This video is my first look at the Warrior class in Structured PVP from the April 27-29 Beta Weekend Event.
I discuss Warrior mechanics with two weapon setups:
- Axe/Axe and Rifle
- Greatsword and Sword/Axe
Here are recommendations for abilities:
- Of the 3 healing abilities, Mending seems to be the most useful, based on the short 20-sec cooldown. The passive regeneration from the Healing Signet (~180 every 3 seconds) does not offset the downside of the long 40-sec cooldown, and once you activate the Healing Signet you lose the passive regeneration
- Of the 3 elite abilities, Signet of Rage seems to be the best choice due to the long 30-sec duration of the 3 buffs
- Endure No Pain is a solid utility ability that is not heavy on defense/shield; the 5-sec invulnerability can buy time for your heal to come off cooldown or for you to finish an opponent
- If your spec lacks a charge, consider picking up the utility ability Bull’s Charge, which provides a knockdown effect
Here are recommendations for traits for any spec:
- Embrace the Pain trait (builds adrenaline when hit) rocks
- Heightened Focus synergizes well with Embrace the Pain, since your crit % jumps up to 9% with a full adrenaline bar
Please share your feedback, questions, and tips.
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I tend to play Warrior type classes in every game i can, but i decided to change that up a bit for GW2 and try something different first this time. So, Warrior was one of the 3 classes (along with Mesmer and Necromancer) that i did not play at all this weekend. The Warrior skill videos were the first thing that attracted me to GW2 back when they first came out though, they looked so heavy and brutal, so i like to peek into videos to see what this class has to offer. So thanks for the video :)
Great introduction video to Warrior. I will be rolling this class as my first when GW2 launches. Unlike when some MMOs are in beta, I do not feel like rolling your “preferred” class in beta is spoiling anything because there is so much to learn about each class. There are so many ways to customize any single class that it is almost a boon to try your preferred class in beta as opposed to waiting for launch.
Question: I have heard that if you down a player or enemy after using the downed 3-skill Vengeance as a Warrior that you will then rally. I know you can have a trait that gives you a chance to rally when you used the 3-skill, but I wanted to know if you or one of your guildmates can confirm that downing a player or PC will rally you while Vengeanced.
Agree 100%. Also, until you try it you won’t know whether you like it.
I don’t know, and unfortunately we can’t test until next BWE.
I played this weekend and you do *not* res after a kill in vengeance. You go to defeated still.
OK good to know.
Yes, I noticed that too and was surprised as I thought I had heard that you did rally. Have to see whether they add this mechanism in later or whether they thought it was op.
I generally love playing a warrior and will be one of the classes I look at come launch. Awesome video as always taugrim I look forward to catching you live on a stream soon to get more of your impressions.
Thanks for the content! You need to be posting these up in gw2 forums and maybe gw2 guru forums for better exposure.
The GW2 forums are locked for new posts / replies.
I did post this on gw2guru just a few minutes ago. There community is good there.
ya im torn between warrior or thief main for GW2. i had so much fun with both. i didnt get to involved with the thief over the weekend as i didnt make one till near the end of the beta. next beta weekend im going to focus on warrior / thief / and maybe guardian, we should get together and theorycraft sometime taug. after watching u play numerous MMOs thru the months, ur playstyle is very similar to mine. i can tweet u some of the builds i come up with etc next BWE.
anyways good vid as usual. keep em coming
Would love to hear your thoughts on builds. Please post them or tweet them, it’s interesting to see what choices other players make.
Great video as always Tau. I am 99% sure warrior will be my main class. First it was a thief but I am loving the warrior skills. I like the ability to be able to be a DPS machine, support or pretty tanky. Well, I guess most classes can kind of do all this which is why this game is so awesome.
Namaste,
Trey from ran a 1H Axe / Shield build, and it provided very solid sustained and burst DPS with excellent survivability. It actually seemed more tanky than some of the Guardian builds I tried. But that may have been because I wasn’t spec’ing Guardian well.
At first I was thinking I may try Guardian as my first class but then I heard they are only good as a defensive character, if true that limits their potential. From the sounds of Warrior, they are not limited to only being good as Offensive or Defensive to be good in PVP.
I tried Guardian for a bit, but I couldn’t figure out how to get a good offensive spec that didn’t feel too squishy. Of course, that may be simply because of ignorance not the capabilities of the class. That said, Guardian is really easy to spec as a durable support character.
My impression from the weekend is that Warrior was more flexible in terms of range of viable specs than Guardian.
Taugrim,
I have to ask, are you going to replace your SWTOR playing time for GW2 when its released? I’m mainly a PVPer in TOR and would appreaciate your feedback on this since you have played both games. From just watching videos, GW2 looks like the superior game in every way but maybe story. Thoughts?
It’s hard to compare the PvP between the two directly. There’s nothing quite like the tank guard and taunt mechanics in GW2, nor is there any dedicated healing. Positioning is way more important too and the matches are smaller (8v8 is for the random group matches but the tournament play will be 5v5).
WvW is incomparably better than any “world pvp” that SWTOR has or ever seems like it will have. Their plan for tournament organization also seems better thought out than the ranked warzones. And the complete lack of statistical grind (e.g. stats on gear/level/skills) in structured PvP for gear (just an aesthetic one) since you have everything unlocked immediately is really refreshing.
I’ll say one thing about SWTOR’s PvP… there’s nothing quite like huttball. I’d miss that if I left TOR for good.
A friend of mine specced as a support guardian over the beta weekend looking to provide buffs to the team, and couldn’t do much offensively. Unfortunately he found he was doing almost nothing but buffing players who often ignored him and ran out of range. Certainly in this type of spec i think the guardian is going to really rely on how good his team mates are. Likely to shine in guild or organised groups but lack in PuGs
Yea that makes sense. Guardian based on the mechanics is easier to build for support than for offense.
There was a thread / video on the GW2Guru forums, showing an ultimate glass cannon Greatsword Guardian dishing out a lot of damage…
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/34750-fairly-impressive-damage-by-a-greatsword/
…but the thing is he was running with a measly 11k HP.
I think for most players who want to play a “tanky” character, the Warrior is the better fit. You won’t have the ward / obstruction capability of the Guardian, but you can provide much more functional offense without having to spec glassy.
With what you’ve heard about the difficulty of speccing an offense-oriented Guardian, don’t you think they’ll tweak the class? Also, were you able to play the thief class over the weekend? I love the challenge of melee dps, so I’m pretty interested in that one. If I decide to get the game, I like the looks of those two classes (guardian/thief)…and mesmer looks pretty tricked out too.
Played Thief briefly but not enough to get a meaningful impression.
I don’t know re: Guardian. There is a lot of discussion among Guardians on the forum re: their lack of being able to spec as offensively as other classes.
I loved playing the warrior in GW2 beta. I generally played as sword/axe with rifle. Speccing out for bleeds (longer bleeds and 10% extra damage to bleeders) and adrenalin/crit building. The warrior has huge versatility from what i can see. My only problem is i can’t have 3 weapon sets. I think come live we will likely see too many glass cannon high crit builds to start off with, but i think as people play WvW more we will see some funkier builds start cropping up. Definitely one of the better warrior classes for a while
Does that mean you were stacking stats / traits for Condition damage instead of +damage, Power, +Crit damage, etc?
I thought about it, but the Warrior with it’s mechanics seems better suited to direct damage than DoTs.
Can you try an engineer a bit also? The tool belt looks hard to understand, with their own unique mechanics. How does it feel? are engineers a support class with worse damage?
Taug didn’t try an engineer yet over the weekend but I’ll probably have a guide up pretty soon (maybe by Sunday?) with some footage of the Engineer. It’s definitely viable/flexible; just has some weird mechanics that make it easy to spec poorly or overlook some abilities.
I’m sure people would love to see it. I’ve read threads over on the GW2Guru forums where people claim Engy’s suck, but they may be because they didn’t find an excellent build like the one you came up with.
One viable build does not a good class make :)
That’s true and Engineers could definitely use some love/fixes in some respects but a number of people have been advocating a complete overhaul of the profession. There’s major issues like turrets not scaling properly (at all?), some of their effects not working as described in the tooltip, weapon kits not getting damage scaled from the weapon (so for example the flamethrower is missing some 1000 power since it doesn’t get any contribution from your weapon). Those all should be fixed.
But the core design of the profession isn’t broken if you can find a few builds that do work. I don’t know what ArenaNET will decide to do with the Engineer but there’s definitely potential for them to bring them up to par with a multitude of different playstyles if they just fix some things.
That was my personal impression as well, the kits not scaling is an obvious problem thats relatively easy to fix. I only played the class in pve for about 8 levels, so my experience doesn’t count for much, but i read a lot of complaints. I liked the pistols, loved the rifle skills but thought they should have more aoe capabilities (designwise i don’t like that the pistols hit aoe and the shotguns don’t so much). Powerwise i had a much harder time killing things on low levels than with the other classes. That has not much to do with “endgame balance”, of course, but is a concern. I tried all the kits in the mists, but not against living things. I still plan to roll an Engineer when the game comes out, because i think its very fun designwise and i think you should never ever roll a class or not because of balance concerns, based on beta or not. The flavor of the month buffs and nerfs will swing to your class sometime anyway.
Hey Taugrim,
I know its extremely early to tell but, do u tink structured pvp’s Meta will be No Jack off all trades? Here is why i ask , In the BWE i did pvp almost exclusive from WvW to Structured and got to about 13k glory , not much but also did not play To much =( , And started to see Full Dps and Full support/tank builds to be way stronger.
Like the way that Crit dmg stacking works vs some 1 who is not tank build, I can take less then 5s to kill any class not spec in high resist/vit, same way a Full tank/support class will not die to a hybrid build.
I know its extreamly early to say but 1s teams can actually queue and call targets. Do u tink a mid spec will have its space in Stuctured pvp?
My dps Necro 18k hp , Amulet CritDmg/ Perfect ruby / Divinity / Bust runes on Axe/horn Doom Intelligence, Off weapons with Leeching & Blood for survival.
http://www.gw2tools.com/skills#n;NkaaN;Zgageaaaaaaabga;YdbX;ZZgTZ
My Tank NecroMM 29k hp Amulet Tuf/ Perfect Beryl/ Dolyak / Staff with Blood Offweapons Dagder/horn Blood & Hydromancy
http://www.gw2tools.com/skills#n;aapNS;aaaaaaeZUeWaeaa;Zabd;bWXdY
Also played with some Good Burst Warr spec and Phoenix Burst Ele’s.
That can kill ppl in matter of seconds.
And Tankspec Guardians and SpiritTank Rangers that where almost Immortals.
Anything in the middle was to easy to kill or cant kill fast.
*Note what i call Tank is ” Toughness/Vitality with proper upgrade components* Sorry for the wall of text XD
It’s too early to say, but I do agree with your statement that full DPS and full support/tank builds for Warrior seemed to be the strongest. By the latter I mean the Axe/Shield builds that could output good Eviscerate damage while still retaining high survivability.
The default spec for Warrior is a mid spec but it didn’t seem as strong as the other 2 extremes.
Granted the full DPS Warrior will be fairly squishy under focus fire. But they offset that by dropping opponents quickly and changing the numbers game.
You hit the nail on the head.
It’s part of the reason for the next BWE I want to try:
1. revising my Elementalist to more of a high-durability, mobile DoT’r (i.e. tanky)
2. revising my Warrior to play Axe/Shield, which retains good DD and has really good survivability.
Hey taug I saw your GW2 Stream and while you were playing WvW I had flashbacks of Warhammer Online. However let me tell you that when there were many players on the screen, the frames per second, well, it made Ilum look good.
There was some cpu problems in the BWE for some ppl, I played Swtor and this is my spec : i5 @ 4.0 / 16gig Ram / 6870 x2 , had 25fps + even in a eternaty main keep fight, In Swtor’s Illum cant remember the fps but it was un-playable.
Things to take into consideration are that GW 2 has weather,day/night cycles, more visual effect particles & more choke points in terrain all that are more cpu demanding and gpu then Illum’s Big open static map. Not to sound like a fanboy of GW2, But its Beta……i know we have all read those words all to much, but I myself did not Crash ever in WvW not even a hiccup.
U may have been one of the few ppl that had the game running in low priority. It was a bug reported on the beta forums.
https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/support/tech/Hardware-Compatibility-Issues/page/1
“We are currently optimizing Guild Wars 2, making ongoing improvements to the game’s frame rate. Presently, the game is CPU-bound on most high-end systems, so lowering graphics settings or upgrading your video card may not have a large impact on performance.”
Do you mean that the framerate of Taugrim’s stream made Ilum look good? Because keep in mind, he WAS streaming (encoding video for streaming can be CPU intensive and since the game hasn’t been optimized to actually take advantage of graphics cards yet it’s all on the CPU already).
I joined Taugrim’s group in WvW about halfway through his stream and never had any framerate issues while I was there. There was minor lag for ability activation (click a button and the animation doesn’t fire and the button stays highlighted for a bit) sometimes but nothing outside of the periodic lag spikes that cropped up throughout the weekend in all aspects of the game (due to server load, I imagine). Certainly felt much more stable than Ilum where you’d always have 10-15 frames skip whenever the zone buffs/quests got flipped.
Im just commenting on what I saw on the stream, I’ve been watching Taug’s videos since WAR and I also saw many of his swtor videos. The framerate issues he had while playing WvW were similar to the ones we suffered on Ilum, he even commented that when there are many players in the area his FPS would drop.
But as Emanuel Gonzales said, Beta is Beta, this is to be expected actually.
The lag in BWE for WvW was less than what I was getting in Ilum in 1.1.
It’s still Beta, we’ll see where GW2 lands.
Hi Taugrim
I have to admit i didn’t play much structured PvP mainly WvW so I’m playing more as a ranged warrior. I tend to stack the bleeds from the gun along with a pretty high crit chance to generate more bleeds. I didn’t really look at the PvP gear much but I’d look at speccing with a condition neck, crit and crit damage gear with the 60% to bleed on crit weapon enhancement. Without modding the gear i got using this spec i was able to compete pretty well http://www.gw2builds.org/create/bwe_1/warrior#3.0.6.0-2.5.2.6.1-10.30.10.0.20-2.2.4.8.8.2.1 . It’s only a beta spec but i was able to dot up from range and use the rifles 3 burst skills if i was ignored, if not with bleeds already stacked and a long cripple the sword and axe burst was enough to put most players i met. Obviously it’s just a beta and players ability and knowledge isn’t too high but i see no reason so far that it couldn’t work.
Some thoughts on your setup:
Keep in mind that condition damage can’t crit so the crit damage gear won’t add a lot.
Signet of Might isn’t terrible in that spec if you do have crit damage but without some focus on power gear even with the signet you won’t ever be hitting that hard in direct damage. Vulnerability on crit will be useful in WvW even if it doesn’t benefit you much (because it only affects direct damage; you’ll be buffing those around you but not yourself very much). Berserker’s power doesn’t help condition damage either (AFAIK there isn’t a single effect in the game that has a multiplicative factor towards condition damage, just condition duration like the amazing bleed duration trait you took).
Burst skills costing less adrenaline is an interesting trait. If it just makes the bars fill faster then it synergizes well with traits that buff you according to how much adrenaline you have.
Thanks for the feedback. As mentioned I haven’t really looked at the PvP gear much to think about how I’m going to gear. I see your point about getting power gear and will look at that next BWE where i’ll spend more time in structured than i have already. Although the spec is based around condition damage there’s still enough direct damage in volley, killshot, brutal shot and up close dual strike, kill shot and whirling axe that the heavy crit base and vulnerability still synergize well (I Hope).
Burst skill scosting less as you say means my adrenaline bar should hover at 2-3 bars the majority of the time giving the added crit and + damage. Along with the +10% damage to bleeding targets I hope to have around +12-15% most of the time which is a pretty hefty amount and beats any weapon based pluses and counts for a lot of added power overall.
It’s definitely directed more at PvE and WvW than structured PvP but i think the theory is pretty sound… just got to test it in PvP though :)
Itemization, especially the amulet slot, accounts for a huge part of how your spec will play. Gearing for power versus not gearing for power accounts for something like doubling the base damage of your attacks (compared to the contribution from the traits where it multiplies another ~10-15% more). There is a precision/condition damage/power amulet you can use which will give you a decent amount of power and condition damage (maybe 20-30% lower than someone who focused on power or condition damage) but you’ll end up with relatively low toughness/vitality so you have to keep that in mind as well. But again if you’re focusing on PvE and WvW maybe you can make that work as you’ll have a lot more support/ability to run with a bit of a glass cannon spec.
Hey Taug, check out this video of some ex-WAR players roaming in WvWvW, so pretty sweet elementalist group play http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2Pey8g3CWU&hd=1
Taug maybe you can help out here. Got my brother into MMO’s and playing PVP in SWTOR and he’s hooked on a Vanguard. Running Assault Spec mostly and really likes it. I’m trying to get us moved over to GW2 when it comes out because of the flexibility it gives in being able to play with your friends from Dynamic events and scaling/sidekicking. I’m thinking the Warrior may be the closest I’ve seen to the feel of the Vanguard and was looking to get your opinion since you’ve played both or if you know another class is closer to the same feel. I know nothing will be exact but seeing as the Vanguard is really the first MMO class he’s played and done well with in PVP its going to be hard to get him away from it without something similar in style.
Thanks!
I haven’t played enough GW2 nor all the classes to give a recommendation.
Okay… :( Thanks :-P
I know I’ll be in the next Beta, he’s thinking about buying it before then as well so we’ll get to try it out. Just hoping I can help him find a direction he’ll like.
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