Guild Wars 2

Greetings warriors. I’ll put two things on the table right off the bat:

1) I do not currently play a warrior and I know very little about the class

2) I’m not here to troll. I dueled a very talented warrior recently in WvW and am interested in backwards engineering his tactics to get a loose idea of what kind of build he’s running

Here’s my best assessment of my opponent based on several attempts at taking him 1v1 in WvW.

1) Heavy use of conditions (mostly bleeding but I don’t recall if there were others)

2) Weapons were Sword in mainhand (can’t remember what off-hand was but I’m leaning toward shield). Weapon swap was Longbow.

3) This guy was wicked fast. Tons of mobility, gap closers and it looked as though he had QUICKNESS up nearly 100% of the time during our battles. Note I said QUICKNESS, not SWIFTNESS although it could have been a combination of both. Bottom line is this guy was always right in my face, swinging his sword really rapidly and I wasn’t able to escape. Knockbacks worked but only for a split second before he stood up again with a nearly instantaneous gap closer.

4) Here’s the real kicker. When 2-3 allies showed up he was able to turn and run faster than any warrior I’ve ever seen. He had 2-3 leaps or utilities that he chained back to back to create massive distance between myself and a few allies.

If he’d done this once or twice I could chalk it up to luck but he managed to flee to safety on at least 4-5 different occasions using the same 2-3 skill combo.

My assessment of his skill usage (without looking at the combat log because I forgot to do so):

1) He used maybe 1-3 skills as his primary melee attacks.

2) He never switched weapons during any of our encounters. I only saw him with a long bow in passing later on in the afternoon.

3) He was very fast as I’ve said before and even with all my dodges, speed enhancers, knockback and interrupts I still couldn’t shake away from melee range for more than 1-2 seconds at a time.

4) He ALWAYS had an escape plan using at least 2-3 skills that were either on reserve strictly for escaping or were on very rapid cooldowns so he could use them in rotation on demand.

So yeah, dude was good, stomped me out on multiple occasions but I believe you learn the most from players who are better than you so I kept going back for more in hopes that I’d be able to improve my own skills and builds.

I’ve faced many warriors but I’ve never seen this kind of mobility, speed and condition damage from a Warrior before so it’s certainly got my curiosity.

Any help in nailing down what build you all think he may have been running would be a great help. As I said I know very little about the class so it would take me ages to sift through all the build options to come up with my own best guess.

Hmm condition warriors are not the fastest of the bunch. Maybe he chained sword leap + bullsrush, but that doesn’t gat you that far either. Are you sure he didn’t have a GS in his swap?

It’s possible that he had Greatsword on swap during our duals but the only weapon I remember seeing during his rapid melee bursts was the 1H sword.

I saw him use a longbow ONLY once. It was right after a fast escape when he turned to re-engage after leaving combat. That means he could have just swapped it in from his inventory.

I really wish I’d noted the combat log during our duels so I had more information to present but unfortunately I didn’t think about it at the time. It’s possible he was some kind of Direct Damage / Bleed hybrid as he was pulling in very reasonable direct damage from all those sword slashes.