Warriors in WvW are good at being pretty much exactly what they sound like. They’re a soldier-ey class that works well with groups, where you’re typically granting fury, might, and swiftness as far as actual boons go, or the bonus of whatever banner(s) you’re using. Some minor heals, and a decent amount of area condition removal/conversion if you take soldier’s runes (for shout builds) and/or a traited warhorn. The thing is, when you’re doing this your influence is spread out across a lot of people – five at a time, to be exact. It’s not like ‘yeah, I’m awesome, look what I can do!’ and so it really depends whether you want to be useful, or be seen being useful. I don’t mean that in a judgemental sense, only that if you want/expect to be awe-inspiring, group buffs would probably put you to sleep.
Alternatively, you can also provide quite a lot of crowd-control abilities if you build that way. This is another thing which works best if you place damage secondary to survivability, and don’t mind being with a group. You basically exist to see the enemy doing things, and convince them that this is bad and they should stop. Maybe you want to ‘death from above’ them off a door, or slap them silly when they’re trying to res or finish someone, or just generally disrupt their ability to exercise free-will so your allies have an easier time of dealing with them. Arguably the most visible thing you can do short of being a commander… unless you do that at the same time… but you won’t be seeing huge numbers flash across your screen a lot.
I you do want to see large damage numbers on your screen and be the one directly killing people instead of getting them killed, you can actually prove to be decent long(ish) range fire support. You won’t hit out as far as some other things, but your attacks are faster-moving than things like grenades, and deal nice single-target damage (rifle) or AOE (longbow). You can couple this with group buffing as well to varying extents, and alternate to melee when it looks appropriate. Blast finishers everywhere.
Where they seem to fall short is basically… anything resembling e-sports. Okay, to be fair, that’s what I see everyone else saying, and I tend to defer to it since I don’t use my warrior for that style of play often. I basically expected what I got, and am happy to use it like a generic infantry class.
As far as my actual experience goes, in the short times I tried solo WvW play as a warrior, what I found was that it basically works like a predatory animal might. You spend more time moving around and selecting targets, and running from herds of enraged grazing animals hydralisks, than actually fighting. I’d go as far as to call it hunting instead, because you need to catch and kill a thing quickly or realize it’s not working (or wouldn’t work) and flee while you can.
For me that was… alternately a refreshing change of pace, or boring. It really depends on luck a lot of the time (again with the hunting analogy) that you happen to find suitable prey or not. And this is either lost randoms, players crossing ground to get somewhere after spawning, or others doing what you are. It’s not completely impossible as it’s sometimes made out to be, but it’s very black and white. Either you win quickly, lose quickly, or run quickly – with a few amusing stand-offs here and there as you do randomly come across a player who is both hard to kill and having a hard time killing you.
I can certainly see why a lot of people dislike it, because while you can get extremely mobile in a cross-country sense, to the point it would make anything else envious, your mobility is more oriented to starting a fight that didn’t want to happen, or fleeing before someone can do the same to you. It’s much less like a thief (or various other things), which is mobile and evasive within combat, but not as fast to cover ground in general. That tends to contribute to combat itself being of a limited(er) duration, which may bore you. Another thing I should mention is that, for the sake of this mobility, you do end up somewhat limited in build choices. Naturally not everything sends you hurtling forward at an alarming pace.
There are those who do it successfully though, so clearly it appeals to some. I don’t hate it, but would get bored of it eventually. On the other hand, I can pick a commander I think isn’t a moron, and follow them around for ages just buffing the people around me, dragging them back to the world of the living when nobody else can sit in the AOE long enough, en-speedening the swiftness deprived classes, and so on. I do of course fight things in the process, but I’m okay with my priority being to allies.
…and yes, in PvE there’s not really a downside. Some things do trouble it more than my other characters, but not really to the point of impossibility, and it’s more likely to be the other way around most of the time.
