Build Review #3
Originally Published by Sausaletus Rex
The last few weeks I’ve showcased builds featuring Warrior as secondary professions. The first used Warrior for a few key defensive additions to an otherwise complete Necromancer. The second, a Warrior in Mesmer's clothing using Illusionary Weaponry. So it seemed only too appropriate to this week take a look at a primary Warrior to see the true glories those secondary wars were only hinting at.
I was perhaps a bit reluctant to spend the time and effort involved in one of these build reviews in something as simple as a proper Warrior. At least, until I realized that building a Warrior is simple to me only because I’ve been doing it for so long. The sorts of tips and techniques that are, by now, second nature to me are basic, to be sure, but only to those who are willing to use their Warriors effectively. Everything a Warrior will do is based off the principles that lead me to make my own, personal choices when contemplating a build. It’s not simple, it’s fundamental, and it never hurts to review the fundamentals. So, this week I’ll be looking at a build that is in desperate need of the aid of those fundamentals, a Warrior/Elementalist created by justin_m.
Warrior/Elementalists are a personal favorite of mine, as anyone who ran into me during the WPE is likely to attest. They’re both professions that can easily turn to damage dealing roles so they work quite well together. They synergize, each feeding off the other to create a character that’s going to be more dangerous than it would otherwise. The same’s true for those characters with a more defensive mindset as both Elementalist and Warrior provide answers to that desire as well. Many people would look over an Elementalist’s skill list and decide that those energy costs are simply too high to bear on character with an energy pool of a mere 20. Those people are wrong, of course. The trick to using skills from the profession with the most energy in the game with a character from the profession with the least energy in the game is to use the Elementalist’s energy management techniques or to just avoid those Elementalist skills that have high costs. You then couple those affordable skills to what you’d be doing with a “pure” Warrior in the first place using them to augment that build’s strengths.
First, though, you need to understand just what it is that will let a pure Warrior fly. A Warrior built using only those skills and techniques from the Warrior profession is a pure Warrior, of course. It’s, at best, an intellectual exercise because each and every character in the game has the capacity to have two different professions and there should always be at least one skill, one attribute, one reason from that other profession that has convinced you to take it in the first place. If there’s not one skill from your primary you’re willing to drop for a skill from your secondary profession then you likely should look for another profession. And, yes, there are characters that only have one profession thanks to a glitch in the new tutorial section but my point is that no one should want to play such odd creatures given the choice.
There are no pure Warriors, then, but we can learn from what making one will tell us. So, just what is it that sets a Warrior apart from everyone else? Just what areas is the Warrior profession geared to enter?
The first and most obvious role a primary Warrior can adopt is to deal damage. Warriors are big, strong brutes who enjoy hitting things until they stop moving. And they have the attributes and the skills to make their weapons hit very hard indeed. A well-constructed Warrior can mow down opponents, surely enough, but they must first know how to do so. The primary gate to walk through here is staying in range. Warriors work best in melee. In fact, they work best to the point of not working at range. To do damage, a Warrior needs to be standing right next to their target. Something, of course, their target is going to want to avoid at all costs.
Therefore, the first thing a Warrior with an eye towards slaughter foes must learn to do is to stay close to his opponents. The two main ways of doing so are to either make sure the opponent can’t get away or to make sure the Warrior can catch up if they do. Preventing the opponent from running is achieved by reducing their movement in some way. That’s called snaring and an example of a snaring skill is Hamstring which will Cripple the target when used, decreasing the speed they can run for a time, which allows the Warrior to keep up with them easily. The disadvantage with most Warrior snares, though, is that they require a Warrior to already be in range before they’re used. That’s where the other method, namely increasing the Warrior’s movement rate rather than decreasing the speed of the target, known as using speed buffs comes into play. An example of a speed buff would be the Warrior’s stance Sprint that simply lets them run faster for a brief time. Using such a skill allows a Warrior to close into melee range faster than they otherwise would in addition to preventing someone from outdistancing them once they do.
Either one or the other – speed buff or snare - is about as close as a required resident on a Warrior’s skill bar as it gets. Other characters can work from range but a Warrior needs to be close. Reserving a slot to make sure that happens is just good, common sense.
The next thing damage dealing Warriors care about is their weapon. Equipment is vital for all professions but to no profession more than the Warrior. And a large part of that is the weapon they swing. And the effectiveness of a weapon is tied into several factors including that weapon’s associated attribute, the skills linked to that weapon, and the statistics of the weapon itself. Warriors are aided here by the fact that all the weapon attributes they care about – the melee weapons, axe, hammer, and sword – are within the Warrior profession. A weapon’s effectiveness is tied to its associated attribute in a number of ways. The most readily apparent one is that a decent weapon has an attribute requirement. Without a certain rank in a weapon’s attribute it will deal far less damage. A sword which deals 14~22 damage with a Swordsmanship 9+ attribute requirement will deal something like 4~6 damage if you only have Swordsmanship 8. But more over than that, the level of a weapon’s attribute determines how close to actually getting that displayed damage a character gets. With Swordsmanship 9, no matter the damage on your sword or its requirements you’ll only deal around 77% of the listed damage on your sword at best. The following table shows exactly what each rank of your weapon attribute is worth in terms of the percentage of damage (Credit to Ensign for figuring this all out in his combat mechanics treatise.) :
If a Warrior cares about doing damage they’re going to want their weapon’s attribute as close to 12 as possible. Over 12 the benefits of each rank drop off dramatically. Under 12 the effectiveness of the weapon is drastically lowered. Weapon 12 is the gold standard in any Warrior build for that reason.
A weapon attribute is also important because it provides the Warrior several skills usable only when using a particular kind of weapon – Swordsmanship skills require a sword, after all – and those skills serve to make a weapon that much more effective. They add damage over and on top of the weapon’s base damage. They add effects and conditions to weaken a foe’s position or improve the Warrior’s. A Warrior just swinging away with a weapon is dangerous. But a Warrior swinging away with a weapon enhanced by that weapon’s skills is much more so. Taking high levels in a weapon’s attribute is a double bonus then because it both makes the weapon itself better and makes the skills that weapon uses better.
Beyond improving the attribute of a weapon or the skills that weapon uses the next step in making a Warrior better is to simply get a better weapon. There’s a cap on just how much damage a type of weapon can deal and a Warrior’s weapon should be as close that maximum as possible. More than that, weapons can be upgraded or otherwise modified to add yet more power. The best Warriors will be the ones swinging the best weapons. Max damage with several highly useful modifiers. Changing the damage type of a weapon lets it bypass some protections, for example, by eliminating the bonus armor granted against another type of damage. Other modifiers can increase the speed with which a weapon swings or grant the wielder energy when it strikes. There’s no one “best” for every character, not if the game is approaching the balance point, instead it depends on the needs of each individual build or character. The best weapon your Warrior will wield is one that will reinforce the rest of the choices you’ve made, from attribute allocation to skill choices.
At the moment, however, it’s a clear choice in which weapon to choose. Swords are, hands down, the most popular Warrior weapon and deservedly so. They offer the skill line that’s the most deep and diversified as well as the one with the most effectiveness at dealing damage. It’s a line that relies on both energy and adrenaline and can spread around a nice variety of conditions. Axes are hampered because they rely on adrenaline but when using an adrenal skill it drains your other adrenal skills of one strike of adrenaline meaning that a lot of adrenal skills on your bar work to reduce the effectiveness of all your adrenal skills. And hammers are handicapped by their slower speed than the other weapons, they hit less often, gather less adrenaline, and trigger fewer effects, and also by their two-handed requirement requiring a Warrior to forgo a shield. Both can be made to work but not as easily as a sword.
So, a Warrior needs to swing a weapon, in melee, to deal damage and is well served by making that weapon as good as possible. What else can be done to increase their effectiveness? Several things, of course, but when discussing the best way to get sheer damage, the answer is to basically increase that damage. The easiest way is simply to pack more damage into each and every hit. Many skills cause each attack a character makes to deal more damage. An example from the Warrior’s skill list would be Power Attack, which will add a certain amount of damage onto your weapon’s hit for a nominal cost of energy. The real key to getting a lot of damage out of a Warrior is to stack up several ways of adding that damage to an attack. If you have an enchantment that adds damage, a hex that adds damage, a stance that adds damage, and a skill that adds damage you’re adding a lot of damage per hit. That’s called stacking damage, and by doing so, you multiply the damage your character can do drastically especially if the damage buffs you’re using can be added to each and every swing. There are lots of ways to do this and we’ll get into them a bit later on.
Also, a Warrior can swing their weapon better simply by swinging faster. A skill such as Frenzy will increase their attack rate much the same way using Sprint will increase their movement rate. Something as seemingly harmless as raising a character’s rate of attack by 33% will increase their damage output by 150%. If, for example, they swung twice for 10 damage in 3 seconds for a total of 20 damage, they would now swing three times for a total of 30 damage. What’s happened is a dramatic increase to their damage per second or their DPS. Each and every second they deal damage they’ll be dealing more damage just as they’d do more damage by stacking up damage. For a Warrior pumping out damage doesn’t come down to a matter of using one or two big skills, the way it does for an Elementalist or the average nuker, it comes down to adding together many smaller attacks in the same time it takes that nuker to get their spells off. It’s cumulative damage, gathered together from all the damage buffs and weapon swings that really downs an opponent. So increasing the amount of swings within that time is one good way of going about increasing that damage because the more damage you do per second the more damage you’ll do over a number of seconds. Either way, the advantage a Warrior has is in doing that increased damage consistently. Not one swing, not one hit, but many at the highest damage at the cheapest cost repeated over and over until the target is dead.
A further way to raise DPS is through damage over time or DOT skills. Causing your opponent just 1 pip of degeneration causes them 2 damage each and every second. So many Warriors will use a skill like Sever Artery to cause their opponents to Bleed and take 6 more damage over and above anything else they do. Each pip is worth 2 health and there’s a maximum of 10 pips so you’ll never get more than 20DPS from your DOT but when it’s paired with other techniques that raise damage it can be especially devastating.
Dealing damage with a Warrior is a matter of swinging a good weapon, swinging it as hard as possible, and swinging it as fast as possible to raise their DPS and allocating their attributes and slotting their skills to support that weapon.
Damage, of course, is not the only thing a primary Warrior can do. And, indeed, a competent healer will outrace a competent damage dealer each and every time so it’s not always the best thing. Damage is a slow process, one that will take a long time to eliminate a threat; sometimes it’s necessary to prevent a threat almost immediately. That’s the job of disruption.
With disruption, a character aims not to kill a target but to prevent them from doing anything worthwhile. Damage is a solution to a problem while disruption is delaying the inevitable. Snaring a character is one example of disruption, although a light disruption of their abilities. There are as many ways of dealing disruption as there are of dealing damage although a pure Warrior has problems making the best of all of them. But the general goal is to prevent them from using the skills they want when they want. As skills in Guild Wars mostly require energy to use one easy way of preventing someone from using skills is to prevent them from having any energy. Energy denial techniques, skills that rob characters of their hard regenerated energy or prevent them from regenerating more are extremely effective in relegating someone to the sidelines of a battle. A Warrior doesn’t have much in the way of help here although there are a few skills, such as Fear Me! to explore.
Another way of preventing someone from using a skill is to interrupt the casting of that skill. Interruption’s a much more involved prospect than energy denial because it requires a lot more attention to what your opponent is doing. One of the best tools a Warrior has for interruption is Distracting Blow. That skill will interrupt the action of whatever the target is doing should the melee hit land. Like most other Warrior skills it requires that arm’s length range but since a Warrior’s going to be working to get in close range anyway it likely doesn’t matter that much to them. Anything with an appreciable casting time can be interrupted. It requires timing and quick reflexes and “babysitting” your target before they start to cast anything but it can effectively stop them from using that critical skill. Interrupting a skill also makes the target lose the energy required to cast that skill so it can be coupled well with energy denial because interrupting a target enough will soon drain them of the resources to use a skill in the first place.
Yet another way of going about disruption is the dreaded skill lock. This technique temporarily disables an opponent’s skill causing it to recharge through the lock and hopefully preventing them from using it when it’s needed. A Warrior doesn’t have much to pick from here beyond Disrupting Chop an axe skill that will interrupt a target and, should it have interrupted a skill, lock the skill they were using for a long time. As both an interrupt and a skill lock it’s very effective.
The final method of disruption that a Warrior can perform is through debuffing. A debuff is any sort of skill that makes your opponent worse off than they were before. Anyone who’s played Guild Wars for any length of time has probably been tagged by one hex or another – something that drained their health or hurt them when they attacked or made them run slower - and that’s the basic idea of a debuff. You disrupt your opposition by making them more ineffective at what they want to do. The way a Warrior goes about debuffing is to impart conditions on their foes.
Conditions are a specific subset of debuffs and there are several ways of giving them to an opponent through the Warrior skill list. Sever Artery will make an opponent Bleed, causing them to lose health over time, Dismember will give an opponent a Deep Wound, lowering their maximum health, Staggering Blow will Weaken someone, causing their attacks to do less damage, and the previously mentioned Hamstring will Cripple a target, causing them to run slower. By placing several different conditions on a target a Warrior will be causing havoc by reducing some of their fundamental abilities. Conditions don’t stack with and of themselves – you can’t have three or four Blinds on the same target – instead when you place a condition on someone already suffering that condition the duration that condition will last is extended so the goal here is to use several conditions and to use them often enough that they’re more or less permanently on your target.
Lastly, once past the roles of dealing damage and dealing disruption what a Warrior can also specialize in is the role of absorbing that damage and disruption. In short, Warriors can tank.
Through the use of defensive stances, like Shield Stance, Warriors can decrease their chances of suffering damage. Through skills that add armor, like Watch Yourself!, they can reduce the amount of damage they’ll take. Through the use of skills that heal them, like Healing Signet Warriors can recover that damage.
Even without those skills a Warrior is going to be wearing armor that, point for point is better than anyone else’s in their party in all but a few circumstances (Rangers facing elemental damage have a Warrior beat but that’s about it.) so they’ll already be taking far less damage than other professions. When combined with the various options for defense and self-healing that a Warrior has access to that makes for a character that’s very survivable. Of all the characters in your party to take a blow, the Warrior’s probably going to have the best chance at living through it. Or, more importantly, the best chance at taking the least amount of damage for a healer to recover so they can conserve their energy. That’s the big advantage of having a Warrior tank. They can survive more so fewer resources need to be spent making sure they survive. That reduces the burden on your teammates who care about keeping others alive and lets those who care about dropping targets actually concentrate on dealing as much damage as possible rather than running around trying not to get hurt. All a Warrior really needs to do to become a tank, as far as a build is concerned, is to load up on what will best let them come out of an encounter with their health points intact. There are all sorts of tactics and techniques that go into becoming an effective tank. You’ll need to learn how to attract the enemy to yourself and to keep them from attacking the rest of your teammates, you’ll need to learn to time your buffs and heals for the best effect, you’ll need to learn how to position and screen yourself, and you’ll need to learn not to panic as your hit points start flying off, but those are more issues of tactics rather than strategy and are a bit beyond the scope of this article. And, for the most part, they don’t really matter in most PvP matches because your human opponents will be focusing on your weaker teammates rather than the metal-clad Warrior. Tanking is of primary importance in a PvE setting yet it’s almost an after thought in PvP, although the lessons about self-reliance and survivability to be drawn from it are still quite important.
So, when tanking a Warrior is providing protection for the rest of their teammates. Teammates who are softer and less defended targets. And to do so the Warrior is the one standing up to the enemy while the blows rain down upon them.
And, of course, since they’ll be right next to the enemy they’ll be up close enough to rain their own blows upon them. A Warrior can tank and while tanking be dishing out enough damage to drop whatever they’re tanking. Or they can be dealing damage to a target while also disrupting them making them easier to kill. Those roles can be blended and mixed on any Warrior’s skill bar to create a Warrior’s build. A Warriors best not when they can excel at any one of those roles but when they can combine those roles together and use, for example, the increased durability of a tank to allow a Warrior to continue to stand in close range and pound away at the enemy with that sustainable cumulative damage. Once that’s accomplished, a Warrior can look into the options provided by their secondary profession and find what they need to support and reinforce their strategy there.
The Warrior, though, is a very difficult profession to pair with others. It’s the most different from other professions. When you look at it with Ranger there’s the conflict between being best when far away and being best close up. When compared to the various casters there’s the difference in energy pools and defense in addition to the various conflicts between skill lists. What we have today, of course, is a Warrior/Elementalist.
Now, as I said, the Warrior/Elementalist is the pairing of two professions that are both quite good at offense. They both deal damage, they can both toss around conditions; they can both be put to good use by taking the fight to the opponent. That’s markedly different than, say, a Warrior/Monk where the main advantage is an increase in survivability leading to a better tank or a character more capable of sustained damage, or a Warrior/Necromancer where the point is to massively disrupt and debuff an opponent to set them up for large amounts of damage. At heart, the choice of Warrior/Elementalists says that you’re a player who likes to attack.
The main problem there, though, is that while the Warrior skill list is designed for the small energy pool you’ll have, the Elementalist’s is not. A primary Warrior will have twenty energy and two regeneration while a primary Elementalist will have sixty or more energy and four regeneration. The problem is not so much the energy as it is the regeneration. More regeneration means that energy spent will return faster so that when an Elementalist casts a five energy skill they’ll have the energy to cast it again in under four seconds a Warrior will need to wait seven seconds for that energy to return. The skills and spells that an Elementalist does to do their damage are, by and large, extremely costly for a primary Warrior. An Elementalist’s plan for doing damage is to spend a lot of energy to do a lot of damage and then quickly get that energy back to do it again and that’s just not possible on a Warrior’s energy pool. A primary Warrior can’t stand to cast those ten and fifteen energy skills once every five or ten seconds. Therefore, the best skills to pluck from Elementalist are the skills that are efficient.
These are skills that offer a lot of benefit for a little amount of energy. They either pack a lot of damage or effect per point of energy or their effects last a long time for that energy. Remember, the key to dealing damage with a Warrior is sustainability. You want to deal a lot of damage but you want to be able to deal that damage for a long time. Burst damage – spending all your effort and energy into doing a lot of damage all at once then having your output tail off until you can gather the resources to do it again – is not what a Warrior is really best at doing. So, the skills that offer high damage per energy or the ones that offer long durations for low energy are the skills in the Elementalist’s list that should appeal to a Warrior. True, Elementalist does offer a lot of options for managing your energy, such as the Glyphs of Energy and there are ways of reaping a lot of energy from the Warrior list, too, but that improved energy management is best put to use when you’re already being economic and efficient with your en. Using that GLE to allow a Warrior to cast that big twenty-five energy nuke is nice and all but using it with lower cost skills is an even better way of making sure that energy is put to good use.
A good example of what a Warrior looks for in the Elementalist list is any of the various Conjure Elements. There are three versions, one each for Air, Fire, and Water and each adds a bit of damage to each and every weapon hit your character makes. That sounds great for a Warrior who’ll be swinging a weapon a lot. The Conjures are damage buffs and they’ll be added to each and every attack your character makes including those improved attack skills. And, of course, that’s a great way of sending your DPS sky-high. But what really makes the Conjure so attractive is that duration. A Conjured Element lasts for nearly a minute, at present, for just ten energy. Ten energy is a lot for a Warrior, sure, but not when they get six seconds of improved damage for each point of energy and they’ll only need to cast that skill once every minute or so. Even with only two pips of regeneration a Warrior will have forty energy returning each and every minute meaning they’ll have more than enough to cover the constant replacing of that Conjured damage. There’s really no excuse for going Warrior/Elementalist and not looking into the possibilities a Conjure offers you. Just as a snare or speed buff should have permanent residence on a Warrior’s skill bar, so, too, should a Conjure on the Warrior/Elementalist’s.
Beyond the excellent Conjures, there are still skills that can greatly benefit the Warrior/Elementalist. Warriors have few problems surviving in melee range so the various PBAoE skills – those skills that affect a radius around the caster – can be put to good use. The real key is to look for skills which can be used repeatedly without putting too much of a burden on your regeneration. That skill that takes five energy but can be cast every three seconds is actually worse, in terms of energy, than the skill which takes ten energy but will recharge in ten seconds. And beyond the concerns of energy management what also should be considered are the casting times. Every second you spend casting a skill, as a Warrior, is a second you’re not swinging your weapon or falling further out of the melee range you need to do so. High casting times are something a Warrior wants to avoid just as much as they want to avoid those skills that they can’t afford to cast all the time. The name of the game is to hammer away at a target and keep hammering away, hounding them into death or ineffectuality and while a high-cost high-cast skill might be damaging the longer it keeps you from that chipping damage the more it’s hurting your overall damage.
All that said, let’s take a look at justin_m’s build :
There are some good starts here and there but, overall, it’s a build that’s in serious need of help.
The general idea here would be to close with a target and use Hamstring to Cripple them to keep them close. Frenzy to build up the adrenaline for Sever Artery and make them Bleed. Enervating Charge and Lightning Strike. Glyph of Lesser Energy can be used to reduce the cost of either Lightning Strike or Enervating Charge by casting it before the battle is joined. That Glyph effect lasts a while and won’t be affected by the Hamstring or Sever, it’ll drop the energy cost of those Air skills but only once every so often. Healing Signet can be used to recover lost health, albeit at the cost of doubling the damage justin_m takes. And there’s a Resurrection Signet there in order to revive any fallen comrades.
There’s an emphasis here on fighting justin_m’s fellow Warriors because he’s settled on the Air Magic line. Air Magic has many lightning skills and lightning skills – not lightning damage, that’s something else, entirely – have an innate armor penetration. When used they act as if their target had a much lower armor rating than they should. Currently, it’s about 25% armor penetration, and obviously that makes a greater difference the more armor your target has initially.
Armor is exponential, the actual amount doesn’t matter when raising or lowering it for the purposes of damage, it’s the amount you’ve raised or lowered it that does. There’s no change to the increase in your damage if you drop a target from 60AL to 40AL than if you dropped a target from 100AL to 80AL. You’ll obviously do more damage to the 40AL target but you’ll increase your damage by the same percent either way. However, since lightning’s armor penetration is a percentage, it does care about the initial amount. That 100AL target becomes 75AL while that 60AL becomes 45AL and that is a difference. You’ll still do more damage against that 45AL target but you’ll increase your damage as a percent more against that 75AL target. Armor penetration, as long as it’s not a flat drop to AL, is bet set against the targets with more armor to start with. And there’s few with more armor to start with than Warriors (Again, it’s Rangers here who’ll have more AL to start with. Their 70+30AL means they’ll have 100AL against lightning damage. Most Warriors will have 80AL or 85AL to start with). So Air Magic is the line of choice if you want to tackle those hardened targets. It’s also a line that offer the most in the way of single target direct damage spells so you won’t just be doing better damage because of penetration you’ll be doing better damage because you’re more efficient at damaging a single target.
That’s further evidenced by the selection of Enervating Charge, which will damage a target, and not for an insignificant amount considering armor penetration on that lightning damage, but also causes Weakness. Weakness, though, is only valuable against physical attackers – that’s Warriors and Rangers, basically. It causes their weapon attacks to do far less damage but it’s not going to do anything against that Elementalist lobbing spells or that Necromancer tossing out hexes or that Mesmer out to interrupt. It’s also a costly skill considering its recharge time. Lightning Strike is even worse. At their current costs and current recharge times in order to cast them both as often as possible would require roughly six or seven pips of regeneration. Hamstring’s also a ten energy skill that can be cast repeatedly further sucking up all the energy available. Those two lightning skills are both nice, quick, good damage skills but they’re just too costly to belong on a Warrior’s skill bar. One, perhaps, but not both at the same time.
Glyph of Lesser Energy or even the elite version Glyph of Energy, which would be wasted here, is a poor solution. True, it’s the sort of long lasting, low-cost skill that should appeal to a Warrior but it has an extremely long recharge time. You can only use it with those nukes every so often. When you do, it’ll make them cost, effectively five energy – less than that, actually, as you’ll be regenerating the whole time from when you cast them to the time you complete your spell, the longer you wait before casting your next spell the bigger the savings – but it does so at the cost of adding some casting time to that spell. As I tried to explain before, adding casting times to skills is a bad thing for a Warrior to be doing. This relegates Glyph of Lesser Energy to the skill you’ll use before a battle and will avoid using during it. By using it to prepare for a fight, justin_m can cast his first nuke for free, effectively, and that’s not a bad thing, but there are better ways to go about managing energy.
As for Resurrection Signet, far be it from me to discourage people from the notion that rezzing is crucial in any pitched fight. But, if you’re really going to bring a rez, then go Warrior/Monk and take a much superior skill. Rezsig can only be used once per map and then it will rez your teammate where they stand with one health and no energy. That’s not bringing them back to the fight, that’s making them a sitting duck.
So, let’s see what we can’t do to improve matters. I do so enjoy considering Elementalist builds because it means I can showcase a few different examples, one for each elemental line. So, that’s what I’ll do here. Justin_m’s build need drastic overhauls, so let’s look at some of the different ways he can go with it.
First, let’s establish a base to work from. What’s the core of our build? Well, since we’ll be using a sword and pairing Warrior with Elementalist, it seems like we’ll want to increase our damage something fierce. Therefore, we’ll pump out a lot of damage by using our Conjure and an attack buff like Frenzy coupled with a few choice damage skills. The popular way of doing things is to use Sever Artery to cause a target to Bleed then Gash to use that bleeding to cause a Deep Wound. And then to follow that all up with Final Thrust - which I’m not sold on so maybe we’ll try some alternatives - once the target’s dropped below 50% health, which should happen pretty quickly. Those are all adrenal skill so our attack buff will help us charge them and we won’t even touch on our energy beyond that ten en every minute for our Conjure. We’ll need our requisite speed buff or snare, too. That’s six skills, which gives us two more to play with. With that kind of set-up we’re best going with an attribute set-up to maximize our damage. Strength will add to our damage from our skills and offer us a few nice skill options, Swordsmanship needs to be at 12, of course, and whatever element we use needs to be as high as possible, too. Everything else, such as the Tactics from justin_m’s original build, is superfluous.
So, let’s start with justin_m’s favored element, Air Magic. My version of a sword swinging Air Warrior would look something like this :
Whirling Blade
Since we’re using Sever and Gash, we’re going to have a target with at least two conditions. We’ll take Hamstring to use as a snare and cause a third. With that we can pick up Victory is Mine! for our elite skill. That’s going to give us five energy per condition per enemy that we’re standing right next to. That will more than make up for the energy we’ve used to cast Hamstring and Victory is Mine! in the first place and gain a little healing on the side, too. We can do that once every fifteen seconds or so and that should be more than enough to build up to our Final with Frenzy. And if energy ever becomes a big problem we can drop Hamstring from the rotation and actually gain energy from using Victory is Mine! That leaves us with one slot left over and we could spend that on something like Lightning Strike or Lightning Orb but, instead, let’s get a bit creative and use Gale instead. Gale will cause exhaustion when we use it and that’s a bit off-putting with a Warrior’s energy pool as just one cast of Gale and we’ll drop to a maximum of ten energy and it’ll take us thirty seconds to undo it. However, we don’t have any skill that costs more than ten energy and what Gale gives us is a safety net. We’re using Hamstring, mostly, to snare our foes, but we can only use Hamstring when we’re in melee. If a target manages to limp away from us somehow, Gale makes sure they don’t get too far. It gives our character a bit of range and that’s never a bad thing to add to a Warrior build.
But, let’s take try a different direction with Fire.
Burning Blade
We’ll trade in Hamstring for the cheaper Sprint. It’s also a bit more tactically useful as it allows our character not just to stay in melee range but to reach it more quickly as well as to escape should something go wrong. Since we, hopefully, won’t be spending that much energy we can use Immolate to add to our offensive punch. Not only does that skill cause a decent amount of damage, damage we can use from range if need be, it also sets the target On Fire. That’s also a condition – albeit a brief one, so we can use that to power Victory is Mine! It won’t be that hard as Victory is Mine! is an instant cast shout so we can use it almost immediately after Sever+Gash+Immolate and offset the energy cost entirely. Immolate will be a bit costly to spam with its low recycle rate but we can use it every time we’re going to use Victory is Mine! at the very least.
As I said before, I’m skeptical about Final Thrust. I don’t like using any adrenal skill that drains my other adrenal skills of all their energy when I’m using as many adrenal skills as we are here. So, instead, let’s add in Hundred Blades. That will cost us energy instead of adrenaline but with Victory is Mine! our energy picture isn’t looking all that bad. As with Final Thrust it will serve as a big increase to our DPS when we get a target near death and it’ll have the added bonus of adding our Conjured bonus not once but twice to our strikes.
Still, let’s look at what we can find with another elite skill with Water Magic.
Frigid Fencer
Water Trident is our elite skill here. It’s a low-cost, low-recharge ranged attack that can also knock down its target. As with Gale, if an enemy manages to slip away from us, they’re not going to be slipping away for long. As an added bonus we can use a Warrior’s Stonefist Gaunlets to increase the knock down time not just on our Warrior skills but on things like Water Trident, too. It won’t work all the time, so we’ll keep Sprint around in case we miss or we otherwise need to reach a target.
Once again, let’s try an alternative to Final Thrust here and go with Pure Strike and Galrath Slash. Both take a little less adrenaline than Final Strike and both do a little bit less damage, especially when the target is under 50% health. Adding another adrenaline skill to our rotation will lower our overall effectiveness, though. When you use an adrenal skill all your other adrenal skills are drained of one hit of adrenaline. That’s not that much of a problem as when you use an adrenal skill you’re usually using it to score a hit so you’ll gain those skills a strike of adrenaline, too, but the net effect is that using an adrenal attack won’t charge your other adrenal attacks. The more adrenal skills you use, the longer it takes for them all to charge. We’ll have four adrenal skills here as opposed to the three with Final but that’s increased charge time is offset by the increased charge time we’d have after Final drained all our adrenaline from our skills. We can further offset things by taking Berserker Stance instead of Frenzy. We won’t be able to use it as often as we can Frenzy but when using it we’ll gain more adrenaline so our skills will charge faster. Since we’ll likely be pumping out Water Tridents, too, using our attack buff less means we’ll be spending less energy on it, too, so we can afford more Tridents.
Finally, Earth Magic offers us no Conjure. We’re already shooting our offense in the foot by taking it; so let’s concentrate not on damage but on becoming a tank. Earth Magic offers some pretty good defensive skills so it’s well suited to the task.
Clay Soldier
Instead of Victory is Mine! let’s take another energy management elite with Warrior’s Endurance. That will let our melee attacks gain us some energy so we won’t be as dependent upon quickly taking advantage of our conditions. Since we’re not as worried about dealing damage here, just surviving, we’ll drop Final Thrust entirely in favor of a defensive stance like Shield Stance. That offers the best protection at the lowest cost. Since we’re going to be tanking we’re not as worried about the hit to our movement rate. The enemies are going to be swarming us not the other way around. Wary Stance is another possibility, albeit a more costly one, as that will serve to give us some energy but only if our opponents are using attack skills. Sever+Gash actually works fairly nicely on a tanking Warrior as they serve to hasten the death of their target. The less time that target is alive the less time it has to beat on you. They’re also adrenal and won’t cost any energy so they can stay. Since we're trying to stay alive as much as possible Flurry gets the nod over Frenzy.
Next, we’ll pluck a few choice skills from Earth. Armor of Earth is a nice defensive buff. It should about halve the damage this character receives and its duration is a lot longer than its recycle time. Again, we don’t really care about the movement debuff. It’s a costly skill but we can alternate it with Shield Stance to get the most out of it. Obsidian Flesh would be a nice skill to have as it both decreases damage and renders us immune to harmful spells – a big weakness of our stance will be that it will only protect us from physical attacks – but it’s also an elite skill and we wouldn’t have the energy to cast it without our Endurance. So, we’ll take a ward instead. Ward Against Melee can be used while Shield Stance is recharging to increase our opponent’s miss rate. Or, if we’re planning to go up against a lot of spell casters or elemental damage we can take Ward Against Elements instead.
There you have it, four different elements, and four different looks at building a better sword Warrior/Elementalist. Thanks for reading and be sure to comment on this essay as well as justin_m’s build here in our forums.
I was perhaps a bit reluctant to spend the time and effort involved in one of these build reviews in something as simple as a proper Warrior. At least, until I realized that building a Warrior is simple to me only because I’ve been doing it for so long. The sorts of tips and techniques that are, by now, second nature to me are basic, to be sure, but only to those who are willing to use their Warriors effectively. Everything a Warrior will do is based off the principles that lead me to make my own, personal choices when contemplating a build. It’s not simple, it’s fundamental, and it never hurts to review the fundamentals. So, this week I’ll be looking at a build that is in desperate need of the aid of those fundamentals, a Warrior/Elementalist created by justin_m.
Warrior/Elementalists are a personal favorite of mine, as anyone who ran into me during the WPE is likely to attest. They’re both professions that can easily turn to damage dealing roles so they work quite well together. They synergize, each feeding off the other to create a character that’s going to be more dangerous than it would otherwise. The same’s true for those characters with a more defensive mindset as both Elementalist and Warrior provide answers to that desire as well. Many people would look over an Elementalist’s skill list and decide that those energy costs are simply too high to bear on character with an energy pool of a mere 20. Those people are wrong, of course. The trick to using skills from the profession with the most energy in the game with a character from the profession with the least energy in the game is to use the Elementalist’s energy management techniques or to just avoid those Elementalist skills that have high costs. You then couple those affordable skills to what you’d be doing with a “pure” Warrior in the first place using them to augment that build’s strengths.
First, though, you need to understand just what it is that will let a pure Warrior fly. A Warrior built using only those skills and techniques from the Warrior profession is a pure Warrior, of course. It’s, at best, an intellectual exercise because each and every character in the game has the capacity to have two different professions and there should always be at least one skill, one attribute, one reason from that other profession that has convinced you to take it in the first place. If there’s not one skill from your primary you’re willing to drop for a skill from your secondary profession then you likely should look for another profession. And, yes, there are characters that only have one profession thanks to a glitch in the new tutorial section but my point is that no one should want to play such odd creatures given the choice.
There are no pure Warriors, then, but we can learn from what making one will tell us. So, just what is it that sets a Warrior apart from everyone else? Just what areas is the Warrior profession geared to enter?
The first and most obvious role a primary Warrior can adopt is to deal damage. Warriors are big, strong brutes who enjoy hitting things until they stop moving. And they have the attributes and the skills to make their weapons hit very hard indeed. A well-constructed Warrior can mow down opponents, surely enough, but they must first know how to do so. The primary gate to walk through here is staying in range. Warriors work best in melee. In fact, they work best to the point of not working at range. To do damage, a Warrior needs to be standing right next to their target. Something, of course, their target is going to want to avoid at all costs.
Therefore, the first thing a Warrior with an eye towards slaughter foes must learn to do is to stay close to his opponents. The two main ways of doing so are to either make sure the opponent can’t get away or to make sure the Warrior can catch up if they do. Preventing the opponent from running is achieved by reducing their movement in some way. That’s called snaring and an example of a snaring skill is Hamstring which will Cripple the target when used, decreasing the speed they can run for a time, which allows the Warrior to keep up with them easily. The disadvantage with most Warrior snares, though, is that they require a Warrior to already be in range before they’re used. That’s where the other method, namely increasing the Warrior’s movement rate rather than decreasing the speed of the target, known as using speed buffs comes into play. An example of a speed buff would be the Warrior’s stance Sprint that simply lets them run faster for a brief time. Using such a skill allows a Warrior to close into melee range faster than they otherwise would in addition to preventing someone from outdistancing them once they do.
Either one or the other – speed buff or snare - is about as close as a required resident on a Warrior’s skill bar as it gets. Other characters can work from range but a Warrior needs to be close. Reserving a slot to make sure that happens is just good, common sense.
The next thing damage dealing Warriors care about is their weapon. Equipment is vital for all professions but to no profession more than the Warrior. And a large part of that is the weapon they swing. And the effectiveness of a weapon is tied into several factors including that weapon’s associated attribute, the skills linked to that weapon, and the statistics of the weapon itself. Warriors are aided here by the fact that all the weapon attributes they care about – the melee weapons, axe, hammer, and sword – are within the Warrior profession. A weapon’s effectiveness is tied to its associated attribute in a number of ways. The most readily apparent one is that a decent weapon has an attribute requirement. Without a certain rank in a weapon’s attribute it will deal far less damage. A sword which deals 14~22 damage with a Swordsmanship 9+ attribute requirement will deal something like 4~6 damage if you only have Swordsmanship 8. But more over than that, the level of a weapon’s attribute determines how close to actually getting that displayed damage a character gets. With Swordsmanship 9, no matter the damage on your sword or its requirements you’ll only deal around 77% of the listed damage on your sword at best. The following table shows exactly what each rank of your weapon attribute is worth in terms of the percentage of damage (Credit to Ensign for figuring this all out in his combat mechanics treatise.) :
| Attribute Level | Percent of Weapon Damage |
| 0 | 35.6% |
| 1 | 38.6% |
| 2 | 42.0% |
| 3 | 45.9% |
| 4 | 50.0% |
| 5 | 54.5% |
| 6 | 59.5% |
| 7 | 64.8% |
| 8 | 70.7% |
| 9 | 77.1% |
| 10 | 84.1% |
| 11 | 91.7% |
| 12 | 100% |
| 13 | 104% |
| 14 | 107% |
| 15 | 110% |
| 16 | 114% |
If a Warrior cares about doing damage they’re going to want their weapon’s attribute as close to 12 as possible. Over 12 the benefits of each rank drop off dramatically. Under 12 the effectiveness of the weapon is drastically lowered. Weapon 12 is the gold standard in any Warrior build for that reason.
A weapon attribute is also important because it provides the Warrior several skills usable only when using a particular kind of weapon – Swordsmanship skills require a sword, after all – and those skills serve to make a weapon that much more effective. They add damage over and on top of the weapon’s base damage. They add effects and conditions to weaken a foe’s position or improve the Warrior’s. A Warrior just swinging away with a weapon is dangerous. But a Warrior swinging away with a weapon enhanced by that weapon’s skills is much more so. Taking high levels in a weapon’s attribute is a double bonus then because it both makes the weapon itself better and makes the skills that weapon uses better.
Beyond improving the attribute of a weapon or the skills that weapon uses the next step in making a Warrior better is to simply get a better weapon. There’s a cap on just how much damage a type of weapon can deal and a Warrior’s weapon should be as close that maximum as possible. More than that, weapons can be upgraded or otherwise modified to add yet more power. The best Warriors will be the ones swinging the best weapons. Max damage with several highly useful modifiers. Changing the damage type of a weapon lets it bypass some protections, for example, by eliminating the bonus armor granted against another type of damage. Other modifiers can increase the speed with which a weapon swings or grant the wielder energy when it strikes. There’s no one “best” for every character, not if the game is approaching the balance point, instead it depends on the needs of each individual build or character. The best weapon your Warrior will wield is one that will reinforce the rest of the choices you’ve made, from attribute allocation to skill choices.
At the moment, however, it’s a clear choice in which weapon to choose. Swords are, hands down, the most popular Warrior weapon and deservedly so. They offer the skill line that’s the most deep and diversified as well as the one with the most effectiveness at dealing damage. It’s a line that relies on both energy and adrenaline and can spread around a nice variety of conditions. Axes are hampered because they rely on adrenaline but when using an adrenal skill it drains your other adrenal skills of one strike of adrenaline meaning that a lot of adrenal skills on your bar work to reduce the effectiveness of all your adrenal skills. And hammers are handicapped by their slower speed than the other weapons, they hit less often, gather less adrenaline, and trigger fewer effects, and also by their two-handed requirement requiring a Warrior to forgo a shield. Both can be made to work but not as easily as a sword.
So, a Warrior needs to swing a weapon, in melee, to deal damage and is well served by making that weapon as good as possible. What else can be done to increase their effectiveness? Several things, of course, but when discussing the best way to get sheer damage, the answer is to basically increase that damage. The easiest way is simply to pack more damage into each and every hit. Many skills cause each attack a character makes to deal more damage. An example from the Warrior’s skill list would be Power Attack, which will add a certain amount of damage onto your weapon’s hit for a nominal cost of energy. The real key to getting a lot of damage out of a Warrior is to stack up several ways of adding that damage to an attack. If you have an enchantment that adds damage, a hex that adds damage, a stance that adds damage, and a skill that adds damage you’re adding a lot of damage per hit. That’s called stacking damage, and by doing so, you multiply the damage your character can do drastically especially if the damage buffs you’re using can be added to each and every swing. There are lots of ways to do this and we’ll get into them a bit later on.
Also, a Warrior can swing their weapon better simply by swinging faster. A skill such as Frenzy will increase their attack rate much the same way using Sprint will increase their movement rate. Something as seemingly harmless as raising a character’s rate of attack by 33% will increase their damage output by 150%. If, for example, they swung twice for 10 damage in 3 seconds for a total of 20 damage, they would now swing three times for a total of 30 damage. What’s happened is a dramatic increase to their damage per second or their DPS. Each and every second they deal damage they’ll be dealing more damage just as they’d do more damage by stacking up damage. For a Warrior pumping out damage doesn’t come down to a matter of using one or two big skills, the way it does for an Elementalist or the average nuker, it comes down to adding together many smaller attacks in the same time it takes that nuker to get their spells off. It’s cumulative damage, gathered together from all the damage buffs and weapon swings that really downs an opponent. So increasing the amount of swings within that time is one good way of going about increasing that damage because the more damage you do per second the more damage you’ll do over a number of seconds. Either way, the advantage a Warrior has is in doing that increased damage consistently. Not one swing, not one hit, but many at the highest damage at the cheapest cost repeated over and over until the target is dead.
A further way to raise DPS is through damage over time or DOT skills. Causing your opponent just 1 pip of degeneration causes them 2 damage each and every second. So many Warriors will use a skill like Sever Artery to cause their opponents to Bleed and take 6 more damage over and above anything else they do. Each pip is worth 2 health and there’s a maximum of 10 pips so you’ll never get more than 20DPS from your DOT but when it’s paired with other techniques that raise damage it can be especially devastating.
Dealing damage with a Warrior is a matter of swinging a good weapon, swinging it as hard as possible, and swinging it as fast as possible to raise their DPS and allocating their attributes and slotting their skills to support that weapon.
Damage, of course, is not the only thing a primary Warrior can do. And, indeed, a competent healer will outrace a competent damage dealer each and every time so it’s not always the best thing. Damage is a slow process, one that will take a long time to eliminate a threat; sometimes it’s necessary to prevent a threat almost immediately. That’s the job of disruption.
With disruption, a character aims not to kill a target but to prevent them from doing anything worthwhile. Damage is a solution to a problem while disruption is delaying the inevitable. Snaring a character is one example of disruption, although a light disruption of their abilities. There are as many ways of dealing disruption as there are of dealing damage although a pure Warrior has problems making the best of all of them. But the general goal is to prevent them from using the skills they want when they want. As skills in Guild Wars mostly require energy to use one easy way of preventing someone from using skills is to prevent them from having any energy. Energy denial techniques, skills that rob characters of their hard regenerated energy or prevent them from regenerating more are extremely effective in relegating someone to the sidelines of a battle. A Warrior doesn’t have much in the way of help here although there are a few skills, such as Fear Me! to explore.
Another way of preventing someone from using a skill is to interrupt the casting of that skill. Interruption’s a much more involved prospect than energy denial because it requires a lot more attention to what your opponent is doing. One of the best tools a Warrior has for interruption is Distracting Blow. That skill will interrupt the action of whatever the target is doing should the melee hit land. Like most other Warrior skills it requires that arm’s length range but since a Warrior’s going to be working to get in close range anyway it likely doesn’t matter that much to them. Anything with an appreciable casting time can be interrupted. It requires timing and quick reflexes and “babysitting” your target before they start to cast anything but it can effectively stop them from using that critical skill. Interrupting a skill also makes the target lose the energy required to cast that skill so it can be coupled well with energy denial because interrupting a target enough will soon drain them of the resources to use a skill in the first place.
Yet another way of going about disruption is the dreaded skill lock. This technique temporarily disables an opponent’s skill causing it to recharge through the lock and hopefully preventing them from using it when it’s needed. A Warrior doesn’t have much to pick from here beyond Disrupting Chop an axe skill that will interrupt a target and, should it have interrupted a skill, lock the skill they were using for a long time. As both an interrupt and a skill lock it’s very effective.
The final method of disruption that a Warrior can perform is through debuffing. A debuff is any sort of skill that makes your opponent worse off than they were before. Anyone who’s played Guild Wars for any length of time has probably been tagged by one hex or another – something that drained their health or hurt them when they attacked or made them run slower - and that’s the basic idea of a debuff. You disrupt your opposition by making them more ineffective at what they want to do. The way a Warrior goes about debuffing is to impart conditions on their foes.
Conditions are a specific subset of debuffs and there are several ways of giving them to an opponent through the Warrior skill list. Sever Artery will make an opponent Bleed, causing them to lose health over time, Dismember will give an opponent a Deep Wound, lowering their maximum health, Staggering Blow will Weaken someone, causing their attacks to do less damage, and the previously mentioned Hamstring will Cripple a target, causing them to run slower. By placing several different conditions on a target a Warrior will be causing havoc by reducing some of their fundamental abilities. Conditions don’t stack with and of themselves – you can’t have three or four Blinds on the same target – instead when you place a condition on someone already suffering that condition the duration that condition will last is extended so the goal here is to use several conditions and to use them often enough that they’re more or less permanently on your target.
Lastly, once past the roles of dealing damage and dealing disruption what a Warrior can also specialize in is the role of absorbing that damage and disruption. In short, Warriors can tank.
Through the use of defensive stances, like Shield Stance, Warriors can decrease their chances of suffering damage. Through skills that add armor, like Watch Yourself!, they can reduce the amount of damage they’ll take. Through the use of skills that heal them, like Healing Signet Warriors can recover that damage.
Even without those skills a Warrior is going to be wearing armor that, point for point is better than anyone else’s in their party in all but a few circumstances (Rangers facing elemental damage have a Warrior beat but that’s about it.) so they’ll already be taking far less damage than other professions. When combined with the various options for defense and self-healing that a Warrior has access to that makes for a character that’s very survivable. Of all the characters in your party to take a blow, the Warrior’s probably going to have the best chance at living through it. Or, more importantly, the best chance at taking the least amount of damage for a healer to recover so they can conserve their energy. That’s the big advantage of having a Warrior tank. They can survive more so fewer resources need to be spent making sure they survive. That reduces the burden on your teammates who care about keeping others alive and lets those who care about dropping targets actually concentrate on dealing as much damage as possible rather than running around trying not to get hurt. All a Warrior really needs to do to become a tank, as far as a build is concerned, is to load up on what will best let them come out of an encounter with their health points intact. There are all sorts of tactics and techniques that go into becoming an effective tank. You’ll need to learn how to attract the enemy to yourself and to keep them from attacking the rest of your teammates, you’ll need to learn to time your buffs and heals for the best effect, you’ll need to learn how to position and screen yourself, and you’ll need to learn not to panic as your hit points start flying off, but those are more issues of tactics rather than strategy and are a bit beyond the scope of this article. And, for the most part, they don’t really matter in most PvP matches because your human opponents will be focusing on your weaker teammates rather than the metal-clad Warrior. Tanking is of primary importance in a PvE setting yet it’s almost an after thought in PvP, although the lessons about self-reliance and survivability to be drawn from it are still quite important.
So, when tanking a Warrior is providing protection for the rest of their teammates. Teammates who are softer and less defended targets. And to do so the Warrior is the one standing up to the enemy while the blows rain down upon them.
And, of course, since they’ll be right next to the enemy they’ll be up close enough to rain their own blows upon them. A Warrior can tank and while tanking be dishing out enough damage to drop whatever they’re tanking. Or they can be dealing damage to a target while also disrupting them making them easier to kill. Those roles can be blended and mixed on any Warrior’s skill bar to create a Warrior’s build. A Warriors best not when they can excel at any one of those roles but when they can combine those roles together and use, for example, the increased durability of a tank to allow a Warrior to continue to stand in close range and pound away at the enemy with that sustainable cumulative damage. Once that’s accomplished, a Warrior can look into the options provided by their secondary profession and find what they need to support and reinforce their strategy there.
The Warrior, though, is a very difficult profession to pair with others. It’s the most different from other professions. When you look at it with Ranger there’s the conflict between being best when far away and being best close up. When compared to the various casters there’s the difference in energy pools and defense in addition to the various conflicts between skill lists. What we have today, of course, is a Warrior/Elementalist.
Now, as I said, the Warrior/Elementalist is the pairing of two professions that are both quite good at offense. They both deal damage, they can both toss around conditions; they can both be put to good use by taking the fight to the opponent. That’s markedly different than, say, a Warrior/Monk where the main advantage is an increase in survivability leading to a better tank or a character more capable of sustained damage, or a Warrior/Necromancer where the point is to massively disrupt and debuff an opponent to set them up for large amounts of damage. At heart, the choice of Warrior/Elementalists says that you’re a player who likes to attack.
The main problem there, though, is that while the Warrior skill list is designed for the small energy pool you’ll have, the Elementalist’s is not. A primary Warrior will have twenty energy and two regeneration while a primary Elementalist will have sixty or more energy and four regeneration. The problem is not so much the energy as it is the regeneration. More regeneration means that energy spent will return faster so that when an Elementalist casts a five energy skill they’ll have the energy to cast it again in under four seconds a Warrior will need to wait seven seconds for that energy to return. The skills and spells that an Elementalist does to do their damage are, by and large, extremely costly for a primary Warrior. An Elementalist’s plan for doing damage is to spend a lot of energy to do a lot of damage and then quickly get that energy back to do it again and that’s just not possible on a Warrior’s energy pool. A primary Warrior can’t stand to cast those ten and fifteen energy skills once every five or ten seconds. Therefore, the best skills to pluck from Elementalist are the skills that are efficient.
These are skills that offer a lot of benefit for a little amount of energy. They either pack a lot of damage or effect per point of energy or their effects last a long time for that energy. Remember, the key to dealing damage with a Warrior is sustainability. You want to deal a lot of damage but you want to be able to deal that damage for a long time. Burst damage – spending all your effort and energy into doing a lot of damage all at once then having your output tail off until you can gather the resources to do it again – is not what a Warrior is really best at doing. So, the skills that offer high damage per energy or the ones that offer long durations for low energy are the skills in the Elementalist’s list that should appeal to a Warrior. True, Elementalist does offer a lot of options for managing your energy, such as the Glyphs of Energy and there are ways of reaping a lot of energy from the Warrior list, too, but that improved energy management is best put to use when you’re already being economic and efficient with your en. Using that GLE to allow a Warrior to cast that big twenty-five energy nuke is nice and all but using it with lower cost skills is an even better way of making sure that energy is put to good use.
A good example of what a Warrior looks for in the Elementalist list is any of the various Conjure Elements. There are three versions, one each for Air, Fire, and Water and each adds a bit of damage to each and every weapon hit your character makes. That sounds great for a Warrior who’ll be swinging a weapon a lot. The Conjures are damage buffs and they’ll be added to each and every attack your character makes including those improved attack skills. And, of course, that’s a great way of sending your DPS sky-high. But what really makes the Conjure so attractive is that duration. A Conjured Element lasts for nearly a minute, at present, for just ten energy. Ten energy is a lot for a Warrior, sure, but not when they get six seconds of improved damage for each point of energy and they’ll only need to cast that skill once every minute or so. Even with only two pips of regeneration a Warrior will have forty energy returning each and every minute meaning they’ll have more than enough to cover the constant replacing of that Conjured damage. There’s really no excuse for going Warrior/Elementalist and not looking into the possibilities a Conjure offers you. Just as a snare or speed buff should have permanent residence on a Warrior’s skill bar, so, too, should a Conjure on the Warrior/Elementalist’s.
Beyond the excellent Conjures, there are still skills that can greatly benefit the Warrior/Elementalist. Warriors have few problems surviving in melee range so the various PBAoE skills – those skills that affect a radius around the caster – can be put to good use. The real key is to look for skills which can be used repeatedly without putting too much of a burden on your regeneration. That skill that takes five energy but can be cast every three seconds is actually worse, in terms of energy, than the skill which takes ten energy but will recharge in ten seconds. And beyond the concerns of energy management what also should be considered are the casting times. Every second you spend casting a skill, as a Warrior, is a second you’re not swinging your weapon or falling further out of the melee range you need to do so. High casting times are something a Warrior wants to avoid just as much as they want to avoid those skills that they can’t afford to cast all the time. The name of the game is to hammer away at a target and keep hammering away, hounding them into death or ineffectuality and while a high-cost high-cast skill might be damaging the longer it keeps you from that chipping damage the more it’s hurting your overall damage.
All that said, let’s take a look at justin_m’s build :
Attributes | Skills | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Gear | ||||
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There are some good starts here and there but, overall, it’s a build that’s in serious need of help.
The general idea here would be to close with a target and use Hamstring to Cripple them to keep them close. Frenzy to build up the adrenaline for Sever Artery and make them Bleed. Enervating Charge and Lightning Strike. Glyph of Lesser Energy can be used to reduce the cost of either Lightning Strike or Enervating Charge by casting it before the battle is joined. That Glyph effect lasts a while and won’t be affected by the Hamstring or Sever, it’ll drop the energy cost of those Air skills but only once every so often. Healing Signet can be used to recover lost health, albeit at the cost of doubling the damage justin_m takes. And there’s a Resurrection Signet there in order to revive any fallen comrades.
There’s an emphasis here on fighting justin_m’s fellow Warriors because he’s settled on the Air Magic line. Air Magic has many lightning skills and lightning skills – not lightning damage, that’s something else, entirely – have an innate armor penetration. When used they act as if their target had a much lower armor rating than they should. Currently, it’s about 25% armor penetration, and obviously that makes a greater difference the more armor your target has initially.
Armor is exponential, the actual amount doesn’t matter when raising or lowering it for the purposes of damage, it’s the amount you’ve raised or lowered it that does. There’s no change to the increase in your damage if you drop a target from 60AL to 40AL than if you dropped a target from 100AL to 80AL. You’ll obviously do more damage to the 40AL target but you’ll increase your damage by the same percent either way. However, since lightning’s armor penetration is a percentage, it does care about the initial amount. That 100AL target becomes 75AL while that 60AL becomes 45AL and that is a difference. You’ll still do more damage against that 45AL target but you’ll increase your damage as a percent more against that 75AL target. Armor penetration, as long as it’s not a flat drop to AL, is bet set against the targets with more armor to start with. And there’s few with more armor to start with than Warriors (Again, it’s Rangers here who’ll have more AL to start with. Their 70+30AL means they’ll have 100AL against lightning damage. Most Warriors will have 80AL or 85AL to start with). So Air Magic is the line of choice if you want to tackle those hardened targets. It’s also a line that offer the most in the way of single target direct damage spells so you won’t just be doing better damage because of penetration you’ll be doing better damage because you’re more efficient at damaging a single target.
That’s further evidenced by the selection of Enervating Charge, which will damage a target, and not for an insignificant amount considering armor penetration on that lightning damage, but also causes Weakness. Weakness, though, is only valuable against physical attackers – that’s Warriors and Rangers, basically. It causes their weapon attacks to do far less damage but it’s not going to do anything against that Elementalist lobbing spells or that Necromancer tossing out hexes or that Mesmer out to interrupt. It’s also a costly skill considering its recharge time. Lightning Strike is even worse. At their current costs and current recharge times in order to cast them both as often as possible would require roughly six or seven pips of regeneration. Hamstring’s also a ten energy skill that can be cast repeatedly further sucking up all the energy available. Those two lightning skills are both nice, quick, good damage skills but they’re just too costly to belong on a Warrior’s skill bar. One, perhaps, but not both at the same time.
Glyph of Lesser Energy or even the elite version Glyph of Energy, which would be wasted here, is a poor solution. True, it’s the sort of long lasting, low-cost skill that should appeal to a Warrior but it has an extremely long recharge time. You can only use it with those nukes every so often. When you do, it’ll make them cost, effectively five energy – less than that, actually, as you’ll be regenerating the whole time from when you cast them to the time you complete your spell, the longer you wait before casting your next spell the bigger the savings – but it does so at the cost of adding some casting time to that spell. As I tried to explain before, adding casting times to skills is a bad thing for a Warrior to be doing. This relegates Glyph of Lesser Energy to the skill you’ll use before a battle and will avoid using during it. By using it to prepare for a fight, justin_m can cast his first nuke for free, effectively, and that’s not a bad thing, but there are better ways to go about managing energy.
As for Resurrection Signet, far be it from me to discourage people from the notion that rezzing is crucial in any pitched fight. But, if you’re really going to bring a rez, then go Warrior/Monk and take a much superior skill. Rezsig can only be used once per map and then it will rez your teammate where they stand with one health and no energy. That’s not bringing them back to the fight, that’s making them a sitting duck.
So, let’s see what we can’t do to improve matters. I do so enjoy considering Elementalist builds because it means I can showcase a few different examples, one for each elemental line. So, that’s what I’ll do here. Justin_m’s build need drastic overhauls, so let’s look at some of the different ways he can go with it.
First, let’s establish a base to work from. What’s the core of our build? Well, since we’ll be using a sword and pairing Warrior with Elementalist, it seems like we’ll want to increase our damage something fierce. Therefore, we’ll pump out a lot of damage by using our Conjure and an attack buff like Frenzy coupled with a few choice damage skills. The popular way of doing things is to use Sever Artery to cause a target to Bleed then Gash to use that bleeding to cause a Deep Wound. And then to follow that all up with Final Thrust - which I’m not sold on so maybe we’ll try some alternatives - once the target’s dropped below 50% health, which should happen pretty quickly. Those are all adrenal skill so our attack buff will help us charge them and we won’t even touch on our energy beyond that ten en every minute for our Conjure. We’ll need our requisite speed buff or snare, too. That’s six skills, which gives us two more to play with. With that kind of set-up we’re best going with an attribute set-up to maximize our damage. Strength will add to our damage from our skills and offer us a few nice skill options, Swordsmanship needs to be at 12, of course, and whatever element we use needs to be as high as possible, too. Everything else, such as the Tactics from justin_m’s original build, is superfluous.
So, let’s start with justin_m’s favored element, Air Magic. My version of a sword swinging Air Warrior would look something like this :
Whirling Blade
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Since we’re using Sever and Gash, we’re going to have a target with at least two conditions. We’ll take Hamstring to use as a snare and cause a third. With that we can pick up Victory is Mine! for our elite skill. That’s going to give us five energy per condition per enemy that we’re standing right next to. That will more than make up for the energy we’ve used to cast Hamstring and Victory is Mine! in the first place and gain a little healing on the side, too. We can do that once every fifteen seconds or so and that should be more than enough to build up to our Final with Frenzy. And if energy ever becomes a big problem we can drop Hamstring from the rotation and actually gain energy from using Victory is Mine! That leaves us with one slot left over and we could spend that on something like Lightning Strike or Lightning Orb but, instead, let’s get a bit creative and use Gale instead. Gale will cause exhaustion when we use it and that’s a bit off-putting with a Warrior’s energy pool as just one cast of Gale and we’ll drop to a maximum of ten energy and it’ll take us thirty seconds to undo it. However, we don’t have any skill that costs more than ten energy and what Gale gives us is a safety net. We’re using Hamstring, mostly, to snare our foes, but we can only use Hamstring when we’re in melee. If a target manages to limp away from us somehow, Gale makes sure they don’t get too far. It gives our character a bit of range and that’s never a bad thing to add to a Warrior build.
But, let’s take try a different direction with Fire.
Burning Blade
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We’ll trade in Hamstring for the cheaper Sprint. It’s also a bit more tactically useful as it allows our character not just to stay in melee range but to reach it more quickly as well as to escape should something go wrong. Since we, hopefully, won’t be spending that much energy we can use Immolate to add to our offensive punch. Not only does that skill cause a decent amount of damage, damage we can use from range if need be, it also sets the target On Fire. That’s also a condition – albeit a brief one, so we can use that to power Victory is Mine! It won’t be that hard as Victory is Mine! is an instant cast shout so we can use it almost immediately after Sever+Gash+Immolate and offset the energy cost entirely. Immolate will be a bit costly to spam with its low recycle rate but we can use it every time we’re going to use Victory is Mine! at the very least.
As I said before, I’m skeptical about Final Thrust. I don’t like using any adrenal skill that drains my other adrenal skills of all their energy when I’m using as many adrenal skills as we are here. So, instead, let’s add in Hundred Blades. That will cost us energy instead of adrenaline but with Victory is Mine! our energy picture isn’t looking all that bad. As with Final Thrust it will serve as a big increase to our DPS when we get a target near death and it’ll have the added bonus of adding our Conjured bonus not once but twice to our strikes.
Still, let’s look at what we can find with another elite skill with Water Magic.
Frigid Fencer
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Water Trident is our elite skill here. It’s a low-cost, low-recharge ranged attack that can also knock down its target. As with Gale, if an enemy manages to slip away from us, they’re not going to be slipping away for long. As an added bonus we can use a Warrior’s Stonefist Gaunlets to increase the knock down time not just on our Warrior skills but on things like Water Trident, too. It won’t work all the time, so we’ll keep Sprint around in case we miss or we otherwise need to reach a target.
Once again, let’s try an alternative to Final Thrust here and go with Pure Strike and Galrath Slash. Both take a little less adrenaline than Final Strike and both do a little bit less damage, especially when the target is under 50% health. Adding another adrenaline skill to our rotation will lower our overall effectiveness, though. When you use an adrenal skill all your other adrenal skills are drained of one hit of adrenaline. That’s not that much of a problem as when you use an adrenal skill you’re usually using it to score a hit so you’ll gain those skills a strike of adrenaline, too, but the net effect is that using an adrenal attack won’t charge your other adrenal attacks. The more adrenal skills you use, the longer it takes for them all to charge. We’ll have four adrenal skills here as opposed to the three with Final but that’s increased charge time is offset by the increased charge time we’d have after Final drained all our adrenaline from our skills. We can further offset things by taking Berserker Stance instead of Frenzy. We won’t be able to use it as often as we can Frenzy but when using it we’ll gain more adrenaline so our skills will charge faster. Since we’ll likely be pumping out Water Tridents, too, using our attack buff less means we’ll be spending less energy on it, too, so we can afford more Tridents.
Finally, Earth Magic offers us no Conjure. We’re already shooting our offense in the foot by taking it; so let’s concentrate not on damage but on becoming a tank. Earth Magic offers some pretty good defensive skills so it’s well suited to the task.
Clay Soldier
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Instead of Victory is Mine! let’s take another energy management elite with Warrior’s Endurance. That will let our melee attacks gain us some energy so we won’t be as dependent upon quickly taking advantage of our conditions. Since we’re not as worried about dealing damage here, just surviving, we’ll drop Final Thrust entirely in favor of a defensive stance like Shield Stance. That offers the best protection at the lowest cost. Since we’re going to be tanking we’re not as worried about the hit to our movement rate. The enemies are going to be swarming us not the other way around. Wary Stance is another possibility, albeit a more costly one, as that will serve to give us some energy but only if our opponents are using attack skills. Sever+Gash actually works fairly nicely on a tanking Warrior as they serve to hasten the death of their target. The less time that target is alive the less time it has to beat on you. They’re also adrenal and won’t cost any energy so they can stay. Since we're trying to stay alive as much as possible Flurry gets the nod over Frenzy.
Next, we’ll pluck a few choice skills from Earth. Armor of Earth is a nice defensive buff. It should about halve the damage this character receives and its duration is a lot longer than its recycle time. Again, we don’t really care about the movement debuff. It’s a costly skill but we can alternate it with Shield Stance to get the most out of it. Obsidian Flesh would be a nice skill to have as it both decreases damage and renders us immune to harmful spells – a big weakness of our stance will be that it will only protect us from physical attacks – but it’s also an elite skill and we wouldn’t have the energy to cast it without our Endurance. So, we’ll take a ward instead. Ward Against Melee can be used while Shield Stance is recharging to increase our opponent’s miss rate. Or, if we’re planning to go up against a lot of spell casters or elemental damage we can take Ward Against Elements instead.
There you have it, four different elements, and four different looks at building a better sword Warrior/Elementalist. Thanks for reading and be sure to comment on this essay as well as justin_m’s build here in our forums.
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