Guild Wars 2

Sword + Warhorn and Mace + Shield

Sigil of Energy on both swaps, choice on both off-hands. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

You may choose between Rune of Baelfire or Rune of Water depending on whether the team your fighting is burst heavy or condition heavy respectively.

Role:
1.) Roaming initiator. Best initiator to reach and lock down targets to set up kills.
2.) Support via permanent team regeneration, resurrection, and cleansing slows
3.) Distraction
4.) Can somewhat hold points

10/0/30/30/0

Healing Surge/Mending
Balanced Stance
Signet of Stamina/Endure Pain
Banner of Defense/Discipline/Tactics

Important stuff:

1.) Inspiring Banners
2.) Shield Mastery
3.) Warhorn Mastery
4.) Inspiring Battle Standard
5.) Depending on the people you’re fighting.. Last Stand or Spiked Armor whether you have to trade hits better OR simply survive longer.
6.) Sigil of Energy is extremely important. If you choose any other rune this build will NOT work.
7.) Cleric/Shaman’s Amulet (Tactics Banner), Berserker Amulet (Discipline Banner) or Soldier Amulet (Defense Banner) works fine depending on which one you feel works.
8.) Can swap out Healing Surge for Mending (Switch out Berserker’s Power for Restorative Strength) and Signet of Stamina for Endure Pain if the team is burst damage heavy. Signet of Stamina and Healing Surge are both standard for this build.
9.) Embrace The Pain

Other notes:

1.) Why not shouts? No stability = you can’t bunker. Not to mention the fact that Signet of Stamina is godly in terms of survivability (quicker endurance gain that stacks with vigor) and cleansing conditions.
2.) But shouts heal better. No they don’t because Banners heal A LOT more over time. I don’t have to do the math, just understand that Banners heal better.
3.) What is the main source of survivability and DPS? Sword mobility, Reckless dodge, Glancing Blows, Endurance, Axe 1, Shield Stance, Endure Pain, Banner Regeneration, Adrenal Health, Using Warhorn skills when you have vulnerability on so it becomes protection, NOT EVISCERATE.
4.) What else do I need to know about this build? If someone is close to dead and SPECIALLY if you have a Thief on your team, stun lock with Mace + Shield.

Build:
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-sF-CxBFSKVP0d4kKVQ0;9;49-TT-4;308A48A;1UVk6Cwl6Rk06Rk073Nr

Thank you for sharing this, i like it very much. It is nice to see a build which capitalizes off of what i feel are a few very underrated things, vigor, weakness and banners.

I cant help but imagine you might, for pure wtf/confusion and giggles, set rampage and auto attack with a banner. I have an unusual sense of humor though so take that with a grain of salt. Still, as kitten as Rampage is, it might actually bring something to the table in an oshi-moment. Could actually get away with not using SoR i guess i mean to say. Maybe…if you find yourself going the route of dropping precision anyway.

How long does it last 2v1?

TBH, if you ran a tank-shouts heal hammer + mace/shield, you can usually stall 1v1 almost any class. I haven’t found a way to survive very long 2on1 though, there’s just not enough self heal/damage reduction on warrior to stall 2on1 the way a bunker guardian or ele or even engie can.

Forgot to add, you must have Battle Standard as an Elite because right now with the new re-spawn timers, resurrection skills are IMPORTANT.

2v1 is manage-able. I was able to tank 2 good Ele’s with this build for a good amount of time until their roamer came. So long as you actually spam dodge and keep vigor up because dodge is broken as hell when you have a 24 second shield stance and random mace-blocks, you CAN delay a 1v2. If you have Healing Surge up, you can stun-lock one of the two people you’re fighting so that only one person is dealing DPS on you.

Another thing is… if your Warhorn skills aren’t cleansing poison for some reason, IMMEDIATELY use Signet of Stamina to cleanse poison and THEN use Healing Surge. This is very important because right now poison is a very strong condition.

P.S Believe me, banners make you tank/trade hits better and more reliably than shouts ever will. Try to delay a good Thief without Endure Pain as a shout build and you’ll know what I mean.

Battle Standard and its usefulness:

1.) When coordinating a stomp, you can give team stability to stomp easier every 15 seconds at a 90 second timer. It means you have 4-5 potential free stomps until the banner disappears.

2.) Your team mates can use the banner to coordinate stomps, you’re not the only one who has to use the Banner for stability. Can be used for stability resurrection too if work-able.

3.) Fury, Swiftness, and Might for 90 seconds. Simply BETTER team DPS for 90 seconds because not everyone has access to constant fury (Necros, Thieves, etc).

4.) Resurrection skill meta. With Balanced Stance up, NO ONE can stop you from resurrecting your team every 192 seconds.

Just wondering, have you tested that Vigor stacks with Signet of Stamina? I tested it while ago and Vigor effect just seemed to override Stamina.

Signet of Stamina’s stacking with Vigor isn’t much, but it does stack. I mean the Signet is mainly for condition heavy teams so if you have to swap it out for Endure Pain then don’t hesitate.

Simple timer results:
~10 s to refill one dodge.
~6.7 s with Stamina.
~5 s with Vigor.
~5 s with Vigor and Stamina.

Nice find, going to take note of it.

The problem is still the same. Warrior still lacks natural damage mitigation from burst or conditions. In this build you can’t remove the conditions as effectively. Signet is on a 45 sec cd and warhorn can only do so much. Mending can be used but then you make self recovery even harder just to remove 2 conditions. This is not a defensive shout warriors problem.

I have one old build similar to this but the road still reaches the same dead end as everything else. 1v1 is more controllable but the same goes for a shout warrior. Except you don’t have the shout healing bursts to recover from the Oh kitten moments.

A shout warrior’s utilities are less dependent on what situations he is in, but ready to enter ANY situation(the best a warrior can anyway). Doesn’t need to switch between 2 high cd abilities to try to lower burst or conditions. Both of which won’t help you against a consistent skilled opponent that is focused in one of those categories. It will be difficult to hold off in 2v1. A warrior cannot become a true bunker because of this. We either can do two things.

1) Go full on defense to become more 2v1 reliable, but lack ANY type of offense.

-Which is another problem that the other bunkers don’t have. Being a bunker still requires that you can put pressure on opponents(damage). Relying on dodge too much also can work against you(0 dps). It gives the opponent more time to recover. It won’t help if your team has to come fight full hp opponents(unless they become greatly outnumbered).

2) Cut some defense for offense and only be consistently 1v1 capable. Which is what this current prototype build does. Bunkers need to be more solid than 1v1 capable.

^The above 2 are against skilled opponents that equally know what they are doing.

It is a fun build and one that others should try out. However, still not a hidden jewel that will get Warrior to break passed its flaws. Once you keep trying to push the warrior, you will see where my frustration with the class comes from.

tldr: There is still a gate that prevents warriors from going to where they should be.

edit: Realized I had doubled my response…

^
I said it was a proto-type. Not the most ideal form of build when vitality tree still needs a tweak whether be it giving F2 F3 F4 shouts or banners.

Thanks for the feedback though.

Not sure if you tried but…

Clerics Amulet + Healing Signet + Adrenal Health + Banner Regen can give you a really nice passive for this type of build though. You lose about 6k hp(from soldiers) but it really isn’t missed with the healing boost. Signet can be replaced depending on situation. Though It offers trolling moments to those of lesser more “balanced” dps. If you aim for signet mastery then using the signet also becomes an option. That leans to a more defensive setup though and might cut your dps more than you prefer.

Also, I REALLY think you should not waste time with the tier 3 defense traits. Take balanced stance from tier 2, it is more valuable, if you really want 30 points into defense(for the toughness/healing boosts).

For a banner tanking build I also try going for banner of tactics(10% boon duration), 4 grove runes, and 2 earth runes. Offers a nice protection buff. Being able to use warhorn to convert vulnerability synergize well. Protection is still based on luck, but nice to have the chance to get it.

Banner of Precision is also better than defense in my opinion. The crit chance gain and crit damage boost is more effective. When compared to gaining toughness and vit that won’t make a difference.

Just tested this build in a tournament and it is not good enough. Although perhaps with some balance fixes in the future, it will scale to work. Here are some notes I took from the test.

1.) The condition removal was simply not enough against any decent condi burst class. Rangers and Necros could burn the build down 1v1 and the Warhorn/ Signet of Stamina didn’t cut it.

2.) The dodges were nice and the amount of endurance was quite cool. It did prolong fights against power characters. The setup felt it could compliment another build and was not necessary just for a Bunker.

3.) Because of the amount of stress the class has in tanking 1v2-3, It’s very difficult to use all your condi removal, dodging, and poping cooldowns to survive AND being able to use your weapon skills to fight back. Unlike Guardian, Elementalist, and Engie who have enough control going on to provide complimenting damage to kill someone, This class cannot hope to kill anyone in this build. (I say this against capable players in tournaments. Not just hotjoin )

4.) The Banner Regen is also a tad bit weak. Sure it does provide some healing for players and yourself. But in a team fight and solo bunker, I have never seen it save vs condition damage or power pressure. Damage ticks are simply to high against it and it might have saved seconds. Top it off the amount of healing from Cleric amulet or something similar would just negate vitality and not scale well.

This class just needs more passive survival built into it. The trade off on utility skills to make builds work is just to brutal. Ether you can’t handle stunlocks or you cannot survive condition burst. Hopefully with tweaks in the future, we can see builds like this work.

^
To be honest, I made this thread because I believe the Tactics tree should need a rework and I’d like people to see the real problem with the traits in general. Here is one of the problems. Who in the right would take Defense without Tactics tree at this moment? You can’t even make use of the Healing from Defense unless you trait for Tactics on top of Defense. Hopefully ANET actually takes Warrior’s Tactics tree and Defense tree synchronization to other traits into consideration. Let alone improve the 10-20-30 traits for these trees.

P.S You did use Rune of Earth right? That’s pretty important too. I know one guy who used Rune of Mercy with this build. Played with him and surprisingly he did fine without Rune of Earth. Also, you could have both Mending and Signet of Stamina if conditions are that bad.

I did use Mending heal and Rune of Earth and even Lyssa for SOR condition cleanse :P. The 3k healing loss from Mending hurts and using a heal to remove conditions is a bit ineffecient. I think the passive signet condition removal heal might help, if the heal wasn’t abysmal.

A ability or trait that removed conditions passively would help and maybe create some synergy.

Maybe they need to revert the nerf on Mending. It used to heal a lot more, now it doesn’t. Hell… if it could cleanse 4 conditions instead of 2 that wouldn’t be bad either. Adrenal Health should have scaling with the Healing stat because if you noticed, it doesn’t. It should make sense that Call to Arms should also cleanse Weakness while providing Vigor. Right now it doesn’t but it would be nice to see this in the future.

There is a balance patch coming out on Dec 14. Hopefully we finally get the much needed changes. The “state of the game” video lets me know that Anet is aware that warrior isn’t doing too well against other skilled players.

It only worries me that they inch the balancing process. It’s good, but leaves me worried that warrior might still be left behind for awhile.

Here’s hoping for the best!

Ideally, in order to bunker we need consistent healing and/or protection boon. I doubt they will give us protection since we have high HP as a class.

I do think more healing is possible to give us; maybe some sort of life-leeching trait (would keep in theme as an “aggressive” form of healing instead of passive healing)

I’ve tried all the typical warrior builds (shouts heal + hammer as support/bunker, middle of the road axe/mace – 1v1ish build, condition s/s – anti bunker/kite build, and glass cannon gs – strait blow someone up build) and in the long run, glass cannon gs sadly enough provides the most use, and has less “terrible” match-ups since there’s always a chance you catch someone off guard and/or outplay them and gib them even if you would normally be at a disadvantage.

I like the sound of aggressive Bunker. Sustaining through attacking sounds great. Would be nice if the amount you healed was based on how much damage you deal.. like around 5% wouldn’t be bad.

Update:

Banner of Tactics and Cleric Amulet are viable options too. Just the fact that Banner of Tactics will sometimes not even give boon duration.

Update #2:

You may choose between Rune of Earth or Rune of Water depending on whether the team your fighting is burst heavy or condition heavy respectively.

Update #3:

Banner cool downs are different per person. Technically when Battle Standard banner is active, you have potential unlimited stability stomps if team mates alternate in picking up the banner.

Pros and Cons

Pros:
Permanent Team Swiftness
Permanent Team Vigor
Permanent Team Regen
Initiates fights well
Can hard counter Chill, Immobilize, Cripple with Warhorn 4 for team mates
Converts conditions into boons for allies via Warhorn skills
Great mobility for whenever rotation is necessary
Decent point hold capability
Helps trading hits and reaching targets easier via Warhorn skills, Battle Standard, weakness, and stun lock with Mace + Shield.
Very preferable at mid point Kylho due to Trebuchet and perma-vigor
May have 26 seconds of stability if needed for point holding
(Most unique aspect) For a bunker, it can reset fights VERY EASILY.

Cons:
Zero damage out-put like most bunkers
Can’t heal lords like guardians do
Minimal access to protection
Vulnerable to conditions like most bunkers
CANNOT simply spam dodge. Must know how burst and conditions connect in order to hold points properly.
No AoE CC (Build is mostly a single target focus)
Cannot afford retaliation for the most part even though it looks promising

Retaliation is a pretty sweet boon, but I think that grandmaster trait would be better off with something like:

Dragonskin
Gain 5 seconds of protection when struck by a critical hit. Cannot trigger more than once every 15 seconds.

Under constant fire that’s 25% uptime on protection (a bit more if you have + boon duration). And fits in with the idea of a defensive warrior much better than retaliation, in my opinion.

YojimboJones.6243:

Retaliation is a pretty sweet boon, but I think that grandmaster trait would be better off with something like:

Dragonskin
Gain 5 seconds of protection when struck by a critical hit. Cannot trigger more than once every 15 seconds.

Under constant fire that’s 25% uptime on protection (a bit more if you have + boon duration). And fits in with the idea of a defensive warrior much better than retaliation, in my opinion.

If it gave protection, it would be really strong, some people can get up to 80% boon duration easy in WvW, and around 50% boon duration in PvP. which means we get protection for much longer than 5 seconds (which honestly, i think isn’t too broken, but others would argue that since we have high hp, it would be unfair). I do wish we did have some way to get protection, reliably though.

Still i dont know how broken protection on a warrior would be, not to mention for over 1/3 of the time and more than 1/2 the time in pvp/wvw, which isnt bad i think since it could help with burst. We would still die alot to conditions though.

YojimboJones.6243:

Retaliation is a pretty sweet boon, but I think that grandmaster trait would be better off with something like:

Dragonskin
Gain 5 seconds of protection when struck by a critical hit. Cannot trigger more than once every 15 seconds.

Under constant fire that’s 25% uptime on protection (a bit more if you have + boon duration). And fits in with the idea of a defensive warrior much better than retaliation, in my opinion.

I like that idea even I would prefer it to be another name like Heavy Guard or
Tortoise Aura

^ hehe I think those would be fun names (now if only they can change berserkers might in the strength tree to something more useful =\)

Protection at the end of the defense tree makes much more sense than retaliation (or the broken endure pain) . 5s every 15s, which could result in up to 50% uptime on self protection, is too much IMO

I’d also rather see the option to trigger protection, rather than have it happen automatically, but I can’t think of a skill to link it to that would work well.

I Will Avenge You could do it. It was taken out since it had a rallying effect identical to auto attacking an enemy while the warrior using this shout killed it. Maybe have it grant so much protection to allies based on the number of downed allies in the area?

Vv W.7821:

I Will Avenge You could do it. It was taken out since it had a rallying effect identical to auto attacking an enemy while the warrior using this shout killed it. Maybe have it grant so much protection to allies based on the number of downed allies in the area?

The retun of IWAY? I like how this man thinks.

Seriously though, protection seems like the perfect boon for a warrior in this game. And if you want to bend over backwards to get 80-100%+ boon duration so that way you get a 10 sec protection every 15 seconds AFTER you are crit, I bet that still wouldn’t put a bunker warrior on par with a guardian. Or Ele, or Engineer. But it would bring us alot closer. Still leaves us vunrable to conditions and kiting as we ever were.

Anyways, seems like we are getting off track. I’ll probably try out the OPs build in the next couple of days to give my imput.

Spifnar.4712:

I’d also rather see the option to trigger protection, rather than have it happen automatically, but I can’t think of a skill to link it to that would work well.

I’ve always thought the best way to give warriors non-proc protection would be to remove the “+90 toughness with shield” part of Shield Master with “shield skills grant you x seconds of protection after casting.”

It’d be very strong with lots of boon duration, but to get really high levels of duration you need to mix and match rune sets and with warrior’s extremely heavy reliance on rune sets to manage conditions that isn’t a trivial choice

Gaining 3s of protection when casting your 3s duration shield stance seems pretty bad to me. It’s one of the reasons why I wouldn’t want protection linked to stances.

If they can give the protection at the end of the channel, then I think it would be a great idea

Gonna try this out tonight and see how it goes. Been playing nothing but bunker guardian the last 2 weeks so this will be an interesting comparison.

Hmmmm gotta say i’m pleasantly surprised, its not as bad as i thought. Only played it in pubs so far but i see some potential.

I ran a few variations. went 0/0/30/30/10 instead
Picked up bladed armor for retaliation, and decrease signet cd 20%
mending/balance stance/sig of stamina/banner of tactics/signet of rage
Cleric amulet

First, i gotta say this feels alot closer to bunker ele than a bunker guardian in play style.
Bunker ele can get basically full uptime vigor/regen which is basically what i went for. I went 4 water + 2 monk for an extra 20% boon duration. My goal was to get as close to 100% vigor uptime as possible while affecting my regen uptime, as well as retaliation uptime (bladed armor). My goal is to play this like a bunker ele and have high boon uptime while buying time with dodge rolls to let my regen keep ticking.

Couple things i noted: regen uptime is ridiculous. I was gonna slot in for 20% regen duration instead of the 4 set water bonus (chance for condition removal), but its not needed. Alot of the time i have 30-40 sec of regen duration. Swiftness duration is literally perma, often 2mins+ on it. I added signet reduction time because basically i see absolutely no way to play this as a bunker without signet of stamina. The passive on it is completely wiped out by vigor (they don’t stack, and vigor is stronger) which sucks, but the active is too vital to drop in a bunker. I use mending too, since that isn’t enough condition removal on its own.

Trying to convert vuln into protection is gimmicky imo, too difficult and to reliant on what your opponent does. Most of the time you will be converting bleeds and cripples since that’s the most commonly applied condition.

Banner of tactics seems like the only banner worth using. It gives even more boon duration which was what i was going for, and you can stack even more regen while you are idle. With banner on ground and the current boon duration, it will additively stack up, and you can pick it up and use #2 to accelerate the stacking process. Just standing near it doing nothing for the full duration, by the time the banner ends you will have ~35-40 seconds remaining on regen; its higher if u activate #2 while holding it repeatedly.

Weaknesses of the build: well its still pretty weak to necro. I basically can’t do anything against a necro heh…. damage too low to pressure and after i remove the first wave of marks, the 2nd wave will chip me down. Immobilize is such a pain as well Immobilize absolutely KILLS this build as well, since it stops dodging. If you get stuck in mace/shield and don’t have something to remove immobilize you are in big trouble.

Compared to ele which i felt runs similarly, warrior doesn’t have any mini-heals to sustain between heal skills. For sigil i went Leeching + energy on both sets, leeching is the only way to get a bit of a heal, and this build has no crit so can’t use blood sigil. Heals for i think ~975 on a hit which is better than nothing i guess.

There’s some potential here. I don’t think its tournament viable yet with how inefficient the trait trees are though. Its definitely better than a shout-heal attempt though.

I actually really want a clarification if banner of tactics #2 is bugged or its just tooltip error.

I think if it could heal for even half the amount it currently states, this could very well be viable. (you would have to get used to picking up/dropping your banner, which is something i just trained myself to do the last 2 hrs lol)

Edit: scratch that it does heal, but it heals way less than stated. it says it should heal 4,172 for me with my current healing power, but it only heals 947 instead. without my cleric amulet it was like 684. (so it scales a bit on healing power).

And you know how you deal with a Necro? Incapacitate them via flurry, mace and dodge the marks. At the least, try to predict the marks and Rune of Geomancy because that’s how they get condition combos off.

And immobilize? The problem is people who tried this build hesitate to use Signet of Stamina when you’re immobilized. If you’re immobilize you can tell that you’re going to get burst or mauled by conditions. Usually Signet of Stamina and Warhorn 4 takes care of immobilize.

Also would like to point out that you can use mobility as a form of defense on top of your inherent tankiness.

Banner of Tactics #2 heals for 900s if you spec for healing stat. 4k healing would be too broken.

I do agree that the traits need to be reworked however. People are going to dismiss this build partly due to unattractive traits.

Marks are huge…… they cover basically the entire point. You can easily dodge roll and still end up inside the mark circle at the end of the roll lol. They are unblockable too >_>. At least any necro that isn’t half kitten has that mark trait.

Recently.1043:

Marks are huge…… they cover basically the entire point. You can easily dodge roll and still end up inside the mark circle at the end of the roll lol. They are unblockable too >_>. At least any necro that isn’t half kitten has that mark trait.

But at least if you dodge the marks, you won’t get the conditions. Dodge approaching Necros is very helpful for the most part.

Update:

-Added videos to give an idea on how “Tank” Warriors are supposed to work.
-Renamed thread from Bunker Warrior tPvP prototype to TPvP Tank Warrior.
-Added role

http://www.twitch.tv/blacktruth009/b/352188271 Go to 29:00 mins for Kylho match, coordinated team vs. a non-coordinated team (my team had no range or AoE, both which are essential for the tourny meta)
http://www.twitch.tv/blacktruth009/b/352199901 Pub-stomping but gives an idea on basic stuff

2nd video 34:42

Nice build, I’ve tried similar variations, but timing the horn blasts to gain protection is a neat idea, I’m going to try it.

The only thing I’d suggest would be to try going 0/0/20/30/20. You give up Reckless Dodge, Restorative Strength and Spiked Armor, but you gain Signet Mastery (Signet of Stamina down to 36 seconds), Fast Hands and Mobile Strikes. So, with FH you can really take advantage of those Sigils of Energy; and MS means that you’re breaking immobilize with Shield Bash every 20 seconds, and with Savage Leap every 8 seconds. I know Reckless Dodge is a big part of the plan, but your build could really leverage MS.

Mobile strikes is for glass cannon to be honest. If you’re a tank you’re supposed to have 30 points in defense and tactics for an optimal set-up. You already have the Warhorn team slow cleanse so I don’t really think Mobile Strikes is going to make things any better.