Guild Wars 2

If you want a tl;dr just skip down to the last post

Before I even begin I’m first of all going to say that this thread is full of criticism and can easily be taken negatively, make no mistake though, I am enjoying the game just like everyone else. I feel people on the forums are always much to eager to stick their neck out and defend the game when someone offers their criticism simply because they’re enjoying the game themselves and don’t want people to speak badly about it. If you are one of the people who do this, you’re in some ways impacting the game negatively, criticism is needed in order for the game to grow and improve. Claiming the game is perfect is pretty foolish, if it was, why do we receive new hotfixes so often?

So far I’ve played about 200 hours on my warrior. I’ve got 96% map completion, I’ve done all the dungeons on both story and explorable mode, I’ve played WvWvW, I’ve played sPvP and have spent the last few days doing tPvP only. I think I have a pretty good overview on all aspects of the game from a warrior point of view so I want to share some of my thoughts on the class as I see a lot of people discussing the warrior who I feel have heavily invested their time into maybe only a few aspects of the game.

Let’s start off with the questing, exploring side of the warrior. Due to how quickly mobs respawn and the density of mobs in some areas and not wanting to spend the next 15 minutes going from one waypoint to another I’d say it’s pretty much a no brainer that you need to be using an offensive build for leveling. You have a few choices about the way you want to do damage which are basically:

Condition damage is best utilised by equipping yourself with a sword/shield, sword/sword or rifle because these weapon combinations take advantage of bleeds.

Power/precision is best utilised by equipping yourself with axe/axe, axe/shield or greatsword because they are the hardest hitting weapons for raw damage.

Full precision/crit damage can be done with all weapons really seeing as traiting for arms gives you additional condition damage.

Now I’m not really sure what other people feel but in terms of PvE damage nothing compares to power/precision, if you’ve been through the choices yourself you will probably arrive at the same conclusion. If you watch warrior streamers like kungen it’s most likely they will be running power/prec with greatsword, axe/shield and maybe a rifle. The two weapons I haven’t mentioned are longbow and hammer because I feel they are more utility based although they are definitely cool.

Fortunately for us even though we are limited for choice if we want max dps, power/precision with greatsword and axe/shield actually owns really hard. Hundred blades is just a really strong ability in terms of PvE damage. I’m not saying any other weapon combo sucks but it certainly isn’t as strong, I’ve tested a lot of different combinations more than once and can confidently say that if you’re a min/maxer you want a greatsword.

Now the part that really sucks for warriors whilst leveling is that I feel like we’re probably one of the classes with the least sustainability. Let’s not mistake what I’m saying here because let’s face it yes, a warrior can handle 2-3 mobs same level on them at the same time depending on the mob type whereas many other classes cannot. The real problem is that warriors are always the ones taking all the damage yet we can’t really get any of our health back without using our CD heal. Many other classes can kite with a majority of their weapons, heal their selves with regen abilities and use pets to take the brunt of the damage but the warrior cannot.

Now before someone says “Vigorous shouts, noob” or “Get inspiring battle standard” I’ve tried that before and I’ll tell you what the problem is; they both require 30 points in tactics and both of them are tier 3 traits so they can’t be used together. Not only that though, even if you stack your bar with just shouts it still sucks complete muffins. I’m pretty sure each shout heals for 1600 HP of my 22k health pool and each shout has around a 25 second CD, the heal really pales in comparison to what some of the other guys have and besides who the hell wants to play with like 4 shouts anyway? For anyone that has the bright idea to stack some healing power, think again. I think there’s an affix for like power, toughness, healing power… I think it was maybe called Valkyrie? Not entirely sure but I tried that and had a decent amount of healing power, it increased the heals from 1600 up to 2k.

So now that I’ve just told you that healing is kinda crap you’re probably thinking that you’re just going to stack some toughness or vitality. Well that’s great because that’s exactly what you should do. The first thing you need to consider though is which is better? Toughness or vitality? Well I can tell you now that for leveling the answer is toughness. In the most simple terms toughness protects you from physical damage and vitality protects you from condition damage. You may have thought that perhaps you could have both but you’re wrong. During my 200 hrs of gameplay I spent about 20 of those hours farming which in itself is pretty dumb due to arenanets anti-farm code that they didn’t really tell you about (Yeah, I’m not even kidding, search it up) I obviously wanted to find the quickest and most effective way of farming on the warrior. Now the only thing to ever have in mind when farming is how can I maximize my amount of kills per hour.

First of all I went raw DPS: 30,30,10,0,0. Well, that was no good, if you’re level 70 plus you already know that many mobs have a large amount of conditions which they can apply, large amounts of CC which is deadly for a warrior and most annoyingly a pretty stupidly large aggro range. Whilst it’s possible to play like this it can get laborious and frustrating because you have to apply quite a bit of effort to stay alive. Ninja pulling that one extra mob or maybe if some foolish ranger decides to bring you company its byebye warrior, have fun with your 2s waypoint and 2 repair bill.

I also went from one extreme to the other and went full “tank”. This was quite funny actually because I ended up taking more damage this way simply because I couldn’t kill the mobs as quickly thus ended up taking more damage due to long encounters.

I tried many blends of builds after this including the shout build, banner build, full “tank” build and after some time the most effective build for solo farming proved to be :
20,30,20 with full knights armor (Power,precision,toughness wielding a greatsword and axe/shield. Even then though I still encounter some of the same frustrations as I had with the full DPS build.

The bottom line is that in terms of questing I feel like warrior isn’t in such a great place right now, obviously it’s doable, I did it myself even but it was quite a frustrating experience and I just thought it could have been a lot more enjoyable if it was easier.

Next, dungeons. My opinion is that warrior is pretty garbage in dungeons, I’m sure there’s someone out there going to jump up and try and defend the class in this kind of environment with some statement like “learn to dodge”. Well, I’m pretty good at dodging actually but the game only let’s you do that a certain amount. Now the ironic part of warriors in dungeons is that if you could actually do DPS you would probably be, dare I say it, the highest dps there as long as you’re using a greatsword. Anyone that has played warrior in dungeons knows you just get completely trashed, bosses and mobs seem to prefer hunting down melee over range and hit crazy hard. Remember how I said earlier warrior doesn’t have much choice but to eat the damage and cant really regen health? Yup, that’s what makes you garbage in this situation. Obviously you’re going to need to save one bar of endurance for dodging insta-gib attacks so that leaves you pretty much with one bar to use in the mean time. So if you have even just ONE single mob attacking you with auto attack it REALLY hurts, so you dodge one auto attack and then you can’t use any more endurance and you cant heal, it’s probably not going to die fast no matter what mob it is seeing as all the mobs have very high hp so that can be charted like so:

Do I have endurance? Y = Dodge, N = Move to step two
Do I have heal? Y = Use heal, N = Move to step three
Do I have endure pain? Y = Pop endure pain, N = Move to step four
Do I have block? Y = Pop block, N = Move to step five
Do I have a rifle? Y = Yay I have now evolved from my lowly farm as a warrior into the far superior ranger, N = Die

It may seem like that’s a lot of options but remember, heal is a 25-30 sec cooldowns for the decent heals, shield stance is 30 seconds and endure pain is 90 seconds. Almost every time I’m in this position I pop all that and the mob/boss/whatever is still on me and still doing the same high damage.

Overall, the warrior is again in a pretty crap place when it comes to dungeons, they’re in somewhat high demand for dungeons at least on my server due to them being “tanky” which of course in some ways they are but that’s almost code for being appointed as the guy that has a hard time staying alive whilst all the ranged players stand at 600-1200 range pressing 1 on their keyboards. I feel pretty cornered into using a rifle for dungeons because I have a lot of down time where I’m 6k hp, I can’t get it back, heals on cooldown and if I go in I already know that I’m going to die.

Moving on to WvWvW. I got kind of mixed feelings on warrior in WvWvW it depends really on what you’re doing. If you are assaulting or defending a fort it’s pretty cool, abuse the fact that you can use hundred blades through walls and pop frenzy on unsuspecting losers (Is that an exploit? I don’t even know, don’t ban me bros.). In the WvW stalemate situation where theres just 30 people staring at 30 people the warrior is pretty useless, if you go in you know you’re probably dead. With my full exotic knight gear I can jump in with the sword blow all CD’s and kill some low geared players and leave with endure pain which is really fun but if they were all on my level of gear or reacted with CC better I’d be toast. WvWvW feels like just another place where the warrior just needs to become a ranger to feel useful sometimes.

sPvP! This is where the warrior owns at the moment. The warrior is excellent at killing inexperienced PvPers, its just pro, you pop hundred blades and you’re target is insta-gibbed and everyone runs around calling the ability OP. Sometimes I don’t even have to CC! Players just don’t even bother to move or get to greedy with their stomps. You have quite a variety of ways to play the warrior in PvP, I don’t feel the need to go over them, check out Paradigms guides for capture point harrassing, point defending, etc.

In my opinion this is real PvP and you usually get pretty decent opponents especially in round 3. Now, I feel like the warrior is pretty good in tPvP, not the best. The first thing I gotta say is, hundred blades hits pretty hard but if you can't force your opponent into a position where they have absolutely no way to escape you can totally forget about that hundred blades awesomeness that was happening in sPvP because they're going to dodge, CC, blow defensive cooldown, obviously that's where the skill of the player behind the warrior comes in. My point really is that the ability actually requires quite a lot of skill to successfully hit because you need to be counting peoples dodges, considering if they have stability, considering what CC you have available, knowing if you should pop frenzy, etc. I really like the warrior in tPvP but again the lack of sustain really bugs me, luckily a full defensive build is viable in tPvP and can be used as a tide turner in team fights, point capper/holder, etc. I still think the warrior is a bit limited on what they can really use in tPvP and still be viable; longbow and gun are pretty pointless, the hammer is OK but I don't think it fits the role of the warrior within most comps, dual swords or dual axes are just pretty mediocre in damage and lack survivability to.

I know that this isn’t the suggestion forum, please don’t get upset and lock my thread for this but this is what I’d like to see from the warrior in the future:

- Rework hundred blades

It’s not really fun for the casuals to get one shot by this and it’s not really fun to try and actually pull the combo off on an experienced player either and if you don’t hit this ability you can really be in trouble sometimes especially in 1v1.

I would probably make it so that the ability still remains channeled so that you can be shutdown by CC but you should be able to move whilst using it. With this change the damage of the ability should also be reduced otherwise it really would be completely overpowered.

- Give us something to get our health back with

Signet of healing was a cool idea but it isn’t powerful enough. Just one or two abilities that grant regeneration would be fine. A cooldown that allows us to get some damage as health back would be another interesting idea. Caution is needed in order to keep PvP in line but we really need an extra something in PvE because we’re experiencing way to much down time.

- Warriors should probably be a bit more tough

We do have the highest base hp but it doesn’t really feel like it’s helping us that much we still take just as much damage as everyone else, plate armor feels like paper. I would probably either raise the amount of defense on heavy armor or greatly increase the defense on the shield because I mean cmon shields are like 60 defense and chest plates are around 320, the hell? The issue with that however is accidently making guardians invincible, I don’t know, developers are paid for this.

- Condition damage builds need to do more damage

That’s not really a hard one to figure out.

- Dual wielding builds need to do more damage

Ditto.

There’s plenty of aspects of the game I can easily criticise which in turn impact the warrior negatively but when just considering the warrior class these are my main points, that is all.

If anyone reads all of this criticism i’ll be amazed.

I have to agree with you on the Hundred Blades issue. I made a full post about it in this forum. But what it boils down to is that no decent PvPer is going to just stand around while you unload on them with it. Combine that with it being a channel attack that you can’t even change the direction of, and you get a pretty terrible attack that’s really only good for blowing up noobs and bads.

I also REALLY feel your pain on the way melee seems to get horribly punished by dungeon bosses and champion or higher enemies. ALL melee classes suffer from this, however.

Agree again with how melee range builds are not terribly useful in WvWvW.

You pretty much nailed all of the main points, but I don’t think that it is as severe as you think. I don’t see other classes doing any better against some of the problems you listed, although I would KILL for the guardian trait to heal on greatsword attacks.

I do hope that Anet is keeping a close eye on class balance. They seem to be on the ball in all other areas. I don’t see why this would be any different.

thats good cake

@eliteseraph

Yeh, I think most people are pretty mutual on what could use some improvement. I realise that other classes can have a bad time in some aspects as well but I think the real annoying thing with the warrior is there comes a point where no matter how good you are as a player there’s nothing more you could have done to survive sometimes. Whereas I can’t really see a sick ranger or necro dying, ever?

Can you please add a tl;dr version or a sum up?
I’ve read the first part and you just don’t come to the point, what i hate about posts.

Don’t get me wrong: I have no problem with long posts – just with unnecessary ones.

@Jack

I can’t really speak on how often Rangers or Necros die in PVE. I don’t have either one at 80. They certainly look good on paper, however. But I do kill both pretty regularly in sPvP, tho. xD

I have to saw I agree with you. Right now 100b is too binary, either u hit it and the enemy dies in which case it’s OP or they u don’t in which case they are totally worthless. This wouldn’t be such a problem if the other weapons are viable but right now in terms of damage swords etc do far less damage dmg not to mention bleeds gets removed too easily without doing that much dmg to begin with.
TLDR: Change 100b and buff other weapons like sword for pvp

I agree completely with the healing issues… Warriors don’t have enough abilities/passives to heal, I find it difficult while leveling since I’ve only got one or two heals and even those aren’t that good…

Haven’t done much PvP so I can’t comment there, but I’m hoping we’ll start to see some class re-balancing from ANet shortly.

About the healing part and sustainabilty i dont agree with u guys.
At least voor PvE havent done PvP/WvW yet.

But i have a 0/0/30/30/10 build as a warrior and i use a mace + shield.
Healing wise i got regen from my adrenaline, regen from my healing signet, and regen from my banner.
At lvl 80 that gives me a 300 heals every sec (healing signet and regen from banner) and another 300 heals every 3 sec (adrenaline). So basically i have a HoT that heals me for 400 each sec.
With Doylak signet and mace i reduce damage i recieve by 35%. And that is without the 2 block skills i have.

I can take on 5 lvl 80 mobs at a time and stay a life.

Damage wise i use my gear to buff that with Knight … of the Knight and the skills For Great Justice and Elite signet. (61% crit chance)

Just because 1 build has low sustainablity doenst mean warrior is lacking it. U just specced wrong.

I disagree with you on the healing. Adrenal Health and the healing signet allows us to kill jsut about anything anywhere. Its quite possibly OP, couple that with shout healing for emergency heals and stacking Pow/Precision we are PvE gods imo.

Right… if you are dying to 1 mob extra pulls, you likely need to look into the mirror iso to arena net for balance changes.

While I agree the healing is slightly weak, if you are not using the regen signet as your healing ability, you are doing it horribly wrong for farming,leveling and dungeons.
It regens roughly double the amount you’d get from actively spamming your healing ability. Just do not use the activation heal unless you really have no other option.

15 points in Defensive is an absolute no brainer, regens for tons with only a little constraint in adrenaline management.

I haven’t needed a single gearpiece with defensive stats and or defensive trait other than the regen to littery chain farm anywere, even in Orr before enough people were high enough lvl to actually kill the group events there so you’d have to eat a lot of enviromental dmg while fighting mobs.
If you forgo the adrenaline ability spam for a bit, you can easily take 2/3 mobs hitting on you while you manouver them into your kill position.

Your second weaponset isn’t just for show, you are expected to actively use it to mitigate the incoming dmg and/or kite.
If you are having difficulties managing the shield, the horn is an excellent alternative for hairy situations. The number 5 ability roughly nets you 2 extra dodges, the number 4 ability paired with your Signet of Rage gives you nearly 100% uptime on swiftness, for quick manouvering, positioning and traveling.

I think warriors need some tweaks, but I think most of your post reflects poor play style rather than issues with the profession.

I haven’t played nearly as much as you, but I agree with a ton of your points.

Funnily enough, I too have recently switched from Berserker to Knight. I haven’t had a whole lot of time to test out the build, but overall I would say that toughness is definitely the way to go.

Have you tried any “max cc” builds? Bull Rush, Stomp, Adrenaline on Use signet, Hammer weapon. Even up to the point of Mace/Shield alt set maybe. I’m currently experimenting with this type of build because I feel like knockdowns and stuns are really powerful, especially if you have a buddy to whack on a target that you just knocked down.

In PVE defiant kind of screws you over on bosses, but it’s better than nothing (maybe?). CCing trash mobs can let you wade into the fight a lot more than before though, wouldn’t you think?

As for traits, I ended up maxing Power and Toughness (which you have 20 points each in) because 1) the last tier of Toughness major traits are kitten amazing and 2) Precision seems kind of bad without Crit Damage (this is assuming a Knight set loadout). Going 30 into Power lets you pick 3 great majors as well, and gives you a lot of base damage.

The last 10 points are a total toss up, I couldn’t decide between any of the trees. I think for a PVP/WVW focus I would go Discipline for 10% run speed, Arms for pure damage, and tactics for full defensive/some PVP utility.

Thanks for the responses guys, I’d like to address some of the responses now.

First of all I’m aware that the post is largely rambling, it could easily be a lot more succinct and easier to read but I’m too lazy and wanted to vent a little bit. :P

@Eldarion

I certainly don’t blame you for not reading all of that but if you had you’d know that in my post I said x/x/30/30/x was not good enough. It’s pretty simple, you just end up taking more damage because it takes you too long to kill things. It was one of the first ideas I had about how I could increase my survivability and I didn’t really find it viable due to the lack of DPS. On the flip side though, if you use a build like that and consider yourself a group support it can be quite useful in dungeons.

@Zederok and Craid

In my eyes there’s 2 viable heals and the signet is not one of them in my opinion. The passive healing is fair, the active healing is horrible, when it’s on CD you get nothing and weirdly I could live with that. But he main thing though; the holy grail of fail with this signet is that it doesn’t give you a 25 CD condition removal which is essential running a toughness based build. Doesn’t matter if you look from an exploring PoV, dungeon PoV, PvP PoV you really need the condition removal.

The other attractive heal for me that is popular among the PvE streamers as well is the healing surge. Heals more than the other heals, 30 second cooldown.

I’m not really sure what you’re getting at craidt with the whole bad play style comment. I’m not a bad player and I’ve tried a lot of different weapon/trait combos, I certainly don’t have a problem “Managing the shield”. I’m glad you’re not having any problems but there seem to be a number of people who agree with some of my opinions, if you think you know better perhaps you should write a guide?

@Fantom

I have tried a CC based build in PvP and I’ve also tried it in a questing/exploring environment.

The two aspects I didn’t like were:

1) The cooldown on the CC
2) Not enough AoE CC to be attractive for questing/exploring

I ran heavily defensive traits and my weapon setup was a 2H hammer and a mace/shield. Overall the CC that was available to me was:

Pommel Bash – 15s CD – 1s Daze
Shield bash – 20s CD traited – 1s Daze
Staggering blow – 20s CD – Knockback
Backbreaker – 30s CD – 2s Knockdown
Bull’s charge – 40s CD – 2s Knockdown
Stomp – 60s CD – Not entirely sure on exact effect this has on the enemy
Kick – 20s CD – Knockback
Bolas – 20s CD – 5 1/4s immobilise

I chose not to use bolas and stomp. Immobilise is pointless as a pure melee against an AI controlled mob and I didn’t like the long CD on stomp.

My idea of running a CC build was that unless I was keeping the mobs pretty much always locked down then it wasn’t really worth it. Pretty much all this CC is single target other than the knockbacks which aren’t all that great really other than buying some time for other CC to come off cooldown. I’m not about to tell you that it’s not doable because it probably is but it’s quite laborious to play this way and ends up coming back to the same problem as playing with a very defensive build which is you don’t do enough damage.

However, in PvP this is EPICALLY funny. I actually played a tournament round 3 in battle of khylo last night and the opposite team went 3 guardians and 2 warriors built defensive/CC and we got completely denied at every point. We’re not really amazing PvP’ers or anything so we really didn’t know how to counter at all, pretty easy win for those guys.

Stomp is hilarious. But I find it actually kind of annoying to use 1v1, because it knocks you back so far that you have to use another cooldown to get back on top of them before they get up. What I want to pair it with is the guardian’s AOE pull, but I haven’t had a chance to play with my guardian bro since speccing stomp.

“450 blowback” means 450 knockback! That’s like double the distance of kick, and it’s AOE. Also it does double kick’s damage. If you put 30 points into Power (for damage), you can trait for 20% lower cooldown on the physical spells (aka the CC) and it also adds 100% more damage. The damage becomes pretty significant at that point.

But overall I know what you mean about the cooldowns. I think that I am going to keep playing around with it and figure out a “halfway” build. Probably going to replace the Mace/Shield side of things with a more offensive weapon.

And yea I think it might end up being a more of a PVP style build. But it’s going to be a powerful one.

What do you think about the stat distribution? I think it goes pretty well with knight gear, though my crit chance is probably the lowest it’s been since level 10. What I’m currently running is 30 power/30 toughness/10 whatver and pow/precision/toughness gear.

I think 100b could be easily fixed by making it a movable ability, if you take the fiery great sword as an example it moves around while you channel it and it fires bolts of fire. Anyhow it should be the same way with our great sword, maybe with a light damage nerf or whatever.

I’ve really had no survivability issues with warrior in PvE, whether soloing difficult events or doing dungeons. I use greatsword and hammer with the 5-second weapon swap trait. Whirlwind Attack is amazing — one of the most reliable evasion skills in the game, also doing a lot of damage. Against normal enemies, I can alternate Whirlwind Attack with Earthshaker every 5 seconds to easily avoid most damage. Both weapons also have a ranged AoE cripple to assist kiting — indeed I haven’t found a profession that kites more reliably than warrior in PvE. In most zones (not so much Orr due to the prevalence of ranged attacks, but it all depends on what sort of cover is available), I can take on 8+ enemies at once without much difficulty.

The build is not quite as strong against defiant enemies (bosses) as this removes the utility of Earthshaker. Still, between Whirlwind Attack, weakness from the hammer, and the cripples I don’t really have trouble surviving dungeon bosses.