Guild Wars 2

It’s good that open world PvE will become more challenging. Now maybe people will need to think about how they use their skills rather than spamming Hundred Blades off cooldown.

Warrior has never been a mechanically intensive profession. Its challenge has always lain in its telegraphed and difficult to land skills, requiring that competitive players learn how to bait dodges and cooldowns, read skill animations, and set up bursts.

Greatsword is already a very popular weapon due to its extremely forgiving nature (high mobility for kiting and recovery, decent damage from all skills other than auto attack). Buffing Hundred Blades is unnecessary and would only turn the weapon into another Guardian greatsword, with everyone and their mother running it everywhere. Additionally, unlike Guardians, Warriors have decent access to both soft and hard CC, and the skill doesn’t require actually being inside the target hitbox to deal full damage. Given these facts, there’s a clear reason why Whirling Wrath should be mobile, since it would be practically impossible to land if it were stationary, but as far as I can tell people only want walking Hundred Blades because they’re too lazy to actually set up the skill. So what if it’s not usable in every single setting? Maybe that will at least get some players to try running different weapon sets.

Any major buff to Hundred Blades would just draw more people from other forums to complain about Warrior and get it nerfed again, probably leaving us worse off than before. We’re already getting significant buffs to damage in the upcoming trait system rework. There are other parts of the profession that are more deserving of changes, such as the nigh-mandatory traits Cleansing Ire and Fast Hands.

I have a hard time taking this thread’s complaint seriously when the OP is single-handedly responsible for about half of the “buff us pls” threads on the warrior forum (no, really, look through the first five pages and try to find one that doesn’t have several of his threads on it) and the first post is making a direct comparison between ranger and warrior longbow skills.

Maybe the solution is to just realize that not every profession has to be strictly worse than warrior at everything (coming from someone who mains warrior).

Our longbow is fine, there’s a reason everyone runs it in pvp (giant fire field, reliable CI procs, blast finisher, immobilize, blind, etc). The guardian one has better damage but less utility, plus they have to give up one of their trait lines.

I’m really not sure what the point of this thread is.

I think ArenaNet is still deciding how they want to change the numbers on Healing Signet, since the amount shown in the stream (362 hp/s) is just the current value. Still, I’m not sure the active is really worth another nerf to the passive, since we already have resistance in the form of Berserker Stance and the actives for signet heals are typically sub-par.

Turning Mending into a shout would make shoutbow nigh-immune to conditions. I think ArenaNet might rework the skill so that the number of conditions it removes scales with adrenaline level.

Yeah, the buffs are real. Forceful Greatsword and Slashing Power getting merged represents a significant increase in dps, and Physical Training (which happens to be in the Strength line) will allow us to take Mending with a 16s cooldown for a 327.5 hp/s active healing skill with added condition removal, negating the warrior’s current weakness against poison. Since we pretty much have to take a physical skill anyways to land Hundred Blades, this is a pretty major buff which will also allow us to bypass the incoming Healing Signet nerf. Swapping Armored Attack for Spiked Armor is a fair trade, especially when our direct damage is getting a boost anyways with Forceful Greatsword, and gaining access to grandmaster traits in Strength and Discipline should be a good upgrade to our current burst skills.

P.S.: Rampage with reduced cooldown and increased damage is going to smash face.

The PvP-exclusive skins, armors, and minis are completely unnecessary for PvE. You might want them, true, but you don’t actually need them to partake in any PvE activity. This is the same rationale that ArenaNet uses to justify the existence of ascended armor – obtaining it is a bit of a grind, but it’s a completely optional grind, because it’s not really necessary for most areas of the game. At no point is anyone being forced to participate in any activities that they do not wish to undertake in order to perform well in the parts of the game that they do favor. ArenaNet recognizes that PvP isn’t for everyone – that’s why the gear obtained from it doesn’t have any special stat attributes or bonuses that would make them superior to PvE equipment. At the same time, they also recognize that PvE isn’t for everyone – that’s why PvP doesn’t use the PvE equipment system. The PvP-exclusive rewards are purely cosmetic, so I don’t see how you’re being punished for not participating in PvP. At the same time, if ArenaNet did relax the requirements to obtain them, I feel that it would detract from the inherent prestige and exclusivity of those items – the impression of “Oh, that guy has the glorious armor skins, clearly he’s put some time and effort into playing PvP” – and consequently reduce the satisfaction that other players derive from acquiring them. As I see it, this isn’t a tactic to draw new players into PvP – it’s a method of rewarding the really dedicated players who find it to their liking. Since similarly unique rewards exist for PvE (luminescent/carapace armor skins, fractal weapons), I’m fairly confident in saying that ArenaNet has deliberately designed these requirements to reflect the effort that their owners put into the relevant game mode, and barring a complete reversal of that philosophy, I don’t see them changing anytime soon.

With that said, I do agree that it would be nice if the current pool of dailies were expanded such that players didn’t have to go out of their way (or into different game modes) to hunt down their ten achievement points, but it’s really only a minor inconvenience either way.

If you’re going to try and be all anti-meta with your logic and pretend that numbers don’t matter, that’s fine, but please don’t spread misinformation if you don’t know how to calculate simple sums.

Healing Signet is 21,720 health per minute. Healing Surge is 19,640 health per minute, not 19,640 health every 30 seconds, and that’s assuming that you have 100% adrenaline when you use it (and saving your adrenaline for your heal skill instead of burst skills is a waste). That also happens to be what Purple Miku means with regards to depleting adrenaline – using Cleansing Ire to clear conditions uses up adrenaline. Also, you’re wrong about Adrenal Health – 360 health every 3 seconds is roughly 66% less than Healing Signet.

The problem with Healing Surge is that it requires you to conserve one of your most important resources – adrenaline – in order to get its full effect, AND that full effect is still less than what you get with Healing Signet. Furthermore, it has a cast time of 1 second and can be interrupted, unlike the signet. Going off your posts, I assume you think that Healing Surge is somehow better against conditions, even though it requires that you split your adrenaline between your heal skill and your burst skill. Sure, it’ll restore your adrenaline when you use it, but the heal amount when you aren’t at full adrenaline is about half of what you would get otherwise so you’ll just die from direct damage instead.

But, whatever. If you think Healing Surge is better than Healing Signet, feel free to message me in-game for a duel – I’ll use the signet, and you can use whatever kitteny adrenaline-wasting build you want.

After some testing, I’d have to say that the first build seems to be the most effective in general. While you’re correct in that Defy Pain isn’t particularly useful in 1v1 fights (unless it’s a very close duel anyways), I find that it’s rather good in team fights and for securing stomps. Since Healing Signet gives constant health regeneration, the bit of extra durability that Defy Pain adds is an excellent opportunity to get out of the fight with greatsword skills and kite around while healing up. By contrast, Spiked Armor won’t help as much if the other team decides to focus you, as the retaliation damage will be spread out among all their members.

As for the second build, although Leg Specialist is nice for landing bursts, losing 200 power, 20% condition duration, Slashing Power, and Great Fortitude (which is more valuable if you’re planning to take Defy Pain, as it reduces the chance of being one-shot) doesn’t seem worth it, especially when your only access to cripple is Bladetrail. Personally, I’d prefer to slot Throw Bolas over Bull’s Charge – they’re both rather buggy skills, but I’ve been able to land the bolas pretty consistently by only using it in melee range, which is fairly easy to maintain with this build’s mobility. Its cooldown is significantly shorter, the immobilize has a longer duration, it persists through stunbreaks, and your ability to apply trash conditions with the greatsword and longbow should be able to hinder peoples’ attempts to cleanse it off themselves. Even if someone does manage to remove it, the brief cooldown means you can just re-apply it 20 seconds later.

As for the last two builds, I’m not really a fan of relying on the on-crit traits for damage. The precision and condition damage boosts from the Arms line aren’t too optimal; you should already be able to maintain constant Fury uptime with Pack runes, Signet of Rage, and Arcing Slice, and your only damaging conditions are on your longbow, which attacks too slowly to reliably proc the bleed trait. By contrast, Strength offers additional power, which is always useful, and condition duration, which will lengthen your immobilize durations to 3.5 and 4.75 seconds respectively for more reliable bursts with Hundred Blades. As for the traits themselves, I believe you’d need to maintain around 8 stacks of might with Forceful Greatsword to match the 10% bonus from Slashing Power (and if you’re critting that often, the other person is probably already dead). The cooldown reduction on greatsword skills is largely redundant, since if you’re swapping weapons consistently they’ll almost always be off cooldown when you swap back anyways. Attack of Opportunity isn’t a bad trait, but you’re dropping Destruction of the Empowered to take it, which will weaken your damage against boon-heavy builds and/or anyone who’s being supported by a shoutbow warrior.

It’s difficult for me to pick a specific profession that fits your criteria for PvE, since most dungeon builds focus more on constant high dps from the start of the fight (including the use of preemptive might stacking) rather than the “ramping” you’ve described. From a PvP perspective, though, I’d say that a dagger/dagger elementalist would be fairly close to what you want. D/D elementalists are currently very strong in PvP, as their numerous heals, high mobility, and wide range of skills give them excellent survivability, allowing them to fill a variety of roles ranging from bunkering capture points to 1v1ing other players. Furthermore, through the consistent use of might-stacking rotations, they can build up and maintain around ~20 stacks of might over the course of a fight, translating to a +600 increase in power and condition damage. Though D/D specs lack major damage bursts, they make up for it by using sustained damage output and healing to grind down other players in battles of attrition.

With that said, the elementalist is a very mechanically demanding profession. Personally, I got tired of playing it after a few months; until you get really used to utilizing the skills strategically, it might feel a bit like you’re just spamming skills off cooldown. Most elementalist players end up using custom keybinds, as having to stretch all around the keyboard with the default setup will more than likely limit the fluidity of your gameplay. Also, the D/D elementalist is more of a PvP or WvW roaming build – while you can take it into PvE and apply everything I’ve mentioned there, you still won’t have the flat damage output of other classes and builds, which is what most parties look for in dungeons (you will, however, be able to survive pretty much anything PvE throws at you, and maintain some might stacks for your party).

If you’re interested in a D/D elementalist, here are some links:
Build: http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Elementalist_-_D/D_Roamer
Video guide by Phantaram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAtDKypiS5M

Personally speaking, there isn’t really a profession that I find to be inherently terrible in group situations. While it’s true that necromancers don’t really offer much in the way of party support, I’d still rather be in a party with a good necromancer who knows the class than with a guardian in full soldiers camping staff. It pretty much comes down to the individual skill of the player, and how well they know the game mechanics/encounters.

With that said, if you plan to go into dungeons, the typical class ranking is something along the lines of elementalist > guardian > warrior > engineer > thief > mesmer > ranger > necromancer, assuming everyone’s running decent builds and has some knowledge of the run. Since this also depends to some degree on personal preference and experience, I imagine the ranking will vary between individuals to some greater or lesser degree. Some professions are especially valuable for specific dungeons (like thief for Caudecus’ s Manor skips).

As for your build, I’d recommend either greatsword/longbow warrior or sword+dagger/shortbow thief. Both have fairly high survivability (warrior with its high base stats and mobility from greatsword, thief with its numerous evades and teleports) and good utility ranged weapons.

ZeftheWicked.3076:

The point here is that it gets yout out of cc trouble automatically, and is a non utility slot consuming source of stability.

How many times do we use our stab to secure a stomp? I’d say quite often. now imagine a scenario where they downed person does not use his cc despite being able to. You just wasted a precious dolyak signet/balanced stance/rampage.

With this little trait on if he does not manage to cc you you don’t waste it’s cast. Also pretty darn useful when your main source of stability is on cooldown and in pvp smart people will have their eyes peeled for expiration of your stability so they can go cc wild on your kitten . Well…surprise!

I’m guessing 90s is due to abundance of stability for warrior. If it was any shorter us warriors could get some really sick stability uptime…well we do anyway.

This trait is useless for stomping because it doesn’t offer any preemptive cc resistance. For example, if a ranger dazes you with Thunderclap, Last Stand will break you out of the daze, but your stomp will already have been interrupted so you’ll have to restart the animation anyways.

jia li ng.8415:

But it does bring us to the point I am stating; Imagine, you the newbie choose to craft a particular item (not that any item you choose to craft actually matters) but you decide your character might benefit with, hmm, let’s say, charged ambrite orichalcum earrings, sure why not …

Oh, but wait, those take charged quartz crystals, eh not a big deal right just go to the home instance and mine a few a day until you can charge them up (since we all know the Zephyrites don’t have anything to celebrate and we’ll never be able to farm there ever again) … Oh what? You don’t have a Quartz node in your home instance? (Where the kitten were you?) That’s right your a new player, silly me … Hmm, what are your options, go to Dry Top and wait and farm a node or three a day (hopefully within the allotted time frame)… Are you sure you really want to craft those charged ambrite orichalcum earrings, really?

I personally feel for these new players who have to make do with their efforts, and I wish them all the fortune in the entire world of Tyria because the only way that they will ever succeed in crafting something that make them feel accomplished is to grind, wait and hope for the chance to do what we take for granted …

…and like I said, it really doesn’t matter about these kitten newbies anyway .. Why should we care if it is more time consuming for them, they weren’t there at the release so let’s make them suffer, right? Do they really deserve that kind of treatment?

As a relatively new player myself (at least in the sense that I started playing several months after Lion’s Arch was trashed, and never participated in the Festival of the Four Winds release), I can’t really see the validity of your argument. At the time, I also faced the problem of having to acquire charged quartz crystals, since I wanted a set of celestial armor for my elementalist. After looking up the crystals on the wiki, I learned that normal quartz crystals can be bought on the trading post, and promptly purchased enough to make the charged crystals I needed. Problem solved.

Edit: And yes, as another poster mentioned, if you really must have your own quartz node, the Gift of Quartz is now sold by laurel vendors (and ArenaNet has been nice enough to make laurels part of the daily log-in rewards).

What you’re suggesting will only worsen already-unbalanced matchups. If it’s a battle over a fortified keep with hordes of npc guards, the attacking side will need far greater numbers than the defenders to successfully take any location. Furthermore, since all keeps will require “at least” fifteen people to take, servers that simply can’t muster sizable groups will be reduced to capping camps and hoping they drop down a few tiers (assuming they aren’t already dead last) while their larger opponents sit on the walls and watch them wipe to npcs. ArenaNet already added siege disablers to let individual players or smaller groups stall zergs while they call for reinforcements – there’s no need to give the objectives more passive defense.

http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Thief_-_VenomShare

What exactly would this accomplish? Thieves are already limited to roaming/ganking backliners in WvW, nerfing stealth would just restrict them even further. Mesmers wouldn’t really be affected because their stealth skills last five seconds or less and have long cooldowns. Why the thief nerf?

The fights were pretty annoying, if only because of how boring and repetitive they were. For the most part, the bosses just went through cycles – you have to do some task(s) in order to break its defenses, followed by a burn stage, and then it resets. Personally, I would’ve preferred it if they had phases instead so that their mechanics changed over the course of a fight (e.g. when its health hits a certain threshold, it starts using different attacks or something). As it stands, after you figure out the mechanics from the first cycle, you can pretty much predict everything the boss is going to do and the fight just turns into a sort of dps grind.

As the poster above me said, the power difference probably won’t be too noticeable. Also, since you have the boon duration bonuses from traveler runes, you’ll be able to consistently maintain three might stacks with the greatsword auto-attack as opposed to vacillating between two and three stacks with the crests (just tested it). The other stat differences seem negligible.

Still makes noobs qq about stealth and instakill on the forums.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Game-Over

I don’t know much about running staff (only use it when sieging towers/keeps in WvW) but in your tPvP video, it seemed that you blew through your utilities very quickly during the first fight – you used your blast finishers on a well-positioned water field, but then you popped Cleansing Fire and Arcane Shield when you didn’t really need to. Your Unsteady Ground was still up if you had to move out of the fight to heal (you didn’t) and you weren’t really in danger from conditions at that point.

I’m fairly new to the profession as well, but I suggest going over your fights to see what could have gone better. Did you use any dodges when you didn’t really need to? (This is a pretty common problem with everyone taking Evasive Arcana; the spell procs are good, but you can mitigate more damage by dodging a burst than by popping the EA Cleansing Wave.) Are you using all of your utilities when they’ll contribute the most? Do you know your skills well enough to pull off the combos without glancing at the tooltips? I find that the best way to learn a class is practice.

On a side note, your build seems pretty focused on field blasting, so you might want to consider running Blasting Staff over the Arcana trait. I’ve found that the larger radius is very helpful when healing or stacking might/swiftness in groups, especially since everyone will be moving around in fights and might not remain inside the field.

Good luck!

I’ve decided to run Ether Renewal on my generic 00266 D/D build for the condition removal, and I’ve been considering taking Earth’s Embrace over Stone Splinters for the stability proc at 50% health. I also take Armor of Earth as a utility, but ER’s short cooldown of 15 seconds means that AoE will be on cooldown for 3/4 of my ER casts assuming I’m using it consistently throughout a fight. I’ve heard that ER’s main drawback is its long casting time (exceeding Churning Earth’s) which makes it easily interrupted; is the additional stability uptime from Earth’s Embrace worth losing the 10% damage from Stone Splinters?