This can pertain to WvW or structured PvP. I’ve been running axe/gs alot recently and trying many new and different builds, mostly in WvW but I’ve been experimenting a little bit in structured as well.
I’ve been running Defense/Discipline/Zerker the most. I understand people also run Strength/Discipline/Defense, or Strength/Zerker/Discipline as common alternatives.
I’ve been really digging Rousing Resilience in the Defense traitline as of late. It has really good synergy with Outrage which can potentially give you almost 100% uptime on the trait as well as a 2.5k heal every 10 seconds. But I find myself having to run Eternal Champion in order to get some stability. It’s a shame because I want the 10% damage from Bloody Roar.
Blood Reaction in the master tier is a no brainer for me. Dead or Alive is just very hit or miss, mostly miss though. It is either you are not in zerk mode and you die, you go into zerk mode activate the trait and you die anyway, or in a less common case it will save your life. It was mostly the former than the latter for me.
I’m rather torn between Smash Brawler and Savage Instinct. On one hand, Smash Brawler is awesome because you can spam primal skills like crazy and it is only on a 10 second cooldown. But I do like the stunbreak on Savage Instinct, which allows me to combo, go berzerk and allow me to immediately hundred blade rather than having to pop outrage.
Berserker is a decent traitline for this build. Gives you fury, quickness, a couple damage bonuses, faster attacks, and alot of stability/stunbreaks not to mention CC like headbutt. But I feel like I’m missing the damage that I really want to see overall. I use Force sigil and Air sigil in the axe to kind of make up for it but I kind of what more out of it. And also not having a lot of fury outside of zerker mode is kind of annoying.
I’ve tried Strength instead of Berzerker it was kind of weird. I felt stronger yes but I feel like non-specializations don’t really make the cut. My attacks were definitely hitting harder, I like the dodge dmg and the greatsword cooldowns. Because you don’t have outrage, I don’t feel like Rousing Resilience is worth taking as you don’t have significant upkeep on it. With Balanced Stance its about a 20% upkeep and with endure pain you don’t always use it as a stunbreaker. But Last Stand isn’t bad as a trait, lengthier stances + vigor + auto-stability. You can probably even forgo Balanced Stance for something more offensive like Frenzy. It felt a bit slowish to me.
I’ve tried Strength instead of Defense and I was like kitten I really like this damage alot. It was more my kind of thing, Reduced greatsword CD’s, damage modifiers up the kitten , etc. However I felt so much more squishier and it would kind of hurt me a lot to the point where it wasn’t worth sacrificing that much sustainability. At that point I went YOLO with the damage and ran Bloody Roar instead of Eternal Champion so I ran balanced stance for my stability. No shield cooldowns which is pretty big, no auto-endure pain which is also big.
I’m also debating which runes to run. I have durability runes on my ascended gear for my Warrior and I run that in WvW. Durability gives you probably the best bang for your buck, toughness/vit/boon duration and also protection on a 20% uptime. Resistance also isn’t bad even though it is only for a second. But anything to deal with condis. Been running that with some boon duration food and it was okay. In PvP I run with Runes of the Pack mostly because of the fury I miss out alot on outside of Zerker mode. Also runes of the scrapper too are decent. I’m tempted to switch back to it on my regular gear but I feel like the survivability loss might be high if I get rid of the Durability Runes.
Was just wondering what kind of builds you guys run with an axe/GS build.
