Guild Wars 2

Hello, I don’t post here often but I do read the forums a lot, usually after build ideas or advice.

As I couldn’t find any decent consensus on what would make a good general PvE content build. Something you can have fun with running open world content, fractals, dungeons and the like. I thought I’d have a bash at making something myself.

Build here

What I wanted this build to do:

1. Move quickly across distances when travelling around for me and my party.

• Warhorn provides a longer swiftness duration than its cooldown.

2. Buff party when in world events or dungeons

• Banners
• Empower Allies trait
• Warhorn skills

3. Deal a reasonable amount of damage

• Assassin/Berzerker equipment
• High critical hit chance – deep strike + runes & sigils gives almost 75%
• Deals extra damage to foes with conditions
• Might stacking on criticals with the Greatsword

4. Not be a total glass cannon

• Traited quite heavily into tactics
• Healing signet + inspiring battle standard for lots of regen
• Stun breaker + condition removal on signets with reduced cooldowns

A couple of notes on my choices of gear. I’m not the richest player in the game, I don’t yet have access to maxed out ascended everything so I went with exotic gear for the most part. Ascended trinkets are easy enough to get hold of though. I picked runes of the pack as they aren’t the most expensive and help with my swiftness duration, power and precision. I chose my sigils the same way, water & purity are cheap as you like and help fill a blind spot in self condition removal.

Unfortunately I’ve not yet taken the plunge to buy all the gear and test it yet. My current warrior is a Sword/Sword condition build so will need a totally new set of equipment. I just thought I’d float the build here first to get some feedback.

I’ve been running the meta axe/axe full berserk gear for a while now. Haven’t encounter anything I couldn’t do yet.

Even got lots of praise for my DPS decked in exotics.

Try this instead if you’re interested in being as supportive to groups as possible whilst still being relevant in PvE. You don’t need to have the mace either, you can swap it to whatever you situationally need, be it a warhorn/sword/mace. Take advantage of being ooc.

Disclaimer: Strength sigil is ideal for PS builds only and shouldn’t be used otherwise.

I went and made my original idea last night. Actually works pretty well.

I like your idea of using Phalanx strength to capitalize on the insane amount of might you can already stack on yourself and give it to your party. I might try swapping that in and out depending on whether I need more offense or defense from inspiring battle standard.

Sigils was one thing I wasn’t really sure of. I went for the accuracy and condi removal/healing on my original build partly because they seemed to support what I wanted to do and partly because they are cheap. The same can be said for runes of the pack, it was investment enough for me to drop 20g into a set of pack runes while strength/hoelbrak ones are 5x the price.

I stuck with Assassin’s armour since I lost less than 100 power overall and gained about 5% critical hit chance, plus the material available to me saved me some gold since I was already making zerker weapons and trinkets using up all my powerful blood.

I will have to check out the skill changes and trait switches mentioned and see how they feel. I can see how using the strength runes FGJ is going to keep 6 stacks of might on the party most of the time on its own. I do like that dropping deep strike for rending strikes actually nets more precision when using standard of discipline, i’m just sometimes too lazy to drop multiple standards in short encounters (this is more a case of me knowingly playing badly rather than maximizing my build so bit of a moot point)

Thanks for your input Purple Miku, you’ve given me some points to think about.