Guild Wars 2

Hey all, I just hit lvl 80 with my warrior about a week ago. I am trying to do my homework on gearing up and dungeons/WvW/etc.

What I am wondering here is about encounters like the map Silverwastes. I am just starting to build my first Exotic set, thought I would go with a dungeon build first so I can continue to work towards better gear and more money through dungeons and then branch in to WvW.

I just took for granted that I would run my Pure Zerker build in Dungeons and most PvE, and use a Soldiers build for WvW.

My issue is in Silverwastes I just get chewed up like no ones business. Now mind you I have a Exotic Zerker GS, Breastplate, and Pants. Nothing else, and lacking any runes, plus all accessories are like 30 levels old lol.

I am sitting on 40 gold. If I just spend all my gold, gear out a complete set of Zerkers and pick up some good quality food/potions; will I hold my own a little better?

I am using shouts/utilities for condition removals/heals and still just get mowed through in SW. I mean ive completed the Meta and get gold in most all events, but I find myself constantly fleeing to try and cond remove/heal or end up dying in a matter of seconds.

Places like SW be better in Soldiers gear or will I do much, much better dmg if I finish my gear and in return have better sustain if things are dropping much faster?

You can still zerk it but you have to work on active defense, that is dodging. With a greatsword, you have 3 dodges, Whirlwind attack plus your 2 dodges. Unlike other zones, you just cannot face tank the mobs in Silverwastes. You can more or less do it with even lower level trinkets but it will take longer but on the other hand is good training in active defense

Some tips

#Mordrem Husks have very high toughness making them difficult to kill with pure damage alone. If possible, fight them with a couple of others to take them down faster. Husk Slingers are easier to kill as they only have a siege attack. Husk Bashers use a ranged immobilise then rush over for boxing practice. Dodging this is a must, or keep your cleanse available. The tell on this is obvious but when you’re in melee range you need to keep an eye out of their stomp animation. Conditions will kill them faster so you could leave them to condi users

#Thrashers. These guys can shred you if you’re not careful. Their trail causes Torment but can also cause poison and cripple. They also plant themselves in the ground and spawn tentacles from the ground that can be hidden by armour or big characters. When you seem them plant, switch to a ranged weapon and keep moving. Crowd control skills are helpful against them. They should be targets of priority over husks as they can hurt a lot of players in a very short time.

#Menders. These little guys are very weak but have a massive burst heal that can bring them back up to full hp. Luckily when they’re about to heal you can easily interrupt them. Watch for when they spawn with Husks and take them down fast as they can burst heal the Husks as well.

#Wolves. These guys are nasty if they catch you from behind. Their leap attack does a lot of damage if flanking and cripples. Dodges are your friend against these guys. The only way to fight wolves is with burst. Their attack cycle is slow but they run around a lot.

#Teragriffs bashers can be dangerous with their charge attack but they’re easy to dodge. Dropping a cripple, chill or immobilise on them when they’re about the charge will knock them down. Avoid aggroing more than one. If two of them catch you in a cross charge, they will down you fast and they’ll give each other 8 might stacks for a total of 16, which hurts. The basic teragriff uses a ground explosive attack. They’re easy to see because the griff will stop moving and stick its legs into the ground. As soon as they do, dodge towards them and attack, but watch for more of the exploding attacks.

#Trolls. These guys are really nasty. They’re not exceptionally tough but they spawn lots of moving AOEs that can stack a lot of damage in a hurry. I’ve found that if they spawn on the sand, you can jump up on some rocks and the AOEs won’t follow, from there you either range the troll or wait till they get close and melee them. Be careful that they don’t spawn AOEs on the rocks you’re standing on.

Wow, I could not of asked for a better reply! Thanks, I have been getting better at dodge as of late and learning to make sense of whats going on in the mass chaos that is a fort siege at SW.

I think I need to just finish out my gear…I think I under-estimate how much difference having all exotics, as compared to some pieces being rares that are from lvl 67-70, will make. Time to drop the gold and max out.

Thanks again, I am going to use your advice to fight with strategy/tactics instead of just trying to faceroll things. Warrior at endgame suffers a bit because the previous 79 lvls were just mash buttons and win.

I appreciate the tips and safe hunting friend.

I feel that a noteworthy addition to the thrasher info is that leaching thrashers (the ones that plant into the ground) only have two attacks.

Attack one is used when their chosen target is at range, and that is them planting into the ground and performing the aoe tentacle groping on nearby players; this attack will not hit anyone within 300 and something range of the thrasher (it will stop casting it after a few seconds of having no targets.)

Attack two is a large aoe pool that the thrasher drops on its location that will heal the thrasher (and I believe other mordrem inside the aoe) on each pulse if it hits something. They only use this skill when their chosen target is close to them (usually after they’ve just uprooted themselves.) Since most people don’t get up close to fight them, you will likely get aggro on the mob and thus be responsible for making it not aoe heal itself on nearby allies by putting yourself at range when it uproots (you can easily tell if it is aggro’d on you, because it has a large red eye and will be pointing at whoever it doesn’t like.)

This is mostly only relevant when fighting the legendary version of it that can spawn at Blue Oasis, or the champion version/s after and during the Vinewrath event as they can heal themselves a lot on a zerg of players in range of the aoe.

Other useful advice for survival:
- Bring a ranged weapon (I run GS/LB in SW all the time).
- Shake it off is useful for both condition removal and stun breaking. Mobs will knock you down and immobilize you a lot. If you can’t counter that, you’re dead even in full ascended.
- Stay out of hot spots if you are on your own, e.g. don’t stand inside a fort and try to defend it solo while under attack.

Definitely go with your best gear. I have all ascended trinkets and back, and all exotics otherwise, and I still have a hard time there because of all the conditions and burst damage you can take. If you need a bit more survivability, you could use some Valkyrie and Knight pieces, but you also need to be able to hit stuff hard as many of the mobs are level 83 (best to have help too, of course).

I have tried using just melee but I find you just get too many conditions on you if you do that, so I mostly use GS and rifle. I like rifle for skill 5, to create some space if my dodges are used up.

I also use -condi food and +power utilities. Try to get some CC skills on your bar, and make sure to check your traits to make sure they’re optimum for your weapons/skills.

Literally everything can and will make a difference in SW. Going in with blue/green armor is just going to mean you die too fast, then you’re just spending time waypointing and running, which is no fun. If you have karma or WvW badges, you can get exotic stuff with that. Upgrade your trinkets to at least exotic, as with all your armor and weapons.

If you need gold, you could also try to do a bunch of SW chest farm maps first, sell and salvage everything you can to earn some gold.

For the added challenge, I’ve been running a Sinister necro, with a mix of rabid and sinister ascended trinkets (collecting stuff for the remaining sinister gear), AND commanding Breach/VW runs. Although very squishy, the condition / power damage hybrid spread makes her very effective against all mobs in the map.

That’s not to say a Sinister equipped Warrior is the way to go. A zerk warrior, or zerk anything, must pay attention to their environment because they’ve sacrificed all of the passive defense in order to maximise offence. In most other maps, this isn’t a big deal, but SW offers probably the most challenging environment (relatively speaking) for inexperienced zerkers.

Greatsword is handy because of Whirlwind attack, while Forceful greatsword will allow you to gain might as you attack but you really need to keep up the attacks for that to really be useful. Now the problem here is that your best might + vulnerability generator (Forceful greatsword + Rending strikes) is hundred blades which roots you to one spot making you incredibly vulnerable to teragriffs, thrashers and wolves. Also, while you’re channeling HB, you could get hit by slinger rocks and basher immobilises. Interrupting hundred blades reduces your dps output because your final strike does a lot of damage. Arcing slice is your burst skill on GS and hits 5 targets around you. Quite good all in all but if you’re going zerk, you’ll be taking the grandmaster trait Berserker’s Power which puts a flat 15% boost to your damage output with full adrenalin. It doesn’t combine with arcing slice, so you’ll have to make the judgement call whether you want to use your adrenalin or keep it while you’re fighting. However, the nice extra from Arcing slice is that every target you hit has a chance of granting you Fury, which is a 20% increase to your crit chance, and each hit can stack fury duration.

Personally, I’d go Axe / Mace. A/M drops a lot of vulnerability in a hurry, cyclone axe, crushing blow combined will drop 12 stacks of vulnerability on 3 targets, which other players can capitalise on. Combined with the Rending strikes trait gives you can drop a lot of vulnerability quickly. A number of good traits synergise with axe /mace: Dual wielding, Axe mastery in the Strength line and Dual Wield Agility in the Arms line.

Some sigils combinations are meta at the moment,
Fire and Air is the most common one.
Force and Night is another common one, but Night will only be useful half the time
Other commonly used sigils are
Bloodlust (generate stacks on kill up to 25, grants up to +250 more power resets if you go down or swap out the weapon),
Battle (Gain 2 stacks of might for 20s when you swap to the weapon),
Energy (gain 50% of your endurance back when swapping to the weapon).
Strength (60% chance to gain might for 10s on critical with an internal cooldown of 1sec)

However, it never hurts to look for another synergies thatwork well in Silverwastes but not necessarily elsewhere. Superior sigil of impact will boost your damage against knocked down foes by 10% and this synergises well with Tremor (mace #5). The teragriffs automatically get knocked down for 2 seconds when they get hit by cripple, chill or immobolise. With tremor, you can double that to 4 seconds of knock down. This is a lot of damage that can be dished out with an axe especially if you fire off an eviscerate. For example, you could even go something as odd as Intelligence (next 3 attacks crit) /Impact. Swap to A/M, knock down something with Tremor, then Crushing blow, Eviscerate for serious damage. Good for burst but that’s about it XD

Or another odd one, though I wouldn’t recommend it :p , is Superior sigil of incapacitation/Impact. This would work well against teragriffs. Incapacitation has a 60% chance to inflict cripple on critical, which basically gives you a knock down on them when they charge, impact then boosts your damage. And for real oddness, swap to a second set of Axe/Mace with Intelligence/Impact and do the above.

Typical warrior utilities in other areas are usually shouts like For Great Justice and Shake it off. In SW, you have the opportunity to run other utilities. Throw bolas, Bulls’ charge, Fear Me! and Stomp are all good options for helping with crowd control. At times, the mordrem come in big mobs and breaking them up is very helpful. Most warriors will run Banners of strength and/or Discipline but you don’t have to be bound by that stereotype. If you take utilities like Throw bolas or Stomp, then the Physical Training (+100% damage -20% recharge time) trait in the Strength line is a good option to take.

SW is a good place for trying other combinations with warrior simply because the variety of mobs is greater there

I just posted a thread above about the Silverwaste build i run. I have had lots of success with it.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/warrior/Warrior-Silverwaste-build/first#post4853912