Guild Wars 2

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Or, not, since a huge draw to GW2 is the fact there is no monthly fee, and what you’re proposing is a fee almost twice that of WoW.

The fee was just an example, set it at whatever is best.

Did you actually read my post or just responded to the thread title?

The draw remains because the free game version would still be available, people could
play for free the same game they would play now if nothing changed. The thing that
changes is that there is an extra game that people can pay for, to create the income
needed to stop the game from dying.

For non paying customers, absolutely nothing changes, except that their game will
improve faster than it otherwise would, because of the income generated by paying
customers, who get a superior version of the game. The free version wouldn’t be in
any way worse, it would be the same, and even improve once the changes come in
with the delay.

I promise you, that you can’t come up with any argument to show non paying players
getting any disadvantage from this change. On the contrary they get advantage, even
tho it’s delayed. The improvement without the pay-game, would not happen at all, as
there is no income to create it.. so non paying customers would get a much better
game as well, just with a delay and without the goodies that they would otherwise not
get anyway if nothing changes.

I can’t see a single downside to this really.

The system is used in my country with digital television. You get to buy the newest
movies for a hefty fee, but if you wait a few months you can get them for free from the
normal movie-list. Non payers get no disadvantage, but payers get an advantage, it’s a
win-win system all around. If you’re patient enough you get everything for free, if you’re
not patient you can spend money to get what you want right away.

In that system, those who pay get to create advantages for those that don’t pay, those
advantages would not exist at all if no one would pay.

It’s an empathic system that has no downsides and is not greed-based, since for those
that don’t pay, there are only advantages to this system, they don’t lose anything when
compared to the event if nothing changes, they only gain when it does change.

Thing is, Guild Wars 2 is an amazing game, a lot of people WANT to play it, but the
insane amount of bugged, badly designed and underpowered skills, make it very hard
to enjoy the game, especially if the profession you want to play is one of the worst to
play as, or even if your profession is viable but your build is not, and you don’t enjoy
any of the other builds.

Maybe an idea:

Make two versions of GW2, one version free to play, the other version with a
$25/month fee. Offering superior content and skill balance in the pay version,
and slowly having the content changes come over to the free version, with a
delay of a few months.

Kinda weird I guess, don’t know if that would work.

I’d be willing to pay $25 to get a superior game, for sure, even if it would take a bit
for the improvements to start coming. You could also offer a chunk of other things
to improve gameplay for paying players, such as free gemstore items for example,
regularly expanding armor and weapon skins paying players can pick up for free,
maybe an amount of gold/karma/tokens awarded every week as well.

They could hire more than these two people to work on skill balance, and offer a
far superior game to an ever growing player base. Because really, two people to work
on the most important part of the game (skill design/balance/bugs), is just horridly
understaffed, even the most simple bug fixes and balance changes become “very hard
and complicated” that way, taking months or even years to finish, and this might
eventually kill the game entirely I’m afraid, maybe sooner than we think. A lot of new
MMOs that started out very promising, died real fast this way.

There would be complaints from the vocal minority on the forum, maybe even some
kind of spazzfest, but a LOT of people will become paying customers. The lure of extra
goodies like I suggested above, and the promise of a much better game, will be enough
to get tens of thousands of players to pay up, and it’s not like the non paying players
lose anything, they even gain a better game with a bit of a delay, so they benefit from
this as well.

I’m worried the game is going to crash and die because of the understaffed skill team.
No one is going to enjoy new content if their skills are bugged and underpowered, so I
think my idea is weird, but it might just work.

Maybe an idea:

Make two versions of GW2, one version free to play, the other version with a
$25/month fee. Offering superior content and skill balance in the pay version,
and slowly having the skill changes come over to the free version, with a delay
of a few months.

Kinda weird I guess, don’t know if that would work.

I’d be willing to pay $25 to get a superior game, for sure.

Considering how many subscribers WoW has, I don’t really get why anet didn’t
go pay-per-month from the start. They could hire more than these two people
to work on skill balance, and offer a far superior game to an ever growing player
base.

I find it impossible to do significant damage without having precision.. base damage
from skills is just really low.. even without having any critdamage, a critical hit will still
add +50% damage, which is quite significant. If you put 30 points in the valor trait line
you get 180% damage on crits, without having to sacrifice other stats.

I prefer getting 30 valor for the +30% critdamage, and then knight armor for the good
power + precision + toughness, which valor again increases with +300 toughness. That
way you have good enough survivability, as long as you pack some condition removal,
while still having significant damage output because of high precision and decent crit-
damage.

Especially in spvp this works nicely because armor there gives a lot less critdamage than
in wvw or pve, so you get a ton of critdamage from the valor trait line compared to the
total amount of critdamage you can get with spvp gear. Warriors for example to get
their +30% critdamage from trait points, need to invest in a trait line that is useless for
most of their builds (burst). Guardians get +300 toughness and +30% critdamage from
their by far most superior trait line (valor), whcih is simply awesome. Sadly though
that is the only thing that is good about guardian traits.

Having 5% to get 10 seconds of retaliation is highly random too though, you can’t rely
on that at all. Most fights you won’t get retaliation from that at all, and the few times
you do get it to fire, it will probably be too late to turn the fight. Retaliation is more a
kind of boon that you need to be able to control to be useful.

In short, no way to do significant damage without at least 40% critchance, and as a
guardian most preferably 30 points in valor for the free critdamage. That is why I use
sword and not greatsword/hammer, even though those weapons are superior in both
damage and utlity, as I can’t afford spending 20 points in honor to get -20% 2handed
recharge trait.

Maybe find a nice place between offense and defence, with knight gear and valor trait
line (for the +30% critdamage), and just keep spamming staff auto attack to hit all the
clones as well as the mesmer itself. Then once the clones are gone, switch to sword (for
the high damage 3rd chain attack), sticking to him with meditation teleport and sword
teleport, and killing him before he kills you. With monk’s focus you can get nice heals
with meditations, though I prefer having signet of judgment along with 2 meditations,
for the nice +10% damage reduction, which is worth a lot of toughness.

I use smite condition, judge’s intervention, and signet of judgment. So two ~1200 heals,
and 10% damage reduction. I also get the trait to reduce signet cooldown, so the signet
healing skill recharges a bit faster. Against fast attacks you might even want to activate
judgment for the retaliation, with the 16s cooldown it’s not too bad I think.

I just wish Zealot’s Defence wasn’t so bad, it almost ruins the sword weapon. Damage
is just too low, the projectiles don’t have enough range, and blocking projectiles for a
short time like that just isn’t very useful, it should reflect at least, or be used on the move so you can at least use it to close in on the projectile-user.

Despite everything tho, the game is still amazing, it’s worth buying, worth playing and
even worth spending some money on gems, though definitely not hundreds of dollars.
If the next patch is good, then I will probably buy a nice chunk of gems to help support.
I reckon the more we support it, the better the game will get, at least I hope so. They’re
seriously understaffed, and maybe buying some gems will help.

Here is my suggestion to put GW2 back in the top MMO position.

Take a financial risk: Hire 10-15 temporary programmers for one month only, put them all in the skill designing/fixing/balancing team, at least two programmers per profession, and let them work 8 hours a day on nothing but skill balancing, fixing and improving, for one whole month. Don’t downgrade anything, have your two permanent programmers do that later when necessary, for this mega patch only changes and upgrades.

Make a big marketing deal out of it, tell people every single skill is getting an assessment, useless skills removed, better skills added, bad skills improved, etc. Avoid wasting too much time on bugs that are too complicated, unless they are absolutely vital. I realize some bugs will need months, if not years, to get fixed.

Create a temporary limited-access forum, invite players with huge Spvp (not wvw) statistics to join the discussion there to help the programmers. Only those players who get invited, based on their spvp experience/statistics, have access. This doesn’t include me right now, but I just know that this approach works because of my experience with improving skill balance in other games, the devs eventually kept the limited-access forum, allowing more people to join based on their spvp experience to help the programmers with suggestions and advice.

Kind of an elite forum, as a side effect giving people a major incentive to get good at spvp, since this elite forum would have much more active dev talk. You have to realize that a player who does spvp 5 hours a day or so (not me), has far more insight into skill balance than any of the devs, as they simply don’t have the resources to spend that much time playing and testing skills and builds. I know from experience that devs like to think they fully understand their game, anyone would, that’s just natural, but because they just cannot play it that much, they don’t, and a player who spends insane amounts of time pvping with all the professions (not me), simply knows better, and should be asked to help the skill programmers. With some of the games I assisted, the devs ended up assigning a profession-master, and relied on him entirely for skill changes. They asked him to write up a monthly report for his class (each class one class-master), and applied all the changes from his list that they decided were feasible and practical. It worked wonderfuly. The class-master gets his ideas from his own experience and from talking to players who main in that specific profession. I’m not saying this is how it should be done here, I’m just explaining how important experienced players are for game balance.

Anyway,

I guarantee you that at the end of that month, you will have very happy players that spend a ton of cash on the gem store, you will earn back the money you spent on the programmers within a few weeks, and you end up with a much better game and much happier players.

One more thing: assign one employee to talk to people on the forums, a few hours a day, from monday to friday. You don’t even have to hire someone, just ask a knowledgable player, give him access to plans/designs/meetings, and he will talk to the players for free, answering their questions and talking to them about future plans of the dev team and responding rapidly to major bugs that are going on, to assure players there isn’t a stealth nerf going on, things like that.

Signet of Mercy is just one of those utilities that you don’t use. Considering only two people work on balancing/designing/repairing skills, probably something like a few hours a week, I don’t expect much anymore in that regard.

Best thing to do is pick the profession and build that works and is more or less viable, I wouldn’t wait on the bad ones to get fixed, the last patch showed how understaffed they are.

I think it’s inevitable that all professions will get more/new weapons in the future, that’s just part of game evolution, so I don’t see anything wrong with talking about ranged options for the guardian. We have plenty of melee options, but no decent range options.

I think guardian getting a longbow or crossbow would be suiting, and I vaguely remember Anet mentioning that they’re looking into guardian longbow.. it suits the lore as well because of the spirit bow utility skill.

In some situations, melee is NOT an option, period.. end of discussion, so it seems only fair for guardians to get a good ranged option. The scepter is just a really bad weapon, mechanic-wise and visual-wise, smite misses half the time against a single target, and its hits are spread out against multiple targets, it’s just absolutely horrible as a skill, while the tennis-ball orb is unappealing and ineffective in every single way.

Imo, give the scepter a completely different function, just remove the skills and give them another mid-range function, and add longbow or crossbow as a ranged dps weapon. Anyone with experience as a guardian in all the game content, knows that the guardian needs a ranged dps option.

Some professions are better at some roles than others, but every profession should be at least viable at every role when specced into that specific role, and right now guardians just can’t do anything at range. Increasing orb of wrath speed still won’t solve the problem, because the other skills are just too bad.

Eveningstar.6940:

Does anyone build for condition damage? I have this sneaking suspicion that it might be actually, you know, good, largely because we have a fair number of builds that work by maximizing passive VoJ triggers.

I just haven’t been able to prove it yet.

VoJ is just a 1 second burn every 5 hits, doesn’t seem worth building around. Better to build around those 5 hits instead of that tiny effect you get every five hits. I don’t think there is any way to make a condition guardian work, especially if you compare the guardian to the real condition builds of other professions. Many professions will inflict burning or bleeding with every single skill they use, while we get one second of burn every five normal hits, doesn’t seem comparable. Spirit weapons are WAY too bad to use for burning as well.

Major Sword Bug:

It’s probably already been mentioned, but the third hit of the SWORD auto attack chain, is often completely unable to strike objects, and will often just keep repeating the Sword Wave over and over without any effect on the target object, regardless of which range you position yourself at.

Major Sword Problem:

Sword Wave also has an incredibly narrow strike width, and despite the blade animations touching/hitting opponents, will only hit multiple targets if they’re literally standing on top of eachother or in a perfect line in front of the attack direction. I don’t encounter problems with hitting a single opponent though, even if they’re not perfectly in front of me, so it’s kind of an odd problem.

The strike width is fine against a single opponent, but incredibly narrow concerning multiple opponents, which is really annoying in pve, since only your first two weak auto attack chains ever hit multiple opponents that way.

I also have issues with fluency, the third (Sword Wave) move is often greatly delayed. Sometimes it will strike fast enough, sometimes it takes too long for it to fire after the second chain move.

As female I guess it is pretty cool playing a priest, scepter/focus + staff and consecrations with an elite tome.

voidelysium.7285:

Zsymon.8457:

The only thing that changed on staff #2 is that the orb moves a bit faster, there is no changes to damage or cooldown.

Yeah but the speed makes all the difference when it’s just a 3 second cooldown after letting the orb expire at maximum range instead of detonating it. It makes staff #2 a single target dps booster.

Nah, that doesn’t add up my friend, the orb never needed three seconds to reach it target before, it didn’t go THAT slow.

It’s a bit more comfortable using now if you never detonated the orb before, less comfortable if you did, but there’s no change in the actual outcome of using it, other than being a little harder to dodge.

I’m going to use the sword and focus as main, and staff as secondary weaponset.

I want my gear to be a hybrid between offense and defense, without too much support, I don’t have anyone to play with at the moment anyway. I was thinking of using full knight gear, that offers power and precision for offense, and a lot of toughness so I’m not too squishy.

Which heal, utility, elite and traits would you suggest to go with these parameters? Everything goes except spirit weapons, they’re just too bad and I don’t want to use them.

I play all game content, pve, dungeons, wvw, pvp. I plan on dueling alot once that’s implemented.

All advice is highly appreciated.

Defektive.7283:

I think this patch was actually detrimental to the Warrior s/tPvP meta.

Nerf thief burst, don’t nerf ours (or change our skills).

Now we’re definitely lumped into the burst/roaming category.

Thief burst was nerfed.

The only thing that changed on staff #2 is that the orb moves a bit faster, there is no changes to damage or cooldown.

It’d be nice if they removed scepter from guardian weapons, and replaced it with a longbow. Guardian is still a soldier class, staff and focus are enough magical weapons for me, knocking around blue tennis balls with a scepter is too much and just doesn’t fit this heavy-armor profession. Scepter is just really, really bad, so there wouldn’t be a loss, and I think any player would prefer a longbow. Crossbows would suit better but we don’t have those (yet).

If you use knight gear, you might try spending 30 points in the valor trait line, that gives you +300 armor on top of the knight gear toughness, but it also gives you +30% critdamage, which is arguably the best stat that is given by trait points, in the case of guardian especially nice because the valor trait line is not as useless as other trait lines.

Then you have a lot of toughness, but also increased critdamage, to go well with the ~45% crit chance you’ll have. Personally I like meditation utilities, because they give a nice balance of offensive and defensive effects, so 30 points in valor is mandatory for me.

You won’t have a lot of health points though, but my build has so much condition removal that the toughness is enough to get me by.

For pve especially, consider spending 15 points in zeal, that gives you an aoe blind on virtue of justice, and a refresh of that virtue every kill. I use sword/focus, so most fights, event against multiple enemies, will end without me having been hit a single time.

The spirit weapons seem incredibly weak.. having major problems hitting even near-stationary mobs, oozing along at an incredibly slow speed, and when they do connect, they do negligable damage, with a really slow attack rate, while not even pursuing the target when recharging for the next hit. When I kite a monster, my spirit sword just never lands a single hit on the moving target.

You can activate them, but right now the activation of sword for example, does less damage than one swing from my sword chain, and when you do activate them when traited, it takes ages before they get back at their target.

There are a lot of traits you can take to “improve” spirit weapons, but it just seems that the basis of them is too weak for it to ever be worth spending utility slots, let alone traits, on them. Right now I wouldn’t even use them if they remained with me permanent and never had to be resummoned, any other utility seems better.

My question is: Are spirit weapons as weak, even outright useless, as they seem to me right now, or am I just looking at it wrong, what are your experiences with them? I love the concept of spirit weapons, but I don’t see them actually doing anything in a fight, at all.. am I doing something wrong?

Sword doesn’t really have a high attack speed, or else it is just my own lag problem. The third attack of the chain seems to delay almost everytime, dragging down the dps significantly. The third move in the chain also has this really narrow and bad hit detection, I never hit more than one target with it for some reason.

Weapons.

- Sword: The third attack of the chain is often delayed really badly, and its hit detection is very bad, especially against multiple enemies. Flashing Blade is simply said too weak in everything it does, it does really, really low damage, and the leap does not have enough range to justify a 10 second cooldown. Either change the cooldown to 6 seconds, it cannot be traited for anyway, or increase both range and damage significantly. It should be a leap finisher as well, so the sword has one finisher.

- Scepter: Increase orb of wrath projectile speed, right now even monsters dodge it simply by moving a bit, and change smite into a pulse damage skill that hits 5 targets within its area of effect. Right now the area of effect is not only tiny, it also only sometimes hits, and only some of the enemies within its reach, it’s just really bad. Chains of Light, a 2 second immobilize on a 20 second cooldown is totally pointless on an already really weak weapon. Either bring its cooldown down to 8 seconds, or completely change what it does.

- Shield/Focus: Switch shield of wrath with shield of absorption, reduce the cooldown on all shield and focus skills, they’re just WAY too long even if traited.

- Staff: Remove symbol of swiftness and change it into an aoe shout-like buff that gives swiftness to yourself and everyone around, in reality no one bothers to run onto the symbol to get its buff. Change orb of light into a short cooldown Light beam, that lasts 2 seconds and pulses at the start, giving blindness at that first pulse, after 1 second again without blindness, and a last time after 2 seconds again without blindness, so three times total, causing significant damage and vulnerability (one stack at each pulse) to a single target. Use a similar skill to replace trident #2 with.. those slow moving detonatable orbs are just bad and not fun to use.

Traits.

I’m not smart enough to solve guardian trait lines, it needs a LOT of work to get anywhere as good as those of other professions. Guardian traits are either in the wrong place, or completely useless and never picked by anyone. Some traits sound good for support builds, such as resolute healer, but in reality the drastically weakened down shield of absorption created then, is so pointless that the trait becomes useless. The whole trait system of the guardian profession just doesn’t make sense, doesn’t solidly support any build and has so many traits that are either far too weak or just completely useless. It will take years fixing guardian traits, but I hope anet will consider at least starting to try and fix it, bit by bit every update.

Edit: spirit weapons, really need a serious damage increase, both at early levels where it is incredibly weak, and at later levels where even picking every single spirit weapon trait doesn’t make it a viable utility.

The spirit weapons never land a hit in pvp, ever.. and if they do then they have such a slow attack rate, doing such little damage, that it just isn’t worth ever using them.

I wouldn’t mind if they nerf bunker guardians, if in return they upgrade offensive and hybrid builds. Why do you people think bunker builds will get downgraded though, did anet say anything about that? The only thing I heard was them saying burst builds will get nerfed, in the thief profession forum.

Offensive guardians are really, really bad right now, so I’m hoping trait lines like radiance and zeal, utilities like spirit weapons, and weapons like the sword and scepter, will get upgrades. I don’t think they will change the greatsword, but I hope the sword #2 ability gets a damage boost, and the sword #3 gets changed to be useful. The scepter could use a total overhaul, but at least faster projectiles.

Guardian in general has some really horrible traits, that just no one ever uses.. and other traits that used to be good got nerfed so hard they ended up in that same never-used hole. Guardian traits, and some weapons, need some serious work. Many traits are just useless and other traits are too high up in the line. Some traits would be good, such as the spirit weapon traits, if spirit weapons themselves would actually be good.

The whole guardian trait system just gives this feeling of bad quality, low investment, low care, so I hope in a few days guardians, especially offensive and hybrid builds, get some serious love. In return I wouldn’t mind some bunker build nerfs, though I don’t see what much you can do to nerf bunkers without further ruining the entire profession. I don’t think downgrades is what guardians need now, in almost all fields they need upgrades, spirit weapons, weapons, and trait lines all need to be improved.

You (OP) want to trade arcing slice with hundred blades, and then you say designers were not sane for not having made it so from the start? Come on man, talk about bad ideas.. hundred blades as a burst ability would give us a MASSIVE dps downgrade. It would cut greatsword dps clean in half at least in pve settings, while changing absolutely nothing in pvp settings. I’m sorry but this is just a horrible idea.

In pvp, hundred blades is pointless, and in pve, where hundred blades is the only decent source of damage, making it a burst ability would be a gigantic downgrade to warrior greatsword, and no one would ever use that weapon anymore.

I agree arcing slice is bad, but replacing it with hundred blades will make things even worse. Arcing slice just needs to do something else than fury, the move itself is fine, the name is fine, just the bonus it gives is a bit lackluster. To be honest I rather keep it as it is than end up having it made even worse though. When we get a change and it’s even worse, we might end up realizing how 9 seconds of fury, after rage boons run out, isn’t so bad after all.

Warrior just doesn’t need any radical weapon changes right now, we’re in a pretty good place, especially compared to some other professions, we could just use some changes to our utilities to increase pvp viability. Shortening the cooldowns on the physical abilities for example would be a good start.

Yeah it’s quite the opposite, there isn’t much point in using the greatsword, certainly not the general 100blades signet build.

The hammer has a lot more auto attack damage than the greatsword, and very nice control skills, for example. With the hammer you can contribute in all game content, it’s a very solid weapon.

I do like using the greatsword, I just wish it wasn’t so useless in pvp.

Still greatsword isn’t bad in dungeons, as long as you stack a lot of toughness, so you don’t die everytime you try to use hundred blades. But going full offense and toting a rifle, piercing through 5 monsters at once with kill shot, is a lot more efficient. Your team doesn’t have to revive you all the time then since you’re standing at 1200 range.

The greatsword is only really usable for solo pve.

In any other instance the other weapons are better.. and for solo pve, any weapon is viable really, because the open world isn’t that difficult.

No one wants to see a greatsword warrior join a dungeon group or a pvp team for example, you don’t contribute anything with a greatsword in pvp, and in dungeons your team mates just end up having to revive you all the time, and you don’t contribute anything lying on the ground.

I do have a greatsword build for dungeons, but it involves a lot of toughness and no critdamage.. so no 15K hundred blades.

This stuff only happens in WvW by someone who stacked all damage bonuses against upleveled characters with less than minimum toughness due to having lvl2 white gear.

You will not see a single successful rifle warrior in s/t pvp, because of how incredibly easy it is to completely avoid all rifle damage, and due to how low rifle damage actually is without all those WvW-only stats. Kill shots there might do 5K damage, IF anyone would actually get hit by it, which doesn’t happen.

Threads like the latest ones in thief and warrior forums really make me hope anet doesn’t listen to forum complaints, and just tests things for themselves. I’m starting to realize why anet doesn’t give much feedback on these forums, it would just be pointless at this stage with these large amounts of uneducated players that are posting.

Kill shot is mostly good when you stack a lot of might and food buffs in WvW against upleveled players. You stand on a wall then, gathering adrenaline until you can oneshot an upleveled elementalist or thief, causing them to come to the forums to cry about it.

Almost every profession, engineer, thief, necromancer, mesmer, can do that kind of damage against upleveled players in WvW with a full arange of damage bonuses, just browse the various profession videos on youtube.

You have to realize that upleveled characters have no toughness at all.

In proper spvp and tpvp, no player, not thief and not warrior, can do that kind of damage. If you ask anet to balance the game around wvw, then spvp and tpvp will become unplayable.

You will never see a rifle warrior be successful in tpvp or spvp, so I doubt you will ever see a downgrade to warrior rifle, anet has already stated they like where warriors are at now.. which is kinda sad because warriors are in a bad place in s/t pvp.

Nothing that happens in WvW matters at all, because there are too many ways to stack damage bonuses there. World bonuses, trinkets, foods, orbs, etc.. none of these “insane” things you see happening in WvW, will ever occur in spvp or tpvp.

If you base your profession choice on WvW videos, you’re going to get sorely disappointed when you realize how much time you wasted on a profession you didn’t really want to play.

People need to stop posting about stuff that happened in WvW.. WvW offers insane bonuses to damage that are not available in tpvp and spvp. Every single post here I see where people show videos or screenshots of “overpowered” events from warrior or thief or necromancer or whatever, came from WvW, and are thus invalid.

What happens in WvW does not matter, with the food and orbs and trinkets that you don’t have in spvp and tpvp. The warrior sniping 3 people at once, the thief instagibbing someone with two skills, against upleveled lvl2 characters in white gear, it all doesn’t matter squat, it is WvW, there can never be balance in WvW because offense can be upgraded insanely there, against upleveled people with no lvl80 gear, in ways that are impossible in tpvp and spvp.

It’s not a coincidence that none of these omgwtf videos are from spvp or tpvp, and that 99% of the complaints come from people who get gibbed in wvw, by someone who stacked every possible damage bonus available.

Both guardian and warrior hammer do more than enough damage to level with or do dungeons with, or to even use in dps builds. Guardian hammer is a bit more defensive, while warrior hammer is more offensive, I think both are equally good in the end.

I don’t play guardian hammer though because I can’t stand the slow AA chain.. at the third strike your guardian holds his hammer up in the air so long it seems like he’s waiting for lightning to strike him. The only time it will hit is if people actually dodge too soon because it takes so long for the hammer to come down.

Axe offhand is really bad.. the #4 skill is pointles and the #5 skill does very low damage on a very high cooldown, it is only useful for getting adrenaline because it hits so often. Whirling axe is one of those skills that seem good, but are really bad in reality, in this case mostly because of its really low actual damage per second.

Axe/warhorn is infinitely better than axe/axe, you don’t lose any dps, since axe auto attack does more dps than whirling axe, and you gain a lot, especially with quick breathing, which turns warhorn into the best support weapon in the game.

Use axe or mace mainhand for pve, and use axe or sword for pvp, axe for damage and sword for mobility. If you have a condition build then obviously use sword over axe, along with longbow that’s quite nice, due to longbow burning damage.

I use rifle + axe/warhorn, I like how you can use axe #3 and rifle #2 to stack a ton of cripple (9 seconds) on a tough veteran mob and just kill it while it slowly inches toward you. By the time the cripple runs out, your can re-cripple for another 9 seconds, so you can kite any single mob around infinitely just backpeddling.

As to the OP, you can make a 100B build using knight armor, but you will not do a lot of damage then, so no it isn’t really possible to make a survivable 100B build as a warrior. If you have trouble killing a 100B warrior, then you either need a lot of practice still, because they die at a sneeze without posing any threat to you if you can dodge, they are basically free kills, or they had a lot of buffs from their team mates, such as protection and regeneration, and maybe were being healed by shouts or wells on top.

I don’t think either axes or greatsword are getting any nerfs for warrior. The only damage greatsword does is hundred blades, which has already been nerfed and is very easily avoided, and axes already took a massive nerf (-30% dmg) with the burst downgrade, while the whirling axe skill does very low damage.

So no, I don’t think there will be any nerfs to greatsword or axes, there is really no reason to. Axe only has its auto attack for damage, which is about the same as hammer auto attack, but with no mobility OR control, eviscerate like I said already took a -30% damage nerf, while greatsword only has hundred blades, which is only useful once a minute with frenzy, if the opponent doesn’t dodge and if he doesn’t have a stun breaker, hardly overpowered.

I think the only burst builds that are getting downgraded, are thieves, mesmers a little bit too. Downgrading warriors even further would only result in no one playing them anymore in pvp at all, warriors are hardly a strong pvp profession as it is.

Plus, anet already stated that they think warrior is more or less good right now.

The people that keep comparing their own overpowered builds (cough-thieves-cough) with warrior, to try and justify staying overpowered, change their mind real fast the moment they actually try a warrior in pvp themself. Those 50K hundred blades they thought they were going to dish out to 5 people at once, or those 20K eviscerates, are nowhere to be found then. Instead they find they can never pull off hundred blades at all, while their eviscerate does only 7K right before they die to kiting due to having no mobility with axes and being extremely squishy in their zerker gear. So they change to knight gear to be able to survive longer than three seconds, and end up with 5K hundred blades and 3K eviscerates. Then they delete their warrior and go back to their thief.

They could have it give 0.5% increased run speed per point, but it would have to stack with swiftness or with Warrior’s Sprint to be useful. This will help with warrior mobility issues as well.

Longbow I only find useful in dungeons as a support build with condition damage, and during wvw sieges I guess. Rifle is just a better weapon, especially if you trait for it in Arms.

It’s totally useless right now, so I’d be surprised if they wouldn’t change it. 3% damage increase on just burst skills for 30 points into a not so great trait line, really can’t be left like that, and I don’t know why they haven’t changed it already. I agree with above, either change it to +0.5% or make it do something entirely different.

I find I get a lot more support out of a rifle/longbow + axe/warhorn build. The warhorn offers a ton of support with quick breathing, a lot more than either rifle or longbow can do on its own, and the axe gives vulnerability + ranged cripple on top.

I suggest trying the rifle or longbow, together with the warhorn with quick breathing.

Quick breathing puts you 20 points in tactics, so only 10 more are needed for improving your shouts. I don’t think a support build works without the warhorn, as it is one of the best support weapons in the game when traited.

You get a ton of condition removal, five conditions gone of which two are turned into aoe boons, and then you get aoe weakness, aoe vigor and aoe swiftness all in one single offhand weapon, all at 16 seconds cooldown, which is insanely short, it’s really amazing.

I use this build cuz it’s fun in WvW, nice for dungeons because it has enough support to matter and enough range to not die all the time and bother the team. I also use it for farming, not because it’s so effective, but because it’s fun to use, you end up using a lot of skills, rather than just the same two all the time.

Strength – 10 points, Death From Above, love being able to jump and survive.
Arms – 20 points, Deep Cuts for more rifle bleeds, Crack Shot since I use rifle.
Defence – 0 points.
Tactics – 20 points, Leg Specialist for rifle immobilize, Quick Breathing for support.
Discipline – 20 points, Heightened Focus, Sweet Revenge, else downed state is useless.

I use axe/warhorn and rifle as weapons, and gear is a mix of berserker and knight.

Healing skill is mending, utilities I use kick (low CD interrupt for pve), shake it off, bolas.
Elite skill switches between banner and signet of rage, depending on situation.

The build is not great at anything, but not bad at anything either, enough utility, support and damage to be a viable jack of all trades, and unlike greatsword and hammer builds it doesn’t end up getting really boring, since I use a lot of skills at a regular basis.

It would be ridiculous to actually DOWNgrade a profession because of a strong pve skill. The greatsword is completely useless in pvp against anyone that can dodge or has a stun breaker, or catches the warrior inbetween the one minute long frenzy cooldown.

Hammer really isn’t so great either, the burst skill takes a lot of time to get to full adrenaline because of slow hammer strikes, and the only other useful skill it has is #5 and that is only single target on a 30 second cooldown.

So no, the hammer doesn’t have “tons” of control skills, it has two of them, and both take a very long time between uses. Other than that hammer has a weakness debuff, a cripple and a tiny knockback (not knockdown or stun) that really doesn’t do anything, and isn’t useful for interrupting due it its long charge-up, but can be used as a weak whirl finisher.

Axe has a reasonably good auto attack, about the same total damage as the hammer, maybe a bit more.. but all its other skills are useless. Eviscerate used to be good, now it is pretty bad as well because of the -30% burst damage nerf.. as a leap it has a very short range (300, barely more than melee), so axe builds suffer badly from a total lack of mobility.

Mace is reasonably good for pve due to its near-permanent weakness debuff, but not viable for pvp in any way, since it doesn’t have a snare or gap closer of any kind, it has a 1 second daze but that doesn’t impair movement, mace is clearly a pve-only weapon.

Rifle is designed to allow anyone that has two dodges available to completely negate its damage, as both damage skills are incredibly easy to dodge by even complete newbies.

Sword is only useful for it’s #2 mobility, melee condition builds doesn’t work as a warrior, not for pvp anyway, and in pve it’s almost impossible getting the necessary power/condition/toughness gear to make bleed builds work.

Longbow has one single use due to its incredibly weak auto attack and lack of short CD cripple, and that is putting pressure on groups of people in wvw sieges.

I spec for warhorn recharge + signet recharge, since those traits automatically come my way with the rifle build I am trying (0/20/0/20/30). Pretty much permanent swiftness that way, which is nice if you have to run a lot using the rifle.

I don’t find melee enjoyable at all, in pvp as a warrior. You get rooted constantly as a melee build, and my build has huge condition removal, I can remove about 8 conditions total every 25 seconds or so, and that’s without the signet of stamina, if I put 10 points in strength I can add another 3 condition removals from restorative strength.

My goal is to be entirely uncatchable by melee builds, and unkillable by condition builds, so all that leaves is using my rifle skills, kick and bolas to keep away burst builds. Against ranged burst builds I don’t have any defence tho and will die. haven’t decided yet if I’ll use frenzy for 1vs1 encounters, I’ll see how good bolas works for that.

I lost all enjoyment from playing warrior, but this build is giving me alot of fun again. I die fast when I get focused, but who wants to live forever, right?

Lensar.4920:

Was Kill Shot changed recently? I’m doing about 60% of the damage that I was doing with it last week.

I’m wondering that too, Kill Shot seems to do a lot less damage suddenly, maybe it’s just my shoddy memory though, it’s been a while since I last used it. I just switched to a rifle build and it just seems as if Kill Shot is like 40% less damage now.

I ended up using the shortbow a lot more than any other weapons, cuz I just couldn’t stay alive against multiple monsters otherwise. But it’s really boring to run around clusterbombing.

Shortbow does a lot more damage per second than the longbow, it just does less damage per arrow. So if you count the total damage per second, shortbow packs a much higher punch than longbow. Crossfire has higher dps even than rapidfire, and that’s after the shortbow overnerf.

It’s a bit clunky, but if you turn off auto attack on greatsword, you can time the dodge on the third swing for some nice survivability, especially against monsters. You lose dps of course, on an already really weak weapon, but the dodges are not to be overlooked like that. Against a single monster it basically means you never get hit since you have an evade available every 2 seconds or so.

If you’re skilled enough I’m sure it can apply to pvp as well.

Tho tbh, I wouldn’t mind having the evade removed and getting better damage. Right now ranger greatsword is the weakest melee weapon in the game in terms of dps, even most ranged weapens do more damage.

As a thief you really have to keep updating your armor, which will cost a lot of coin sadly. Otherwise you will end up doing too little damage with too little survivability to finish tough quests or face more than one enemy. I also suggest, if you haven’t already, using sigil of bloodlust even at low levels, to increase your power, usually they come at about 1 silver or so.

I don’t know about elementalist, I didn’t have much fun leveling as one because of their awful damage with staff, and squishiness with daggers, but yeah warrior is quite good at pve, but to counter that, warrior is really bad at pvp, compared to thief.

Wouldn’t it be better for steal to cancel cast, that way the thief has to CnD after the steal, giving the target much more time to react. That way they can dodge after getting hit with mug, to completely negate the combo, forcing the thief to actually work for his kill instead of just having to press the finish key once the combo is done.

As a thief you can counter by waiting with CnD until they’ve dodged, and hope they don’t have swiftness up. All in all this will make it much harder for the combo to land, but in return it wouldn’t have to get downgraded damage wise.

I’m not lying, rifle warrior is simply not viable for s/tpvp, period. No one who pays a bit of attention will ever get hit by kill shot or by a full volley, there are no skills that are easier to dodge than those two. You see a rifle user crouch, you wait a second, and you dodge, they will never hit, and they have no way to force you to waste your dodges.

Except no warrior will ever use a rifle in spvp because it is so useless and easily avoided.

When you use kill shot, the big damage dealer, you crouch down so everyone can see you’re doing a kill shot, and need more than a second to charge, giving people all the time in the world to dodge the kill shot you just needed almost a minute charging adrenaline for.

I don’t see the point. Warrior rifle only has any use to pick off squishies in wvw if no one focuses you. I don’t think there is much comparison between thief power and rifle warrior power in s/tpvp.

Against a rifle warrior, having two dodges is enough to completely negate their damage done to you. You dodge once for kill shot, if they miss it will take ages before they can do another one, and you dodge once for volley, which will negate over half of its damage. The auto attack is negligable because it does pitiful damage with an attack rate of one second.

Dodging kill shot and volley are the easiest things in the world, and you have absolutely no way to force an opponent to dodge before using those two skills, since those two skills are the only damage dealers you have.

That’s why no warrior uses a rifle in s/tpvp, it’s just not useful for fighting any kind of even moderately skilled player, there is no logical way to compare a rifle warrior with a thief, thieves are vastly superior in damage, utility and survivability.

I’m not saying thieves are overpowered, I don’t know if they still will be overpowered when rendering gets fixed, but you can’t compare a thief to a rifle warrior.