I’d rather have a 2k heal every 25 seconds that buffs allies.

mrperea.9580:

Huh? I go into WvW specced into shout heals, and I tank a lot. I’m in the front lines swinging my axe and blowing my warhorn.
I actually dont use Endure pain anymore, because you can still take a lot of damage with it. It also has a 90 second recharge. 90! thats forever in a battle, I’d rather have a 2k heal every 25 seconds that buffs allies.

Sorry I should have stated I’m talking about PvE here.
In WvW it’s ok as you buff all allies, but I really don’t want to hear a Warrior saying he can tank dungeons with shouts. Please.

Red Falcon.8257:

mrperea.9580:

Huh? I go into WvW specced into shout heals, and I tank a lot. I’m in the front lines swinging my axe and blowing my warhorn.
I actually dont use Endure pain anymore, because you can still take a lot of damage with it. It also has a 90 second recharge. 90! thats forever in a battle, I’d rather have a 2k heal every 25 seconds that buffs allies.

Sorry I should have stated I’m talking about PvE here.
In WvW it’s ok as you buff all allies, but I really don’t want to hear a Warrior saying he can tank dungeons with shouts. Please.

Who exactly is saying they are tanking with a shout setup? It’s a support setup and a kitten good one at that. But it is not a tank setup, as there are no real tank setups. Not even guardians can pull it off.

But the shout warrior build by default IS above average in terms of tanking ability due to warriors naturally high armor, health, and having nice healing you can take a bit of abuse. And if you want to you can take a Mace/shield for blocks and interrupts and a longbow for kiting and the AoE blind. All which go a long way for “tanking”.

I don’t know everyone elses experiences but when I do explorable dungeons with my friends I always end up getting like 9 out of 10 mobs sticking to me for forever. Which means I end up longbow kiting most of the time (which is a great weapon for it as you can fire the burst and 3 skill behind you). Something is really whack with the threat system in game, I remember ANet talking about it ages ago before the betas saying how mobs tend to prioritize lower level players, players with lower armor, and lower health to discourage tanking. Yet I am in lvl exotics and have like 22k HP and 1600 toughness and 9 out of 10 mobs will stick to me forever. I have even been killed by a dungeon boss that had been sticking to me for 7 minutes straight. I then way pointed and ran back and he started attacking me again.

So I end up getting stuck in a “tanking” roll whether I want to or not.

All my shouts and warhorn skills tend to draw lots of agro I’ve noticed. I can “tank” well enough for a while if I keep running and avoiding. DPS Greatsword builds bring nothing to parties – everybody in this game can do DPS, some can even do it while contributing more to their party than getting other people killed because they tried to rez your paper cannon kitten

I’m not a Wammo, I’m a Paragon!

God beware warriors running utility skills. All MUST DPS. Thanks OP, for your intelligent opinion.

On a less sarcastic note: don’t listen to OP, do what works the best for you. He has obviously no idea.

Got to agree with the Op on this one. Tanking in PVE (which means dungeons) is infeasible for warrior, as for all classes. We don’t have neither tank nor heal, and even if I would have preferred them to still be there, it’s finally a minor change.
Healing is replaced by Support.
And Tank by Guardian (no seriously, they got the highest survivability, if anyone wants to tank in dungeon, even if it’s really hard, and without real sense, can try as guardian, but not warrior).

Although, that doesn’t apply on WvW

Without aggro management skills there is no ‘tanking’

Aside from that, i run control utilities (kick, bulls charge, stomp) and mace- board /longbow and i tank like a boss, in a rotation of ym control i can land a 2 second stun on a boss, and on non-defiant enemies (like very heavy hitting adds, gravling scavengers come to mind with their stunlock) i can keep them held down and useless for an entire battle if need be. Then think of boss fights without defiance, like the Lovers, i feel like an absolute war machine when i render an entire boss mob useless while the rest can deal with the other one.

Although saying that, there is room for controlers (me) support (heal shouts) and hard up DPS (4 signet greatswords) in every group, but having 5 of one kind will lead to failure usually due to lacking an important detail elsewhere.

And as i learned from WoW AND GW2, people love big numbers, that means the majority of people spec damage. That is why people slate damage specs, because if everyone goes damage your team is going to die.

I use a Hammer and a Mace/Axe, specced with healing shouts. With my stuns, extra toughness and vitality. I’m pretty tough to kill. I do good damage and give great support in dungeons. I know I’m not a tank but I can take alot more than most people

PanH.1957:

Got to agree with the Op on this one. Tanking in PVE (which means dungeons) is infeasible for warrior, as for all classes. We don’t have neither tank nor heal, and even if I would have preferred them to still be there, it’s finally a minor change.
Healing is replaced by Support.
And Tank by Guardian (no seriously, they got the highest survivability, if anyone wants to tank in dungeon, even if it’s really hard, and without real sense, can try as guardian, but not warrior).

Although, that doesn’t apply on WvW

Yeah.
My point is that recovering 6k health every 20s does nothing to your survivability in any serious content.
In average situations you won’t need it, in bad situations it will not be enough.
Double EP aka 12s invul is the survivability spec.

There is a reason they put double EP in defense and healing shouts in the support tree.

And when EP is on cd, you’re eating dirt with your build?

Most of the boss fights in this game are not DPS races, but endurance tests. Can you survive long enough between your primary heal cooldowns? If so, you can beat the boss no matter what, even if it takes awhile. I’ve been able to basically solo bosses because of this, or at least hold out indefinitely if my party has wipes and has to do a graveyard run. The extra heal is significant, if your running with alot of toughness, that heal becomes more and more worthwhile. Sure if your a squishy cloth mage your gonna get chunked in a few hits, and that 1.5k shout heal doesn’t feel like much, but if you have high toughness, and proactively dodge, the heals can be enough to pull you through between mending casts, at which point your unkillable.

@ Recently : That’s what we said. The more important if you wanna survive is toughness and dodging. You can’t tank the boss, you can kite it, you can mitigate damage, and you can heal for what he’s done to you. But not as much as people are saying, when they talk about tanking bosses or whatever.

I got kicked from a group for not tanking =P

My spec is hard to kill but i admit no-one can tank, im chasing the old soft trinity dream of controling my opponent so they can’t hurt me rather then sponging the damage, but obviously this is not THAT effective against bosses, but the defiance stripping makes attack interruption a lot more possible which can save the lives of those with low endurance bars or those who simply were not on the ball.

Might consider something else, like offhand being axe/mace so i can rotate for even more CC and damage, however the longbow 3 second immobolize is really handy for keeping a target away from squishies and the damage on the longbow is nothing to scoff at, its kind of like the weapon for people not designed around damage dealing, with its burns, combo fields and blast finishers, and all the AoE attacks are amazing for adrenaline gain in mob packs.

You’ll be lucky to get 3 seconds of invulnerability from EP. That tooltip is wrong, I swear.

So I take it you dislike Yojack’s Build because it chooses to be a little more support than your ideals of what a Warrior should be?

Can heal just fine so long as you have + healing gear to match the build. The shouts heal over 2k a pop, use a 30% to heal teammates offhand, etc etc.

It’s ghetto, but works.

I use shouts that heal + have 3 regens (1 from dolyak, 1 from traits and another from signet) + have plenty of toughness…while I agree that you cant tank in this game you are more “tankish” and able to take more damage than other builds. Saying that it’s worthless for dungeons or whatever is plain wrong. With shouts I not only heal myself and buff myself but do so to party members around me as well and it’s funny when I survive longer than other warriors and some guardians (in their case they probably weren’t playing their profession accurately), and I’m not even using mace/shield which would further increase my survival, I went with axe/axe because I deal a good amount of damage with them (and I love the axe/axe skill set )

I’ve been playing a shouts warrior with a hammer mace/shield in PvE and it was the best decision I’ve ever made. I could actually tank bosses all by myself while the other 4 members wiped and were running back. When I say tank bosses I don’t mean actually take every hit, I would obviously dodge, block and so forth and not all the bosses, but still, I could take a lot of hits if I played it right.

As a shouts warrior I was also able to keep dumb party members alive by healing them when they didn’t dodge an important attack or simply revive them much faster when they were downed.

Playing a shouts warrior properly legit reduced the number of my wipes to 0. I didn’t play a + healing shouts warrior either, all knights gear (toughness, power, precision) so my damage was still up there.

I can’t stress out of my personal experience how important it is for every party member to bring something to the team. It makes a huuuge difference.

You are giving your party members a second heal. Most professions have a 20-30 seconds CD heal that heals them for 4-6k. You give them another heal pretty much with your shouts. If that alone, excluding the buffs is not worth it, then you’re doing your math wrong. You also remove conditions, you res people faster, buff people for extra damage, something like 15-20% with “On My Mark” + “For Great Justice”… just a lot of advantages overall

If you want to have a great experience in PvE as a warrior I highly suggest a toughness gear composition with 0/0/30/30/10 (the 10 points in Discipline so shouts give you adrenaline). You want to use your mace/hammer for stuns to reduce the damage people are taking but then you also want to get your adrenaline back as fast as possible so you can get your passive heal. Use the signet heal too for PvE.

Btw, Endure Pain doesn’t work on many bosses, especially the ones that 1 shot you.

Im running the min/max build with sword/warhorn and rifle in my setup.
Im using shouts to heal and the horn to help the group with speed and the weakness on the mobs which make them hit much less.

I got full exotics and my damage is more than good with my bleeds ticking for 130 per tick and slashing 800/800/2k.

I got kicked out of a group today by a 5 signet warrior because he thought I was a noob with a “Sword/horn” as my mainsetup.
I confronted him and told him that I was much more useful for the group than him, with my reasons “I support my group, you don’t.” and “A dead man doesnt do anything useful in a group” and then I got kicked right afterwards.

I think this is just silly. Well, anyways. This is my first time getting kicked out, and I’ve hard to believe I meet someone more ignorant and goodthinking about himself than that guy. So bad luck I guess..

Edit: Not to mention 100% endurance regen which the horn gives.

Yojack’s “min/max” (dumbest name ever since there is no comparisons or damage meters) is a fairly poor output pve build. Sword is lower base damage as it relies on condition damage to beef it up, has no vulnerability, no weakness, and if someone else in group is also condition damage it still only allows a single stack up to a certain value .

I would question anyone trying to main a war horn in group dungeon play because the damage sucks and the war horn abilities don’t do much for pve ( consider your 2,3,4,5 abilities all offer little value in a dungeon where you need damage)

That being said, you’d probably do significantly more damage standing back and using your rifle… and stay safer while doing it.

stefanplc.5234:

You are giving your party members a second heal. Most professions have a 20-30 seconds CD heal that heals them for 4-6k. You give them another heal pretty much with your shouts. If that alone, excluding the buffs is not worth it, then you’re doing your math wrong. You also remove conditions, you res people faster, buff people for extra damage, something like 15-20% with “On My Mark” + “For Great Justice”… just a lot of advantages overall

If you want to have a great experience in PvE as a warrior I highly suggest a toughness gear composition with 0/0/30/30/10 (the 10 points in Discipline so shouts give you adrenaline). You want to use your mace/hammer for stuns to reduce the damage people are taking but then you also want to get your adrenaline back as fast as possible so you can get your passive heal. Use the signet heal too for PvE.

Seems like more bang for the buck to spend the 10 for the 20% signet cool down reduction, so that you only have 9 seconds of downtime between signet of rage uses.

Kellhus.8071:

Yojack’s “min/max” (dumbest name ever since there is no comparisons or damage meters) is a fairly poor output pve build. Sword is lower base damage as it relies on condition damage to beef it up, has no vulnerability, no weakness, and if someone else in group is also condition damage it still only allows a single stack up to a certain value .

I would question anyone trying to main a war horn in group dungeon play because the damage sucks and the war horn abilities don’t do much for pve ( consider your 2,3,4,5 abilities all offer little value in a dungeon where you need damage)

That being said, you’d probably do significantly more damage standing back and using your rifle… and stay safer while doing it.

I agree about the bleeding being an issue if you got others in the group which stacks bleeding, but this is only on some bosses.

If I get into a group with a ranger (shortbow) or thief, and when we come to a boss, I usually swap to an axe not to get that overkill. If you think that horn is a useless tool, then I will have to tell you to reconsider it, because the horn is there mainly to support the team and help them survive. Swiftness/vigor for allies and weakness for mobs isn’t anything you take for granted, or do you?

As someone else mentioned; not everyone in the group can be pure dps, because the group will most likely fail then. Someone need to support them in order for them to do as much damage as possible. Now when that is said, my damage isn’t top high, but acceptable.

I hope you’re not ridiculing a shout build in dungeons. It’s one of the best kinds of builds for Warriors to run there. The sustained healing won’t save anyone’s life but it does make the moments between evasions less stressful. Combined with adrenal shouts, you can upkeep quite a lot of damage in the process.

“Warriors are supposed to do damage” is a very simplistic and uneducated way of looking at any profession, much less Warriors.

I heard that bleeding actually accounts for the damage of multiple people, but you can’t raise it higher then 25 stacks. If someone got it to 25 then i did a short duration bleed it would appear on my screen that my bleeds were ticking at 25 stack rate. So while it can’t go higher, you combine efforts to get bleeds high and then everyone has the massive speed and each person is proccing their own bleed. I heard this might be the case from a guildy when talking about both me and my fiancé running bleed builds (when i am Engineer)