Guild Wars 2

Minion of Vey.4398:

Have to chime in on people saying you can’t melee bloomhunger.

If you’re willing to give it a try a few times and get downed some, you’ll find it’s actually relatively easy after a bit.

I used to be the same way, did bloomhunger ranged probably a hundred times. Random guy in my group once just fought in melee the whole time, didn’t get downed. I saw that, gave it a try next time, got downed some, tried it some more…now I just melee bloomhunger exclusively.

As an elementalist.

you know I dont think I’ve ever done that fight as anything but a melee. Even my first time in with no agony resist I didnt find it hard at all once I figured out what attack caused agony. It might be bad if the whole group was melee clustering all the poison clouds in one spot but asside from that its really not that much harder than trying to melee an oakheart without geting knocked on your kitten

Instead of blocking them anywhere why not just block them on walls? Asside from walls, the lords room, and the obligatory gate catapult seige anywhere else is dropped as needed and often abandoned after its served its purpose. In the lords room they will either be helpful or be blocked due to too many siege anyway, its primarly the wall siege where this can be an issue.

Alternatively they could just come up with a better way of picking the siege you activate when multiples overlap like this.

BlackSheep.6284:

Just close down the game for a while, add all the features that were promised at !Release! – then and only then release it again.

As it is now, the game is full of broken promises..

you know… I’ve yet to play an MMO that did not have somebody mouthing off on the forums saying this exact same thing. Even WoW the golden goose of MMO’s had folks saying this about it at launch. Sad thing is half the “broken promises” are mearly systems not living up to peoples over hyped expectations and most of the rest were never even promised by the devs but were rumors that took on a life of their own.

Oglaf.1074:

It really should be available as soon as you go down in PvP, like Vapour Form for Elementalists. You’re probably still gonna die (unlike Vapour Form) but at least you go down fighting…

I wouldnt want instantly up although a 1-2s CD would be nice. One issue with vapor form is that if you happen to try to use your 2 skill at the same time or just before you go down you tend to instantly enter vapor form. While not so bad for an elei haveing vengence go off due to lag could deny you a rally unless you trait vengence.

um what are you planing to do with the greatsword? mobility? You didnt really take the GS centric traits so not really sure what your goal with it is. I honestly dont think you’ll do significantly more damage with the GS than you will with just the axe MH in this configuration.

I would consider either replacing GS with hammer(swap last stand for the hammer trait) or going full hog on axe and doing an axe/axe on one set for whirling axe(as leathal as 100b without rooting yourself) with your other set being something/shield, sword for mobility or mace for more defensive.

To tell the truth you really should give more information on what your trying to get out of this build for us to truely advise you.

I have found exactly one non frivolous use for rampage. There was a thief/mesmer camping our boarderland jumping puzzle. For the most part they were just knocking anybody that came through into the water just to anoy us although they’d kill if they could. Anyway between balanced stance and rampage I was able to get up onto the floating rock they were camping on and knock them off into the water and could continue on my way after that. appart from that have yet to find a situation where I wouldnt have been better off useing any of our other eliets including racial eliets.

stomp the warrior. Vengence has a long enough CD that if you start stomping imediatly after he goes down and he perfectly times his stun to interupt you right before the first stomp you still have time to finish a second stomp before he can vengence with 1-2s to spare.

If the warrior does manage to vengence you have two choices, either kill him and he will be dead dead(no down state if you run out of HP in vengence) or just run away from him for 15s. A warrior is going to be looking for a kill during vengence as there is a chance that they will rally although its a small chance if they are not traited for it.

DtC.4806:

Guardian is much better then warrior for tanking and CC and support, the warrior is ONLY better at damage.

I dont know, a couple hammer warriors leading the charge can do nasty things to break up an enemy zerg. Guardian can be better in tight areas with creative use of line of warding to split the enemy but many zergs start to panic when they are geting stuned and knocked around constantly.

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

I love underwater combat, probably you hate it, and are not all that good at it.

Mesmers rock in underwater combat.

good for them, sadly as a warrior I feel like I’m useing nerf weapons underwater compaired to what I do on dry land. I wouldnt mind them giveing more of a point to the underwater areas of WvW maps but they really need to give UW skillsets another polish pass for some of the proffessions if they do so, that and they’d need to come up with something reasonable for underwater siege other than golems.

I still find being able to eat a few more auto attack swings from the boss fairly valuable and condition removal is fairly easy to get. If your full ranged combat zerkers is fine but commonly if you melee alot the boss will turn and clock you one before you can back off. You still need to dodge the big nasty swings but being able to take a few more hits and be safe is valuable unless you’ve got a dedicated tanky guardian you run with.

Red Falcon.8257:

Neither, full zerker.
I wasted so much gold on Tou/Vit gear just to find out stats won’t protect you in this game.
Warrior is all about evading damage and dealing extreme DPS; anything else is gimping yourself.

I disagree. I have full zerker soldier and knights sets I can swap to as needed. While I would agree that the soldiers is not worth it (got the AC set so it was cheep) Knights does provide significant durability over zerkers. While zerkers does more damage the drop down to knights is reasonable and you can take alot more hits in the knights. While you want to avoid damage as much as possible sometimes, particuarly if useing double melee sets, you need to be able to take more than 1 auto attack swing on the chin without going down. Both have their uses but knights will be alot more forgiving for a newbie.

OP I wouldnt bother too much with Vit for PVE. Tough lowers damage taken while vit increases HP pool. Unfortunatly heals do not scale with a larger HP pool so tough will give you a higher effective health when you factor in healing.

laokoko.7403:

Congrats people, you just showed AC can be done by a group of level35. And now low level should never complain no one ever want them in party( end sarcasm ).

Me personally, I dont’ do AC unless I’m level80. But I question Anet’s motive of doing so. If those dungeon are not intend for low level, make the exp dungeon have a level restriction of level80. Else if you look at gwlfg, people are reluctant to invite lower level people.

Personaly I dont mind runin AC exp with low lvl folks, I only object when they are significantly under the lvl 35 limit. I’m sorry Mr lvl 15 but a stiff breeze from a mob passing gas in your general direction will kill you. Then agian if the player is at least withen a couple levels of the recomended level or higher they will probably do ok. Wont be as fast as a party of 5 berserker warriors but who cares, if I wanted that I’d look for speed run groups.

to add to the moderators link http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Equipment_acquisition_by_stats has much the same information layed out in a maner that may be easier to read for some people.

I also mirror the other replys that if your set on knights gear particuarly if your new to dungeons geting a set of crafted is probably your best bet. Run all 3 paths of AC each day to help get coin if your short. AC is arguably one of the easiest set of explorables and you can make decent coin runing it daily. If your haveing to save up for a full set you can even use the tokens you earn in AC to fill in with soldiers/rampager’s pieces as temporary stopgap.

SilverS.2093:

Orangensaft.7139:

do you have 7 runes?
1 for your Aqua breather??
you dont use your helmet underwater so you need 1 on your aqua breather

brilliant. i totally missed this one

thanks

ug your not the only one… here I was trying to figure out why they were working just fine till underwater fractal came up when they would promptly “Break”. Glad theres a logical explination that does not involve a weird bug.

I often run a regen build, its good for what it does but not amazing for everything. Its strong points are protracted engagements. If you end up stacking enough sorces of regen such as adrenal health, signet of healing, banner regen and possibly even a healing food you will be healing for more than useing a healing skill on CD. The downside is you give up a fair bit to go that far down tactics and defence pariticuarly at the same time. Its good for leveling and general open world PVE and is OK in most dungeons. Its rather bad when you are going to face spike damage however as healing sig does jack all for its activation so I wouldnt use it in structured pvp at all and only for sieges in wvw (you make a good ram operator as you regen alot on top of whatever else your team trys to hit you with)

Personaly I prefer knights gear over soldiers for a moderatly tanky build. Pushing the crit rate up helps keep damage high and the lost HP from not haveing the VIT is normaly not a big issue pve. I also think healing banners are worth it even with a guardian/elementalist around. Neither are likely to have 100% uptime on regen and are a bit more constrained on the area of effect. a single banner can blanket a fairly wide area and does so passivly along with the baseline buff on it. About the only clunky thing about banners IMO is that movement bug if you try to pick them up on the move as droping them is as quick as a weaponswap, if you have to abandon the banner due to movement so be it.

most of those all warrior groups are looking to maximize DPS at the expense of utility. That does not work in all locations but there are a few dungeons that are able to be speed runed where you can throw 5 glass cannon warriors at it and they will chew it up fast. I dont think its elietist its just them building the group they want. As to stupid… well an idea is only stupid if it does not work. I don’t see the gains of stacking the group like that to be all that compelling but it works well enough for those involved. About the only advantage is the warrior profession is really easy to do extream DPS with minimal skill/training if you toss them in full berzerkers exotics while most other professions can vary alot depending on player skill.

Are you refering to the environmental burn effect or the one the boss puts on you that looks like an exploding flame aura? The environmental effect applys burning if you stand still, keep moving. As to the other the boss applys that with its arrow shots, if you dodge the arrow you wont get the effect. Ya its hard to doge it in melee but you can dodge it from ranged prety easy. Only times I have trouble with the burn damage is if I either fail to dodge or stand too close to someone else that failed to dodge and starts hiting me with the pulsing aura.

Quiznos.4296:

@Merendel: A noob isn’t going to know his tells quite yet how are they to learn? Maybe I like to bring along people new to dungeons rather than just be an elitist. The “side note” would be AFTER YOU KILLED KOHLER, while doing the protect hodgins event and you get stuck behind the door and are thus unreachable.

Yes a noob is not going to know his exact animation tell. However almost any target with a telegraphed nasty attack shares one common trait. They almost always slowly pull their limb of choice back and start flashing before they do something you probably dont want to stand there and eat in the face, kholer is no exception. I’ve seen mobs even in the starter zones do this and if someone hasnt learned to pick up on that queue by the time they start runing explorable dungeons it really is their fault for dieing. On top of that missing the tell once normally will only down you and your team will revive you. It takes you missing the tell several times in a row befor you go strait to defeated and not learning after the first several times is on the players head. I’ve taken new players in to fight him plenty of times no elietism involved. First time they miss it I say “when he flashes and raises his arm back slowly dodge away to survive that” you know what most of the time the newbies avoid most of the remaining pulls. Its only the bad players that refuse to learn that keep dieing to it (well or the ones with bad connections)

And yes even I’ve been ported through that door before guarding hodgins. It stinks the first time it happens but you learn how to avoid it after the first time or two. Not standing between the burrow and the wall will keep you from porting that way. Additionaly if you kill the burrows in the right order that will be the last one to spawn. Unfortunatly those mini teleports were put in to solve an even nastier issue that was in place when melee destroyed an object. Back at launch if you were too close to something that got destroyed you’d be stuck in the terain till you ported or it respawned. Not an ideal situation but it is what it is.

Evalia.7103:

You alone are easily stacking 10+ minutes of fury over the course, too hardcore -.-.

Actually furry stops stacking past 2-3 minutes of duration, swiftness too. All the boons have soft caps where if your duration is over that cap new attempts to apply that boon do nothing till you fall below that cap. Still you can keep it up constantly on yourself and can even do the same for your group as long as your willing to pick up the banner of disciplin and cast the 2 skill every 10s along with the standard FGJ spam.

Personaly I love the boon duration on the tactics line, the minors of the line kinda blow but the majors have several very strong build options. I tend to play more of a support role however, currently runing 0/0/20/30/20 with hammer, axe/warhorn, and healing banners. Not particularly high damage on my own but providing a good bit of CC for my team and alot of boons/converted conditions an tough as nails to kill.

Red Falcon.8257:

Worst elite:
Most classes have built-in speedbuff of some sort or utility-based swiftness.
Warrior needs to bust, wair for it… AN ELITE…. AND it’s not even enough!
You also need to get +swift duration / boon duration for it to cover the uptime, usually having to waste rune slots.
Compare this to Dagger storm which throws tons of ricochet daggers for loads of damage plus bleeds, while also reflecting projectiles and also getting stability, SoR is a joke in comparison.
Other elites aren’t even worth mentioning.

Not sure what your on about on swiftness. Every banner has swiftness, warhorn has swiftness, one of our trait lines has 10% runspeed with melee weapons. dispite your claims very few classes have 100% uptime on swiftness or excessive runspeed buffs. Thief has probably the strongest runspeed utility at 25% passive with an active that isnt worth useing in most cases to interupt the passive effect. Most other proffessions either have weaker speed boosts, conditional speed boosts(elementalist air trait) or must relly on whatever swiftness they can bring, often with lower uptimes than warriors to tell the truth. Charge(warhorn) and inspire(banner) have one of the better duration/CD ratios of any swiftness boon applying skills and both are group based.

I will agree that our eliets are far from perfect, heck rampage is worthless and theres a reason why most warriors take SoR as the best of the lot but dont try to claim its our only access to swiftness.

My Dead Characters.9517:

maybe, the orbs should make the keep produce supply for itself, but only when NOT under attack, so that way its a strategical advantage, BUT not giving stats to make the numerical team OP and have the numbers.

That would make them pointless, its far too easy right now to keep a keep contested nearly 24/7. A thief/rager plinking the door every 3 minutes and you would compleatly negate any point of holding the orb. Even worse for the team that has bay as if they put the orb there garison can treb the walls continuiously with very little room for retaliation.

I do kinda like your idea of haveing the orb generate resorces for the keep but tieing it to the under attack status just wont do. Other nice alternitives would swap outmaned with the old buff. Frankly a team thats outmaned probably could use a stat boost to help them out while outnumbered. It wouldnt be enough to save them vs overwhelming numbers but would give them a slight edge on even encounters. Meanwhile 10% EXP karma and magic find per orb, particularly if it translated into the open world would be significant enough to be worth fighting for without invokeing a snowball effect.

Bloody Zac.8960:

I love the Colossus and the Grawl fractals. In fact the only fractal I’m not a huge fan of is the Aquatic fractal, because it is quite boring.

well that and underwater combat in general feels way too slow paced and low damag. If that bloated jellyfish wasnt such a panzy I’d hate it just for the UW combat aspect. (note to anet I do 2-3X the damage on land as in the water as a warrior, I hate going in the water)

Personaly I dont mind colossus that much and my only gripe about grawl is it feels like it takes forever compaired to others.

Your going to find these folks in any crowd, just ignore them and move on. Just the other night I ran accross a guy demanding everybody ping 20AR for lvl 10 fractals… Considering you can do lvl 10 jade maw with no AR and only go down if you were already hurt when agony was applied I just found this silly. Group votekicked him and got a less elietist guy in moments off LFG and we had a very smooth run dispite geting some of the worst fractals combinations.

While I agree that there should be an auto respawn option after enough time has passed for cases where your body is unreachable I cant really say Kholer adds much to your argument. There is absolutly no excuse for anybody to die to kholer as long as you’ve either delt with his 2 buddies or seperated him from them. Heck a tankish build can prety much face tank him as long as his pull move is dodged. your budies could have rezed you there but its entierly possible they decided it wasnt worth the effort if you’d already died to not dodgeing when you should have.

I havent noticed a problem. I’ve been walking away from each fractal I’ve done since the patch with 2-4 rares, no exotics so far but those are hit or miss anyway and I havent been runing particularly high fractals either thanks to ranking up a new character with no AR. I’d offer the OP a tinfoil hat but I’m out of tin foil.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

although I have been giving thought to a system that also reflects our personal story reward structure, where you could potentially choose one of three things offered at random.

ohh I like that thought. still might not get what you want but would solve the “Ohh neat I got an exotic drop… of light armor on a warrior… fail.” Still would want the token system kept in place however as even when being able to select from a random selection you might still go months without a specific item showing up. Hiting the jackpot on the weekly raffle is a great feeling but you still want your paycheck from your day job at the end of the week as well.

JoshuaRAWR.4653:

WOW Didn’t even get a decent Vote-kick system until at least 4 years after it’s release.. So i think you should stop over-exaggerating.

ON the other hand it didnt really need it till they put in dungeon finder 4 years after its release. Prior to that all invites/kicks were the responsibility of the group leader but when tossing random folks togeather with no true leader votekick became needed.

That said I think vote kick should have been set to 3 people wanting to kick in a 5 man group or 2 to kick in a smaller group. IF the majority wants to kick fine but not just 2 folks with potentialy 3 opposed to the kick. Also no kicks while a boss fight is engaged.

knbBlackTemplar.3059:

When in battle i switch to bow/rifle i feel running slower

Thats an animation issue. on my human warrior if I swap to a bow i start to take longer more loping strides. I’m still going the same speed (no warriors sprint trait) but I feel slower because the legs are moveing slower. I’ve done footraces with folks with no run buffs swaping between sword/shield and longbow along the way. stayed even with the other player the whole way reguardless of weapon but longbow still felt slower while doing it.

I’m sure they will eventualy but they need to solve two problems first
1) a way to stop the hackers before they can do damage. orbs are hard enough to capture without someone flight hacking and stealing it right out of your keep without even needing to fight.
2) come up with a set of bonuses to put on the orbs that do not create a snowball effect of overpowering the realm that holds them while still being enticeing enough that folks will make the effort to take/defend them.

Most likely we’ll see a solution to 2 that is along the lines of the old suggestion that was floated alot back when orbs were in, swap the orb buff with outmaned buff. Make holding each orb give 10% xp MF and karma and make it work in PVE as well and its worth holding onto them while not making the holding team unstoppable. I think this would be a kitten solution but it would get the job done. Personaly I loved the old DAOC system where the more relics(orbs) you held the harder it was to defend them but they would have to redesign the whole orb capture mechanic to make something that approaches that.

Silidus.7985:

Instead most bosses seem to have lots of ranged abilities and only a very small set of weak melee attacks. Allowing melee dps to go all out all the time, and forcing ranged dps to spend all their time dodging and running around.

I disagree. Most all of those ranged abilities can also target melee. The only situations where I feel melee has a significantly easier time are abilitys where a boss faces a direction and telegraphs a big attack but wont turn after starting. A melee can just swing around or step through the boss and be safe while ranged has alot of moveing to get out of the cone of effect. There are alot of AOE abilitys that ranged are always dancing around that land in melee as well and are often harder to spot the rings thanks to the explosive spell effects all over the place. Some I’ve learned I can just soak the damage as they are not really that dangerous. Others, well I’ve got to dodge just as much as ranged when those are geting thrown around and usualy cant keep attacking while doing so.

Silk Greywin.2453:

Yep…. they are making the game for you, and the rest of us who don’t want everything hardcore can leave……. Congrats

your in luck not everything is hardcore. There is plenty of stuff to do that isnt particularly challenging for anybody smarter than a brain dead monkey. Its just now they’ve fixed the bugs/exploits that let weaker players circumvent the harder content and do it anyway. Want easy stuff? there are options for you. Want hard stuff? there are options for that as well. Want to be rewarded for doing hard stuff without it being… you know actually hard? sorry dont let the door hit you on the way out.

Anybody who actually thought exploity stuff like being able to stand on a wall and kill a boss that cant retaliate was how it was supposed to be was fooling themselves.

Honestly I’m fine with towers being able to siege keeps and keeps able to fire back. The only issue I have is keeps fireing on other keeps where no retaliation is possible. Garison to bay is one example. Garrison cant hit hills but there is this tiny window where it can hit bay which is very difficult to countersiege. Only way to stop it is to either take garison or to very slowly wittle it away from below while abuseing the odd LOS rules of the balista 2 shot and sometimes arrow carts.

Personaly I’d love to see the borderlands redesigned slightly so that garison can bombard the two northern towers but neither keep. The two northern towers can hit either garison or their closest southern keep but the keep cant retaliate. The southern keeps and towers can mutualy bombard their closest neighbor.

It is much more reasonable to break into one of the towers to stop a siege than the garison particuarly when only one side is vulnerable to garrison and not the other. The defending team should have an advantage hence why the towers should be able to hit the keeps. While this can work agianst them at garison it is also much easier for the defending team to bum rush the northern towers and take them back than it is for the enemy to hold them. In addition the home team advantage isnt so lopsided that they can afford to casualy bombard for hours with minimal effort spent to defence of their siege. Leave siege in a tower with only the operators and eventualy a zerg will show up with 4 rams, bust down the gate in under a minute and wipe out that siege. do that at garison right now and the trebs may stay up for hours hiting bay with only the operatiors and a spoter calling out for a mini zerg to wipe out the counter siege attempt down below.

If the commanders are telling you to block siege for half an hour or more at one location tell them to go deal with the problem at its source not just bandaid it at your expense.

There are times when its valid to sit there on swirling winds duty. If you are trying to countertreb their siege chances are you need to do this for a couple minutes while your team dials in their treb to take out the enemies. Likewise blocking the bombardment of a wall for a few minutes to hold out till reinforcements arive is a good thing and a very valueable use of your time.

On the flip side spending an hour spaming 4 to keep the garison trebs from knocking down bay’s wall is utterly pointless. your team would be better served simply leting that wall section fall and setup an ambush of siege just inside to wipe out the enemy zerg if they try to push. I’ve seen that wall down for hours without the enemy even comeing close to breaching the inner walls dispite many attempts. tell your commanders to either send out a squad to kill the trebs from below or just deal with the fact that you’ve got to defend bay from the inside not from the outer wall.

sostronk.8167:

Could be a wierd one for SOS. We have had a rough week in Tier 1. May finish in 2nd or probably 3rd and then end up in a mid tier where we would dominate lower pop servers. I don’t see this being reasonable.

Shouldnt be a problem. Next weeks matchup is still listed by the current rankings. At worst we would fall down to be matched up with 2 of the T2 servers. If we stomp them we’d end up gaining rank anyway under the reset.

Either way a number of servers will end up in blowout matches for a week or two while rankings settle. if we(SoS) still deserve to be in T1 well end up back there by the time everything is said and done.

Yaki.9563:

On the other hand, banners will never help you when you need to heal.

Shouts do more healing over time than banners. The advantage of banners is that it only takes one slot instead of relying on 3 for full effectiveness.

In ideal situations for shouts I’d agree. if your whole party is clustered in melee range and need healing on each shout CD shouts have a higher HPS. In a more likely senario some CD’s some or all of the players either wont need healing causeing you to delay buffs or waste the heal (or just be out of range) lowering its HPS dramaticly.

On the other hand banners have a significantly large sphere of influence and the regen will persist for a time even if players must move out of it providing somewhat low but constant healing. 1 banner near the boss’s feet will provide almost constant regen to the whole party and always provide healing when its needed. That and only requireing 1 slot to provide it alows for 2 other utilitys. That may be shouts anyway but you can mix those slots up instead of being pigeon holed into 3 of 4 skills only.

The only time shouts will save you when banner healing will not are from spike damage. If you or your party are eating those big spikes of damage someone needs to take dodge roll 101.

Honestly I think the 5 point one is prety decent for where its placed. 400 toughness at 80 is nothing to sneeze at considering you are likely to eat a few hits while reviving and being able to tank them instead of having to interrupt the revive is valuable. Could it be made stronger? sure, have it grant protection to allies withen melee range while reviving but that would probably be OP and need to be higher in the tree.

Revivers might (25) is very underwhelming. 1 stack of might wont make a difference to anybody withen range of the revive. A short regeneration/vigor combo on the other hand would be very useful. Whats the one thing the reviver(s) and revivee are likely to need right after the revive is sucessful? first to dodge roll away from whatever nastiness is AOEing the area and second to recover HP they took during the revive. 5-10s of regeneration and vigor plays to both those needs, a single stack of might does not.

As to the 15 pointer it feels weak. It might feel better if it was a stronger effect but to be honest I’d rather they ditched it (or rolled it into the T1 trait) and went with something different that didnt have to do with reviveing someone. Idealy it would be some bonus relating to boons considering the tactics line is the one most used by warriros applying lots of boons to their party. Could be something along the lines of a small heal to the target of any boons you apply, a self buff for X seconds when you apply a boon to another or just a general buff to the recipiant of any of your boons.

Victory chances are the folks looking for you had never played as a thief or tried to perma stealth. I’ve done both and frankly the signs are easy enough to spot if you know what to look for particularly in a confined space. Additionaly as a warrior main it is rather trivial for me to have perma swiftness so just outruning me in stealth isnt happening either. I’ve hunted down many thieves in hills trying to pull that stunt, once I know they’re there and get relitivly close their only chance of geting away is to either somehow kill me or to jump over the wall and get onto open ground where they have more directions they could go makeing it harder to follow. Frankly outer bay is harder to catch a thief in than hills, that place may as well be open field.

Your story of your thief is about as impressive in my eyes as a group of 5 thieves useing spin to win to wipe out 20 or so green arrowed pugs in a choke point. only good for either a laugh at the victems stupidity or as part of a nerfX post.

Evalia.7103:

with 30 in tactics it’s gonna be more than 65 seconds though.
Buffs persist after banner vanish, and it’s for entire party.
Can you count again?
Signet is the same, for 50% uptime is what you want to tell me.
But banner is the same but for 25% uptime(actually more), yet for entire party.
25×5 > 50×1. or something like that.
Plus, resurrect effect which is precious. And he doesn’t benefit all that much from excess might/fury since he’s focused on defending his mates rather than damaging(he plans to help his teammates to do damage)
Pretty much an obvious choice.

Does not mater if you have 0 tactics or 30 tactics the banner disapears after 65 seconds. yes the buffs persist a bit longer, 10s+ your boon duration buffs before all the might falls off. Could be a bit longer for the furry to fall off depending on how high that stacked. Either way asumeing your not stacking extra boon duration on gear might from the banner will be gone 78 seconds after you drop the banner and your still looking at another 2 minutes traited before its off CD still at best 1/3 uptime. IF your the only sorce of might in the party maybe thats worth it during a burst phase. In pratice however I find might gets tossed around like candy and if I’m not the only warrior in the group I’m seeing my stacks siting up in the high teens low 20s because every one is spaming FGJ on cd and the war banner if hauled out would just cap us out more constantly for a little while.

As to the revive your milage may vary. the glairing problem is if you save it for the revive you are drasticly reduceing the uptime of the buffs it provides and if you bring it for teh buffs chances are it wont be up when a good opertunity for the revive comes along. Idealy you shouldnt ever need to use the revive in pve so its a StuffHTF (apparently that accronym is also a naughty word) CD that may be key or utterly worthless. Baring situations like reviving a camp/keep lord in WvW or stupid kitten like 3 people failing to dodge on kholer I find very few situations where its useful. . Even when saveing it I find it would have been almost as fast to just revive the person by hand more often than not. often you cant get more than one person with it and if you can its probably like the kholer example, a total waste because those same 3 people are probably going to fail the mechanic agian in 30s.

Seren.6850:

I think by AOE they mean the 1200 range reticle stuff more so than melee range skills. If anything the Hammer could use some love to make it better in PVE. It’s difficult to justify using it over a greatsword when most things have the defiant buff

somewhat useful in AC for dealing with breeders but then agian so are those 1200 range reticle AOE’s.

probably the closest you can come to that look in heavy armor would be the crafted banded mail for chest/legs with crafted chainmail for shoulders/gloves/boots. Still wont be perfect but with the proper color pallet probably the best you can hope for.

ComeAndSee.1356:

Not really too impressed with PRX’s performance tonight. Been doing SoS map for almost 6 hours now before my sound crashed and all they’ve been able to do is cap supply camps and kill the same treb that gets rebuilt at Garrison.

PRX did give us some headachs in the BG border friday night but it was more their dogged determination to come after us (SoS) than anything else. They rolled up portions of our zerg on occasion but most of the time it was the fact we couldn’t accomplish anything north because they kept pushing briar/refuge and occasionally bay once BG kept knocking down the wall from garrison. Every time we pushed north we’d have to abandon for southern defense because PRX was back agian. Was also makeing it hard to suppress the garison trebs because we could never gather enough to keep blackgate from sallying forth rolling us halfway through killing the things.

Its not just healing for you but up to 5 people withen about 600 units of you for shouts. Banners can provide significantly more healing over a wide area if you have the opertunity to scater a couple around a somewhat stationary fight with lots of combatants but its also slower to heal and less focused and more cumbersome. Also the majority of those stacks of might are probably comeing from the sigils not the trait. Versital power as I recall is 1 stack per swap for 10s while the superior sigil is 3 for 20s. Your geting at best 2 stacks if you swap every 5s out of that trait.

at 2k toughness armored attack is equivalent to 100 power. thats about 3 stacks of might. full knights in everything will net you a bit more toughness than that but not a whole lot more.

Every little bit helps your damage I guess I just feel the group support is more valuable. Still if what you want is the slightly higher power and more personal DPS go for it, will probably work out fine. multiple viable builds is the beauty of the system Anet produced.

Evalia.7103:

Don’t yout think that dolyak runes are very weak?
All what they give is a boost to stats. That’s not what you are looking for in runes I think.
Note: Last bonus is non-existant, 30 HP/S is nothing. Compare to your shouts heal for example. and shouts are aoe too.
Soldier’s runes would be better imo for such build. Also, signet of rage seems to be far off the mark compared to warbanner( it doesn’t suck, it gives actually very decent bonuses!). Not like you get many benefits from might stacks and crit chance in your build, now do you?

Well Dolyak is a good chunk of toughness and some vit but your right about that 6 piece. I tested it in the mists and never looked at that rune agian. Wasnt even a third of healing sig.

Banner vs SoR kinda comes down to your preferance and what your trying to do. The signet gives a fairly decent personal damage boost as well as long duration swiftness with a very respectable uptime, 50% with no traits and can be pushed to near 100% with traits and enough boon duration. Banner has the rally effect on summon as well as what ammounts to signet of rage on the whole party but has an abysmal uptime due to the long CD and fairly short duration. The banner itself only lasts for about 1/4 to 1/3 of its CD depending on if you traited it or not. Banner is amazing for a clutch rally but is not that great as a buffstick considering if you have more than 1 warrior around you probably have all the buffs it provides because a majority of warriors burn FGJ on CD. If the banner stuck around longer so you could have it out a majority of the time (all other banners traited expire about 3s before the CD) or if the stability pulsed along with the furry might swiftness it would be more worthwhile to take for its buffs but as it is its more about the rally and the 65s of buffs are just bonus.

Healing sig, banner of discipline, FGJ, Shake it off, Signet of rage. I tend to run banner spec vs healing shouts so I will sometimes situationaly swap out SiO for ballanced stance and FGJ for whatever is needed. I only pull out war banner in WvW. Draging a camp/tower/keep lord back up from downed to full HP is just too OP not to bring along.

You can pretty much get perma furry with SOR and FGJ on CD without the signet reduction trait. It will be about to expire by the 3rd FGJ cd and SOR will be off CD a few seconds later. Going full tactics for the extra 10% or for the sig CD just makes you stack it longer and longer durations. 30 tactics and the sig trait and you can almost chain the sig off itself with only about 7s of downtime.

Personaly I’ve been runing 0/0/20/30/20 with hammer/S-W. I dont see versital power or armored attack being worth giveing up either shout or banner healing from tactics. runing SOR and FGJ on CD will see you runing around with 6-11 stacks of might constantly with 8 or 11 being more common (depends on the CD cycle) The 1 or sometimes 2 extra stacks from a weapon swap dont make that huge a difference. Armored attack is a bit more of a judgement call depending on how much toughness you wear but an extra major trait will trump that in most situations

Thunderbrew.7034:

I couldnt fathom it affecting hammers considering the AOE
damage on them is so minimal, but Ive been surprised before.

IMO they need to put a better movement skill or gap closer on
the hammer to make it more viable (meanwhile GS has 2) for
survival.

I kinda agree on both points. The AOE a hammer warrior puts out is prety small. Most of our AOE is the standard melee 3 target cleave effect. About the only significant standard AOE they could nerf is earthshakers damage and even thats prety small compaired to what a staff ellie can dish out and more frequently to boot.

For a gap closer I’d love to see fierce blow(2) gain the leap effect of savage leap. would give us a gap closer to use when we have no adrenalin and wouldn’t particularly impact the current usage of the skill. I dont see any of the other skills being particuarly suited to a change.

Juular.4729:

your a tank but you will not kill anything good for dungons with the rest of your team doing the real damage, for pvp wvw forget it tryed it failled hope u have more luck than me..

For Spvp I agree, warriors do not make good bunkers and are better off going damage, for WVW that is another kettle of fish altogeather. A small group of hammer warriors can very quickly cause an enemy zerg to get rolled over by a much smaller force. Yes the warrs themselves are not doing the massive damage of a frenzied 100B but chain stuning large numbers and general disruption can break the moral of a zerg. however your going to want a bit of tankyness or jumping into enemy lines like that will just get you killed.

ChaK.3254:

Fear me : Not a big fan of fear in fact. Aren’t scared mob aggro’ing other packs?

Warhorn over shield : Yeah well, honnestly I can’t play anymore without a shield. Stun, interupt, good way to get back in the fight with 4th skill. And 5th skill is A MUST HAVE for tanking, blocking a burst is more efficiant than any heal, cd remover or anything could be. Blocking 10k+ damage never gets old to me. Not that the idea is bad indead, I keep it in my mind, it’s just a matter of preference I guess.
Mace suggestion is great, was thinking about a mace for dungeoning too.

Soldier’s rune : I’m skeptical in fact, I’m kind of loosing 55 toughness and gain 55 vita. Sure the 6th bonus is great, and I’m not really sure I want to trash 20 gold of rune in a blink of an eye.

Fear me generaly does not last long enough to send a mob out far enough to agro anything. If your close enough to do so your probably going to agro whatever it was mid fight anyway.

warhorn vs shield. you are underestimating the power of dodge roll. Yes blocking a 10k burst is better than any heal. You know what? not being there when that 10k burst goes off is just as good. You get 1 or 2 extra dodges per CD off the warhorn 5 skill not only for you but your whole group. You can still compleatly negate that burst and if you traited for warhorn remove an extra condition as well. its about 13s duration and 16s cd fully traited as well so uptime is stellar. The weakness reduces your targets damage output. The other skill “Charge” also removes all the movement impairment conditions by default (+1 bonus if traited) makeing warhorn an amazing group suport package that is hard to beat. I’m not saying there isnt a place for shield block but it really only offers protection for yourself, protection that can be equaled or surpassed by a simple dodge roll. There are very few things that you can block shield a companion from that they shouldnt have just dodge rolled away from themselves.

trashing 20g of rune: so dont. It is quite possible to get a compleatly new set of gear to put a different set of runes in for little more than a small time investment. Particularly if you want Pow/Vit/Tou gear. Run all three paths of AC every day and you can buy a full suit of the stuff in a bit over a week and make enough gold in the proccess to pay for a good % of the new runes. takes maybe an hour and a half in a mediocre pug. Do this and you now have both options avalible to you as the mood suits you.

Personaly I run my warrior sword/warhorn(Sword is mostly for the mobility, that and I love my dragonsword skin) +whatever suits my fancy and have for a long time. Right now that happens to be hammer for the CC options it brings. Runing soldiers armor/runes, knights jewlery, soldiers for hammer/warhorn and zerker hammer. I can basicly face tank most bosses, dodgeing the big hits when needed, interupt like a champ, and provide excellent group support. Outside of bumrushing a wvw zerg I’ve also never felt the need for defy pain either and never run with it sloted in pve. Agian anything that skill could save you from would also be avoided by a well timed dodge.

Shrug so you’ve goten pushed off EB. it happens and wont last for long. As to 2v1… well dont know how things were in EB but in the BG border SOS has been fending off both BG and JQ all night. There’s been at least 4 different times that if BG had hit hills instead of bay over and over JQ would have been pushed off that map.

On the other hand BG I thank you greatly. You may not be cooperating on the double team like the OP thinks but all those green arrows in your border feeding me badges is most apreciated.

Most cases if your server is geting crushed there is a good chance your server will fall down a bracket after a few weeks. Not only will this give you a chance to dominate the lower tier but you will at least get a different color. This will give you the opertunity to grab those easy POI’s for that color. Baring that the only truely hard POI’s to get if your being crushed would be the forien garisons, stonemist and the enemy keeps in EB. All the towers can be bum rushed with enough preperation and a few of them you can get the POI by runing up and kissing the door anyway. Bay and hills are a bit harder to rush but agian can be done particularly if you draw attention to another map first and then relocate as a zerg or just wait till the dominant team gets complacient. A round of chain caping camps to gather supply and dumping 3-4 rams on a door will have you through the door before any reinforcements can arrive, even if wiped after you already got the poi.