Guild Wars 2

1 sec. immob on Hammer Shock is a great suggestion and would help starting the combos immensely.

Also, how about turning adding some sort of a persistent AoE effect to Earthshaker so it triggers Cleansing Ire/Adrenal Health even if it misses a-la Longbow? It’s just painfully slow and Warrior gets heavily punished for missing burst skills.

Lots of utility is better than a bit of damage. Recharging your Shadowstep is massive value. That being said, it’s not like Exec is bad, damage is still damage, so you’re not suddenly going to become useless if you pick it.

The game isn’t balanced for actually fighting people. There are 2 man comps out there who will never die to another 2 man comps, whatever classes and builds they run. I like the idea, but I think it’s prudent of them to not make it an actual game mode, because it will break as soon as people start treating it seriously.

Faithful Strike is ~1k healing, Staff 2 explosion is ~2k, Empower is ~4k. How is it working for you guys so far? What builds would you make to work with the changed skills and is it even worth playing support?
I tried Symbolic with core Guard and Honorable Staff trait, running Sword/Shield+Staff. Seemed okay, but not sure if it’s actually good.

Scholar runes Rifle Warrior was almost a thing already. I’d also make Brutal Shot instant so it can actually be used as an evade and maybe we have something.

Not like Shoutbow, Hambow, Greatbow and some other builds were really broken. Cele D/D Ele… now that’s what you call broken, but I don’t think Warrior was ever at that level.
But yeah, Warrior’s viability hinges on how busted his sustain is, because most of the actual skills Warrior has are a joke. Kick, Stomp, Bolas, Bull’s Rush, Hammer, OH Sword are like abilities created for a different game. Warrior has a few insanely powerful abilities and a whole bunch of totally useless ones, so he doesn’t really have anything to fall back on in case the broken stuff gets nerfed.

Aeolus.3615:

Caine.8204:

mrauls.6519:

I think we should be able to end renewed focus early by pressing the skill/button again. There are too many times we can die to condis while invulnerable…

You can cancel it, it just goes on full cooldown.

that is balance…. /irony.off

So you’d like an ability that let’s you go invulnerable every 5 seconds as you cancel it before it can finish?

Thief is a decap and +1 bot, that’s his role. D/P fills this role better because you can burst harder and you have easy access to stealth which allows you to conceal your rotations. Which means S/D needs to have another role. Could it be a skirmisher? I guess. So it has to compete with Dragon Hunters and Revenants and be able to 1v1 effectively. It’s okay against what, eles and necros? Dragon Hunters and Revs are also great in team fights, while S/D is much less so.

Bad auxiliary skills need a buff. Dancing Dagger needs a straight up buff in Cripple duration and perhaps deal more damage to targets it bounces to, so it’s better in team fights and 2v2s.

CnD is terribly unreliable. I don’t like the idea of making more skills unblockable, but I don’t know how else to make it not blow. Maybe it should cost 8 initiative, always grant stealth even if you swing at thin air, and refund 2 initiative if you hit something?

Acrobatics needs to be buffed and given a defined role instead of just being a worse Daredevil. I mean, come on, look at Don’t Stop and compare it to Unhindered Combatant. Grandmaster Traits need to be buffed, that’s for sure. Perhaps it needs a trait that grants might to allies when you dodge and attack while wielding a sword? Something like that. I think it should be a trait line that makes Thief good in team fights and prolonged 1v1s, which means it should give sustain and team support.

SharpAvalanche.5938:

are you talking about this build ? [PvP] Symbolic Zealer Burst build
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/PvP-Symbolic-Zealer-Burst-build
I fail to see where the retaliation comes from ? I think you meant aegis ?
and I would still prefer to see some gameplay footage if anyone is willing

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Wrathful_Spirit

You’re spamming Aegis and getting tons of Retal for it.

Power GS/Axe+Sh might be okay, the usual power GS/Mace shouldn’t be bad either. Pure condi sword/LB with Carrion and Balth runes should be fine too.

You sure that DH is better than Radiance? You’re not even using the healing trap.

Also, match stats don’t really mean much, especially total damage. You’re running an AoE heavy build after all. Not that the build is bad, burn Gurd is solid cancer.

Why do people want 2v2 in the rotation? The game isn’t balanced for that. But I’m sure 2v2 will be a blast with Mesmer/Engie comps fighting each other until the timer reaches zero.

marceline.8163:

Kuya.6495:

Only issue i have is that the buffs in coliseum seem a bit underpowered to me.

They are totally rubbish.

My issue is that coliseum is painfully dull and capricorn’s mechanic is almost blissfully ignored by new players; the enemy team is about to get their second bell, no matter how many times you ping the map or how many times you shout “GO TO THE BLOODY BELL”, your team carries on as normal thinking “woo! we can get map control now” only to 10 seconds later be losing worse than ever, haha.
(granted, i have been on some god awful teams in unranked)

New players will learn or be left at lower ranks. I agree about the Coliseum, though. It’s just a slugfest on a flat map, not much to it. I don’t mind Capricorn, just with the map was a bit more interesting. Still, I’d rather have them than not have them, kinda tired of the same 3 maps for years and years.

Esquilax.3491:

The thing is both Rev and DH had bursty long ranged attacks with the intro of HoT and elite specs via coalesce of ruin and True Shot, they were both promptly and repeatedly nerfed into the ground thanks to pvp.

So I can’t for the life of me even begin to fathom how Anet plans to implement a sniper spec which the very identity SHOULD be long range bursty attacks.

I fully expect the weapon to be underwhelming like Hammer or Bow for the respective classes.

Which is why I don’t think it will be a bursty sniper, but rather a utility based E-spec. Engineer 2.0 teef edition.

No? Map control and having to know where the enemy roamers are to secure beast kills is one of the things that makes Niflhel unique.
If somebody steals a beast from you, it’s your fault because it could have been prevented.

If it’s defensive by nature then it’s DoA in PvE. In PvP… who knows, they will probably crank the numbers into blatantly broken territory to sell the x-pac.

Entenkommando.5208:

YuiRS.8129:

Entenkommando.5208:

Buran.3796:

I can’t play Guardian outside meditations or DH.

Yeah I think the biggest problem is that you only have 2 truly reliable condition removes, being Smite Conditions and Contemplation unless you wanna skill full shouts which nobody does.
If they added conremove to some other skills they could open up a lot more variety to Guard. I figured making purge remove a condition every tick could make it worth taking for example, since you got the consecrations trait in the Virtues line anyways.

Traited VoR removes 3 conditions from the entire team, make it double with Renewed Focus. Symbolic Guard has Smite Conditions, 2 condi removal via Smiter’s Boon on heal, Absolute Resolution (x2 with Renewed Focus), Contempation of Purity, Focus 4 (less reliable, but not bad). All of that plus decent healing with Mender’s amulet and other Guardian defenses to negate getting hit in the first place, so surviving condis is not a huge issue in my experience.

Eeeeeh..you missed my point I think.
Of course your average DH is really strong against condi, but it’s basically impossible to build a decent build without Valor and Medis, hence why I said that guard is much more limited in terms of builds than it would need to be.
Playing medi is the only viable choice because they give you everything you need. They give you a very good amount of conremove, a useful stunbreaker, some nice burst damage that can easily be timed, fury and healing. And yet all of that in addition to 2x Virtues is barely enaugh to keep DH on the edge of being meta.

Personally I’m trying to play a bit more bruiser-like right now. While DH isn’t very strong in teamfights anymore you got a very good amount of mobility and excellent 1v1 capabilities so that’s what I try to focus on right now.

Ah, I see. Yeah, agreed. I actually like running Honor instead of DH aka free-to-play variant of the Symbolic build. All of those healing traits make you stronger in team fights and bigger/longer symbols help you force people off points and provide better cleave.

Entenkommando.5208:

Buran.3796:

I can’t play Guardian outside meditations or DH.

Yeah I think the biggest problem is that you only have 2 truly reliable condition removes, being Smite Conditions and Contemplation unless you wanna skill full shouts which nobody does.
If they added conremove to some other skills they could open up a lot more variety to Guard. I figured making purge remove a condition every tick could make it worth taking for example, since you got the consecrations trait in the Virtues line anyways.

Traited VoR removes 3 conditions from the entire team, make it double with Renewed Focus. Symbolic Guard has Smite Conditions, 2 condi removal via Smiter’s Boon on heal, Absolute Resolution (x2 with Renewed Focus), Contempation of Purity, Focus 4 (less reliable, but not bad). All of that plus decent healing with Mender’s amulet and other Guardian defenses to negate getting hit in the first place, so surviving condis is not a huge issue in my experience.

I might be a scrub, but Symbolic vanilla Guard with Mender’s works fine for me right now. Not only that, but it FEELS like a Guardian. You heal, you excel at protecting areas, you buff, you dump on condis and you’re not even that bad at beating people’s faces. I hope Anet pushes for this style of Guardian to be the norm.

Anet basically said “go axe… or else”. Truth be told, axe deals monstrous damage in PvP. Still, it’s the only thing it does, which might mean it’s not enough.

Saiyan.1704:

I think yellow hair should slowly form then on the last might stack, there’s an animated shock wave around the Guardian with full yellow hair that lasts until the Might wears out.

It’s a long shot but I think the community would really enjoy it.

The animation should be increased to at least 10 hours as well and screaming audio effect added. All enemies on the map should be dazed and immobilized for the duration as well, waiting for the Guardian to finish casting.

I suppose you’re talking PvE. Thief is out of the PvE raid meta. The rest of the PvE doesn’t really matter, but yeah, D/D is what you’d play there. The new Staff also works well on bosses with large hitboxes.

It’s not worth it. Thief and Warrior are both out of the meta. Thief is a bit better, but not by much. And Thief is also obsolete in PvE, so… not much to do.

A bit of buffs to the overall functionality is needed, but what we need is something else added to them. Kick is never going to be as useful as Stances, because all it is a single hit small telegraphed hit, which is going to fail most of the time.

In my opinion, Rampage should just deal 20% more damage and Peak Performance needs to change to add something to Physicals. E.g. make them restore Endurance, heal you, remove condis etc.

Sorel.4870:

You make it sound like Anet has something against warriors. While I agree that most elite specs but warrior’s were overtuned, let’s not forget that warrior was the overlord of the meta several times in the history of the game.

You claim shoutbow was not as strong as the new meta builds. But you’re only strong relatively. And a shoutbow warrior (sometimes two) was absolutely needed on every team back then.

There was a time where it was common to see two hambow warriors on a team.

Let’s not even talk about the goold old Frenzy-HB days.

Sure, warriors are in a terrible place, but try to consider the meta as a whole and not from your mono-profession biased point of view.

One of the developers said that Warriors are easy to play and thus should never be viable.

TheOneWhoSighs.7513:

MadVisions.4529:

TheOneWhoSighs.7513:

They literally just did a fix.
Chill.

corrected your quote.

this was everything but ‘HOT’…

They can’t just suddenly shift the meta while a tournament is actively being held.
And it wasn’t blatantly obvious how broken some of the things they nerfed were, until early December.

They’re taking advantage of the break they’ll have.

It’s a HOT fix.
Now, move along.

It’s not that hot if it’s taking place after a month of preparations and evaluations.

Hey, I’m no game designer, but I have a keyboard, so I’m gonna type what I think anyway.

Big balance updates every 4-6 months is a bad practice. It makes the community to wait for too long, the metagame remains stale, problems go untouched. On the other hand, what if you introduce small, but frequent balance changes every two weeks? Or even weekly, if the situation demands it? In the current game where sustain matters so much, changing a few percentages may push certain classes in or out of the meta. Furthermore, even a small buff will motivate players to experiment with abandoned classes and builds, discovering new ways to play and possibly shaking things up just a little bit.

Just some food for thought from a nobody.

Mulling.8421:

I have an idea for a healing skill that can be useful besides healing signet.

Since the main ’’theme’’ of rage skills is to gain adrenaline, why not do something useful with that adrenaline besides expendin it on burst skills?

Blood Reckoning: Heal yourself and gain adrenaline when you hit a foe. All adrenalin you gain while Blood Reckoning is active heals you.

Or as I suggested before:

Current effect plus “Delivering a critical strike reduces the cooldown of Blood Reckoning by 1 second.”

This way the terribleness of the heal is mitigated by the ability to spam it, but it remains a risky heal that rewards offensive play style instead of kiting around waiting for your CDs to get back up.

Why isn’t matchmaking based on Divisions but instead on a separate MMR scale? Seriously?

^Look at all those deer ranks being proud of themselves. I guess it’s good to be bad. Come back when you get some MMR under your belts.

newbihack.7180:

Just play cleric warrior build. That’s what I did. healing my teammate for 6k every 20s seems fun to me.

Hey, almost half as much as berserker Druid. Good job.

Drayos.8759:

well actually no, because once the system settles everyone gets to the skill level they belong, that 5 man team wont be capable of it anymore, so they’ll drop vastly in ranks down to Sapphire again.

it was obviously going to be abit rough in the start, all MMR Systems are to begin with.

Bad teams drop to the ranks where solo people are, farm them, get back up, lose to other teams, go back down, farm soloers again etc. There will be teams in every bracket, but even a really bad team is almost unbeatable by a group of solo players.

All MMR systems separate solo and duo Qs from team Qs.

I think it’s important to note that Warrior’s been in trouble for many months and I’m not talking viability as a whole, but the flaws in its design.

Most people roll a Warrior to be a brawler. A big melee dude holding an obscenely large weapon, smashing and slicing people, while being somewhat survivable. However, this role hasn’t been viable for a very long time due to the state of Warrior’s offensive abilities.

Rampage became a thing for a while, but even then people noted how weak the Warrior was outside of it. Before that it was all about Shoutbow and what is Shoutbow? A passive tank that uses AoE abilities to sustain and support. It doesn’t really hit people with it’s multitude of attacks, it just stands there, shooting fire under his feet while buffing his team. The build was viable because it didn’t rely on actual Warrior mechanics.

The easiest way to make Warrior viable would be increasing the healing on Vigorous Shouts. And yeah, it would probably make the Warrior usable in PvP again, but is that really what people want? They want to play a sustain bot instead of a fighter? Some do, but I will say that the majority of us do not.

So what should be done to make a brawler Warrior viable? That’s the problem. I feel like almost all abilities need to be looked at and touched up. For that to ever happen, A-net needs to make a conscious decision, they need to accept they need to spend resources for a serious rework of the profession.

Wait, is that true? If yes, A-net is capable of some truly sublime trolling.

Impact.2780:

It’s also a buff.

In some cases it’s a nerf, denying you access to that swiftness which you might need if it comes down to a decap to win a PvP match, or if you’re running hidden thief and just need the stealth.

Mostly, though, it’s a buff. I lost count how many times I’ve missed steal because I press it a millisecond after my target enters stealth. This patch should prevent steal from going off in such cases, allowing me to use it for its full effect.

It’s only a buff if you’re bad. Meaning it’s not a buff.

Harvey.7820:

At this point there’s so many problems I just reroll to FoTM classes. Anet will balance when they see only 5 builds are being played in Ruby division

Why would they balance if that occurs? Why would they care?

Imagine the sheer amounts of hate you’ll get from your team mates for playing a Warrior! kitten , I can feel the burn already.

Mulling.8421:

Arcade.8901:

I bet on tool tip fixes.

Maybe they ll nerf warriors too.

Hell yeah, survivability nerf and unnecessary rifle buffs!

Hey, if they buff rifle we may actually see anti-zerk Gun Flame builds become a thing.

Season’s in progress, so no balance patches any time soon. Plus they don’t really care about PvP balance, it’s a minor issue to them.

Yep, it would also help Berserker a bit, since they use Bursts more often.

Nobody should be losing a 1v1 to Warriors. If they do, they’re bad. Period. A lucky Rampage is still devastating in a team fight, but a Zerker/Marauder Warrior is still weak outside of it. Has been for years now.

So, yeah, you can still kill terrible players, but I’d argue that even a medium-level Scrapper, Chrono, Herald or Druid will tear any Warrior apart in a straight 1v1 and be leagues ahead in team fights, because DPS Warriors provide zero utility to their teams.

I thought everybody knows how it works, because it’s self-explanatory.

Gramp.7482:

Arent thief one of the highest, if not the highest single target dps? Whats with all the thief are weak threads lately?

Every class are qqing that their own class is weak. Just play what u freaking enjoy. Every class is weak every class needs a buff

No, thief isn’t the highest DPS. Engineer and Ele are.

That’s kind of the whole point. You have to make a choice, you know? Daredevil is pretty well designed in this regard, actually. All of the trait choices have some validity to them.

Wouldn’t recommend a Warrior for PvP.

Try reading skill descriptions, I heard it helps. King of Fires doesn’t increase Burning damage.

Coalescence of Ruin hits harder than Backstab.

Think about it for a second.

So Rage skills. Outrage is good, Headbutt is okay, the rest is awful. Let’s change that while keeping the functionality and animations mostly unchanged! Keep in mind, these skills have to compete with the likes of Berserker Stance and Endure Pain, so they better be strong. Just throwing some more ideas into the wind, hoping they reach the Big Brother.

Wild Blow. What a fun little skill, but mostly useless. The bowling aspect of it isn’t going to matter much even if you hit a strike on all 4 enemies in a team fight.

Proposition: Make the skill to inflict 50% of the original impact damage to the target for each enemy it collides with.

This way, tossing the guy into his whole team will be a big burst move, the skill retains it’s functionality and becomes a viable move for an offensive team fight oriented Warrior archetype. Still, using the skill requires some good timing and setup, which is ideal.

Blood Reckoning. What have you done? This skill makes me weep. Heals that require you to deal damage to heal you are not that good by definition, because avoiding damage in GW2 is extremely easy. We’re talking dodges, blinds, Aegis, CC, Protection, plain old strong counter pressure that requires you to pull out and waste the heal etc. Plus, a lot of GW2’s combat is based around kiting, where heals become useful while you’re not actively engaging your opponent and simply waiting out his active AoE effects or waiting for your cooldowns to come back. This heal can’t be used without actively engaging your opponent at all. I will say this: even if it healed for 100% of ALL damage dealt, it would still be sub par. That’s how bad it is. However, we agreed to not completely remake skills, so let’s just touch it up.

Proposition: Inflicting a critical strike reduces the cooldown of Blood Reckoning by 1 second. The healing is doubled while in Berserk mode. Talking about the damage to healing numbers, not the upfront healing.

This way we create a far better sustain skill that rewards Warriors for going full offensive. The increased healing is, in my opinion, a needed buff to make the skill work at all, because this heal hardly heals at all sometimes thanks to Poison and Protection.

Sundering Leap. Come on. You can’t think this skill is good enough, surely? Low damage, a bit of Cripple and Vuln… and what does it do exactly? Is it meant to be an engage? But it’s just a slow 600 range leap. Kiting isn’t even an issue on Warrior, not often, and you can’t counter teleports with leaps anyway. I’ll be honest, I don’t get why this skill exists in it’s current form. This one needs a more serious change.

Proposition: Same effect, but it also creates a 360 radius ring of rocks, which functions similar to Guardian’s Ring of Warding.

Yeah, it may chip at Guardian’s unique flavor a little but, but it fits the Warrior so well. You leap into the battle and isolate your enemies before bringing your greatsword down on them. Hammer 5 is what made old Medi Guard worthwhile in a team fight, so giving Warrior the same tool may bring the class one step closer to being viable.

Shattering Blow. This one is just a DPS move with projectile reflect thrown in for good measure. Now, I like the fact that it has a defensive component, but it can’t be used on reaction, because it’s pretty slow. Not only that, but there are few projectiles in the game that are worth reflecting. Killshot/Gun Flame, True Shot, Mirror Blade, maybe a few others. The projectile reflect on that skill doesn’t make that much sense. I’ll be honest, I don’t really know how to rework this skill so it functions the same and yet it strong enough to compete with Stances. So, let’s give it the simplest treatment!

Proposition: Bigger numbers! Make it inflict a lot more direct damage (say, double it, so it deals 1.2k base damage on a full PvP Zerker setup), a couple more Bleed stacks and make it generate 5 more Adrenaline for each enemy hit. This way it becomes a good general DPS move and enables Adrenaline-dependent builds, making Berserker stronger overall.

ArthurDent.9538:

NiloyBardhan.9170:

Kayberz.5346:

I think the problem is they designed the warrior to be extremely basic and to the point, it worked out early on in the game because they made up for lack of special tricks by being very well rounded and having a good mix of offense and defense
But now that the game has changed since launch especially with elite specs it seems like they put all kind of cool bells and whistles on all of the classes that fit thematically with thier magic/abilities but because the design of the warrior is essentialy just a normal guy who is really strong, they kind of ended up with an extremely limited template to create new abilities for and they always end up getting really bare bones versions of abilities other classes get because they have no magic to justify any added conditions and effects

Well said, they never bothered with it again.
Actually same happened with the whole warriors – We got nerfs so that we were on par with other classes and then Anet went ahead and buffed the other classes so much that warriors feels underpowered once again.

It is just the cycle of life. Class X overpowered and Class Y is under-powered. Anet nerfs X buffs Y and all of a sudden the situation is reversed. Soon warriors will be back to being op it is only a matter of time. With that being said, from what I can tell there hasn’t been a class in as bad of a state as warrior currently is in a long time. The rangers from last meta which were considered the weakest class then were much more competitive than warrior is in the current meta. Also I would much rather have nerfs to all the new elite specs than buffs for warrior, as the elites completely outshine the vanilla specs even though they were supposed to be horizontal progression, not an upgrade.

Yeah, I don’t know about that. Warrior’s been regarded as a support class because it’s actual fighting skills aren’t fit for this game. They’d need to flat out remake so many skills it’s clear they don’t want to do it.

What they will probably do is abandon Berserker completely and just buff numbers on Shouts and restore condi conversion on Warhorn. Warrior will be back as an OP mindless support that can stalemate anything indefinitely, which will make the class viable, but… not very fun for most of us, because people roll a Warrior to play a brawler, not blow into horns and wave flags.

Warrior has the strongest downed state in the game, as in, he will win/draw a downed fight against any class in the game. It’s balanced by the fact his other downed skills aren’t that strong. I don’t think it needs to change. Would only add more condi spam into the game too.