Guild Wars 2

So to start off with, I run a condition build for WvW – http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIEQNAT8ejcOxwNP+OMRCEUBswUwIOPSCqg8SKOjBE-j0xAINBZaRgoKw5wioxWNLiGr6GTHTEVDA-w

It’s all good and fun standing on the walls and dropping fire from the skies when the barbarians are at the gate but I’m getting somewhat bored of it, so I’m switching over to a direct damage build and at the same time going from defensive to offensive – http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQNBkYDbkzJGuGy5hJOgceQFBI5pU0G2RSRZwGA-jUCBYLCyEEAJQFRjtsNsVXBp8KaKGY6TER1eDFRrGA-w

Armor/trinkets is a mix between Knight/Cavalier to get a decent-ish balance between Toughness and Crit rate/damage. Zerker weapons just for the extra damage

Runes are for boon duration, allowing for perma-fury and swiftness with SoR, as well as perma-vigor from Warhorn when needed.
With Fury from SoR I feel less reliant on FGJ, so instead using Frenzy for quick burst.
Condition removal through “Shake it Off” and Warhorn/Quick Breathing
Balanced stance for stability as well as all 3 utilities being stun breakers.
Piercing from Arms VII somewhat negates the lack of AoE and with Arms XI it allows for fast Adrenaline building.

Thoughts/opinions/suggestions/criticisms?

Personally I wouldn’t waste the rune slots for boon duration for just fury and vigor considering we already have 100% uptime between SoR and FGJ. Vigor is nice and all but I only use warhorn as a switch for my shield for keeping swiftness up. it’s not that good atleast not better then a stun and 3 seconds of blocking/reflection.

Well the boon duration also keeps swiftness up permanently if I’m roaming, meaning I can save the Warhorn for condition cleansing. Being able to have Vigor up is just a bonus.

Also with Fury at 100% means I don’t need 2 utilities (SoR & FGJ) so that frees one utility slot up for Fenzy.

But I can also see the perks in what shield offers, so I can always drop Warhorn for Shield, take points from Discipline and put into Defense for Missile Deflection, using Shrug it Off to (somewhat) compensate for condition removal, and still maintaining the boon duration.

Ends up something like this – http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQNAU8ejcOxw1QOPMRCEUBs48gKCQyTVwOSKKjBE-jUCBYLCyEEAJQFRjtsNsVXBp8KaKGY6TER1eDFRrGA-w

Thoughts?

Edit – although personally I think an AoE Weakness/Swiftness/Vigor and condition removal is more useful than a 1sec stun/3sec block

Your build concepts show good intuition and it’s crazy how similar the warhorn build is to mine. As a warhorn user with stances and SoR I can fully vouch for the warhorn + boon runes. They’re a pretty sweet package! You’ll find yourself appreciating the permanent swiftness and the vigor helps a lot as a warrior. The boon duration also helps your Signet of Rage to where the Signet Mastery trait isn’t even necessary. The warhorn is an amazing offhand weapon that, when traited, synergizes extremely well with Empowered since you’ll always be running with several boons at once, not to mention the ones you get when converting conditions applied to you. Those can not be ignored or underestimated.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Quick_Breathing

Due to the sheer amount of vulerability thrown around in wvw I find myself having protection throughout most fights I encounter. You also obtain a hard counter boon to whatever condition it is you’re dealing with usually so it’s a favorable setup regardless.

I think warhorn helps smooth the gaps in a warrior profile and saves you from needing to take many traits and utilities such as Restorative Strength, Dogged March, Shake It Off, or – God forbid – Warriors Sprint. Instead, you get the freedom to use them as added insurance or to simply choose other traits and abilities to extend your potential in combat.

With warhorn I greatly recommend staying 15 points into Discipline as you’ll find yourself needing – or even just wanting – to swap to warhorn often to transform conditions.

By the way, you may already be aware of this but it’s worth repeating that the CC clearing the warhorn 4 applies occurs before it converts conditions when traited, so you get to almost wipe the slate if you’re getting CC’d on top of other things like bleeds, etc..

I agree about the shield, btw. The warhorn doesn’t provide “hard” utility like the shield but you can make up for that by switching out Shake It Off with Endure Pain (In fact, SIO can be ignored entirely with your build suggestion). Endure Pain is not as flexible as block but it does save you when you need it and combines with the warhorn skills really nicely. You lose out on a stun by skipping shield but you also obtain a blast finisher on warhorn 5 that shouldn’t be ignored, especially if you find water, ethereal, or light fields. Speaking of which, warhorn beats shield hands down when it comes to group play. A traited warhorn applies all its abilities to your team mates around you and that includes converting conditions. People will love you and it makes travel feel effortless for everyone.

continued…

If you’re escaping, you can just pop Balanced Stance and use your horn and sword leap to ensure a swift and comfortable ride. This is also really useful for getting inside keeps when they’re being taken and you need that extra push to survive when getting immobilized or chilled. As a matter of fact, Balanced Stance is wonderful with boon runes. If you’re crazy like me you can even toy with Sure-Footed to get it to almost 16 seconds. It’s hardly necessary but when you have a single utility that grants you stability almost 40% of the time you’re doing pretty good. Sure-Footed also helps Endure Pain and Frenzy (if only by a second or so, but still). Regardless, with 12.75s stability and convenient condition clearing I’d say you’re pretty set for defense.

I recommend a Sigil of Energy on the warhorn in your build. I imagine you’ll be swapping to sword and warhorn mostly for defensive purposes so it’s just another way of enhancing what it provides you. Also think about getting a Sigil of Generosity for your sword. That’s a really good one and with the crits you’ll be making all the time it complements the warhorn to keep conditions off you while applying them to your enemies!

With boon runes you can also stack a lot of might if you stick with For Great Justice. It’s a bit redundant with SoR but it can guarantee a lot of extra damage all the time. Just something to think about.

Since you have two cripples available with your build (rifle 2, sword 3) you might be interested in swapping out Empowered for Leg Specialist. It gives you back the immobilization that you’ll miss from losing longbow 5 for a rough 6%-10% trade-off in damage. With a cripple on each weapon set you’ll always have a means of stopping somebody which is gravy. This can help with keeping people at a distance with the rifle and will just severely frustrate opponents when combined with Rifle Butt. It also benefits Kill Shot for obvious reasons, heh. By the way, you will likely want to use Frenzy with rifle because many good players will time their rolls to dodge the Kill Shot. With Frenzy it gives you an opportunity to speed up the delivery which can and often will mess with people’s expectations. Something to keep in mind.

Here’s my build in case you are interested:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQNBiODbkzJGuFS2hJSAgU8FXmCFpU0mbJFixGA-jEDBYMCyEHw0HAEBQJQFRjtsNsVXBp8KaabYqTLqW5CwbYR1SBExYA-w

I have a peculiar build… I roam with a close friend who has a Guardian and it’s like peanut butter and chocolate. I use burst skills a lot and I have a Sigil of Intelligence for a guaranteed crit on eviscerate when swapping back to axe. Warhorn is an enormous help with my lack of mobility between axe and hammer so I imagine you’ll do really well combining it with sword. It’s also just a fun and unique play style.

Wow, that’s quite the wall of text there, thanks for the feedback!

Yeah the Warhorn does seem to cover a lot that would normally need to be traited for, allowing me to amp up the damage output.

Agreed the 15 in Discipline is just about a must for WH, but seeing as none of the minor traits in Strength, Defense or Tactics are really that awe inspiring for the last 5 points I just put the full 20 into Discipline.

Will experiment with swapping SIO for some other utilities like Endure Pain as I have no particular preference to it, more condition removal along with a stun break on relatively short cooldown just seemed like a good choice.

I did consider Sure Footed, but I’d be lowering my builds efficiency somewhat (taking points from Arms means sacrificing the faster Adrenaline building from Furious and taking points from Discipline means lowering crit damage as well as either crit chance or sigil cooldown which negates the perma-boon) for a few extra seconds of Stability, so decided against it.

As for FGJ, while the extra Might would up my damage output, I think Frenzy will be more effective for the build over-all (as you pointed out, most notably for Kill Shot but also Volley for a quick burst) so I prefer Quickness over the extra 105 Power.

I like the suggestion of Leg Specialist. I’ll be testing out the damage gained from Empowered, if negligible enough I might just trade out for LS. Having 3 sources of Immob (#3 being from Flurry) seems like a pretty handy feature.

Again, thanks for the feedback!

I’ve been there done that with the above specs. I just can’t seem to switch to it full time because of the versatility and overall effectiveness of my current layout. This layout is certainly not unique or anything but the rune package coupled with dogged march and food I find myself to be a truly effective MOBILE warrior without a warhorn, mobile strikes, or boon duration runes.

Runes: Melandru
Gear: Knights, berserker trinkets
Weapons: Greatsword, Longbow
Spec: 10/20/20/10/0 for 1200 longbow range, or 10/20/30/0/0 for spiked armor or endure pain, or 10/20/20/0/10 for more crit chance.

Pros:

1. free’d up utility slots – no balance stance because of trated last stand. No cure condition utility because of dogged march, lemongrass, and melandru runes.
2. Greatsword offers the best mobility in combat you can find. A notch further would be sword mainhand as offset but range is so key in open warfare. Rush, whirlwind are saviors. I counted 5 times last night in open warfare where 10+ people jumped me on a flank and I escaped with just those two skills while the snares fell off me in less than a second.
3. Necros, engineers are cake. No conditions sit on me. Heck, I put up a fight against pistol/dagger thieves who think I’m easy mode.
4. Healing Surge can be used which guarantees you to open with an f1 bow shot. You don’t need to use Mending because of the condition removal setup. Alternatively (see below) you can use Signet of Fury which gives you a full adrenaline bar in the third utility slot because of the freedom to choose that third slot.

Cons:
1. Not a lot of mitigation besides the condition removal – shield would be a great offset but I can’t give up the greatsword.

Utilities: FGJ, Bulls Charge, and whatever you want in the last spot. I typically run lately with either Stomp or Fear Me to get the thief out of their safety bubble after a hide in shadows, or frenzy, or endure pain.

Dedlaw.9130:

Well the boon duration also keeps swiftness up permanently if I’m roaming, meaning I can save the Warhorn for condition cleansing. Being able to have Vigor up is just a bonus.

Also with Fury at 100% means I don’t need 2 utilities (SoR & FGJ) so that frees one utility slot up for Fenzy.

But I can also see the perks in what shield offers, so I can always drop Warhorn for Shield, take points from Discipline and put into Defense for Missile Deflection, using Shrug it Off to (somewhat) compensate for condition removal, and still maintaining the boon duration.

Ends up something like this – http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQNAU8ejcOxw1QOPMRCEUBs48gKCQyTVwOSKKjBE-jUCBYLCyEEAJQFRjtsNsVXBp8KaKGY6TER1eDFRrGA-w

Thoughts?

Edit – although personally I think an AoE Weakness/Swiftness/Vigor and condition removal is more useful than a 1sec stun/3sec block

By the way, without Mobile Strikes or the Melandru/Hoelbrak/Lemongrass/Dogged March setup, I find the lag of switching weapon sets and the time it takes to literally blow the warhorn #4 takes too long to get rid of whatever it is that has pinned you down. On paper it sounds good but in practice (at least from my experience) it doesn’t meet my needs.

I like your build, and quite honestly the condition removal builds are becoming more and more frequent which is one of the reasons I’m switching over ^^.

There are a few things I dislike though (mostly just personal preference things):

Agreed you freed up a utility be trading Balanced Stance for Last Stand, but the cooldown on LS is double that of BS. Also LS is triggered automatically, and (although it’s unlikely to happen often) it could be triggered when you don’t want it to, resulting in you losing out on Stability for the next 90s.

By trading in the boon duration for condition reduction, you lose out on the perma-fury (unless you use FGJ but that then costs you a utility slot) as well as perma-swiftness. While I agree GS is probably the most mobile weapon Warrs have and (as in your example) I can see the usefulness it can have, but outside of combat swiftness trumps that mobility (and lets face it, there’s a lot of roaming to be done in WvW). Also, Warr was my first main and I mostly played as a GS Warr. I’m honestly just tired of it.

And our team support seems to be in different directions – where my build provides condition removal, Swiftness and Vigor buffs as well a Weakness on enemies, yours provides Might, Fury and a Fire field. Mine’s more defensive where yours is offensive.

Other than that all I can really criticize is you have a lack of stun breakers from you’re choice in utilities (although you still have the 3rd slot if need be).

So like I said, I think it’s a good build but due to personal preference I don’t think I’d enjoy it that much

All great points and preference.

I typically run endure pain for the stun break as a third utility.

I am not in a group type setup as I am a solo roamed so not as worried about group support.

I carry a warhorn and switch out regularly while roaming and I’m ok with that approach as a trade off. That coupled with rush and whirlwind and I get around fine.

Separate note: I do have an armor set with three sets of boon duration runes and I enjoy that spec as a GC rifle spec as a change of pace. I do think it can be effective. It’s not my ultimate because of my play style but this is why I love the warrior profession due to the number of weapons we can wield.

Oh here’s my rifle / greatsword spec where I switched out last night the boon duration setup to a bursty sick damage setup with Lyssa runes.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQJARUjcOJvxOyQMxBEThi48gKYiAU9wOqj4A-jkCBYLBiCEiIBI5RhNBSQrKqIasKGYqSLqW5CwbgRrWKgIWAA-w