Have troubles struggling against ranged professions ? This new “Build your Warrior” subject will help you deal with this issue in a PvP area!
Engineers, Elementalists, Thiefs, Rangers and Mesmers are able to play builds made to prevent you from being in melee range. Because this game has no trinity (tank, healer, dps), you won’t be able to temporize with your healer, meaning that you are at the mercy of your foe during this combat sequence. This will give enough time to your opponent to recover his cooldowns, deal an enormous amount of damage because you are not a threat anymore and probably kill you if you don’t have the tools to counter this. Playing Warrior will always revolve around elaborated combos made with simple tools: canceling your shield stance before the end to fake your opponent and prevent a dodge, letting your opponent land a crowd control on you to force him to be where you want him to be while having a stun breaker ready to use, tactical use of line of sights, etc. Those are the first kind of things you may want to use first against tough opponents: be smarter.
While being smart is a way to go, sometimes a band of skritts just steal your ideas and you end up in a frost trap, chilled and ready to post on the forums how unbalanced this game is. Fortunately, ArenaNet gave us tools to deal with this issue – and I’m not talking about community managers. I ended up thinking that there are two kind of tools that can help you keep a melee vs ranged fight close, meaning that you won’t let your opponent take the edge. And I definitely love to take at least one of those tools in a build: reflecting projectiles on block and movement skills with a range greater than 300 (generally meaning at least 450). You have three block abilities and an easily-taken trait in the first defense tier tree and many good movement skills (Bull’s charge, savage leap, earthshaker, whirlwind, rush) that you may even combine with mobile strikes in the discipline tree to pretty much get a high immobilize-removal potential. While the effects of those skills are pretty much self explanatory, the point is to understand that you may negate your ranged opponent actions with such tools.
Obviously, you can equip a ranged weapon to deal with ranged enemies, and you have plenty of tools to deal with this kind of situation with ranged crowd control (Fear Me, Throw bolas, Blade trail etc), defensive cooldowns (Shouts, heals, Endure Pain, etc). This will simply help you temporize. My plan will be to balance my strengths between tools against melee opponents and ranged ones.
Some good things to know :
God tier tools in melee range : The axe, the hammer, frenzy, Fear me.
God tier tools in a ranged combat sequence : The sword, the mace/shield combo (reflect traited), the improved shouts (tactics tree, armor runes).
Debatable skills :
Endure Pain : Terrible against conditions, pretty good against direct damage even if the cooldown is really long. This utility will definitely be useless against pistol engineers, conditions rangers and mesmers.
Throw Bolas : Good in theory, but subject to condition removals (and you don’t have that many conditions as warrior) and easy to dodge. But this will still be a good skill.
Bull’s Charge : If you use it from afar, it will be easy to dodge and be nullified by movement impairing effects.
Also, more warrior pov !
What kind of damage, then, do you need to be able to output to handle someone trying to keep you at range, because your tools for closing the gap are all on cooldown timers? And how do you then handle offensive melee characters if your building to close the gap on ranged?