Guild Wars 2

I’ve seen a lot of comments about stances and suggestions on how to make them feel more like stances you’d see in other MMOs, though a lot of what I’ve seen doesn’t try to deviate much from their current implementation. I’d like to suggest a more drastic change to their mechanics.

I’d like to change warrior stances into a two-part skill, similar to how engineer turrets or guardian summoned weapons work. You would activate the skill once to enter the stance, gaining strong passive effects that last so long as the skill is active. Then you can activate the skill again to BREAK the stance, gaining an increased effect (that would be similar to what you get currently when you use them), but also putting the stance on cooldown. This behavior is also similar to signets, except that only one stance could be active at a time and ideally the passive effects would be stronger to the point of “build defining”. Some of the effects I list clearly take from existing Warrior traits, as my goal is also to take some of the passive sustain we have and move it to more of an active role. Also, forgive me for not including a lot of specific numbers. I’m not going to pretend I’m an accomplished theorycrafter here, I just wanted to throw out some ideas.

Frenzied Stance – Increased attack and movement speed, increased damage received. Burst skills remove up to 2 movement impairing conditions on use (based on adrenaline).
Breaking the stance is a stunbreak that grants drastically increased attack speed at the cost of more increased damage to the player for a short duration (same effect as the current form).

Berserker Stance – Increased adrenaline gain per condition on the warrior. Burst skills refund part of their cost when used. Warrior receives reduced healing from self and other sources while stance is active. Successfully landing burst skills can remove up to 2 damaging conditions (based on adrenaline).
Breaking the stance grants condition immunity. Its duration depends on your current adrenaline.

Balanced Stance – Reduced Stun duration on the player, increased stun/daze duration on their abilities. Reduced movespeed on the warrior. Burst skills refresh existing daze/stun on the target when used at max adrenaline.
Breaking the stance is a stunbreak that causes an aoe knockback on use and grants stability.

Enduring Stance – Player takes reduced damage from direct attacks and gain adrenaline when struck. Player gains less adrenaline from their own attacks. Burst skills grant protection to yourself and nearby allies.
Breaking the stance is a stunbreak that causes the player to be immune to direct damage from a short duration (same as the current endure pain).

Again, try to think of these as replacing some of the passive effects of traits, rather than considering them alongside the same traits. Since you can only have one stance active at any time, typically you’d only run with one of these on your bar. Though there could still be benefit to having multiples and swapping stances based on personal need. I also wanted to associate some risk to using them as well to allow some counter play for each stance.

You know I was thinking the same thing. The thing with stances is there are only 2 traits that help stances one gives vigor I think vigor is a good thing however, stances like endure pain make u invulnerable you don’t need to dodge while using it. Seems like having more dodges is a good thing but stances “stand” seems counter intuitive.

There is another trait the increases duration of most stances by like1 second its hardly worth it since most attacks you will be negating by using a stance do not last longer than the base stance duration. And 1 second doesn’t make or break the stances.

That being said having these weak or useless traits in places that compete with other better traits makes it a no brainier that you are weaker if you take a stance trait that doesn’t help you much if any at all over another trait that helps you clearly more.

This is a reoccurring problem with warriors, we have a lot of useless traits to make it look like we have a lot of traits but these traits are worthless compared to the better ones.

In the past we have repeatedly ask ANET to buff these weaker traits to make them competitive with better ones. Because there is no reason to pick them over something better. That or combine like traits into one, Combine both of the stance traits vigor and the 1 second one to a single trait and mover it to a spot that has a other good traits that forces people to choose.

Problem with that is ANETs idea of forcing people to chose is putting weak traits that are weaker than adept traits in grandmaster spots that people wouldn’t chose even if they were adpet traits because they are so bad.