Spotlight on Skills #4
Originally Published by Sausaletus Rex
Every so often this column will shine the spotlight on a particular skill or set of skills for an in-depth analysis of just what that skill can do for you and the best ways to make it work. Keep in mind that Guild Wars is still under development and the information in this column is subject to swift and drastic change.
This round we continue our breakneak tour through the Warrior elites by taking a close look at one of the elite stances available to a Warrior. This stance is, quite possibly, the worst skill showcased yet, being a skill relying on landing a number of blows to yet being tied to a weapon that swings incredibly slow. Among other things. Still, just what is it that makes this skill so poor? Read on and find out as we look at :
Dwarven Battle Stance
““For 3-8 seconds, if they hit, your hammer attacks interrupt your target. Dwarven Battle Stance ends if you use a skill.”
A stance tied to the Warrior primary attribute Strength, Dwarven Battle Stance is an intriguing skill. Linked to Strength it’s a skill that’s mostly going to appeal to the primary Warriors. And only to those primary Warriors who want to wield a hammer. It requires a hammer to cast and, most importantly, will only give your character its benefit when you attack come from a hammer. You cannot use Dwarven Battle Stance and then switch to another, faster weapon to capitalize on it, you’re stuck with the sluggish hammer. However, when you can satisfy those restrictive conditions all your blows - for a set time tied to your Strength attribute anyway – will pack incredible disruptive power as they’ll interrupt your target each and every time they hit.
The disruptive effect of those interrupts is extremely useful for a hammer swinger. They’re already very disruptive as the hammer is the king of knockdown. A knockdown is, effectively, an extended interrupt – it stops whatever the target is doing and then prevents them from doing anything else for a few crucial seconds. So, of all the Warrior weapons hammers can be the most suited to, if not damaging, disrupting the opposition. And Dwarven Battle Stance only serves to reinforce that idea and support that purpose.
Dwarven Battle Stance, as a stance, is difficult to counter. True, it takes energy to cast – and a lot of energy for a Warrior, indeed - but its casting is instant and outside of a few skills like Wild Blow there’s nothing to stop your average stance. And Dwarven Battle Stance is immune to most of their efforts as it will neither block nor otherwise evade any blows. About the only thing that’s going to stop your Dwarven Battle Stance is another stance. Stances, when cast, will cancel any other stance your character has active, so you can only have one active at a time.
This, of course, is a problem because the easiest way to combat a hammer’s naturally slow swing speed is to use a stance that will increase your attack rate. That’s not an option with Dwarven Battle Stance, as there’s practically no way of increasing your attack speed outside of a stance. I Will Avenge You!, a Warrior shout, Gives you a flurry of increased attack speed but to do so it requires a nearby dead ally and that can be a bit difficult to arrange. Sad but true, your allies are unlikely to want to die in order to further your strategy. There’s the old trick of playing a secondary Ranger and bringing a lv1 pet along with Revive Animal that’s commonly used by Necromancers to provide them with a cheap supply of corpses but it’s unlikely that a pet, as it’s not a full-fledged member of your team, is considered an ally for the purposes of I Will Avenge You! Such a strategy also requires that you spend two skill slots to make it viable and that’s probably too high a price to bear. Outside of such an extreme measure Dwarven Battle Stance is going to decrease the ability of your character to do what they’re probably out to do in the first place, if you’re not a Warrior concerned only with disrupting other characters then it’s going to decrease your damage by preventing you from using many of the stances and other techniques used to drive Warrior DPS through the roof.
Unfortunately, then, with Dwarven Battle Stance you’re stuck with your unaided swing rate with a hammer or an attack roughly once every two seconds. That means, at best, you’ll get four interrupts out of your precious elite skill before it ends. Your skill will then need to finish its recharge time of thirty seconds before you can use it again. Thirty seconds, really, is a long time in the midst of a battle, it’s more than enough time to finish off an undefended foe, meaning that you’ll only be using Dwarven Battle Stance about once per encounter or skirmish, so you’d better make the most of it. And once you’re done using it, your character’s left with, at best, about twenty-two seconds of downtime when they won’t be making use of the benefits of their stance. In other words, Dwarven Battle Stance will only be active roughly 25% of the time. With high Strength and at a high-energy cost. There are, of course, ways around this, and any sort of technique which will increase your recharge rate will allow you to use Dwarven Battle Stance faster and to have it active a larger percentage of the time. One way of doing so is to use the Ranger Survival skill Serpent's Quickness, which will decrease all your recharge times by 33%, lowering Dwarven Battle Stance to twenty seconds recharge and allowing it to be active about 40% of the time, potentially. That’s not doing anything for the cost of the skill, though, and at ten energy Dwarven Battle Stance is a highly costly skill for a primary Warrior to be running constantly. If you can afford it, you’ll want to make use of it as much as you can by recasting it as often as possible as soon as it’s recharged. And, of course, you’re close enough to your target to use it.
Then, and only then, all your melee hits will interrupt your target. Which, of course, brings up all the requisite problems of reaching and keeping in melee range that can so bedevil even the best Warriors. And while your character might not be able to increase their attack rate an opposing player can sure decrease yours. That Necromancer with Faintheartedness – which will debuff your attack rate - or that Elementalist with Blinding Flash – which will Blind you giving all your attacks a healthy miss rate – or that Monk with Amity – which will prevent you from attacking at all - are going to spoil all your plans. Most techniques out to neuter someone focusing on doing melee damage will serve to greatly lessen the effectiveness of Dwarven Battle Stance, with the notable exception of things like Weakness which impair damage rather than a characters ability to swing their weapon.
So, Dwarven Battle Stance is bad because it’s an ineffective, costly stance with a huge recharge timer and several, readily available counters? No, what really kills Dwarven Battle Stance is that last sentence in the skill description: “This stance ends if you use a skill.”
Guild Wars, of course, is a game all about skills. They’re your primary means of getting much of anything done. And when using Dwarven Battle Stance you can’t use a single one of them or else that elite stance you’ve spent so much energy to cast or waited so long to recharge will disappear. It’s a mechanic found on several Warrior stances and while it’s true that a Warrior simply swinging a weapon is a decent killing machine – which is what an “end on skill” stance reduces a character to, basically – they’re a lot better when they can use their skills to support their weapon. Dwarven Battle Stance would be a marginally useful kill if you could combine it with Staggering Blow or Power Attack or with Crude Swing – for some AoE disruption – but because it actively prevents you from doing that it’s an extremely poor choice as an elite skill.
Interruption is, of course, a very powerful ability, especially when you can be relatively assured of it happening a lot and frequently. Whatever your opponent is doing will be halted, whether it’s running away or casting a spell or swinging a weapon, and it’s going to happen repeatedly. Of such, Dwarven Battle Stance is certainly a skill with drawing power. However, because it’s only for hammer users, and only for primary Warrior hammer users, and with all the incumbent problems of its recycle time and it’s countering all your own skills, any desire for the skill should soon sour. If you’re running a hammer Warrior who’s focused on disrupting your target, this might be the elite for you. Otherwise, steer well clear of it.
This round we continue our breakneak tour through the Warrior elites by taking a close look at one of the elite stances available to a Warrior. This stance is, quite possibly, the worst skill showcased yet, being a skill relying on landing a number of blows to yet being tied to a weapon that swings incredibly slow. Among other things. Still, just what is it that makes this skill so poor? Read on and find out as we look at :
Dwarven Battle Stance
““For 3-8 seconds, if they hit, your hammer attacks interrupt your target. Dwarven Battle Stance ends if you use a skill.”
A stance tied to the Warrior primary attribute Strength, Dwarven Battle Stance is an intriguing skill. Linked to Strength it’s a skill that’s mostly going to appeal to the primary Warriors. And only to those primary Warriors who want to wield a hammer. It requires a hammer to cast and, most importantly, will only give your character its benefit when you attack come from a hammer. You cannot use Dwarven Battle Stance and then switch to another, faster weapon to capitalize on it, you’re stuck with the sluggish hammer. However, when you can satisfy those restrictive conditions all your blows - for a set time tied to your Strength attribute anyway – will pack incredible disruptive power as they’ll interrupt your target each and every time they hit.
The disruptive effect of those interrupts is extremely useful for a hammer swinger. They’re already very disruptive as the hammer is the king of knockdown. A knockdown is, effectively, an extended interrupt – it stops whatever the target is doing and then prevents them from doing anything else for a few crucial seconds. So, of all the Warrior weapons hammers can be the most suited to, if not damaging, disrupting the opposition. And Dwarven Battle Stance only serves to reinforce that idea and support that purpose.
Dwarven Battle Stance, as a stance, is difficult to counter. True, it takes energy to cast – and a lot of energy for a Warrior, indeed - but its casting is instant and outside of a few skills like Wild Blow there’s nothing to stop your average stance. And Dwarven Battle Stance is immune to most of their efforts as it will neither block nor otherwise evade any blows. About the only thing that’s going to stop your Dwarven Battle Stance is another stance. Stances, when cast, will cancel any other stance your character has active, so you can only have one active at a time.
This, of course, is a problem because the easiest way to combat a hammer’s naturally slow swing speed is to use a stance that will increase your attack rate. That’s not an option with Dwarven Battle Stance, as there’s practically no way of increasing your attack speed outside of a stance. I Will Avenge You!, a Warrior shout, Gives you a flurry of increased attack speed but to do so it requires a nearby dead ally and that can be a bit difficult to arrange. Sad but true, your allies are unlikely to want to die in order to further your strategy. There’s the old trick of playing a secondary Ranger and bringing a lv1 pet along with Revive Animal that’s commonly used by Necromancers to provide them with a cheap supply of corpses but it’s unlikely that a pet, as it’s not a full-fledged member of your team, is considered an ally for the purposes of I Will Avenge You! Such a strategy also requires that you spend two skill slots to make it viable and that’s probably too high a price to bear. Outside of such an extreme measure Dwarven Battle Stance is going to decrease the ability of your character to do what they’re probably out to do in the first place, if you’re not a Warrior concerned only with disrupting other characters then it’s going to decrease your damage by preventing you from using many of the stances and other techniques used to drive Warrior DPS through the roof.
Unfortunately, then, with Dwarven Battle Stance you’re stuck with your unaided swing rate with a hammer or an attack roughly once every two seconds. That means, at best, you’ll get four interrupts out of your precious elite skill before it ends. Your skill will then need to finish its recharge time of thirty seconds before you can use it again. Thirty seconds, really, is a long time in the midst of a battle, it’s more than enough time to finish off an undefended foe, meaning that you’ll only be using Dwarven Battle Stance about once per encounter or skirmish, so you’d better make the most of it. And once you’re done using it, your character’s left with, at best, about twenty-two seconds of downtime when they won’t be making use of the benefits of their stance. In other words, Dwarven Battle Stance will only be active roughly 25% of the time. With high Strength and at a high-energy cost. There are, of course, ways around this, and any sort of technique which will increase your recharge rate will allow you to use Dwarven Battle Stance faster and to have it active a larger percentage of the time. One way of doing so is to use the Ranger Survival skill Serpent's Quickness, which will decrease all your recharge times by 33%, lowering Dwarven Battle Stance to twenty seconds recharge and allowing it to be active about 40% of the time, potentially. That’s not doing anything for the cost of the skill, though, and at ten energy Dwarven Battle Stance is a highly costly skill for a primary Warrior to be running constantly. If you can afford it, you’ll want to make use of it as much as you can by recasting it as often as possible as soon as it’s recharged. And, of course, you’re close enough to your target to use it.
Then, and only then, all your melee hits will interrupt your target. Which, of course, brings up all the requisite problems of reaching and keeping in melee range that can so bedevil even the best Warriors. And while your character might not be able to increase their attack rate an opposing player can sure decrease yours. That Necromancer with Faintheartedness – which will debuff your attack rate - or that Elementalist with Blinding Flash – which will Blind you giving all your attacks a healthy miss rate – or that Monk with Amity – which will prevent you from attacking at all - are going to spoil all your plans. Most techniques out to neuter someone focusing on doing melee damage will serve to greatly lessen the effectiveness of Dwarven Battle Stance, with the notable exception of things like Weakness which impair damage rather than a characters ability to swing their weapon.
So, Dwarven Battle Stance is bad because it’s an ineffective, costly stance with a huge recharge timer and several, readily available counters? No, what really kills Dwarven Battle Stance is that last sentence in the skill description: “This stance ends if you use a skill.”
Guild Wars, of course, is a game all about skills. They’re your primary means of getting much of anything done. And when using Dwarven Battle Stance you can’t use a single one of them or else that elite stance you’ve spent so much energy to cast or waited so long to recharge will disappear. It’s a mechanic found on several Warrior stances and while it’s true that a Warrior simply swinging a weapon is a decent killing machine – which is what an “end on skill” stance reduces a character to, basically – they’re a lot better when they can use their skills to support their weapon. Dwarven Battle Stance would be a marginally useful kill if you could combine it with Staggering Blow or Power Attack or with Crude Swing – for some AoE disruption – but because it actively prevents you from doing that it’s an extremely poor choice as an elite skill.
Interruption is, of course, a very powerful ability, especially when you can be relatively assured of it happening a lot and frequently. Whatever your opponent is doing will be halted, whether it’s running away or casting a spell or swinging a weapon, and it’s going to happen repeatedly. Of such, Dwarven Battle Stance is certainly a skill with drawing power. However, because it’s only for hammer users, and only for primary Warrior hammer users, and with all the incumbent problems of its recycle time and it’s countering all your own skills, any desire for the skill should soon sour. If you’re running a hammer Warrior who’s focused on disrupting your target, this might be the elite for you. Otherwise, steer well clear of it.
