Guild Wars 2

Hi everyone, I’m new to the warrior camp, and just wondering if the class has any viable builds for sword main and off hand. Secondary swap can be whatever is necessary, but from my admittedly painfully short time and experience with the class (currently working on the elite spec still) the idea of dual sword for pvp seemed fun. Of course gear, traits, and anything else I’m not a stickler on I just wanted to know if the class can run such a setup effectively. If not what are the prevailing viable builds currently?

Assuming you run condi:

sword sword doesn’t work against more than 1 enemy player, and even then its lackluster due to lack of synergy when fighting other meta builds. So right away you are limited to duels and pve.

Now looking at pve…..you need to realize it has very limited cleave power. So what would you run it for? individual bosses? like what…? raids? WElll immediately you shoudl realize that torch if gonna be the meta for any condi offhand for raids and not running the meta doesn’t go over well with people. So if you wanna run it for kicks and be really slow at killing pve…why would you even want a build that works? Just run anyhting! But obv u want something somewhat effective….so read on.

I agree with you that dual sword sounds aawesome….ive tried time and time again to make it work. It doesn’t work though….it just doesn’t.

In wvsw though, what I found WILL work is something like: bow, mace/sword.
The beauty of mace sword is that it offers you 2 blocks on one set…a useful f1….and an even more useful f2…along with a short pummel on 3 for quick daze. Mace is 1….honestly still preferable to sword 1 even though its slower, since it does more direct damage via power and has that weakness duration which is useful. Basically run that, and shield mastery with rousing resilience with trailblazer gear (or dire would probably be fine too)….slap on endure pain, berseker stance, the outrage, and headbutt… and you got a build that allows you to never die if ur good enough. My limit was taking on 4 fairly competent enemies all at once with that build….I could down 1 but could nver finish them and eventually I would make enough mistakes that I hit my limit and died. Very fun build though….very fun, and very effective. I did however switch back to a power build since…..honestly I don’t find the tick system fun or satisfying. And my fights lasted wayyyyy too long compared to 1 hitting thigns with gunflame.
Basically your mace/sword is a defensive breather set that you switch to while you have covering aoe from ur bow, and all ur condi ticks doing their damage. You do damage with bow….then u swap to doing blocks while that damage ticks away, and while the enemy is ontop of you and panicking you time ur heavy hitting attacks like the f1/f2 and sword 4 so they land at the right time and do good damage. Then you swap back to bow and immediately put pressure all oveer the map again….then swap back to be defensive again.

Its fun cause sword 5 functions the same as shield 5 does, but any melee attacks will break the block early and prompt a counterattack that does decent bleed damage.

I just ran…..geomancy and sigil of cleansing on the bow. Then sigil of purity on the other set I think…..with, I think I ran it with the onkillstack one….cruelty or something. Basically I swap my weapons with fasthands and I auto clear 2 conditions…..its pretty amazing. Focusing ur sigils on condi clear…..basically what i did.

I dont think i have a copy of hte build anymore…but whateveer i told u pretty much all of it alrdy.

It killed people too slow, since they all ran resistance it seemed. So I would have to play around with them till the resistance weared off…..and then I would win. It took too long, and I couldnt focus on the actual objectives of wvsw. Maybe the problem is I needed to run dire instead….for slightly harder ticks before tehe enemy put resistance up. That said though….having 4-6 second immobilizing on bow 5 and other abilities like it was hard to pass up at times. And if you do the math the condition damage difference isn’t that much bettween trailbalzer and dire…..and if you use food to see what the difference is really like….well it ain’t nothing to lose sleep over.
One of the problems was the need to take down, down, down in the berserker traitline. Doing so makes u very very tanky/survivable and makes the build work….but the output is pretty slow still and resistance hardstops u completely.