Guild Wars 2

Why does a warrior not have access to a few more evade type skill other than on Greatsword. Good candidates would be Savage Leap, Bull’s Charge, Earthshaker, and Eviscerate. Maybe not all of them obviously, but certainly adding it to skills like Earthshaker and Eviscerate would make those skills infinitely easier to land as long as you were mindful of conditions and would have really good synergy with traits like Cleansing Ire.

Thoughts?

At the risk of sounding like the “make my class OP!” guy, I’d say the most fitting ability for an evade would be Savage Leap. The speed at which your moving coupled with the duration of the ability would make an evade very plausible. Putting an Evade on Shield Bash wouldn’t be the most effective choice, since the skill only lasts for roughly a fourth of a second and has no tell (making the evade nearly pointless since the skill is difficult to counter). Putting it on Eviscerate would yield the same issue.

Earthshaker wouldn’t be a bad option, but an evade with the hammer seems to contradict the hammer’s theme; Stability would be a more fitting addition to Earthshaker, in my opinion (not that I’m suggesting adding Stability to the skill, since it’s strong as is).

Because unfortunately for warrior, warrior was designed well.

Someone might make the argument that warrior armor/health pool makes up for lack of evades or escape moves, but I think we’ve beaten that to death: it doesn’t.

I think that the warrior’s active defense was intended to be block instead of evade. The problem is that block is too easily bypassed (in dungeons it’s just ridiculous how many things ignore block) and we don’t have nearly enough block skills unless we go mace/shield.

As for why greatsword has evades, the melee DPS characters were weak in the first betas so the evade was probably put into greatsword for that reason.

Personally I’d add an evade component to Earthshaker and Shield Bash. That way the melee two-handed weapons would have an evade, and the one-handed weapons would have an opt-in for evade by using the shield, or they could forsake their evade by using another off-hand.

So if we were do get say, 1 more evade skill, what skill would be the best fit? I am partial to your choice of Earthshaker. But for a 1h Evade, I personally think Evicerate is the best choice. As much as I would like to see it on a skill like Savage Leap, I think that skill is pretty strong as is. Shield Stun is an interesting choice I had not considered. The downside to putting it on a Burst Skill, as opposed to a skill like Savage Leap or the shield stun, it cannot be used defensively as readily as one might like.