Guild Wars 2

Get a guardian, you’d have to try pretty hard to die. It sounds like you might enjoy playing a supportive role and the guardian will allow you to do that in dungeons if you build for it. Outside of dungeons they have excellent sustainability and the damage is definitely in line. In terms of PvP I don’t think they’re fantastic 1v1 but you have the highest chance out of any class to survive long enough for your team mates to come to the rescue. With 1v1 put aside guardian makes an excellent addition to any team in tournaments, sPvP or even WvWvW.

As a side note I actually play a warrior with around 200hrs clocked, it’s pretty straight forward but the guardian definitely beats it in survivability outright in all game modes.

Sebaku.3645:

Jack.2095:

I run with 30/30/20 traits, full knight armor, greatsword and axe/shield mainly. I carry a war horn and rifle in my bags also. The knight set is Power/precision/toughness.

Actually, Power/Prec/Tough sounds pretty decent. What runes/sigils are you running if I may ask? Divinity maybe? Dolyak?

I use superior rune of the fighter.

+25 Power
+15 Toughness
+50 Power
+35 Toughness
+90 Power
When you use a healing skill you gain might for 20 seconds. (Cooldown 10s)

I think it’s pretty flexible though, divinity could be a good choice because of the amount of stats it gives. I haven’t had a chance to test many of the runes in PvE because they can be quite expensive.

I run with 30/30/20 traits, full knight armor, greatsword and axe/shield mainly. I carry a war horn and rifle in my bags also. The knight set is Power/precision/toughness.

This is a really nice way to play in my opinion because often with more defensive builds you end up taking such a long time to kill mobs that overall you take more damage. With this build you can mow down mobs without much fear of dying.

Every build has drawbacks and the drawbacks to this build is that you can get in pretty critical condition if you get chain CC’d and it is not very resilient to creatures that use condition damage. If you opt to try something like this out make sure you have at least one condition removal spell!

Hi there, I’d like to contribute.

I know exactly your problem with bulls charge. If you don’t have a target selected it does just as you say, goes really far in whichever direction you’re facing.

The idea of frenzy is that it is a strictly burst DPS cooldown, it is the warriors strongest dps cooldown but I think you will find it’s more suited for PvP. It can appear to be a bit lame in PvE. You could try popping it with endure pain if you have survivability issues. Just a tip though the next time you see a mob try popping frenzy with 100 blades, it should soon become apparent what the ability is for.

Fear me, not really all that fantastic I must agree but as you say it’s AoE CC so you can’t really complain, can get you out of a tight spot quite useful in team fights in PvP. Coupled with the vigorous shouts trait that allows you to heal when using a shout the ability isn’t too bad.

Why take banner of strength and for great justice when you can have both? :P I’m not to keen on banners myself but again there are some trait which buff banners substantially making them more appealing than shouts in some cases. Especially the trait that applys the regeneration buff to allies in range of the banner.

Whilst the signets aren’t particularly interesting one of the current popular builds right now is the 4-5 signet build in which you utilise a trait that allows you to gain +40 precision for each available signet. Individually however, signet of might can be used as a pretty strong offensive cooldown with no particular drawbacks. Signet of fury can be used quite nicely with dual wield builds in order to bust out those awesome double flurries or it can be used to generate enough adrenaline for a stage 3 healing surge, you just have to be a little creative.

Hope this helps.

@Fantom

I have tried a CC based build in PvP and I’ve also tried it in a questing/exploring environment.

The two aspects I didn’t like were:

1) The cooldown on the CC
2) Not enough AoE CC to be attractive for questing/exploring

I ran heavily defensive traits and my weapon setup was a 2H hammer and a mace/shield. Overall the CC that was available to me was:

Pommel Bash – 15s CD – 1s Daze
Shield bash – 20s CD traited – 1s Daze
Staggering blow – 20s CD – Knockback
Backbreaker – 30s CD – 2s Knockdown
Bull’s charge – 40s CD – 2s Knockdown
Stomp – 60s CD – Not entirely sure on exact effect this has on the enemy
Kick – 20s CD – Knockback
Bolas – 20s CD – 5 1/4s immobilise

I chose not to use bolas and stomp. Immobilise is pointless as a pure melee against an AI controlled mob and I didn’t like the long CD on stomp.

My idea of running a CC build was that unless I was keeping the mobs pretty much always locked down then it wasn’t really worth it. Pretty much all this CC is single target other than the knockbacks which aren’t all that great really other than buying some time for other CC to come off cooldown. I’m not about to tell you that it’s not doable because it probably is but it’s quite laborious to play this way and ends up coming back to the same problem as playing with a very defensive build which is you don’t do enough damage.

However, in PvP this is EPICALLY funny. I actually played a tournament round 3 in battle of khylo last night and the opposite team went 3 guardians and 2 warriors built defensive/CC and we got completely denied at every point. We’re not really amazing PvP’ers or anything so we really didn’t know how to counter at all, pretty easy win for those guys.

Thanks for the responses guys, I’d like to address some of the responses now.

First of all I’m aware that the post is largely rambling, it could easily be a lot more succinct and easier to read but I’m too lazy and wanted to vent a little bit. :P

@Eldarion

I certainly don’t blame you for not reading all of that but if you had you’d know that in my post I said x/x/30/30/x was not good enough. It’s pretty simple, you just end up taking more damage because it takes you too long to kill things. It was one of the first ideas I had about how I could increase my survivability and I didn’t really find it viable due to the lack of DPS. On the flip side though, if you use a build like that and consider yourself a group support it can be quite useful in dungeons.

@Zederok and Craid

In my eyes there’s 2 viable heals and the signet is not one of them in my opinion. The passive healing is fair, the active healing is horrible, when it’s on CD you get nothing and weirdly I could live with that. But he main thing though; the holy grail of fail with this signet is that it doesn’t give you a 25 CD condition removal which is essential running a toughness based build. Doesn’t matter if you look from an exploring PoV, dungeon PoV, PvP PoV you really need the condition removal.

The other attractive heal for me that is popular among the PvE streamers as well is the healing surge. Heals more than the other heals, 30 second cooldown.

I’m not really sure what you’re getting at craidt with the whole bad play style comment. I’m not a bad player and I’ve tried a lot of different weapon/trait combos, I certainly don’t have a problem “Managing the shield”. I’m glad you’re not having any problems but there seem to be a number of people who agree with some of my opinions, if you think you know better perhaps you should write a guide?

@eliteseraph

Yeh, I think most people are pretty mutual on what could use some improvement. I realise that other classes can have a bad time in some aspects as well but I think the real annoying thing with the warrior is there comes a point where no matter how good you are as a player there’s nothing more you could have done to survive sometimes. Whereas I can’t really see a sick ranger or necro dying, ever?

Loving the build man, just been using it for the last 19 minutes, I never knew the blank traits page was so pretty. :p

I know that this isn’t the suggestion forum, please don’t get upset and lock my thread for this but this is what I’d like to see from the warrior in the future:

- Rework hundred blades

It’s not really fun for the casuals to get one shot by this and it’s not really fun to try and actually pull the combo off on an experienced player either and if you don’t hit this ability you can really be in trouble sometimes especially in 1v1.

I would probably make it so that the ability still remains channeled so that you can be shutdown by CC but you should be able to move whilst using it. With this change the damage of the ability should also be reduced otherwise it really would be completely overpowered.

- Give us something to get our health back with

Signet of healing was a cool idea but it isn’t powerful enough. Just one or two abilities that grant regeneration would be fine. A cooldown that allows us to get some damage as health back would be another interesting idea. Caution is needed in order to keep PvP in line but we really need an extra something in PvE because we’re experiencing way to much down time.

- Warriors should probably be a bit more tough

We do have the highest base hp but it doesn’t really feel like it’s helping us that much we still take just as much damage as everyone else, plate armor feels like paper. I would probably either raise the amount of defense on heavy armor or greatly increase the defense on the shield because I mean cmon shields are like 60 defense and chest plates are around 320, the hell? The issue with that however is accidently making guardians invincible, I don’t know, developers are paid for this.

- Condition damage builds need to do more damage

That’s not really a hard one to figure out.

- Dual wielding builds need to do more damage

Ditto.

There’s plenty of aspects of the game I can easily criticise which in turn impact the warrior negatively but when just considering the warrior class these are my main points, that is all.

If anyone reads all of this criticism i’ll be amazed.

Moving on to WvWvW. I got kind of mixed feelings on warrior in WvWvW it depends really on what you’re doing. If you are assaulting or defending a fort it’s pretty cool, abuse the fact that you can use hundred blades through walls and pop frenzy on unsuspecting losers (Is that an exploit? I don’t even know, don’t ban me bros.). In the WvW stalemate situation where theres just 30 people staring at 30 people the warrior is pretty useless, if you go in you know you’re probably dead. With my full exotic knight gear I can jump in with the sword blow all CD’s and kill some low geared players and leave with endure pain which is really fun but if they were all on my level of gear or reacted with CC better I’d be toast. WvWvW feels like just another place where the warrior just needs to become a ranger to feel useful sometimes.

sPvP! This is where the warrior owns at the moment. The warrior is excellent at killing inexperienced PvPers, its just pro, you pop hundred blades and you’re target is insta-gibbed and everyone runs around calling the ability OP. Sometimes I don’t even have to CC! Players just don’t even bother to move or get to greedy with their stomps. You have quite a variety of ways to play the warrior in PvP, I don’t feel the need to go over them, check out Paradigms guides for capture point harrassing, point defending, etc.

In my opinion this is real PvP and you usually get pretty decent opponents especially in round 3. Now, I feel like the warrior is pretty good in tPvP, not the best. The first thing I gotta say is, hundred blades hits pretty hard but if you can't force your opponent into a position where they have absolutely no way to escape you can totally forget about that hundred blades awesomeness that was happening in sPvP because they're going to dodge, CC, blow defensive cooldown, obviously that's where the skill of the player behind the warrior comes in. My point really is that the ability actually requires quite a lot of skill to successfully hit because you need to be counting peoples dodges, considering if they have stability, considering what CC you have available, knowing if you should pop frenzy, etc. I really like the warrior in tPvP but again the lack of sustain really bugs me, luckily a full defensive build is viable in tPvP and can be used as a tide turner in team fights, point capper/holder, etc. I still think the warrior is a bit limited on what they can really use in tPvP and still be viable; longbow and gun are pretty pointless, the hammer is OK but I don't think it fits the role of the warrior within most comps, dual swords or dual axes are just pretty mediocre in damage and lack survivability to.

So now that I’ve just told you that healing is kinda crap you’re probably thinking that you’re just going to stack some toughness or vitality. Well that’s great because that’s exactly what you should do. The first thing you need to consider though is which is better? Toughness or vitality? Well I can tell you now that for leveling the answer is toughness. In the most simple terms toughness protects you from physical damage and vitality protects you from condition damage. You may have thought that perhaps you could have both but you’re wrong. During my 200 hrs of gameplay I spent about 20 of those hours farming which in itself is pretty dumb due to arenanets anti-farm code that they didn’t really tell you about (Yeah, I’m not even kidding, search it up) I obviously wanted to find the quickest and most effective way of farming on the warrior. Now the only thing to ever have in mind when farming is how can I maximize my amount of kills per hour.

First of all I went raw DPS: 30,30,10,0,0. Well, that was no good, if you’re level 70 plus you already know that many mobs have a large amount of conditions which they can apply, large amounts of CC which is deadly for a warrior and most annoyingly a pretty stupidly large aggro range. Whilst it’s possible to play like this it can get laborious and frustrating because you have to apply quite a bit of effort to stay alive. Ninja pulling that one extra mob or maybe if some foolish ranger decides to bring you company its byebye warrior, have fun with your 2s waypoint and 2 repair bill.

I also went from one extreme to the other and went full “tank”. This was quite funny actually because I ended up taking more damage this way simply because I couldn’t kill the mobs as quickly thus ended up taking more damage due to long encounters.

I tried many blends of builds after this including the shout build, banner build, full “tank” build and after some time the most effective build for solo farming proved to be :
20,30,20 with full knights armor (Power,precision,toughness wielding a greatsword and axe/shield. Even then though I still encounter some of the same frustrations as I had with the full DPS build.

The bottom line is that in terms of questing I feel like warrior isn’t in such a great place right now, obviously it’s doable, I did it myself even but it was quite a frustrating experience and I just thought it could have been a lot more enjoyable if it was easier.

Next, dungeons. My opinion is that warrior is pretty garbage in dungeons, I’m sure there’s someone out there going to jump up and try and defend the class in this kind of environment with some statement like “learn to dodge”. Well, I’m pretty good at dodging actually but the game only let’s you do that a certain amount. Now the ironic part of warriors in dungeons is that if you could actually do DPS you would probably be, dare I say it, the highest dps there as long as you’re using a greatsword. Anyone that has played warrior in dungeons knows you just get completely trashed, bosses and mobs seem to prefer hunting down melee over range and hit crazy hard. Remember how I said earlier warrior doesn’t have much choice but to eat the damage and cant really regen health? Yup, that’s what makes you garbage in this situation. Obviously you’re going to need to save one bar of endurance for dodging insta-gib attacks so that leaves you pretty much with one bar to use in the mean time. So if you have even just ONE single mob attacking you with auto attack it REALLY hurts, so you dodge one auto attack and then you can’t use any more endurance and you cant heal, it’s probably not going to die fast no matter what mob it is seeing as all the mobs have very high hp so that can be charted like so:

Do I have endurance? Y = Dodge, N = Move to step two
Do I have heal? Y = Use heal, N = Move to step three
Do I have endure pain? Y = Pop endure pain, N = Move to step four
Do I have block? Y = Pop block, N = Move to step five
Do I have a rifle? Y = Yay I have now evolved from my lowly farm as a warrior into the far superior ranger, N = Die

It may seem like that’s a lot of options but remember, heal is a 25-30 sec cooldowns for the decent heals, shield stance is 30 seconds and endure pain is 90 seconds. Almost every time I’m in this position I pop all that and the mob/boss/whatever is still on me and still doing the same high damage.

Overall, the warrior is again in a pretty crap place when it comes to dungeons, they’re in somewhat high demand for dungeons at least on my server due to them being “tanky” which of course in some ways they are but that’s almost code for being appointed as the guy that has a hard time staying alive whilst all the ranged players stand at 600-1200 range pressing 1 on their keyboards. I feel pretty cornered into using a rifle for dungeons because I have a lot of down time where I’m 6k hp, I can’t get it back, heals on cooldown and if I go in I already know that I’m going to die.

If you want a tl;dr just skip down to the last post

Before I even begin I’m first of all going to say that this thread is full of criticism and can easily be taken negatively, make no mistake though, I am enjoying the game just like everyone else. I feel people on the forums are always much to eager to stick their neck out and defend the game when someone offers their criticism simply because they’re enjoying the game themselves and don’t want people to speak badly about it. If you are one of the people who do this, you’re in some ways impacting the game negatively, criticism is needed in order for the game to grow and improve. Claiming the game is perfect is pretty foolish, if it was, why do we receive new hotfixes so often?

So far I’ve played about 200 hours on my warrior. I’ve got 96% map completion, I’ve done all the dungeons on both story and explorable mode, I’ve played WvWvW, I’ve played sPvP and have spent the last few days doing tPvP only. I think I have a pretty good overview on all aspects of the game from a warrior point of view so I want to share some of my thoughts on the class as I see a lot of people discussing the warrior who I feel have heavily invested their time into maybe only a few aspects of the game.

Let’s start off with the questing, exploring side of the warrior. Due to how quickly mobs respawn and the density of mobs in some areas and not wanting to spend the next 15 minutes going from one waypoint to another I’d say it’s pretty much a no brainer that you need to be using an offensive build for leveling. You have a few choices about the way you want to do damage which are basically:

Condition damage is best utilised by equipping yourself with a sword/shield, sword/sword or rifle because these weapon combinations take advantage of bleeds.

Power/precision is best utilised by equipping yourself with axe/axe, axe/shield or greatsword because they are the hardest hitting weapons for raw damage.

Full precision/crit damage can be done with all weapons really seeing as traiting for arms gives you additional condition damage.

Now I’m not really sure what other people feel but in terms of PvE damage nothing compares to power/precision, if you’ve been through the choices yourself you will probably arrive at the same conclusion. If you watch warrior streamers like kungen it’s most likely they will be running power/prec with greatsword, axe/shield and maybe a rifle. The two weapons I haven’t mentioned are longbow and hammer because I feel they are more utility based although they are definitely cool.

Fortunately for us even though we are limited for choice if we want max dps, power/precision with greatsword and axe/shield actually owns really hard. Hundred blades is just a really strong ability in terms of PvE damage. I’m not saying any other weapon combo sucks but it certainly isn’t as strong, I’ve tested a lot of different combinations more than once and can confidently say that if you’re a min/maxer you want a greatsword.

Now the part that really sucks for warriors whilst leveling is that I feel like we’re probably one of the classes with the least sustainability. Let’s not mistake what I’m saying here because let’s face it yes, a warrior can handle 2-3 mobs same level on them at the same time depending on the mob type whereas many other classes cannot. The real problem is that warriors are always the ones taking all the damage yet we can’t really get any of our health back without using our CD heal. Many other classes can kite with a majority of their weapons, heal their selves with regen abilities and use pets to take the brunt of the damage but the warrior cannot.

Now before someone says “Vigorous shouts, noob” or “Get inspiring battle standard” I’ve tried that before and I’ll tell you what the problem is; they both require 30 points in tactics and both of them are tier 3 traits so they can’t be used together. Not only that though, even if you stack your bar with just shouts it still sucks complete muffins. I’m pretty sure each shout heals for 1600 HP of my 22k health pool and each shout has around a 25 second CD, the heal really pales in comparison to what some of the other guys have and besides who the hell wants to play with like 4 shouts anyway? For anyone that has the bright idea to stack some healing power, think again. I think there’s an affix for like power, toughness, healing power… I think it was maybe called Valkyrie? Not entirely sure but I tried that and had a decent amount of healing power, it increased the heals from 1600 up to 2k.

Haha, I was going to do this as well. GL in getting some important people to read this.

Well seeing as you never mentioned PvE I fail to see why it matters. In sPvP you can roll a new character every day and never have a disadvantage over someone playing the same class all the time. :}

I’d even go a step further and say that the karma gear is even more useless due to the fact that you can’t pick the exact stat prefixes that you want.

I’m not 100% on Arena Nets design intention but I think maybe the more expensive karma gear, cultural gear and exotics bought for dungeon currency are supposed to be for aesthetics or vanity purposes and could be used as such by taking advantage of fine transmutation stones.

The fact that you reinstalled the game and it didn’t fix it would suggest that it probably has something to do with the language settings on your computer. When was the last time you installed a fresh copy of windows on your machine?

Hah, Vizunah Square are insanely good. GL mate.

Well you only need the professions for the gifts, not the legendary itself. It’s annoying if professions are required to make a legendary because I really hate crafting.

Let’s share what we know about the mystic forge. I don’t know much but I would love to know a bit more about what can be combined in there.

I’m pretty sure there is a recipe that is:

250 Mithril Ore
x Phillosophers stones
x Crystals
and I think mystic coins? That creates Orichalcum Ore around maybe 20-50?