The game of life Utility Skills

Utility Skills

• Infiltrator’s Signet – Passive: Regenerates one extra initiative every 10 seconds. Active: Shadowstep to foe
• Roll for Initiative – Evade backwards to regain initiative and recover from crippled, chilled, and immobile

As you can see, there are quite a few skills and traits that impact initiative for the thief. No matter what your playstyle in Guild Wars 2, every thief requires initiative to function at their deadly best. Who wants to use their base attack over and over again? Nobody, that’s who. I’d rather be flipping over my enemies, causing them lots of damage and to bleed, using my Death Blossom attack with my twin daggers as opposed to using my mundane Double Strike. Fortunately, the skills and traits that impact initiative are varied, so any thief should be able to pump up their initiative regeneration no matter what playstyle they choose to use.

Warriors are an incredibly versatile profession that benefits from the ability to wield a wide variety of weapons. While some weapon sets may give a polite nod to the more traditional warrior archetype of a sword-n-board melee combatant, the warrior in Guild Wars 2 can be a major damage dealer in both melee and ranged combat. They also have excellent survivability, can grant positive benefits to allies, and really ruin their enemies day through a variety of negative conditions and crowd control abilities.

Warrior Quick Facts

• One of Guild Wars 2’s two Soldier professions
• Able to wear Heavy armor
• Can wield a large variety of weapons
• Builds Adrenaline to unleash powerful attacks based on their active weapon set
• Able to focus on both melee and ranged combat styles
• Uses a strong combination of physical and condition damage
• Can create a variety of Banners to support and bolster allies
• Can be highly mobile, while greatly reducing the mobility of foes

Warrior Themes and Combat Roles

Thanks to the ability to wield the largest variety of weapons of all the professions in Guild Wars 2, the warrior also tends to offer some of the most diverse options for how you choose to approach combat. While they can certainly be played with a more traditional sword-n-board approach befitting of the typical RPG warrior, they can also be a DPS powerhouse, crowd control specialist, or masterful ranged combatant.

Don’t let the use of heavy armor fool you; the warrior can also be one of the most highly mobile professions, pairing particularly well with their ability to hinder the movement capabilities of foes. This combination greatly reduces the all too common issue for melee classes in MMOs where you can dish out a lot of damage, but tend to get kited by ranged attackers to the point of uselessness.

Another thing to note about the warrior is that most of their weapon sets focus on a very specific theme or damage type, perhaps more so than any other profession in the game. This is partly due to the fact that the warrior in GW2 draws heavy inspiration from many of the strongest primary / secondary skill synergies in the original Guild Wars. As you’ll learn below, these concepts aren’t necessarily limited to GW1 warrior skills. For example, the longbow skills draw heavy inspiration from ranger skills that focus on inflicting the Burning condition.