Guild Wars 2

Hi everyone,
with all the upcoming new E-Spec speculations – and because i’m bored at the moment – i thought to make an espec for the warrior. This is just for fun and I did it for myself, but sharing it with the community is always fun and maybe I can inspire some people to make their own ones.
This espec didn’t start as a warrior espec! I wanted to think of a dervish specialization and by looking at the professions warrior fitted the most for my idea. Thematically the guardian would probably fit better but I’ll stick with the warrior because of various other reasons.

So Warrior: Dervishes an warriors had some similarities back in GW 1. The core-warrior skills wouldn’t seem out of place. And you still have a specific weapon choice fitting the “dervish-theme” (see below).

I tried to think of class mechanic changes, weapon skills, new utilities and traits. All of them are just ideas and some kind of randomly chosen, but I tried to give this profession a “direction”. I also tried to write a bit of lore, but I’m not quite happy with it – maybe there are more creative people out there to come up with a background-story .

In General

E-Spec:
Dervish

Theme:
A melee class with a touch of mystic/magic. Heavy attacks with aoe dmg/ cleave. Focuses on conditions like blind and cripple (earth prayers) or chill (wind prayers). Further it gives warriors access to boon strip. The class has a slightly supercilious character, giving them advantages in fights when they are better than their enemies.
Could even better fit if the next expansion really is going to be in the desert (crystal or elona).

Class mechanic:
Since the dervish gets access to a 2-h-weapon, the change to the class mechanic is rather small.
Of course the staff gets an own burst skill and the core – warrior bursts stay the same.
Additionally: Get access to the enchantment calm before the storm (F2) which consumes your adrenalin and lasts for 8 seconds granting you might and fury. The enchantment ends prematurely when your adrenalin bar is full again. When it ends consume all your current adrenalin and release a force explosion around you dealing more damage the more adrenalin was spent (on activation + ending, so a max of 6 is possible)
[any adrenalin-related traits would proc on activation and ending]

Continued below…

I actually really like this. I do wish they would actually add a weapon type to the game like great axes/scythes/ Pole arms. But I realize that hope is a lost cause. Although I still think they could make spears land usable. In which case those would be good for this. Well thought out though. Thumbs up

Good work. The warrior forum is often the sounding board for other professions. I hope elementalist enjoys the suggestions you’ve made.

From what’s been done thus far, ArenaNet’s dervish policy seems to be to spread it out among the other professions. In vanilla GW2, this was fairly weak – guardians have virtues, which roughly echoed the dervish “enchant-consume” mechanic, mesmers shattering illusions can also be seen as an equivalent if you squint, and necromancer death shroud could be seen as an equivalent to avatars if you squint.

HoT brings in things that are more recognisably dervish-y – the revenant is built around channeling external powers (albeit legends rather than gods), and Glint in particular echoes the enchant-consume mechanic (although more from a supportive approach while core dervish was generally more aggressive with its enchantments). Reaper in particular feels a lot like a grenth dervish translated into Guild Wars 2, particularly when used with a greatsword. However, this is still effectively parcelling out dervish-like builds to multiple professions rather than concentrating them into one.

Moving into the future… I don’t think we’re likely to see warrior dervish. Warriors, to me, feel too physical to serve as a baseline for dervish: a dervish who swaps to a mundane rifle for ranged attacks or who makes use of physical utility skills like Kick or Throw Bolas wouldn’t feel right to me. Incorporations of magic into the warrior would still clearly be a matter of being a warrior first and the magic is an addition (like the berserker’s fire), while the dervish, to me, should be more clearly aligned with magic in their utilities, even those coming from their base profession.

What I could see is:

Guardian with axe mainhand as an analogue to a more Mysticism-based dervish. (Axe is pretty much the only weapon that would fit for a dervish that guardian doesn’t already use – however, the guardian offhand skills all feel compatible with the dervish.)

A succession of necromancer elite specialisations, with the different shrouds as a replacement for avatars. The (supposedly) leaked desert-oriented necromancer spec might fill this category, veering into the theme of an Earth Prayers dervish. I doubt that we’ll have another necromancer spec that’s as melee-oriented as the reaper so soon, though: the desert necromancer may be more along the lines of stealing techniques from the Mordant Crescent.

Revenant possibly, but I think the revenant skills are oriented more towards ‘what fits for this legend’ rather than aiming towards being a substitute for any given profession. So if we get an elite specialisation based on a legendary dervish (Varesh? She doesn’t feel like she was powerful or impactful enough in her own right to earn ‘legend’ status, though), maybe.

As already raised in this thread, the most likely place for the core dervish playstyle to appear seems likely to be elementalist. Dervish was a fairly element-focused profession, and if ArenaNet is considering a genuine melee elementalist (as opposed to dagger elementalist, which is close-in but not really melee), elementalist probably most closely matches the theme, and there are a lot of possible weapons that would fit for the dervish that the elementalist still has open. The pianoesque playstyle of elementalists also seems like a closer match to the cadence of a lot of dervish builds. While dervish didn’t focus on all the elements like elementalist does, GW1 elementalists also generally had to specialise, and elements that weren’t so closely associated with dervish (air and fire: for the first, while dervish has Wind Prayers they largely behave more like water magic, particularly the GW2 iteration of water magic, and regarding fire, some of the Mysticism skills are fire-oriented but more due to the connection between fire and holy than classical fire magic) could be used to provide the specialisation with an attunement that has a bit more range (as water does for daggers) or could just be a new development.