Guild Wars 2

Er-mah-gurd!

I feel like some of these changes were almost designed around making Skullcracker viable!

Mending being a Physical skill means that we will hopefully be less beholden to the evil Cleansing Ire.

Unsuspecting Foe a MINOR trait?! Please leave the % as is :P.

Every Shield/blocking trait as one? Yes please!

Might on Distracting Strikes might be interesting. Even without being speced into condi dmg with all of your blocking giving might the Confusion will probably still deal decent dmg. It’ll hopefully give the build much needed damage between Skull Crack +100b combos.

Factor that into Sundering Mace applying Vuln after stunning that will probably make the main combo hit even harder.

The major potential pitfall is Adrenaline gain, but we’ll see. There was other stuff I was hyper about too but it went by so fast so I’ve gotta wait Dulfy uploads everything.

No “Fast Healer”, Mes and Necro stole the res speed trait

Renn.8241:

No “Fast Healer”, Mes and Necro stole the res speed trait

…doesn’t really affect Skullcracker in any way. It might also be baseline now.

OK, so after looking over all of the traits I’m cautiously optimistic about the future of Skullcracker.

You would be specing into Strength, Defense, and Discipline. I see a few different options in terms of trait choice. One is focusing on pure DPS and might stacking and one is more hybrid.

Strength: Physical Training – Body Blow/Forceful GS – Distracting Strikes

Defense: Shield Master – Any trait depending on focus – Sundering Mace

Discipline: Warrior’s Sprint – Brawler’s Recovery – Either Burst Mastery or Heightened Focus (only if the new quickness applies to a 100b that has already been activated)

HOWEVER, and this is HUGE, the placement of Unsuspecting Foe isn’t good.

It’s cool that it become a minor trait, but it being in the Arms tree is counterintuitive for a Mace build. Most of the other traits in Arms to not benefit Mace in any significant way. Arms is more of the Sword line.

My solution would be to either merge Unsuspecting Foe with Building Momentum. Building Momentum is so weak atm I don’t think many would care if it disappeared entirely. The Arms Spec could use a trait that actually synergizes with the other minors.

You do realize that you can only have 3 specializations / trait lines right?

It’s either Strength Arms Defense OR Strength Defense Discipline. Arms Defense Discipline is probably okay but I’m not going to pick that over STR DEF DISC.

You lose fast hands over unsuspecting foe, it will make your rotations awkward.

Also I’m excited about Rampage and how it will work with Skullcracker builds:

“Physical skills have a new thing where if your endurance is above 50% they are more effective…. Rampage and Mending are now physical skills.”

and I assume it stacks with Physical Training, making Rampage deal +150% DMG at full adren.

Stun combo into 2k auto attacks from Rampage?

UncleDolan.9430:

“Physical skills have a new thing where if your endurance is above 50% they are more effective…. Rampage and Mending are now physical skills.”

This looks designed to try and get people to take enough defensive abilities that they can ‘stand and take it’ more often rather than dodging constantly.

You can already build for that. Most of my characters can stand through two big hits before having to dodge the third. But it comes at a DPS cost.

Many zerk builds can’t even stand through one hit.

This change might encourage a middle ground between these extremes. A ‘sweet spot’ where having “just enough” defense to stand through one more hit actually leaves you with more DPS than always dodging and going glass.

If that actually does occur, that will free up just enough points for some build variety in the ‘meta’.

But… it probably won’t be enough of a DPS boost to do this, or it will be too much of a boost, and unbalance play in the other direction…

BlackTruth.6813:

You do realize that you can only have 3 specializations / trait lines right?

It’s either Strength Arms Defense OR Strength Defense Discipline. Arms Defense Discipline is probably okay but I’m not going to pick that over STR DEF DISC.

You lose fast hands over unsuspecting foe, it will make your rotations awkward.

Did you not read the post above yours at all? I said that it was an issue. It just needs to be brought up often enough so that they consider changing it. UF doesn’t fix in the new Arms Spec anyways since the other minors in that line are bleed focused.

Distracting strikes is cool and all but it seems like it’d be more suited to building around interrupts only, such as hammer + mace/shield. Berserker’s power, on the other hand, looks like Khorne’s gift to skull crackers. A 20% damage boost for 10 seconds right after you skull crack someone is insanely good, especially combined with the extra 10%’ers you get from forceful greatsword and stick and move.

I’m really really looking forward to running 6/0/6/0/6 condi (or hybrid) interrupt build with Hammer/Mace+Shield. It’s going to be awesome. I really like the changes. Can’t wait to jump ontop of people in WvW.

BurrTheKing.8571:

HOWEVER, and this is HUGE, the placement of Unsuspecting Foe isn’t good.

It’s cool that it become a minor trait, but it being in the Arms tree is counterintuitive for a Mace build. Most of the other traits in Arms to not benefit Mace in any significant way. Arms is more of the Sword line.

My solution would be to either merge Unsuspecting Foe with Building Momentum. Building Momentum is so weak atm I don’t think many would care if it disappeared entirely. The Arms Spec could use a trait that actually synergizes with the other minors.

I got to disagree on this one. Unsuspecting Foe might indeed mainly be associated with Hammer and Mace. However, claiming it to be necessary for those weapons at all times is rather historically than actually true.

If you want to go condi (interrupt) Hammer/Mace, you will go 6/0/x/x/6. If you want to go power Hammer/Mace you will go 0/6/x/x/6. Since Strength no longer provides a stat bonus there is no reason to go for it in such a power build. We have to free ourselves from the restrictions the current trait system dictates. You won’t need the Bleeds from Body Blow and you got enough Weakness on Mace/Hammer anyway. Personally, I see it as a fair trade off.

That aside, Unsuspecting Foe quite obviously is a crit trait and therefore fits the theme of Arms way better than Strength. As mentioned above, a power build has great use for it when placed in Arms.

I still disagree. I don’t see anyone attempting to do with a condi Mace/Hammer build. There’s just not enough cover condis that deal damage that make it worth the effort. Also, I have never been able to make a Mace/Hammer build that did not run into major issues with kiting or anyone with stability. At least with Skullcracker with Hydro on the GS you have ways to deal damage and use 100b when they have stability up.

Also, the trait IS pretty mandatory for Skullcracker. I’ve tried running with other traits but the DPS is always lower on the main combo as opposed to using UF. Not only that, the new Sundering Mace also synergizes well with it. Other than that 1 trait though, there’s not much reason to invest in Arms. Strength and its access to Distracting Strikes is much more appealing.

While I understand the mentality, the other 2 minors deal with bleed, yet UF deals with stuns? Most of the time minors agree with each other thematically.

An ideal and viable Skullcracker would play out like this:

• You have been interrupting your foe and blocking, gaining might and applying Confusion.

• Your Skull Crack interrupts your target and gives you more Might.

• You swap to GS and start using 100b.

• Due to UF every hit crits, as a result Forceful GS gives you more might and Sundering Mace applies Vulnerability.

Without UF, the whole thing deals much less damage. There’s no room to go into Arms for the trait.

Unsuspecting foe is in a bad spot. Sadly, no skullcracker will sacrifice a whole tree just for one minor trait, even though it is essential for the build. The Arms tree seems to be design just for sword and unsuspecting foe is practically useless for sword builds. Even though Unsuspecting foe is a precision base trait, I think it would be best to move it to Strength and replace Building Momentum with Unsuspecting foe. This will help preserve the current skullcrack builds and make it more viable against new metas.

BurrTheKing.8571:

I still disagree. I don’t see anyone attempting to do with a condi Mace/Hammer build. There’s just not enough cover condis that deal damage that make it worth the effort. Also, I have never been able to make a Mace/Hammer build that did not run into major issues with kiting or anyone with stability. At least with Skullcracker with Hydro on the GS you have ways to deal damage and use 100b when they have stability up.

That’s more of a playstyle thing. I quite obviously main Mesmer. I do play an interrupt build and I play it with a very in-your-face-style. OH Sword requires you to be close to your enemy to interrupt the right skills. The only gap closers I got are my Stunbreak (Blink) and Illusionary Leap. I rarely fight at range even though I run Staff. I really don see why H/M+Sc should fail at the same thing while having, Cripples, two Leaps and Warriors Sprint.

You don’t need cover conditions that deal damage. You will have two damaging conditions – Bleed and Confusion – and you will have Vulnerability and Weakness as cover conditions. And you will be able to reapply all of those quite frequently. It is pretty similar how Guardians work right now. You could also go Mending + Physical training and exploit Balthazar Runes for Burning although this might be less appealing when they change how Burning works.

When it comes to Stability: Yes, it is an issue. However, there are few cases where there is so much Stability floating around – especially since it is now a stacking boon – that it invalidates your whole build. Also, when running M/Sc you got quite some defenses you can pop untill the opponents Stability runs out.

BurrTheKing.8571:

Also, the trait IS pretty mandatory for Skullcracker. I’ve tried running with other traits but the DPS is always lower on the main combo as opposed to using UF. Not only that, the new Sundering Mace also synergizes well with it. Other than that 1 trait though, there’s not much reason to invest in Arms. Strength and its access to Distracting Strikes is much more appealing.

That’s why I said that you’ll go 0/6/x/x/6 for power. Because it makes sense there. But you don’t need it in a condi set up. There are plenty traits in Arms which work well with power.

BurrTheKing.8571:

While I understand the mentality, the other 2 minors deal with bleed, yet UF deals with stuns? Most of the time minors agree with each other thematically.

UF deals as much with crits as it deals with stuns, though.

BurrTheKing.8571:

An ideal and viable Skullcracker would play out like this:

• You have been interrupting your foe and blocking, gaining might and applying Confusion.

• Your Skull Crack interrupts your target and gives you more Might.

• You swap to GS and start using 100b.

• Due to UF every hit crits, as a result Forceful GS gives you more might and Sundering Mace applies Vulnerability.

Without UF, the whole thing deals much less damage. There’s no room to go into Arms for the trait.

The rotation you mentioned is how it used to work. But why shouldn’t there be any new ‘Skullcrack’ builds? That aside, I guess you will just have to make some trade-offs somewhere. Do you want the Might and cooldowns on GS or do you want the crit chance against stunned foes? You could also easily sacrifice Sundering Mace, really. On the other hand, the new Mening might compensate at least a little bit.

Of course, 6/6/0/0/6 would be glassy as hell. But thats what going all offense means. You are asking for ‘getting it all’ for one very specific build and I doubt you can convice the devs to go for it.

It’s not about “getting it all” it’s about “being useful in any way.”

The one reason to take Mace over hammer is the extra sustain it brings. your role would be to set up spikes on high value targets. Having to make any tradeoffs means that the current Skullcracker DPS will either remain the same as it is now or become weaker.

Taking 6/6/0/0/6 would be terrible because you lose Sundering Mace AND Shield Master which are the key points of the build. If you go 0/6/6/0/6 you lose All the nice new physical skills and Distracting Strikes which have a ton of synergy with the set. 6/0/6/0/6 is the optimal setup no matter how you look at it.

Also, as Doon said Arms is basically tailor made for Sword and in some cases Axe/Mace or Axe/Axe builds. Those sets have little to no use for the trait.

My old skullcrack build was 06503, or some variation thereof.

The main thing that would kind of screw my build a bit with the proposed changes is that forceful greatsword would be moved to the strength line instead of arms. I kind of need unsuspecting foe in order to get my 100% crit chance on the skull crack→100b combo. However, they ended up making it a much more condi focused trait line (the arms, that is).

So perhaps I’ll just have to go into strength and try to find some other way to compensate for the loss of crit chance. I guess my total precision might be higher due to the way stats are going to work (completely gear based now), so that could help out a bit I suppose.

Unsuspecting foe is a bit odd in a condi-focused line though. The condition options for warriors don’t really include stuns, so you’d either need to make some sort of hybrid CC/condi build (i.e. distracting strikes build) or rely on team composition to really make the best use of it. Though if they rolled it into the strength line, perhaps that could be a little too potent?

But it seems like skullcrack builds should more or less be very functional after the changes go through, perhaps even more powerful than they currently are.

I used to use the same trait loadout as you Yamsandjams.3267. I think the only reason we even used the Arms line was for UF and Forceful GS. The other minor traits are generally less useful since they’re bleed focus. They best you can hope for is that you randomly proc a bleed early into the combo to get that extra dmg. Even then I would rather have the damage on dodge for blind clear and the damage bonus when Endurance isn’t full because I’m more in control of that than hoping I get enough bleed to make the trait worth using.

My current version actually prioritizes sustain over damage. Although, I found that with Furious Reaction and Pack Runes you really don’t lose that much damage. I’m thinking of maybe dropping DotE for 1 more point in arms which with Fury means the main combo still has over 90% crit chance but with way more sustain. That being said vs Eles and Guards DotE can be super useful.

Back on topic, you’re right that Arms is clearly more condi focused and I think there’s more viability in Skullcracker than any sort of build that either focuses entirely on CC like Mace/Hammer or some crazy Hammer + Sword hybrid. No matter what happens someone’s build is gonna die, but for a brief time Skullcracker was really strong and I think with UF replacing Building Momentum it could be again. Heck, Strength is the line with Physical Training so there’s way more synergy there because many Hammer or Mace builds also bring at least 1 Physical skill, especially since it’s sadly no longer possible to just dip into Tactics for Leg Specialist.

You’re right though that it might be too strong at 50% as a minor trait, but in Arm it’s going to see very little use.

BurrTheKing.8571:

I would rather have the damage on dodge for blind clear

Hey Burr, can you explain this?

Because this trait only removes blinds when you dodge into melee range so it miss the dodge-attack on someone, only then it removes blind..

So it doesnt work if you dodge back (away from someone) the dodge-attack still triggers ofc.. but because you dont hit something (so you dont miss also)

So in the end its just faster to Auto attack for removing a blind compared to a dodge (wasting a dodge.. and the radius is so small that most of the time it doesnt removes the blind also)

I find this trait kinda meh.. if only they could increase the range a little bit..

nicknamenick.2437:

BurrTheKing.8571:

I would rather have the damage on dodge for blind clear

Hey Burr, can you explain this?

Because this trait only removes blinds when you dodge into melee range so it miss the dodge-attack on someone, only then it removes blind..

So it doesnt work if you dodge back (away from someone) the dodge-attack still triggers ofc.. but because you dont hit something (so you dont miss also)

So in the end its just faster to Auto attack for removing a blind compared to a dodge (wasting a dodge.. and the radius is so small that most of the time it doesnt removes the blind also)

I find this trait kinda meh.. if only they could increase the range a little bit..

Reckless dodge can allow you to be hit by the blind from something like Blackpowder applied by a D/P Teef AND avoid their burst. Count to 2 (they get stealthed for 3 but sometimes they go early so 2 is safer I find) after the Heartseeker and dodge backwards. You generally cleanse the blind and put yourself in a good counterattack position if you’re using Mace or Hammer. Atm I can’t afford to put any points in strength so besides the UF placement the changes are nice.

Other uses would be dodging at a Mediguard right at the start to break their Aegis or one of their Shield charges. It lets you make your defensive action an offensive one as well. One problem you can run into on Skullcracker is making sure you have enough damage when you aren’t using your main combo. The Forceful GS merge will help on this as well.

The uses might seem limited but when I run Greatbow they can be super helpful vs other zerkers. The radius is also 180 which is 50 units larger than melee and I think it’s a AoE rather than directional.