sneakytails.5629

Well there is playing Thief and killing some random Necro running back to the zerg, and then there is playing Thief and killing 2 supercharged soulbeasts, not dying and taking t3 Northcamp on ABL.

Thief is one of the higher skill caps in the game. You have these little windows to apply your damage. If you pressure too long, or waste initiative you are done. You are also squishy, and prone to CC. Its really hard to learn WvW roaming on that.

You need something meta, and durable if you are roaming and new. Camping stealth, and running when things go bad teaches you nothing. You wont learn to heal at the right times, you wont be stomping key stomps, or interrupting key stomps on allies. You will be too busy trying not to die.

You also need to be collecting chests at a decent rate along with bags, you will need the resources contained in them to gear up. If you are chain dying/running from fights you are not going to be doing that.

The shortcut would be to buy the exotic gear for a solid build from the auction house and just run with that for a decent amount of time. The alternative to that would be to follow zergs around and tag as many as you can during a push, on active nights you will get lots of bags. It really does not matter what you are running build-wise, just tag the downs. This is how I accumulated gear and resources to get enough gear for a decent build for roaming.

It will take a long time even after you are geared on one character before you get the basics down and are not a free bag/rally during a fight.

If you are serious about roaming you HAVE to be able to get your heals off 7 out of 10 times while in combat, you HAVE to be able to secure key downs during a team-fight, You HAVE to be able to CC at the right times for a burst, or interrupt of a stomp on a ally. Those are BASIC levels of skill for roaming. The bare minimums.

Do not become that guy who can only run and camp stealth, and dies every time you are pressured.

I would just follow zergs and flip sentries/camps with help. Right now you are lean on resources/gear and skill. Its going to take time to claw your way out of that situation.

Avoid Deadeye.

Great thread. I stayed up just to type all this out. Axe is my most used weapon (even over GS), and I really want it to be the premier damage weapon for Warrior.

Axe is not performing fully to its true purpose, damage. Its too slow, it has after-cast issues, and dual wielding axes actually makes you weaker not stronger. Overall the damage is on par with Great-sword and in some cases less, and this is not acceptable. Axe does not have the flexibility of Great-sword, its does not have any evades, 1H lacks movement, or blocks.

Axe should be our fastest and highest damage weapon, and any Warrior wielding it should be feared not taken lightly.

I would make the following changes:

Mainhand

Eviscerate-F1- held back by the long cast time (you typically have to pre-cast this to get reliable hits), and especially the after-cast. Remove after-cast and reduce cast time from 3/4 sec to 1/2 sec.

Chop, Double Chop, Triple Chop-Axe 1-Using the attack chain to completion rarely happens. I would change the interaction of the attack chain in this way. If Chop and Double Chop are succesful hits then Triple Chops cast time is reduced to 1/2 second from the original 1.5 seconds which was unusable.

Cyclone Axe-Axe 2-Cast time reduced from 1/2 second to 1/4 second.

Throw Axe - Axe 3- Remove cast time, and increase projectile speed.

Offhand

Dual Strike- Reduce cast time from 1/2 second to 1/4 second.

Whirling Axe- I like the idea of the OP's superspeed suggestion, it might be to much with my suggestions though. reducing the channel down to 2.5 seconds for a more compact burst might be better and allow for more chaining of skills, thats really where dual axe shines. You pump out compact bursts on the merge or cc.

I feel the damage needs a slight tweak as well, with such a lack of utility (evades, blocks, blinds, immobs, etc.) the damage really needs to be there, it should be the main focus of this weapon.

We should be focusing on chaining together multiple hits when dual weilding and getting a good F1 going with strong setup use, wether from sheild, other cc or a good Axe 3. Right now the weapon plays far too slow, and its hitting too weak. Fix it.

Warrior is in very poor shape. Slowly, but surely I stopped playing my Warrior. I held out longer than most too.

Axe sucks now, used to be my favorite weapon. , I have been playing my thief instead. Maybe the X-Pac will bring axe for thief so I can actually do damage again. Why land 2k Evis (if you are lucky it lands) when I can just spam 5k Heartseeker?

I just stopped playing GW2, cant bring myself to play other classes as a main.

kittenpaw................................................

First you cut the speed making it harder for smaller random groups to defend against organized guild groups or havocs. Lame. Now you have removed the Warclaw stomp which made it possible to punish sloppy players in an enemy comp that was larger than yours. Lame.

At this point just remove the Warclaw and just give groups larger than 10 permanent endure pain. This game is so skewed against smaller scale and its really disgusting.

Every single time the mob complains they get it. Really sick of it. Might as well remove camps and sentries too while you are at it. Neutered siege, neutered Warclaw, and trash downstate.

LAME, LAME, ..........LAME!

Rifle 4 is also a weapon evade for Warrior, you get 2 charges, and the chance to reset them on a successful rifle 5.

Rifle is more flexible than its ever been before the only thing that is hurting it right now is the low damage overall, and the self root/long cast time on Killshot.

Having 2 cripples, 2 piercing channeled attacks, 2 immobilized/evades, and a knock back that can reset the former is huge. You can stay on Rifle far longer than before and actually put together a rotation. The old rifle was pretty much a dump it, and swap type game-play. Now you can actually chain skills together especially if enemies are letting you free-cast or you can position well.

Once you get consistent landing rifle 5 it can be pretty good and it compliments a melee weapon nicely. Most players are not willing to put the time into making it work which you have to do with non-meta weapons. You will have to use it more than twice to get used to it.

You have to give yourself time to get the muscle memory with the Rifle or you will not do well with it.

That is a Teddy Bear not a Necro stop trying to confuse us.

Weakness and Protection are real problems now. Enemy builds with high uptime on either mean a guaranteed loss, you just dont have the damage anymore.

Its even worse with bunker condi, and barrier spam.

Feels like I am using those foam pool noodles they sell in the toy department instead of actual weapons.

Yeah, I tend to run Scrapper runes, with damage reduction food, and 3k base armor (with sigil) on my Shield-less Warriors. Of course I also take lots of stunbreaks (4), and Rousing Resilience as well.

This works ok when not running GS and SH.

I agree with the lower damage on the CC skills, it only pushed all Warriors to run the same specific CC skills, because they were too good. Bulls Charge was WAY overtuned and overused. In its old state it was literally an Elite skill that you could put in a utility slot.

The part that is hurting is the damage nerfs to things like Eviscerate and Dagger among others. Its almost pointless trying to land Evis on certain targets, and many of them are not even bothering to dodge. To me that says a lot.

Yeah I stopped playing core when I was getting 1.5k eviscerate crits with Destruction of the Empowered, and tier 3 Berserkers Power.

I have no idea what I will do when Spellbreaker gets adjusted on its F1's.

I have been running Axe/Axe-Rifle for years in WvW and Rifle is now the best its has ever been by a wide margin. The changes are amazing. Its key to land your Rifle 5 so I run sigil of Agility to really speed up the cast time on Rifle 5 (i always go for the knockback after a weapon swap), its makes it so much easier to land. I also run Celerity as the 2nd sigil for a faster volley after the knockback lands.

2 cripples, 2 evades, and 2 channeled piercing ranged attacks are very nice to have.

Since you have 2 cripples to use I usually try use that before trying to land a rifle 5 if my agility sigil is on cooldown.

At this point Killshot is almost more valuable to bait out a dodge, or to lure an enemy into you so you can cancel the F1 and weapon swap into a Evis or something.

With all that said it can faceplant pretty hard it your rifle 5 misses. The kneeling rooted Killshot is also still a liability. But I feel the utility of Rifle does compensate for it just a bit and makes it worth tolerating now.

I have been running it on Spellbreaker and Core. I have not run much meme with rifle yet, I think the damage is too low, and the players are running way too much bunker to make it worth while. The whole point of the meme rifle builds was to burst down quickly and now that is gone so there is no point anymore to run those imo. For me its about the utility.

If the damage coefficients go up on Killshot, then it might be worth it again to run glass.

Well, said MeepeY. WvW does feel like more of a struggle.

Berserker felt the worse to me while roaming in WvW. I was getting punished very hard for having Berserker mode on cooldown, and just kind of languishing in purgatory with no control of the situation, it feels terrible. After playing some Reaper this patch I really feel like the player needs to be able to toggle the mode on an off. This change would be huge.

It was a bit easier for me this patch though as I have been using heals a lot more over regen even pre-patch, that made an easier transition for me. Heals are inferior though to regen, except when dealing with strong poisons which can kill regen easily.

I kind of felt that regen was a bit too dominant though, almost everyone used it, and it kept the GS/X-SH dominance because that was the best kit for regen.

Things did change though post patch for Thief vs X. Before the patch the Thief was very squishy, it could be downed easily by any real burst and even cleave damage. This felt balanced against what thief could do, and the fact that they do not play around cooldowns like the rest of the classes in GW2.

Now most bursts are not hitting anywhere near as high, and the harder hitting CC's are doing almost zero damage this is making taking down Thief's in the very small windows you get very difficult now. Lets face it, versus the thief class you only really get small windows to apply your damage. The rest of the time its, blind, blind, evade, evade, teleport, teleport, stealth, stealth, etc.

As long as I can burst the thief reliably then all the blinds, evades, and stealth's are somewhat acceptable. Post patch this has been flipped on its head, the window is gone now, and thief holds the advantage.

Was roaming last night on T3 NA and started fighting a BOZ mesmer and was then plus one'd by a condi bunker Firebrand. I Managed a last ditch Eviscerate to down the mesmer, but with my condi defense on cool-down this happened. It was literally like getting stomped by a Warclaw in slow motion.

This is the highest amount of condition damage I have ever been hit with in that short amount of time in the years that I have been playing this game.

35,086 condition damage in a few seconds.

I was not really paying attention to the numbers until I glanced at them afterwards, I have never hit even close to those numbers with condi Berserker even with might stacking.

I am seeing more and more condition bunkers, my first 8 fights were all against condition builds.

This is not about how many condition builds are currently running around NA or EU, its about condition builds not having to play by the same rules in gearing, (Trailblazer, Dire) and the fact that condition damage bypasses armor and toughness ,which power builds have to sacrifice for, and condition builds do not.

Its never been a level playing field. Its beyond obvious at this point.

Its not balanced in the slightest, everyone knows the issues as we have been discussing them for years, but for some reason the same problems still exist.

1. Condition damage bypasses armor/toughness, power damage has no such luxury. This is not a level playing field.

2. There are 5 damaging conditions, (Bleeding, Burning, Confusion, Torment, and Poisoned) 8 crowd control conditions, (Blinded, Chilled, Crippled, Feared, Immobilized, Slowed, Taunted, and Weakness) and finally the bonus Vulnerability. So that is 5 damaging conditions against power damage by itself, again, tilted in condis favor. The real imbalance comes from the cover condis that come along with the damaging conditions, THIS is what destroyed cleanse and removal, and now its very easy to outpace enemy defenses by many condition builds.

3. Good damage for power requires 3 stats (power, precision, ferocity) but only one stat for condition damage (condition damage), this heavily tilts things in favor of condition builds as they can freely stack toughness and vitality, even healing power as well. Power damage builds MUST make sacrifices in damage to do the same. Condition builds clearly are not playing by the same rules as power in gearing, and this is bad game design.

4. Many condition damage skills are AOE and once tagged, conditions will still tick on the player even without LOS. Again, power damage has no such luxury. The heaviest hitting power damage skills are very often single target and require LOS.

Its so obvious that most of the advantages lie with condition builds, and this patch has only highlighted the power gap.

I really wish we could make some mini-tournaments at the dueling arena in bastion. That would be sick. Maybe have a small gold prize. To me that's the only thing missing.

I cant believe they have not touched Trailblazer and Dire stats yet. That's a huge problem, and post patch peeps are reaching for it again because now power damage is so weak.

Our characters have to last longer because the fights are now much longer, and condi bunker does this the best and is the easiest to play.

I was landing 1.5k tier 3 Eviscerates, with a 3 stack of Berserker's Power, and Destruction of the Empowered, and these bunker types do not even make the effort to dodge them. Pretty pathetic. Throw in tanky food, and Protection and most power builds stand little chance.

It might not be the entire meta, but at least pre-patch we could actually kill the tankier specs in a reasonable amount of time.

You even have people running dedicated support with condi bunkers.

When Spellbreaker f1's get adjusted you will see a lot more complaints. Warrior feels pretty weak so far.

Everyone's skill bars are a lot more pressured now after the patch, with less stability, and longer cooldowns on many skills we have to choose the most important things first. This does not leave a lot of room. If I take enough to fight condi effectively I am too susceptible to power damage, if I take a balance its easily overwhelmed while the condi player hides behind tank stats and spams defensive skills.

Trailblazer is still an issue, getting really good damage with enormous buffs to tanky stats. I have to sacrifice at least some things on my power builds to add in toughness and health, I generally end up with lower crit chance and damage. Condition builds have no such problems. This is the disconnect in WvW between power and condi.

Besides, resistance skill cooldowns were increased, in some cases significantly. This has meant its now even easier to outpace clears and resistance, unless you go for a full condi defense build, those are a requirement to fight 2 condi players.

Lower power damage has increased TTK and it has benefited the Trailblazer and Dire users the most, with absolutely zero sacrifice on their part.

All condi has ever been is hiding behind tank stats while rotating through defensive abilities (which they usually stack) while your condis tick. Heck most condi skills are AOE which are far easier to use.

Making a damage type (condi) bypass a stat (armor) that most power players have to sacrifice for in gearing is just about the dumbest thing ever.

This and the above is why condi should get zero respect.

No wonder all I seen while roaming on the first day were the same old strength spellbreakers. I was full zerk core, with Berserkers Power, and Destruction of the Empowered, and they still were out damaging me with F1's.

Cmon ANET.

Same problem here.