Nice list Sami, glad someone took the time to make a big easily readable list.
Two things though. You should probably add that banner tooltips state they last 45 seconds but they actually last 90, the tooltip leads a lot of people to think they are not worthwhile as they think they don’t last long enough to be worth the downtime.
Also about the Rune of the Soldier underwater bonus. That is not a bug, when underwater your aquabreather replaces your helmet so it acts as your helmet so you are suppose to have the rune on it.
Warrior rifle is pretty good, works well in both damage and condition builds.
Biggest problem I have with it is that it is simply the most boring weapon in game. Even more boring that necromancer staff. There isn’t much to it other than strafe and use your abilities when needed.
Also what are you referring to when “warrior rifle does more single target damage”. In what context? Full on bleed stacking build? Maybe, but conditions have their down sides. But Engineer rifle when built correctly is pretty nice. I personally use a Rifle Power/crit setup on my engineer for casual sPvP play. And you can do 1k auto attacks from 1200 range with it critting for 1900-2k pretty often. Which is by no means a little amount of damage especially at that range.
When there is some server lag (usually in giant WvW mobs or zerg PvE events) there can be ability delay.
But it sounds like what you are referring to is the attack animation. The attack animation is essentially the attack speed of your weapon. Chance are you don’t notice it on thief as much because all the thief weapons hit much faster than warrior, especially dagger.
@Monki : The skill “Vengeance” will get you on your foots for 15s before being defeated. There’s only one way to avoid it : having the trait Sweet Revenge AND killing a foe before 15s.
You don’t have to have the Sweet Revenge trait. There is some sort of percentage to rally on kill but it is low.
Huh? I go into WvW specced into shout heals, and I tank a lot. I’m in the front lines swinging my axe and blowing my warhorn.
I actually dont use Endure pain anymore, because you can still take a lot of damage with it. It also has a 90 second recharge. 90! thats forever in a battle, I’d rather have a 2k heal every 25 seconds that buffs allies.
Sorry I should have stated I’m talking about PvE here.
In WvW it’s ok as you buff all allies, but I really don’t want to hear a Warrior saying he can tank dungeons with shouts. Please.
Who exactly is saying they are tanking with a shout setup? It’s a support setup and a kitten good one at that. But it is not a tank setup, as there are no real tank setups. Not even guardians can pull it off.
But the shout warrior build by default IS above average in terms of tanking ability due to warriors naturally high armor, health, and having nice healing you can take a bit of abuse. And if you want to you can take a Mace/shield for blocks and interrupts and a longbow for kiting and the AoE blind. All which go a long way for “tanking”.
I don’t know everyone elses experiences but when I do explorable dungeons with my friends I always end up getting like 9 out of 10 mobs sticking to me for forever. Which means I end up longbow kiting most of the time (which is a great weapon for it as you can fire the burst and 3 skill behind you). Something is really whack with the threat system in game, I remember ANet talking about it ages ago before the betas saying how mobs tend to prioritize lower level players, players with lower armor, and lower health to discourage tanking. Yet I am in lvl exotics and have like 22k HP and 1600 toughness and 9 out of 10 mobs will stick to me forever. I have even been killed by a dungeon boss that had been sticking to me for 7 minutes straight. I then way pointed and ran back and he started attacking me again.
So I end up getting stuck in a “tanking” roll whether I want to or not.
It was originally 30% in the early betas, but it was abused with eviscerate, sigil of intelligence and the old sigil of doom (30% damage on your next attack) to get like 14k+ eviscerates easily.
I believe nerfing the crap out of the Discipline burst damage bonus was a temp fix. Because they then also nerfed eviscerate some, and changed the functionality of sigil of doom so that they old easily 14k+ eviscerates aren’t possible anymore.
But yeah, it needs a redo, +raw damage isn’t that useful for most of the burst skills liek you said.
How about when you use a banner it puts it on your back and your skill chances to a new skill that is a combination of inspire (the speed buff) and the banners 2 skill. (does anyone ever actually attack with the banner or use the charge in combat?)
Yeah, we would lose a blast finisher, and I imagine multiple banners sticking out of you would look funny but it solves a lot of problems and is pretty practical.
I also suppose battle standard would have to turn into a PBAoE which is annoying. But it is the best idea I can come up with.
Greatsword and Longbow. Water sigil of greatsword, fire sigil on longbow.
Makes a very nice balanced support build, you are capable of doing respectable damage, tanking, all while providing nice buffs, AoE heals and AoE condition removal to a large group of people.
The traits are also semi flexible so you can say swap to a mace/shield for tanking the more slow hitting mobs. Or taking the 1200 range longbow trait for fights where you don’t want to be near anything.
why is Vitality useless in this game? I am still learning the traits so any information of the differences between benefits toughness vs. vitality would be helpful
It’s not, just not as useful for warriors due to naturally high HP. Lower HP classes like ele, thief, and guardian it is much better for them.
If you are running a bunker spec on most profs, you have not stacked enough power to make retaliation as viable as it sounds with the 100% uptime on some classes. If you make retaliation damage a priority, then you are bunkering/surviving off of your CDs alone, and any decent stun timing will finish you off pretty quickly.
I don’t see retaliation as an item that needs to be addressed in comparison to a few others at the moment. It truthfully seems to mostly upset people running paper specs.
Guardians can get 1800 power/1700 toughness/2k vitality and have very, very good survivability with a shout build and having near immunity to condition builds. All while maintaining retaliation that does 240 damage per hit.
Granted this is not as good at bunkering as a traditional Guardian bunker build it actually have pretty good mobility and better team support than a regular build does and can 1v1 anything, and 2v1 lots of things. It is a very powerful build.
Although retaliation is a big part of it I think it’s main power comes form the trait that turns conditions on your into boons when you use a shout. That trait is insanely strong.
I don’t know if I like the idea of some guardian hunting my dragons tooth cast animations and pressing 10stack of retaliation button to oneshot me without any possible way of avoiding the damage.
If you are going shout support I suggest taking longbow as one of your weapon slots.
Ranged is always useful but the blast finisher on it is fantastic.
Using your fire field and blast finisher and For Great Justice gives you about 9-12 stacks of AoE might alone, which does wonders to increase your teams DPS. Possible to get 22 stacks of AoE might for like a second or two for the pure novelty of it.
Also if you want to focus on pure healing it is better to drop On my Mark and take Banner of Tactics with Inspiring Banners trait instead. The AoE heal and regen out heals it. You end up losing a condition remover but you gain more healing, a blast finisher, AoE 10% boon duration and 90 compassion, and a handy AoE swiftness with like 90% up time to get around quickly. (Regular banner tooltips are bugged, they last for 90 seconds not 45, and with the trait that gives them 3 seconds of downtime.)
Swiftness and Warrior’s Sprint do not stack. I recorded a video running in a straight line with Swiftness and the Warrior’s Sprint trait, then walked backwards so I’d run exactly the same path and tried running it just with Swiftness. I compared the 2 videos and the 2 runs were identical.
I don’t think they are supposed to stack. As far as I can see, in game only the higher speed buff is applied.
Cap is 33%, unless you have a skill that goes over the cap by itself. Like Engineers slickshoes utility.
Pure DPS glass cannon spec is absolutely worthless and hurts your team more than anything in any sort of hard encounter.
I stack Berserker armor, and Cleric trinkets and use Rune of the Soldier and it makes a very nice balanced builds and my 3 shouts get rid of conditions and and heal for 1700 each on 20 second cooldowns.
All while having 1700 power before any might stacking (which For great justice and longbow fire field blast finishers stacks very nicely) and 25% crit rate before fury and 40% crit damage.
Also Superior Sigil of Water is a decent 500 point heal every 10 seconds.
I cannot fathom why anyone would ever play full damage spec in a team setting.
Mace/Shield shout support is amazing and you build up adrenaline so quickly with the shouts gain adrenaline trait you can stun people like no tomorrow so your team can focus them down.
And you can take the trait that increase crit rate vs stunned enemies by 50% and swap to greatsword and still have some burst while being built tanky.
And I’ve also seen people run Rifle roaming builds to great success.
IF anything 100B bulls charge+frenzy is very weak in a team environment. It is very easy to chain CC them and make them accomplish nothing.
I’m pretty sure signet of shadows is working correctly, it’s just that the in combat -speed penalty is pretty large. So you naturally go faster when out of combat and it is very noticeable.
And what do you mean Infiltrators arrow isn’t working on Kylo? Are you sure you aren’t trying to go too far with it? It’s a shadow step and shadow step has 2 pre reqs for it to work.
1. You must be able to walk to the location.
2. There is a max “walking” distance associated with it. (Think of shadow stepping as instantly walking the distance to your target, not magically teleporting.)
While the distance is fairly long, a lot of people misjudge walking distance . For instance in Kylo say you are right in front of clock tower and you try to shadowstep up onto the ledge right above you. To do so would be the same as walking through the bottom corridor of clocktower, walking up the ramp on the other side, and then running along the ramp for a fair distance. This out reaches the max distance of a shadow step.
To rectify I assume the change is on purpose because 60 seconds of AoE stability is insanely strong. And the AoE rez, and buffs from it are still strong.
I just want to know for sure for curiosities sake. Also if it was on purpose you should probably rename the Whirlwind Banner skill as the name no longer really fits with how you changed the skill.
