Guild Wars 2

Warrior and Berserker focus heavily on the more barbaric side of warrior. The next elite spec should focus on the aspect of warriors that have more finesse in their method. I think it would be cool to have a spec completely based on parrying attacks.

New Weapon:
Melee Staff. Staff will focus on blocks and and putting melee pressure on enemies. I’m not sure what the exact skills would be, but the overall vision is for it to be a weapon that might not deal a lot of damage, but it will easily wear down enemies by blocking their major burst abilities and using up their stun-breaks and condi-clears (main condis would be cripple, vulnerability and weakness, conditions which mesh well with a duelist or skilled fighter). After you wear them down you can swap to a more damage-oriented set. The main counter to staff is blind, range or skilled mobility. So thieves and druids would do well against this. Necromancer, Revenant and Elementalist might not.

Profession Mechanic:
F2 ability is Parry. Base cool-down is 10 seconds and you can use it any time. When used, the warrior will block the next attack (ranged or melee) that hits it. When adrenaline is not full, successfully blocking an attack will give a huge amount of adrenaline. If adrenaline is full, then blocking an attack will change the F2 ability to Counter-Attack for 10 seconds. Counter-Attack uses half of your adrenaline to use an attack based on your weapon. If Counter-Attack isn’t used for 10 seconds then it reverts back to parry. Note that Counter-Attacks aren’t automatically used against the enemy that you blocked, you can target another enemy and use it on them.

List of Counter-Attacks after a successful Parry:
Sword – Whirling Riposte: Does a 2 second whirling and evading leap toward your enemy before striking your enemy, immobilizing and bleeding them.
Mace – Unsavory Smash: Whirl your mace around yourself, reflecting projectiles and taunting your target. After two seconds, bring your mace down and knockdown enemies around you.
Axe – Punishing Leap: Leap at your opponent, applying bleed and vulnerability, then leap again at your target, granting you fury. If your target was hit by the first leap (they didn’t dodge, block or blind), then you also blind them with the blood on your axe.
Rifle – Slamfire: Gain a buff that eliminates the cooldown the next rifle skill you use.
Longbow – Sticky Arrow: Fire an arrow at the target that detonates on them, inflicting burn.
Hammer – Hammerhead Charge: Point your hammer forward and charge a set distance toward your target. Anyone you hit along the way gets pulled with you until you reach max range.
Greatsword – Mordau: Flip your greatsword and grab it by the blade, bringing the hilt down on your enemy, stunning them for a long duration, and applying vulnerability.
Staff – Clearing Swipe: 360 Whirl that knocks all enemies away from you.

Utility Skills:
The new utilities will be survival skills (similar to ranger). Coming up with specific skills would take a while, so I’ll just detail the overall vision. The idea is that the utilities address the warrior’s defensive issues by giving them bonuses on attacks. For instance, one survival skill (Underhanded Strikes) kicks up dust, blinding opponents and gives warrior protection while removing one condition each for the next 5 strikes landed. Another survival skill is a low cooldown but low range dash (Combat Shuffle) which evades an attack, and gives the warrior stability if used after a successful parry.

Traits:
Each stage of adept, master and grandmaster will have a trait that will either: improve the speed and damage of parry skills, gives more sustain from survival skills, provide boons on successful parrying/counters.

I will admit, this spec is very PvP and small-scale WvW-oriented. This is where warrior needs the most help. I don’t really see the necessity of giving Warrior a more fractal/raid-oriented spec when Berserker is just so amazing. But in open-world PvE this spec will give Warriors a lot of defensive options that they don’t have; so it would be a powerful solo spec. Anyway, just had to write this out. Warriors definitely needs a PvP spec that promotes tactical offensive play.

I’m all for this- at least as far as the general idea goes. Plus give us a special polearm for the staff skin, make the weapon skills spear or halberd based. Why does everyone assume warriors have to just be armored versions of the Hulk?

Also, plus one for the Mordhau. We need more -actual- weapon techniques.

Eastcorn.5901:

Hammer – Hammerhead Charge: Point your hammer forward and charge a set distance toward your target. Anyone you hit along the way gets pulled with you until you reach max range.

I like the idea in general, but how does this work in practice? Do they kinda get feared/taunted toward your charging direction or is it a pull that only takes effect when you reach max distance? Or is it a pulsing pull effect?

Also, the longbow counter-skill needs more work. The current config would utterly destroy any practicality the longbow has. Just burning feels UP without the firefields that warriors have on it currently. Ofc you can just not use it but I’d rather like some rework on it. A knockback maybe? And the name could indicate that the effect also has a delay, maybe 2-3 seconds. For that I could find some use for in PvP.

I’d assumed it would be a case of hit someone → push them forward → hit them again → repeat until you reach the end or they manage to get out of the way.

Onlysaneman.9612:

I’d assumed it would be a case of hit someone -> push them forward -> hit them again -> repeat until you reach the end or they manage to get out of the way.

That doesn’t really work on enemies with breakbars. Since they don’t get pushed, the skill would be endless in this case. The charge needs to go through targets.

I’m not sure how the longbow would lose its functionality, given that you can cast the fire-field alongside the sticky arrow. The Counter-Attack skill swaps with the F2 (parry slot), not the F1 (burst slot). This is distinct from Berserker, in that for Berserker the Berserk skill swaps with the F1 (burst slot), rather than the F2 (frenzy slot).

And the way the hammer skill would work would be similar to Revenant Staff 5. Revenant staff 5 pushes enemies forward and out, but the hammer counter-attack would only go forward. Also, it would only consume one stack of stability. The way Revenant staff 5 removes multiple stacks of stability is stupid, and is one of the things which only serves to reduce the enjoyability of playing and watching GW2 as a competitive pvp scene.

The enjoyability of fighting as AND against this spec was one of the things I had in mind when thinking of it. Every component of the spec is distinct, in that you won’t see similar things as you see with Tempest shouts, Chronomancer wells or Necromancer marks, where you see a clustered stacking of these abilities and you have no idea what to do other than evade/block through it. This is the real problem of skill clutter, rather than Elementalists aura effects. When fighting the Champion, you will know when he is parrying, and you will know when he is able to use his counter-attack, and based on his weapon you will know what counter-attack the Champion is capable of doing. When playing AS the Champion, you can use parry to punish people who spam abilities. Any Scrapper that tries to use Rocket Charge on you will regret it when you parry and stun them right back, and follow it up with a burst ability. Rocket Charge gives the Champion three opportunities to parry and puts them right next to the Champion. For a more specific example, take Axe. Let’s say you’re running the Champion and the trait that makes critical axe hits generate more adrenaline. You are winning against an enemy and they try to flee and use a cripple/chill ability on you and you parry it. The counter-attack on Axe will let you leap toward your fleeing opponent, then leap again (similar to rocket charge). Landing at least one leap, followed by one axe hit would refill your adrenaline, allowing you to finish the retreating enemy with an eviscerate. The enemy can counter this by baiting out parry prior to fleeing. Or failing that, make sure to dodge the second axe leap to deny adrenaline and put distance between you and the Champion. When fighting the Champion you can only fail so many times before he gets you with his sustained pressure. Something like a rifle core Engineer would be able to easily take on the Champion and win.

One of the criticisms of this build, I think, is that there would be too many obvious animations which are easy to dodge or counter. Warrior has had this problem for some time. I disagree with the criticism in this particular case, in that the problem in this game is that powerful abilities for other classes don’t have enough of a tell. The skill floor of the game is too low right now.

I don’t like how the Warrior has been themed as a simpleton fighter. The Berserker class seems to enforce this. The profession mechanic may be the burst skills, but being a Warrior is more than that. Of all professions, Warrior should be one with their weapon sets. A true martial artist. Warriors became Warriors (from a lore standpoint!) because they are skilled, not because they are too stupid to be a mage or an engineer. We need a spec that enforces this and gives the Warrior more non-passive complexity.