Guild Wars 2

MiLkZz.4789:

I think not a single warrior on this forum will agree to this. Berserker stance is one of the strongest utilities you can take right now. So they don’t want to see it changed.

I think it’s inevitable that it’ll get changed, most likely in the form of a nerf. Being able to become effectively immune to most conditions for a significant period of time is just… ridiculous, especially combined with how many other methods Warriors get to cure conditions (Cleansing Ire, Dogged March to further reduce condition duration, Quick Breathing, Soldier runes, and so on.)

Honestly, I don’t like the whole “reduces duration of conditions” effect to begin with; it just feels completely out of place in a team-oriented game.

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

A little late but that sounds like a good change. It’s just the people that want them to become passive buffs, and extremely strong ones considering they would be passive for one utility slot. That can’t happen, that would make banners way too strong.

Right now my banner grants aoe regen, a bonus to two stats that I choose. Imagine how strong that would be for a passive utility slot. How could anyone pass that up?

The regen isn’t that great unless you stack a lot of Compassion, which inevitably comes at the cost of other stats (typically Vitality.) I’d rather have the 20% faster Longbow skills than a piddly little 200 HP/sec regen effect, especially considering how good Poison is at dealing with regeneration.

Asura is pretty much your only choice if you want to be serious in sPvP; they’re really tiny, which makes them surprisingly hard to target and in general keep an eye on, especially when there are flashy spell effects and pets all running around throughout it.

Otherwise? Pretty much anything but Norn. Norns are pretty much the most boring, uninspired race I’ve ever seen in an RPG. They’re nothing but bigger humans with a the genre-standard uninspired take on Norse mythology. At least Humans get something mildly interesting with their different gods.

Talonblaze.3175:

I find the rifle mostly shines in large enemy groups when traited. Being able to line up and hit multiple enemies can do quite a bit of damage with Killshot and Volley.
(And makes #4 SOMEWHAT more useful, being able to apply Vulnerability to all it hits.)

It’s speed is mostly my issue, with its cast and projectile speed. They are quite slow, especially for its untraited version which really suffers from it against more than one foe.

Overall, I think it could use more love, but that doesn’t stop me from still using it despite the drawbacks.

The problem is that Longbow is also considerably better against groups due to its Burst skill, especially when you consider you can activate the fire field yourself with the 3 skill.

On top of that, you don’t need good positioning and timing to maximize Longbow’s AOE, while you do need good positioning (and 20 points in Arms) in order to make decent use of Rifle’s “AOE.”

Honestly, Longbow probably needs to be nerfed a bit, in addition to Rifle being boosted a bit. I feel like Longbow is entirely too effective even without the Tactics traits associated with it.

I feel like the game needs a better, more detailed UI than anything else. I’m trying to get into PvP right now, and the biggest stumbling block for me is having to fight with the UI.

With the Necromancer example there – why do we need to see names and stuff for the pets without clicking on them? I’m new to PvP, but I haven’t run into a situation where I felt like I really needed to be able to pay close attention to enemy pets – more often, it’s the Ranger or Necromancer I’m after, not their pets.

And at any rate, if ArenaNet do want to curry favor with the whole “esports” thing, the best way of having a successful esports game is to make it as newbie-friendly as possible. League of Legends and Dota 2 would not be where they are now if they weren’t both very welcoming to new players.

I feel like GW2’s PvP is pretty close to being that kind of welcoming, but as a newcomer to PvP… the UI is just awful and really makes understanding what’s going on difficult.

Knote.2904:

Nope, UI options here are lacking extremely.

Was hoping that wouldn’t be the answer

Oh well. ArenaNet seems to be pretty on the ball with most stuff (the little link to the xkcd comic when I had to reset my password floored me.) Maybe we can get more UI customization options in future patches :-/

For stats, I’ve decided to focus on being as chufty as possible; this means Vitality and Toughness are our primary stats.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any defensively-minded Sigils; I’ve chosen two Battle sigils for my Mace/Warhorn combo, and a Doom sigil for my bow. Because of the points I have into Discipline, I swap weapons very often, and this seems to work best for my purposes. Having the Poison hit for reducing incoming healing is quite nice, especially since my first Longbow attack is typically going to be Pin Down or Smoldering Arrow.

The Battle sigils just serve to give me a small boost to my damage output; Hydromancy sigils seem interesting, however, since I often only swap to my Warhorn kit when it’s time to use my horn skills again, or I need to stun someone to get them off my back. With both weapons using the sigil, it’d translate to an impressive 6 seconds of Chill… but conditions very rarely last their full duration in PvP, in my experience.

Runes are where my toughest choices have been, because there’s a lot of runes that seem to work really well with my build.

I’ve gone for Dolyak for the time being, because it gives us both of our primary stats, and an additional regeneration effect on top of Healing Signet. With 200 Compassion, Dolyak runes appear to regenerate for about 240/tick; this isn’t bad, but it’s not that great, either.

Mercy runes would make us considerably more effective at reviving teammates, while still giving us a lot of Toughness; but how often do you find yourself actually being able to sit there and revive teammates? Would these bonuses apply to Battle Standard’s reviving effects, too? It’s something I’d like to test, but it’s also kind of hard to notice in the average solo-queue zergfest.

Melandru runes… well, there’s a reason they’re popular. We’re already good at curing conditions and removing them from ourself, and Melandru runes would just make that even better. However, because we already have so much, I’m wondering if sacrificing the Vitality would even really be worth it.

Warrior runes are the last choice; we don’t get Toughness, but we do get Vitality at least, and the extra second off of weapon swapping brings our weapon swap cooldown down to 4 seconds, which is pretty quick.

There are some other runes that might be interesting (Pack runes could be interesting, but aside from the 4-rune proc effect, don’t really give us any stats we want), but I feel like the main choices are going to end up being Dolyak, Mercy, Melandru, or Warrior.

I’ve gone with Soldier/Soldier for my accessory, since it provides me with everything I like and nothing I don’t.

With these traits, items, and skills, I sit at around 28,000 HP and 3330 Armor; with Banner of Defense up, this turns into about 30,000 HP and 3600 Armor. You are extremely chufty with this build, but have all the ferocity of a wet egg noodle.

My gameplay focus has been primarily focused on staying alive. In solo queue PvP, at least, this seems to mean “kite, kite, kite, and keep kiting”, which is why I’m not sold on Mercy runes, which would otherwise probably be pretty fantastic for a build like this. Maybe organized PvP would find different results.

I’ll write a section on actually playing the build once I have more than half a dozen games with it. In particular, I want to try and find some people to play at least semi-organized games with, to really test the concept. Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

For traits, I’ve chosen to focus on being as hard to kill as possible. It’s a build style I usually see referred to as an “anchor” (in the rock climbing sense), but the term here seems to be “bunker.”

- Dogged March and Cleansing Ire out of Defense. I feel like these are pretty much must-haves for any Warrior build focusing on not dying, and honestly feel like both are probably a little too strong for where they’re found. Either way, I don’t feel like any of the other choices come anywhere near these two. You’re very hard to pin down with Dogged March, and Cleansing Ire gives you a considerable amount of condition curing on top of your Warhorn skills.

- Inspiring Banners, Quick Breathing, and Burning Arrows out of Tactics. Since we’re using Banners, Inspiring Banners is a no-brainer, and the same goes for Quick Breathing. Burning Arrows might be a point of contention, especially since it means no Inspiring Battle Standard (banners grant regeneration to teammates), but I’ve found that the heal from Inspiring Battle Standard isn’t particularly impressive unless you really stack Compassion, which typically comes at the cost of other, more important stats like Toughness and Vitality. With just the 200 Compassion from 20 points into Defense, Inspiring Battle Standard will only heal for around 180/tick, which just… isn’t very much.

By comparison, Burning Arrows lowers the cooldown on Longbow skills by 20%; that means 20% more Blinds, 20% more Blast finishers, 20% more Immobilize shots. The extra damage is nice, too, but it’s not really something this build concerns itself with. The only other choice I might consider is Empower Allies, since that trait seems to have fallen out of vogue when it got shifted to Master tier, and it seems less likely you’ll have two Warriors with it on the same team.

- Signet Mastery and Destruction of the Empowered out of Discipline. Signet Mastery is a no-brainer, especially for the reduced cooldown on Dolyak Signet. Destruction of the Empowered isn’t really that useful to us, but it can still translate to a hefty damage bonus against enemies with lots of Boons (Guardians being a prime suspect of this), and I really don’t feel there’s much of a better place to spend those 5 points. Defense might be the only other choice, for Armored Attack… which serves to just (slightly) boost our damage. Destruction of the Empowered will almost certainly turn out to be more damage; nearly everyone in PvP will have at least a couple of boons, and many players will have several.

This is just a first draft of the build. I like my traits, skills, and weapons, but I’m not completely sold on my runes – I think I need more time playing it before I can have a good idea of what’s best, and feedback from others giving it a shot. Anyway.

I like playing support roles in competitive games, and never have liked magic much in any game, so Warrior was the natural choice. And within the Warrior class, I feel like Banners and Warhorns are the best way of supporting my team. I’m deliberately avoiding focusing on Shouts; not just because I feel Shouts are already overplayed as it is (most Warriors I see seem to use Shouts a lot), but also because I feel like a Shout-focused support build is more of a healer build (especially with the recent boost to Vigorous Shouts), while a Banner-focused build is more about providing long-duration support to teammates.

Anyway, I’ll worry about pretty formatting and stuff later, after I’ve had a chance to get some feedback and make adjustments from my own experiences with the build.

For now, you can find the build at: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQNBjSDbk0p2NAy4BHOggUohVhShdshpHhBbYGA-TsAA1CtIsRZjzGjNSbs2M6YJyWEA

A quick breakdown of what I’ve chosen for the build, and why:

- Longbow is the primary weapon of the build. It has moderate damage potential, but more importantly comes with a lot of benefits that a Rifle wouldn’t bring: Blind, an excellent Immobilize, and a Fire combo field. Its Burst skill also does not require a target, making it a great way to dump adrenaline to proc Adrenal Health and Cleansing Ire.

- Mace/Warhorn is our secondary combination, but with points into Discipline, you could really consider both setups to be “primary.” The Warhorn is the obvious choice for support, with excellent abilities to support your team, and I’ve chosen Mace over the other options because I feel it’s best-suited to the pure support role; the Burst skill is a long-duration stun, you get an additional 1-second Daze on the 3 skill, and the 2 skill gives you either a block or a way of generating some adrenaline on the fly.

- Axes are pretty awful without a focus on burst damage, and I feel Swords just aren’t a good choice without taking a lot of damage-boosting stats and traits. In particular, Swords’ Burst skill requires you to stand in place for a fairly long period of time, while you can quickly whack someone with your Mace and continue moving. You’ll find that moving around a lot is a core component of this build; I’m almost always kiting, only hitting when I have my bow out.

- Healing Signet is the best choice for healing item on this build, especially with Signet Mastery and the focus on kiting.

- I pick Stomp as my first utility skill. I feel it’s a hugely undervalued skill, and much better than people give it credit for. First, it breaks stuns, and then also gives you a second or two of Stability to block a second stun from landing on you immediately. Then, it launches every enemy in a generous radius, while also doing a little damage. It’s a fantastic skill for clearing the area around you, either for forcing that Guardian or Warrior off of you, or for getting them off of a friendly Necromancer or Elementalist. Unfortunately, it can be evaded and blocked, and has a relatively obvious cast animation. Fear Me! would be my other choice, but it doesn’t break stuns.

- My Banner of choice is Banner of Defense; in effect, it’s almost like giving Protection to your team between the boosts to Toughness and the extra health from the Vitality boost, and the 2 skill while carrying the Banner gives you an extra method of interrupting enemies. Banner of Precision would probably be my runner-up, especially with its 2 skill giving Fury to nearby allies (you can probably expect to give allies over 30% crit chance with Banner of Precision up.) With Inspiring Banners, we can have Banner of Defense up almost constantly.

- My final skill for sPvP is a Stability skill, which I feel is absolutely critical. Since I’m in Discipline and taking Signet Mastery, Dolyak Signet is our skill of choice here. With Signet Mastery, it has almost as short a cooldown as Balanced Stance, while having a longer Stability buff, and Balanced Stance’s Swiftness buff isn’t particularly useful when we’re running a Warhorn. When it’s not in use, Dolyak Signet gives us a pretty hefty bonus to Toughness (I believe it’s 180?), making us pretty chufty, indeed.

- Elite skill is a no-brainer: Battle Standard, baby! It’s not as good as Signet of Rage for boosting our own damage output, but it’s a HUGE damage steroid for your teammates, and its 2 skill gives your teammates just under 4 seconds of Stability on only a 15 second cooldown. Battle Standard’s cooldown is also made much more manageable with Inspiring Banners.

As far as I’m aware, speed boosts just replace each other, with the strongest one taking priority. Swiftness will take precedence over Warrior’s Sprint; you will move at 133%, not 158%.

knbBlackTemplar.3059:

I understand exact why reason, but still, should it mean the male and female charr armor have to look absolutely same?

Why not? Female charr look very different from male charr; the tail is the most obvious difference visible from a long way off, but obviously their faces are considerably different, too.

It actually makes less sense to have armor specific to genders; that’s not how they do or did it in the real world, so why do it here? A breastplate is considerably less effective if it’s a breastplate, you know?

Hell, do you watch Game of Thrones? Did you ever grouse about Brienne not wearing armor that shows off her figure better? It wouldn’t make sense for her to – not only would a blacksmith have to custom-make her armor (which would be kitten ed expensive), it’d also be less effective at, you know… protecting her.

Zach.3264:

PizzaSHARK.2741:

Zach.3264:

I wouldn’t say Rifle is underpowered at all. For being a ranged weapon on a mostly melee class it’s actually really good.

The problem is that there’s pretty much no reason to use Rifle – Longbow is pretty much strictly better.

Well, I actually much prefer Rifle over Longbow. Longbow feels too clunky and the projectiles are too slow for my liking. Sure I do miss the blast and fire field, but Rifle 3 is great in my opinion.

I’m using a Rifle build in PvE and WvW simply because… well, no Iron Legion Charr would ever dare sully his hands using some silly twig!

Though I use a longbow in my sPvP build, since it’s just simply better in all the ways that really matter.

I’m not sure why people are bashing Brutal Shot, though; it has more than 100% uptime, and it’s still a damage steroid that everyone on your team benefits from, not just you.

I did like the idea of turning Bleeding Shot into a clone of the harpoon gun’s 1 skill.

Ahlen.7591:

Longbow 1 and rifle 1 should probably be switched, making longbow a more condition based weapon and making rifle the POWA weapon.

Make kill shot cast a lot faster, but reduce the damage some. Cast at 1s and do 30% less damage maybe?

I actually like Kill Shot having the long cast time; it makes Quickness a valuable commodity, and it makes sense – you’re lining up a killing shot (head shot.)

If Rifle has any major problems, I’d think it’s due to Longbow performing too well as a damage weapon (rather than a support weapon), and Bleeding Shot not really matching up to what Rifle is all about (flat damage instead of condition damage.)

Specifically, I’d like better, more robust nameplates, similar to what World of Warcraft has.

Nameplates in Guild Wars 2 are… really small, and with how much faster people move (especially with the dodge mechanic, and the occasional bit of latency I get while playing on an EU server), it’s awfully hard to be precise when I want to target a specific person.

On top of that, nameplates aren’t color-coded by class, but instead are just a generic red, and control effects aren’t listed above them like they are in WoW. Granted, control effects typically only last a couple of seconds in GW2, so that last bit may not be all that important.

Mostly, I’m trying to get into PvP, but it really feels like the only option I have is to pick a build that’s good at mashing lots of buttons for AOE buffs and damage, and that’s about it – I don’t feel as if I can make effective use of any skills that require precise targeting, because it’s very difficult to pick nameplates out amid a cloud of red text, and tab-targeting will cycle me through targets I don’t want to waste my time on, such as Ranger and Necromancer pets.

Zach.3264:

I wouldn’t say Rifle is underpowered at all. For being a ranged weapon on a mostly melee class it’s actually really good.

The problem is that there’s pretty much no reason to use Rifle – Longbow is pretty much strictly better.

Bleeding Shot seems a little misplaced on Rifle; it’s very clear that Rifle is all about burst damage, both with the actual Burst skill and Volley, and everything else except Bleeding Shot supports that concept.

It also means that, when playing as a rifleman, you gear for Precision and Prowess, not Malice or Expertise, so Bleeding Shot’s Bleed, let alone the free Bleed you’d get from Precise Strikes don’t really get much attention or love.

Ultrajoe.8674:

And hey, who doesn’t want banner-javelins, am I right?

Your ideas are pretty fantastic, but I think a simpler band-aid fix might be to just make Inspiring Banners increase effective radius by 100% (1200 radius) instead of just 50%. Or maybe 75% (1050 radius.)

Either way, the idea is to make banners a little less of a pain in the kitten to micromanage without making them too good. I already think they’re pretty good, but it is a pain to micro them around in the middle of a fight. But then again, I pretty much do play as a buff-bot in WvW, just hanging out in the back with my warhorn and longbow. Then again, PvP in general in this game feels like a clusterkitten of AOE spamming, so maybe it’s just me :p

Knote.2904:

That’s it, none of that changes how I play, it just adds a few more numbers to everything I was already doing previously, that’s where I feel the game could really use some improvement on.

My warrior plays pretty differently equipped with a shield instead of a warhorn, or a greatsword instead of a longbow. I haven’t tried Mesmer, and based on my experiences with them in WvW, I don’t think I’d mind too terribly much if they were “accidentally” deleted from the game and the person who came up with the illusion idea “accidentally” locked in a cupboard for a week.

The risk of having traits considerably alter the functionality of a skill is that it’s no longer simply adding something to the skill, but changing it completely. The closest I’d feel comfortable with would be like Quick Breathing, which causes Warhorn skills to convert a condition to a boon; it encourages more strategic use of the horn skills while not necessarily changing the way they’re used.

IMO, I just want more “fun” for all parts of the game including spvp, just make the classes more fun, more options etc, there will always be builds that are on top, but it makes the game much more fun/interesting and offers a better chance for the players to develop/counter the meta themselves.

I haven’t played any class but Warrior yet, but I feel like ArenaNet has already done a better job of this than any other MMO company out there. Blizzard was a solid competitor back in the days of Wrath of the Lich King, but especially with Mists of Pandaria, I feel like they treaded too far into the deadly waters of “homogenization” (yay, buzzwords!)

That might just be because I’m new, though. I feel like I have a variety of ways of playing my Warrior that, while most probably aren’t the “best” way of play, are at least effective enough to let me have fun and not be a complete deadweight to my teammates or party members.

I’d definitely rather see the focus be on encouraging players to try different playstyles – whether or not those playstyles are “the best” – by focusing efforts on shoring up weaknesses in trait lines and skill choices, rather than focus on the top-tier metagame and balance solely around that.

I feel like the eSports thing will take care of itself when the game generates enough interest.

Knote.2904:

Pretty much anyone here is afraid anything they post won’t be considered by the devs. Hell even if I spend a few hours posting some indepth criticism/ideas I have in my head, and it does get seen, and maybe even acknowledged assuming the criticism/ideas are good, what are the odds they even happen or inspire the devs? Especially when you get these tiny changes after 4 months?

That’s just the nature of things. It helps to keep in mind that developers value open-ended concepts more than concrete suggestions. While I might think “Dogged March would totally be better off if it were swapped with this trait in the Master tier!”, it may not look that way when you’re viewing it from the much wider perspective of a developer. Instead, it might be better to phrase it as “Dogged March might be too strong for an Adept trait,” and let them worry about how exactly to address that issue, if they feel it’s an issue.

I’d also recommend Occam’s Razor (or the much simpler KISS, or “Keep It Simple, Stupid”) when you’re making a suggestion. The simpler the change is, the easier it’ll be to implement, and the more likely it’ll be noticed and possibly put into the game in one way or another. Changing a value from 10% to 15% is a lot more likely to happen than completely restructuring a trait line.

It’d be awesome if the developers communicated exactly what they were thinking, so you’d actually know if they agree or not… but you have to remember that they’re already getting blasted for “not taking any action.” What happens if they report their thought processes? Now they get blasted for going in the “wrong” direction?

If you played World of Warcraft, you might remember their dev team and community managers being much more open and candid during the early phases of vanilla. And then you might remember a guy that went by the name Tseric, and that pretty much explained exactly why being open and candid is not a recipe for success; not unless you’re talking to people face to face and not when they’re hiding behind a shield of anonymity.

Also people complaining about things you think aren’t an issue usually are issues. That’s where balancing for casuals vs balancing for top tier comes in, and it’s something I think Riot has does a decent job at.

It’s more about “do I want to make money off of this?” If the answer is yes, you “balance for casuals.” In general, trickle-down is the best way of balancing things, but you run into the issue you just mentioned – someone that just ain’t very good isn’t going to notice (or, in all likelihood, even care) that there’s a solution to it that players up the totem pole have figured out. This exists in pretty much every competitive game I’ve ever played, from UT (Link Gun is bullkitten, mmkay?) to Counter-Strike (try using awp sometime, see the reactions it generates), to Team Fortress (W+M1 Pyro lolololol) to World of Warcraft (hell… take your pick; people whined about literally everything.)

It’s a problem without any real solution, at least not that I’ve seen. On one hand, you tell the players that just aren’t very good (I prefer “newbies” to “casuals”) that… well, you aren’t very good, and this isn’t actually a problem at higher levels of play. I wish I could say most of them would go “Ohhhhh, okay! I’ll just get better, then!” But this is the internet; most of them will pitch a fit and call you an idiot, and say you don’t know your own game. You know… the game that you make and know more about than the next fifty players put together.

Your other option is telling those high level players to pipe down, but as you can see pretty much everywhere (in this very thread, even), those players tend to have an ego problem, and the results are pretty much the same.

Unfortunately, you can’t please everyone, so you mostly focus on pleasing the people that are paying the bills – the shareholders.

Django.5923:

They ignore the request of the good players and listen to the casuals.

There are enough players who could fix pvp with just a little tweak of numbers, if given the chance.

Here’s a hint: Listening to your players is never a good idea. Players will inevitably have a much more subjective view of the game than the game’s designers will. Player feedback can and often is valuable, but it should never be the sole basis for making a change to your game.

No one knows everything there is to know, or can see something from every single angle. You’re kidding yourself and dramatically overstating your own importance if you think otherwise.

BurrTheKing.8571:

Like many classes, Warrior still has several Major and Minor traits that are pretty much worthless. There’s just no reason to run some of them. As for how to fix some of them, many just need some sort of addition to make them worth running on some specific builds so that you’ll be tempted to take them over others.

Terrible Major Traits
Strength
- Berserker’s Might
- Distracting Strikes (Although it can be good for a laugh in WvW)
- Powerful Banners
- Great Fortitude (All traits like these are really, really boring)

Great Fortitude really should be a minor trait. Powerful Banners… How much damage does it do, anyway? Probably not enough to make it worth having, not when Banners tend to have lengthy cooldowns, anyway.

Berserker’s Might would probably be good if Signet of Rage wasn’t comically overpowered.

Arms
- Furious Speed

Reduce the duration of the effect to 6 seconds and have it affect all allies within a modest AOE (900? 1200?)? Might make it an interesting choice.

Defense
- Vigorous Return
- Cull the Weak (No real reason to bring over Dogged March)
- [Arguably] Spiked Armor

I’d like to see Cull the Weak apply to all attacks made on the target, not just yours. Otherwise, for PvP I really don’t think there’s any choice but Dogged March at this tier; Dogged March honestly probably needs to be a tier 2 or tier 3 major trait, it’s that good. Spiked Armor seems kind of dumb – if you’re the burn target, they’re gonna keep pounding you whether you have Retaliation or not. If it’s just a skirmish… well, Retaliation is a great “don’t hit this guy, idiot” sign.

Tactics
- Shrug it Off

I disagree here. At worst, it’s a free stun break and condition removal for you and your entire team once every 30 seconds; it also interacts as a Shout for Vigorous Shouts, so it also functions as a heal.

Discipline
- Thrill of the Kill
- Mighty Defenses (No reason to take over other Adept traits)

Agreed here. Signet Mastery probably needs to move deeper or just be nerfed… or the signets themselves could be nerfed; either way, with how good some of our signets are, it’s way too cheap for the relatively large benefit it provides.

Useless Minor Traits
Tactics
- Reviver’s Might: gives ONE stack of might on revive, you could also say that the other 3 minor traits are also pretty “meh” as well

All of Tactics’ minor traits are pretty lackluster. Sure, you can revive 20% faster if you also pack Melandru runes, but for literally every other Warrior but one running Melandru runes… those bonuses are pretty kitten ed worthless.

Jabberwock.9014:

I think healing sig is better than healing surge in almost all cases because there is no opportunity cost since there is no cast time. You can’t be interrupted, and you’re healing for the same amount over time even while attacking and running away. And you can even use the active if you are about to die to a burn or bleed, and gs away to fully heal ooc. Not to mention you don’t have to worry about having to have full adrenaline before healing… if I need a heal now, I hardly have time to wait for my adrenaline to fill. The actual adrenaline fill from healing surge at no adrenaline is negligible since I’ll almost always have full adrenaline by the time eviscerate is off cd anyways.

Then again I’ve never actually tried healing surge. Like I said, I am a war noob.

Healing Surge is pretty good; the ability to instantly fill your adrenaline is pretty great, and it’s a great burst heal if you’re already sitting on full adrenaline.

The problem is that with Signet of Rage, getting and maintaining full adrenaline is completely effortless, so the versatility afforded by Healing Surge is more or less nullified.

Empower Allies is no longer in the level 10 tier; you have to drop Shrug It Off or Vigorous Shouts if you want to get it.

Since you’re so heavy on Shouts, I’d just pick up Lung Capacity for shorter cooldowns.

Scoobaniec.9561:

Trait inst simple, but cripple from sword has to go. Till then enjoy perma immo build.
Its funny how we moved from perma cc to perma immo tho xD

Would there be much reason to use a sword without that, though? Swords do less damage than axes and lack the control provided by maces – so the only real reason to pick them is for the cripple and leap.

Remove the cripple from swords, and I don’t think you’d see swords getting used too terribly often.

nicknamenick.2437:

Well doesnt take long and they nerf/fix leg specialist back with the internal cooldown

Which is? I’ve never seen mention of an internal cooldown on the trait or any of the skill calculators.

nicknamenick.2437:

yeah it sucks now… hope the Dev reply on this..
I did 30 in arms also for 300 conditions (using longbow/sword)
+10% damage on bleeding foe
+Fury on immobilize (longbow/sword both have it)

But now i have to drop 10 from arms into Discipline for burst mastery..
I get:
+ 10% crit damage
+ 10% burst damage (not really need it on longbow/sword..)
+ 10% burst recharge.. (well not really need it also… its already on short cooldown :-P
+ 33% adrenaline back..

compared to before:

+ 10% on bleeding foe (both sword and longbow benefit from it)
+ 100 precision (5% crit chance..)
+ 100 condition damage
+ 2 adrenaline per crit (used to be..)

Put 10 points into Tactics instead, and take Leg Specialist. Every Cripple procs a 1 second Immobilize, which procs Opportunist. Basically ensures you have permanent Fury, and the Immobilize is pretty awesome, too.

I’m tinkering with a PvP build around those two traits :p

Nuorus.8415:

what about if Anet made it so you can’t chain stun someone and not perma blind someone. some kind of cd is needed.

Stability exists for a reason.

Is this something that’s doable? Like, for just general use. It seems like you’d need a lot of points in Defense for the hammer skills, and then it just seems like since you’re basically building up to be tanky, you’d want points in stuff like Tactics and Discipline to really make use of buffs and warhorns.

I’d really like to make a build that uses banners in a significant way, but it’s honestly a real pain in the kitten juggling multiple banners around, and they can be destroyed by enemy players; seems like shouts are just plain superior to banners for most purposes, and I’ve heard that of the 30-point Tactics skills, the healing shouts skill is pretty much plainly superior to the regenerating banners one.

I feel like the concept might be enough points in Defense to get to the Hammer skill, with points in Discipline to allow rapid weapon swapping, to get access to a warhorn setup (maybe a sword for the mobility?), especially since you can get the warhorn skill that lets you convert conditions to boons, and aiming for 30 points in Tactics for all the benefits it provides.

Mostly I’m picking hammers because hammers are clearly the best weapons in any game, but it does seem like the weapon lends itself well to control, with a lot of methods of stunning or disabling enemies, and an easy way to apply conditions like Weakness.

Has anyone tried something like this? Is it functional?