Guild Wars 2

I do have to say, a good experienced warrior using the stun build alongside the now buffed healing signet is EXTREMELY hard to kill in 1v1. The combination of healing signet/adrenal health/mango pie allows a burst warrior to heal for 700 hps. It is really, really hard to deal 700 dps while avoiding their stuns. You can block/blind/dodge their stuns all day but eventually u run out of dodges and stunbreakers and will take skull crack/100b to the face.

That’s actually a sylvari racial elite skill, you probably played originally as a sylvari guardian. Its called “Take Root”, it has not been deleted.

My attempt at making a tanky dps build. I have no clue how some people are getting their stats so high, it puts mine to shame :/.

It really depends on what you are doing in WvW. Guardian generally shines in groups where you can apply constant buffs/condition removal to your allies an reap the benefits of AH. You also have tons of useful utility that your team can benefit from. However, solo roaming on a guardian is horrible. With no stealth, clones or high mobility, you really have no way of escaping if more than 2 or 3 people go after you.

Thanks for the responses guys, its helpful.

Thought I should probably post both of the builds so u can get an idea of what I’m working with.

Current Build (Soldier Runes)

Attack: 3072
Critical Chance: 42%
Critical Damage: 58%
Armour: 3038
Health: 18355
Healing Power: 300

Theoretical Build (Divinity Runes)

Attack: 2931
Critical Chance: 44%
Critical Damage: 91%
Armour: 2938
Health: 16655
Healing Power: 884

So I’ve been running the standard 0/5/30/30/5 AH build for a while and for the most part I’ve used a soldier rune build. The build had a nice balance of damage, protection and condition removal but it lacked any kind of healing power. This ended up being a problem for me in WvW, as I found that 300 healing power was insufficient and I am constantly being downed by bunker eles, mesmers and certain ranger builds that can simply outlast me. Recently I’ve done some theorycrafting and found myself a build that uses divinity runes and has a good amount of healing power while keeping the tanky dps that my old build had. The problem is, it sacrifices the soldier runes. I still have pure of voice to remove one condition per shout but I feel like that isn’t enough. Was wondering if I could get any feedback as to how gamebreaking that one condition removal is. I don’t want to spend 70g on a new build that ends up being destroyed by conditions.

This is just something I threw together in attempt to add healing power to my build. Haven’t actually tried it since I can’t afford divinity runes atm. These stats are with buffs.

Power: 1831
Precision: 1766
Toughness: 1727
Vitality: 1501
Critical damage: 91%
Healing power: 884

So I play a male sylvari guardian with the shout “Hold the Line” almost constantly on my bar. I used to think the skill was just completely silent but a while back I noticed that it does have audio, but it only seems to use it 1/10 of the time. It also appears to have multiple possible options that it randomly picks from and differs from race to race.

So far, my male sylvari has shouted out the following:
“None shall pass!”
“They will know pain!”
“You shall not fail!”

Has anyone heard other things shouted or have any idea how this skill’s audio works?

Jester.1546:

Comming off PVT will just mean you need to move back some, but this makes you easier to get left behind/singled out.

This is the main problem with staff, If you stand too far back you tend to get singled out by thieves or other bursters. If you build is squishy, that often means death. However, it also goes the other way, if you are really tanky and have to be really close to do anything, you tend to overextend and get focused by the enemy zerg which tends to kill you, regardless of tankiness.

Im trying to find a good staff gear setup that puts your most effective position right in the middle of your group. Something that is tanky enough to survive but can also throw out some decent damage. However, its rather difficult due to the ele’s light armour, low health and traits that don’t favor toughness. From what I’ve found, the only way to tank anything on a staff ele is to go with a full pvt setup like Jester suggested.

If anybody has a good balanced gear/trait setup, Id love to see it.

OreoWolf.9564:

Its like giving warriors a mainhand warhorn.

I can just imagine, “Oh god here comes a warrior dual warhorn one-man-band build!”

:O

Or you could take the wombo combo and use a bit of both. There’s no requirement that you take either extreme, you could even throw in a pinch of berserker if you wanted to and get a balanced build.

I’d agree with Kharel Arhew, GS guardian is best suited as a tanky dps build. The setup Guanglai gave is a glasscannon guardian which isn’t bad but since you mained a warrior previously, it would be kinda pointless since warriors make better glasscannons. A “Tanky DPS” build doesnt automatically refer to full soldier with absolutely no crit ability. I usually recommend a combination of soldier/berserker/knight armour to get a good balance of tankiness and critical ability. The traits vary but I would highly recommend speccing 30 into valor for one of our 2 main healing traits coupled with 30% crit damage and 300 toughness. Altruistic Healing is for a shout based build and Monk’s Focus is for a meditation build.

I personally use a 0/5/30/30/5 AH build with GS/Hammer, soldier runes, and a mix of the armour I mentioned above.

The setup gets me about 3k attack, 42% crit chance, 58% crit damage, 19k health and 3.1k armour on top of amazing healing ability, condition removal and support.

Like others have said above me, you generally want to find a combination of knights/soldier/berserker armour that gives you the stats you want. How you distribute your armour depends heavily on your traits.

Most guardians put 30 points into valor since our main healing traits are there. This would mean you have a base of 300 toughness and 30% critical damage. After that it depends on your build. If you are running AH, you will probably put 30 into honor as well which would give you a base of 300 vitality. Monks focus builds vary but often put 30 into radiance which would give you a base of 300 precision.

Once you have decided on a trait set, you really just experiment with different armour/trinket combinations until you find stats that you like. You dont want to favor one area too heavily as it results in diminishing returns. For example, armour becomes a lot less potent after 3k so you should probably aim for around that.

Heres my setup for an example: I use a 0/5/30/30/5 AH build with soldier runes, plate of orrian steak frittes and quality maintenance oil. The equipment goes like this:

Knights: Helm, leggings, amulet, one ring.
Soldiers: Weapons, boots, one ring.
Berserkers: Chest, shoulders, gloves, backpiece, both accessories.

The resulting stats are 3k attack, 42% critical chance (w/o fury), 58% critical damage, 3.1k armour and about 19k health.

Hope this helps

The class is fine for everything outside of tPvP. The average skill levels of your opponents in hot join and WvW are low enough that you can do pretty well. As people have said, most of the whining comes from tPvP where your opponents will look to exploit every single one of your weaknesses. Unfortunately, warrior’s weaknesses are rather numerous and easy to exploit. That said, however, warriors are absolute beasts in pve so its a bit of a tradeoff.

JonathanSharp.7094:

100 blades needs to be changed.

Unfortunately, it seems 100b is going to be nerfed regardless. If the nerf is more then like 10%, nobody will use 100b since auto attack would become a better damager.

People dont realize that any situation where they were killed by 100b, the warrior could have just spammed auto attacks and gotten the exact same result.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Rising Dusk.2408:

their “immense strength” boils down to exactly 1 skill, Hundred Blades.

Agreed! 100 blades needs to be changed
As I’ve said, that’ll be happening in coming patches.

I think people REALLY overestimate the power of 100b. I did some calculations earlier to see just how powerful it is in relation to the GS auto attack.

100b has a total base damage of 4730 over the course of 3.5 seconds.
The GS auto attack chain has a total base damage of 1948 over 1.5 seconds.

Now since 3.5/1.5 = 2.33, you should be able to deal out 2.33 auto attack chains in the same time it takes to finish a 100b. Now, 1948(2.33) = about 4539. GS auto attacks should deal 4539 total base damage in the time it takes 100b to deal 4730. 4539/4730 = about 0.96 . This would mean that GS auto attack has 96% of 100b’s base damage while allowing you to move.

Now, I could be wrong and somebody check my calculations but doesnt seem like 100b is terribly OP :/

It sure seems like rifle doesnt shoot as far as other weapons that have 1200 range. Ive noticed this mainly in WvW where staff eles and mesmers (both 1200 range) seem to outrange me. I tested this by taking a rifle and a longbow (stronger bowstrings trait) to the sPvP golem dummies. I took a few auto attacks with rifle and stepped further away until it was out of range. In the same manner, I took the traited longbow and fired its auto attacks. Both of the skills supposedly have 1200 range so I assumed it would start missing at the same spot. But lo and behold, I was able to step SIGNIFICANTLY further back with the longbow before it was out of range.

Has anyone else had this problem? Is it a glitch?

Its also interesting to note that the longbow’s 3 and F1 skills appear to have the same range as the rifle.

Are you sure you arent in a high level area? Warriors are somewhat notorious for having really easy leveling. Even if you just sat there spamming 1 with a junk sword and no armour it shouldnt be that bad.

Leo G.4501:

Discipline isn’t a defensive tree. Discipline is a movement/burst skills tree. The only defensive trait in Discipline is vigor on stance use. Besides, Discipline is already a strong trait line.

It makes more sense for a “Using adrenaline recovers health” trait to be in Defense as that’s the tree with the +Healing Power stats and the trait line that needs the most help.

Thinking it should go in Discipline just makes me think you want more sustain without having to build for it (aiming for your zerker build so you can have your cake and eat it too).

Whether it goes into the defence tree or the discipline tree doesnt really effect me personally since I use a 0/20/30/0/20 build. I just feel like putting it in the discipline tree would also fix it’s problem with the burst damage attribute being completely useless.

I get what you’re saying though since discipline is more of an offensive tree but its also a burst based tree so it might fit :/

The combination of GS 3 and 5 along with SOR for swiftness should get you pretty decent mobility. Warrior actually has some of the better mobility while wielding a GS when u compare it to some other professions. If you feel that you really need another movement skill you can try swapping out a utility for bulls charge (900 range “leap”).

As for sustain…

Yea there isnt much… the only real way to get healing or condition removal is to go with a shout build which sacrifices a LOT of utility/damage :(

Spifnar.4712:

Braxxus.2904:

I would much rather have adrenal health changed so that it heals you for X in one lump sum whenever you use your burst (F1) ability, scaled up with adrenaline level at time of use (3 bars adren heals for more than 1 bar)

This.

Passive healing as you gain adrenaline strikes leaves us with very little control over healing. Linking it to burst gives us more control, and gives the same amount of healing

But leave Adrenal Health the way it is, and put the heal-on-burst trait in Discipline (30). To make room for it, drop Quick Bursts and have being able to burst more often a function of how many points are in Desc.

This is probably the best idea I’ve seen in a while. Replacing quick bursts with a heal on burst trait and replacing burst damage with burst recharge would solve a lot of our problems.

Discipline would be the perfect tree for it since its secondary attribute is messed up. Also, most warriors already spec 20 into discipline anyway, meaning that most warriors wouldn’t have to sacrifice too much in order to get it.

Even thouh Ill admit that the longbow is very useful in ZvZ or wall defence, I tend to favor the rifle. If I didnt have it’s heavy ranged dps, I feel like I would get owned by every mesmer that looked in my direction…

Plus I spec 10 into tactics for leg specialist anyway so rifle 2 gets a short root as well.

Yea we really need some form of healing outside of our heal skill. I’ve seen alot of threads about healing on adrenaline use/gain, seems like it would be good. Might actually give me a reason to use my burst.

Gaudrath.6725:

Don’t be. He assumes the warrior will not use one of their many gap closers and CC abilities and not use ranged weapons, for some reason.

Once an ele pops their mistform, usually they have lightning flash for extra stun breaker and mobility but that’s it.

So basically you’d want to force them to pop mistform early on, then proceed to apply as much DPS as you can. Now, they can run away with RTL, but that either removes them from the fight or puts them just nicely in range of your rifle if they start legging it back towards you. You would have to watch for projectile reflection/absorption though.

I think warriors get a bad rap because there’s so many 100B users out there… people even forget that warriors have some really nice single target DPS on rifle. You can’t really kite a warrior, you just turn it into a ranged fight.

Yea its not so much that I have a huge amount of trouble with eles, Im just really sick of going on the mesmer/ele forums and seeing all the “lol warriors are no threat”.

Lucas of the Desert.2165:

Enemy: Warrior
The fight is really trivial.

This makes my warrior sad.

I like the idea of using adrenaline to gain survivability, but I’m not so sure it should be based entirely on the defense tree.

This change would make 15 in the defense tree a requirement for any build. The emphasis on the F1 burst skill would also make weapons like the greatsword or main hand sword nearly useless due to their weak bursts.

Hammer and Axe/X builds would probably dominate with these changes since both of them use their burst skill often and can spec easily into the defense tree.

I was thinking an alternative would be to add F2 or F3 defensive burst skills that heal/remove conditions based on adrenaline level. The defense tree could have traits that add extra ability to these and make the trait line more useful.

So I play 2 classes for the most part, a warrior and a thief, and I do a little bit of everything on both of them. Now, there is no doubt in my mind that warrior is much better at dungeons (at least imo) but I’m trying to decide if he is viable in WvW. I’ve tried all sorts of weapon setups (GS/Rifle, Hammer/Rifle, Hammer/Greatsword, Greatsword/Longbow, Hammer/Sword Warhorn, Sword Shield/Longbow) as well 3 different armour setups and traits. I finally focused on a combination of berserker’s armour and cavalier’s trinkets (Power/Toughness/Critical Damage) with GS/Rifle and a 0/20/20/10/20 trait setup. Slot skills are Mending/Bulls charge/Frenzy/ Endure Pain/ Signet of Rage.

The build has the following stats:
2.9k Attack, 3k armour, 20k health, 65% critical chance (When fury and consumables),90% critical damage,lifesteal from omnomberry ghosts.

It seems like he can do OK at WvW, he can 1v1 most classes and survive fairly well in team fights but it’s nothing special and he has all sorts of weaknesses (Cripple/Chill being the most common) and it seems like he gets focused like crazy.

My thief on the other hand seems to be infinately better and it’s not like im using any kind of crazy build. I’m just using the usual 25/30/0/0/15,Dagger Dagger/ Shortbow, full berserker crit build and yet it does SO much better than my warrior. My thief can easily do 1v2 or even 1v3 if the enemy sucks enough. He can literally walk into the middle of the enemy zerg, gank someone and shadowstep away with very little issue. At a range, he can do the same damage with shortbow as my warrior can do with rifle but also do it AoE. Heavy focusing is never a problem either since i can stealth/shadowstep away.

I really do like my warrior and I feel like an absolute jerk for using a D/D thief build but is it just undeniably better? Do I just suck at warrior? Is my build wrong?

Would really appreciate any help that might make my warrior as good as my thief or at least a bit better because right now, he doesnt even come close. :(

So I’ve been getting back into using my warrior for WvW but I’m having some trouble finding a good weapon setup. I play offensively for the most part but not glass cannon and I’m trying to find some balance between damage,mobility,control and ranged ability. Trouble is, their really isn’t a combination of 2 sets of weapons that can give you all 4 of these things. I tried typical GS/rifle but it lacked control, tried GS/hammer but I got destroyed in fights at a range, tried hammer/rifle but lacked mobility. Does anybody have any ideas as to how I should work this out?

Yea they seriously need to fix the way one person’s shout cuts off the other. Would also be nice if they changed FGJ to a more interesting quote. I feel like WvW would be 10x better if right before bursting down a gate all the warriors could yell “FOR NARNIAAAAAA”

I don’t think the devs are going to nerf cleave AoE because its not really the problem. The nerfs to AoE are probably more focused on the dozens of little red circles you find littering the ground in WvW. I could be wrong but I’ve never really seen anybody complain about warriors suicidally rushing the enemy team to use his cleaves.

So I’ve been trying to get back into using my warrior more often in sPVP but it’s clear that I’m doing something wrong. I use the following build:

Equipment: Hammer/Greatsword (Rage sigil in both), berserker’s amulet, runes of lyssa
Traits: 20 arms (Unsuspecting Foe, Forceful Greatsword), 30 defence (Sure Footed, Merciless Hammer, Defy Pain), 20 discipline (Signet Mastery, Mobile Strikes).
Utilities: Mending, Signet of Fury, Endure Pain, Balanced Stance, Signet of Rage.

I play offensively for the most part by applying both heavy damage and CC while invulnerability from 30 defence and endure pain as well as the protection from signet of rage (Runes of Lyssa give all boons when using elite skill) in order to gain a fair amount of survivability. However, my problem is that the initial earthshaker is always seen coming and is easily dodged/misses due to blinding. Following this whoever I am fighting usually proceeds to apply cripple/chill and kite me. I dont have enough condition removal to deal with the constant cripple/chill and the greatsword isn’t mobile enough to catch up with them. The ability to kite me does not appear to be restricted to any class either as almost every class has done it to me (save for guardian who can just block/outheal me).

Does anyone have any suggestions to my build or playstyle that would make my warrior more viable in sPvP?

More variety would be nice. : /

OptimistPrime.9283:

I support this with every fiber of my being.

Ive never played ranger so I cant really tell you any details about them. What I can tell you is that thief is extremely good. People tend to overlook the shortbow when talking about thief’s viability in pve but it deals out pretty good aoe damage. Also, the ability to stealth and make all monsters stop hitting you is invaluable.

Keep in mind that we cant immediately go back into stealth. If he hit u from in stealth, he has 3 seconds of “revealed” before he can go back in. With 8 people, 3 seconds should be more then enough time to down him, even if he’s specced for survivability.

I’d love to see how much they would QQ if they were hit with hs before it was nerfed…

Duke Blackrose.4981:

Grimwolf.7163:

I don’t know why they nerfed it at all; wasn’t a large part of the heavy damage it dealt caused by that multi-hit damage multiplying bug, which they fixed in the same patch?
The same thing that was giving Blade Trail and Kill Shot such ridiculous damage, because every time they hit someone the next person would take 2 hits worth of damage, then 3 and so on with each person hit.

Yeah, it was pretty much a nerf within a nerf.

Its Nerfception O.o

Might I ask wwhat you are doing to get 69% crit chance and 104% crit damage? I use full berserker gear with wurm runes and 30 in crit trait line but i only get around 49% crit chance and 85% crit damage.

Can anybody tell me what good keybinds are for a thief in WvW? I’m just using D/D for the most part but I’m having issues deciding what keybinds to use for my weapon skills/steal while still being able to use w,a,s,d keys to move and dodge. Just clicking the skills isnt working very well.