Guild Wars 2

Lol. I have not played warrior much THIS Season. I took a season off to learn thief. But i’m still a warrior main, and i still show new players the ropes with warrior. And yes, A skilled warrior is on par with other classes. It’s not the strongest thing out there, but it’s viable in all formats.

oh!. look no further than DH. A build can take you all the way to legendary if it is cheesy enough.

I have not played Warrior this season, but for the most part i look at the meta for most classes and find that those builds are build which are the easiest to play. The meta build actually carry players who otherwise may bot be good enough to advance. Which is fine, because the meta works for advanced players too.

Preparedness: I happen to agree with you, but what would go it it’s place?

Venoms are Support skills, given they are also skills which cause conditions, but they are support as their bonuses are granted to the entire team. Given, they have had their effectiveness reduced lately, but that is something that will be dealt with in the skills changes later on.

Dagger/Dagger, Sages, Sinister or viper Amulets.

Use Daredevil

not going to tell you any more than that, because i don’t want my personal build all over the place.

Chorazin.4107:

This is what i run into mostly for roamingFor sPvP id imagine it would be reasonably easily countered due to the lack of tanky style amulets?

But for WvW it’s a pretty low risk high reward build. You can easily be rocking around with close to or beyond 3k armour with dire/trailblazers. Making a burst, even if it lands with the Death Blossom/Sheathe Weapon/Dodge trick not overly scary.

Kiting im not sure would work at all, they will gap close with steal at 1200 rng(albeit on a 26sec cooldown) and shadow shot at 900 rng. And can forgo something for shadow step. On top of this they will be running uncatchable to make sure it’s difficult to get away with those cripple stacks and a couple stacks of torment as icing on the cake from say pressure striking.

Yes, that one is easier to counter because it does not have a way to continuously refresh Endurance and Initiative.

Okay I did this for fun
The Document is public, and feel free to add comments.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10VLmRZU45W6aGotovBVhIcv2HYOGpkRDAz6g6ej9kFs/edit#

So far I have only reordered the traits, and added one new trait (because I merged two traits into one

There will obviously be a lot more to this in the future, but i wanted to get feedback on the traits changes first.

i do just fine with in pvp ranked.

oh.
15 chars

unfortunately Obindo, it is a new issue. if they changed it to not proc Rousing Resilience they changed it recently without putting it in the patch notes. before the AH change RR was my main heal and Headbut to break stun+Enter Bersrerk to break self stun was actually my favorite heal combo. I’m okay with it not procing RR though, as Elites are powerful enough. just saying it’s not SUPPOSED to be that way.

Don’t disagree with you about the top 10% thing, but 2v1 thief necro? impossible? you need to practice your vanilla then. As for the 2v2s, that’s dependent on who you have on your team and how well you work together.

Thief: Regardless of your spec will die with one good burst combo

Necromancers: once you eat through their shroud they are seriously done for. and you have the resistance, stability, and in-vulnerabilities to ignore their burst long enough to kill them even 2v1 regardless of spec.

Fun fact. Eviscerate hurts regardless of spec. (Vanilla power, or Berserker’s power) and the you have to build adrenaline to 100 to rage. Meanwhile in vanilla land. I’m bursting every 5 seconds. Yes Berserker’s is stronger. Because all elite specs are more powerful, but vanilla warrior is one of the only class specs that can still stand up to elite specs. (Necro is not bad either I hear)

The long and short of it is that yes it’s still viable for your average player, even good players. But it’s not viable for people she intend to play strictly competitively. But if you only care about winning, you are playing the game wrong.

Also, gave you are a hero

^Aside from the bit about Reaper, i agree with you.
+1

Straegen.2938:

IMO four main condi builds:

1. D/P Poison stacking stealth low-evade.
2. D/D Death Blossum “perma” evade
3. Ghost Thief
4. Lotus Training Interrupt

Each has significant weaknesses. One and Four are the two most dangerous IMO. Four requires the most skill as timing Interrupts in bunker meta is an art. One outplays them all in 1v1. Three is only useful in group play.

Death Blossom builds have a hitch between attacks making them open to easy counters by a decent player.

You are grouping two D/D Condi build into one. there are two. One uses Deadly Arts, the other Does Not. Also, while Death Blossom does have an after cast, a smart DD Thief does not spam it for that very reason.

and sacrifice shortbow?

nicknamenick.2437:

emkelly.2371:

You did not add the hammer delay to the bug list.

Can you be more specific? is it the pre-cast time or aftercast?

Well the after cast just sucks. that’s not bug. No the problem is that activating both versions of the burst skill will cause you to sit in one place for 1.5 seconds before actually performing the skill.

There are two Condi DD Builds out there. The most Common are the ones who use Burst Condi damage. but they are not the Perma Evade build i think you are talking about. here is how to kill either one per each class you play.

Warrior

• Fight as normal, but try and time your dazes when you see Death Blossom. Your resistance will protect you long enough to do this.

Dragon Hunter

• Just play DH as normal.

Other Guardians burn/ symbols, etc

• you should win easily because of your defenses, also we cannot dodge your teleport/Symbol combos.

Power Mesmer

• if you get the drop on the thief you’ll win easily.
• if you don’t get the drop on the theif kite until you get one good burst on them. it won’t take long.

Condi mesmer

• Kiting is your only real option.

Necromancer

• Time a plague signet at the end of a Death blossom. We will have to waste our heal early to counter it.
• Terror mancers’ can take out our stun breaks very quickly

Power Ranger

• Immobilize us and don’t waste that moment to burst us.

Bunker ranger

• Imobilize us, and keep your stupid healing wall between us and you.

Scrapper

• Fight as normal, you have more sustain than we do, more damage than we do,

Engineer

• Kite us and fight as normal

Thief

• Kite long enough to get a burst off. by the time you get even a small burts off we will likelly be low enough for it to kill us.

Bunker elementalist

• The only chance we have of doing enough damage to kill you is to stop evading and start using AA. if we do this, you can kill us with your stupid Air overload.

Fresh Air

• We cannot dodge your Air overload completly, if you are running your storm glyph, we cannot dodge that completely either. in fact anything you do we cannot really dodge completly, so just kite us. and fight as normal

Power/Revenant

• Unless you catch us offguard, i’m sorry you will loose. But time your burst at the end of a deathblossom and you may do enough damage to kill us.

Condi/Revenant

• You win, because continuous torment application, turns our build against it’s self.
  
  Classes that typically i never fear when playing this build
• Necromancers: They have all the tools to be able to kill me, they just never use them correctly
• Rangers: Again, they should have the easiest time killing me besides DH, but they rarely manage it in 1v1s.
• Mesmers: Typically easy kills if i even need to kill them
• Engineer’s: I can decap off and engineer then get away fairly easilly
• Bad warriors; because they don’t know how to time their attacks they are easy kills, though it may take a few moments.

Classes i hate fighting

• Good warriors.: A single well times Burst can either kill me or cripple my ability to pressure.
• Bad DHs: because DH
• Good DH’s: Because DH
• Mediocre DH’s: because DH
• Good Scrappers: because sustain and damage

I’ve said this before but i run Full evasion Condi DD. I can stand in a fight against anyone except a good DH on point (not that i bother unless i am purposefully trying to keep three people on point to give my team the edge elsewhere) but i give any semblence of power and cannot even relay on Condi bursts. no i went a different route and rely on continuous application of conditions While maintaining a full Defense posture. I pretty much have too. Thieves rely on sudden bursts of damage that kill in an instant and with all of the defenses rolling around there’s just no way to do that reliably wihtout a massive amount of skill. You can;t stand in a brawl, you have to hang back and wait for the right moment to strike, and if you miss a backstab (somthing that is getting easier to do with every nerf) or if something stops your burst you die instantly.

• purely from a berserker’s point of view
• Revenant can kill you one skill (which is channeled so stealth does not make it miss)
• Warriors can kill you with one Burst combo.
• Warriors can also kill you with one killshot or gunflame, both are channeled
• Rangers can kill you with one use of at least two skills. Smokecale can kill you with it’s revenant attack, Bristle back can kill you with it’s barrage, the list goes on.
• Guardians are have always been hard targets for us, but now they are direct hard counters. to our entire play style. We can’t effectively decap with DH’s on point, objective capturing has become even harder
• One Plague signet will kill us unless we manage to clear it quickly
• Engineers have a combination of sustain and damage that we have to work very hard to get around
• A good Bunker Ele skill shuts us down.
• Honestly only Mesmer’s are easy kills assuming every one i’ve mentioned is a good player. Not even great, just good.
• and i know i’m not good at power Thief, but i know the combos and I use them.

Stealth: Impairing Daggers>Backstab>Steal>Fist Flurry with DP is probably the best one out there and you have to wait 20 seconds to use it again and if you miss for some reason you die because you have to sacrifice defensive abilities for damage.

It is definitely working as intended but with nerfs to stealth over the years it would be nice if it was changed. Note, i said “nice” not mandatory.

If you drop an ambush trap. then for some reason wait out seconds it takes to recharge (because you cannot swap skills while they are on cooldown) then swap the ampush trap utility skill for another utility skill (any skill that is not already on your bar) the amush trap will disapear. Period. i don’t know where to got your information or if you are exploiting a bug in the system, but i tried it in HotM and it definitely disappears.

DeceiverX.8361:

Again, it’s all builds.

D/P and staff? They’re fine. D/D? Rendered almost useless as a consequence when also paired with the BV change.

Power D/D, definitely. Condi D/D is fine, but again the only reason for that is that condi D/D does not run Stealth.

Professor Sensei.2941:

…

Some thief’s are new players. That 1s delay is too big a penalty for new players trying to learn the Class. You are only okay with it because you have already got the skill to play around it. New players don’t have that luxury.

And i’m not even talking about myself, because i use A full evasion, no stealth DD Condi build. stealth attacks never even cross my mind.

PVE, Viper, PVP I like Sinister

they also made the venoms weaker (re: nerfed) in general I believe. (please correct me if i’m wrong)

So…you do nto like vanilla warrior. you don’t have success with it,

but obviously people still do have success with it. it all comes down to your personal play style. I’m the kind of player that plays a multitude of different builds, i typically have success with Vanilla warrior, though I agree that berserker is more powerful. you can say that vanilla is not viable, but what you really mean is that it’s not the most powerful spec. you are correct there, but something does not have to be the most powerful to be good.

You did not add the hammer delay to the bug list.

All of this said, Hammer is still bad. Mike may not be wrong about the way he plays the class, but why waste your time on hammer when you could run the same thing with Sheild, Axe/ Greatsword. Hammer just has too many problems right now to be a reliable weapon. which is sad because i love the hammer. I wish they had not gutted it and broke it in the process.

^Still? Well thats what i get for taking a season off Warrior

Poor Revenants…

^ this. all of this

LMAO!!! I love the “heroes never die” thing.

BTW Nice unranked, and an extremely funny video

Mike, you sound like a great guy, but Hammer does have a problem with skill delay and power. Earthshaker is suposed to have a 3/4 second cast time, but instead you often stand still for 3/4 a second, then leap at your target destination for 3/4 of a second. That’s 6/4 of a second, or 1 1/2 second cast time. Not to mention the after cast which while i don’t know what it is, still seems to be very long unless it just seems that way because Backbraker has such a long wind up.

The weapon has problems, massive, horrible problems. there was a time when hammer was not only very fun, but awesome, but right now it is not. On top of all of it’s problems the entire weapon is negated by stability. and there is a whole hell of a lot more stability going around than there used to be.

Thats alot of words to say, “Elites are the only way to play”. and you know what/ your not wrong that Elites are over powered, although i would not say so much overpowered as horribly designed to begin with. that horrible design makes them overpowered, yes, but no one is disputing that. What we are saying is that you can play Warrior as vanilla, and succeed. Sure, you will not have as easy a time of it as with a berserker, but that is not what the OP asked. save your “elites are OP” talks for another thread, trust me i’ll be on your side then. but as far a vanilla warrior being viable, Warrior is about the only case in the game right now where the vanilla build is still a viable option. Its not as strong, but it can still get the job done. just remember it plays differently than berserker.

Yannir.4132:

emkelly.2371:

Elite Specializations.

• Mechanics Stack on top of vanilla mechanics, like a tumor.
• Over powered trait lines that often negate entire trait lines form the core mechanics
• Anything done to improve vanilla mechanics will only make elite specs more powerful.
• gate utility skills behind the trait line, for no good reason.
• gate the weapon behind the trait line, for no good reason.
• Were created solely to force players to pay for heart of thorns, instead of giving the players actually good content.

What do you think they were supposed to do? I can’t believe this whining is still a thing. This is always what happens with expansions, you should’ve seen it from the get-go. And GW2 was always going to have expansions even if the devs didn’t see it at the start. Expansions are PR first and foremost to keep the game in the public eye. Continued updates can’t do that.

Expansions are also supposed to bring progression. Since the devs hold on to the idea that we won’t have horizontal progression via levels, we have to have some vertical progression via “widening” the classes we already have. The flexibility alone that it brings is powercreep by itself. It’s just not blatantly obvious by pointing out that the other guy has a bigger number than you do.

hmm, how best to respond to this. Criticism is not whining, first off. Secondly, what were they supposed to do? sure why not.

Checklist of Elite Specializations

• give each class a new weapon.
• weapons should add new vatriety to the class granting them new options for character building.
• Don’t gate the weapons behind the new specialization. They already bought the expansion, Ted!
• Give the players new Utility skills
• No Ted, we’ve been over this. They already bought the expansion. wait, do you just not know what to make their first keystone trait under the specialization line? is that why you keeps suggesting this crap? Seriously ted, leave the development to people who understand game design.
• Grant a player a new profession mechanic which drastically changes the class in a meaningful way.
• What was that Ted? No. What? No! why would we just stack the elite mechanic on top of the core mechanics? Oh, of course, money. Seriously, have you ever played a game? that will just kitten players off. yeah they will buy the expansion, but will they buy the next expansion if you mishandle this one? sit back down and shut up Ted.
• Elite mechanics should replace core mechanics, not stack on top of them. For example, Discipline should handle adrenaline and bursts, while Berserker handles berserk mode, and you have to choose between Discipline or Berserk.
• Oh Christ, Ted! Of course it’s more effort than just making Berserke mode do everything! Oh my god, I swear if you put as much effort into the new Legendary Skins as you do trying turn the game into a marketing scheme we’d have Exotic and legendary Cultural skins by now!
• Elite specializations should definitely not create a situation where on trait line, in this case Elite trait lines, completely invalidates other trait lines.
• No, Berserker does not need Sustain, damage, and condition damage on one trait line, Ted. Jesus, who hired you?! Why is there a Corporate stooge in our development room? Where the hell is our concept designer?!"

Okay, all joking aside. What would i have done with DH? Easy.

Dragon Hunter Redone Lite

• Weapon: Long bow (Keep as is, except not gated behind Dragon hunter)
• Virtues: They are not virtues, Virtues should be handled by the Virtues Trait Line, Dragon hunter “virtues” should be handled by the dragon hunter trait line.
• DH virtues (no longer called virtues) do not have passive effects. they are active skills which are more powerful than virtues active effects, they sacrifice the passive effect for this.
• Traps: (assuming i have to keep traps) Should never be instant cast, should never drop automatically. (that’s it)

Traits: Not enough room for this.

(Ted is my imaginary corporate representative who does not understand game design. pretty much the little voice in my head i imagine when I wonder what Anet Corporate bigwigs are thinking)

True. not to mention, i think thief may be the only class with a cooldown on a #1 skill. correct me if i’m wrong.

also, confession here. I’m new to thief this season, so when i heard about the cooldown on stealth attacks, i totally thought they were talking about attacks that GAVE stealth, like cloak and dagger. I immediately thought. “oh that’s not bad. totally goes against the idea of initiative, but doable.” now i’m like. “OMFG! this goes against the concept of initiative, #1 skills, AND cripples a thief!”

Kuya.6495:

emkelly.2371:

Ghotistyx.6942:

emkelly.2371:

DH is poorly designed (like all Elite specializations), and because of the way it’s designed, it is specifically overpowered in SPVP, no where else.

You’ve still never properly explained your opinion here. For all I know you’re just trying to dump some warrior salt over here.

Brutaly.6257:

Not entirely correct- Its over powered in
-Low level pvp
and
-with opponents with low skill level
and/or
-when classes are stacked in low level pvp.

So tl:dr, If you’re having trouble with DH you’re bad.
Sounds about right.

(And I’m almost convinced it blocks 360 even though it’s not supposed too)

Nope

lol yeah i know, it just seems that way sometimes. that was more of a joke than anything

Oh yes, you make a good point/ but the reason Hammer could get by without damage if you fixed speed issues is Condition damage from Distracting Strikes and body blow. don’t get me wrong, damage would be very much appreciated, but the hammer could get by without it if i could Earthshaker> Backbreaker> Staggering blow, reliably. as it stands if you try Earthshaker, even if they do not break the stun (assuming you hit because the dang skill bugs out and takes about 1.5 seconds to go off) they will not remain stunned long enough to get off Backbreaker. THAT above all else needs to be fixed before we even think about adding in damage. a weapon is of no use if you cannot use it’s skills to any effect.

Ghotistyx.6942:

emkelly.2371:

DH is poorly designed (like all Elite specializations), and because of the way it’s designed, it is specifically overpowered in SPVP, no where else.

You’ve still never properly explained your opinion here. For all I know you’re just trying to dump some warrior salt over here.

Brutaly.6257:

Not entirely correct- Its over powered in
-Low level pvp
and
-with opponents with low skill level
and/or
-when classes are stacked in low level pvp.

So tl:dr, If you’re having trouble with DH you’re bad.
Sounds about right.

I’ve actually explained this in great detail. do a forum search for my posts before you decide to say something like that. but here, for the hundred-thousandths time here is what is wrong with first Elite Specializations, then DH.

Elite Specializations.

• Mechanics Stack on top of vanilla mechanics, like a tumor.
• Over powered trait lines that often negate entire trait lines form the core mechanics
• Anything done to improve vanilla mechanics will only make elite specs more powerful.
• gate utility skills behind the trait line, for no good reason.
• gate the weapon behind the trait line, for no good reason.
• Were created solely to force players to pay for heart of thorns, instead of giving the players actually good content.

Dragon Hunter

• Pro league from your every day gamer. first of all Pro Leagues have different rules. so i’ll only be talking about standard play both ranked and unranked spvp
• Just traps in general, They take up most of a point, They deal damage, are instant cast in some cases, one can be dropped automatically, one of them forces you to stand in side it or take damage, another does not let you out, another punishes you for standing in side it, another heals you. (not that everyone will have all of the traps at the same time, we’ll get to that)
• dodging traps. first of all, Shut the hell up about how you don’t take damage if you dodge them. That’s BS and you know it. ToF does give a frag if you dodged it. if you cross the threshold after you activate it your taking 3 k damage. Your blades traps doesn’t care either. it will gleefully keep dishing out damage if you are standing inside it.
• Second, when you say “well don’t stand in the traps!” you are actually saying. “Juts let me have the point and let me hit you from range!” because that’s all you have to do. if we don’t pressure you on point you win by capping a point.
• third, just the whole design of traps. They were obviously meant to dominate points, which is rather stupid for a design, because this a point capture and objective capture game. Even if they were super weak in damage, i’d still say the were stupidly designed. If you make them any weaker the become useless, but if you don’t make them weaker they are over powered. That’s no way to design a class.
• I can’t believe i’m still on traps. Jesus, okay so next, what the hell is with the instant cats. so lets say i do avoid your traps. i dodge them to “break” the trap, then stay out of the secondary effect…aaaaand then a DH teleports to me and drops a test of faith on my face. It’s instant, there’s no way to avoid it besides luck. your teleport does’t have a tell (not one that matters anyway with latency which every player has even if you don’t notice it.)
• So in short, Traps are easy to predict, hard to avoid, (regardless of what you say) and poorly designed specifically for SPVP.)
• now lest talk about your virtues. Like WTF. Nothing about your virtues is equivalent to the Vanilla versions. everything about them is supersized like Frilock. Just the virtues alone are reason enough to spec into DH. they are extremely overpowered compared to their vanilla versions, regardless of how they arfe compared to other classes.
• Your shield is perhaps the best block in the game. (And I’m almost convinced it blocks 360 even though it’s not supposed too)
• Your spear is unblockable and has nearly no wind up. so incase we manage to avoid your traps completely you can still pull us in. It also does pretty nice damage (not great, but nice)
• Your heal is more powerful than some dedicated healing skills
• you can refresh them while being invulverable.
• you have blocks out the wazoo (which in vanilla guardians was are, but is over done in DH)
• you are basically one specific specialization that fairly effectively shuts out an entire class.
• you can do all of this while still contesting a point.
• you are great in a team fight, great 1v1, and great at holding and capturing points. the only thing you lack in is speed.
• Sure, there are classes with more sustain, or more damage, but none of them meld all of that into a package so adept at dealing with so many situations.

Saddly, CntrlAltDefeat is correct. Hammer should be fun, but over time it has become useless. There has been no word from anet about fixing the problems with he weapon. sadly the weapon does not need damage, but it does need the massive delay on skills, and the delay bug on the burst to be fixed.

Let me get this strait, you think that a thief is OP because of stealth, when it is literally the only trully defensive abuility that a thief has. Let me remind you that without that stealth you would have killed him in maybe two or three hits because he has 11000-12000 hp, and almost not toughness, no stability, very little healing power. Also, let me remind you that because he is strictly condi, his Stealth attacks, do nearly nothing against you, and by chance if he was running a hybrid build and they DID do anything to you, he has to land it every time or else he will pretty much be stunned for 1 second. If he cannot kill you the most you can say about his build is that he was annoying. you know what thieves find annoying? Everything. Because everything is stronger than them right now.

Thank you Dark. ESL, Pro league players, only play what is the most powerful thing out there that they can find. They do not see the game in terms of having fun, they see the game in terms of winning. which defeats the entire purpose of a game. a sport is not a game.

An E-port is not a game. It is a competition which uses a game as it’s basis. A viable build has no place in a competition unless it is the most powerful build out there.

For your average player, Vanilla is viable, hell for a good players Vanilla is viable. And again, there is a difference between “viable” and “the most powerful thing out there” if you are thinking they are one and the same, then nothing we say will ever change your mind.

Vanilla or Berserker

Let me first point out that i have been very vocal in the past about my opinions about Elite specializations. I will not attempt to dilute what this thread is by bringing that back up. If you want to know my opinions on the matter, just do a forum search of my posts.

Having said that, which spec should you choose?

In a perfect world, Every Specialization and build should have it’s own positives and negatives, in practice, this is never the case with any MMO, Moba, or fighting game. For example: Characters that play like Ryu and Ken will always be better than characters that play like Guile, or Juni,

Of course if you spend time on Guile or Juni, you can become nearly unbeatable with them, and that’s the most important part of this entire analogy.

Vanilla warrior plays much different than Berserker, though you may not notice it right off the bat. Berserker’s main power is gated behind a full adrenaline bar. so if you can make a berserker miss their headbut or deny them a full adrenaline bar, you have a huge advantage. Vanilla warriors don’t need to worry about that. we can throw out a t1 burst every 5 seconds at the very least, and we never need to worry about saving up adrenaline. For a Berserker, using a tier 1 burst is a sign that they are being denied their berserk mode. which means you are pressuring them. One missed headbut, and buys you about 10 seconds to wail on a warrior. (yes eventually they will get 100% adrenaline, but you already have the advantage at that point, and once a berserker has berserk mode it’s very easy to know what they are going to do. (burst, burst, burst)

Vanilla warriors are more unpredicatable. We can come out of a whirling blades into a burst, or a sheildbash, or a kick, or whatever the heck we want. we can burts every 5 seconds, and you may never know what burst we are about to do. baybe it will be arking slice, maybe it will be eviscerate, maybe i’l fake a burst just to draw out a dodge, then sheild bash you.

I’ll be the first to admit that Berserker is more powerful than vanilla. at least in PVP, but that’s not to say that vanilla is not viable. There is a huge difference between “Viable” and “the most powerful , overpowered thing to play”. to many players think that they are one and the same. and if you are one of those players, sure, use berserker. but you are wrong. and you are missing out on the fun of the game. sure you get the pleasure of winning, but you don’t really deserve the win. your build deserves the win.

Play what makes you happy, and don’t listen to people who only care about the meta. Enjooy yourself. it’s a game.

kdaddy.5431:

No

Of course against the average to below average player better players can play anything. Someone posted phanta killing people on a old school fresh air ele but that is unranked.

Against good players vanilla builds will lose 100% of the time.

I disagree. and i have already written a guide describing why.

(Edit: For clarification. there is a difference between “viable” and “the most powerful thing you can play” Saying berserker is the only viable option is like saying that 6+6 is the only way to get to 12. it is not. )

before they fixed warrior, there were tons of Stuns going around, and i ran a Warrior build that used RR as it’s main survival. I found that the only time the build became viable was in a large fight, where i was pretty much guaranteed to get stunned. I also ran Headbut, and purposefully used it as often as possible to stun my self so that I could break the stun for heals. This was back when a warrior has laughable survival and all it did was give me enough time to stand in a fight. another problem was that stability actually hinders RR. if you can’t be stunned then you cannot heal yourself, so my build ran as little stability as possible because I WANTED to get stunned. Balanced stance is great because it procs rousing resilience, but the problem was that after using it, i was actually susceptible to damage for about 12 seconds. So, while i ran it, i always had to be very careful about when to use it.

you are not wrong, that dare devil is poorly designed, but don’t mistake that for me agreeing with you. ALL Elite Specializations are poorly designed. Just because some got entirely new forms means jack all. The reasons Elite Specializations are horribly designed are far more base than the individual changes each class got.

Problems with Elite Specs

• you have to spec into them in order to use the skills. What? I bought HoT, just let me use the skills like any other skill!
• you have to spec into the elite specialization to use the weapon? WHAT? DUDE, we’ve been over this. I bought your expansion. let me use the weapon. there’s no reason to gate skills or weapons behind a specialization.
• Elite specializations, do not change the class, they stack on top of the existing class like at tumor.
• Anything that Anet does to improve the base mechanics of the game, just makes Elite specializations stronger.
• Elite specializations don’t change how the class is played. elementalists still memorize a very specific rotation, necromancers still have a shroud they depend on which means they still depend on Life Force, Warriors still depend on adrenaline, engineers still rotate through utility skills and kits (they just have an extra one), Guardians still depend on their virtues, Thief, still relies on stealth , speed, and evasion (but now we have more access to the evasion and speed)

• Finally, Elite specializations were purposefully created to make the game unbalanced. Anet got greedy. they thought that by creating specializations that overpowered each core class, that people would HAVE to buy HoT. Some Developer probably had a great concept for Elites, but then the money guys got involved and just rushed it out because “hell, players will have to buy this!!”

Anet must have forgotten that we bought three expansions for GW1, not because they made the core game nonviable anymore, but because we wanted the new content. you delivered new content without destroying the old. and you expect any sane human being not to notice that you just threw together some ideas, specifically designed to force players to pay money. Anet, we’d have bought the content anyway, seriously, we would have payed $50 for less content, if it had been well implemented.

Okay that’s enough ranting for me.

DH is poorly designed (like all Elite specializations), and because of the way it’s designed, it is specifically overpowered in SPVP, no where else.

why not just not have a cooldown on your #1 weapon skill REGARDLESS OF STEALTH OR NOT?

In response to Title:

No.
It.
Does.
Not.

^a thousand times this.

Any class that does not have to get close to a DH, or can just say “No” to the damage is a counter to DH. Scrappers are great for that because they have both options. I mean, nothing has as much damage mitication as a scrapper, and the damage on a scrapper is often omni-directional meaning it gets around the stupid shield. Mesmers are great fr it because their clones can break traps, and shatters have omni directional effects, Warriors have enough damage mitigation to take one out, but often they will be out of CDs by the time the DH dies.

Simple answer….warrior is not the easiest, most cheesy thing out there. yeah, if played well its strong, and its downright useful, but it’s not the easiest class to play. When the competition can just jump on a DH and face roll, why play warrior? when Engineer’s (not easiest to play either) has just as much if not more sustain with more team support and debatable better damage, and Mesmer’s can turn an entire party into roamers, why even bother playing a warrior?Necromancers can also perfrom the roll of a warrior while also providing more team support as well. So you are seeing Necros, Engy, DH, DH, DH, Elementalist, more than anything else. thief is still up there of course, but only about as much as warriors.