Guild Wars 2

Does anyone know why the hammer trait was moved from defence? I feel like hammer builds are suffering having access to only one of these traits, and if you do pick the hammer trait, your other weapon set suffers from the lack of quickness.

I think there’s two parts to this.

The first is that the defence tree had three possible weapons for it, those being shield, mace, and hammer. They wanted to keep at most two weapons in each specialization line, so one had to go. Hammer was the one that went.

I think the other part is that they wanted to try and shake the meta a bit by taking the popular hammer out of the defence line and making it so that warrior would be less inclined to take it. However, I imagine most warriors will go with defence and discipline anyways.

In any case, I’m not sure that it would be any better in the defence line. There’s already the tough choice for shield specialists in giving up dogged march. Having the hammer there could mean a choice between that trait and something like cleansing ire.

So while burst mastery and heightened focus would be nice, I don’t really think they can put it in a sport where you won’t be giving something else nice up.

In fact, that may have been one of the better places to put it. Most people won’t use hammer to build adrenaline fast in the first place, and it’s burst skill doesn’t have extremely high damage. The CC combos can all be landed without quickness. Any foe with a stunbreaker or blink is just going to get out of there anyways, quickness or no.

I mean, they could’ve stuck it in, say, tactics or something instead, but I think hammer builds would’ve bought the farm completely if that happened.

Merciless Hammer and Burst Mastery was something I almost always took together as well, and as I said before, taking hammer hurts your other weapon set. There’s no compromise here, we are missing out on 2 grandmaster traits that make a hammer build work. Arms wouldn’t have been a bad choice, there is only sword there now. They could even move hammer back to the 2nd group swapping it with the banners, that trait is good enough to compete in grandmaster.

Most zerk h/gs roaming builds didn’t take Burst Mastery pre-patch and they did just fine. MH is the better trait of the two for a hammer build.

Choppy.4183:

Most zerk h/gs roaming builds didn’t take Burst Mastery pre-patch and they did just fine. MH is the better trait of the two for a hammer build.

For a solo roamer HF is the preferred choice as it provides a spike and stomp. You won’t be effectice with only MH and letting your other set suffer. BM isn’t required, which is why it wasn’t one of the main 2 traits in my original post. My point is hammer builds are not going to be effective without both MH and HF.