Guild Wars 2

I wish they would make a unique effect for all kits, but it’s probably not reasonable. I love the predator’s grenade tool kit skill. It would be awesome if they made all the grenades have that glow and sound effect

…and the worst game fixing idea of 2017 goes to drum roll…… The OP of this thread.

Armor is EASILY acquirable. There is absolutely no need to lock people into fixed stats. Have you seen pvp? All anet does is remove amulets and it’s still unbalanced and not fun. Stats aren’t the issue, it’s the power creep introduced by HoT.

You also mention that necros are overpowered and the basis of your reasoning behind this.. really? It’s honestly a L2P issue. I’ve fought some great necros in my time and I have to say that all but one of them were power. As for 100 stacks of bleeding, you would die before the second tick.

I was a high MMR player when I was in NA, I transferred to EU and currently play with 280+ ping. As such I’m in high gold at the moment but I think I could do high plat if I try hard it.

I found silver harder than gold, I think the way it makes you break out of silver is you have to be able to carry an entire team consistently. It’s much easier rising the ranks of gold than silver in my experience.

If it’s mainland only they could also make it work similar to the first part of staff. Phantasm on 3 skill, clone on 2 skill. Perhaps with that setup it would lower the need for things like deceptive evasion, chronophantasma etc. It would definitely open up even more build possibilities

In response to the OP, you mentioned what’s wrong with your build in the beginning – it’s due to inconsistencies in your gear. If you have wrong/mismatched gear your not going to get the damage you should have. When taking Trailblazer/dire your damage is going to come from stacking condi duration and damage only. Illusionary reversion is not the issue.

Few things to fix with your gear:
- Your runes aren’t very good. In PvP they’re nice due to limited options, for WvW you have a lot more choices. Depending on gear/stat mix some good options are anti-toxin + sweet bean buns, perplexity + veggie pizza, torment, any runes that add more varying condis/effects.

Next thing always account for food. You can’t afford not to have that as it can drastically change fights, especially if fighting outnumbered.

Lastly, the way this build works is you’ll only kill people who fight you. If a target wants to flee and has decent cleanse/health remaining – there’s not much you can do to stop them, especially if you are using scepter torch and staff.

If played correctly, you are invincible 1v1 and have enough survival to outlast or flee from most things.

At the floor, Mesmer seems difficult. Most of the people on the forums are around that area and portray it as being some kind of underpowered class. At the ceiling, it’s one of the best. There’s a lot of things you don’t understand about Mesmer since you just picked up the class,

I’ve played since day 1 and done tequatl at one point nearly every day. I’ve got the chest twice then just stopped doing it.

Same could be said of legendary precursors, 5+ years or however long it’s been and have yet to see even one drop. On the flip-side, I’m the only person of my other friends who have played the same duration who has never obtained any. the lowest of them has got 5 by now.

RNG is kitten in this game.

Wardlord: Overall, I think you looked at the build and setup and made comments based on generalizations rather than trying the build. I understand it’s out of the comfort zone for newer players to the game since most of you have come to know warrior as being primarily a passive class – it wasn’t always this way.

- Last stand is not a terrible trait. The current meta has made warriors dependent on constant stability – virtually immune to CC. This won’t last forever, it’s already changing. As for why it’s important to my build is that it’s one of the few ways to access stability without losing important utility to make the whole thing work.

- The assassins accessories I can agree with, as I stated that those aren’t necessary. I linked the build according to “my” current gear. I like the way whole numbers look, and previously I had pack runes bringing my base crit to exactly 60% with 214% crit damage.

- Magnanimous sharpening stones are great, just not for this build – it simply will not generate enough boons to warrant a big investment. This would take away from the survival components that make this work.

- I’ve used hydro and leeching forever on greatsword and it’s especially important for this build as you’ll be using sword mainhand flurry into weapon swap. Hydro can can crit for a lot of damage, it slows the cooldown recovery with a brief chill, and more importantly, if your opponent is out of escapes and needs to walk out of your hundred blades it will keep them in for another 2-3 hits. This combined with leeching’s 1000 damage and minor heal, helps balance out a really old nerf to hundred blades where anet back loaded the damage.

Choppy: Don’t mean to keep this brief, but yeah I’ve been getting by just fine with the same things you mentioned.

Read in other threads about how the berserker nerfs slowed down gameplay, many have been playing core again.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vJAQNAR8ejMdQVI2FCGeApIGICKLAigBAPhXYF0vY63CA-TlCFABFq+DDXAgrUCy++DLcQAQS5RVKxA4IA0wDAINdDBAQAu5NzmtZw5Nv5Nv5NP38m7cn7cnlCoKpWA-w

This revolves around high mobility and crazy amount of dodges through energy sigil/signet/food/vigor. It’s nothing earth-shattering new, just some tweaks to the same traitlines/gear/food we are confined to.

Strengths:
- Very high mobility, only thieves can keep up. Often i’ll use this to pull thieves out of the group, kill them then go back in to kill the rest.
- lots of iFrames.
- Decent lockdown on non-thieves via rampage, sword immob into hundred blades.
- Forceful greatsword!! Warrior feels so much more fluid with this 20% reduction in skills, it really makes it a lot more fun to play.

Weaknesses:
- higher reflex/awareness of play needed, can’t ROFL eating all attacks like the meta shifted warriors into post HoT.
- loss of cleansing ire means we need to take full advantage of our dodging and mobility, you can panic button your signet of stamina in an emergency, or shrug it off with rampage.
- loss of eternal champion through berserker/access to stability.
- primarily single target DPS.
- limited access to fury if you use the rampage version vs SoR version

Optional changes:
- if you use a lot of terrain to your advantage when kiting, i.e. jumping up and down cliffs – take death from above and swap elite to signet of rage.
- marauders where the assassins trinkets are would give 1000 more health and a bit more power at the loss of 4% crit damage and 2% crit chance. I just linked the build with my current setup as I don’t like wasting any stats with .XX of a percent.
- Using bloodlust where the air sigil is in sword. I use air as it makes up some of the damage loss you get from taking sword over axe.
- if the 100 power/10% boon duration utility is too costly, use a plain sharpening stone. Unfortunately you will only gain 28 or so power and lose 10% boon duration.

Few tips off the top of my head for those who haven’t played sword on power:
- Sword F1 then immediately weapon swap into hundred blades.
- Final thrust is your “eviscerate”.
- Rampage can be used for mobility with the leap (#5) and rush (#3). Make sure to pop healing signet before entering rampage. Also great for extra access to stability/increased damage reduction.
- Your dodge rolls do damage and are unblockable. You can use it offensively to keep up damage while iframing; i.e. jump dodging through an opponent while in greatsword, then whirlwinding backwards. Something like this would allow you to land the damage from dodge, gain might, then connect all hits on whirlwind – while completely invulnerable.
- your F1 Bursts restore endurance and adrenaline – further allowing you to dodge even more.

“I’ll destroy you all!…. Slowly”.

Nah, core warrior can be better in most circumstances with proper build/setup, but I still enjoy my berserker. Been playing zerker since the day HoT was released, love the “style” of it.

I’ve been playing exclusively great sword and sword shield warrior (power build) since pre HoT and upwards of now when I feel like playing core warrior and roaming – if anyone is interested, drop me a message and I’ll create the build in an editor… Typing here in my phone at the moment.

I typically fight when highly outnumbered i.e. 1v3-15 (less so now post HoT) and I wouldn’t like that implemented. I use the rally states to my advantage. When people go to res, I use that as an opportunity to burst all of them there, reset survival skills I need to keep going, etc.

It works both ways, and the downstate system is great as is in my opinion.

Hey, yeah this has been a bug since pre-expansion days, not sure if it’s human male only though – I to have a warrior human male.. Unfortunately nothing was done to resolve this issue. If you look closely you’ll notice that this skill DOES go off, but your character just shakes his hips a bit, then stops – no damage goes off but the skill goes on cooldown. Trust me it’s more annoying in PvP/WvW when you set up a burst only to stand there and sexy dance in front of your opponent.

“The owner of en.support.guildwars2.com has configured their website improperly. To protect your information from being stolen, Firefox has not connected to this website.

This site uses HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) to specify that Firefox may only connect to it securely. As a result, it is not possible to add an exception for this certificate." Is what it says.

Thank you, I will try that at a later point but for some reason it says this link is not safe when I click support.

Hello Support,

This is one last item I needed to complete my thief’s look and was wondering if there is any way I can purchase it. Since it isn’t on the gemstore I’d be willing to pay a lot more than it’s previously sold price, or if that is not possible if it is coming back anytime soon?

Thank you

Hello, I’ve been playing this game since launch many years ago. I know you are looking to the forums to help guide what class is a best fit for you – but I have a different recommendation. Try every class, even if you don’t have LOTS of time, there is nothing you’ll miss end game gear is relatively easy to get, especially after you’ve geared up your first character.

Every class, is welcome in every environment (with the exception of raids) and is capable of playing in the way you want to play. It’s only raids where you’re forced into specific roles/builds if you want to participate in a public group. The power creep of this game has trivialized all dungeons, fractals up to around the mid 80’s range, PvE, and unless you’re in the top 100 of the game in pvp, pvp as well.

With this in mind, I really suggest trying all classes – typically I’ve been heavy armor, front line tanks in other games – especially if it had support elements, playing things like paladin/knight roles. I hated mages/wizards/rogues. In GW2 I actually quite enjoy elementalist and necro. You can build it the way you want to play it, the just all achieve this differently.

One of the benefits I had being a player who started in launch, was that I had the freedom to create my own builds, experiment with mixing gear and finding what’s perfect for me. These days it’s mostly the recent players (past 2-3 years) that are pushing for META only builds. It really isn’t necessary once you get a grasp for how to make your own builds and what stats are optimal within that.

A summoner class. I know currently we have necro with the flesh things, but it would be awesome if they could get revive dead, skeletons and/or skeletal magi just like in an old game I used to play, Diablo 2.

I don’t think any of the things suggested in this thread are overpowered, with the exception of one thing.

I don’t play or have a ghost thief, but I’ve never had issues beating them. Just carry a stealth removal trap – they die fairly quickly; most of the players who would use it weren’t very competent pvp wise.

Guardian could be a problem in PvP with class stacking and forcing to fight on nodes, but in WvW there’s no reason to engage on their terms. I don’t play DH, but never have issues beating them in WvW, even on my glass cannon thief.

The warrior being OP is due to a 4 second invul frame (x2 with the passive trait) and berserker stance/healing signet. I treat those fights the same as I would a reaper. Most classes these days have as much or more mobility as warriors do. I would usually kite out the stances and/or boon strip depending on whether I run power or condi. Slow play the fight, don’t need to rush head first while they have all their skills off cooldown, time is in the opponents favour.

Necro, I have a condi necro I min/maxed to the exact stats I wanted – he’s definitely a beast. The reason he’s so effective is not just the damage and tankiness, but it’s because I use “jukes”, spectral walk and wurm to teleport. Without those 2 I wouldn’t be able to 1vX semi competent players (this was prebuff). The best way to beat them, is using range/mobility to your advantage. Necro is one of the slowest classes in the game with no blocks or invuls.. just a fragile second life bar to face tank attacks. Their defense is a good offense, through weakness/poison/chill/fear. Out of shroud, be as close as you possibly can be – CC and hit hard. In reaper you simply walk away, let them waste it or come out of shroud. I find this fight very similar to fighting a warrior.

Druid, I don’t have any class specific strategies for beating – but it’s because I never had much issues with them. I have one as a mule holding all my ascended items and so that I can familiarize myself with their rotations/playstyle with each update. As someone who DOESN’T play it, I wouldn’t like to see them nerfed. The pets are finally useful and I like having an opponent where I have to constantly adapt or change my playstyle to overcome.

As for the one thing, the ONLY class I believe is overtuned in WvW right now it’s the condi chrono/mesmer. I say this as someone who has played it pre-hot and post, very successfully. Mesmer can simply rotate blocks/invuls/stealth/interrupts coupled with high mobility and near immunity to conditions via inspiration. They can deal damage while completely immune themselves. Combine this with high outgoing damage, high sustained damage, and high resilience to damage they are in the right hands impossible to drop. They can also chase targets and lock them down, so there’s no avoiding it in some circumstances. Most of you see the scepter/torch/staff variant, but there are builds far more dangerous than that. I’m currently running one of them. I don’t have any recent videos of my play as I don’t record anymore. However I have an older video (pre-hot) I can link here showing some of the strengths with proper timing – bearing in mind during this time I was fighting warrior when they were considered “overpowered” and mesmer was looked at as useless by and large on the forums, I also intentionally fought in melee range. It’s a different time now but the mechanics I employed at that time I still use today. I completely agree on having this class toned down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfbt_X_Ut_E&t=247s

Please bring back Rox’s Quiver i can’t finish my character’s look without it.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rox's_Quiver_Set

+1 to this comment. I really want that back!!! If possible you could make it last in the gem store for a week, if it’s only there for a day I would surely miss it.

Short answer, no you don’t need all berserkers.

I will tell you what worked for me though. I started back when the game was first released – people said to go all soldiers back then. There was an advantage to learning in that way. Sure dungeons took longer (pre-hot the game was very different back then), but it allowed me to experiment with stats and find the perfect fit for my playstyle. Slowly I removed one piece of soldiers at a time and replaced it with berserker – until I was full zerk. Getting that slow feel and experimenting allowed me to create some pretty awesome builds in WvW catered specifically to my playstyle.

As for fractals and open world – unless you’re doing T4 fracs, sacrificing some zerk pieces for a bit of extra resilience will be almost unnoticeable with how this game is power creeped. I currently do T3’s on my mesmer in my WvW gear and my own, non-meta build and if you ran with me would not see any difference from a speed run.

Last bit of advice I should mention, most of the guides out now are outdated – zerker is great on some classes like guardian, but other classes benefit more from condi or hybrid to output max DPS such as necromancer.

Take a look at his other posts:

About a day ago – Warrior is overpowered
Later that day: warrior is overpowered if this class isn’t nerfed I’m going to quit this game.
Today: Pulmonary impact is overpowered

My guess is the OP plays an elementalist, since Warrior and Thief are the only things preventing that class from making pvp a boring bunker fest.

As others have mentioned, it’s a bad idea to nerf thief with your given suggestions. Rather than bringing down d/p which keeps thief relevant and in pvp today, instead bringing up the other sets.

As for d/d thief, something I think that would help is removing the cripple from dancing dagger and putting it as an addition on death blossom. As for dancing dagger it would apply 1 second of slow and 3 seconds of weakness. The idea of the set would be not just burst, but debilitating your opponent – forcing them to eat attacks and this would also allow more defensiveness to d/d. I would also add a 3 second blind to cloak and dagger.

Staff, I would add a small daze to the 3 skill – part of the hit portion, and it would be nice to have poison/evade added to the 2 skill, right now outside of combining it with steal, it makes you very vulnerable for a mediocre attack. I’m not sure how to improve staff to bring it up to d/p, without having it far surpass (staff is better for team fights in my opinion) d/p, and without making it too similar to what the other sets bring.

I’m sure I’m not the only player who would like access to these locked pets without having to purchase and play Guild Wars 1.

I was thinking perhaps Anet could sell these pets for unlock on the gem store, make it part of a really difficult Guild Wars 2 achievement, as part of a birthday gift (on old characters) or even add it into purchasing the Digital Deluxe Upgrade for 2000 gems. Whatever the means, it would be great to have these pets unlocked or at least accessible to players in Guild Wars 2.

My intention with this thread is to get enough support from other rangers who would like these 4 pets added to their list – and hopefully give Anet something to consider; or if I’m just in the minority with this idea, let this thread die. Share your thoughts, +1, or offer some suggestions for or against it.

I became a Necro main a few months ago, swapped after seeing how negative the warrior community is, in conjunction with their passive buffs to warrior (adrenal healing as the main culprit). You guys are definitely more friendly xD

Anyhow, I agree here that Greatsword was overlooked. It definitely needs some quality of life improvements, and I believe if they make it a hybrid weapon of sorts (adding more chills for example) ontop of improving functionality – greatsword will be in a good place. It’ll come soon guys.

I noticed a lot of you are pretty angry about rise, but I believe it was for the best – it was definitely extremely powerful. what many of you have overlooked though is that spectral armor has a reduced cooldown now. I suggest using that over rise – sure you lose the minions and 17% physical reduction; but you gain life force on incoming damage. Overall I think Necros had it pretty well this patch. For future patches I would like to see: Greatsword improvements, improvements to power based necros for pvp environments, and more active defensive functions if they don’t improve our mobility.

It’s not bad, however is lacks in stun breaks which makes the build significantly weaker than it should be. I’ll link what I’ve been using: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAseWncfCFoh1fCmpBUrhFijyMASgFquS/0S9sBugPD-TpRHABFcEAA4QAQwJAg89HQuMgAPAAA

I suggest trying out my variant of the build Messiah, I think you’ll like it more than what you currently have.

@ VagaMule

Yeah the video wasn’t really to show any skills or playstyle; it was done pretty hastily and wasn’t to show any effectiveness at all but just to show that I’m not both scott and myself. Unfortunately, one of the posters here had his ego hurt for unknown reasons and since he’s acquired a following chose to attack me; the dilemma this causes is when people focus on ME and not the possibilities of the build this thread becomes pointless. I didn’t post to get flamed or insulted, or have people create casual conversations in my thread. It was just to show what I was using and hopefully other people who are interested can find their way here – perhaps it’ll work for them to. As for dueling, it’ll be easy to post videos from my perspective but a friend of mine who records fights also has migrated to Black Desert Online due to the current state of the game. I’ll PM you in a few regarding recording and we can work something out.

@Scott

Don’t be sorry or anything man, I’m not. They had their fun attacking me, I can’t stop/control what other people do nor would I try, but I’ve gained from what they did – a new friend which is always good. Cheers, bud.

@ angvl

Sorry if this was similar to your build; looks like we had pretty much the same idea. I’m sure with the thousands of people that play the game there are others who have done the same things also – before us. The build I’ve posted in it’s entirety is simply the way I choose to play, what I’ve created for myself, and what has worked for me. Maybe it’ll work for others as well, you prefer hydro/leech on mace shield, where as I’ve used hydro/leeching on greatsword for a very long time and I have a hard to to go outside of that, I simply just love that combo. The reasoning is the chill keeps an opponent in hundred blades for just enough time to land more hits before needing to interrupt with a whirlwind, you can also weapon swap to apply damage, the leeching allows for additional pressure/healing if only 1 attack from HB were to land; alongside a multitude of other things. It’s my bread and butter sigils for greatsword. :P

@Rekt

Thanks for the response, I’ll try and address my reasoning behind these choices, I know you did sort of hop back and forth between both variants so I’ll try to interpret which version you meant. At first glance taking rousing resilience with eternal champion seems counterintuitive, why use stability with your form of healing? I’ve tested this without and found that without balanced stance, last stand, or dolyak signet the build was very weak to CC. Sure having the 3x stun breaks was nice but not when you’re locked in place by multiple people. Eternal champion allowed me to do things like escaping double gravity well for example or getting chain cc’d by multiple opponents (which can still happen but is significantly easier to manage with this). The upside, the stability you gain on stun break is only 3s with one stack – this prevents getting CC locked (giving enough time to dodge, block, or swap into something more defensive) but also doesn’t make you blow all your stun breaks simply to get out of CC. I find today a lot of the warriors using berserker mode are heading in the direction of spamming skills – using smash brawler, gunflame spam, spamming primal bursts off cooldown – weapon swapping to F1 burst again, etc. My approach to this build and playstyle was treating it very similar to core warrior, need to time and use skills effectively; using the berserker traitline “defensively” rather than just offensively to make up for losing things like forceful greatsword (the cooldown reduction is far more important to me then the damage as whirlwind is available almost immediately after weapon swapping back in GS as one example), last stand, and balanced stance. The overall idea was to increase warrior sustain without hurting the damage so much that it becomes unusable.

Next point sigil of paralyzation. In the WvW version, I take sigil of draining so I’m assuming you’re focusing on the conquest version here (it was still a difficult choice for me to drop the paralyzation sigil for that in WvW – I’m even considering changing back). The sigil of paralyzation stun affects shield bash, headbutt (equal to level 3 skull crack), and non-zerk mode skullcrack. Each of these skills has quite a long stun duration and with paralyzation allows for an even longer time they’d have to sit in things like hundred blades. The next direction I went was to allow for more hits to offset the damage loss from zerker.

For smasher brawler, I think you answered your own question in advance there, you simply don’t gain enough to adrenaline as quickly with other builds to make use of smash brawler; making savage instinct the superior choice (in my opinion) and I would almost never spam outrage just for adrenaline with this build. Again the idea towards this build is not to spam but to play in a similar manner to core warrior.

I’m glad you asked the questions you did because I’ll have to make a video to show these things in action, I’ll post one this coming weekend when I have more time; and yes this build isn’t going to counter everything (I’m not sure there is any build that can do that however) but I found it to be pretty strong for what it is.

It was very nice of Scott to say what he did. Unfortunately it seems to have sparked some paranoia. I’m posting this not to showcase any skills but so that people can take a look at the build rather than attempting to discredit me. Thank you Scott for both your words and participating in this video. https://youtu.be/RU74Tah1Xoo

For the rest of you, if you choose to watch this please don’t take this as an idea of what the build is capable of, it was just to show that I’m not running multiple accounts. Truthfully I didn’t even know Scott before today, so these claims are pretty laughable from our perspective. Enjoy

Hey guys, I’m Ridun – I’ve been warrior main for the past 3 years. I’ve decided to post my build because I’ve been finding great success with it and have had quite a number of people as for it. I’ll post a direct link to a build editor as well as my variation and gear spread for WvW. I hope you find as much success with it as I have, if enough people would like I can record and post videos of how it’s played and how to 1vX on it.

Conquest: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vJAQNAR5enMdAVhgdhAmkCElilrADJAkASdvj2U7rVJH06aBA-TpBCQBEc/hLcQA6WZgM8AAwwFAAAHBAA

With this setup every time you stunbreak you’ll heal for 3690 health (1136 aoe heal), gain 3 stacks of might, 1 stack of stability, an extra 1000 toughness, among other things. Reasoning for heightened focus over burst mastery: I find the ability to land more hits greater than the extra 7% damage given that we’ve chosen knights over zerker or paladins. The damage is still great and this level of toughness definitely helps against some of the more burstier builds floating around recently. Just like the old days I still prefer toughness over vitality stacking on warrior and with that smaller health pool I feel the heals from your stun break are more beneficial. You can still manage conditions through proper use of signet/berserker stance, weapon swapping; and now have the addition of activating berserker mode for an extra stunbreak/2x cleanse. Keep in mind to, that getting feared, you can activate berserker mode, headbutt, or weapon swap to activate your burst heal + other things over using berserker stance – take advantage of your stun breaks!

My WvW Version: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vJAQNAR5enMdAVhgdhAmkCciglrA7d0maftIBgEQqTJH06aBA-TVyHABAcQAqe/BBuAA+p+DTKB9S3Q8HBgeU+FwDAIAACwNvZ2sNDG6QH6QH6553+2m38m3sUAmp1C-w

You can choose to ignore the infusions (that’s currently my setup due to my ghostly infusions and I use those trinkets on my zerker build to reach 2701 power exactly) which would obviously be quite costly for the majority of players. Again, the reason I go with knights outside of the toughness is on any power build for warrior I find my personal sweet spot to be 48% crit chance as the very minimum. Different thing here, instead of paralyzation I use sigil of draining for even extra heals. A little bit of playstyle difference occurs with the change in runes as you can use your blocks to stack regeneration. There’s a lot of passive heals in here that’ll help you sustain. Note: the reflect doesn’t proc the regen but it’s still worth keeping, you can still get the block procs against range if you block right up in the enemies face.

I’m open to critique, as I’m sure I’ll get but before knocking down my build PLEASE, try it for yourself – you may be pleasantly surprised.

Cheers,

Feel free to message me in game as well at Feral.3609 or character name: Ridun

Not sure if I like this idea, right now hundred blades needs to be setup – even then you may not be able to land the full burst and for good reason, it does amazing damage with the full series of attacks.

I like hundred blades as is and would not like to see a change to it.

Here is the build and my stats, try it for yourself and you’ll see why sword is less damage then mace.

…………………..your ignorance just blows my mind, Fivedawgs. I run sigil of air in my sword to make up for a bit of the damage loss and it still comes under, dps wise, to mace with paralyzation (my shield always has energy which I personally find a necessity for glass cannon power roaming).

Sword’s main use in a power build is for locking down targets, setting up burst, and giving high mobility. Yes, final thrust is nice (under 50%), but like Choppy said it’s very situational. The bulk of, if any damage done while in sword is done with the auto attacks in a real fight, especially against outnumbered targets. The adrenaline again would mean you could land flurry FOR immobilize more often, and it would also mean less time that you need to linger in sword/shield when you need to burst with greatsword. As it stands currently, because of the lack of adrenaline you are forced to stay in sword/shield slightly longer to build adrenaline to set up your burst. How can this benefit both power and condi builds, you may ask (since you are very confused)? You have one reason there for power, another means being able to take advantage of a higher tier in berserker’s power, being able to lock down more frequently, more benefits from adrenal healing especially when you need to create gaps from your opponent(s), more endurance gain… I could go on. I’m hoping the benefit to some condi builds is pretty self-evident. I don’t feel like writing an essay so hopefully other knowledgeable “warrior mains” like Choppy can continue on with educating you.

@Fivedawgs sounds like you’ve never used sword before in a power build, as such you have no idea how it can benefit both power and some condi builds. Now sir, your attempt to belittle my suggestion just makes you look like a moron.

I still love my warrior, and don’t plan on changing mains anytime soon.

However, I’m going to have to disagree with you in that warrior is simple/boring. Sure it’s easy to pick up and play but at a higher level of skill it comes down to knowing when and how to land your burst, animation cancelling, reading/knowing your opponent, watching their dodges and buffs so that you can land your highly telegraphed attacks, knowing how to use your mobility to be able to win fights you’d otherwise lose in an upfront melee battle (reapers for example) timing of your cooldowns, among many other things. This makes warrior fun to me, both in theme and playstyle (power warrior.. Not a fan of condi).

This game has changed a lot over the years and it seems anets direction is heading towards passive play rewarding players who do very little yet reap high rewards. There are probably the vast majority of people who are happy with the current state of the game, no dungeons, low risk/high reward builds/gameplay, boring borderlands in WvW, unfixed traitlines across many classes, the constant nerfing/buffing of classes making the game change so radically you can rarely learn to love what they are introducing or being slowly confined into a handful of optimal builds per class at best…. sigh I could go on. I may be the minority in my opinion but Guild Wars 2 has been my favourite game for years (played since day one) but these days I often find myself looking for and hoping for something new. I’m hoping Crowfall 2 will be my replacement to what Guild Wars used to be.

Sorry for the rant that went slowly off topic… But I hope a dev reads this, and it inspires them to change things.

One of the suggestions I’ve made in the past regarding sword mainhand is giving it extra adrenaline per hit on the auto attack. Prior to the nerfs on warrior I ran sword/shield and great sword on a power build for mobility and to set up burst using immobilize on the burst skill. However now, the mobility it provides is not enough anymore; especially not enough to justify the loss in potential damage using other sets. I’m currently using mace/shield (loss of mobility made up with extra block/reflects and damage increase).

I believe giving it an adrenaline buff would make it more viable on power builds, without making it overshadow axe mainhand in terms of dps. Any buffs you guys suggest, please take into account the other weapon sets!

Can’t really blame the devs for being silent. I’ve had this game since day one and back in the beginning they were active and vocal on the forums. What I noticed was a large part of the community was very hostile towards. Nitpicking their words, insulting them, being passive aggressive.

I want them to come back, it’s cool to be able to talk to developers and play alongside them in game. Unfortunately I know that they will have to endure a lot of abuse if they do; so its best they continue on with their own “vision” of the game.. in silence. While people blame the devs for things like the current balance of the game I believe a lot of the whining from the community has contributed towards that as well.

The game is in the worst state it’s ever been and I believe “we” are equally to blame. I don’t think any of this is fixable as it would take too much time and money to do all the fixes needed. Rip Guild Wars 2

I used a similar layout to another thread here, I changed things that I felt would be more balanced as some of the suggestions if anet went along with it would overbuff warrior. Feel free to comment on some of the things I’ve mentioned. I’ve bolded main points so you can skim over the thread faster. I should state I’m a warrior main with LOTS of experience in high end pvp, WvW solo roaming/teamfights, GvG’s, and PvE. For the purposes of these changes I’d like to focus on the PvP environments i.e. WvW/PvP.

Great Sword: I know some people want the rush improved, or having hundred blades sped up/range increased, but I think it’s fine as is. Rush is both good mobility and the damage is high if you can land your attack. I feel if they increase the strength and abilities of greatsword anymore it would make other weapon sets obsolete. You really have to set up the attacks to make it work.

Axe Main Hand: I feel that since they moved the dps portion of the axe to the end of the auto attack chain, axe has suffered a lot. I know many of you like GS/axeshield in power builds, but I find greatsword/swordshield far superior. In an actual fight against a competent opponent you simply don’t have the time to complete the full chain. My suggestion is reverting the axe nerf or cutting the auto attack chain in half so it takes less amounts of attacks to see that damage. As for eviscerate, again I see it fine as is. For such a high damaging attack it needs to be setup. I do this through counting dodges used, baiting a dodge and timing the eviscerate for the end, or using CC. The buff to shield (2 second daze) allows you to land this quite easily (assuming the stun isn’t broken).

Axe Off Hand: Now here is where I do think a lot of people are onto something. Axe offhand, the idea behind it was to generate adrenaline quickly but this is assuming your target is doing nothing while you generate that adrenaline. I’m totally for having the whirl become a projectile reflect (similar to the thiefs stolen skill). The 4 skill (dual chop) I believe the fury doesn’t have synergy with really any other set. I think this skill in general needs to be reworked and if you have any suggestions leave them in the comments!

Sword Main hand: Sword already applies a long lasting bleed. Sure cleansing comes into play especially in our current meta, but I don’t feel it needs an extra stack as it strikes pretty fast. Also increasing the physical based damage of it would make axe main hand inferior. Instead, my suggestion to adjust sword to be great for both berserker and base warrior is to give the auto attack adrenaline gain on hit, similar to rifle auto attack. For based warrior that means charging your ability to land your F1 Burst on bleeds faster and for berserker it encourages stacking more bleeds to reach your rage form (at which point you stack fire). This would be a strong upgrade to sword without making the weapon more powerful than other options or “OP”.

Mace Main Hand: Fine as is.

Mace Off Hand: Add a small leap to crushing blow and Increase the damage/velocity of tremor. To be a strong contender to options like shield, something needs to be done to make it worth taking over other options (especially if my other suggestions are implemented).

Long Bow: Make the longbow trait (1s burn) baseline. Longbow feels like a hybrid weapon however with a lack of conditions on the autoattack, many choose to use traits and alternative weapon sets to stack conditions OR they have to add sigils like geomancy/doom to buff up the application.

Hammer: I feel this weapon set is fine as is for base warrior. It’s great in team fights, and is pretty solid as is even post nerf. On berserker however my experience is limited as I found it to be almost weaker than using it in base form. One of the ideas I have for improving this is making the aoe on rupturing smash similar to arc divider in terms of size, but have it ripple out in quick pulses immobilize and bleed or perhaps, pulse bleed/daze instead (making it a great way to AOE remove stability, something unique to warrior).

Rifle: Ahh the rifle, some have suggested making the pierce baseline. I feel that isn’t needed, nor would I want that. I run greatsword/rifle very often, almost as much as greatsword/swordshield. I know a lot of you may disagree but I feel that rifle is in a good spot right now. It’s become a “power weapon” and is great where it stands. At the very most adding the bleed back to the auto attack without decreasing the physical damage or adrenaline gain. Sure you might say that “guardian longbow has a low cooldown killshot without needing to charge adrenaline”. Dragonhunter is very strong right now, we can all agree on that, they have almost replaced us in our respective roles. We cannot however suggest that this weapon be buffed to be equal in capacity or greater. I’d rather be balanced fairly then have to be over nerfed again.

Warhorn: I feel first and foremost this needs to be adjusted from the trait line point of view. Returning the 2 conditions to boon conversion. Secondly, since warrior is about mobility and the warhorn is described as “Grants boons to allies, facilitating mobility”; it should grant vigor AND super speed to allies with call to arms.

Let me know what you guys think of these adjustments, and don’t be afraid to contend my ideas, I welcome the criticism! Let’s collectively get warrior back on track. I know there hasn’t been any devs in here since HoT but I know that they are reading these threads, so let’s help them out. Cheers.

Agreed, self stun is good. I do however think the range should be increased – maybe not as far as the proportions of bulls rush but something like a 300-600 range.

I’m a warrior main (used to be guardian ages ago), and to be honest I wasn’t hyped about the berserker because I’m not a huge fan of condition based fighting. I love melee, being in the face of my opponent as I drop them. As HoT was approaching I wasn’t “excited” in any way because I felt that there was no class I truly wanted to play. The top things from what I’ve read that seemed interesting were: Reaper, Chronomancer, and Revenant.

I logged on to my warrior just to check my armor and food and figured I’d try out berserker. Holy hell.. was I blown away by how much fun I had, and am having. I absolutely love it. Even the voice overs are adrenaline packed when you enter that berserker rage. Your character begins glowing red and yells out “I’ll destroy you all”, dealing large AOE and fast attacks.

In summary, yeah I had no hype towards this to begin with but after playing it I love it more than anything they have released!!! Even went as far as to tell a dev in game that they did a great job on it. xD

The ONLY thing I’d say I don’t like is the kitten headbutt elite. It’s strong, it’s fast, the animation looks great, and used with the right traits/skills can definitely turn around a battle (I don’t even mind the self stun) but! the range on it is way too low. if they increased it by another 100 or 200 range it would be perfect, and you’d get to see that sort of tackle the warrior does. It would feel more epic.

I don’t think this guy has ever played thief before.. I’m calling bullkitten on this thread. If he can go into WvW and kill everyone no problem 1 random guy on the forums shouldn’t be an issue right?

I’m willing to fight the OP and defeat him on thief, on every class in the game I have (no ranger or necro). If he accepts this challenge (publicly here), I would also like someone to record the fights and post unedited full footage of every battle on this page.

If you would like to see someone ignorant get their kitten handed to them up vote this post and see if he takes up on it.

I don’t think everyone would agree here, but I think with death blossom shouldn’t be increased in damage. Instead, remove the bleeds altogether and increase the evade frame. At the moment you either run a condi or hybrid condi and spam death blossom or you run power and don’t use death blossom at all (high initiative cost, unreliable evade frame/leaves you open to getting bursted).

Personally I would rather have the increased evade frame, leaving the physical component of damage where it is (reduce it for all I care), but apply cripple instead of bleed (like slashing tendons). Now the reason this is beneficial to d/d is at the moment we have to take shadow arts just to make d/d somewhat competitive with d/p. the increased evade would increase survivability (timed well) with the absence of blind (or even further in competition with the blind field from pistol off-hand), and it would cripple the target allowing for easier to set up backstabs or landing quick attacks.

I don’t know, this is just a quick idea to make d/d viable now rather than having to rework the whole set and wait months-years for a fix. What do you guys think of this?

Edit: Thought it would be pretty cool to see a steal → into deathblossom → CnD → Backstab. Thief is definitely a flashy, class and aside from it’s obvious flaws death blossom does look pretty cool.. if only they made it useful.

I used to main guardian. Played it exclusively for the first half year of the games release. Despite the bugs, crap traits/lines that haven’t been fixed, weapon sets, etc.. I stuck with it because overall it still fit the theme I wanted to play – heavy armor, supportive front line like a knight/paladin.

I quit guard when they announced dragon hunter, no regrets there.. moved all my ascended armor sets and legendary to my warrior. Then they make a push for condi warrior (the berserker). While it’s not as utterly disappointing as this backline fairy of a ranger, it still doesn’t quite fit what MOST of us GUARDIAN MAINS were looking for.

Unfortunately guys (and girls), we have to hop that revenant will fill the hole in our hearts. xD Until then, I suggest swapping to warrior or ele for now. They are much better “guardians” in my opinion.

When you created the pu condi build, no one knew anything about it. All of us mocked and said ‘what is this pu condeeee?? We only know power shatter!’ Maybe you’re right. Maybe we need to learn this complex, high risk/high reward build. Maybe it doesnt need chaos explosion and it can actually be played by highly skilled players such as yourself.

All I know for sure is that in hotjoin, (where I play most of my games) when I play your creation pu condi, I keep getting killed by OP bunker guards and pewpew rangers.

Unfortunately Coxy, it really isn’t complex, nor is it high risk, high reward. You have an almost infinite amount of ways to deal with the 2 builds you mentioned. Reflects/blocks/boon stripping via nullfield/invulnerability. If you’re having trouble fighting those two I will personally show you how to fight them, you either A) play those classes yourself and I will fight them so you can see how to counter or find the best power ranger/OP bunker guard you know and I will beat them while you can observe how.

I’m not saying this challenge what you’re saying, I genuinely want to help you if you’re struggling. However I feel that this issue speaks more about the player rather than the build itself.

@ OP: Since people have linked you a few of the major variants of the condi pu builds, I won’t get into the build itself. However, I do think that you feel the mesmer(s) are using perpex runes to stack up such high levels of confusions which I can tell you honestly, it’s not needed at all. I play thief myself and there’s quite a few tricks I can show you in-game on fighting mesmers and I’m willing to go over all of it with you if you’d like. Feel free to drop me a message me either via my account name or on my thief (Elijan) or mesmer (Rijan). With this being said, having both created a condi build from near the release of the patch AND playing it myself from then to now, it is no easy fight. It allows the mesmer to make a lot of mistakes and still be successful.

@ the others talking about balancing this asking for buffs.. it really blows my mind. I remember when I first created and posted my condi build on the forums many people said it wouldn’t work and was too weak for pvp. It’s funny how now it’s considered as I called it, OP. Maybe I’m just truly exceptional at playing this and lots of these people play it at a low level/tier, otherwise I still personally feel it needs to be toned down.

Just a few changes I think would achieve this and still keep the condi mesmer a good option for pvp:
- PU should be reverted or entirely reworked, mainly due to WvW – infinite reset ability and constant harassing when this trait is abused makes it not fun to deal with/engage for opponents. If the stealth duration is dropped to where it was +1 second of stealth, the boons it provides should be buffed in some way (to help with thieves – perhaps always giving aegis + one extra boon).
- Blind on shatter should have a cooldown (at least 5 seconds).
- Phantasm physical damage reduced to its previous state -15% damage.

I’m sure there could be more fixes however for now if those are implemented it would at least allow some counter play for opponents. I would also like to see some of the traits work as intended (i.e. pistol bleeds in the dueling line). Also scepter attack speed (not recharge) made baseline.

To address you both at once, I wasn’t talking about diminishing returns per say (although this is probably what people may have been talking about at launch where some accounts had diminishing returns all the time; something I think my account has); more that some accounts may have a bugged level of any sort of return. I.E. incapable of finding any drops.

Although according to your responses it seems you’re suggesting it’s all luck based entirely and therefore I’m just really unlucky xD

I’ve had this game since release (almost 3 years) and watched friends and newcomers alike find amazing items and more importantly precursors (via forge/chest drop/mob drop). To this day I haven’t found really anything of value other than some dyes. One example using SAB back when it was released everyone got at least one skin, whereas nothing dropped for me (same for all events in the past).

I’ve thrown many thousands of gold worth of items into the forge, run literally several thousands of dungeon runs, and farmed every content you can think of, but am yet to see a precursor anywhere. Has anyone else been playing since release and had the same problem?

Back at release I know on the forums some people were talking about having decreased returns and it being something like a glitch or bug. I read the posts and I’m not sure whether anet fixed that issue or not for those people. I guess I’m posting this here hoping that someone can address this issue for me and perhaps fix whatever issue is with my account.

I haven’t switched classes, sure thief might be out of place in this current meta but it can still function. I play mainly d/p and s/d builds. I’m glad to be honest, less thieves running p/d cheese in WvW, and haven’t seen any heart seeker heroes in pvp either. The good thieves won’t drop their mains.

In response to Denis I’m advertising ranked because this works in rank. I can post screenshots of high ranked matches against recognized players where I’m first place in top kills, defends, and points. It is rare that I’m not top player on a team (I solo queue) and play ranked only. I think posting screenshots with other players names on the forums is against the rules but I can upload them send them to you and you can confirm it here. Condi used to lose effectiveness with more players because we didn’t have this much application before. Played properly you can aoe bomb areas in team fights dropping multiple people. With the current changes its not about long duration sticking conditions for Mesmer, kills are made through constant application which we can do well.

I’ve heard a lot of complaints about condi mesmer and nerfs to MtD etc. I’m not saying this to be an kitten , but they are legit, extremely powerful right now. I’m currently running full condi with your “nerfed” traits and completely dominate in 1v1’s and team fights (both in WvW and high end ranked pvp) with all the tools and abilities mesmers have. I think they should be toned down a bit more as right now they are capable of way too much. This build does high damage like the power version but is significantly tankier and has more defensive options.

I wasn’t going to post my build (created right as the patch hit and haven’t needed to look back) but I’ll do it anyhow as someone will figure it out eventually:

Dueling: Phantasmal Fury, Blinding Dissipation, Deceptive Evasion
Chaos: Illusionary Defense, Chaotic Transference, Prismatic Understanding
Illusions: The Pledge, Maim the Disillusioned, Ineptitude

Scepter/Torch, Sword Pistol
Sigil of Energy and Doom on both sets
Full Rabid with Travellers Runes.

Ether Feast, Decoy, Null Field, Blink, Mass Invisibility

For a WvW setup you’d have just over 17k health before stacks and over 19k after. Why use Full Rabid? You have all the survivability you need in your weapon sets, stealth, invuls, blinks, condi cleanses, etc, to win. At the very most I’d recommend you only get on a few pieces of Dire (in your armor slots) making sure you don’t go under 40% crit chance. Since your stats affect every illusion you summon, full rabid will benefit you much more as you’ll stack significantly more bleeds. This is assuming you know how to dodge/block/use invuls/blind your opponent.

I’d also recommend playing d/p glass thief to learn how powerful blinds can be at shutting down your opponent as effective use of this will highly increase your survivability.

I’ve never video recorded my playing so if someone is interested in watching me use this help me out with recording and I’ll add it to this thread.