Guild Wars 2

This is just a first draft of the build. I like my traits, skills, and weapons, but I’m not completely sold on my runes – I think I need more time playing it before I can have a good idea of what’s best, and feedback from others giving it a shot. Anyway.

I like playing support roles in competitive games, and never have liked magic much in any game, so Warrior was the natural choice. And within the Warrior class, I feel like Banners and Warhorns are the best way of supporting my team. I’m deliberately avoiding focusing on Shouts; not just because I feel Shouts are already overplayed as it is (most Warriors I see seem to use Shouts a lot), but also because I feel like a Shout-focused support build is more of a healer build (especially with the recent boost to Vigorous Shouts), while a Banner-focused build is more about providing long-duration support to teammates.

Anyway, I’ll worry about pretty formatting and stuff later, after I’ve had a chance to get some feedback and make adjustments from my own experiences with the build.

For now, you can find the build at: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQNBjSDbk0p2NAy4BHOggUohVhShdshpHhBbYGA-TsAA1CtIsRZjzGjNSbs2M6YJyWEA

A quick breakdown of what I’ve chosen for the build, and why:

- Longbow is the primary weapon of the build. It has moderate damage potential, but more importantly comes with a lot of benefits that a Rifle wouldn’t bring: Blind, an excellent Immobilize, and a Fire combo field. Its Burst skill also does not require a target, making it a great way to dump adrenaline to proc Adrenal Health and Cleansing Ire.

- Mace/Warhorn is our secondary combination, but with points into Discipline, you could really consider both setups to be “primary.” The Warhorn is the obvious choice for support, with excellent abilities to support your team, and I’ve chosen Mace over the other options because I feel it’s best-suited to the pure support role; the Burst skill is a long-duration stun, you get an additional 1-second Daze on the 3 skill, and the 2 skill gives you either a block or a way of generating some adrenaline on the fly.

- Axes are pretty awful without a focus on burst damage, and I feel Swords just aren’t a good choice without taking a lot of damage-boosting stats and traits. In particular, Swords’ Burst skill requires you to stand in place for a fairly long period of time, while you can quickly whack someone with your Mace and continue moving. You’ll find that moving around a lot is a core component of this build; I’m almost always kiting, only hitting when I have my bow out.

- Healing Signet is the best choice for healing item on this build, especially with Signet Mastery and the focus on kiting.

- I pick Stomp as my first utility skill. I feel it’s a hugely undervalued skill, and much better than people give it credit for. First, it breaks stuns, and then also gives you a second or two of Stability to block a second stun from landing on you immediately. Then, it launches every enemy in a generous radius, while also doing a little damage. It’s a fantastic skill for clearing the area around you, either for forcing that Guardian or Warrior off of you, or for getting them off of a friendly Necromancer or Elementalist. Unfortunately, it can be evaded and blocked, and has a relatively obvious cast animation. Fear Me! would be my other choice, but it doesn’t break stuns.

- My Banner of choice is Banner of Defense; in effect, it’s almost like giving Protection to your team between the boosts to Toughness and the extra health from the Vitality boost, and the 2 skill while carrying the Banner gives you an extra method of interrupting enemies. Banner of Precision would probably be my runner-up, especially with its 2 skill giving Fury to nearby allies (you can probably expect to give allies over 30% crit chance with Banner of Precision up.) With Inspiring Banners, we can have Banner of Defense up almost constantly.

- My final skill for sPvP is a Stability skill, which I feel is absolutely critical. Since I’m in Discipline and taking Signet Mastery, Dolyak Signet is our skill of choice here. With Signet Mastery, it has almost as short a cooldown as Balanced Stance, while having a longer Stability buff, and Balanced Stance’s Swiftness buff isn’t particularly useful when we’re running a Warhorn. When it’s not in use, Dolyak Signet gives us a pretty hefty bonus to Toughness (I believe it’s 180?), making us pretty chufty, indeed.

- Elite skill is a no-brainer: Battle Standard, baby! It’s not as good as Signet of Rage for boosting our own damage output, but it’s a HUGE damage steroid for your teammates, and its 2 skill gives your teammates just under 4 seconds of Stability on only a 15 second cooldown. Battle Standard’s cooldown is also made much more manageable with Inspiring Banners.

For traits, I’ve chosen to focus on being as hard to kill as possible. It’s a build style I usually see referred to as an “anchor” (in the rock climbing sense), but the term here seems to be “bunker.”

- Dogged March and Cleansing Ire out of Defense. I feel like these are pretty much must-haves for any Warrior build focusing on not dying, and honestly feel like both are probably a little too strong for where they’re found. Either way, I don’t feel like any of the other choices come anywhere near these two. You’re very hard to pin down with Dogged March, and Cleansing Ire gives you a considerable amount of condition curing on top of your Warhorn skills.

- Inspiring Banners, Quick Breathing, and Burning Arrows out of Tactics. Since we’re using Banners, Inspiring Banners is a no-brainer, and the same goes for Quick Breathing. Burning Arrows might be a point of contention, especially since it means no Inspiring Battle Standard (banners grant regeneration to teammates), but I’ve found that the heal from Inspiring Battle Standard isn’t particularly impressive unless you really stack Compassion, which typically comes at the cost of other, more important stats like Toughness and Vitality. With just the 200 Compassion from 20 points into Defense, Inspiring Battle Standard will only heal for around 180/tick, which just… isn’t very much.

By comparison, Burning Arrows lowers the cooldown on Longbow skills by 20%; that means 20% more Blinds, 20% more Blast finishers, 20% more Immobilize shots. The extra damage is nice, too, but it’s not really something this build concerns itself with. The only other choice I might consider is Empower Allies, since that trait seems to have fallen out of vogue when it got shifted to Master tier, and it seems less likely you’ll have two Warriors with it on the same team.

- Signet Mastery and Destruction of the Empowered out of Discipline. Signet Mastery is a no-brainer, especially for the reduced cooldown on Dolyak Signet. Destruction of the Empowered isn’t really that useful to us, but it can still translate to a hefty damage bonus against enemies with lots of Boons (Guardians being a prime suspect of this), and I really don’t feel there’s much of a better place to spend those 5 points. Defense might be the only other choice, for Armored Attack… which serves to just (slightly) boost our damage. Destruction of the Empowered will almost certainly turn out to be more damage; nearly everyone in PvP will have at least a couple of boons, and many players will have several.

For stats, I’ve decided to focus on being as chufty as possible; this means Vitality and Toughness are our primary stats.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any defensively-minded Sigils; I’ve chosen two Battle sigils for my Mace/Warhorn combo, and a Doom sigil for my bow. Because of the points I have into Discipline, I swap weapons very often, and this seems to work best for my purposes. Having the Poison hit for reducing incoming healing is quite nice, especially since my first Longbow attack is typically going to be Pin Down or Smoldering Arrow.

The Battle sigils just serve to give me a small boost to my damage output; Hydromancy sigils seem interesting, however, since I often only swap to my Warhorn kit when it’s time to use my horn skills again, or I need to stun someone to get them off my back. With both weapons using the sigil, it’d translate to an impressive 6 seconds of Chill… but conditions very rarely last their full duration in PvP, in my experience.

Runes are where my toughest choices have been, because there’s a lot of runes that seem to work really well with my build.

I’ve gone for Dolyak for the time being, because it gives us both of our primary stats, and an additional regeneration effect on top of Healing Signet. With 200 Compassion, Dolyak runes appear to regenerate for about 240/tick; this isn’t bad, but it’s not that great, either.

Mercy runes would make us considerably more effective at reviving teammates, while still giving us a lot of Toughness; but how often do you find yourself actually being able to sit there and revive teammates? Would these bonuses apply to Battle Standard’s reviving effects, too? It’s something I’d like to test, but it’s also kind of hard to notice in the average solo-queue zergfest.

Melandru runes… well, there’s a reason they’re popular. We’re already good at curing conditions and removing them from ourself, and Melandru runes would just make that even better. However, because we already have so much, I’m wondering if sacrificing the Vitality would even really be worth it.

Warrior runes are the last choice; we don’t get Toughness, but we do get Vitality at least, and the extra second off of weapon swapping brings our weapon swap cooldown down to 4 seconds, which is pretty quick.

There are some other runes that might be interesting (Pack runes could be interesting, but aside from the 4-rune proc effect, don’t really give us any stats we want), but I feel like the main choices are going to end up being Dolyak, Mercy, Melandru, or Warrior.

I’ve gone with Soldier/Soldier for my accessory, since it provides me with everything I like and nothing I don’t.

With these traits, items, and skills, I sit at around 28,000 HP and 3330 Armor; with Banner of Defense up, this turns into about 30,000 HP and 3600 Armor. You are extremely chufty with this build, but have all the ferocity of a wet egg noodle.

My gameplay focus has been primarily focused on staying alive. In solo queue PvP, at least, this seems to mean “kite, kite, kite, and keep kiting”, which is why I’m not sold on Mercy runes, which would otherwise probably be pretty fantastic for a build like this. Maybe organized PvP would find different results.

I’ll write a section on actually playing the build once I have more than half a dozen games with it. In particular, I want to try and find some people to play at least semi-organized games with, to really test the concept. Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

The Dolyak6 rune regen is horrible. I really don’t recommend it.
Also, wtf 30 tactics without regen banners. Drop burning arrows, put in regen banners.

Kaga.7629:

The Dolyak6 rune regen is horrible. I really don’t recommend it.
Also, wtf 30 tactics without regen banners. Drop burning arrows, put in regen banners.

Inspiring Battle Standard heals for less than 200 HP/sec with only 200 Compassion. In order to get more Compassion (by taking a Cleric accessory), I’d sacrifice an enormous amount of HP – something like 6,000-8,000 HP, and the banners would still heal for little more than 300 HP/sec.

On the other hand, Burning Arrows lowers the cooldown on Longbow skills by 20%. 20% more blinding, 20% more immobilizing, 20% more everything.

Especially when you factor in Poison, the amount of healing from Inspiring Battle Standard is pretty awful. Stacking Compassion works in a Vigorous Shouts build because that healing comes in large spikes. Inspiring Battle Standard is a very gradual healing, and sacrificing that much HP in order to increase the amount healed is counterproductive.

I’d rather replace Burning Arrows with Empower Allies than Inspiring Battle Standard.

And, yeah, Dolyak rune regen is… pretty underwhelming, about 260 HP/sec with the basic 200 Compassion I have from Defense traits. I’ll probably switch back to Mercy runes and see how much of a difference those make in being able to revive effectively.

PizzaSHARK.2741:

Kaga.7629:

Also, wtf 30 tactics without regen banners. Drop burning arrows, put in regen banners.

Inspiring Battle Standard heals for less than 200 HP/sec with only 200 Compassion.

Regen is all about the layers.
Healsig + def15 passive + regen bannah + occasional dogged march regen. In pve you would add pies for another layer.

You simply don’t take 30 in tactics without taking regen banners or shoutheals, that’s just bad. Also, you could try it with purple banner if you want to go fullon regen defensive.

Kaga.7629:

PizzaSHARK.2741:

Kaga.7629:

Also, wtf 30 tactics without regen banners. Drop burning arrows, put in regen banners.

Inspiring Battle Standard heals for less than 200 HP/sec with only 200 Compassion.

Regen is all about the layers.
Healsig + def15 passive + regen bannah + occasional dogged march regen. In pve you would add pies for another layer.

You simply don’t take 30 in tactics without taking regen banners or shoutheals, that’s just bad. Also, you could try it with purple banner if you want to go fullon regen defensive.

I don’t see how having a tiny, insignificant extra regen layer is going to outweigh having more utility from my bow, or giving a permanent 150 Power to allies just for being alive and in the general area.

I could stack Compassion to make the banner regen notable, but I’d sacrifice a ludicrous amount of HP in order to get those stats, which defeats the purpose of increasing the healing amount to begin with.

An extra 100 HP/sec isn’t going to keep me or a teammate alive, but an extra immobilize or extra AOE blind might.

Healing Signet alone is only something like 400 hps. 200 hps is a 50% increase, how is that insignificant?