Guild Wars 2

I would just like everyone’s thoughts on a particular build I’m playing with the idea of building out for PvX (WvW & PvE for you non GW1 folks out there). Before I start working on the gear, I’d thought I would ask for some feedback.

Link: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQNAS3ejgOVvNPKPMRCAkCsyyUoHVB7SPEDt0A;TsAAyCoo8y0loLbQOvkBt+YIyWEA

I would say that in the actual gear I build, condition damage would be dropped (the celestial amulet gave me the best all around spread I wanted in the calculator).

Pretty much a defensive, self-reliant setup revolving around healing shouts/2 condition removals/100% uptime swiftness through the signet/100% fury uptime/might stacking. I am planning on having a rifle in reserve for siege activities where shooting from a wall (or up to a wall) is needed.

So…let me have it.

Edit: Why does this forum hate my link? Is there something fundamentally wrong with it? If I cut/paste it works fine.

This is very similar to what i was running for quite a while, pretty much the exact same spec, just different chosen traits and skills, it’s quite effective, for a PvE/Dungeon build, i went for something along the lines of this

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQNAS3ejgOVvNPKPMRCAkCsAzUoIVh2SPCjt1A;TsAAyCoo8y0loLbQOvkBt+YIyWEA

The weapons i used were Mace/warhorn & Rifle or Longbow, i’d sometimes replace the warhorn with a shield if i knew that reflects would be a big help, but i never bothered to switch the reflect trait out, as nothing else available seemed appealing, although the 200 toughness trait is nice.

I’d swap out signet mastery for Heightened Focus during dungeons, as i’d be using Battle Standard there, so Signet mastery was pretty much going to waste, and as i wasn’t going to be using my burst, the extra crit is nice, as is the damage from Berserkers power.

I’d also trait banners to regen, and Warhorn skills to convert conditions into boons, basically trying to fulfill the support role as best as possible, while also trying not to gimp my damage far too much, and it actually works incredibly well, you won’t be pumping large numbers, but with the right gear (Knights with Emeralds) you can get a fairly high crit chance and see the red numbers quite often, i definitely felt i contributed to the group, and it’s certainly a useful spec, never tried switching out the traits for others though to give it a try in WvW.

My honest opinion based on playing a warrior since launch. I am sorry to say but it is the truth your build is not all around you wont be able to kill anyone in wvw. For something to be all around it needs to be balanced. Your build is not balanced at all. It is purely a defensive/support build. Your build has no specific weapon traits your weapon cool downs will be long and those weapons damage will be low.

You do not have any damage boosting traits such as beserkers power or even empower since you were so heavy into tactics. Your damage will be very bad. Even 25 stacks of might and might stacking will not be able to make up for having very low precision. You will not crit that much at all.

You do have a very defensive build and you will be hard to kill but I don’t see as that helping your group at all if your not actually killing anyone or anything you are just dead weight.

Well, after getting the rune set I needed and a few piece tweaks, I have to say that I would respectfully disagree with you Warlord. After doing some running around in WvW solo and in roaming parties, I am very pleased with how this worked out.

First, as I said in the OP, the stats from the celestial amulet didn’t give the me exact spread I wanted. What I did end up with before trying my build out was approx. the following;

1500 Power
1400 Prec
1600 Tough
1300 Vit
30%/30% crit/dam
450 healing
0 cond

However, with the boon stacking I was effectively running at 50% crit, 1500+350 power (10 stacks avg), and 350 cond (pointless bonus for this build).

I found there are some very obvious downsides to this build, mostly revolving around no massive spike damage available to you (apart from a guaranteed 5k crit evisc, but hardly a scary hit compared to 100b), but there is definitely more than enough pressure to work with. The part I didn’t expect was how much pressure the hammer was able to provide particularly from 2 different abilities Fierce Blow and Hammer Shock. Funnily enough Hammer Shock + Leg Specialist stops groups of people long enough to drop weakness on them via Fierce Blow. Couple that with a stun chain, it seems to wear people out fairly well.

You are right Warlord in that this build is very durable, pretty much a necessity given the above. The buff stacking is proving to be absolutely crucial though, perma swiftness/fury/8-14 might stack pretty much means you’re spamming SoR every CD, and FGJ as soon as you enter combat. This means I am susceptible to boon stripping, but that seems to be a currently underused tactic.

However, I have to say the most gratifying moment this weekend was reflecting a ballista shot right back into a zerg guarding the SMC lord during our push to take it. Absolutely hilarious to see all those folks eat their own siege.

P.S. Forgot to add that I swapped out Fear Me! for On My Mark when flipping supply camps as it counters the immunity buff on the guildmaster NPC.

Right as I was saying because I have ran this build. There is no spike damage or good damage in general. You need to be able to spike people down to kill them or you simply wont. If you run into any kinda bunker class like an ele or a gurdian you will never kill them. They can out heal anything you can throw at them. A lot of other professions will be able to kill you a lot faster than you can kill them as well making all of that defense a moot point because they have better ways of damage mitigation besides a warrior just having a high hp pool to soak up damage. So like I said it maybe fine with running with a group and maybe you can CC witha hammer or whatnot to try to help them. But might stacking isn’t anything special to your build any build can pop FGJ and SoR and if using a traited GS youll get 20 stacks easly. But just having a shield alone and maybe endure pain a glass cannon can have every bit of survivability as you so something to think about.

It’s very interesting you’ve had a completely opposite experience with a similar build. I admit this doesn’t have the spike necessary to spike people down, but wouldn’t you agree that it isn’t the only way to finish a fight?

As for your assertion that Shield Stance and Endure Pain on a glass cannon is of equal durability, I simply don’t see it, on paper and in practice. Those two abilities in concert allow glass cannons to get in, do their burst, then get out. I would argue that this build sets up for sustainability; 2 condition removals, 3 2k hp AOE heals, a personal heal, lot’s of CC, stun breaker, traited stability, I don’t see how all this is inferior to Endure Pain and Shield Stance (which this build has the latter too, although I could drop Fear Me for Endure Pain as well).

Also, I want to ask that in your assessment are you judging it’s metric of success off of solo, unsupported kills or team kills? Also, is it also based off of TTKs (time to kill)? It seems like your assessment is based in a 1v1 vacuum against a sPvP meta, which really isn’t the approach I’m going with.

I’m not really picking on your feedback, I actually appreciate it. I’m trying to understand where you’re coming from, because I’m experiencing something different.

The thing with your build that is really good is at being a meat shield. I think its great if you have support DDs running with you. With solder runes you can heal them remove the conditions, with hammer and mace you can cc. If this is what your going for its great. But basically you need to have others kill things for you is what I’m trying to get at. Its tanky but gurdians can do it better even bunker eles can do it better. Not only tank better but do great damage without the huge sacrifice warriors have to go through in attack power to attempt to mimic what guardains or eles can do. Most my experience comes from WvW running this build. In SPVP there is a hammer build pretty similar to your own its called the captain hammer build http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe3ZiX8_M8U Which is what you have. pretty much. Watch the whole video he gives a very good explanation of it. In WvW though its worst cuz your dealing with unbalanced pvp. And people can kite you more worst than spvp.

Note in the video he says hes healing for 2090 with shouts… Shouts have been nerfed since this video.

Also this is during open beta in Spvp and none of the people he is fighting know how to play. So just because he is doing good means a lot less.

Hmm, did I link the wrong build or are you talking about tweaks and options for the way I went about my build? I was painfully clear in my OP that this was intended to be a defensive (not to the extreme) build, but not to the point of being a bunker.

I had heard about the captain hammer build, but hadn’t actually read up on it, thank you for that. No sarcasm here, really.

His setup is pretty much purely bunkered, which allows him to do very well. It would be fair to say that what I came up with is a variant of the Captain Hammer build. The build’s use of healing shouts, and use of a hammer, are pretty much the commonalities here. Where he continues down in defensive and CC abilities though, I digress into boon stacking, hence my rune choices. While we’re on the subject of bunker builds though, those two bunker builds you referred to rely on boon stacking three buffs, vigor, protection, and regeneration, none of which are really accessible to the warrior. So comparing them to a bunker warrior is an “apples to oranges” discussion and at the same time shows that warrior bunker builds with similar strategies is flawed. I’m more inclined to think that bunkering on a warrior needs to be done by CC, not necessarily boon stacking. But that’s not really what I was trying to accomplish with this build anyway.

I’m not sure why you think that this build does very little damage though. With Fury and 10 Might up (I do get to enjoy perma Fury and anywhere between 8-14 stacks of Might at all times) my axe’s #1 chain does 1300 per hit and critting 50% of the time for over 2000. That means going through a full chain drops about 10k damage on a target in about 3 seconds (approx. time to go through a single #1 chain). Seem’s plenty fine to me when I need to put the pressure on someone (and I’m not even counting any other ability).

I did see that he is healing for about 2k, which is nice. I do recall seeing in the patch notes that healing shouts was nerfed (for the life of me I can’t find the patch notes where that occurred), but as it stands right now I heal for roughly 1500 at 450 healing. So maybe the scaling was nerfed while the baseline was buffed (which is good for low healing stacked builds).

Also this is during open beta in Spvp and none of the people he is fighting know how to play. So just because he is doing good means a lot less.

This is not really relevant to the discussion, but I wanted to point out that Taugrim wasn’t in any of the CB’s either. All he had to go on was forum posts and Beta Weekends like everyone else. While he is an excellent player the skill maturity levels for this game were no different than anyone else that was playing against him. So I would actually bet he would still do as well playing in today’s topology as he did during the BW if not better.