Guild Wars 2

Work on your reflexes to dodge and/or use a block. If warriors are giving you trouble, thief must seem like a blinding light of insta-death.

As a warrior, I still have the most trouble with thief over every other 1-on1 because of the unpredictable nature of when attacks are coming in/fast thief attacking animation. In other words, spend some time to recognize the precursor moves before you take that spike damage.

@Boroming – It’s about coordinated “bombing” with a group. AoE and any means to gain Quickness (hello, AoE) makes it work often.

By “bombing”, I’m talking about the Mesmer portal/stealth tactic (usually with a Guardian or three for pulling everyone together or a Elementalist for AoE stun). The tactic was popularized back in the DAoC/WAR days from my recollection.

I realize the power of the spec but it doesn’t help the far majority of warriors to make them suddenly becoming playable in WvW as a melee. That same coordinated group would be fine in 90%+ of circumstances with any type of spec because of the power of portal/stealth/support Guardians in WvW.

EDIT: I still don’t know how you can run melee at all with the invisible / culling bug right now though. At least with range, you can tab target (lol) stuff.

Bytor.3826:

Red Falcon.8257:

I use full zerker setup with Knight’s weapon and 30def, running around with 2800 armor, 3k pow, 50% crit, and 210% crit dmg.

Bullcrap? How can you possibly have stats like that? You can’t. I’m running around in FULL Berserker’s, including weapons, with 20 in Arms and 30 in Discipline and 20 in Defense and the only number I compare to is your Crit Chance. I can understand pulling that kind of power and toughness if you’re heavily invested in Strength and Defense, and even having 50% crit if you’re counting Fury crit in your base stats, but there is no way in hell you have 210% crit damage. Stop lying.

Maybe using the bugged Divinity Runes … that has now been fixed.

Sure, Hamstring can enter circumstances where it can be useful but there are usually much better options ahead of it.

All other classes besides Rangers have at least two pull options, warriors have one (underwater only). Rangers have the pet abilities though.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Pull

Remember, single target pull. Unbalanced – perhaps. But with a decent cooldown, it’d be exactly what MH Sword needs to make it different and fills an odd missing gap in the warrior arsenal (especially melee warriors).

Lohengrin.8573:

@Artaz
you are wrong. try this build out before to say it’s wrong. you obviously know nothing about metagame

again: this is the most common build for wvwvw guilds, and I told you already why: amazing aoe dps, loads of combo finisher, good survivability, good escape and chase etc.
feel free to keep playing like a nob, if you want, but I think mose of warriors wants to udnerstand how is the best way to play their class. I’m giving you a “not pug-bow” build and you are spitting on it. I hope to meet you in the battleground, but in the enemy side, so I can pown you

I’ve already tried it, read my post again – there is a lot of negatives to the build and quite frankly, if you are having success with it, great – but you are being carried by the players around you. Realize that.

Your build is not for the 90%+ of at least partial playtime PUG warrior players as your thread title would leave you to believe no matter how you claim it as “perfect”.

“pown” – this made me lol

Khristophoros.7194:

@Artaz – How can you compare Hamstring to Flurry? You have both skills so chain them. Flurry first, then Hamstring. You get 11 seconds of movement control on your target. These are not redundant skills.

How long do you think it takes to bring down a target? Totally redundant in PvE. 11 seconds (base) of movement control in PvP/WvW is rarely needed (the target will have an escape option, be dead or you’ll be down).

EDIT: All I’m saying is Hamstring is pretty bad as an ability on MH Sword and should be replaced with a “pull” ability (or at least have the cooldown/duration reduced if nothing else). ANet can datamine how often the ability is used when available – I’m guessing it’s pretty poor.

If I could downvote, I would. Absolutely no.

In PvE, yes, this works well. In WvW where you are spiked down by a wall of players, you have one option here, Endure Pain. But you need to use Endure Pain basically just to melee for 5 seconds so…

If you want to melee in WvW where zerg is the common-meta to build around, you need to play a stealth thief or an ultra-defensive Guardian/Warrior build.

If you are having success with this build in any way, it’s because you are surrounded by other players (in the zerg) or you are being heavily supported with combo fields/other player boons or running a very coordinated CC lockdown team (impossible right now with the massive invisible player culling bug).

By my napkin math, Sword is actually very good DPS compared to every other option but only if bleed is allowed to happen (when the stack cap of bleed is 25 per target this makes the weapon somewhat middle/upper-ground of the warrior weapon options).

The 1k-1k-2k autoattack chain is when all three attacks crit. Sword normally hits for much lower but also attack speed is extremely fast (attacking almost twice as fast as the next comparable melee)… so it is very deceptive on the actual damage output. That and the animation of the sword autoattack chain is meh so aesthetics is a problem when you use the attack so much.

The MH Sword “2” Savage Leap is a great ability to give the weapon some mobility and is really the shining star… BUT

My biggest gripe with MH Sword is the “3” Hamstring ability which is a melee range cripple (7 seconds base duration is almost too powerful) but the ability is on a 15 second cooldown – a 4.5 seconds cripple on 10 cooldown is far better. But the MH Sword warrior doesn’t need a “long”-cooldown melee cripple attack anyways when you have a shorter one with Flurry F1 (10 seconds – remember the MH Sword attacks fast and any adrenaline strikes build is not a problem; technically 12 second between uses if no other adrenaline gain options are in your build). But Flurry also immobilizes for 4 seconds so it ends up being far far superior than 7 seconds of cripple (the target actually loses the ability to travel out of combo fields/dodge).

So MH Sword “3” Hamstring is just redundant to the Flurry “F1” unless you don’t have the adrenaline to use F1. And to boot, it isn’t even a finisher type like Axe’s “3” Throw Axe as a projectile finisher or Greatsword’s “3” Whirlwind Attack as a whirl finisher.

A fix: If Sword “3” was a 600 range single target pull ability (Warrior’s seems to lack a pull even though they are a melee class – what’s up with that?!?), you would at least see MH Sword used far more often. I’m just not a fan of this “3” ability because it basically never gets used…so it’s like playing a 2-button MH warrior and less options = less fun.

Now compare that to any other MH warrior melee weapon option (except Mace F1 but that’s a different issue). That’s why you don’t see as many MH Sword warriors.

Asura – nothing quite like “Yoda”-lightsaber Hundred Blades animation.

Z-axis is broken on all leaps (not just Bull’s Charge) when going high-to-low and you’ll miss. The game uses a anticipated trajectory to your target but does not compensate for movement in a non-linear fashion.

There is basically two ways to fix this, either (1) increase the speed for all leaps/charge or (2) increase the range of the hit effect and allow the attacker to hit objects behind/below/above at the end of the movement. It might require both.

Teleport to target (Guardian-like) attacks uses the (1) option to get around the lag/trajectory issue.

Ari Kagura.9182:

…I just think that signets are poorly utilized for some folks. Crap! I got a stack of bleeds, poison, confuse, and burning on me! But if I pop my Signet of Stamina, I’ll lose my precious DPS! Crap!

That’s an example of a poorly played warrior and is not an example of Signet builds. That same player would have issues realizing that they even have conditions on them in the first place and then would understand that any amount of conditions on that magnitude needs to be removed ASAP.

Look, when I ran the 80 GS/Signet (4) build most people simply did not realize that the build requires an excessive amount of gear (Exotic Rampager, Exotic Jewel, rare guild backpack) set up to make it absolutely a beast spec. Read Forceful Greatsword:http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Forceful_Greatsword, and then add +100% crit chance and + crit damage. Guess what happens – that’s right, perma-full stack Might that happens automatically by attacking all while stacking AoE vulnerability for everyone else to gain significant DPS from.

Non-stop I hear comments about how sick perma-Might Elementalists are – you know what, GS/Signet warriors can do the same thing – it takes more to get there (gear) but the same throughput happens except it happens with 100% crit rate as well (a fair tradeoff for Elementalist swap attunement and utility).

A warrior without a knowledge to go ranged when needed, to clear self conditions, to use stability, to dodge, to move into a fight to take a few hits/tank and back out, etc. when the situation calls for it, happens in every spec.

But I get it, bad warriors have a direct correlation to playing 5 “Singet”/GS builds but that does not mean that same warrior doesn’t know how to play the crap out of it and contributes more to the group than any other warrior would do.

For all you Signet haters, what happens when you require teammates to cover their own condition removal and stop relying on shout Warriors to cover it for you?

(FYI, I’m playing a shout warrior right now and I know the answer – the problem isn’t the warrior player build and instead of saying, “blame that GS/Signet warrior, he should have shout condition removal”, it instead should be, “hey, maybe I should build for my own survivability/condition removal”)

GS + Signets does not mean no group utility (warriors have a second weapon set) or even for that matter, glass cannon (warrior have other talent points to allocate besides precision). Even Rune sets can be group utility if chosen by a warrior. But even then, the “1” spammable GS ability is AoE vulnerability.

It’s hard to explain because I think we are encountering an entire different class of player level expertise.

But if your definition of group utility is only healing, well, then you have two options – and you’re right, Signet builds can’t do that.

4 Signet GS + FGJ for perma-fury creating 100% crit rate, +80% total crit damage, super might boon stacking, while having the magic that is Adrenaline Health in Toughness plus any Food choice for WvW/dungeon PvE/solo is my spec choice of preference.

If ANet ever gets around to fixing Superior Rune of the Pack bug, the build will have 10 talent points to allocate in a more effective DPS area as well.

Fair warning: Do not judge a player based on signets O.o

In Cursed Shore with the Engineer turrets (Rifle, Flame, Rocket) at Temple of Melandru if you repair these turrets (interact while the turret is destroyed) and stand inside the turret, you become stuck inside the object.

Is this on the confirmed ANet bug list?

As a warrior, you should probably know that during Whirling Axe, you can dodge. This is what the thief is doing during the first ‘steal’ and use ability phase to become invulnerable.

The biggest issue is there is no dodge animation during that particular ability usage regarding dodge so it is impossible to tell what the thief is doing. And the ability (steal/Whirlwind does immense damage when followed up by Dagger Storm).

But the real culprit here is that many a thief uses reduced cost of endurance per dodge trait along with vigor buffing (comes from steal) trait to get even more endurance; then the thief becomes rather difficult to deal with when they can dodge 4-5 times in that 12 seconds of high burst damage (nevermind the stability and reflect projectiles during the latter 3/4ths).

The only solid way to beat it is to get out of there and come back or go invulnerable yourself (shield block + Endure Pain + dodge). CC is the wrong way to deal with it as the thief is likely dodging in the first few seconds when they can be CC).

Meta +1

Read the Post Your Build thread at the top of the page first stickied on this forum.

There is no reason why you can’t do what you posted as a build. For leveling up, many other people would recommend a Signet build with Deep Strike (just don’t let it make you lazy).

You can use whatever weapon you like, I recommend experimenting with all of them because down the line, it’ll pay off (especially in group dungeon settings).

TIP: You can cancel the long animations at any time if you want (including the long Rush animation or HB animation) by weapon swapping.

I’m actually thinking the opposite of Signet/GS warriors these days. Everyone seems to be a defensive spec and there is no one actually doing damage anymore (especially in a burst fashion) whether they are support/CC/condition based.

Now if the GS/Signet warrior keeps falling over every time they get into melee range, that’s a different story.

Seriously, the warriors that make the spec glow are the ones with the most experience in most fights from what I’ve experienced. It’s the bad ones who have no idea where to position and what telegraphs to look for that makes the spec bad in group settings. Group AoE vulnerability stacking (the “1” on Greatsword) is unbelievable in DPS support.

I’m also not sure I agree that spamming shouts or banners basically on cooldown is “more difficult” and doesn’t make that warrior-player any better.

Note, on my GS/Signet warrior, I can run a ~98% crit gear setup because of the +Prec Signet talent (and FGJ/Signet of Rage for perma-Fury). It is devastation.

The reason players are upset is that it is essentially a “lockout” timer artificially placed without any justification other than to combat botting and exceedingly fast player advancement. Many prior MMOs had the 24-hour or week-long dungeon instance “lockout”.

But it is two-fold here, since it was not in game on day 1, you have a class of people that were treated better by getting it first. This nth percentage of the top one-percent is what the DR code caters to and gives this class of player base a far greater head start (weeks of play time) than other players following and trying to accomplish the same goals will have.

Secondly, it really is for the anti-bot/farm group of players but is so dramatic that it is easy to realize that anyone playing under the right circumstances can hit it in ~40 minutes of continuance and ‘normal’ event chain hopping on a given map with your group.

In essence, the DR code is the opposite of fun. It sucks because it hurts the players that want to play the game far too much at the expense of combating the real underlying issues, bots, player advancement pace, third-party gold sellers, etc.

EDIT: Example of hitting DR code in ~40 minutes happened today in Orr. I did the Arah event chain immediately followed by the Plinx event chain (Broodmother was in as well during Plinx). Mobs at the end of Plinx were dropping nothing but greys. This was not random. If DR code is able to be hit after 8-10 events back-to-back, it is far too harsh.

I can anecdotally say that + Magic Find does not does increase the quantity of items received but it does increase the quality of items.

The DR code in essence caps the quantity of items received in a specific time period session on mob kills per time. The DR is slowly removed by “x” amount of time after not killing anything. The actual quantity of items does not increase percentage wise; the quality (white -> blue, blue -> green, green -> yellow, yellow -> orange) is directly correlated to the +MF amount (although there may be mathematical tiers/soft caps).

This is why you are having conflicting reports of +MF and Diminishing Returns. Both of you are correct. If +MF is used, you are noticing a substantial decrease (as players, we get more efficient/smarter in hitting that cap sooner every day) because you are hitting the quantity item cap sooner. If all you did was play for 30 minutes though, you’d never even be phased (the latter report).

Note, I hit the DR cap in Orr today by first doing the Arah chain followed immediately by the Plinx chain. By the end of Plinx, I was getting next to nothing dropped. That’s how quick DR kicks in (8-10 events back to back) under two different chains (~40-45 minutes play time).

In essence, +Magic Find is even more important now after DR changes because you have a limited ‘farming’ period of maximum quality drop rates.

I’m also fairly certain that particular items (dyes, Black Lion chests and grey trash items are not affected by +MF).

EDIT: What is missing in the DR code is the relative distance of event chains from one another AND that event chains (many mini-mobs in a short amount of time that is scaled based on the number of players present in the event) is not taken into account.

Conditions requires time in order to fully gain the positive damage output over a comparable Power build. For general solo, you should build for spike/burst damage first. (Carry a second set of gear and invest in some invisible containers to store the other set)

Offhand Axe is another option.

Especially in Orr, it requires some “practice” to anticipate when mobs stop the “invulnerable” message and can be damaged with any build. Obviously knowing the spawn locations in each event helps immensely as well.

Kill shot (Rifle), I’ve never seen it (probably not possible to exceed 12K) in the most extreme of circumstances. I know I’ve only seen a personal best in the 9K range.

However, I have rarely done that with a Ballista (3rd ability) and even more in one shot (personal best is 22K). Ballistas are crazy spike damage output but the projectiles are fairly slow meaning it is very easy to avoid simply by strafing side to side slightly.

<<< Over 3500 WvW kills and counting on my warrior (not that it is impressive by any means, just perspective)

Short answer: Yes

Long answer: It’s not just the tier point 30 traits, it’s also the tier point 25 traits. Many tier 25 tier traits (power/precision/toughness) are well worth the investment.

Suggestion: Two WvWvW matches run simultaneously.

Game 1 starts at noon server and runs to midnight server time (Twilight).
Game 2 starts at midnight server and runs to noon server time (Sunrise).

Both game matches can last one-week/two-weeks (I prefer 3-day matches because I like opponent diversity). Servers can be ranked/matched against different servers based on Twilight ranking and Sunrise ranking.

At the end of Twilight and Sunrise, everyone is booted, maps are reloaded from the prior day’s (12-hours prior) match and the continuance match begins again.

Use the same “relative” scoring criteria currently but it does require a full map save and would help clear the maps consistently (so it does have ‘maintenance’/anti-bot benefits as well).

What makes it entirely frustrating for the legit players is how the behavior of the botting feels like it is going relatively unnoticed. I understand you want to keep things private since there are or will be cases of mistaken activity that looks like botting. But the banning of only 1600 accounts when there is probably several times that amount started up last week alone is just a very poor showing of ANet’s seriousness in the matter.

Are you at all looking at the common and repeated botting areas used on multiple servers?

And what your current detection system (requiring in game players to keep pointing the finger at the culprits) misses is any botting activity that happens in far away locations (far edges of a map in Frostgorge for instance) or in private instances (like the storyline areas). The players have no idea how widespread or minimal the botting issue really is.

This lack of communication (and reminding players of how this is a bannable/termination of account offense) does not appear anywhere in the login screen. Because of this, many botting accounts when finally banned will simply appeal and claim they didn’t know better.

In short, what this all means is that by not being HUGE with an announcement and HUGE with the ANet ban-hammer is you are ultimately encouraging it to continue and expand.

Needless to say, I reported ~15 bots running a bot-figure-eight pattern/dynamic event spawn found on one map today alone. They were there on Saturday and I’m quite certain they will be there tomorrow. What timeline should we expect to see a report investigation followed up on?

You are missing at least 2 more sources;

The actual Regeneration boon (this is only available to a warrior (self-created) through Warhorn’s convert condition to boons trait).

And in PvE/WvW use, there is a ANet purchased boost item (random from BLTC Chests) that gives health over so many seconds as well.

Really, the level 80 WvW exotics are just way overpriced. The PvP armor skins are rather bland too and does not justify the grind factor. Also, the weapon skins should really be using the Mystic Forge skins and the Mystic Forge skins should have the much visually blander PvP skins.

Or increase the player limits instead and make the score clock be based on the number of players in WvW…

Or you know, just make the score clock be calculated based on the number of players in WvW…

I’d love to see 3-day matchups actually. 3-days seems like a nice balance between solidified leader board and close and exciting matches.

I dread seeing 2-week long matches based on current server morale/far too easy to transfer anytime issues/orb bonuses just exacerbating the winning-dominance-keep-trouncing problem.

Bad idea – then basically it’s a yo-yo dominate one week/get trounced the next like Eredon’s Terrace is going through by hopping 3rd/4th place every other week. This would simply rank #2-#4 servers to be in yo-yo instead.

Highly suggest transferring if you want variety in server world matchups.

Hint: Transfer servers; complete stuff; transfer back

Or just jump off a cliff while engaged in PvP; the enemy loses the kill credit and you don’t take an armor penalty either :P Just found this one out.

Reporting the teleporters doesn’t actually make them disappear. And you have to be very quick since they are teleport-hacking afterall. In fact, I see more and more myself day after day because it spreads exponentially when no action is visibly taken.

And the last time an exploit was publicly announced (Karma item salvaging) by ANet, they gave exploiters a get-out-of-jail-free card by reducing sentence from ban to 1 to 3-day suspension. …Many current cheaters will expect the same treatment even with how blatant it is.

So warriors are OP because Deep Strike is a flat +40 Prec as oppose to based on warrior level, gotcha.

Couple of minor tweaks/comments -

1. I’ve been going back and forth with Turtle’s Defense (Toughness talent). The reason is with so much condition removal (Warhorn 4 especially) that this talent “seems” wasted. The only time I find Turtle’s Defense useful is when all other condition removal is on cooldown (sort of rare since I tend to “save” Shake it Off as the last ability used after everything else anyways).

There isn’t a lot of great Toughness tier 1 talent alternatives though but Embrace the Pain can be useful depending on your playstyle to use the burst skill more often (and helps when being enemy focused by getting you to the higher Adrenaline levels quicker for the increased Adrenal Health heal). Vigorous Return/Sure-Footed are just garbage talents (even if spec’d for them). Missle Deflection is great if you use blocks (but this build uses dodge instead).

2. The build really only works at level 80 as it relies on the allocated point spend noted.

I’d recommend a full signet/Deep Strike (not sure why this talent isn’t scaled with level yet) build until you can acquire the gear using the Greatsword variant.

3. Fear Me is a suitable alternative to On My Mark. Personally, I prefer On My Mark in PvE and Fear Me in WvW although Fear Me is still good in PvE if you find yourself alone/exploring/don’t like to die.

I still don’t get why guild influence can’t just work cross-server. Guild want to move? Guild is already set up and exactly where it left off. Even better, there could probably be a small free gem store “compensation” mail to encourage transferring to a low population server.

But it does matter. If the winning team doesn’t have the continuing-to-win advantages of orbs of power, it’ll change the baseline map/winning player mechanics and the losing teams can come back without resetting the map every day.

Yes, I agree at this point though, a 420K point deficit is a lost cause. This really shouldn’t happen at all if world pairings are done correctly. This might be the real resulting fault of the matching system and lack of WvW player data/free servers transfers mid-match.

Genjuro.6903:

SmokeyNYY.7841:

Been done before. Eerdon Terrace put up a wall of about 15 golems right in front of SoS spawn point. Its on youtube somewhere

Hey smokey show vid or it didnt happen! Anyways great video guys!

Actually, it’s still better to line up a handful of ballista and ‘camp’ the entrance point. For bonus points, take an empty golem or a half built siege site and place it closer to the front of an enemy entrance. Some poor suckers will continue to run forward just enough to whack the golem suit/hit the building siege site (losing the invulnerability buff) and the backline ballistas will wrack up the kills.

Sorry for my trickery/cruelty fellow WvW players It’s tough when no one wants to play. C’grats to SoS for their 5+ hour garrison siege the other night.

Swapping WvW objectives and immediately taking it back with a couple defenders (alts or guildies logged on) to maximize the time it takes/reward pride points would eventually be discovered and abused.

Basically, this is what the nighttime/off hour players would do since WvW doesn’t have a level limit.

It would actually probably make the off-hour players influence the overall outcome of the Pride scoring system far more than it does for the current countdown clock system.

TL;DR Too easy to manipulate.

WvW = fun! Probably the best part of the game (and that’s saying a lot).

Can we get an “overflow” WvW server where we team with random other WvW players while we wait in queue for our homeworld WvW ranked point match? Basically, a pseudo-PvP flagged map with objectives where you can learn maps/strategy/and do what we want to do, PvP. Just remove the countdown/point clock.

The difference between DAoC and GW2 is that in DAoC, cross-realm would team up routinely against the winning realm to steal the orbs back (numerical and tactical advantage). That type of coordination doesn’t happen when you have a new “companion” server world every day/week in GW2.

ANet needs to intervene where consistent server coordination is impossible and quite frankly, highly discouraged anyways and viewed as a form of ‘bad sportsmanship’ by the winning server.

Or just have the orbs give less and then next to nothing as the point margin increases more and more. Honestly, the balance needs to start with the orbs of power first.

Why are immediate friendly and pets/corpses/objects/resource nodes/friendly NPCs rendered before enemies on a WvW map? Why can’t WvW maps have specific client/server load settings?

What is even worse is large enemy fields (combo fields/multiple arrow carts) not being rendered either (basically “known” death zones that renders so slowly that you can’t react until red numbers starts flying off of you). I’m looking at you tower/keep door sieges.

Or just make it an Elite

>:D

Greatsword is fine; it’s Greatsword + Signets that is the issue. Change out the Signets for more group utility (except Healing Signet and Signet of Rage). Just not playing smart and using a ranged weapon/aware of group mate health is probably the real issue here.

People use Greatsword/Signet/Power/Prec builds and get tunnel vision.

^^^

IMO, idea feels too similar to mainhand sword/Flurry. Also, I’d rather have Rush added to the 2 skill (cooldown reduced) to make it a tad different than Sword and then have Arcing Slice retain its Fury and move to Greatsword 5 ability.

I honestly think 2H Axe will be something similar to this anyways (except more of a spin around in a circle/whirl for the F1).

Thought of another (better) control mechanic for banners: if the “Plant Standard” ability 5 is used, the banner can only be picked up by the warrior (and preferably group mates). If the standard drop bundle is used, the banner can be picked up by anyone. Hopefully, the animation for “Plant Standard” could be sped up a tad as well.

The planted banner would then summon a different object name like “Planted Banner of Strength” that could only be interacted with the warrior (or group).

80 warrior, signet build, GS here for solo – nothing matches the burst DPS at the moment. High offense means much easier time since time-to-kill is much lower.

The problem is really people running 30/30/…10 builds with Signets/GS. In dungeon/coordinated groups, I agree that there are far better “support” (or at least defensive) builds that would better suit the overall PvE group better.

Here’s the thing, change your build. At 80, it’s 3.5 silver, or basically, next to nothing. ANet just really needs to add retrainers near every dungeon entrance. This would also help to “on the fly” coordinate based on PUG.