W/N Sword Conditioner, thoughts, improvements....

First of all let me show the build and explain what I was thinking:

Death Magic: 9
Strength: 9+1
Sword: 12+3+1
Sup Vigor

Sword: Crippling and Health mods
Focus: +1/20% Death +30 HP

Gladiator's Chest, Legs, Gaunts, Knight's Boots for 38e, including focus

Hamstring
Virulence{E}
Frenzy
Sprint or Savage Slash/Distracting Blow or Pure Strike/Seeking Blade
Plague Touch
Galrath Slash
Final Thrust
Res Signet

First, yes Mend Ailment/Restore Conditions negates my degen. But unlike a Fragility Mesmer, I'm still a 16 skill 10 strength warrior with frenzy and a cancel/speed stance and a decent adrenal spike.

Why Sword and not Axe? Namely the non elite adrenal spike from sword outperforms the Axe non adrenal spike and you have to devote a conditional(adrenaline) attack to cause a condition to use Virulence.

Hamstring is an unconditional condition for 10e out of your 38, that also enables you to keep runners near stationary for yourself and the rest of the team.

This synergizes well with Virulence, something that people do NOT expect a warrior to carry at the moment, which kicks your DPS through the roof for the period it is active. Using frenzy to speed your adrenal spike which should and usually is active about the time they hit 1/2 health, Galrath to take them well below half, final thrust to finish or atleast put the nails in the coffin for them.

I am tending to lean towards using Savage Slash/Distracting Blow to keep Mend Ailment from being used well when targeting monks instead of Sprint because with a Crippling hilt and 16 sword you can keep them stationary fairly indeterminitely. Except for the whole can't cancel the double damage from Frenzy part, that keeps holding me back...

Was repeatedly told Sword was pointless for PvP, that it was too energy intensive to use as a Primary Warrior, Well why not USE its energy intensive skills that combine and work extremely well with a Secondary's skills?

Thoughts? Opinions? Flames?

lol i tried this build ages ago and the problem i got is because you are close to your target means you share his disease!

And that isnt good is it

I like it. But tafy has a point. just move right after maybe? I prefer w/n with poison

Yeah but right after I get diseased I swap targets, Plague Touch and beat on him or plague touch it right back onto who I recieved it from, but disease by itself isn't that much damage, its the combination of itdisease, poison and getting hit once a second by a warrior that gets them, any half competent monk can keep you alive with a very occasional orison or breeze with only disease on you.

Its decent degen combined with a decent spike and ok consistent damage, which by itself can't kill too much but all the skills tie into each other nicely.

So far ele's and mesmers just lose it and freak out when the war they ignored heavy conditions them then throws a little spie behind it shortly afterwards.

Half the monks i've fought tried to out heal it and the constant damage from my attacks and then the decent degen kept us so slowly going killing after they realized what was going on. But after another teammate or 2 jumped on him it was all over.

The others tried to run, for a second, which they couldn't, and died soon afterwards.

if u diseased u dont need to plague touch it to the next target, normally as warrior u dont wanna be running from target to target as ur lowering ur dps.

Generally warriors should only swap target if your current target has been buffed up somehow.

With you being diseased acts and a cover condition against a mend ailment, they wont be getting off their crippled until it wears out normally lol, and for a monk thats not good. Id laugh if u faced a melandrus monk tho

Yeah, faced one yesterday and it was rather interesting fight. But having to spam mend ailment cost him all the extra energy he gained. And I was still a warrior beating on him with him doing only weak heals getting interrupted every other, every couple casts. All in all, he had enough trouble keeping himself alive and barely one other so that my team was able to win easily enough.

2 monks both with mend ailment/conditions really abuse this though

Also ran into a 2 monk team where one was running martyr and purge conditions/mend ailment. They took us to a stand still for about 15 minutes before my monk missed a self heal before an axe spike.

But only 3 replies and 80 something views means I'll probably see a few W/N swords running around I bet...

In the competition arena, this is not an optimal strategy since when i tried it sometime ago, my unsuspecting random teamates get the disease trouble as well. So I end up wondering if im helping the team or otherwise XD

As for team arena, I suppose this build might be applicable if your team has some sort of plan going..

You need a zealous mod to keep up with all that energy :X

Energy isn't really an issue except for very prolonged fights, or if you are spamming plague touch. But yeah as a secondary weapon I carried a Zealous because I wasn't sure if I'd need it.

And yeah played it about a third of a time in TA but mostly CA, disease isn't a big killer like I stated before, only one guy wasn't able to cope and keep himself alive with the disease, an AoTL Sacrifice/DA necro. But I expected him to die anyways within 45 seconds of the round beginning.

In TA it is just fuel for Mend Ailment heals for my teams which is nice, a near garunteed condition. >.<

But its really impressive when I can grab an off target caster and kill them within 15 seconds of attacking, if not faster, if I'm not soothing'd or they don't pop an evade stance as a Sword wielder.

I really wish I could think of a logical and energy efficient way to add Wild Blow in. Anyone have any ideas?

Ok try this, swap frenzy out for berserker's stance(i know the recharge sucks) it helps ALOT in getting the kill quickly by charging Galrath and Final Thrust quickly.

Also dropped sprint for Wild Blow, I've gotten cussed out badly for this a couple times by different people for smacking them with it right after they threw a stance down. Oddly more than I normally got which was like 1 in 20 on my other warrior skillsets, must be the degen + warrior damage I had on them

Worth a try for any playing around with this template.

And there must be some... A good bit over 200 views and less than 10 replies.

Sword is a smart move seeing that 4a is all it takes to bleed. Here's my beef with this build...

Need Gladiator's? That's already a ridiculous limitation when the equipment MUST be this in order to work well. What if I wanted some anti-magic resistance? Oh no, I lose energy max using my Wyvern Hauberk...

I'd take this build and make it more energy friendly using this setup... [as well as make the enemy beg for energy mercy]

12+1+3 Sword
8+1 Strength
7+1 Tactics
8 Death Magic

Sever Artery
Gash
Galrath/Savage Slash
Fear Me!!
Frenzy
Sprint
Plague Touch
Virulence {E}

I personally would go with Galrath because you can't spam Savage Slash as much as they can spam Mend Ailment.

With this setup, you'll be doing 2.3 e. degen on your foe if you spam Fear Me as well as all the foes in ward range of the monk... [he will be in ward range of teammates if he expects to heal anyone...]

Sever is spammed right along side Fear Me which will act well as a 3hp degen buffer...

I wish I could sever artery like an Aatxe...

Tried to go with the full spectrum of conditions like that and it worked ok, but the loss of final thrust and the res signet turned me off from doing the build that way.

And e.denial isn't really what this build originated as, using the good non elite adrenal spike along with heavy degen with a couple added fun conditions was the basis for me.

If I was going to use an adrenal condition why not go axe for the immediate deep wound?

The whole purpose for me in going sword was for the immediate run up and cripple, virulence, then slice and dice. When I first started playing it the immediate virulence without a Me/N on my team would throw the other team into confusion pretty bad. They would try to run, but couldn't because I slipped a cripple in near unnoticed/forgotten when the virulence hit.

Also tried using that temp except instead of fear me! I used hamstring to give them every condition but blind Was rather funny to run up hamstring, berserker's stance for added adrenaline, then sever, virulence, gash, galrath's, final thrust.

Used this:

Hamstring
Berserker's Stance
Sever Artery
Virulence{E}
Gash
Galrath's Slash
Final Thrust
Plague Touch

Same attributes, but the loss of the res sig made itself rather clear a few times. Dropped plague touch for res sig to see if that helped but seemed everytime I didn't have plague touch I was blinded near immediately.

Axe needs 7a. for the Deep Wound.

Sever needs 4a. At almost half the time, you can land Virulence {E}. What's more, at 10e. Hamstring for me was just far too inefficient. This build I posted dumps 5 conditions on you forcing a Restore Condition, Martyr, or Draw Conditions.

Let's make this build a Fragility's Favorite shall we? 6 conditions for an unfair amount of suffering...

I'd say we'd need to go axe since they have a more energy friendly skill list...

16 axe, 9 strength, 10 death magic

Dismember
Axe Rake
Axe Twist
Frenzy
Sprint
Plague Touch
Virulence {E}
Res sig / Disrupting Chop / Soul Feast

That last skill slot can be Soul Feast if you're in Random Arena (or res sig if you're certain your team sucks enough). Disrupting Chop for GvG or TA/HoH.

The DpS this build generates as well as the obscenely large burial of both Deep Wound and Cripple makes it quite the ferocious beast on the field.

Problems? Hexes [as usual] and the ever present Martyr/Restore Condition/etc... If you can disrupting chop his self mend, then you win. No monk can compete with a frenzied warrior reconditioning and not being able to remove them. Plague Touch will innoculate you from your own disease so it's cool...

with the extra energy from the focus it wasn't a problem at all using hamstring, because once you hit them with it its still more energy than near all other warriors have.

And the axe twist wouldn't help as much unless you are using a mes somewhere to cast fragility since Virulence already has weakness built in.

And with the automatic starter cripple from hamstring you don't "have" to take sprint, can take another damage skill, and with a cripple hilt and 16 sword they will ALWAYS have it on.

I suppose your right. If you can bury cripple deep enough.

However, needing to bring a focus is not only stupid looking [warrior with no AL bonus w00t], but not as efficient. That's just my opinion though and there's no need to rebuttle it... I like efficiency in a battle system. Still, now that I look at it, I think a Zealous Hilt can make up for the massive energy strain. Perhaps this?

16 Sword
8+1 Strength
10 Death Magic

Hamstring
Sever Artery
Gash
Final Thrust
Frenzy
Sprint
Plague Touch
Virulence {E}

A real conditioning damage style build if you can swing enough. I still say to bring sprint since if the enemy DOES wield a mass anti-condition skill, waiting for hamstring to recycle is too much.

Fear Me!! as mentioned is just too good of a skill to use at 8 tactics and that alone combined with Frenzy is quite a bit of suffering.

A Monk standing next to a Fear Me!! warrior taking clean hits will NOT be healing himself for long... The degen that Fear Me!! causes is too great and casters will scatter should they notice it. If they don't, so much the better.

Yeah, I love Fear Me! also but I didn't really want to spread the attributes out thin considering it's a warrior primary with low energy to begin with so it doesn't have the ability to spam out energy skills to compensate for the lower durations.

This is probably decent for random, but woe to you if the other team has a monk. I've fought warriors like this, and getting a 200hp Mend Ailment is hilarious. I can practically heal someone with Mend Ailment alone vs this build.

Seems to me that this build is set up not to take out chars in spite of an enemy monk, but to take down the monk himself or make his job tougher. Going for the squishy targets and all. Sure you go after a warrior with this build while an enemy monk is around... well why would any build go after the monk first?

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Of course, there are always counters. Interruption is a potential counter for anything. But the bottom line is, a team that has a monk should also have Mend Ailment. I said this build might work in CA because teams don't always have monks, and would get owned by the conditions.

However, just about anywhere else monks will be present and all that condition stacking will feed Mend Ailment like crazy. You have to take this into consideration if you want to be successful. We could go on for days talking about "what if", but chances are MA is going to be a factor.

As a side note, Healing Breeze also pretty much cancels out condition/degen (if they have -10 degen, a good Breeze will bring that down to -1 degen). I know a lot of people discredit Breeze so you might not see it that often, but keep it in mind when you're planning your strategy. Breeze is much more effective in 4v4, and I bring it oftentimes. Mend + Breeze would completely negate the damage, but chances are you won't be facing that too often.

Actually the ability to take one character and make the monk devote so much of his/her time to keeping just that ONE person alive makes this build work even if the damage is cut drastically by mend ailment.

The only real "counter" to this build is a mend ailment cast inbetween Hamstring or the other starter condition and Virulence. Which is exactly one second for the monk to register whats happening, not shrug off the cripple condition which A) he ignores because it doesn't hurt him B) doesn't realize that its a W/N doing the crippling/conditioning C) Doesn't react fast enough.

This is another reason I like hamstring over any of the other conditions that can be used to start this, they have no idea what exactly is going on until AFTER you rip off Virulence.

Breeze? yes it CAN counter the degen a decent bit, but thats a reason I like savage slash/distracting blow, cast Virulence on the monk then immediately use the interrupt if you are targetting the monk, 9 out of 10 times you will catch his first attempt at countering, even if its mend ailment, and that will throw even more pressure on him buying the REST of your team time to deal more damage, knock off a different enemy, throw their hexes/conditions elsewhere.

The worst thing for this is Martyr/Purge Conditions and/or Restore Conditions.

Which I expect to see more and more of in all likelyhood soon.

EDIT: While you may be able to throw a 200hp Mend Ailment out, how much time do you devote to keeping that one person alive compared to the rest of the team? How much do you think the priority of that target would drop if YOU were being targetted by a W/N Virulence conditioner also?

Just some thoughts, you can't look at it in a bubble, but have to look at what it does with having to keep 3 others alive for TA and 5-6 others alive in Tombs/GvG while 4-5 OTHER people are doing their thing to your people not just that one W/N.

I don't like mass conditioning because mend ailments owns it hard. You're not going to run a monk dry with no E. denial AND giving him the ability to heal to near full with one mend ailments.

I really don't see any single build BUT an E. Denial build running a monk dry by itself.

The heals from mend ailment are a problem, but we knew that to begin with from post one

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Except for the fact that the first condition removed is weakness.

Which isn't a degen condition. So you have to cast mend ailment atleast twice to cancel SOME of the degen which is 5 seconds. thats 100 damage at 10 pips of degen. thats if you cast immediately as Virulence is cast. if not thats 120-140 damage if you use mend ailment twice.

That's 4 casts of mend ailment to remove all of the degen in my final build of it.

thats still a decent chunk of damage.

And btw, I already stated mend ailment/martyr/restore conditions hurt this build.

But incase you didn't read it. It does. Looking for improvements for the build. Being as it is one of the most damaging and hard to counter builds there is for a W/N. Martyr/Restore Conditions/Plague Signet are the only "best" counters to this build. Mend Ailment/Condition is an "ok" fix to the problem but until the 2nd/3rd cast it doesn't effect the degen. It may heal but that health will be gone in another 3-4 seconds.

So really, read the skill descriptions, and all builds have an "ideal" counter.

Final Build:

Hamstring/Savage Slash/Distracting Blow
Sever Artery
Virulence{E}
Galrath's Slash/Savage Slash/Distracting Blow
Final Thrust
Berserker's Stance
Plague Touch
Res Signet

Dude, not to rag on you but you're overestimating the power of conditions. 1 pip of health = 2 hp/sec. So at -10 degen (the max) the person is taking 20 dmg/sec. If I can get a 200+ hp Mend Ailment, that means I can completely cancel out the condition damage for 10 seconds.

The healing amount goes down as the conditions thin out, but I don't necessarily need to spam Mend. Once I see that +192 +27 from Mend, I know you're stacking conditions so I won't worry about removing them all since it would be a waste of energy and I can take advantage of them if they stay on. This is why I bring Breeze to 4v4. That 20 dmg/sec turns into 2 dmg/sec for 10 sec, and most of those conditions won't last longer than 10 sec anyway. If the target starts getting too low, I can always drop a Mend or Orison/Kiss and bring them back up.

Of course this build can work, but don't rely on the conditions to do all your damage. Conditions are definitely not the "most damaging and hard to counter" form of attack out there, if monks have anything to do with it.

LoL, no, not relying only on conditions, the Galrath's Slash, Savage Slash and Final Thrust I have been carrying lately tend to do more than the 200 hp heal you get from Mend, Also breeze is not the most common heal available since most would rather remove the condition/hex causing the degen.

But like I said to start with, Mend Ailment and Purge and Restore Conditions take a GOOD bit of damage away from this build.

So continue stating the same thing I did in post #1. Please.

Or do you have something to contribute? Because if all you have to say is Mend Ailment! 200+ hp! Breeze! You are ONLY focusing on 2 of the 6 offensive skills I have loaded. Congratulations, you can beat 2/6 of my bar with two skills. Have any improvements or are you saying that the build doesn't work? If not...

Savage Slash does some wonders for this build though, after playing with the build abit and beating on a monk that IS using mend ailment you'll get the timing down needed to interrupt it by using Savage BEFORE they pop it off.

Had one monk who wised up after being ressed for the 3rd time who targetted me and waited until AFTER I struck with Savage Slash to use Mend Ailment. But it was too little too late. Most teams get knocked off within the first 2-3 minutes, had one team that had a ranger built to just run and res (which didn't work, he just got interrupted) that took us to near 20 minutes, but finally stuck him with a plague touch for his blind and got a cripple through on him.

And anything about oh, I'll use Healing Breeze and there goes your damage! Wrong, I've started to carry Strip Enchantment instead of Soul Feast just for you. Ha! Counter of a Counter of a Counter that!

this build works fine i've use the almost exact same build. there will always be counters to anything that is the nature of the game. use it and enjoy.

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For random arenas, I've been notice that plague signet is such a great skill to bring. Warriors like this, those dumb fragility mesmers still trying to do something, most trappers, and those stupid condition stacking rangers can all eat it. Plague touch is great too, but sometimes it becomes a back and forth thing, and nothing gets accomplished...

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