How to melt things

Hi everyone. As you can see from my total number of posts, I'm new to these forums. Scaphism recommended these forums and from quickly browsing through them and reading the various articles I must say I'm very impressed. Knowledge is power, and there seems to lots of it here.

Now to cut to the chase, last BWE I tried out a rather intriguing build. It was essentially a Warrior/Elementalist sent out on one and only one mission: burn and melt everything on it's rampaging path. The idea came from my discovery of a rather peculiar sword: the Dragon Sword. Appart from looking fantastic it dealt between 14 and 21 fire damage. That instant a lightbulb brightened over my head which sparked a rather intriguing build.

My objective was to get someone on fire. Essentially On Fire comboed with Sever Artery will result in 10 degen to any ennemy it's unleashed upon. Even if you're a monk, 20 health lost every second makes you wonder why you got out of bed to get whiped. Initially I had 12 Fire, 10 Swords, 10 Strength. I opened with Glyph of Lesser Energy, followed by Mark of Rodgort and a quick Power Strike. Three strikes later Sever Artery and voilà a nicely cooked caster or warrior. I tested it in Gladiator's Arena and well it just dominated. Warriors with their invulnerability illusion crumbled and casters ran away like beat up dogs often to end up charred by the remaining 2 seconds of -10 degen. When I brought it to 8v8 however I discovered maybe I had a flaw. You guessed it: I had no healing. So essentially I was a hassle to my fellow monks since a warrior should be able to tank and I couldn't even do that properly. Also a Dragon Sword yielding high-damage output player attracts it's own share of attention. The build was quickly put aside and my classic Odd Sock Wa/Mo was brought out.

Either Scaphism or Sarus from my trustworthy guid MDK recommended that perhaps I should go Elmo. I could heal and get that -7 degen whilst being able to do some form of damage. Not content with an Elmo I tried a Mes/E with a familiar approach: get the target on fire and use some nasty domination on him. This type of build worked half-decently but when 1 on 1 versus a warrior I quickly died. This type of build was also discarded and I went back (once again) to my Wa/Mo.

Reminiscing on the events occured in the BWE I couldn't help but feel sorry for my poor Wa/E. The DPS is fantastic but how to make it more survivable ? It came to me that perhaps Victory is Mine ! could be my savior. After a few touchups I came with the following concept:

Warrior/Elementalist

Skill 1: Mark of Rodgort
Skill 2: Glyph of Lesser Energy
Skill 3: Sever Artery
Skill 4: Gash
Skill 5: Final Thrust
Skill 6: Axe Rake
Skill 7: Watch Yourself!
Skill 8: Victory Is Mine!

Swordsmanship 11 + 1
Tactics 10 + 2
Strength 6 + 1
Fire Magic 8 + 0
Axe 2 + 0 (dump points)

The idea is simple. Attack a few times to get Sever Artery charged up. Then inflict bleeding and deep wound. Axe Rake is to avoid hamstring which costs 10 energy (too hefty for my build). Once these conditions are on, Glyph + Mark come along and bam ! That sweet -10 degen and 4 conditions on one target. Then if you start going low, just slap on Victory is Mine ! for an energy and health boost. With the following attribute distribution I can heal my character for over 200 health and 15 net energy. That's also assuming no other ennemy is on a condition.

The advantage from this build is that I can now equip a shield (compared to the strength heavy one I used in the BWE) and can actually heal myself. Replacing Watch Yourself with Healing Signet came to my attention but the whole double damage thing really scares me. The problem now is that the fire condition only lasts 15 seconds so I'm left without my precious flame for 15 seconds because Glyph of Lesser Energy won't recharge fast enough. I was thinking maybe not waiting for it and getting a +10 energy item to be able to cast Mark and then Victory is mine to regain the energy...

Is this build initally flawed ? Is there room for Wa/E that don't use Conjure in Guild Wars ? I love this build (and conveniently named my character The Melter for it) because of it's enormous DPS. However my guildmates still insist on me going Elmo for an On Fire build. I'm quite hesitant to do so, so I'm asking the Guild Wars Guru staff if maybe this build could be the focus of the next Round Table Discussion to see what can be modified. The way you guys turned a Warrior Bane and made it into a power build gives me hope for my Wa/E...

Bonetti's might be something to play around with. Your main goal is to inflict as many conditions, so it goes against that somewhat. But for those times when you're being focused by more than one warrior, if you throw up Bonetti's you can still drop a Rodgort and just swing with your fire blade and do decent damage, plus gain back some energy.

Why would you not run Conjure?

Well for starters, there's no more room on the skill bar for it... Secondly Conjure will add around 12 damage to all my attacks. Considering a sword swings every 1.66 seconds, I find it better to go with burning and bleeding: you get -20 hp/s + anything resulting from your attacks instead of a mere +12 every 1.66 seconds. Comparing DPS, your damage output will be higher with this build than with any Conjure combo. Third, I don't have much energy to spare with this build to cast a 10 energy spell

I'd have to go with Charles on adding in a conjure- 10 energy every 60 seconds is nothing that's going to drain your energy pool- cast it before meeting up with your enemy, and it won't slow you down at the start of the battle. Adding an extra 12 damage on your attacks(swords are 1.33 second attack speed, btw) might not be as much damage as -10 regeneration, but there's no reason to sacrifice one for the other- 12 damage every attack + -10 regeneration will kill your enemy much quicker than either one by itself.

I'd probably ditch Axe Rake or Watch Yourself for Conjure Flame. Axe Rake takes a lot of adrenaline, requires you to switch to a weapon(which you won't deal much damage with due to your low axe mastery attribute), just in order to inflict cripple to get a bit of extra health/energy from Victory is Mine. I've found that Victory is Mine works quite well with only 3 conditions, and you might even occasionally get lucky and get a few more conditions inflicted by your teammates. Watch Yourself can be decent for taking reduced damage, but it's not a skill I'd usually bother with- you've already got good armor with a warrior, and nice healing through Victory is Mine. Not using Watch Yourself will free up some energy as well, leaving you a bit more room to play with when needing to refresh Mark or the Conjure.

So basically what everyone is recommending is go with the following:

Warrior/Elementalist

Skill 1: Mark of Rodgort
Skill 2: Glyph of Lesser Energy
Skill 3: Sever Artery
Skill 4: Gash
Skill 5: Final Thrust
Skill 6: Conjure Flame
Skill 7: Riposte
Skill 8: Healing Signet or Victory is Mine !

Swordsmanship 11 + 1
Tactics 10 + 2
Strength 6 + 1
Fire Magic 8 + 0

Perhaps Conjure can add some more damage but I'd also like to point out that the bonus is a mere +9 fire. I guess it covers from the lack of Strength this build has. Since Riposte is in the build (up till now I never noticed how much of a 'free skill' this is, 4A is sweet) I figured I might as well throw in Healing Signet. It'll be a nice heal every 4 attacks which is a nice bonus compared to 150 or so every 15 seconds.

EDIT: I won't be getting back energy... Now to think about it, perhaps Victory is Mine is a better skill to have.

Don't bother with Riposte, it only does anything in a duel. If you have more than a single person attacking you're going to be wishing you had a skill that actually did something there.

In PvP no one cares about Warriors, let alone Warrior/Elementalists. Don't even bother with defense. Offense, offense, and more offense. Your build is missing Frenzy.

With Conjure Flame you'll be dealing fire damage with every hit, so you can drop the Fire Hilt for a Zealous one, and solve your energy troubles.

Also, you're going to have to be casting Mark of Rodgort before engaging. Why? 1.75 seconds for the GLE and 2.75 for the Mark. 4.5 seconds standing there in battle not swinging is completely unacceptable. Use Conjure, GLE/Mark, and go mix it up.

You can lower your Tactics a good deal to pump out Fire and/or Strength. All Tactics gives you is more health on Victory is Mine, and we don't care about the healing - we want the energy. The healing is just a nice bonus.

Conjure Flame
Mark of Rodgort
Glyph of Lesser Energy
Sever Artery
Gash
Final Thrust
Frenzy
Victory is Mine

Peace,
-CxE

[COLOR=Indigo]im going to hve to disagree with u on riposte, riposte is a great skill
u r dealing 32 damage every 4 hits with it, with 8 hits u could hve used it twice which means it has just as much damage as final thrust in less hits, and doing this will block 2 attacks from your opponent. so in general if u r getting rid of riposte i would disagree, riposte makes excellent damage and a blacok for only 4 hits. so if u want to ad your skill over riposte then put riposte in for final thrust, would work better anyways...[/COLOR]

The problem with Riposte is that you have to be attacked to damage to opponent. W/Mo is my main character and I don't get attacked much in PvP unless most of my team is dead anyways. Warriors are one of the last to get targeted so choosing Final Thrust over Riposte is choosing offense over defense, something a warrior can usually get away with.

You can't Riposte a Monk.

Ah, how'd I miss out on this party? Always been a big fan of the Warrior/Elementalist...

Anyhow, I don't know about Mark of Rodgort's. It's a lot of energy, which necessitates burning a slot on GLE - which won't recharge nearly as fast as Rodgort's will - and it's also a hex which means that your target can easily have it removed spoiling all the effort you've gone through to put it up. And you won't be able to afford casting it again until GLE recharges in a minute, which is roughly 1,000 years worht of time in the midst of a battle. You devote two skills slots just for getting an easily removable Burning effect on your target? It seems questionable to me.

Perhaps that's because I tend to discount DOT focused builds. One of the first characters I ever ran was a Necromancer/Warrior based on creating serious DOT damage to a target with Sever+Siphon and more. And I wasn't too pleased with the results. Maybe that had more to do with trying to play a secondary Warrior as a Warrior but the problem with DOT damage is that it's capped. With Bleeding and Burning running constantly you'll be doing 10 pips of damage, sure, but that's only 20 DPS. The key to making that worthwhile is to make sure you're capable of doing something else on top of that DOT damage. You want the DOT to be effective and easy to maintain but you don't want it to take up too much space in your design because you need slots to do straight damage as well. I tend not to bother with DOT, then, except as an afterthought, since I'd be pairing it with regular damage which can be much more effective anyway. Not to say it can't work, just that I don't find it to be worth the effort personally.

Also, as long as I'm being curmugeonly I might as well mention that I dislike Final Thrust, too. Final Thrust drains all your adren, of course, whihc means it's not going to play nicely with other adrenal skills. Yes, it's going to be the last one you use so you won't lose too many strikes But you still lose those strikes which I hate. If I kill a target off with Final Thrust, I'd want to jump right on the next target with my adrenal skills nearly ready to go again. Perhaps it's my roots as a hammer war showing but when you take 16~20 seconds to build up enough adren you're not goig to be using that skill on the target you started out with. As a Warrior you'll want to be constantly hitting targets, switching to a new one as soon as your initial target goes down, and by not sacrificing all your adren to finish them off with Final Thrust you can be effective against the next target that much more quickly. Say you save up and time things so that you can bust out with a Sever+Gash+Final combo, by the end of all that you' have two strikes worth of adren in Sever or nearly halfway to recharging it (Yes, using an adrenal skill drops all other adrenal skills but you'll be spacing those out with normal attacks anyway so as long as they don't all cost the same adren you'll have the others somewhat recharged by the time you get to Final.). If you kept that adren you'd be Bleeding your next target almost immediately or able to use your Sever again for yet more damage and to either extend the Bleeding or replace it if it's been removed.

Sustainable damage is the watchword, you don't want to sacrifice your abilitiy to deliver a steady and consistant steam of pain by spiking your damage up and that's what the "lose all adrenaline" of Final Thrust does. I'd favor either Pure Strike or Galrath Slash over Final. You won't do as much damage with each hit but yyou'll do it more often and you won't unduly hamper your other adrenal skills. Better yet, you can use both of those together. That's just me, though.

So, what I'd do would be to drop Rodgot's Mark, pick up a nice energy gaining sword instead of a fire damage sword, and use something like Immolate to cause fire damage instead. It's something like 1 second cast with a 5 second cooldown and it'll deal decent damage and set the target on fire. Pop that with Sever (heck, with Victory is Mine you don't even need the energy sword) and that's a combo you can keep up for a while and it gives you one more slot to use in your build as you won't need to carry around the achingly slow GLE.

So my ideal build here would look something Victory!, Sever, Gash, Pure, Galrath, Frenzy, Immolate, Conjure Flame.

Precisely. Riposte is only good against a single opponent. It only blocks the next attack. Unlike other defensive stances it doesn't scale up in effectiveness as you add more attackers. It's not a flat 25% damage reduction, it depends on how many folks you're facing. It's 12.5% with two people attacking you. 6.25% with 3. Et cetera. And does nothing against non-melee attackers. It's going to be of use more frequnetly than the average stance bt it's going to be of far less use when it is active than another stance. It's porbably about the same degree of protection but, then, Warrior's stance protection is incredibly poor (what do you expect when you can only get it up 1/6th of the time?).

[COLOR=DarkRed]thats true on riposte, but i guess i just love it cause it was useful when playing my mesmer/warrior IW guy. when the big bad warriors came over and thought they could take on the little mesmer, they were usually surprised when every couple of hits they kept gettin dealt with 30 damage, plus the damage the mesmer is dealing out with IW. on top of that they would just keep attackin cause most warriors had no clue what soothing images was : ).[/COLOR]

Dovi what are you talking about?
Did you read Rex's build review of the IW mesmer warrior? You're not gaining adrenaline...unless you're not using IW. Or do you have some secret formula for gaining adrenaline, and if so, please share it with us.

I haven't read Rex's review, but if it actually says that, it's wrong. If nothing else, you gain adrenaline every time you're hit. Using IW will not change that, even if it prevents you from gaining adrenaline when you hit someone else.

Hardly secret knowledge, check the description of adrenaline under the warrior guide on this very site.

i also used sword a little, so while the damage was definetly not as great as with IW, it worked to build up adren, and since that IW lasts 30 secs and has 40 sec recharge during the time i could use sword with disruption and since i was basically just going iwht sword my adren build up and could be used later or then, and energy wasnt realy a problem cause i didnt hve any skills going except for healing signet and hundred blades, i want to get as much damage output as i can with my little weak sword that did like 15 damage at a time, lol. when doing i found i would sometimes die, but atleast i ahd soemthing to do during those 10 secs withtout IW. so basically my secret adren builder was to use basic swordsmanship for 10 secs to gain like enough adren for a few ripostes : ), which helped big time on the destruction of another char.

what was relaly nice is attacking soemone whos attackin someone else to gaoin adren and then swict on IW and deal awsome damage and then hve them attack me and get torn apart with 2-3 ripostes.

I just thought about this. If you happen to have a mesmer cast Fragility on the flamming target and you (the warrior) put on Frenzy, you'll have dealt 9 attacks in 8 seconds, triggering Fragility 9 times. Assuming it's at level 11 Illusions, that's 9*26 = 234 damage. Considering you're just causing Burning and no other conditions, that's going to add up to 346 net damage (considering burning + fragility). If you consider the base damage from your sword as a well as a Final Thrust, the target you were after should be dead within less than 10 seconds ! (if there's no healing support that is). This gets even crazier if you get a second warrior that deals flamming attacks. Again both put on Frenzy and swing away. That means you'll be at 2*9*26 = 468. Add the pips of degen and we're looking at 580. Add base damage and Conjure Flame to the equation and well... it'll be a lot less than a 10 second timeframe

These numbers also don't reflect using skills like Sever Artery and Gash which will 1) cause a new condition 2) reignite the fire. So for these 2 attacks, you're basically activating Fragility twice on top of causing a -20 health after the fourth attack if you're using Sever Artery. You might also want to get your friendly neighborhood Ranger to cause Pin Down so that it activates Fragility and avoids the target to run away, giving him time to heal. If I were the target, my first relfex would also be to run away lol

Of course such a strategy can only be effective once the combat has progressed at least a few seconds after both teams have met. It's probably not a good idea to open with this since the odds are that your hexes will be shattered.

So the trio could be the following:
2 Warrior/Elementalists with Mark/Glyph, conjure and a flamming sword
1 Ranger/Mesmer with Pindown and Fragility, Apply Poison or Kindle Arrows

Please comment on this idea. I know it's not a good idea to base an entire strategy on items and hexes but if you look at the numbers, they are quite impressive.

I also have a question. What's the current status on Fevered Dreams ? Does it have a good enough AoE to actually be used ? And has anyone found it in the BWE ? If anyone has it, I'd be willing to pay a decently large sum to get my hands on a charm

I swear that I don't have an 8v8 build that uses Fragility + (Mark of Rodgort + Fire Weapons) + Epidemic + Victory Is Mine!....



Also, I like putting 12 points into Fire just to make Mark of Rodgort's Burning last another second

Have you actually tried this type of play in GvG ? If so is it worth it even with the risk of hex removals ? I know it would slaughter for Tombs since pick up groups probably don't have interminlging skills to complement each other

Another question I have is regarding Dragon Swords. Can Dragon Swords be equiped with the infamous Zeoulous Grip as well as another hilt or is the hilt considered the fire damage part ? Also could two buffs ie stealing energy be stacked on one sword ?